Access All Areas, Chapter 8.
13 Mar 2007 06:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
curiouswombatI've been writing hard over the weekend, as has ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
speakr2customrs, and we have finished a very long chapter of Access All Areas.
Apart from writing, I was looking for something on the hard-drive of my old, dead, computer, which I have as an external drive - and I found this lovely icon, made for me bytalesofspike presumably more or less on the day the old computer died, as I hadn't yet put it onto LJ, and had 'lost' it. My apologies to Tales for taking so long to use it - but isn't it lovely, and just right for this fic.
So -
Access All Areas, Chapter 8
5,900 words
Rated 15 (or NC17 depending on your local system)
Dawn lay on the mattress, in the damp basement, and tried to work out what time it was. She was hungry, but then she had only had a sandwich and an apple at lunchtime, and so that just meant that it was at least seven-o-clock in the evening. She realized that her bladder was becoming painfully full. She had used the bathroom before she left the Records Office, and had nothing to drink – so it must be four or five hours after that – eight or nine in the evening then.
Actually her bladder was very full; she would have to empty it. At least she thought the pain was from a full bladder. Maybe one of the earlier punches had damaged her internally somewhere. She looked around the room – there were absolutely no ‘facilities’. If she didn’t do something soon she would end up wetting the mattress.
With a struggle she managed to roll off the mattress and onto her back on the floor. Grateful that working out with the Slayers had given her strong abdominal muscles, she managed to sit up. Then by bending her knees and pushing off with her feet she could move, backwards, across the floor. At least the floor was tiled and there were no splinters, she thought wryly.
After a few minutes she was sitting with her back to the wall furthest away from the door, and with a bit further effort she was squatting with her back to it.
This would have to do, she would have to pee, and then she could think a bit more clearly. Peeing hurt. It hurt quite a lot. She must be swollen and cut ‘down there’. She felt sore, cold, dirty and degraded, and as her urine pooled around her feet, tears poured down her cheeks and she wanted to just slump down against the wall and give up.
In the end it was the thought of sitting in her own urine, when she had made such an effort to get off the mattress, that helped her to shake herself mentally and try to push herself up the wall onto her feet. At least her eyes were opening easier, as the tears had washed off some of the mascara that had been gluing her lashes together. ‘Just the swelling to contend with’, she thought, trying to be positive.
Of course her feet were bound at the ankles, and the tiled floor was wet, moving was not going to be easy. She found that keeping her back to the wall helped her to do something between a hop and a shuffle, and she moved slowly around the room finding it easier as she reached dry tiles and her feet stopped slipping.
She was more than halfway around, and so far there was nothing but floor and walls – not even a dusty box or packing case. Probably not surprising, if the basement flooded sometimes, but there was nothing useful or even useless.
She could hear a murmur of voices occasionally, although there was no sign of anyone coming down to her, when suddenly there was a cacophony of sound above her head. A crashing sound, furniture being moved heavily, a sharp bang (a shot?), another thud (someone hitting the floor?), then voices again. Nothing else. The voices were raised but she couldn’t really make out words.
What the hell was going on? Was it Spike? She knew Spike would come for her! Or was it Jarmila? Oh God, she didn’t want Jarmila or Milan to see her like this! (Afterwards she would wonder why she had not worried about Spike seeing her like that – but then he had seen her deep in despair before, and bloodied, and bare – although not all at the same time.)
What if it was a rival gang? If one lot of thugs knew about The Key there might be more – they might be fighting over her. Whatever, the best thing to do would be to get back onto that mattress before anyone came down the stairs. She sat back onto her bottom on the floor, and pushed herself backwards to the mattress – all the time expecting to hear someone coming down to the basement, but no-one did. She rolled back onto the mattress, trying to pull the blanket with her using her tie-wrapped hands and then her teeth, and waited.
There was no sound of anyone coming down. Dawn wondered if maybe this was more a cellar than a basement, and the entrance was a hidden trap door and ‘the cavalry’ hadn’t found it. But if ‘the cavalry’ included Spike she knew, gross though it was, that he could follow her scent like a bulldog.
Spike; her British Bulldog, like the one in some of those old advertising posters you could buy in Covent Garden that wore a Union Jack waistcoat. She found herself giggling, and tried to shake her head and make herself think straight. Oh fuck that hurt. Her head hurt, and her stomach still hurt, although not so much, and her eyes hurt, and she was cold, and if it wasn’t ‘the cavalry’ but some other gang then shouting wouldn’t help, it would just give away that she was conscious, and anyway it wasn’t bulldogs who sniffed it was bloodhounds.
She was so tired. She closed her eyes because they hurt, and tears slowly oozed out between her lashes, washing the rest of her mascara down her cheeks.
………….
Spike, wearing a Union Jack waistcoat under his old black duster, was sitting beside her, tapping his Doc Martin boot in time with the music. Hang on. Music? Dawn realized that she had been asleep, or unconscious, again. There was no Spike, no music, but there was a rhythmic ‘bang, bang, bang’ – someone was hammering something. Then the hammering stopped, and it was quiet again.
She tried to make out sounds from above – there were people moving around then there was a new sound; ‘thump, thump, thump’ and the sound of voices coming nearer. The same voices as before; no rescue then.
The thumping sounded as if something like a sack of flour was being dragged down the stairs. Her mind still not really clear, Dawn thought maybe it was Christopher Robin and Pooh Bear coming to rescue her. She tried to make herself think straight and concentrate – anything she could learn would help her try to figure out how to get away from here.
“He’s damned heavy,” she translated from the German. “Of course he is heavy – that is why they say ‘dead-heavy’ or ‘dead-weight’, fool,” came the second voice, the voice that she expected to say “Where is The Key? We know that you have it. Give it to me now and we will not hurt you.”
“This will show the little bitch that we mean business”, he continued. “If we can kill her stupid boyfriend, we can easily kill her. Especially now that she has had the stuff.”
‘Kill? Boyfriend? What are they talking about? Think, Dawn, think!’
She lay facing the door, eyes almost totally shut, and tried to keep her breathing slow and shallow as the thumping sound was replaced by a dragging sound, and then the voices were right outside the door, and there was the sound of bars being moved on the other side and a key being turned in the lock.
“Are you still asleep Slayer?” asked her interrogator, in English, with a sneering emphasis on ‘Slayer’. “Or are you too weak to open your eyes, stupid bitch?”
Dawn did not move. She wondered if he had his piece of paper in his hand ready in case she was awake – ‘Where is The Key? We know that you have it. Give it to me now and we will not hurt you.’ But she was not that stupid – of course they would hurt her. More. Again.
“See what happens to anyone who tries to rescue you,” the man continued, kicking Dawn none too gently on her shoulder to try and rouse her. Dawn stayed resolutely unroused.
He spoke in German. “Throw the body there where she will see it when she awakes.”
Through her lashes Dawn could just make out a dark shape being dropped within her line of sight. It did look like a body. Who the hell had she brought to their death in this dank Prague cellar? Whoever it was, it was all her fault, perhaps it would just have been better if she had died on that tower all those years ago.
The men stayed in the room for a few minutes. Someone kicked her again a couple of times, but she shut her eyes tightly and concentrated on her breathing, refusing to admit to being conscious.
“You shouldn’t have dropped her,” said a different voice, in German, “these English must all have soft skulls!” He spat onto the floor somewhere.
“Come on, we might as well go back up and watch the second match,” said the man who had complained about the weight of the body. “Leave her to find her boyfriend when she comes to.”
There must have been some sort of unspoken agreement, because Dawn heard three pairs of feet move to the door, the door was shut, barred and locked, and three pairs of feet went back upstairs. ‘The second match,’ she thought, ‘it must be at least ten-o-clock then.’ Eurosport showed one live soccer match then a recording of another one – it might even be later if they used the rewind.
Once she was sure that she was alone with the body, Dawn opened her eyes as well as she could, dreading what she would see.
Suddenly she had the urge to laugh hysterically; she had to roll her face into the mattress to stay quiet. “Oh my God, they’ve killed Kenny!” she gasped to herself.
There in a heap on the floor was a figure in a black leather coat, blond hair catching the light, Spike! They thought that they’d killed Spike! She wanted to laugh and laugh.
After a few minutes Dawn found herself sobering. They might not have killed Spike, it being hard to kill someone who was dead already, but he was most certainly unconscious. If he was badly injured it might take a while for him to recover consciousness, and she needed him fighting fit as soon as possible.
She rolled off the mattress again, and maneuvered herself over to Spike. Using her head and mouth she tried to move his coat – yes, she had heard a shot – there was a bloody hole in his chest – she hoped it had come cleanly through and wouldn’t need digging out later.
But shooting him shouldn’t have left him unconscious. She remembered the comment about ‘soft English skulls’ and shuffled up to look at his head. Yes – there was some blood in his hair – it looked as if something had hit him very hard.
She nuzzled him, and spoke his name into his ear, but he showed no sign of having heard. She lay against him, and tried to piece together what must have gone on. He had obviously found where she was and crashed in through the door, but someone had shot him, and someone had hit him hard enough on the head to make him pass-out. She began to giggle slightly hysterically again, imagining them discovering that he was not breathing and had no pulse, and declaring him dead.
She realized that her mad thought that Christopher Robin was coming to save her, dragging Winnie-the-Pooh down by his leg, bumping each step, was probably very close to the truth – and if that ‘thump, thump, thump’ was Spike’s head hitting the stairs then it might be a good long while until he regained consciousness.
Her own head hurt but this time she thought she was likely to stay awake. She curled herself against Spike and shuffled under his coat as much as she could. Every couple of minutes she spoke to him, or tried licking his face. She tried to think how they would get out of their prison. Spike might not be fighting fit soon enough, and if they couldn’t rely purely on his strength, then she needed her brain to be functional.
She wasn’t sure how long she lay there beside Spike trying to ‘get her brain into gear’, before she had a sudden flash of realization; their route of escape was so obvious, but it would only be possible if they could work together. She tried again to rouse Spike.
It must have been well over an hour after Spike was thrown in with her when she remembered that sometimes people responded to pain even if they didn’t respond to anything else – so now she not only spoke, and tried to lick him, but bit, quite hard, on his ear-lobe. Still no response.
After a while there were no longer any distant sounds from the rest of the building and she decided that everyone must have gone to bed. She wished that they had left her a drink – she was very thirsty, although, as her hands were so firmly held behind her back, a drink would have been no use anyway; unless she could have thrown it at Spike.
‘Wake up!’ she said, more loudly than before, in his ear, and nipped him again. At long last he moved slightly. She persisted. Buffeting him with her head and her shoulder, gently kicking him, urging him to wake up.
Time passed. ‘It must be at least three or four-o-clock,’ Dawn thought. Now Spike was beginning to act more like someone who was asleep and didn’t want to wake than someone who was, well, dead.
More time passed and he began to mutter, and then to reach out and gather Dawn into his body, as he often did whilst asleep.
“Wake up! Spike – wake up!” Dawn kept on trying to rouse him.
Eventually he began to rub his eyes, and groan. “What the hell? What did I drink last night? Oh God, my head hurts, pet.”
“Spike, Spike! Try to remember before you open your eyes,” Dawn cautioned.
He immediately opened them wide and stared around him.
‘I suppose I should have been saying “stay asleep” all this time,’ Dawn thought to herself.
“What the...? Oh fuck!” Spike spluttered, trying to get to his feet and failing dismally.
He stared at Dawn, obviously shocked. She didn’t know exactly how she looked but she could guess it wasn’t good. Her hair was matted, her face felt swollen, she was fairly sure that she had a black eye, if not two. Her body was bruised, and covered only by her jumper, which one of the men must have dragged back on her at some stage, and she had bruises on her inner thighs where her legs had been roughly wrenched apart. She probably smelled of pee.
Spike’s eyes glinted gold, so much so that she could see it clearly by the light of the single bulb, and he began to curse vehemently. He tried again to get up. “I’ll kill them. I’ll kill every one of them!”
Dawn half expected him to stagger to his feet and away from her, but he gathered her to himself and held her; rocking her, calling her his ‘little Dawnie’, his ‘moonbeam’, whilst all the time cursing and swearing revenge.
They lay like that for quite a few minutes, Dawn just glad to be held, until Spike realized that her hands and feet were tied. He was beginning to think somewhat straighter, Dawn thought, but probably still only at the level of someone with a pretty bad hang-over.
He tried again to get to his feet, but still couldn’t, and she managed to persuade him to just move her onto the mattress and sit with her, at least until he could see straight.
“What have they done to you?” he asked. “If they’ve laid a finger on you, I’ll, I’ll…”
“Ssshh,” Dawn said. “Of course they’ve laid a finger on me, silly vampire, they’ve laid fists and boots on me – but,” she paused, and spoke slowly and clearly to be sure that he understood, “if you mean did they rape me – no, not that.”
He shook his head again still trying to clear it, and looked hard at her thighs – where there were bruises, and blood.
“No, not rape, they, they, they… they just looked for The Key!” she explained, shivering. She could see him hovering between human-face and game-face and desperately wanted to reach out to touch him.
“They know about The Key?” he asked. He must be a bit clearer headed, as that was really the most important part of the whole thing. “How? Thought the bastards’d grabbed you for the sex trade.”
She tried to speak calmly; she needed Spike to be in control of himself. “I don’t know how, but they think it is a thing. They kept asking me to tell them where it was.
“They thought they’d killed you,” she told him, changing the subject slightly. “They bumped you down a whole flight of stairs and left you there as a warning to me. I’ve never been happier to see a ‘dead body’ in my life.
“But I need you to do something for me, before we do anything else,” she said, trying to be firm as she could feel Spike tense, ready to jump at the door or something.
“There’s nothing of any use in this room that I can see to cut the tie wraps, but they’ve given me the perfect cutting implement – you. I need you to bite through them for me. Can you see straight enough yet?”
“Yeah, yeah, think so,” Spike answered, although he still looked somewhat bleary-eyed to Dawn. The amount of head trauma had definitely taken it out of him, she thought, and the bullet in the chest probably didn’t help.
Cursing himself for being so weak and clumsy, Spike more or less rolled her onto her tummy on the mattress, and then Dawn felt his teeth, game-face sharp, working on the thick plastic around her thumbs.
As soon as she felt the plastic give way she moved her hands and rolled herself over bringing her arms, rather painfully, around Spike’s neck to pull him, still in his game-face, towards her.
They sat together like that for some time. Dawn wondered what time it actually was and whether Spike was still conscious or whether, like she had been, he was drifting.
“What time is it?” she asked, eventually, and was relieved to feel him move more confidently to pull his sleeve up to look at his watch.
“Bastards! Thieving bastards! They’ve nicked my watch! Cost me five hundred euro!” He started patting his coat pockets, “and my phone! And my cash!”
Dawn almost laughed with relief. Spike was sounding much more like himself.
“Don’t vampires have a sense of sunrise, like birds migrating or something?” she asked him.
“Okay, okay, just let me bloody concentrate!” he retorted. “Think it must be at least sunrise, but being unconscious hasn’t sodding helped!”
“Uh, now you’re feeling better, think you could do something about my ankles as well?” she asked. “They used a couple of tie-wraps on them as well, and biting through is going to be the only option.”
Spike shrugged his coat off first, and Dawn realized that the bullet had indeed gone straight through him; there was a hole in the back of it, and in the back of his shirt, and a lot of congealed blood sticking his shirt to his skin.
He put the coat around Dawn, wincing as he moved. He touched his hand to his chest, and said “I remember one of the buggers shooting me – ‘bout the last thing I do remember. Was just going to rip his throat out when something hit me from behind.”
“I heard the shot,” Dawn said. “Does it hurt a lot?”
“Probably less than it would have done right after, it’s healing already – and looking at the coat it went straight through – made a bloody mess of a good coat! Even if they hadn’t touched you I’d kill them for that.
“Missed my spine, though, or I could’ve been in trouble for a while longer,” he added and Dawn thought he must be remembering the time that Buffy put him into a wheelchair. She wasn’t sure that she totally approved of killing people for ruining your coat, but thought that under the circumstances she could let it ride.
She waited as Spike again shifted into his game-face to make it easier to bite through the thick plastic holding her feet together, and then spoke as he rubbed them to bring back the circulation.
“Look, Spike, I know you can recover pretty quickly, but I don’t think you’re going to be strong enough soon enough for us to be absolutely sure we can fight our way out of here if it’s morning already. I’m still feeling pretty wobbly, and I don’t even know how many people are in the house. There are at least five, but it could well be more. They were just going to leave me here till someone else arrived, their bosses I think. The ones who really know about The Key – these guys just read questions about it off a bit of paper. I think it would be best if we just weren’t here when those other guys arrive.”
She could see a series of thoughts flitting across his face. He wanted to argue that he was strong enough to fight, but looked worried about her, and then there was a realization of what she intended.
“I think this might well be your Meatloaf moment,” Dawn said, referring back to their conversation of a few nights before.
Spike looked at her blankly for a good ten seconds before he recognised the allusion – a sure sign that he wasn’t thinking properly, Dawn thought. She was pretty sure that, vampire healing or not, he was still somewhat concussed. It might be hard convincing Mr. Big Bad Tough-Guy here that he wasn’t fit to fight.
“I hurt,” Dawn said to him again, slowly, “I hurt a lot. I don’t think I’ve got any broken bones, and I think if I’d any major internal bleeding from all the kicks and punches I’d be in a pretty bad way by now, so probably not dying here, but not exactly feeling at my best. Climbing the stairs on my own might even be more than I can manage.
“You’re healing from what should have killed you if you weren’t kinda dead already and you are so not at your fighting best. Your head might be pretty hard, and it might not take a lot of brainpower to fight your way out, but you came down that staircase like Winnie the Pooh. Head hitting every step. I bet you’ve got double vision!”
She stared at him hard. He shook his head again, as if trying to clear it, and then admitted “Well, a bit.”
“So, even if you are fit enough to go crashing out of that door, the noise is going to wake those guys even if they are still asleep. If you carry me up the stairs you’ll have your hands full, and not be able to fight, and if I’m dragging myself up behind you they could shoot me past you. And I don’t know if fatal-type gun-shot wounds would actually kill me, but I think maybe they could, and I don’t want to find out. I’ve visited enough ancient castles to know that fighting your way up a defended staircase is a bad option, and I just want to get out of here before they come back down, or before the ‘Englander’ or ‘Hakim’ arrive.”
Dawn looked pleadingly at Spike. “I know you want to kill everyone, and I know it would make you feel better, but can we just come back and do it later? Please.”
“I don’t want to bite you,” Spike said, slowly. “I want to be a man with you, not a demon.” Dawn was about to say something but he continued, “Although you’re right – I’d be much better in a few hours, but you probably wouldn’t be, and we might not have a few hours. Then again,’ he added, with a hint of a smile, “we sure as hell would have the element of surprise if they think I’m dead!”
…………………………
Anna grasped the edge of the skylight with both hands and pulled. Slowly, steadily, but with all her power. The catch bent under the inexorable force and slipped free. She steadied the window and then raised it high so that she could slip under it. The floor was close enough for her to lower herself quietly while holding the skylight up above her gripping hand. Once her feet were on the floor she allowed the window to close.
There was a bed in the attic room. Empty, as she had already seen through the skylight. She had delayed her assault until after daybreak so that the enemies would have risen. Any small noises that she made would be less obvious once people were moving around in the house. Even so she took great pains to move silently around the attic. The man who had occupied the bed might be directly below her, for all she knew, and would be alerted by any sounds from a room that should be empty.
A quick search of the room revealed little of interest other than a gun that lay on a little locker beside the bed. She left it there for the time being and moved on. She slipped off her Parkour gloves, stowed them away in a zipped pocket, and donned latex surgical gloves in their place. She took hold of her sharpened bicycle spoke, moved over to the trapdoor down into the house, and looked down.
A man stood in front of a door. He thumped on it and called out. Not in Turkish, rather to her surprise, but in German. Her German was not as fluent as her Turkish, her Greek, her French and her English, but she had no trouble in understanding his demand for ‘Ergün’ to hurry up and make room in the bathroom. “Your shaving can wait,” the man said. “I need to piss. Hurry up.”
Anna frowned. If she killed the man in that state he would void his bladder. Messy, unpleasant, and the resultant puddle might get on her shoes and leave tracks that would give the police something to go on. Also the man in the bathroom might emerge as she was occupied with the first man and gain a second’s advantage that he might use to raise an alarm prematurely. It would be better to delay for a moment.
Anna waited until the bathroom door opened. A bare-chested man emerged, dabbing with a towel at the clean-shaven chin below his thick moustache, and spoke to the impatient one who waited. “All yours,” he said, and made for the ladder that led up to the attic.
Anna moved around so that she would be behind the man as he came up. Once his head and shoulders had emerged into the room she struck. Her left hand clamped over his mouth and she pulled him backwards so that he was sitting on the edge of the trapdoor. He raised his hands and tried to free himself but it was futile against Slayer strength. She jerked him further back and plunged down with her right hand, driving the sharpened spoke home under his ribs, and dragged him fully through the trapdoor and into the room as his struggles weakened. She had found the heart and in seconds he was limp in her grasp.
Anna lifted the body and carried it to the bed. She laid it down and pulled free her weapon. Only a trickle of blood emerged from the small puncture wound. She wiped the spoke on the sheets, cleaning away what little blood there was, and checked for a pulse to make certain that the man was dead. He was.
She picked up the gun from his locker and examined it briefly. Junk. A starter pistol illegally converted into a working firearm and chambered for small calibre ammunition. Presumably the late Ergün had been very low in the hierarchy of this gang, and that was why he had been relegated to the attic room with its uncomfortably low sloping ceiling. She put the gun down and returned to the ladder.
Anna descended quickly and quietly. She checked the bedrooms. All unoccupied. She could hear activity downstairs. It seemed that breakfast was in progress. She went to the bathroom door and waited as the toilet flushed and water ran. Before long the door opened and its occupant began to emerge. His eyes widened as he saw the girl and his mouth opened.
He died without a sound. Anna bundled him back into the bathroom, pushed him into the bath, and withdrew the sharpened spoke. Again there was very little blood but she wiped the spoke on a towel anyway. She checked the body for weapons. He had a pistol tucked into his waistband. A large Walther semi-auto with an olive green polymer frame. That was more like it. She tucked it into her own waistband and left the bathroom.
Descending the stairs would be the point at which she was most vulnerable. Her legs would come into the view of the men below before she could see them. The answer to that was to bypass the stairs altogether.
Anna vaulted over the banister and landed on her toes, bending her knees to absorb the impact, and immediately spun around to locate the enemies. One man was only a metre away, but he was facing in the opposite direction, and was only just beginning to turn towards the sound of her landing. An adjacent door was open and she could hear sounds of conversation and the clink of crockery from within. Someone in that room might have seen her. She seized the man by the waistband and one arm and hurled him into the room to crash down upon the dining table. She drew out the gun as she followed up.
Speed and violence was the key to success. The Walther bucked in her hand as she fired on the move. She plunged the bicycle spoke into the throat of a man who was coming to his feet in front of her and left it there. She snatched up a vacant chair and whirled it in a circle. Someone had been trying to come up behind her with a length of lead piping in his hand. The chair batted his arm aside and continued on to shatter against his head. A gunshot crashed out, not from her gun, but the bullet struck the man who had been used by Anna as a human missile as he rose to his feet at exactly the wrong time. Before the gunman could fire again Anna was on him. She used the remnants of the broken chair as a stake and rammed it into his chest. It proved just as lethal against a human as it would have done to a vampire.
Her original gun was empty now, the slide locked back, and she cast it aside and snatched up the weapon dropped by the man who now writhed on the ground screaming and clutching at the length of wood that impaled him. Another Walther. She fired twice more and the last uninjured man in the room spun around and fell on his face. Another two shots dealt with someone who appeared at the door with a gun in his hand but who took a fraction of a second too long to locate his target. Anna retrieved her bicycle spoke from the throat of a dying man and moved on to the next room.
There was only one man there. He was filling a hypodermic syringe, his hands shaking in his fear and frantic haste, and as Anna entered he pulled back the plunger. A tube of some dark liquid fell from his hand as he raised the syringe like a dagger. Poison or a sedative, Anna didn’t know which, but she knew that it would be a very bad idea to allow him to inject her. She shot him between the eyes.
The kitchen was empty but the back door stood open and someone was fleeing along the path. Anna ended the escape attempt with a volley of shots. She cursed briefly to herself. There had been a slight chance that the gunfire inside the building might have been attributed to something else, and that the police might not have been called, but that slim chance was now non-existent. She would have to complete the remainder of her mission as quickly as possible.
She returned to the main room to make certain that everyone inside was dead. She had to step carefully to avoid the pools of blood that were everywhere. Two men proved to be badly injured but alive. She used the bicycle spoke to make certain that they wouldn’t survive. As she was carrying out that grim task she felt a familiar tingling sensation.
A vampire was in the area, or had been recently, and she smashed another chair to pieces to acquire a non-bloodstained stake. Was one of the Turks a vampire? Unlikely, she thought; none of them had dusted, and some had dropped with wounds that a vampire would have shrugged off. The early morning sunlight was streaming into the room through windows from which the curtains had been drawn well back. The sensation wasn’t strong enough for a vampire to be in the immediate vicinity but it was definite and unmistakable.
There was only one place that the vampire could be. The basement. It was also the logical place for the Turks to have imprisoned Dawn Summers.
Anna made one last quick sweep of the ground floor. In the room in which the man had been filling a syringe she found two cell-phones, two watches, a wallet and a couple of notebooks. They were set aside on a table and therefore were more likely to belong to captives than to the gangsters themselves. The wallet was a man’s, as was one of the watches, and they were unlikely to belong to Dawn Summers. So, there were two captives, and one of them might be a vampire. Strange, even inexplicable, but Anna couldn’t afford to spend any time puzzling over this mystery.
So far everything that she had done had been not dissimilar to missions that she had performed in the past. She rarely killed humans but she would shed no tears for gangster kidnappers. Dawn Summers was in a completely different category. Anna clenched her teeth and fought to summon up her resolve. “The Key is the Link,” she muttered to herself as she descended the stairs to the basement. “The Link must be severed. The Key is the Link. The Link must be severed. Such is the will of God.”
She could smell stale urine as she reached the cellar door. She ignored the smell and concentrated on something more important. The sensations that warned her of a vampire’s presence were noticeably stronger here than they had been in the rooms above. She readied her improvised stake, pulled back the bars on the door, and threw it open.
........................................................................
The ’BtVS’ characters in this story do not belong to me, but are being used for amusement only and all rights remain with Joss Whedon, Mutant Enemy, the writers of the original episodes, and the TV and production companies responsible for the original television shows. BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER ©2002 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation. All Rights Reserved. The Buffy the Vampire Slayer trademark is used without express permission from Fox.
Previous chapters are here in Memories
speakr2customrs, and we have finished a very long chapter of Access All Areas.Apart from writing, I was looking for something on the hard-drive of my old, dead, computer, which I have as an external drive - and I found this lovely icon, made for me by
talesofspike presumably more or less on the day the old computer died, as I hadn't yet put it onto LJ, and had 'lost' it. My apologies to Tales for taking so long to use it - but isn't it lovely, and just right for this fic.So -
Access All Areas, Chapter 8
5,900 words
Rated 15 (or NC17 depending on your local system)
Dawn lay on the mattress, in the damp basement, and tried to work out what time it was. She was hungry, but then she had only had a sandwich and an apple at lunchtime, and so that just meant that it was at least seven-o-clock in the evening. She realized that her bladder was becoming painfully full. She had used the bathroom before she left the Records Office, and had nothing to drink – so it must be four or five hours after that – eight or nine in the evening then.
Actually her bladder was very full; she would have to empty it. At least she thought the pain was from a full bladder. Maybe one of the earlier punches had damaged her internally somewhere. She looked around the room – there were absolutely no ‘facilities’. If she didn’t do something soon she would end up wetting the mattress.
With a struggle she managed to roll off the mattress and onto her back on the floor. Grateful that working out with the Slayers had given her strong abdominal muscles, she managed to sit up. Then by bending her knees and pushing off with her feet she could move, backwards, across the floor. At least the floor was tiled and there were no splinters, she thought wryly.
After a few minutes she was sitting with her back to the wall furthest away from the door, and with a bit further effort she was squatting with her back to it.
This would have to do, she would have to pee, and then she could think a bit more clearly. Peeing hurt. It hurt quite a lot. She must be swollen and cut ‘down there’. She felt sore, cold, dirty and degraded, and as her urine pooled around her feet, tears poured down her cheeks and she wanted to just slump down against the wall and give up.
In the end it was the thought of sitting in her own urine, when she had made such an effort to get off the mattress, that helped her to shake herself mentally and try to push herself up the wall onto her feet. At least her eyes were opening easier, as the tears had washed off some of the mascara that had been gluing her lashes together. ‘Just the swelling to contend with’, she thought, trying to be positive.
Of course her feet were bound at the ankles, and the tiled floor was wet, moving was not going to be easy. She found that keeping her back to the wall helped her to do something between a hop and a shuffle, and she moved slowly around the room finding it easier as she reached dry tiles and her feet stopped slipping.
She was more than halfway around, and so far there was nothing but floor and walls – not even a dusty box or packing case. Probably not surprising, if the basement flooded sometimes, but there was nothing useful or even useless.
She could hear a murmur of voices occasionally, although there was no sign of anyone coming down to her, when suddenly there was a cacophony of sound above her head. A crashing sound, furniture being moved heavily, a sharp bang (a shot?), another thud (someone hitting the floor?), then voices again. Nothing else. The voices were raised but she couldn’t really make out words.
What the hell was going on? Was it Spike? She knew Spike would come for her! Or was it Jarmila? Oh God, she didn’t want Jarmila or Milan to see her like this! (Afterwards she would wonder why she had not worried about Spike seeing her like that – but then he had seen her deep in despair before, and bloodied, and bare – although not all at the same time.)
What if it was a rival gang? If one lot of thugs knew about The Key there might be more – they might be fighting over her. Whatever, the best thing to do would be to get back onto that mattress before anyone came down the stairs. She sat back onto her bottom on the floor, and pushed herself backwards to the mattress – all the time expecting to hear someone coming down to the basement, but no-one did. She rolled back onto the mattress, trying to pull the blanket with her using her tie-wrapped hands and then her teeth, and waited.
There was no sound of anyone coming down. Dawn wondered if maybe this was more a cellar than a basement, and the entrance was a hidden trap door and ‘the cavalry’ hadn’t found it. But if ‘the cavalry’ included Spike she knew, gross though it was, that he could follow her scent like a bulldog.
Spike; her British Bulldog, like the one in some of those old advertising posters you could buy in Covent Garden that wore a Union Jack waistcoat. She found herself giggling, and tried to shake her head and make herself think straight. Oh fuck that hurt. Her head hurt, and her stomach still hurt, although not so much, and her eyes hurt, and she was cold, and if it wasn’t ‘the cavalry’ but some other gang then shouting wouldn’t help, it would just give away that she was conscious, and anyway it wasn’t bulldogs who sniffed it was bloodhounds.
She was so tired. She closed her eyes because they hurt, and tears slowly oozed out between her lashes, washing the rest of her mascara down her cheeks.
………….
Spike, wearing a Union Jack waistcoat under his old black duster, was sitting beside her, tapping his Doc Martin boot in time with the music. Hang on. Music? Dawn realized that she had been asleep, or unconscious, again. There was no Spike, no music, but there was a rhythmic ‘bang, bang, bang’ – someone was hammering something. Then the hammering stopped, and it was quiet again.
She tried to make out sounds from above – there were people moving around then there was a new sound; ‘thump, thump, thump’ and the sound of voices coming nearer. The same voices as before; no rescue then.
The thumping sounded as if something like a sack of flour was being dragged down the stairs. Her mind still not really clear, Dawn thought maybe it was Christopher Robin and Pooh Bear coming to rescue her. She tried to make herself think straight and concentrate – anything she could learn would help her try to figure out how to get away from here.
“He’s damned heavy,” she translated from the German. “Of course he is heavy – that is why they say ‘dead-heavy’ or ‘dead-weight’, fool,” came the second voice, the voice that she expected to say “Where is The Key? We know that you have it. Give it to me now and we will not hurt you.”
“This will show the little bitch that we mean business”, he continued. “If we can kill her stupid boyfriend, we can easily kill her. Especially now that she has had the stuff.”
‘Kill? Boyfriend? What are they talking about? Think, Dawn, think!’
She lay facing the door, eyes almost totally shut, and tried to keep her breathing slow and shallow as the thumping sound was replaced by a dragging sound, and then the voices were right outside the door, and there was the sound of bars being moved on the other side and a key being turned in the lock.
“Are you still asleep Slayer?” asked her interrogator, in English, with a sneering emphasis on ‘Slayer’. “Or are you too weak to open your eyes, stupid bitch?”
Dawn did not move. She wondered if he had his piece of paper in his hand ready in case she was awake – ‘Where is The Key? We know that you have it. Give it to me now and we will not hurt you.’ But she was not that stupid – of course they would hurt her. More. Again.
“See what happens to anyone who tries to rescue you,” the man continued, kicking Dawn none too gently on her shoulder to try and rouse her. Dawn stayed resolutely unroused.
He spoke in German. “Throw the body there where she will see it when she awakes.”
Through her lashes Dawn could just make out a dark shape being dropped within her line of sight. It did look like a body. Who the hell had she brought to their death in this dank Prague cellar? Whoever it was, it was all her fault, perhaps it would just have been better if she had died on that tower all those years ago.
The men stayed in the room for a few minutes. Someone kicked her again a couple of times, but she shut her eyes tightly and concentrated on her breathing, refusing to admit to being conscious.
“You shouldn’t have dropped her,” said a different voice, in German, “these English must all have soft skulls!” He spat onto the floor somewhere.
“Come on, we might as well go back up and watch the second match,” said the man who had complained about the weight of the body. “Leave her to find her boyfriend when she comes to.”
There must have been some sort of unspoken agreement, because Dawn heard three pairs of feet move to the door, the door was shut, barred and locked, and three pairs of feet went back upstairs. ‘The second match,’ she thought, ‘it must be at least ten-o-clock then.’ Eurosport showed one live soccer match then a recording of another one – it might even be later if they used the rewind.
Once she was sure that she was alone with the body, Dawn opened her eyes as well as she could, dreading what she would see.
Suddenly she had the urge to laugh hysterically; she had to roll her face into the mattress to stay quiet. “Oh my God, they’ve killed Kenny!” she gasped to herself.
There in a heap on the floor was a figure in a black leather coat, blond hair catching the light, Spike! They thought that they’d killed Spike! She wanted to laugh and laugh.
After a few minutes Dawn found herself sobering. They might not have killed Spike, it being hard to kill someone who was dead already, but he was most certainly unconscious. If he was badly injured it might take a while for him to recover consciousness, and she needed him fighting fit as soon as possible.
She rolled off the mattress again, and maneuvered herself over to Spike. Using her head and mouth she tried to move his coat – yes, she had heard a shot – there was a bloody hole in his chest – she hoped it had come cleanly through and wouldn’t need digging out later.
But shooting him shouldn’t have left him unconscious. She remembered the comment about ‘soft English skulls’ and shuffled up to look at his head. Yes – there was some blood in his hair – it looked as if something had hit him very hard.
She nuzzled him, and spoke his name into his ear, but he showed no sign of having heard. She lay against him, and tried to piece together what must have gone on. He had obviously found where she was and crashed in through the door, but someone had shot him, and someone had hit him hard enough on the head to make him pass-out. She began to giggle slightly hysterically again, imagining them discovering that he was not breathing and had no pulse, and declaring him dead.
She realized that her mad thought that Christopher Robin was coming to save her, dragging Winnie-the-Pooh down by his leg, bumping each step, was probably very close to the truth – and if that ‘thump, thump, thump’ was Spike’s head hitting the stairs then it might be a good long while until he regained consciousness.
Her own head hurt but this time she thought she was likely to stay awake. She curled herself against Spike and shuffled under his coat as much as she could. Every couple of minutes she spoke to him, or tried licking his face. She tried to think how they would get out of their prison. Spike might not be fighting fit soon enough, and if they couldn’t rely purely on his strength, then she needed her brain to be functional.
She wasn’t sure how long she lay there beside Spike trying to ‘get her brain into gear’, before she had a sudden flash of realization; their route of escape was so obvious, but it would only be possible if they could work together. She tried again to rouse Spike.
It must have been well over an hour after Spike was thrown in with her when she remembered that sometimes people responded to pain even if they didn’t respond to anything else – so now she not only spoke, and tried to lick him, but bit, quite hard, on his ear-lobe. Still no response.
After a while there were no longer any distant sounds from the rest of the building and she decided that everyone must have gone to bed. She wished that they had left her a drink – she was very thirsty, although, as her hands were so firmly held behind her back, a drink would have been no use anyway; unless she could have thrown it at Spike.
‘Wake up!’ she said, more loudly than before, in his ear, and nipped him again. At long last he moved slightly. She persisted. Buffeting him with her head and her shoulder, gently kicking him, urging him to wake up.
Time passed. ‘It must be at least three or four-o-clock,’ Dawn thought. Now Spike was beginning to act more like someone who was asleep and didn’t want to wake than someone who was, well, dead.
More time passed and he began to mutter, and then to reach out and gather Dawn into his body, as he often did whilst asleep.
“Wake up! Spike – wake up!” Dawn kept on trying to rouse him.
Eventually he began to rub his eyes, and groan. “What the hell? What did I drink last night? Oh God, my head hurts, pet.”
“Spike, Spike! Try to remember before you open your eyes,” Dawn cautioned.
He immediately opened them wide and stared around him.
‘I suppose I should have been saying “stay asleep” all this time,’ Dawn thought to herself.
“What the...? Oh fuck!” Spike spluttered, trying to get to his feet and failing dismally.
He stared at Dawn, obviously shocked. She didn’t know exactly how she looked but she could guess it wasn’t good. Her hair was matted, her face felt swollen, she was fairly sure that she had a black eye, if not two. Her body was bruised, and covered only by her jumper, which one of the men must have dragged back on her at some stage, and she had bruises on her inner thighs where her legs had been roughly wrenched apart. She probably smelled of pee.
Spike’s eyes glinted gold, so much so that she could see it clearly by the light of the single bulb, and he began to curse vehemently. He tried again to get up. “I’ll kill them. I’ll kill every one of them!”
Dawn half expected him to stagger to his feet and away from her, but he gathered her to himself and held her; rocking her, calling her his ‘little Dawnie’, his ‘moonbeam’, whilst all the time cursing and swearing revenge.
They lay like that for quite a few minutes, Dawn just glad to be held, until Spike realized that her hands and feet were tied. He was beginning to think somewhat straighter, Dawn thought, but probably still only at the level of someone with a pretty bad hang-over.
He tried again to get to his feet, but still couldn’t, and she managed to persuade him to just move her onto the mattress and sit with her, at least until he could see straight.
“What have they done to you?” he asked. “If they’ve laid a finger on you, I’ll, I’ll…”
“Ssshh,” Dawn said. “Of course they’ve laid a finger on me, silly vampire, they’ve laid fists and boots on me – but,” she paused, and spoke slowly and clearly to be sure that he understood, “if you mean did they rape me – no, not that.”
He shook his head again still trying to clear it, and looked hard at her thighs – where there were bruises, and blood.
“No, not rape, they, they, they… they just looked for The Key!” she explained, shivering. She could see him hovering between human-face and game-face and desperately wanted to reach out to touch him.
“They know about The Key?” he asked. He must be a bit clearer headed, as that was really the most important part of the whole thing. “How? Thought the bastards’d grabbed you for the sex trade.”
She tried to speak calmly; she needed Spike to be in control of himself. “I don’t know how, but they think it is a thing. They kept asking me to tell them where it was.
“They thought they’d killed you,” she told him, changing the subject slightly. “They bumped you down a whole flight of stairs and left you there as a warning to me. I’ve never been happier to see a ‘dead body’ in my life.
“But I need you to do something for me, before we do anything else,” she said, trying to be firm as she could feel Spike tense, ready to jump at the door or something.
“There’s nothing of any use in this room that I can see to cut the tie wraps, but they’ve given me the perfect cutting implement – you. I need you to bite through them for me. Can you see straight enough yet?”
“Yeah, yeah, think so,” Spike answered, although he still looked somewhat bleary-eyed to Dawn. The amount of head trauma had definitely taken it out of him, she thought, and the bullet in the chest probably didn’t help.
Cursing himself for being so weak and clumsy, Spike more or less rolled her onto her tummy on the mattress, and then Dawn felt his teeth, game-face sharp, working on the thick plastic around her thumbs.
As soon as she felt the plastic give way she moved her hands and rolled herself over bringing her arms, rather painfully, around Spike’s neck to pull him, still in his game-face, towards her.
They sat together like that for some time. Dawn wondered what time it actually was and whether Spike was still conscious or whether, like she had been, he was drifting.
“What time is it?” she asked, eventually, and was relieved to feel him move more confidently to pull his sleeve up to look at his watch.
“Bastards! Thieving bastards! They’ve nicked my watch! Cost me five hundred euro!” He started patting his coat pockets, “and my phone! And my cash!”
Dawn almost laughed with relief. Spike was sounding much more like himself.
“Don’t vampires have a sense of sunrise, like birds migrating or something?” she asked him.
“Okay, okay, just let me bloody concentrate!” he retorted. “Think it must be at least sunrise, but being unconscious hasn’t sodding helped!”
“Uh, now you’re feeling better, think you could do something about my ankles as well?” she asked. “They used a couple of tie-wraps on them as well, and biting through is going to be the only option.”
Spike shrugged his coat off first, and Dawn realized that the bullet had indeed gone straight through him; there was a hole in the back of it, and in the back of his shirt, and a lot of congealed blood sticking his shirt to his skin.
He put the coat around Dawn, wincing as he moved. He touched his hand to his chest, and said “I remember one of the buggers shooting me – ‘bout the last thing I do remember. Was just going to rip his throat out when something hit me from behind.”
“I heard the shot,” Dawn said. “Does it hurt a lot?”
“Probably less than it would have done right after, it’s healing already – and looking at the coat it went straight through – made a bloody mess of a good coat! Even if they hadn’t touched you I’d kill them for that.
“Missed my spine, though, or I could’ve been in trouble for a while longer,” he added and Dawn thought he must be remembering the time that Buffy put him into a wheelchair. She wasn’t sure that she totally approved of killing people for ruining your coat, but thought that under the circumstances she could let it ride.
She waited as Spike again shifted into his game-face to make it easier to bite through the thick plastic holding her feet together, and then spoke as he rubbed them to bring back the circulation.
“Look, Spike, I know you can recover pretty quickly, but I don’t think you’re going to be strong enough soon enough for us to be absolutely sure we can fight our way out of here if it’s morning already. I’m still feeling pretty wobbly, and I don’t even know how many people are in the house. There are at least five, but it could well be more. They were just going to leave me here till someone else arrived, their bosses I think. The ones who really know about The Key – these guys just read questions about it off a bit of paper. I think it would be best if we just weren’t here when those other guys arrive.”
She could see a series of thoughts flitting across his face. He wanted to argue that he was strong enough to fight, but looked worried about her, and then there was a realization of what she intended.
“I think this might well be your Meatloaf moment,” Dawn said, referring back to their conversation of a few nights before.
Spike looked at her blankly for a good ten seconds before he recognised the allusion – a sure sign that he wasn’t thinking properly, Dawn thought. She was pretty sure that, vampire healing or not, he was still somewhat concussed. It might be hard convincing Mr. Big Bad Tough-Guy here that he wasn’t fit to fight.
“I hurt,” Dawn said to him again, slowly, “I hurt a lot. I don’t think I’ve got any broken bones, and I think if I’d any major internal bleeding from all the kicks and punches I’d be in a pretty bad way by now, so probably not dying here, but not exactly feeling at my best. Climbing the stairs on my own might even be more than I can manage.
“You’re healing from what should have killed you if you weren’t kinda dead already and you are so not at your fighting best. Your head might be pretty hard, and it might not take a lot of brainpower to fight your way out, but you came down that staircase like Winnie the Pooh. Head hitting every step. I bet you’ve got double vision!”
She stared at him hard. He shook his head again, as if trying to clear it, and then admitted “Well, a bit.”
“So, even if you are fit enough to go crashing out of that door, the noise is going to wake those guys even if they are still asleep. If you carry me up the stairs you’ll have your hands full, and not be able to fight, and if I’m dragging myself up behind you they could shoot me past you. And I don’t know if fatal-type gun-shot wounds would actually kill me, but I think maybe they could, and I don’t want to find out. I’ve visited enough ancient castles to know that fighting your way up a defended staircase is a bad option, and I just want to get out of here before they come back down, or before the ‘Englander’ or ‘Hakim’ arrive.”
Dawn looked pleadingly at Spike. “I know you want to kill everyone, and I know it would make you feel better, but can we just come back and do it later? Please.”
“I don’t want to bite you,” Spike said, slowly. “I want to be a man with you, not a demon.” Dawn was about to say something but he continued, “Although you’re right – I’d be much better in a few hours, but you probably wouldn’t be, and we might not have a few hours. Then again,’ he added, with a hint of a smile, “we sure as hell would have the element of surprise if they think I’m dead!”
…………………………
Anna grasped the edge of the skylight with both hands and pulled. Slowly, steadily, but with all her power. The catch bent under the inexorable force and slipped free. She steadied the window and then raised it high so that she could slip under it. The floor was close enough for her to lower herself quietly while holding the skylight up above her gripping hand. Once her feet were on the floor she allowed the window to close.
There was a bed in the attic room. Empty, as she had already seen through the skylight. She had delayed her assault until after daybreak so that the enemies would have risen. Any small noises that she made would be less obvious once people were moving around in the house. Even so she took great pains to move silently around the attic. The man who had occupied the bed might be directly below her, for all she knew, and would be alerted by any sounds from a room that should be empty.
A quick search of the room revealed little of interest other than a gun that lay on a little locker beside the bed. She left it there for the time being and moved on. She slipped off her Parkour gloves, stowed them away in a zipped pocket, and donned latex surgical gloves in their place. She took hold of her sharpened bicycle spoke, moved over to the trapdoor down into the house, and looked down.
A man stood in front of a door. He thumped on it and called out. Not in Turkish, rather to her surprise, but in German. Her German was not as fluent as her Turkish, her Greek, her French and her English, but she had no trouble in understanding his demand for ‘Ergün’ to hurry up and make room in the bathroom. “Your shaving can wait,” the man said. “I need to piss. Hurry up.”
Anna frowned. If she killed the man in that state he would void his bladder. Messy, unpleasant, and the resultant puddle might get on her shoes and leave tracks that would give the police something to go on. Also the man in the bathroom might emerge as she was occupied with the first man and gain a second’s advantage that he might use to raise an alarm prematurely. It would be better to delay for a moment.
Anna waited until the bathroom door opened. A bare-chested man emerged, dabbing with a towel at the clean-shaven chin below his thick moustache, and spoke to the impatient one who waited. “All yours,” he said, and made for the ladder that led up to the attic.
Anna moved around so that she would be behind the man as he came up. Once his head and shoulders had emerged into the room she struck. Her left hand clamped over his mouth and she pulled him backwards so that he was sitting on the edge of the trapdoor. He raised his hands and tried to free himself but it was futile against Slayer strength. She jerked him further back and plunged down with her right hand, driving the sharpened spoke home under his ribs, and dragged him fully through the trapdoor and into the room as his struggles weakened. She had found the heart and in seconds he was limp in her grasp.
Anna lifted the body and carried it to the bed. She laid it down and pulled free her weapon. Only a trickle of blood emerged from the small puncture wound. She wiped the spoke on the sheets, cleaning away what little blood there was, and checked for a pulse to make certain that the man was dead. He was.
She picked up the gun from his locker and examined it briefly. Junk. A starter pistol illegally converted into a working firearm and chambered for small calibre ammunition. Presumably the late Ergün had been very low in the hierarchy of this gang, and that was why he had been relegated to the attic room with its uncomfortably low sloping ceiling. She put the gun down and returned to the ladder.
Anna descended quickly and quietly. She checked the bedrooms. All unoccupied. She could hear activity downstairs. It seemed that breakfast was in progress. She went to the bathroom door and waited as the toilet flushed and water ran. Before long the door opened and its occupant began to emerge. His eyes widened as he saw the girl and his mouth opened.
He died without a sound. Anna bundled him back into the bathroom, pushed him into the bath, and withdrew the sharpened spoke. Again there was very little blood but she wiped the spoke on a towel anyway. She checked the body for weapons. He had a pistol tucked into his waistband. A large Walther semi-auto with an olive green polymer frame. That was more like it. She tucked it into her own waistband and left the bathroom.
Descending the stairs would be the point at which she was most vulnerable. Her legs would come into the view of the men below before she could see them. The answer to that was to bypass the stairs altogether.
Anna vaulted over the banister and landed on her toes, bending her knees to absorb the impact, and immediately spun around to locate the enemies. One man was only a metre away, but he was facing in the opposite direction, and was only just beginning to turn towards the sound of her landing. An adjacent door was open and she could hear sounds of conversation and the clink of crockery from within. Someone in that room might have seen her. She seized the man by the waistband and one arm and hurled him into the room to crash down upon the dining table. She drew out the gun as she followed up.
Speed and violence was the key to success. The Walther bucked in her hand as she fired on the move. She plunged the bicycle spoke into the throat of a man who was coming to his feet in front of her and left it there. She snatched up a vacant chair and whirled it in a circle. Someone had been trying to come up behind her with a length of lead piping in his hand. The chair batted his arm aside and continued on to shatter against his head. A gunshot crashed out, not from her gun, but the bullet struck the man who had been used by Anna as a human missile as he rose to his feet at exactly the wrong time. Before the gunman could fire again Anna was on him. She used the remnants of the broken chair as a stake and rammed it into his chest. It proved just as lethal against a human as it would have done to a vampire.
Her original gun was empty now, the slide locked back, and she cast it aside and snatched up the weapon dropped by the man who now writhed on the ground screaming and clutching at the length of wood that impaled him. Another Walther. She fired twice more and the last uninjured man in the room spun around and fell on his face. Another two shots dealt with someone who appeared at the door with a gun in his hand but who took a fraction of a second too long to locate his target. Anna retrieved her bicycle spoke from the throat of a dying man and moved on to the next room.
There was only one man there. He was filling a hypodermic syringe, his hands shaking in his fear and frantic haste, and as Anna entered he pulled back the plunger. A tube of some dark liquid fell from his hand as he raised the syringe like a dagger. Poison or a sedative, Anna didn’t know which, but she knew that it would be a very bad idea to allow him to inject her. She shot him between the eyes.
The kitchen was empty but the back door stood open and someone was fleeing along the path. Anna ended the escape attempt with a volley of shots. She cursed briefly to herself. There had been a slight chance that the gunfire inside the building might have been attributed to something else, and that the police might not have been called, but that slim chance was now non-existent. She would have to complete the remainder of her mission as quickly as possible.
She returned to the main room to make certain that everyone inside was dead. She had to step carefully to avoid the pools of blood that were everywhere. Two men proved to be badly injured but alive. She used the bicycle spoke to make certain that they wouldn’t survive. As she was carrying out that grim task she felt a familiar tingling sensation.
A vampire was in the area, or had been recently, and she smashed another chair to pieces to acquire a non-bloodstained stake. Was one of the Turks a vampire? Unlikely, she thought; none of them had dusted, and some had dropped with wounds that a vampire would have shrugged off. The early morning sunlight was streaming into the room through windows from which the curtains had been drawn well back. The sensation wasn’t strong enough for a vampire to be in the immediate vicinity but it was definite and unmistakable.
There was only one place that the vampire could be. The basement. It was also the logical place for the Turks to have imprisoned Dawn Summers.
Anna made one last quick sweep of the ground floor. In the room in which the man had been filling a syringe she found two cell-phones, two watches, a wallet and a couple of notebooks. They were set aside on a table and therefore were more likely to belong to captives than to the gangsters themselves. The wallet was a man’s, as was one of the watches, and they were unlikely to belong to Dawn Summers. So, there were two captives, and one of them might be a vampire. Strange, even inexplicable, but Anna couldn’t afford to spend any time puzzling over this mystery.
So far everything that she had done had been not dissimilar to missions that she had performed in the past. She rarely killed humans but she would shed no tears for gangster kidnappers. Dawn Summers was in a completely different category. Anna clenched her teeth and fought to summon up her resolve. “The Key is the Link,” she muttered to herself as she descended the stairs to the basement. “The Link must be severed. The Key is the Link. The Link must be severed. Such is the will of God.”
She could smell stale urine as she reached the cellar door. She ignored the smell and concentrated on something more important. The sensations that warned her of a vampire’s presence were noticeably stronger here than they had been in the rooms above. She readied her improvised stake, pulled back the bars on the door, and threw it open.
........................................................................
The ’BtVS’ characters in this story do not belong to me, but are being used for amusement only and all rights remain with Joss Whedon, Mutant Enemy, the writers of the original episodes, and the TV and production companies responsible for the original television shows. BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER ©2002 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation. All Rights Reserved. The Buffy the Vampire Slayer trademark is used without express permission from Fox.
Previous chapters are here in Memories
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no subject
Date: 13/03/2007 06:51 pm (UTC)(no subject)
From:no subject
Date: 13/03/2007 07:10 pm (UTC)Bwah! Although Spike was right about missing the spine.
And Anna is quite the little assassin isn't she?
(no subject)
From:no subject
Date: 13/03/2007 08:07 pm (UTC)There was a nasty Tim Brooke Taylor flash when it came to the Union Jack waistcoat though ... but I'm over it.
(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:no subject
Date: 13/03/2007 08:43 pm (UTC)What next? talk about cliffies...
Sami
(no subject)
From:no subject
Date: 13/03/2007 08:44 pm (UTC)Your descriptions of Dawn's captivity conditions were very well done, and the dead boyfriend business was funny.
Anna seems to be really efficient. I can only hope that she'll see the light.
(no subject)
From:no subject
Date: 13/03/2007 11:21 pm (UTC)I feel a bit as though I'm reading a recipe for Gunpowder. When Dawn/Spike, Anna, and Ethan all get close there's going to be an exPLOSion!!
(no subject)
From:no subject
Date: 13/03/2007 11:30 pm (UTC)I am thoroughoy enjoying this story.
(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:no subject
Date: 14/03/2007 12:47 am (UTC)I'm here following a link from
Now I have the pleasure of going back and reading "Ten Years After" and the first 7 chapters of this one. It's all good. :)
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Date: 14/03/2007 08:36 pm (UTC)Very nice details, especially about the less pleasant bodily functions. You wouldn't by any chance work with continence, would you? :D
Er, the next chapter is coming soon, right?
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Date: 14/03/2007 11:19 pm (UTC)Loved concussed Spike! Although I felt horrible for both him and Dawn, I can just see his fuzzy thinking.
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Date: 17/03/2007 12:54 am (UTC)Enjoying this muchly. And I must say how nice it is for the two of you to be working together. I always like it when His Lordship and I are on the same page (so to speak!)
Enjoy your weekend!
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Date: 28/04/2007 09:52 pm (UTC)Kathleen
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