BY: Spiralled
Page 1
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Blessedly, the quarrel of sights, sounds and sensations stopped. In that hairsbreadth, the flood of memories started up again, this time like a Beatles record played backwards. His journey here, conversing with Clem, getting soused. Buffy. Buffy in her bathrobe. The images slowed down. Every look on her face, every crack of her voice as she cried out, intensified tenfold.
This continued, the minutia speeding by, the death, pain, and violence all slowed and squeezed out drop by drop. His occasional brushes with valor, times he helped, provided comfort, or simply cared were also stretched like taffy, but those moments were sparse.
He shuddered when Glory’s image appeared, flinched when her finger bore into his flesh. But there was no pain, instead each time it was replaced by the sensation of Buffy’s butterfly kiss she’d given him for protecting Dawn. Even as syrupy slow as the moment was, it was quickly gone. Replaced by carnage, death, destruction – Sunnydale, Los Angeles, South America, Budapest, New York, Hong Kong, England. The girl in the coal bin. Torturing of his former peers. Being turned. His foibles and follies while human.
The demon removed his hand. “It is done.”
For a long moment, Spike stayed on his knees, staring inside himself. Then his lips began to move, as if he was forming words, but there was no sound. Shakily he got to his feet and stumbled forward, out of the cave and into the desert. It was a moonless night, but the stars were out and bright. He meandered without direction. He didn’t care. It didn’t matter. He stopped in the darkness and slowly turned. He stopped when he found the eastern horizon, the faintest ribbon of red peeking out. Stretching out his arms, he fell backward into the sand, landing with a jarring thump. He laid there, spread eagle, waiting, mindless of the heat pouring off of the sand.
A breath of a breeze blew across him, ruffling his hair. Then another, longer this time, like a child blowing out birthday candles. Then again, with force enough to move the sand, which pelted against his skin.
“Good,” he thought. “Damned good and proper way to go.”
The wind continued. The sand pooled up next to him. Finally he realized all but his face was covered. “Bloody hell,” he thought as he closed his eyes and the sand covered them. He neither slept nor really felt awake. At some point he realized the howl of the wind had disappeared. He tried to move, but the sand had wrapped him in a tight embrace. Oddly, he didn’t feel the sense of claustrophobic panic that waking up in a coffin had given him. He let go of the thoughts and slipped into a state of blessed numbness.
*****
Warm pants of breath covered his face. He opened his eyes and found himself looking into yellow-gold ones. It was night and there was a smattering of stars and an ebbing moon. With a blink, his eyes adjusted and decided it was either a wild dog or a wolf or a coyote. Probably a coyote. It bent its head down and pushed something toward him. Spike sat up on his elbows to get a better look. It was a hare. The coyote bumped its forehead against Spike’s arm and then looked at the hare.
“For me, eh?” He reached out for it, licking his tongue across his incisors. The hare was still warm and he sank his teeth into it, ravenous with hunger. After he’d sucked every last drop out, he looked up to see the coyote still standing there, its head tilted, looking straight at him. Spike would’ve sworn it sported a grin. It trotted off a few steps, stopped and looked back at him. It bobbed its head twice and stared pointedly. Finally, it trotted back and bumped its head into him again.
“I’m to follow, eh? I suppose I got nothing better to do until the sun comes back.” Spike rose to his feet and followed. When he lagged too far behind, the coyote stopped and waited until he caught up. They walked throughout the night, accompanied by the desert sounds: The constant swish of sand under their feet, the occasional popping and hissing of the unevenly cooling grains of sand. And his thoughts. His terrible thoughts, which fractured like black ice. He reached up to run his hands through his hair, finding only a bit of fuzz. “Fancy that,” he thought.
A breeze ruffled the coyote’s coat. It sat down and thumped its tail a couple of times, giving Spike another cock-eyed smile. Spike knew it was nearly sunrise. Why here was better than there, he didn’t know and it didn’t matter that much to him.
The coyote whined as the wind picked up and sand swirled around Spike’s ankles.
“What?”
In the blink of an eye, it was leaping at him. The front paws connected with his chest, knocking him to the ground. It stood over him, panting happily. He tried to sit up and it growled, so he growled back. It just smiled with its tongue lolling out of its mouth. Slowly the sand crept over him and he gave in to the cocooned abyss.
*****
He woke to the coyote’s warm breath in his face, yet again. He tried to ignore it, thinking the pup would become bored and leave him alone. Then a wet warm tongue ran across his forehead.
“Oh God,” he said, waving his arms in front of his face as he sat up. The coyote danced back a few steps, then picked up another hare and dropped it in Spike’s lap. He stared at it for a long while, then gathered it up and gestured toward the coyote with it, saying, “Cheers.”
This night was the same as the last, as was the night before that. He wasn’t sure how long he had been out here, except the moon could now been seen in the sky. His will to live or at least to go one being dead had kicked in a couple of days back as the predawn changed to dawn. He had acquiesced to the insistence of his companion and laid down to let the sand wash over him, acknowledging that for reasons outside his scope he wasn’t going to see daylight any time soon. Now when the night ended, he found himself willing to be wrapped in the sand, buried in oblivion.
*****
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