| Lost and Gone Forever, Dreadful Sorry By Wwolfe |
| Disclaimer: Characters and situations related to BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER and ANGEL are the property of Joss Whedon, Mutant Enemy, the WB, and others. No copyright infringement is intended or implied. But it won't matter if you sue, because Wwolfe isn't some kid that'll fold like a house of cards, he's the legal counsel for the DarkSide, the Devil's Mouthpiece, the real lawyer from Hell. So go ahead. Do your worst. If you dare. Bwa Ha Ha! Archive- Please email request. Feedback- Absolutely. ******************* "The evening and the night, with their stillness, their vagueness of outline, their lack of dimensions; the moonlight, with its unreal day, delicate parody of the world of the sun and reason, were like the place which his mind rejected but his bosom felt." - Paul Rosenfeld, "Port of New York" He was impressed by the precision of the work. Delicately, methodically, moving back and forth with swift, deft strokes, the business at hand was conducted in a most felicitous manner. While he had to admit that staring at a fly rubbing its forelegs together, back and forth, as it took its meal was perhaps not the most productive use of his time, the afternoon sun made him feel so lazy and, Riley thought, there really wasn't anything else he felt like doing just now. He looked over at Graham - who, like Riley, was reclining against the trunk of a tree, at the edge of a clearing here in the nameless Central American jungle where their mission had taken them - and thought not for the first time that this was not how he had expected things to turn out. -------------------------------------------------------- His life in Sunnydale now seemed like a dream he could not quite remember, or like a cut so fresh the air still made it sting. He had vanished, literally into thin air, courtesy of a military helicopter, and he had likewise descended into his new existence via a similar craft. The officer who had allowed him to join the outfit was on board, as were Graham and the other former Initiative members he recognized. He had been briefed on their mission during the flight, and by the time they settled to earth on a landing sight cleared away on a hilltop, Riley was more or less up to speed. There was a nest of vampires that had set up what appeared to be a small community in the jungle. The XI (as the ex-Initiative personnel had taken to calling themselves) wanted to find out why the vampires had built this village in the middle of nowhere. Rather than a simple slash and burn operation, a reconnaissance was ordered. Riley put on his camouflage, smeared his face with green to match the undergrowth, and crawled into the village. It seemed strange to be doing a re-con in broad daylight, but of course that was the middle of the night for vampires. When in Rome, thought Riley, as he edged his way toward the door of his target building. Using long range lenses, XI had noted the buildings to which the vampires retired at the approach of sunrise each morning. This building, the largest one, appeared to be the place where the vampires spent their "days," gathering inside it after the sun went down. He wasn't sure what he had expected to find once he entered, but the sight he saw was both startling and familiar. Down in the vast underground labyrinth of the Initiative, he had seen the same type of set-up, where the scientists had gone to cook up the various potions used in experiments on the demons kept captive there. Now, as he snapped pictures of the equipment and bagged a few samples, he considered the evidence assembled in front of him and reached a conclusion: the War on Drugs wasn't working. I mean, he thought, how do you tell a vampire to just say 'No'? ------------------------------------------------------------- The sun was shining in his eyes now from just above the tree tops. He needed to be up and moving before too long, but for the moment he remained, resting against the tree. If it was late afternoon here, it would be dark back in Iowa. His folks would be getting ready for bed - mornings came early on the farm. The diner must be just about closed up for the night - old man Steinbauer might be ducking in for a cup of hot coffee to warm him up on his drive home after finishing his janitor duties at the high school. Riley had thought about going back for his fifth class reunion later in the year. I should show up looking this, he thought. That'd give everybody something to talk about. -------------------------------------------------------------- Riley's guess had been confirmed: the vampires were producing a very pure grade of cocaine in extremely large quantities. The orders were given to destroy the village that same day. Shortly before noon, Riley and two other soldiers fired incendiary devices from medium range at the buildings in the vampires' village. It was expected that any vampires not consumed in the fires would burn when they ran from the buildings into the sunlight. Should a few strays manage to make it to the shade of the jungle, they would be hunted and staked. The plan worked well - in fact, not a single vampire escaped from the buildings. Constructed of wood, the structures went up in an instant, quickly reduced to no more than charred remains, as Riley saw when his group approached the clearing. And then he saw something else. Buried in the ashes and collapsed beams were bodies. No longer recognizable as individual people, but unmistakably recognizable as people nonetheless. Or, rather, as having once been people, not so long ago. Riley and several of his fellow soldiers became ill, while around them could be heard expressions of dismay and bitter, frustrated swearing. Then a shout was heard and Riley managed to look up in time to see a trap door being opened and several soldiers descending through it. Along with the rest of his group, Riley followed down the stairs descending from the trap door. ---------------------------------------------------------------- "We should get going, Graham," Riley said. "Make hay while the sun shines." He looked over at his friend. Graham had always been a man of few words, but Riley was getting tired of the quiet right now. As he watched his friend stare out at the clearing, Riley thought he might just take off without him - just leave him here in the jungle. People might not like it, but that's really what he ought to do, he thought. "Besides," Riley said, making his decision. "In another day you'll start to stink and I'll just have to bury you." ---------------------------------------------------------------- In the subterranean rooms they'd found at the bottom of the stairs leading from the trap door, Riley saw a very familiar sight: cages filled with prisoners, some angry, others frightened, all helpless to escape. The pale, wasted condition of the cells' inhabitants was explained in a note that had been left by one of the vampires. "Bet you're wondering what's going on. Back in the early '70's, me and my old lady used to take our van down here, score some dope, and take it back to LA. Then one time I ran into this weird dude who said he had something to show me - blow my mind, he said. You can guess the rest. It was a beautiful gift, and since we were into sharing, I shared it with my old lady. Afterwards, we got to thinking - we'd always wanted to get back to the land, maybe get into some kind of communal thing. So we set up this farm, brought some of our friends in on it. That's our livestock in the pens in front of you. Upstairs, that was our breeding stock. It's a drag to lose it, but there's always more where that came from. We've done alright, what with so many people liking coke the way they do, so we'll find a new place easy. Stay real." Shell-shocked, the XI soldiers staggered back up to the surface and stood in the harsh glare of the clearing, stunned into a demoralized silence. It was then that the vampires attacked, firing from the deep shadows of the encircling jungle. Riley recalled what he'd read in his military history of the miles of tunnels the Viet Cong had built at Cu Chi outside of Saigon during the Vietnam War, and he wondered how extensive the vampires' system was. Enough to get them from underneath their buildings out to the jungle, at the very least, he thought. He had been hit early on, with the bullet passing through cleanly, striking no organs, but leaving a dull throbbing in his side. When the fighting started, he and Graham had been together, and they had fought with their backs to each other for what seemed like hours, but was in fact approximately thirty minutes. As they saw their fellow soldiers picked off one by one, Riley and Graham agreed that those who had fallen might well be the lucky ones - come sundown, the survivors would be at the mercy of the vampires. Not long after, Riley heard a wet thud, followed by the sound of a sharp exhalation of air. When he turned, Riley saw Graham splayed out on the ground, his eyes open, and a spreading circle of blood in the center of his chest. ---------------------------------------------------------- The fly was still at work, dipping delicately into the wound in Riley's side and then methodically rubbing its forelegs together. "Dinner's over," Riley said, as he shooed it away. He tried to bury Graham, but he didn't have the strength. He couldn't even drag the body to the back of the van he used to drive away from the blackened remains of the village. The few prisoners from the cages below who were strong enough to walk refused to believe that he wasn't a vampire and therefore chose to make their own attempts to get away from the village. Riley had no illusions about how far they'd get. As he drove north on the one road that led through the jungle, he didn't know how far he'd make it, either. He kept moving, though, not so much because he sought safety as because he couldn't stay still. ----------------------------------------------------------- Shellshock was real. He'd known the term since he was a boy, reading about World War II in the little library next to the bank on the square in his hometown, but he'd never experienced it until now. The Initiative encounters with vampires involved little real fighting, and he'd never been shot at with live bullets until today. Finding the burned bodies, discovering the people in their cages and the purpose for which the vampires used them, being ambushed, and seeing his friend killed - it all had left Riley dumbstruck, staring dully into space as he sat on the ground, the sound of battle continuing around him. Time passed - time stopped, as he floated in a void - then, unexpectedly, he saw himself with his dad in the backyard of their house, using his rake to toss piles of leaves onto the fire on a crisp autumn day. I smell smoke, he realized. He looked around in confusion and saw that the whizzing bullets had re-ignited a piece of partially burned wood from one of the buildings. Suddenly, he was angry at himself and his inexperience in combat. He would have clapped a palm to his forehead in exasperation, had his arms not been so very heavy. Instead, he crawled a short distance to where he had dropped his large backpack. Inside, he found three remaining incendiary devices. Strapped to the side of the backpack was a launcher, compact and lightweight. Steadying himself as best he could, he aimed one load each at the southern, eastern, and western points of the compass-circle of jungle that surrounded him, leaving the northern point with its road leading away from the village untouched. The screams told him that the fires had claimed some of his opponents, and the scuttling sounds in the underbrush said that the survivors were beating at least a temporary retreat. He staggered to his feet, where he tried to steady his spinning head. There was no one else left alive. Only him. "Now I'm Custer's horse," thought Riley. He recalled that a horse had been the sole survivor of the Seventh Cavalry after the Battle of Little Big Horn. For the rest of its life, it had been trotted out for ceremonial occasions, where it was treated as a cherished hero. Riley thought again. No, he decided. I'm not Custer's horse. ------------------------------------------------------------ He'd seen the vehicle as he walked into the village earlier in the day. It was an ancient Volkswagen mini-van, rusted out, but with an engine that had been surprisingly well-maintained. He wasn't sure how far it would go on three-quarters of a tank of gas, but he would drive until it stopped. The van was so old that it had an 8-track tape player. He'd seen the big clunky tapes at garage sales, but he'd never heard one. There was a collection of tapes on the dashboard by bands Riley had never heard of, with titles he didn't know: "Share the Land" by the Guess Who; "Closer to Home" by Grand Funk Railroad; "Time Has Come Today" by the Chambers Brothers. He'd heard of the Rolling Stones, of course - who hadn't? - but this album was unknown to him. "Exile On Main Street." He played the tape over and over, for days as he drove north, as the passage of time made it clear that the vampires were not pursuing him. He stopped for food or gas when necessary, and he slept in the back of the van during the day, but otherwise he simply rolled along in constant motion, with the music welling up around him: strange, slithering sounds, murky and confused, as if it had been recorded in a swamp, with tales of fear and loss and hauntings, told in gibberish and riddles and unsettling clues. The meaning remained a mystery to him, which was oddly comforting, but stray phrases drifted into his consciousness from time to time. "Headed for the overload, splattered on a dusty road/Kick me like you kicked before, I can't even feel the pain no more." "I'm an old crap shooter/All sixes and sevens and nines." "His clothes are torn and frayed/He's seen much better days." "Got to scrape that shit right off your shoes." "Gimme 'nother drink from your lovin' cup/Just one drink and I'll fall down drunk." "When I could fly, way back home." "I don't wanna walk and talk about Jesus/I just wanna see his face." "Let it loose/Let it all come down." "Stop breakin' down." "Saw you stretched out in Room Ten-oh-nine/With a smile on your lips and a tear right in your eye." "Gonna be the death of me." The last line being the recurring statement of the final song, somehow titled "Soul Survivor." It made no sense, but he kept listening, hoping that it would, or that it would stop mattering to him. -------------------------------------------------------------- The ship drifted away from harbor, its destination unknown to him. He hoped he would not get caught, here in his hiding place down in the hold. He remembered crawling into his grandma's attic when he was little, where her belongings from decades ago sat in stillness, forgotten, covered by a soft blanket of dust. He wanted to be a picture in a frame in that attic, hidden in the dark, forgotten and covered in dust. Beyond that, he chose nothing. He wanted a place where no one would speak his name. Main Menu ~ Return to "Other Worlds" Menu |