Buffy the Vampire Slayer - Buffy Season4 02 by The Lost Slayer 02 Dark Times # Christopher Golden

recollection of the place. “I think so.”
    “That’s the border. We can have an extraction team waiting for you there. One hour.” One hour, Buffy thought. A smile spread across her face. One hour, and then she could begin to make sense of this insane world, this horrid future.
    “If I’m not there it means I’m dead,” she replied. “Oh, and this line is bugged. There could be a Welcome Wagon there waiting for me and for your team.”
    “One hour,” Fontaine repeated. “And Buffy?”
    “Yes?”
    “I’m glad you’re alive.”
    He hung up, and before she could do the same, Buffy heard a series of rapid clicks on the other end. Though she knew there was no way the vampires could monitor all calls at all times, a dreadful certainty filled her that they had listened to at least part of this call. One hour.
    She hung up the phone and turned to the Rosses. They flinched, and would not meet her gaze.
    “Keys to the Volvo. Now.”
    Andrew Ross shook a bit as he stood to face her, face growing red. “Just a goddamn second. Maybe you scare me. Hell, you kicked in a door with three dead-bolts in it. But I’m not just going to hand you my keys.”
    “Are you kidding?” Buffy asked, amazed. “I’m not going to leave you two here. You’re coming with me.”
    “They’ll kill us,” Nadine hissed, scandalized.
    Andrew crossed his arms defiantly. “We’re not going anywhere.” Buffy gaped at them. After a moment, she shook her head in astonishment. “All right, look, I’m not going to make you come. The last thing I need is to wrestle with people I’m trying to help. And maybe you’re right, maybe you’re safer here until the nest is destroyed. But I need your car, and I’m taking it.
    “Now, keys.”
    “They’ll… they’ll think we helped you,” Andrew stammered. With a sigh, Buffy strode across the room and decked him. She pulled the punch, but it would leave a hell of a bruise. Andrew moaned as he sat up on the linoleum. Nadine just stared at them both.
    “Now they won’t think you helped by choice. I don’t have time to be nice. Give me the keys.” Nadine hurried across the kitchen and picked up her purse, rifled through it and dug out a key ring. She tossed them, jangling, to Buffy.
    “I’ll be back,” Buffy told them.
    The couple only stared at her, Nadine with her purse clutched defensively in front of her and Andrew on his butt on the floor, one hand over the rapidly rising welt on his face.
    “What’s wrong with you people? I want to help.”
    “No one can help,” Nadine whispered.
    “This is helping?” Andrew snapped. “You can go to hell.”
    “This is hell,” Buffy told them grimly. “And I’ve already stayed too long. I’m outta here.” She went out the front door and loped across the lawn to the Volvo. As she drove, Buffy tried not to think about the Rosses and the fear that kept them from even trying to run away. Her destination, Donatello’s, was about nine miles away. If the vampires were listening, they knew where she was headed. The only advantages she had at the moment were that they did not know what she was driving, and that she knew the roads. There were half a dozen ways to get where she was going. The hard part was going to be guessing correctly which one of them would get her there alive. After high school graduation, Xander Harris had retreated to the basement of his parents’ house and a series of dead-end jobs, not because he could do nothing else, but because he was burdened with a depressing ambivalence. He just had no idea what he wanted to do next. All he did know was that he did not want to sit in another classroom as long as he lived. And, while hanging out in the cramped, damp space he called an apartment while his parents battled it out upstairs was not his ideal living arrangement, it had a certain charm in the area of personal finance.
    Still, he knew there was more for him to do in life. It was only that he could not figure out what that