Delirium - 3 of 3
Xander woke up alone in the passenger seat of a completely different car. It was parked in what looked like a basement parking garage and he had no idea where he was. The windows had been freshly blacked out and the fumes made his eye sting. He barely had the energy to move. He propped his head against the stickiness of the window and fumbled with his eye-patch where it bit into the socket. A stairwell door clashed open somewhere and Spike came stalking across the lot, shopping bags in hand. He cast them into the backseat and then made to pull out.
“Finally decided to grace me with your presence then? Nearly left you for dead, two towns back,” he remarked as they snaked up through several parking levels and out into a clear winter night.
“Wha…where was that?” His throat burned and his lips felt dry and cracked.
“Little supply stop. Now it can truly be said that corporate America is the tool of the underworld. Though it has to be said that the minimum wage undead aren’t any more helpful than the living,”
“What’d you want?”
“Guns, meat - the essentials of pioneer life,”
“Meat?”
“You’d be amazed how many of you they have strung up by the toes in the walk-ins back there,”
“I don’t even want to know if you’re joking,” he sighed and closed his eye again.
~
He came around again feeling more awake and less drained than he had in weeks. His head and body still screamed at him more than ever, but that was an assurance that feeling had momentarily returned. He was laid out on a bed and the salivating smell of onions and seering beef reached his nostrils. Steadying himself against a wall, he limped out of the bedroom and down a hallway towards a kitchen. Spike was cooking at a grill and swigging from a bottle of red.
“What the fuck is this?” Xander slurred, slouching down at a breakfast bar and laying his head on the mosaic surface.
“Dinner, what the fuck does it look like?”
“Why the desire to play Suzie Homemaker all of a sudden?”
“Hey, if anybody’s the housebound bitch in this setup, we know who that is.”
“Fuck you.”
“Too easy,” Spike sneered at him. “It would seem that you need something in the way of replenishment.”
“Aw, gee, it almost sounds like you care.”
“I do, I couldn’t have filled a shotglass with what you had left after you deciding to go and play Midnight Cowboy.”
“Go to hell.”
“Undoubtedly, but first you can shut up and eat your fucking steak,” he commanded as he slapped down a plate with a steaming slab of meat on it. He even proceeded to slice it into manageable chunks, most likely to watch the blood flow than to afford Xander any help. The first pieces made him gag, but then a ravenous appetite well and truly took hold.
“This my last meal?”
“Not quite,” Spike’s answer was oddly distant.
The food made him crash. He woke back in the bed, Spike propped up next to him, reading, smoking, drinking.
“What?” he questioned Xander’s expression without looking up from the page.
“Y’know, you let me recover too much and I’ll stake you in your sleep.” The threat was utterly empty and Spike knew it.
“You’d eat a bullet more like,” he waved him off.
Xander moved to open the front of Spike’s faded black jeans.
“You don’t have to do that you know,” his eyes lifting a beat from the book.
“You think I don’t know that?”
They actually talked afterwards. Drank wine, smoked, played cards. It was the closest thing to the same universe as pleasant as Xander could recall in outside a year, which was the far side of forever by now. Quiet music strained from the stereo as they sat together in the dark.
‘…all I have left, is my memories of yesterday…’
“Jesus, Bristol was fucking depressing enough before this shite,” Spike muttered. “Try and find something a little more upbeat for the road would you? See if they’ve got any Stones, or the Pistols, hell - I’ll even take the Ramones.”
~
The sky was briefly blue as they headed out the next day. They hadn’t gone half a mile when a ringing shot did something to one of the front wheels, the car fitting and pirouetting into a rock or a barrier or a tree.
“Out of the vehicle! Do it now!” A voice ordered from a distance. Spike swaddled himself in more blanket and nodded to him, his brow bleeding from where it had struck the wheel.
Xander cracked the door and stepped out, palms raised. He made a poor enough impression at night, let alone in the cold light of day, exposed flesh riddled with holes.
“It’s ok…” His voice croaked. There were three of them that he could see, camouflaged grey and white against the snowdrifts, weapons trained.
“How many of them in the vehicle?” Another voice shouted its demand.
“I…no….it’s ok…” Xander tried again, his head throbbing. He looked back in at Spike.
“Your call, though it’s a touch sunny for me to go all Butch and Sundance by your side,” he stated evenly. Xander’s head made a wavering nod. Conflicting orders rained down at him from the bend in the road.
“Step away from the vehicle!”
“On the ground!”
“Do it now!”
Xander leant back into the car and took the handgun from the glove compartment.
“Not a good idea,” Spike contributed. Xander just smiled.
He barely got the weight of the revolver to shoulder height before the shot cut through his chest. He heard the report after his head struck the side of the rear door and then the blacktop. He knew it was done from the cold, white burrow of pain and the attempt at a gushing font of scarlet. He smiled up at the leaden sky. He definitely didn’t have enough blood for that.
More yelling. Cold white hands snatched at him and wrenched him back into the car, even as the windshield fractured into a crystalline spider’s web and shots sunk hard into metal. Impacts of shattering glass landed near by, mixed with the stink of alcohol and gas, flames leaping up not far behind. Everything seemed inappropriately funny, bleeding out was one thing, frothy red bubbles were another.
“After…all these years…put down by a person…” Xander managed.
“Think you needed to be a little quicker on the draw there, Billy,” Spike remarked, keeping his head down and binding more swaddling around his head.
“You want this? Shame…for it to go…to waste,” Xander did his best to proffer his seeping chest to him. For the first time that he could remember, Spike looked disgusted.
“No…you’re alright,” his voice low, as he took the gun from Xander’s grasp and checked its contents.
“Never would’ve…guessed…I’d wind up bleeding to death in a…burning car…with you….” he wheezed. A hot trickle ran from his mouth, something thick and metal in his throat.
“Speak for yourself. Think I can make the treeline?” Spike asked, voice flat.
“There isn’t…a treeline…” Xander would’ve laughed again if the agony wasn’t unbearable.
“You’re a fucking idiot you know that? Why didn’t you just give me up?”
“Because…you’re the only…one left…who knows enough…to care,” he managed to struggle out.
“Feeling’s mutual, Xander,” Spike’s voice as close to feeling as he would ever hear. His vision was far away already, world seen through a pinpoint. “Wish me luck,” Spike breathed and shouldered open the driver’s door. Xander liked to think he might’ve looked back, as his breath gave out and the world went dark.
The pain finally went away.