Alpha Xander
Choose your own Adventure Xander
(eventually this will have its own title, but not until you guys decide what happens)
So,
Xander finds himself pulled into a new universe with a new crazy woman who wants him. This time, the crazy woman decides that she wants him to father a new race of monsters. Eve has seen the Winchester brothers destroy most of her children, and poisoned by phoenix ash, she can't make new ones. So she picks a warrior with darkness in his heart and tries to convince him to become her newest alpha--a child capable of fathering a new race of monsters.
I started this for Shakatany (so Spike will show up eventually), but I couldn't decide what to do with the bunny. That's why I'm leaving it up to you guys. Tell my muse where to go from here, and let's see if we can write it together. A couple of your ideas are already here.
Chapter ONE
Chapter TWO
The semi slowed as it approached, and Xander turned to watch the driver. This was a mostly deserted part of the countryside, and Xander felt a little like the star in a horror movie of the week. Then again, he’d just been adopted by the mother of all monsters, so he wasn’t sure he was the redshirt slated to die… not anymore. Actually, he’d rather die that turn into some monster that ate humans, and Eve said it was his choice, so he was choosing “no” on the monster front.
Xander waved as the driver steered his rig toward the shoulder. The truck overshot, and Xander was showered with pebbles before it finally stopped with a wail of brakes. Xander trotted toward the passenger side.
“Hey, thanks for the ride,” Xander said as he pulled the door open.
“No problem. You’re a little out of the way here.” The guy had on a flannel shirt and worn jeans that made him look like some stereotype of a farmer, but he his beer gut definitely came from sitting still all day.
“I got dropped here under less than voluntary circumstances.”
The driver eyed him. “Girl trouble?”
“I would say yes, only the girls who seem to have trouble with me never liked to be called girls, so I think it’s woman trouble.”
The trucker snorted. “Yep, that’s women for ya. Hop on up.”
Xander climbed up into the seat. The guy spoke English, so that was a good sign. Xander had a few basic words in Chichewa, Hausa and Songhay, but he doubted that knowing how to ask for the location of young girls in tribal languages would be much help. Well, it might help him land in prison, but been there, done that.
The trucker shoved his truck into gear and they started rolling down the highway again. The truck looked remarkably truck-like, so if this was a different universe, it wasn’t all that different. “Where are you heading?” The guy asked.
“Um… anywhere Eve isn’t?” Xander guessed.
The guy laughed. “That’s a good answer. You really pissed her off, huh? Whad’ya do?”
“Breathe… I think.”
The guy shook his head and chuckled. “Burg Garfield,” he said, holding out his right hand while steering with the left.
“Alexander Harris,” Xander offered. Xander was an odd enough name in his own universe… everyone always asked if he was Dutch. He really didn’t want to do anything that would make him stand out, not until he…. Xander’s imagination failed him. He didn’t know what he would do. Panic and flail was an option, but he’d save that in reserve. Plan one involved staying alive and out of jail while Willow fixed whatever had gone wonky.
“So, what’s your line of work, Harris?”
“Uh, construction, mostly,” Xander improvised. He hadn’t done much construction since losing the eye, but trying to explain that he’d been travelling through Africa in search of slayers while getting intermittently shit-faced drunk on local moonshine and mourning the death of his ex-demon ex-fiancée seemed a little much to tell someone on the first day.
“You look like a man who works for his money.”
“Yeah,” Xander said weakly. Giles and the Council money kept flowing into Xander’s account whether he worked or not, so he wasn’t sure if that was true. Xander froze. Shit. Not more than a week earlier he’d told the girls to stop hovering… that he was an adult with a right to drink himself stupider from time to time. And Xander was the first person to admit that he could be a total shit when he lost his temper, and he’d definitely lost his temper with all their hovering. They weren’t parentals, yet they nagged him more than Dawn. He really hoped they didn’t take him at his word because when Willow got her feelings hurt, she could get a good pout on, and a pouting Willow might not look for him for weeks.
“Between jobs? With this economy, I’m not surprised. I’m telling you, between the economy and all the weird shit in the last few years, working men don’t really have a chance.”
“Weird shit?” Xander’s ears perked up. That didn’t sound good.
“Where the hell have you been? I mean, this stuff even hit the main news channels.” Garfield looked over like Xander might be a slime demon. “You’d have to live under a rock to not have heard some of this shit.”
“Um, I’ve been in the woods,” Xander said, poking a thumb toward the trees, trees, and more trees out the window.
“A survivalist type, then?” And he sounded weirdly okay with that thought. Most people considered the ‘live off the grid’ sorts sort of odd, but Garfield was nodding again, clearly approving of the choice. “Trying to ride out the apocalypse, were ya?”
Xander’s heart skipped a little. What the hell was it with him and apocalypses? Trying to keep the emotion off his face, Xander said, “It seemed safer than sticking around. I mean, Eve and I were hearing all sorts of things on the less than official channels.” Xander offered one of his harmless smiles, and surprising it worked.
“No joke.” Garfield seemed to relax back into his seat, but Xander eyed the cab. A broken baseball bat with the jagged end of raw wood was shoved into the driver’s side door, a rosary hung from the mirror, and now that Xander was paying attention, the knife in the guy’s belt looked suspiciously like silver. When truck drivers started carrying supernatural weapons, you knew the universe sucked. But Eve had said that her monsters were dead… that she was poisoned. And that made it sound like the good guys had won. Yeah, something was weird.
“So, what sent you running into the woods?” Garfield asked as casually as someone might comment on a baseball game. Hey, how the Mets doing? Do you think the Yankees will win this week? Which sign of the apocalypse really worried you? Yeah, this universe was all kinds of screwed up.
Xander chose an appropriately generic sign of the apocalypse. “The earthquake.” He tried to school his face into something suitably sad as he nodded his head.
“You’re lucky. You missed the real fun.”
“Like?” Xander’s stomach was tying itself into sheep shank knots.
“A big chunk of the west is blackened stumps. There are whole towns gone. Of course they say that in Russia, there were places where they couldn’t get the people out of the towns before they burned, so I don’t suppose Colorado has too much to complain about. And then there’s the way whole areas got sick and died. And they say,” Garfield lowered his voice, “that there’s a mass grave outside Carthage, Missouri and a big chunk of the town got dumped in it.”
The knot in Xander’s guts tightened. “Shit.”
“That’s one way to put it,” Garfield said. “You took off at the right time, but if your Eve is holding the fort in some well-stocked cabin, you might want to consider making up with the missus. I mean, it seems like a lot of this stuff is settling down, but it feels a little like the other shoe is waiting to drop.”
“Oh yeah, shoe droppage. That’s my luck to walk in as the other shoe is dropping.”
Garfield gave him another odd look. “Have some bad luck in your past, do ya? You look the sort.”
“The sort?” Xander really wasn’t sure he wanted to hear what sort he looked like. He’d been kidnapped, dropped in purgatory, mojoed, and then dumped in the middle of the woods and left to walk until his feet hurt and his pits smelled.
“Been to prison?”
“Um, not in the States.”
The guy laughed again, and oddly, he looked more relaxed. “Good answer.”
“I’m glad you approve.” Xander stared at the guy, suddenly not so sure how normal he was. Or even which side he might be on. Fighting demons didn’t automatically make you a good guy. Xander had met a few shamans and chiefs who were big on the demon fighting and also big on the evil asshole scale. As Xander stared at Garfield, shadows started to swirl around him. Arms, drifting over Garfield’s form. A woman’s arm floated in front of him, and Xander sucked in a breath and jerked back. The smoke scattered, and the images vanished like fog.
“Hey, you’re not stoned, are you?” Garfield asked.
“Definitely not,” Xander assured the guy, and he tried really hard to not look at him.
“I don’t want crack-heads in my cab.”
“I don’t want crack in my head. Honestly, me and drugs-not a good combination. I get silly and I say things and then bad stuff happens. Alcohol is my vice of choice.” Xander carefully stared out the front window.
Garfield grunted, and out of the corner of his eye, Xander could see him reach for the baseball bat. Scooting a little closer to the door, Xander started calculating distances and the likelihood that he’d be broken to little tiny bits if he tried to jump out of a moving truck. “So, what’s the next town you’re stopping in?” Xander asked as brightly as he could. Please just let him get off at the next stop, and he would never talk to this guy again. And he really didn’t want to look at the guy again because the ghost arms were freaky to a level that Xander just did not want to deal with.
Garfield didn’t answer right away, and the silence dragged on until the discomfort made Xander want to squirm. He had to work at staying still. “I usually fill up at Bangor. You can catch another ride from there.”
“Bangor. Bangor, Maine. Home of Stephen King… or near home, anyway. He lived in one of the towns around there.” A town infected with ghosts and at least one angry Indian god intent on revenge, and Giles was pretty sure that at least some of his books were documentary.
“Who’s that?”
“A horror writer,” Xander said, and suddenly he wasn’t sure King was a horror writer in this world because how could someone not know Stephen King? If you were alive in the nineties, you pretty much tripped over him every time you went to the bookstore or the movies. And while Xander typically avoided bookstores, he still knew the guy.
“Never heard of him. Have you read Carver Edlund’s stuff?”
“Carver Edlund?”
Garfield seemed to be warming up to his topic a little, which was good because his hand inched away from that broken bat. “Yep. He wrote a whole series of books about two demon hunting brothers. They’re fated to be some lynchpin in the apocalypse, only they’re more about taking care of each other than fighting any world-ending demons. They go around the country, steal what they need, lie to the authorities, and kill demons… and they get a fair amount of tail in the process. The one brother even fucks a demon girl while the other brother’s in hell.”
“That sounds…” That sounded awful. Being the chosen always sucked, but if they were demon hunters, sleeping with a demon didn’t sound good, and Xander did realize that he was being a little hypocritical because the love of his life had cursed men’s genitals for a thousand years, but he’d loved her during her ex-demony period. “Interesting,” Xander finally finished.
“They’re not for everyone,” Garfield said. And with that, the conversation appeared to have died. At least it was the conversation and not Xander that died, so Xander was perfectly willing to stare out the window and pray for them to get to Bangor faster. The truck rolled past old weathered houses and trees and streams and trees and a few gas stations that Xander had seen in old horror films and more trees, trees, and trees until houses and stations started to dot the side of the highway. Shacks and cabins gave way to homes with white siding and truly ugly shutter colors until the empty land gave way to a pale imitation of a city. Oh it had lots of buildings, but they weren’t exactly up to city quality. Either they were in a crappy part of Bangor or Bangor was a pretty crappy little place.
Garfield pulled his truck into a station, and Xander tensed, ready to jump out if Garfield showed any interest in staking him. While he wasn’t a vampire, staking would still prove remarkable effective at killing him. However, as the truck slowed and finally inched toward the pumps, Garfield seemed more interested in not hitting the other trucks than killing Xander.
A ghost hand appeared again, and Xander shivered as ghost fingers reached for him, brushing over his arm.
“Hey, thanks for the ride,” Xander said as he reached for the handle; however, he made the mistake of looking at Garfield. It was as if a movie projector shone an image onto him so it fuzzed out at the edges, but the image was clear enough for Xander to see Garfield wearing a wife-beater shirt as he held his hands around a woman’s throat. She screamed silently, her mouth open as she clawed at his arms. One hand groped along the floor until she grabbed something, and she slashed at him. Xander watched the knife part the flesh of Garfield’s arm, and when Xander looked down, the real Garfield had a scar along his left forearm in that exactly place.
Panic and horror pushed the bile up into Xander’s throat as he stared at that scar-at that proof. Something broke Xander’s concentration because he looked up at Garfield’s face, and now Xander could see a half-dozen women, all screaming and dying and writhing in pain as Garfield strangled them and stabbed them an did things to the bodies that made Xander want brain bleach.
“Why would you….” Xander stopped, unable to even say those things out loud. A woman floated toward the back, and suddenly Xander knew that Garfield had trophies back there… a necklace from a woman in Connecticut, a lock of hair from a prostitute in New York, a set of teeth on a string that came from a woman in Florida.
“What do you mean?” Garfield’s voice lost all emotion, but Xander watched a ghost arm reach for a gun, Xander ripped the door open and tumbled out into the chilly evening air.
“He’s got a gun. Someone call a cop!” Xander yelled as he ran for the nearest truck. In his experience, Xander found that most people froze in that kind of situation, but this trucker had pulled his own gun out of the back of his pants and pointed it in Xander’s general direction before Xander could finish. Xander tried to stop too fast, slipped, and fell on his ass, but when he heard footsteps behind him, he scrambled toward guy number two, gun or no gun.
“He killed girls. He told me how he killed girls and one sliced him up, and he pointed a gun at me, and I am really not interested in getting shot by a psycho.” Xander blurted it all out as he ran for this new trucker, a black guy with short cropped hair and a very confused expression. However, Xander must have convinced him because the guy shifted until he pointed the gun at Garfield.
“Stay back. I do not want to shoot you in the middle of big old tanks of diesel, but I will if you come one step closer.”
“He’s some criminal. He stole from me,” Garfield said.
The guy glanced over at Xander. Xander shook his head. “I am seriously not stealing a necklace made out of women’s teeth, and even as serial killers go, that is creepy beyond all levels of creep known to man.”
Garfield turned white.
The new guy looked back and forth between Xander and Garfield before seeming to settle on seeing Garfield as the bad guy. “Fuck. That’s some sick shit. Let’s call for the police and settle this.”
“I’m not waiting for some cops.” Garfield turned his back, shoving his gun in his waistband, but Xander could see a new scene forming from the shadows. Garfield floored his truck toward a roadblock. He hit it so hard cop cars flew… falling on fleeing bodies, trapping officers between steel cars and the guardrail and crushing them so that flesh bulged and the ragged ends of bones stuck out at jagged angles. Xander’s stomach lurched.
“Don’t let him go,” Xander turned to the second guy.
He shook his head. “I’m not getting involved in a shootout. I’ll call in his license plate.”
Xander couldn’t let all those men die. Bloodied faces and blank eyes stared at him from the shadows, and without stopping to think, Xander darted after Garfield. Behind him, the other trucker called out, but Xander caught Garfield by the arm. The second the man started to turn, Xander knew this had been utterly and deeply stupid. He didn’t have Buffy and Willow to save him here, and this guy was armed and more than willing to kill.
Just as Xander started to panic, he felt something warm gathering under his palm. Garfield turned, his eyes wide with shock, and they kept getting wider and wider. The warmth spread, and for a second, Xander felt infused with heat, the sort like he felt from a really strong eggnog that made you warm from the inside out. The world slowed, and Xander braced his feet as he started getting light headed, but then the world erupted into motion.
The second truck driver yanked Xander away, and stood between him and Garfield with his gun pointed at Garfield. Three men were running out of the café, and Xander could feel a pull so strong that he looked down at his hand to see if he had something tied to it. For a brief second, he could almost see a white thread trailing back to Garfield, but as soon as Xander saw it, the thread snapped, and Xander fell back on his ass.
“I don’t think he’s breathing.”
“What the fuck is going on?”
“The cops are coming!”
“Does anyone know CPR?”
“He’s grabbing his left arm. That means heart attack.”
“The other guy said this one attacked him, that he’s some sort of serial killer.”
The words floated past Xander. He ignored them just like he ignored the men milling around and the sounds of distant sirens. Ignoring all of it, he focused on Garfield’s open eyes. The man was dead. Someone was trying to use CPR, but some voice deep inside Xander told him that it was too late. The man was deader than dead. Something vital inside was simply gone, and he was an empty shell lying on the hard concrete, a rainbow captured in an oil spill near his head. He was dead… and Xander had killed him.