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In America, there are many ghost towns, scattered across the nation like tiny shards of broken glass.
This was not one of them.
This was a dead town.
This was Salem's Lot.
They still told stories, though. The sun didn't always have to be down
below the horizon, although it
helped. In towns like Bangor and Castle Rock, Haven and Derry, you
could always find a roadside
pub with an old-timer nestled up to the bar, weathered and beaten by
the tides of life. He'd have the
look of a man who's spent more time drinking than loving, a man who
decided long ago that God
was just a cruel little man who enjoyed watching his creations twist
in the wind, an omniscient
wizard of Oz laughing at the fools who talked one way and looked the
other. He'd be tall sometimes,
or short, sometimes so fat his belly nearly pushes him off the stool,
sometimes so skinny that you'd
think that the breeze from the open door would knock him over. Buy
the man a drink, and he'd tell
you a story, about things you'd never believe, things no one in their
right mind would consider for
more than a second before shaking their head in denial. With a voice
so cracked with time and ill use
that you can't help but imagine a dried-out riverbed , he'd tell you
a story like -
"I had a cousin up the Lot way, this'd be now twenty years gone last
month. Ayuh, it all went bad
up there in a summer just like this one: hot like blazes, and drier
than year-old cow dung. My cousin
Billy, he was a good guy, was a mechanic in the garage downtown, never
married, but God, that boy
could drink one of them Frenchmen up north under the table in two hours
flat and still have room
left for a tequila chaser. But when it all came down, Billy never got
out in time. It's hard, you see,
when you hear the rumours from your neighbours, but they just all sound
so wild and crazy. You
don't know until they're tappin' at your window at four in the morning
asking to come in, they got
somethin' to show ya, and you can tell by the looks on their faces
that it ain't good. By the time you
scramble for the cross that's on your night-table, they're gone, but
you still remember, ayuh, you
remember the eyes and how they looked at you."
The trucker signaled the bartender for another couple of drinks. "How was that?"
The old-timer looked at the trucker and his apparent companion, a young
blonde girl who looked
pretty tough for her age, probably on the road and on the run for a
long time. The girl returned his
gaze with a disturbing eagerness. The old-timer shifted lightly on
his stool, suddenly feeling the need
to center himself and grab hold of something, because there was something
old in this room, old and
powerful, and he had seen too many broken years go by, too many faces
pass by in his crowd to
miss that sensation of coiled tension. He was suddenly glad that the
sun had not yet set.
"They looked at you like you were somethin' good to eat."
This trucker had heard stories, too, it seemed, because he didn't laugh
or shake his head in disbelief.
And the girl… She didn't look away either. The old-timer, Jacky to
his friends if he had any left that
still lived, tightened the grip on his drink. He remembered hearing
about a young boy right after the
Lot went bad, a young boy people said looked a little wild, crazy.
Like he was going to pull
something out of his coat and start makin' some trouble. He thought
this girl had that look, too.
"So what happened then?" asked the girl.
"Well, it was a funny thing, how people who had lived in the Lot all
their lives, they'd just up and
left, or how others, they just disappeared. Undertaker was really busy
for a while, until he went on a
holiday, and the schools in town closed down 'cause there weren't any
students. Mind, all this
happened in a few weeks time, and then somehow, somewhere, a fire got
started, a fire that lasted
three days. When it was finally over, there weren't anybody left."
The trucker cleared his throat. "What do you mean, anybody left?"
"I don't know how many people lived in Salem's Lot before, maybe a thousand,
but after the fire,
there weren't anybody left. The fire crews got in there, and the people
were gone. It was funny, too,
because there were some houses that were burned right to the foundations,
and other houses weren't
touched at all. They had search and rescue go through the debris and
rubble, but when it came to
searchin' the other houses… well, one of the boys there, Jimmy Dupree,
good kid, he told me that
the Lot was way too damn creepy; they just wanted to get the hell outta
there. I don't blame 'em."
The old-timer finished his beer and sighed significantly. The trucker
signaled for another. They
always did.
"So," said the teenager, "nobody ever came out of Salem's Lot after
the search and rescue teams
left?"
"That's right. In fact… anyone who's ever gone into Salem's Lot since
then hasn't come out either.
Not ever."
* * *
The eighteen-wheeler lumbered along the Maine highway. The sun was beginning
its slow descent to
the other side of the world.
"You knew the story already, didn't you?"
The trucker, Brian Redfield, nodded without looking at his hitchhiking
passenger. "Ayuh, it's a
common story round these parts. And not one to take lightly, from what
I've heard."
The blonde girl hmmmed. "So you believe it?"
Redfield glanced over at her. Lord, if she wasn't the best-looking girl
he had ever seen hitching rides
on the Interstate, and yet some dimly sensed impulse told him the moment
she stepped into the cab
that she wasn't someone you messed around with. Not that he was that
type of guy, mind you; he
knew where to stop and spend a few bills to get some quick satisfaction
if he needed it. But this girl,
who by all rights should be fearing for her life on an hourly basis
out here on the road, looked like
she was the dangerous one. Maybe not to folks with good intentions,
but he wondered what had
happened to those foolish men who thought that a free ride meant a
free ride of another kind.
"Ayuh, I believe it. If enough people tell me the same story, I gotta
think that somebody's telling the
truth."
The girl, who had never told him her name, stared out her passenger
window deep in thought. He
thought about asking her what she was running from, who she was trying
not to be, but he figured it
would be like asking her out on a date, and he was twenty years removed
from that sort of
behaviour. That sparked another thought: where was he when the Lot
burned to the ground? Down
in Ogunquit High School, sitting in the back row, yukking it up with
his no-account buddies, most
of whom were in jail now, or working at the sawmill in Castle Rock,
or selling fries down at the
tourist beaches. Now here was a girl who had her whole life ahead of
her, with so much potential, so
many possibilities. And instead of mooning over boys or burying her
head in a textbook or shopping
at the mall with her friends, she was in his truck, hitchhiking to
God knows where for God knows
what reason.
He opened his mouth, and -
"You so do not want to know."
He shut his mouth with a snap.
"Although I appreciate your concern."
And as they hurtled along the pavement chasing the twilight, they sat
silently, both wishing the other
would find a way to say the right thing.
* * *
"Is that the exit up there? To Salem's Lot?"
Redfield squinted at the distance, wishing he had the time to get to
an optometrist some time this
century. "Ayuh, I think it is. Look, it's all closed off."
The girl looked at the trucker, and as Redfield met her gaze, he knew
what she was going to ask
before she said a word. He took his foot off the gas.
"Would you mind letting me off here?"
That was less of a request and more of an order, really. He pulled over
and began braking. "You,
uh, know that it'll be dark pretty soon."
"That is the logical progression. Day, then night, then day again, hopefully."
She was rummaging in the back for her things, and Redfield silently
cursed himself for never taking
a moment to have a quick look in her packsack. When she sat back in
the seat, radiating a calm
determination, he reconsidered. I wouldn't want her to catch me doing
anything bad.
"Listen, if you want off, the next town's just a half hour away, we'll be there in no time, and…"
She put her hand on his arm and smiled. "It's okay. I know what I'm doing."
That's what scares me, he thought. Outwardly, he nodded. The truck came
to a stop a dozen yards
past the Salem's Lot exit.
"Do you need anything? Here, I've got some cash you can have." He pulled
out his wallet and began
rifling through it, looking for something to give her.
"Please, the ride was really great. I owe you, for the ride, and for
being a good, considerate person."
She stuck out her hand. "Shake?"
They shook hands. She opened her door.
The last words he heard from her were, "Have a good life."
The last words he said to her were, "Have a long life."
After she had gone, he wondered why there were tears in his eyes, and
why it felt like he said
goodbye to the daughter he never had. He sat there for a few minutes
wishing he could have thought
of some good advice to give, or some way to convince her to continue
on, at least to the next town.
Because the overriding sense that he had gotten from her, the radiance
that she unconsciously
projected, was an innate goodness. He recalled seeing Charles Manson
on TV once and thinking,
God, that is pure evil. And now, he felt, he just met the closest thing
to… what? Evil's opposite.
Hope's champion. His hand was on the door handle, and he was pulling
it down, then…
Then he realized the sun was setting. Thirty seconds later, the truck was back on the highway.
* * *
FBI agents Starkey and Jameson sat in their nondescript Ford Taurus
and waited patiently. Two
blocks down the street, a van sat in the parking lot of a fast food
restaurant. It was a familiar van;
they had been following it for the last two thousand miles, through
Nevada and Texas, Arkansas and
Louisiana, Florida and Georgia, the Carolinas, Delaware, Philadelphia,
New Jersey, New York, and
just how many New states were there anyway? But now they were in Connecticut,
in a quaint little
town called Derby, and their quarry had decided to stop at yet another
fast food joint for lunch.
"Do they eat anywhere else?" Starkey was enjoying a fine Julienne salad.
"It's the teenagers today. They can shovel that crap into their stomachs
all day long. Give them real
food, and they gag." Jameson had chosen a health shake.
"Makes you wonder what their moms cook them for supper."
"You're out of touch, Starkey. Moms don't do all the cooking anymore;
sometimes the dads cook
too."
"That explains it." They laughed.
"Man, if it isn't a barbeque, I don't know what the hell I'm doing,"
said Jameson, sucking the last
bit of goodness out of the straw.
"I've had your burgers. You still don't know what the hell you're doing."
"Your lack of appreciation of my generosity continues to amaze me, Starkey.
I suppose you don't
like my choice of beer, either."
"Any alcoholic beverage whose name ends in the word 'light' can't be good."
"Remember who paid for that salad, buddy."
"Yeah, the American taxpayer, god bless 'em."
They laughed again.
Starkey poked at his salad. It was almost done. "How long is this going to take, anyway?"
Jameson grinned. "Who cares, as long as they're doing all the work?"
"Xander, I'm tired of doing all the work here. Here's some newspapers, you go through them."
"Cordy, no offense, but the one paper you picked up this morning was
the first one you read since
we left California two weeks ago."
"I get carsick really easily. Excuse me for having a delicate stomach."
"And yet," interjected Giles, "you seem to have no ill effects from
eating that greasy hamburger."
The librarian was struggling to make sense of the soggy salad he had
ordered. He was also still
irritated that the cashier had given him one of those 'what-kind-of-lunatic-have-we-here'
looks when
he had asked for it.
"Grease is good," said Xander. "Helps speed the blood along the veins.
And keeps you regular. In
fact, I think grease has gotten a really bad reputation over the years.
After all, grease is your friend."
Giles shook his head in defeat. "What are we teaching you children in school these days, anyway?"
"The question should be what are we learning in school these days," replied Willow.
"Not a question you want honesty to be anywhere near," added Oz.
The Watcher poked at the lettuce, hoping vainly for any signs of life,
or at the very least, freshness.
"Are they still there?"
Xander leaned over and looked out the window.
"Oh yeah. One very conspicuous FBI tail present and accounted for."
Giles sighed, thinking of the empty feeling his wallet was experiencing.
"I must admit, I did not
expect this pursuit to take quite this long. I am afraid that if we
do not find Buffy soon, we, uh, may
not have the funds to continue the search."
"Not a problem," said Oz, grinning.
Willow turned in her seat, surprised. "Oh?"
Oz's grin shrunk slightly. "Well, it's not something I'm proud of, really, selling out and all that."
Willow poked him in the ribs. "Selling out? To who?"
"A few months ago, in my spare time, nothing serious, you know, but,
um, I developed an internet
search engine. And I sold it."
His girlfriend's eyes grew wide. "Not to…"
Oz covered her mouth with his hands. "Shhh. No one has to know. They
gave me a bag of money
and I thought, well, I could use the money for a rainy day, or a cool
gift for my girlfriend, or a
summer roadtrip."
Giles leaned forward. "How much money are we talking about here?"
Oz whispered a number in his ear.
"Oh, my…" said Giles.
* * *
When she passed the city limits of Salem's Lot, she could have pointed
to the exact spot with her
eyes closed, ran her palm along the demarcation line like a street
mime. There was definitely a
difference to the air, both physically and psychically. This was a
bad place, emphasis on the word
bad, and since she had spent the last week or so on the road and travelling
without a stop, she was
getting antsy. Restless. Hungry for something to do with herself. Something
to distract her from the
dreams she had been having. They wouldn't have been so bad, except
they were all about Angel, and
as she thought about them, she was a little surprised to find herself
blushing.
All about Angel, indeed.
She couldn't escape the strong feeling that even though she sent him to Hell, he wasn't entirely gone.
So here she was, in a ghost town, looking for trouble because it had
been too long since she last
flexed her muscles and exercised her powers. Sure, there were the drivers
who had picked her up and
thought she was this helpless little girl, but there was no fight in
those guys - one punch and that was
it. And when they had stopped at that bar and heard the old-timer's
story, it was like a light going
off in her head. A floodlight, really.
Maybe it's because I fight for the forces of good, I have to do some
good every once in a while to keep
myself from going crazy. Destiny's a hard bull to ride.
The two-lane road wound around some small hills before topping a rise,
and then she could see the
whole town, tinted orange from the sunset. It looked like a dried-out
beehive husk, the bees long
gone, but perhaps one or two remained to surprise the unwary visitor.
A ghost town. Can't be any worse than Sunnydale.
To her right, overlooking the town like some malevolent gargoyle, was
a large, ancient house. Two
miles away, and she could feel a darkness emanating from the boarded-up
windows, a simmering,
ancient evil that called to her with naked glee. Oh, and it pulled,
didn't it? An insistent tug at her
spine, like an impatient lover wanting all the goods.
That place is wiggins central.
She decided to give it a wide berth for now. Not a hard decision.
Whatever was going on in this town, she didn't want to start at the top right away.
She picked up the pace.
* * *
The young girl walked past the War Memorial, past the overgrown ruins
of a dozen storefronts, past
Eva Miller's boardinghouse. She kicked at the dead leaves on the sidewalk;
she watched the streets
like a Secret Service agent at a political rally. She seemed to be
looking for something, but she didn't
have a great deal of time left before darkness would claim the Lot
for its own. Finally she turned a
corner and stopped momentarily. She was staring at the Catholic Church.
He could understand why;
the houses all around it had burned to the ground twenty years ago,
but the Church was
miraculously untouched. God takes care of His own, when He feels it's
necessary. Now she was
walking up to the front doors, and from this distance, he couldn't
be sure if she was examining the
blasted doorknob, but if she had any sense, she would be. Then she
pulled the door open and walked
in.
It was time.
* * *
The pews were overturned and at the front of the church, the cistern
that at one time held holy water
had been smashed against the far wall. She could see handprints burned
into the wood, but the cross
hanging on the front of the pulpit was unharmed, and the stained-glass
windows were all intact. As
good a place as any to spend the night. It seemed that whatever had
happened here, a pitched battle
of some sort, was long in the past; there was a fairly thick covering
of dust on everything in the
church.
"This was Father Callahan's church." The voice carried easily from the front doors.
She turned quickly to see a young man in his early thirties, fairly
tall, thin, dressed casually, with
dark hair and darker eyes. He took a few steps forward, closing the
door behind him, and she was
impressed by his grace; he seemed to flow from one step to another.
This is a dangerous man, she
thought.
"I didn't think Catholics got so rambunctious during services. But I
guess the last service was a
while ago."
The man stepped closer, his movements betraying a certain wariness.
"I doubt that you were alive at
the time."
"Was he?"
The man raised an eyebrow in surprise. It felt like he was faintly mocking
her. "You have heard
stories, then."
She found a pew that was still upright and solid, brushed away the dust
with her hand, and sat down,
facing away from the stranger. "This place looks like a Gap store after
a year-end clearance sale.
What happened? The altar boys got into the sacramental wine?"
He came up to her from behind and put his hand on her shoulder. "This
is not the safest place to
be."
She turned, smiling, and looked up at him. She watched his eyes for
a moment, dark and intense. He
was vaguely handsome, but his gaze was of a man who had seen too much
too soon. His
apprenticeship as a child had been far too short. "What, the church?
Or the town in general?"
His grip tightened on her shoulder.
"If you have come here on a dare, or something like that, I suggest
you leave as soon as possible.
The consequences are greater than you could imagine."
She twisted suddenly, grabbing his arm and, in a fluid motion, flipped
him over judo-style into the
next pew. The sound of his body crashing into the wood echoed loudly.
"I don't know. I can imagine a lot. I've seen even more. And I don't even have cable."
The man groaned, blinking at her. "Who are you?"
Buffy stood and offered her hand. "No, no, I get to hear your story
first. These pews are tough on
the rear end. And a little dusty. Why don't we find somewhere more
comfortable to talk?"
* * *
"You're not a vampire."
"Neither are you. I could tell by the way the sunlight didn't fry you
to ashes when we walked across
the street."
He looked out the window of the deserted restaurant and watched the
setting sun fade behind a
stand of trees. "How fortunate for me that you're so observant."
"Easy call. I'm a night person by nature." Buffy smelled her drink,
which was a clear liquid in a
plastic cup. It had no scent. She shrugged, and tossed it back. "So
what's your story? You like the
night life?"
He looked back at her, and for a moment, she thought she could see agony
in his eyes, a twisting,
trembling burn in the fires of hell. He blinked, and the illusion faded.
Intense, she thought.
"When I was twelve years old, I saw my parents killed right in front
of me. If it hadn't been for
Father Callahan, I might have joined them on the living room carpet…
or worse. His name was
Barlow; at least, that's what he called himself, but his look was ancient,
his evil bloated but still
hungry. When everything in the Lot went bad, Barlow and his henchman,
Straker, were at the heart
of it, living up at the Marsten House, adding to their army of the
undead each night. There were a
few of us who knew what was going on: me, a writer named Ben Mears,
Doc Cody, the English high
school teacher, Father Callahan. By the end, after my parents were
dead, and Doc, and the teacher,
and so many others, it was just me and Ben. I still don't remember
what happened in that basement,
but Ben cleaned Barlow's clock, you bet he did. Staked that bastard
like it was God swinging the
hammer.
"We left then, too tired and afraid to do any more. But we had to come
back. We had to return to
the Lot, because people were starting to disappear from neighbouring
towns, and we knew that was
something we couldn't ignore and still live with ourselves. So we came
back, and we lit the fire that
burned. It was an oddly pretty sight, the flames driving the creatures
from their hiding places into
the sunlight, into our waiting arms with the stakes at the ready. I
don't know how many we killed in
those three days; I lost count after a hundred."
He stopped to take a sip of his water. He gazed shrewdly at her, a small
grin surfacing. "The story
crazy enough for you? Wondering what I did with the strait-jacket?"
Buffy was still trying to make sense of what he said. The whole town,
full of vampires, and this man,
once a little kid, staking as many as he could.
"Keep going. I left the strait-jacket back in the Mercedes."
He kept his eyes on her a moment longer, trying to assess her mood. Then -
"Ben and I had to hide for a while after that; firefighters came in,
tried to clean up, and we didn't
want to be around to answer questions. They didn't stay long, though,
and by the time they left, we
knew what we had to do.
"We had to stay and make sure they were all dead. Barlow was gone, but
who knew how many were
left after the fire, nursing their wounds, hiding from the flames,
waiting for their chance to find more
victims? Through that winter and the following spring, we hunted, going
from house to house,
looking for the undead. We found some, but not as many as we expected.
"Then Father Callahan returned."
Buffy blinked. "I thought he died."
The young man sighed. "Oh, no, that would have been a blessing, if he
had. No, Barlow made him a
vampire as punishment for not having enough faith. He saved my life,
but I guess he didn't have
anything left for himself." He paused then, closing his eyes. Buffy
thought he was probably
imagining those fateful moments, and her heart went out to him. How
many times had she done the
same? Closed her eyes and saw the sword sink so easily into Angel's
chest. Closed her eyes and
watched her love fall so far, so long.
Finally he continued, "We didn't know at the time, but Callahan travelled
down to New York and
wintered there. And then he came back. With friends. We found them
in his old church. God knows
how they got in, but when we walked in, they were performing… rituals,
something, I don't know.
There was a dead body on the altar, they were all around it, chanting
stuff. Father Callahan was the
first to see us, and that was it. All hell broke loose inside that
church. It was a huge battle, but we
had been training for a while, see, and new vampires tend to be a little
dumb, so by the end, there
was just us and the Father, but he escaped.
"In the morning, Ben decided that he should go after Callahan, because
he wasn't likely to stick
around the Lot now that he knew we were still around. I stayed in the
Lot, to continue the hunt and
the vigil. Sure, I was only thirteen by then, but I was an old thirteen.
"Nineteen years ago, Ben Mears left Salem's Lot to find the Father,
and I haven't heard from him
since. I've spent those years here in the Lot, keeping an eye on the
town, making sure that those
events from long ago never get repeated again."
They looked at each other for a couple of minutes, before Buffy reached
inside her vest and pulled
out two stakes from her rib holsters. The man's eyes widened, and she
held out her hand.
"We haven't been properly introduced. Buffy Summers, Vampire Slayer."
The man took it.
"Mark Petrie, Vampire Slayer."
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