Taking the Initiative
by Rainne
Chapter Six
[reviews]
A/N: Lots of bloodshed in this part. If you're squeamish... well... yeah. Also, if you're a fan of the Initiative, you might not want to read this.
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Dakota had decided, after quite a bit of hard thinking, to leave the new Slayers at the Academy as a line of defense just in case something was to happen there. She got a locator spell from Maisri and it led her to a secluded, secure compound in a heavily-wooded area several miles north of Ramstein Air Base. Dakota set about scouting the two-acre lot and was almost disappointed at the lack of challenge. Apparently these Initiative people thought a lot of their secrecy. They had a total of six sentries patrolling the perimeter, and they didn't even look up into the trees as she passed over their heads toward the fence.
The compound was tiny and consisted of several Quonset huts; two large, open tents that served as barracks and mess hall; an unguarded armory tent; and a three-story building at the far end of the compound that was built of steel and concrete and had a sign next to the heavily-guarded front door that read "Containment Unit." A wide dirt strip ran from the gate of the compound directly to the front door of the Containment Unit and, nearby, several large trucks were parked. She sat in the tree, watching, examining the area, and was rewarded for her patience by a disturbance at the door of the Containment Unit. A prisoner was being brought out.
The prisoner was surrounded by armed guards and wore a feature-hiding hood, but Dakota would have known Faith anywhere. She struggled with her captors when she realized that she was outside, but her hands and feet were shackled and one of the guards had what appeared to be a cattle prod, which he used on her until she stopped fighting. Dakota hissed, feeling her features slide into gameface. She studied that guard carefully, memorizing his features. He had just signed his own death warrant.
The men — one of whom she recognized as Graham Miller — led Faith into a Quonset hut close to the fence. Dakota took a careful look around, extending all of her senses, and found none of the sentries near enough to her. She edged out on her branch, jumped, tucked, landed on the other side of the fence, and rolled behind the first hut. She stood, shook her head to clear it, and slid over behind the hut they had led Faith into. She blinked at the window nearest her and shook her head slightly. What is this, a MacGuyver episode? The back window of the hut was wide open, and inside she could see a man in fatigues sitting behind a desk. She edged up to the window, listening.
"Take that hood off her." A whisper of cloth. "Your vampire face doesn't frighten me, Hostile 45. I've seen them before." The creak of wood as he leaned back in his chair. "Where is your friend, the other daywalker?"
Faith cheerfully suggested that he retire to his quarters and perform several illegal — and possibly anatomically impossible — sexual acts upon himself. Dakota had to bite her lip to keep from laughing. Her lover was in fine spirits.
"Fascinating. Nelson?" There was the sound of the cattle prod again, and a choked gasp from Faith. Dakota ground her teeth. Then she turned to face the wall and very carefully edged one eye toward the side of the window, praying they wouldn't notice her. They obviously weren't expecting a frontal assault on this secluded place. She looked around the room carefully and counted men. There were eight of them, including the man in charge. She dropped back to the ground again, thinking. She couldn't take them all. She needed something.
Armory. She blinked, then crawled back to the place where she'd landed after jumping out of the tree. From there, she lay flat on the ground and elbow-crawled her way to the front of the building, peeking out. The armory was on the other side of the dirt drive, and she would never get there unseen. She retraced her route back to the fence, scaled it as noiselessly as possible, and dropped to the ground on the other side. From there, she returned to the trees and circumnavigated the compound until she was behind the armory, then repeated her flying leap and landed behind the building. Here her luck ran out. The window in the side which was away from the guards at the front of the Containment Unit was locked tight, and the door was on the open front. She chewed her lip, thinking, then pulled her knife out of her boot and dug at the wood casing of the window. To her surprise, it was rotten. She almost laughed out loud again, and began digging at the wood in earnest. In just a few minutes, thanks to her vampiric strength, she was able to get her fingers around the edge of the window. She braced her feet against the wall and pulled. With a crack, the window came out of its frame.
She froze. Had anyone heard that? It had sounded to her as loud as a thunderclap. But the guards were at the other end of the two-acre lot. They hadn't heard a thing. She dropped the window on the ground and clambered in through the window.
Tasers, guns, electrical-pulse weapons, she wouldn't have been surprised to find tachyon disrupters. What she was looking for was in a crate at the back of the building. Tear gas. A huge crate full of small canisters of tear gas. She jammed as many in her deep pockets as would fit, and turned to leave. A gun caught her eye and she briefly considered it, then decided not to. She'd probably only shoot herself in the foot. She climbed back out the window and back over the fence, wincing as the barbed wire cut into her hands.
She almost got caught returning to her previous place, but she was lucky enough to see the sentry before he saw her. Before he had a chance to speak, she had her teeth in his throat. Then she removed his weapon from his hands and checked it over. It was some kind of electrical thing, she realized. It didn't shoot bullets, it shot current. She smiled, but it was a smile that would have caused anyone seeing it to lose all bladder control in total fear. She had plans for cattle-prod boy.
Back behind the hut where Faith was apparently now taking punches to the gut, Dakota forced herself to remain calm as she listened to her lover hiss in pain, refusing to scream. She pulled all the teargas canisters out of her pockets and pulled the tabs out of all of them. When the gas had begun to come out of the canisters, she began lobbing them in through the open window. The little hut was almost immediately full of smoke, and Dakota came in through the window, gamefaced and in kill mode. She got the man in charge first, wrapping her hand around his throat and twisting his head, snapping his neck. Dropping him, she heard a hum of electricity behind her and narrowly dodged cattle-prod boy. She lifted her weapon and fired an electrical pulse at him. He screamed and fell to the floor. The other soldiers were in chaos, trying to find her. She shot another with her weapon before she could get to Faith, but she got there and broke the chains with her hands.
Faith, now mobile though still with chains hanging from each limb, joined the fray. She sunk her teeth into Graham Miller from behind while Dakota took out another of the soldiers before one intelligent one found his way to the door and burst out into the street, screaming for help. At that, the two vampires made their way to the window in the back. Dakota paused to pick up the boy with the cattle prod and sling him over her shoulder.
"What have you got him for?" Faith shouted.
"Hostage if we need him," Dakota replied breathlessly as they pelted toward the front fence. "Payback if we don't."
Faith hit the fence and scrambled to the top. "Here." She held out her hands and Dakota handed up the unconscious soldier, then scrambled up herself. She dropped to the ground and caught the boy as Faith tossed him to her, then Faith came down as well and the two of them sped as fast as their legs could carry them past the confused sentries, who had apparently just found their fallen member and were in disarray. They went to ground about half a mile east of the Initiative compound in a very convenient cave. Dakota pulled out her pocketknife and began trying to pick the locks on Faith's shackles, but had to stop when it became obvious her hands were shaking too badly to perform the delicate maneuvers necessary to the task.
Faith reached down and took Dakota's shaking hands, pulling her lover close to her and holding her tightly while Dakota sobbed. "I thought... never see you again... maybe kill you... Riley said... set you on fire... heard them hurt you..."
"Shh. I'm okay now. You got me. We're here. We're free. They won't find us. And tonight we'll go back and kill them all."
Dakota looked up at Faith. "Yeah?"
"They'll never leave us alone if we don't." She shrugged. "There's not that many of them, and they'll be in complete confusion. You killed their commander. There's only about fifteen guys left there. And believe it or not, I was the only thing they had locked up in that big old building. It got kind of lonely." She squeezed Dakota. "I'm so glad you came — but why on earth didn't you bring backup?"
"The girls are too green, and Buffy's got an apocalypse of her own going down tomorrow. The eclipse, the Noh demon, all that."
Faith nodded, remembering, then looked sharply at their captive soldier, who was beginning to moan his way to consciousness. She stood, walked over to him, and kicked him sharply in the kidney to help him on his way to wakefulness. "Hey, Shock Boy," she purred when he opened his eyes. "Remember me?"
"Ho-Ho-Hostile 45," she stuttered.
"The name is Faith," Faith responded. "I want you to know that. Because you should always know the name of the person who teaches you. And you're about to learn a little lesson in pain."
"You- you- you can't!" he gasped. "Lieutenant Finn said — soul — can't hurt people."
Dakota moved to the other side of the boy and dropped to one knee. "Lieutenant Finn didn't know what the hell he was talking about," she replied pleasantly. "Faithy here was a murderer in life before she became a vampire. Me, I've always been a little psycho. And you got a little too handy with that cattle prod for me to bother with you. I doubt you'll even nudge at my conscience once." She reached down and picked up his hand, gently stroking his index finger. "You have very nice hands," she commented. "What's your name?"
"B-B-Brian Palmer," he stuttered.
Dakota smiled, and Brian felt his blood freeze in his veins. "Nice to meet you, Brian Palmer," she purred. Then she broke his finger.
He screamed, and Faith clucked. "Can't have that. Someone might hear." She tore the sleeve off his shirt, rolled it up, and stuck it in his mouth. "Now, then. About that cattle prod."
By the time they were finished playing with him, he was begging them to kill him.
As night fell, the sentries rotated shifts. They spoke quietly in a group and then spread themselves along the perimeter of the compound, eyes trained on the forest, night-vision goggles in place. Most of them didn't even know what was going on before they felt fangs on their necks. Faith and Dakota met up at the main gate. "Six down," Faith announced. "Nine to go."
They turned toward the gates and pushed them open, walking brazenly into the lighted compound. They looked around before anyone registered their presence. Four men were in the barracks tent, apparently asleep. Three more were in the mess tent cooking something to eat, and two more were playing cards in the mess tent as well. Faith gestured to Dakota and they moved behind the armory, stealthily approaching the barracks tent.
The four sleeping men never stood a chance.
They moved back into the shadows of the barracks tent, and there was a sudden gleam in Faith's eye. "You look so sexy with the blood on your face," she whispered to Dakota, leaning forward and kissing her hard. "I love you."
Dakota kissed her back. "I love you, too," she replied fiercely. "Let's get those other guys. We've got a school full of girls to get back to."
Faith's face took on a worried cast. "Kotie?"
"Yeah, baby?"
"I... I don't think we should tell the girls about this."
Dakota shook her head. "Definitely not." She peeked out of the tent to peer at the men in the mess tent.
"Does... does this make us evil?"
Dakota turned toward Faith and saw the fear on her lover's face. "Oh, no, baby," she rushed to assure her. "No. Look, just the fact that you can ask that question makes you not evil. This isn't evil. It's not even payback. These guys, they're the evil ones. They're the ones who have been kidnapping and harming innocent people just because they happen to be demons. You and I both know that not all demons are evil. Just think about Clem." She smoothed Faith's hair back and kissed her forehead. "Think of it as taking out the trash."
Faith sighed and nodded. "All right," she said, visibly steeling herself. "Let's do this."
They came out of the barracks tent and moved quietly toward the mess. They slipped between two buildings as they heard one of the men say, "Hey, Jack, I'm gonna go take a leak." They heard the sound of a chair moving, and a man's footsteps growing closer. They dragged him between the buildings and Faith snapped his neck.
"Four," Dakota whispered. "I'm gonna see if any of them are armed." She leaned around the building carefully and looked, then pulled back. "Morons!"
"Unarmed?"
"All four of them!" Dakota spat. "Jesus Christ, this is the crème de la crème of the United States Military?"
They attacked. Dakota knocked one out with a well-placed kick to the head, then snapped the neck of a second, while Faith took the third down with a knee to the groin and knocked several teeth out of the fourth. He fell, howling, clutching at his jaw, and Dakota was right there to rip his throat out. Faith knelt next to the one she'd kneed and broke his neck before he had a chance to get his breath back, and Dakota did the same with the one she'd knocked unconscious.
They stood alone in the midst of the compound and listened carefully for any movement that would indicate the presence of a human being. There was nothing. They glanced at one another, then began a systematic search of the tents and huts, looking for humans and trashing any computer equipment that they came across. When these all turned up empty of human habitation, they took the Containment Unit together. It, too, proved empty. Dakota paused as they exited the huge building and then strode over to the commander's office. She walked inside and found a cellular phone lying on his desk. She picked it up and hit last-number-redial.
A man answered the phone in a voice that was eerily familiar to Dakota. "What is it, Colonel Brock?"
"This isn't Colonel Brock," Dakota replied, wondering where she knew that voice from. "I just thought you might like to know that your compound up here at Ramstein is empty. Your men are all dead. It's time for the Initiative to be buried, sir, permanently."
"Who are you?"
Dakota smirked. "Let's just say I'm an interested party. A friend, if you will."
"A friend?" The voice was incredulous.
"That's right, Senator," Dakota purred, having finally recognized the voice. She'd heard it enough on campaign advertisements before she left the States — she ought to know it. "A friend."
He spluttered for a moment, then finally said the only thing he could think of to say. "What if I don't want your friendship?"
She laughed, a frighteningly low sound. "I didn't say I was yours, Senator. Shut down the Initiative. It's all over." She hung up the phone, then wiped it carefully with her shirt to take the fingerprints off and dropped it back on the desk. She looked up then at Faith and smiled. "C'mon, baby," she said, holding out her hand. "Let's get the fuck out of here."
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