Hunting the Anomaly

Disclaimer:BtVS characters belong to Joss Whedon / Mutant Enemy. Supernatural characters belong to Eric Kripke. I claim no rights to any copyrighted material. Please do not copy or take this story without my permission.


Note: This takes place once the Scoobies are established in Cleveland.The Winchester are friends of the Buffy and the gang they work some jobs with them YED is dead and Lilith is not on the picture as of yet. The siege on Terminal City has happened and is over transgenics are a hidden group in society outof sight out of mind.

Alec McDowell had tried being bad, and he had tried being good. Right now, he was trying to kid himself into thinking that bad had been more fun.

It really hadn’t, of course. It had just been a lifetime of punching people as hard as he could, because he had thought that was the only way to keep them from punching him at first opportunity. But you could say this much for being bad. No one had ever felt at liberty to keep him waiting on the street for half an hour, when he had been bad. He would have broken the legs of anyone who disrespected him like that, and everyone had known that. Now he was a card-carrying, bona fide goodie-two-shoes, and people were happy to let him wait.

Just one leg, he thought, absently tapping his baseball bat against his foot. Would the Max really come down on me for just one leg? It’s not like I would be doing it for no good reason. I’d be doing it to teach people not to let me wait here, alone, in a pretty rough part of town, for half an hour. It’d be to teach them manners. It’d be to make the world a better place!
He sighed. No, he didn’t even buy it himself.

He heard the sound of shoes hitting the pavement, right behind him. Alec spun, baseball bat whirling – and found it caught in a bony but very strong hand.

“Ooooh! Jumpy!” Xander said. He grinned. He was thin, and pale, and had greasy black hair and an eye patch looked like someone off the set of Pirates of the Caribbean. He was, all in all, not the kind of person you wanted to leap off of a roof and land right behind you.

“Would you mind not doing that?” Alec said. He tried to make it a growl, but somehow the growl just wouldn’t manifest. Instead, it came out as a timid, polite request.

“Sorry,” Xander said, without sounding sorry. He released Alec's’ bat. “So how’s it hanging? Gee, you really look like him. Willow warned me but…”

“It’s about forty-five minutes until the bars close, and I’d really like a chance to have a quiet beer after we’re done,” Alec said. “Where’s Buffy?”

Xander laughed.

“I left her in the bar. I should have brought Dean and Sam with me.”

“Who?” Alec asked.

“Soon enough.” Xander was proven truthful. Buffy sat in the bar wearing an army jacket. She didn’t seem imposing for a slayer.

“I’m ready. Has Max decided to accept our help? Are we making a deal tonight?” Buffy asked Alec.

“Yes, we have decided to accept your help and agree to your terms. Just remember this is not a demon it is a transgenic gone horribly wrong.” Alec told her.

“What does this anomaly do?” Xander asked.

Alec shook his head, annoyed. “It goes around being an anomaly all the time, that’s what it does. It eats kids,” Alec said.

“You’re sure? We can’t save it?” Buffy finally said.

“If it could be saved Max and I would have done a capture and save. We wouldn’t have wasted time with even asking for your help. Have any kids gone missing from the neighborhood?” Alec asked.

“Yeah.” Xander grimaced. “Kids have been going missing in the neighborhood, one every week or so for the last three weeks.”

“Right so Max sent me here. I have been listening to the wind lately. Two nights ago, I caught the sent of something on the wind.”

Alec didn’t really want to think about it. It had been far away, at the very edge of what he could pick up. The hurried, nervous voice, harsh with effort and shame and fear, telling someone to hold still, stop fighting, it didn’t have to hurt… and the other, childish voice whimpering, the sound muffled behind a hand, and then a that voice had died away and there had been these… gurgling sounds, and someone smacking his lips…eating children.

Alec had run straight out into the night, not grabbing a weapon, not thinking it through, just running and willing all his strange senses to bring him to the right place so he could break the fucking neck of the sicko who had just done what he had heard it do. They hadn’t, though. By the time he got close, the creature had already slipped away somewhere, out of reach for the wind.

“Okay, I’m in.” Buffy said. “Are we packing?”

Alec grinned smugly and flung open his coat. From the looks of it, he had guns enough to equip a minor army in there. He reminded her of Dean in that moment. She needed to make sure that the Winchester’s met Alec McDowell.

“Right.” Xander took a revolver out of his jacket pocket and glanced at Buffy. “And you’re taking the low-tech route as usual?”

“Always worked before,” Buffy said pulling a wooden stake out of her jacket.

“I don’t see what you’ve got against guns,” Alec said.

“I don’t have anything against guns, but they are not always necessary. You and Dean are a genetic match. You both always go for the gun first.”

“There are things out there that you can’t just pound with a piece of wood, you know.” Alec told her as Xander handed Buffy the bat Alec had been carrying earlier.

“Save it for some other day,” Xander said. “You know where this thing is hiding, right?”

“Of course I know.” Alec sniffed and straightened out his coat. “When you can use your senses like a cat, you know these
things.”

“Your contribution is greatly appreciated,” Buffy said. “You are very powerful and valuable. Please lead the way now so you can still catch that beer afterwards?”

Alec’s ego was suitably mollified. He led the way.

The way, in turn, led to the basement of a condemned building – Alec could smell and hear in the air itself was moaning. This was the home of something sad and hungry and destructive.

Xander produced a flashlight from some hidden pocket, gripped it in one hand and a gun in the other. He flung the door opened and rushed in through it. Alec followed at his heels, and Buffy brought up the rear.

The stench of the cellar felt like a wall. It was rot, and sewage, and something chemical. Xander’s eye teared, but he blinked them clear and tried to make sense of what he saw.

The floor was covered in some kind of chunky slime. He thought he could make out half-dissolved bones in it, though he didn’t know what they were bones of. Someone was cowering in the corner, as if trying to escape the glare of the flashlight.

“Leave me alone!” The voice was thin and whiny, with a slur to it, like its owner’s mouth was anesthetized. Alec recognized it all too well.

“You’ve been killing people,” he said. It wasn’t an accusation. He just felt he should explain why it had to be this way.

“No… well, yes.” The creature looked up, sullen. “I didn’t want to! I had to!”

It had been a chubby middle-aged man, once, with nondescript features and thinning grey hair. It still was, mostly. But its mouth had been hideously, impossibly stretched, so that its corners almost reached the ears, and the throat was wide as a barrel. The body beneath what had been a cheap charcoal suit before weeks of wear and tear had turned it almost into tatters was lumpy and grotesque, like one big cancerous tumor.

Alec had been doing this for a while. He knew the rules. Keep thinking of the target as ‘it.’ Convince yourself that while it was obviously a man once, it’s not anymore. Remind yourself that what the that its condition is uncontrollable, that death will be a mercy for it. And hope like hell that that’s going to be enough to keep you from going insane.

“It’s the hunger, don’t you see?” the creature whimpered. “The terrible hunger! You have no idea! How could you? I have to feed it! It’ll kill me if I don’t feed it! I have to eat anything I can find, vermin and filth and anything, but every now and then, oh, every now and then it wants something fresh and tender and young…”

The creature might be frightened and miserable, but it wasn’t stupid, and all that whining had just been a distraction. One that had worked, too – Xander and Buffy, at least, had been shrinking back in sick disgust, trying to gather the will to do what had to be done. When the creature leaped, Alec was the only one who was prepared.
Two shots rang out and echoed between the cellar walls, then the flashlight fell to the floor and everything became vague shadows. Alec was laughing wildly, the creature was screaming, Xander was swearing. Buffy concentrated, sensed his way forward in time and found a path that had him hit the creature, and then he brought down the bat just so. She hit something too soft and yielding. The bat came down again. This time it was struck aside, though, and a soft, reeking weight, like a sack of garbage, tackled her. The charge pushed both them out of the door. They dropped to the ground just outside of the threshold, the anomaly on top of her.

Its mouth was open and stretched wide enough to encompass a pumpkin; the huge maw filled Buffy’s vision like a cavern of pulsing flesh and dripping mucus and broken, splintered teeth. She pushed back with every ounce of strength in her muscles, trying to keep those flabby lips from closing around her head.

Then there was the thunder of several guns firing at once, and the anomaly’s body was pounded into hers as if in some parody of passion. Then it went limp on top of her, and the mouth shrunk back together to merely grotesquely large as the strange, mutated muscles around it relaxed.

When Buffy was sure it was dead, she pushed its body away and let Alec and Xander help her up. Together, the three of them silently watched the pathetic, crumbled form on the ground.

“Think it could have been helped?” Xander said.

“NO!” Alec said.

"I am going to head quarters and take a shower. Alec do not leave town without coming to Watcher Head Quarters and seeing me tomorrow."

Buffy left as Alec watched her go. He thought, pushy bitch reminds me of Max. I guess I can hang around for a few days. I have to clean this place up.

“I’m going to drive him out of town and bury him,” Alec said. “Do you want to help?”

“Me? Sure.” Xander said.

“ This is a small mercy, at least,” Alec allowed.

“So, I guess we’d better go fetch a garbage bag or something to carry him in,” he said. “So we’re not so obviously dragging a corpse across town.” Xander said.

Alec glanced at him.

“Let’s go get a beer.” Alec said.

“Yeah,” Xander said.

Chapter 2- Alec meets Dean & Sam. He also meets Faith.