An Old Dog.
Chapter 70
An Old Dog.
>>>>
At Henry's request, and because they were willing, the 'support team' will be operating from the Initiative headquarters for the three days that Admiral Linmeyer will be on the base. Even Alexis is given a rather spiffy-looking computer station that has direct live feeds from her Iron Defenders and a lot of deactivated buttons she can click around on to make it look like she is actually doing something tech-wise when she is controlling them. They are all brought into a meeting room at eight for introductions, and after Henry offers the basics and everyone sees the look on the man's face, hearts begin to sink a little.
The admiral, a slender, aging man of probably sixty-five or thereabouts, has brought with him a three-person entourage that consists obviously of a slightly chubby woman bean counter, a whipcord lean bodyguard, and interestingly, what most of the people there are assuming is the equivalent of a public relations guru in a uniform. Why an admiral nearing retirement would need such an animal is anyone's guess, but based on the way and topics that Linmeyer looks to this guy for confirmation on things, there is essentially no doubt what he is there for.
"Henry, I'm here because the president has asked me to come down and give you a few days to make a case for your needing the presence of a carrier in the vicinity. I come down here and you're trying to fill my head with campfire stories of ghouls and goblins. Have you lost your mind? Do they put something in the water around here?"
Henry gives the man a look. "No need to be rude, Admiral. We are all on the same side here. We have to patrol the surrounding area to keep things under control. Most of the time, I am given to understand that this is enough to keep things on a somewhat even keel. But it just so happens that there is an eclipse coming up and one of the local 'goblins' is planning to take advantage. My hope is that we won't need the assistance of the Navy. My hope is that we can solve the problem and send you and your men on their way. But I don't feel like betting the safety of the country on hope, and neither does the president."
He gives the Admiral a kinda unusual look. "It's strange to me that you would use the phrase 'make a case' against me because that isn't why you're here at all. You're here so I can educate you on how things work. Once I've done that, I honestly have no doubt about how you'll lean as far as giving us a hand."
Linmeyer frowns, then guffaws, and slaps the table. "Damnit Henry, the president said you had some spice to ya. But seriously. A carrier group? I need proof. I read your packet on the plane. Spreadsheets and tales of barbecue fork incidents are not going to get me to reposition a hundred billion dollars worth of hardware."
Willow gasps. "That much?"
The admiral nods. "Near enough. The carrier group he requested is at least a five-ship flotilla with a three-sub escort, plus payloads and the seventy or so planes that will be on board. A hundred billion might be a bit high for an estimate, but it isn't off by much."
Giles speaks up. "Sir, if I may, what would you accept as proof?"
Linmeyer gives him a calculating look. "Well, I was given a tour earlier. They could have put some goblins in the cells. That might have helped their case. But failing that, I suppose we'll just have to go along on one of these patrols and see what we get, now won't we?"
Henry immediately pales. "Sir, I don't think that is a good idea. I don't even go on these patrols myself, none of the senior staff do. Far too dangerous. We send the men out and observe from the command room. We have a station set up for you if you would like to join us."
Shaking his head, the Admiral scoffs loudly. "This is a city in California, Henry. We're not in the Middle East. I'll be bringing my escort here, Special Forces trained. I'm sure we'll be fine. But I'm not trusting anything spoon-fed to me on a screen. I want to see it in person."
Kendra, who it must be said has had a terrible day and slept just as bad, has heard enough of that and stands. She turns to Linmeyer's bodyguard and offers a quick nod. "Would you care to spar with me? I think we can settle this rather quickly, and honestly, I don't have the patience for this today."
The man offers a smirk but turns to the admiral. "With your permission, sir?"
Linmeyer shrugs. "Lieutenant, if she is willing to meet you on a mat I wish her the best of luck. Maybe once that is done I can start getting outfitted for this 'patrol' of theirs."
Kendra offers a smirk of her own and does an about-face as she leads the entire room across and down the hall into the training room where some of the men are lifting weights and practicing with wooden swords. She merely walks onto the mats, and the men that were using them, seeing the expression on her face, scurry out of the way.
Linmeyer leans over to Henry. "I see she has quite the reputation here."
Henry nods. "They all do. Watch this, and then realize that without them, my response to what we've found here would be to contaminate the area with something so nasty we would have to force the population to leave. Might have to do that anyway."
Kendra, seemingly dressed in a pair of slacks and a long sleeve shirt, gives her opponent a short bow, which he returns. As soon as he moves in to attack, he stops short.
She is now wearing armor. It appeared out of nowhere on her body. A second later, she shrinks to half the height she was, and while he is still gawking at this development she leaps the twenty-five feet across the mat and hits him in a vicious body check across the head and neck with her armored body, flipping him to the floor so violently that he actually lands on his shoulder. As he is trying to figure out what happened and get to his feet, the two snaps and then cold steel he feels on his neck stop him. The swords cross his neck in a scissor, preventing him from getting up. The voice from behind the helm has a curious lilt to it, as though the face making it is trying to avoid smiling. "Do you yield?"
He almost nods and then realizing how bad an idea that would be, he instead responds verbally. "Yes, absolutely. Yielding is exactly what I am doing right this instant."
Giles takes a few steps forward and helps the man up as Kendra gets off of him. He then turns to Kendra and speaks in a very soft voice. "I thought we weren't going to be showing off quite so much?"
Kendra puts away the swords and makes the armored look fade. Her face looks a little ashamed. "I know. But we might need the help, and we won't get it if the stubborn old fool gets himself killed tonight. I felt it needed to be done."
Giles nods. "Perhaps. But we discuss things like this. All of us. Unilateral action is not tolerated." He gives her a pointed look. "It's the kind of thing Travers would do."
Her look of horror is quickly followed by a heartfelt apology. "I am sorry, Giles, I didn't think of that."
Giles nods and brings the girl into a hug, heedless of the spectators. "Obviously. You are not the only one guilty of it, but we really need to stop it." He backs away a step. "What's done is done. Let us go deal with the consequences."
Ten minutes later when things have calmed down some and everybody is back in the meeting room, Linmeyer is staring at Kendra speculatively. Nudging Henry, he nods at her. "Is she a vampire?"
Henry almost chokes on his coffee while everyone else has reactions that vary from eye-rolling to startled amazement.
"No, she is part of the team we hired to help us deal with them. It would be more accurate to call her a vampire hunter.
The admiral nods again thoughtfully, and spares a glance around the room to take in the rest of her team, and ultimately to rest on his own man who was so easily taken out. "And they are all that dangerous?"
Henry sweeps his eyes across the table, and seeing Giles' irritated look, decides it might be in his best interest to stop the direction this meeting is going.
"Admiral, if you have questions about their team perhaps you should ask them directly. They are contracted to work for me, they are not under my direct chain of command. Quite frankly I need them here. I can't afford to piss them off."
Linmeyer purses his lips as though someone has grated a lemon against his gums, but sadly he finds himself in much the same position. Henry, while under the President, is otherwise as far removed as it is possible to be from his own chain of command.
"Fine then. You there, Giles, was it? Are you all as deadly as little miss changeable here? And how did she change size like that?"
Giles closes his eyes briefly. He removes his glasses and begins the process of cleaning them while Linmeyer starts to turn red in his impatience. After a few moments have passed and Giles has gotten a reign on his temper, he replaces his glasses and opens his mouth to speak.
"No. Like any such group, we have members who fulfill a role that is tailored more toward support or intelligence gathering than direct combat. Most of us are capable of defending ourselves, should it come to that. But this is not useful. We are not looking for work, are already contracted out indefinitely. And frankly, wouldn't want to work directly for the department of defense in any case. As to the size-changing, that is a bit of a trade secret. So perhaps we can stop focusing on my group, and back on the matters at hand?"
The Admiral looks at Kendra in confused irritation for a moment, and then back at Giles in what can be best described as consternation. "If you weren't looking to impress me, why stage that tussle and beat up my bodyguard?"
Giles shrugs and offers a quick nod to Kendra. "That wasn't part of the original plan. But the motivation would be to impress upon you that when we go out to hunt, we usually aim for two to one or better odds at a minimum of fighters at that level. Taking you or even myself along would be a handicap that could get good people killed. It isn't worth the risk. If you wish to see things first hand, I might recommend that you ride along in the car. It will be a boring night, and you may not see much, but you will likely survive."
Linmeyer looks again at Henry. "Is he serious? If it is this dangerous after dark around here, how is there even a town?"
Henry taps his pen on the table. "I thought you read the materials on the plane?"
The admiral has the good graces to look a little embarrassed at this point. "I may have skipped a bit here and there once the reports started mentioning campfire stories."
Henry settles in. This might take a while.
>>>>
>> The Sunnydale Arms 10:34 PM.
Linmeyer watches as two of the girl contractors enter the building, followed by two of Henry's men bearing some manner of unusual crossbows. The other two girls and their crossbow escorts stay outside, with one of the robotic dog things going in, and the other staying out.
"Henry, this is Admiral Linmeyer. Why are they splitting up?"
There is a brief moment and then the response comes back.
"Ackers here. They are securing the exit and keeping an eye on the car. Standard operating procedure when they have a mixed unit. Nothing to worry about."
Linmeyer nods. So far this has been an educational evening. In the last hour, he's seen two vampires staked as they erupted from graves, and one pulled off of a girl behind a local club and 'dusted' after which these contractors forced a series of concoctions down her throat which seemed to restore her and escorted her home while his car slowly followed along a block behind. When he offered to simply give the girl a lift, it was explained that compromising the security of the patrol is not allowed when there are viable alternatives. The armored truck being kept close as an escape route for Henry's men should they need it, and moreover, kept free of nonvetted personnel, is not a decision to be made lightly.
He sits there for a few minutes. Considering what he has seen and that while yes, it is both incredible and highly interesting he can't imagine how it could possibly require the kind of firepower Ackers is petitioning for. He is startled out of his musing by a sudden crashing boom from the building. He looks up in time to see the other four members of the patrol and their dog pile into the door as the truck starts up. "Admiral, this is Henry. They found something big, I am pulling you in."
Linmeyer is bellowing a negative response to that when he is cut off. From the second floor there is a crashing sound, and a smaller form, not one of Henry's men, but certainly not the tiny midget woman, crashes through not a window but rather a wall and then falls twenty feet to the sidewalk below like a slab of meat. He briefly sees something moving about in the hole she was flung through but has already opened the car door and is rushing out to get to her.
He's old, but he came through the ranks honestly damn it, and you do not leave people on the ground to die like that.
He finds her alive, and her breathing is steady, but she is not conscious and she has blood coming from her mouth and nose.
"Henry! One of their people just got flung out of the house from the second floor and is unconscious on the sidewalk. I'm no doctor, Henry, but she looks to be in bad shape to me and I am afraid to move her because of the worry of spinal injuries. What do they want me to do? She can't stay here."
There is a milliseconds pause, and then Henry's voice comes back. "Damn it, what are you doing out of the truck?! Get her in the back of the truck if you can. Quickly."
As the old man is grabbing her under the armpits and trying to pull her as gently as he can back to the truck, he can hear a battle raging inside the building. The crashing of glass and the sparking of wires as the electrical in the house goes haywire. In the midst of it all, he can smell the first stirrings of a fire.
As he makes it to the back of the truck and has opened the armored doors, he hears a thump on the lawn. Looking back as he leverages the unusual dark green and neon purple clad warrior into the truck he can see an absolutely massive creature, at least nine feet tall, with claws and hooves. The enormous ram horns that adorn his head and the way he is lowering them and pawing the ground while facing the truck is highly worrisome. He is crisscrossed in cuts that all bleed a green, puss-like substance, and has numerous crossbow bolts stuck in him. Even while Linmeyer watches, he realizes that the demon is also getting a stitching of gunfire across his eyes from somebody that is apparently unbelievably accurate. It is then that the Admiral realizes that it isn't him or the truck the demon is targeting, but rather his driver, this Daryl that the Director saddled him with. The man has a rifle out and is taking single shots from maybe eighty feet away with the speed of a typewriter, flashing through clips at a dizzying pace.
Linmeyer gets back into the truck, this time into the driver's seat, and while the rest of the patrol is getting out of the old boarding house and this strange demon is staggering around half-blind, the old man puts on his seat belt and waits. He has a wounded soldier in the back. He'd rather not do anything. But if he has to, he'll ram that thing and see how it likes getting shoved through a wall at high speed.
Fortunately, it turns out that isn't needed. In the end, the effort of the five uninjured members of the patrol is enough to bring it down. They pull a strange bit of cloth out of a pack and lay it on the ground, where it then somehow becomes a steel-lined hole. They roll the demon into it before collecting everybody and getting out of there before the blaze attracts too much attention.
>>>>
Buffy wakes up and the first thing she does is blink a lot in the bright fluorescent lighting. The second thing she does is realize that she is in a hospital gown and in a larger room but that her section has been given privacy with a curtain. She hears a lot of voices, and she can see both her mother and Alexis in the room with her. Joyce's eyes widen and her face breaks into a smile.
"Hey there. You gave us a bit of a scare."
Buffy scowls. "Sorry. I had to take a hit for one of Riley's idiots. He wasn't going to get out of the way in time."
Alex nods. "Yeah. We know. The poor guy has been swearing his undying devotion to you pretty much since he realized he might live to see tomorrow. In fact, it got so annoying he had to stop or Faith might have seen to it he didn't."
Buffy smirks, then frowns. "So, not that I'm complaining but why haven't I just had the potion and stuff? Why the gown of breeziness? I hate these things."
Alex grins. "Tried wiggling your toes yet?"
The look on Buffy's face, confused horror with mounting panic, causes Alex to quickly continue.
"Chill! It's okay. I can fix it. But Maggie had an interesting idea. If we start hooking people up to monitoring devices and trying to work out how the magic fixes things, it might give technology a road map to do the same thing, eventually, say, with nanomachines or something down the line. The woman is like a knowledge sponge, she just grabs from everywhere and balls it together to see what she can make with it. So glad she is on our side. Anyway, it would involve being a little personal and some doctor-patient confidentiality, so..." She shrugs. "I know I'm not a real doctor but I figured I should still ask before I went through with something like that."
Buffy smiles. "Sure, so long as my name doesn't end up on any of the reports."
The curtain is pulled aside instantly and Maggie's somewhat manic face is there with a cart full of electronic devices.
"Excellent!"
An Old Dog.
>>>>
At Henry's request, and because they were willing, the 'support team' will be operating from the Initiative headquarters for the three days that Admiral Linmeyer will be on the base. Even Alexis is given a rather spiffy-looking computer station that has direct live feeds from her Iron Defenders and a lot of deactivated buttons she can click around on to make it look like she is actually doing something tech-wise when she is controlling them. They are all brought into a meeting room at eight for introductions, and after Henry offers the basics and everyone sees the look on the man's face, hearts begin to sink a little.
The admiral, a slender, aging man of probably sixty-five or thereabouts, has brought with him a three-person entourage that consists obviously of a slightly chubby woman bean counter, a whipcord lean bodyguard, and interestingly, what most of the people there are assuming is the equivalent of a public relations guru in a uniform. Why an admiral nearing retirement would need such an animal is anyone's guess, but based on the way and topics that Linmeyer looks to this guy for confirmation on things, there is essentially no doubt what he is there for.
"Henry, I'm here because the president has asked me to come down and give you a few days to make a case for your needing the presence of a carrier in the vicinity. I come down here and you're trying to fill my head with campfire stories of ghouls and goblins. Have you lost your mind? Do they put something in the water around here?"
Henry gives the man a look. "No need to be rude, Admiral. We are all on the same side here. We have to patrol the surrounding area to keep things under control. Most of the time, I am given to understand that this is enough to keep things on a somewhat even keel. But it just so happens that there is an eclipse coming up and one of the local 'goblins' is planning to take advantage. My hope is that we won't need the assistance of the Navy. My hope is that we can solve the problem and send you and your men on their way. But I don't feel like betting the safety of the country on hope, and neither does the president."
He gives the Admiral a kinda unusual look. "It's strange to me that you would use the phrase 'make a case' against me because that isn't why you're here at all. You're here so I can educate you on how things work. Once I've done that, I honestly have no doubt about how you'll lean as far as giving us a hand."
Linmeyer frowns, then guffaws, and slaps the table. "Damnit Henry, the president said you had some spice to ya. But seriously. A carrier group? I need proof. I read your packet on the plane. Spreadsheets and tales of barbecue fork incidents are not going to get me to reposition a hundred billion dollars worth of hardware."
Willow gasps. "That much?"
The admiral nods. "Near enough. The carrier group he requested is at least a five-ship flotilla with a three-sub escort, plus payloads and the seventy or so planes that will be on board. A hundred billion might be a bit high for an estimate, but it isn't off by much."
Giles speaks up. "Sir, if I may, what would you accept as proof?"
Linmeyer gives him a calculating look. "Well, I was given a tour earlier. They could have put some goblins in the cells. That might have helped their case. But failing that, I suppose we'll just have to go along on one of these patrols and see what we get, now won't we?"
Henry immediately pales. "Sir, I don't think that is a good idea. I don't even go on these patrols myself, none of the senior staff do. Far too dangerous. We send the men out and observe from the command room. We have a station set up for you if you would like to join us."
Shaking his head, the Admiral scoffs loudly. "This is a city in California, Henry. We're not in the Middle East. I'll be bringing my escort here, Special Forces trained. I'm sure we'll be fine. But I'm not trusting anything spoon-fed to me on a screen. I want to see it in person."
Kendra, who it must be said has had a terrible day and slept just as bad, has heard enough of that and stands. She turns to Linmeyer's bodyguard and offers a quick nod. "Would you care to spar with me? I think we can settle this rather quickly, and honestly, I don't have the patience for this today."
The man offers a smirk but turns to the admiral. "With your permission, sir?"
Linmeyer shrugs. "Lieutenant, if she is willing to meet you on a mat I wish her the best of luck. Maybe once that is done I can start getting outfitted for this 'patrol' of theirs."
Kendra offers a smirk of her own and does an about-face as she leads the entire room across and down the hall into the training room where some of the men are lifting weights and practicing with wooden swords. She merely walks onto the mats, and the men that were using them, seeing the expression on her face, scurry out of the way.
Linmeyer leans over to Henry. "I see she has quite the reputation here."
Henry nods. "They all do. Watch this, and then realize that without them, my response to what we've found here would be to contaminate the area with something so nasty we would have to force the population to leave. Might have to do that anyway."
Kendra, seemingly dressed in a pair of slacks and a long sleeve shirt, gives her opponent a short bow, which he returns. As soon as he moves in to attack, he stops short.
She is now wearing armor. It appeared out of nowhere on her body. A second later, she shrinks to half the height she was, and while he is still gawking at this development she leaps the twenty-five feet across the mat and hits him in a vicious body check across the head and neck with her armored body, flipping him to the floor so violently that he actually lands on his shoulder. As he is trying to figure out what happened and get to his feet, the two snaps and then cold steel he feels on his neck stop him. The swords cross his neck in a scissor, preventing him from getting up. The voice from behind the helm has a curious lilt to it, as though the face making it is trying to avoid smiling. "Do you yield?"
He almost nods and then realizing how bad an idea that would be, he instead responds verbally. "Yes, absolutely. Yielding is exactly what I am doing right this instant."
Giles takes a few steps forward and helps the man up as Kendra gets off of him. He then turns to Kendra and speaks in a very soft voice. "I thought we weren't going to be showing off quite so much?"
Kendra puts away the swords and makes the armored look fade. Her face looks a little ashamed. "I know. But we might need the help, and we won't get it if the stubborn old fool gets himself killed tonight. I felt it needed to be done."
Giles nods. "Perhaps. But we discuss things like this. All of us. Unilateral action is not tolerated." He gives her a pointed look. "It's the kind of thing Travers would do."
Her look of horror is quickly followed by a heartfelt apology. "I am sorry, Giles, I didn't think of that."
Giles nods and brings the girl into a hug, heedless of the spectators. "Obviously. You are not the only one guilty of it, but we really need to stop it." He backs away a step. "What's done is done. Let us go deal with the consequences."
Ten minutes later when things have calmed down some and everybody is back in the meeting room, Linmeyer is staring at Kendra speculatively. Nudging Henry, he nods at her. "Is she a vampire?"
Henry almost chokes on his coffee while everyone else has reactions that vary from eye-rolling to startled amazement.
"No, she is part of the team we hired to help us deal with them. It would be more accurate to call her a vampire hunter.
The admiral nods again thoughtfully, and spares a glance around the room to take in the rest of her team, and ultimately to rest on his own man who was so easily taken out. "And they are all that dangerous?"
Henry sweeps his eyes across the table, and seeing Giles' irritated look, decides it might be in his best interest to stop the direction this meeting is going.
"Admiral, if you have questions about their team perhaps you should ask them directly. They are contracted to work for me, they are not under my direct chain of command. Quite frankly I need them here. I can't afford to piss them off."
Linmeyer purses his lips as though someone has grated a lemon against his gums, but sadly he finds himself in much the same position. Henry, while under the President, is otherwise as far removed as it is possible to be from his own chain of command.
"Fine then. You there, Giles, was it? Are you all as deadly as little miss changeable here? And how did she change size like that?"
Giles closes his eyes briefly. He removes his glasses and begins the process of cleaning them while Linmeyer starts to turn red in his impatience. After a few moments have passed and Giles has gotten a reign on his temper, he replaces his glasses and opens his mouth to speak.
"No. Like any such group, we have members who fulfill a role that is tailored more toward support or intelligence gathering than direct combat. Most of us are capable of defending ourselves, should it come to that. But this is not useful. We are not looking for work, are already contracted out indefinitely. And frankly, wouldn't want to work directly for the department of defense in any case. As to the size-changing, that is a bit of a trade secret. So perhaps we can stop focusing on my group, and back on the matters at hand?"
The Admiral looks at Kendra in confused irritation for a moment, and then back at Giles in what can be best described as consternation. "If you weren't looking to impress me, why stage that tussle and beat up my bodyguard?"
Giles shrugs and offers a quick nod to Kendra. "That wasn't part of the original plan. But the motivation would be to impress upon you that when we go out to hunt, we usually aim for two to one or better odds at a minimum of fighters at that level. Taking you or even myself along would be a handicap that could get good people killed. It isn't worth the risk. If you wish to see things first hand, I might recommend that you ride along in the car. It will be a boring night, and you may not see much, but you will likely survive."
Linmeyer looks again at Henry. "Is he serious? If it is this dangerous after dark around here, how is there even a town?"
Henry taps his pen on the table. "I thought you read the materials on the plane?"
The admiral has the good graces to look a little embarrassed at this point. "I may have skipped a bit here and there once the reports started mentioning campfire stories."
Henry settles in. This might take a while.
>>>>
>> The Sunnydale Arms 10:34 PM.
Linmeyer watches as two of the girl contractors enter the building, followed by two of Henry's men bearing some manner of unusual crossbows. The other two girls and their crossbow escorts stay outside, with one of the robotic dog things going in, and the other staying out.
"Henry, this is Admiral Linmeyer. Why are they splitting up?"
There is a brief moment and then the response comes back.
"Ackers here. They are securing the exit and keeping an eye on the car. Standard operating procedure when they have a mixed unit. Nothing to worry about."
Linmeyer nods. So far this has been an educational evening. In the last hour, he's seen two vampires staked as they erupted from graves, and one pulled off of a girl behind a local club and 'dusted' after which these contractors forced a series of concoctions down her throat which seemed to restore her and escorted her home while his car slowly followed along a block behind. When he offered to simply give the girl a lift, it was explained that compromising the security of the patrol is not allowed when there are viable alternatives. The armored truck being kept close as an escape route for Henry's men should they need it, and moreover, kept free of nonvetted personnel, is not a decision to be made lightly.
He sits there for a few minutes. Considering what he has seen and that while yes, it is both incredible and highly interesting he can't imagine how it could possibly require the kind of firepower Ackers is petitioning for. He is startled out of his musing by a sudden crashing boom from the building. He looks up in time to see the other four members of the patrol and their dog pile into the door as the truck starts up. "Admiral, this is Henry. They found something big, I am pulling you in."
Linmeyer is bellowing a negative response to that when he is cut off. From the second floor there is a crashing sound, and a smaller form, not one of Henry's men, but certainly not the tiny midget woman, crashes through not a window but rather a wall and then falls twenty feet to the sidewalk below like a slab of meat. He briefly sees something moving about in the hole she was flung through but has already opened the car door and is rushing out to get to her.
He's old, but he came through the ranks honestly damn it, and you do not leave people on the ground to die like that.
He finds her alive, and her breathing is steady, but she is not conscious and she has blood coming from her mouth and nose.
"Henry! One of their people just got flung out of the house from the second floor and is unconscious on the sidewalk. I'm no doctor, Henry, but she looks to be in bad shape to me and I am afraid to move her because of the worry of spinal injuries. What do they want me to do? She can't stay here."
There is a milliseconds pause, and then Henry's voice comes back. "Damn it, what are you doing out of the truck?! Get her in the back of the truck if you can. Quickly."
As the old man is grabbing her under the armpits and trying to pull her as gently as he can back to the truck, he can hear a battle raging inside the building. The crashing of glass and the sparking of wires as the electrical in the house goes haywire. In the midst of it all, he can smell the first stirrings of a fire.
As he makes it to the back of the truck and has opened the armored doors, he hears a thump on the lawn. Looking back as he leverages the unusual dark green and neon purple clad warrior into the truck he can see an absolutely massive creature, at least nine feet tall, with claws and hooves. The enormous ram horns that adorn his head and the way he is lowering them and pawing the ground while facing the truck is highly worrisome. He is crisscrossed in cuts that all bleed a green, puss-like substance, and has numerous crossbow bolts stuck in him. Even while Linmeyer watches, he realizes that the demon is also getting a stitching of gunfire across his eyes from somebody that is apparently unbelievably accurate. It is then that the Admiral realizes that it isn't him or the truck the demon is targeting, but rather his driver, this Daryl that the Director saddled him with. The man has a rifle out and is taking single shots from maybe eighty feet away with the speed of a typewriter, flashing through clips at a dizzying pace.
Linmeyer gets back into the truck, this time into the driver's seat, and while the rest of the patrol is getting out of the old boarding house and this strange demon is staggering around half-blind, the old man puts on his seat belt and waits. He has a wounded soldier in the back. He'd rather not do anything. But if he has to, he'll ram that thing and see how it likes getting shoved through a wall at high speed.
Fortunately, it turns out that isn't needed. In the end, the effort of the five uninjured members of the patrol is enough to bring it down. They pull a strange bit of cloth out of a pack and lay it on the ground, where it then somehow becomes a steel-lined hole. They roll the demon into it before collecting everybody and getting out of there before the blaze attracts too much attention.
>>>>
Buffy wakes up and the first thing she does is blink a lot in the bright fluorescent lighting. The second thing she does is realize that she is in a hospital gown and in a larger room but that her section has been given privacy with a curtain. She hears a lot of voices, and she can see both her mother and Alexis in the room with her. Joyce's eyes widen and her face breaks into a smile.
"Hey there. You gave us a bit of a scare."
Buffy scowls. "Sorry. I had to take a hit for one of Riley's idiots. He wasn't going to get out of the way in time."
Alex nods. "Yeah. We know. The poor guy has been swearing his undying devotion to you pretty much since he realized he might live to see tomorrow. In fact, it got so annoying he had to stop or Faith might have seen to it he didn't."
Buffy smirks, then frowns. "So, not that I'm complaining but why haven't I just had the potion and stuff? Why the gown of breeziness? I hate these things."
Alex grins. "Tried wiggling your toes yet?"
The look on Buffy's face, confused horror with mounting panic, causes Alex to quickly continue.
"Chill! It's okay. I can fix it. But Maggie had an interesting idea. If we start hooking people up to monitoring devices and trying to work out how the magic fixes things, it might give technology a road map to do the same thing, eventually, say, with nanomachines or something down the line. The woman is like a knowledge sponge, she just grabs from everywhere and balls it together to see what she can make with it. So glad she is on our side. Anyway, it would involve being a little personal and some doctor-patient confidentiality, so..." She shrugs. "I know I'm not a real doctor but I figured I should still ask before I went through with something like that."
Buffy smiles. "Sure, so long as my name doesn't end up on any of the reports."
The curtain is pulled aside instantly and Maggie's somewhat manic face is there with a cart full of electronic devices.
"Excellent!"
Walsh is still a terror, she's just their terror now. 
