Escape to New York

by Setcheti

 

 

Disclaimer:  Don’t own Buffy or Real Ghostbusters, they belong to Joss Whedon/Mutant Enemy and whoever else. This story is a work in progress, last updated on 29 June 2009.

 

The woman behind the desk glanced up when the door opened, one hand reaching for the security of her just-in-case gun.  These days, in this neighborhood, even broad daylight wasn’t exactly safe.  The man who came in, though, didn’t look like the usual threat.  He was just under six feet, dark haired and dark eyed, and probably not far into his twenties.  He was also clutching a newspaper, and that told her everything she needed to know.  “Here about the job?” she asked.

 

“Um, yeah.”  He looked around, no doubt taking in the dilapidated interior of the echoing space that the shadows failed to hide.  This was usually when half of the few potential applicants backed out, but this one just got an interested look on his face and came the rest of the way over to her desk.  He smiled, holding out his hand.  “Alexander Harris.  Is there an application I need to fill out?”

 

She took the offered hand after a moment’s hesitation, felt the strength in it and the calluses that said he knew how to work and had possibly even done it recently.  Yet another improvement over most of the other people the ad brought in.  “I’m Annie and yeah, there is.”  She fished out an application and pushed it across the desk.  “Pull up a chair.  You got a pen?”

 

“Sure.”  He pulled a battered wooden chair over to the desk, sat down and fished a pen out of his jacket.  Annie pretended to go back to her magazine, but she watched him scratch his way across the application, taking the opportunity to look him over more closely.  At first she’d thought the tousled-looking hair was a style, but it was actually just windblown.  He was cute in a way that said he didn’t know it, and broad enough across the shoulders to keep it from making him look like an easy target.  There was an alertness about him, in fact, that told Annie he was used to looking out for himself.

 

That wasn’t a bad thing.  This one, she thought, might actually last a little while if she could pass him on the application.  Annie smiled at her magazine and turned a page.  It wasn’t the original application, that one had pretty much had everyone who made it as far as the desk running for the door.  She’d gone down to the office supply store and bought a pad of generic ones the other day, right before the next ad had come out.  As long as Alexander Harris wasn’t a felon and didn’t list the bottom of a bridge as his home address, he was getting the job.

 

He had the application finished in ten minutes, and sat back in the chair while she looked it over.  He saw her eyebrows go up and let a small smile leak out.  “Yes, that Sunnydale,” he told her.  “Sinkhole City itself.”

 

Annie raised an eyebrow.  “So you moved to New York…?”

 

“Because it’s as far from California as I could get and still be in the same country,” he said with a shrug.  It was true, even if it wasn’t the actual reason he was there.  “How long do you think it will be before I hear back about the job?”

 

She smiled, looking a little too smug.  “Answer a few questions for me and it might be today.  Do you believe in the supernatural, ESP, precognition, ghosts, demons, Bigfoot, the Loch Ness monster, yadda yadda yadda?”

 

He shifted in his seat.  “Wouldn’t have answered your ad if I didn’t.”

 

“Do you know how to use a gun?”

 

“Yeah.”  He knew how to use an axe, a crossbow and a rocket launcher too, but he wasn’t going to say so.  “I don’t have one, though.”

 

“Not a problem.”  Annie snapped her gum.  “Can you follow directions for using sensitive machinery?”

 

“If they’re good directions, sure.”

 

“How about computers, can you use one of those?”

 

“Well enough to check my e-mail and do a little research.  I can use Windows pretty well.”

 

“Good enough for me.”  Her smile widened.  “You probably don’t scare easily, do you?”

 

That made him laugh.  “Not any more, no.  Is there anything here I should be scared of?”

 

Annie’s smile fell.  “Yes,” she said seriously.  “Yes, there is.  Plenty of things.”  Her sigh came from the bottom of her shoes, and she waved a resigned hand at the front entrance.  “If you’re going to run for the door, do it now.  Don’t get my hopes up.”

 

He looked at the shadows again, turned in his seat to size up the door…and then lounged back as much as he dared in the shaky chair and folded his arms across his chest.  “I’m not so much with the running right now, you know?  You have a list of these things I should be scared of, or is that what the gun is supposed to be for?  Because I’ve got to tell you, in my experience shooting a demon just pisses it off.”

 

She stared at him, and he wondered if he’d laid it on too thick…but then her smile came back times ten.  “I’m gonna make a phone call, tell the boss we’ve got a winner,” she said.  “You can take a look around here on the ground floor if you want, I’ll yell when I’m done.”  She cocked her head.  “You go by Alex or what?  What do your friends call you?”

 

“They don’t.”  He stood up.  “Some people call me Xan, though.  I’ve never really been an Alex.”

 

“Xan it is.”  She waved him away.  “Go on, shoo.  I’ll only be fifteen minutes or so, and then you can have the nickel tour.”

 

“Oh, I’ve probably even got a quarter somewhere,” he told her with a grin, and then he gave her a little wave and made himself wander away from the desk.  There was a row of dented lockers with peeling paint along the nearest wall, and a door beside them; Xander opened it cautiously and looked inside.  It was an office, bare and dusty enough that he knew it hadn’t been used in quite a while.  He closed the door again and walked past the lockers toward the stairs.  They looked solid enough, and he could tell that someone had been using them, but Annie had indicated that he should stay on the ground floor so he passed them by.  The fire pole drew him next, and he grinned as he laid one hand on it and looked up into the darkness on the floor above.  Every boy’s dream, sliding down a fire pole.  Probably wouldn’t be safe to try, though, since he’d be in the building alone.

 

Yeah, he was pretty sure he’d gotten the job.  Mainly because he was pretty sure from the way the secretary was acting that applicants had been few and far between…and that she wanted out herself.  Xander doubted she stayed in the building once the sun started to go down, or even that she ventured far from her desk during the day unless she absolutely had to.  Not that he blamed her.

 

He wasn’t her, though.  Shadows didn’t scare him.  Ghosts didn’t either.  And he had it on good authority that there were no vampires in the Big Apple.  Yet another good and truthful reason to be here, even though that wasn’t the real one either.

 

Because he had flat out lied about being not so much with the running.  Running was what had brought him to New York when he was supposed to be in Africa, what had brought him to one of the biggest paranormal nexuses on the planet to hide, knowing that no one could find him magically as long as he stayed within its boundaries.  He definitely had no intention of venturing outside of those boundaries in the foreseeable future.  Leaving meant being found, being found meant being dragged back.  And Xander Harris was not going back, not ever.

 

Being identified by more mundane means probably wouldn’t be a problem either, not now.  The rest of the old Sunnydale gang had last seen him with long hair, an eyepatch, and baggy bright-colored clothing.  Right after getting off the plane he’d tossed the patch and put in the glass eye he’d secretly acquired, and then he’d gotten a haircut and bought some new clothes to replace the ones that were currently on their way to Africa – he’d made sure everything he really needed or wanted with him had been packed in his carryon.  Xander had picked his flight carefully, knowing that it had a stopover in New York where he could slip away unremarked in the throng of other disembarking passengers and just…disappear.

 

Seeing the ad in the paper for a full-time caretaker/security guard and then realizing it was at the old Ghostbusters Central building had just been icing on the cake.  Construction and fighting evil were about the only things he knew how to do, so the job was absolutely perfect for him.  Not that there had been evil to fight around the old firehouse for quite a while, hence the need for a caretaker.  Xander walked around to the other side of room, examining the structure of the building since there wasn’t much else to see except for oil stains on the concrete floor and dusty parts on shelves against the back wall.  There was a battered tool chest near the shelves, and looking inside he found an equally battered collection of tools.  Someone’s cast-offs, he decided, spotting the empty pegboard rack over the stained worktable and deciding that getting tools of his own was going to be his first priority.  He could see a lot of work that needed to be done already, and he’d rather have good tools to do it with.  He didn’t have much money, but a trip to the nearest hardware department wasn’t going to break him as long as he didn’t go overboard.  He could do that tonight.

 

Xander heard Annie end her phone call and headed back across the garage floor to the desk before she called him.  “Well?” he asked.  “Did I pass?”

 

“Sure did.  Welcome to Ghostbusters Central.”  The snap of her gum had a self-satisfied sound to it, and Xander wondered briefly just how much lying she’d done to her boss on the phone.  He wasn’t worried about it, though; he was the right man for this job, and once he was doing it they’d be able to see that.  She was pulling more papers out of the desk, making a little pile to one side of his application.  “I’ve got all the usual forms you’ll have to fill out, but we can do that once you’ve had a look at the rest of the building.” 

 

“Fine by me.”  Annie stood up and came out from behind her desk, and Xander had to smile.  She had dyed-black hair and pale skin, lots of jewelry and a little too much eyeshadow on behind her cat-eye glasses, and he guessed that she wasn’t too much older than he was.  She was also wearing jeans and shockingly orange tennis shoes, apparently having decided that the peach-colored blouse was enough of a concession to proper secretarial clothing.  “Like your shoes,” he told her.

 

She gave him a narrow-eyed look, then apparently decided he meant it and started smiling again.  “There was no way I was wearing a skirt and heels in this place,” she said, snapping her gum.  “All the filth aside, if I’m gonna be in this neighborhood with the door unlocked, I’m wearing shoes I can run in.”

 

“Good thinking,” was Xander’s reply.  He pushed an image of Buffy trying to fight vampires in high heels and a miniskirt out of his mind; the Slayer had been big on strength and speed, but low on common sense sometimes.  “So, tell me a little more about this job I just got?”

 

“I’ll tell you all about it,” Annie promised.  “Come on, we’ll start in the basement.  That’s where the containment unit is, and taking care of the containment unit is the most important part of your job.  The last time it overloaded, it blew the roof off the building!”

 

Xander trailed along in her wake, hiding a smile.  “Don’t blow up the building, got it.”

 

 

Annie came back once at the end of the first week to check on him, but other than that Xander was on his own at the old firehouse from his very first day – which was the day after he’d answered the ad.  It took him just over a month to get the building cleaned to his satisfaction, and he knew the repairs would be ongoing for a lot longer than that.  The place was well-built, but it was also pretty old and hadn’t been occupied for a long time, so lots of little things had gone wrong with it.  Xander repaired loose handrails, replaced broken windows, fixed leaking pipes and patched cracked plaster.  He sanded and re-varnished the old, beautifully turned woodwork that still decorated parts of the building just because he could, and then repainted dingy walls so that the woodwork would show to its best advantage.

 

Then, he got bored.  Endless little repairs and cleaning did not come close to filling up his days.  Maintaining the containment unit didn’t either, although the unit fascinated him and he’d practically memorized the manuals that were stored in the basement with it.  He learned about the traps and the packs and the PKE meters too, and grew frustrated when his limited grasp of higher science kept him from understanding much of what he was reading.  Finally he got the idea that he might be able to find the information he needed online, and the search for what he wanted led him in a direction he’d never expected to go.

 

It led him to college.  And to Xander’s even greater surprise, he enjoyed it; it was not, as he had once feared, anything like high school had been.  By taking online courses and tele-courses when they were available, he was able to be a full-time student and a full-time caretaker without neglecting the responsibilities of either.

 

 

Another of Xander’s responsibilities as caretaker of what had once been Ghostbuster Central, before the ghosts had all disappeared, was the daily metro-meter check.  The metro-meter, a strange hybrid of a PKE meter and a radar system that scanned the entire city for PKE fluctuations, was located in an upstairs lab, and Xander had gotten in the habit of making the check every night on his way up to bed.  The meter hadn’t done anything the entire time he’d been there, and so he was more than shocked when he walked in one evening late in August and found that the usually static readings had changed.  He checked the meter carefully to make certain nothing was wrong with it, and then he checked the readings against a color-coded chart on the nearest wall before recording them into the logbook that went with the meter.  They had changed, yes, but not enough to warrant use of the Red Phone.

 

The Red Phone was not actually red, or a phone; it was part of a clear and precise protocol regarding what to report to who and when.  The meter hadn’t changed enough to warrant any notifications yet, but it was enough to change Xander’s once a day check to twice a day.

 

And two days later, the meter’s readings changed again.  They were going up, and staying up.  Which meant that PKE energy across the city was going up and staying up, which meant that something big was going down.

 

According to the chart they were still in the safe zone, but Xander had a bad feeling.  He started checking the meter at intervals throughout the day, and he paid closer than usual attention to the security of the containment unit and to the warding spells around the building; he couldn’t affect the wards, but after a lifetime on the Hellmouth he could feel them and he knew if they were ‘right’ or not.  So far, they were.  But his bad feeling was getting worse, just a little bit worse each day.  Xander knew it wasn’t paranoia, or even a case of the heebie-jeebies from being alone in the firehouse so much.  Because the problem he was feeling wasn’t inside the firehouse…it was outside the wards, in the rest of the city.  And as near as he could tell, it was everywhere.

 

Another month went by before he saw the first true spike in the metro-meter’s readings – if he hadn’t been practically camped out in the room with the meter, he might have missed it.  But he was, and he didn’t, and he called the first number on his Red Phone list not thirty seconds later.  He identified himself as the Ghostbusters Central caretaker to the woman’s voice that answered, and then gave the precise message his instructions mandated for the situation.

 

Ray Stanz called him back fifteen minutes later, verified the information from the message and then asked Xander a lot of questions about the daily meter checks before saying that he would be over to the firehouse first thing in the morning so they could figure out what was going on.  Xander stayed in the lab with the metro-meter for the rest of the day, doing his homework and going over the graduation plan one of his professors at the university had encouraged him to make.  He’d have his first degree in a couple more years, give or take: a double major in engineering and parapsychology.  He found himself wondering vaguely as he went downstairs that night to do the evening containment and security check if he might just decide to stick with it after that and get his Masters, or maybe even a PhD…

 

 

This story has not been completed.