Disclaimer: I do not own BtVS nor... (I can't just claim it's a secret, can I? I'll give it a shot.)

Disclaimer: I own neither BtVS nor the... series I am crossing it over with, both are owned by their respective media companies.

The bomb taken care of and the zombies dealt with, Xander left the Sunnydale high school boiler room with his head held high, foolishly assuming that the zombie behind him wouldn't just re-arm the bomb and leave, now that the way out was clear.

Of course, the point became moot thanks to a hungry werewolf who was locked up down there.

Xander was a bit banged up from the night's events, but for the moment he was feeling no pain. He'd saved his friends and gotten laid. The only way his day could improve would be if Cordelia agreed to bury the hatchet so he didn't have to listen to her rip on him and use things she'd learned in confidence against him.

As if summoned, Cordelia stepped out of the hall in front of him.

"Oh, it's you!" Cordelia spat out before starting a diatribe about how worthless Xander was and how he'd end up a drunken loser like his father.

"Good seeing you again too," Xander said, not in the least surprised, before turning and walking off.

"Don't you turn your back on me!" Cordelia yelled, rushing over to continue berating him.

Naturally, it was at this point that the earth opened up beneath them and swallowed them both.

Xander would describe the trip like being flushed down the toilet after you'd puked in it, but at the moment he was more concerned with the landing at the end.

A five foot drop doesn't sound like much, but a five foot drop onto asphalt when you're not expecting it can be a killer, even if you land feet first.

Recalling his dimly remembered jump school training, he quickly bent his knees and allowed himself to crumple to the side, bruising his shoulder but preventing any serious injuries.

"Fuck-fuck-FUCK!" Cordelia screamed, sprawled out on the ground and clutching her leg.

"You OK?" Xander asked, moving to help her.

"Don't touch me!"

Xander backed off, noting a lack of blood or serious malformation denoting a life-threatening injury. A quick check of himself showed he was OK, no breaks or bleeding, just some moderate bruising.

Taking stock of his surroundings, it looked like they'd been dropped on a two-lane highway somewhere in the mountains. Although there wasn't any snow on the ground, the air was a bit cold despite the sun being directly overhead, and there were pine trees along the road. And speaking of the road, it was cracked and worn like it hadn't been serviced in years. The slow creep of the forest was evident by the bushes pushing out into the roadway and the small plants growing up from the cracks in the road.

He figured they were in North America, probably the US, but somewhere deserted, probably for economic reasons like a mine closing.

Cordelia's complaints tapered off as Xander tried to make up his mind which way to go. Downhill would be easier and would eventually lead to civilization, while uphill was probably a shorter trip to some form of shelter, and though likely abandoned, it might have a phone.

His mind made up, Xander started walking.

"Wait! You can't just leave me lying here!" Cordelia screamed.

"Why not?" Xander asked. "You left me when I had a major concussion, internal bleeding, and cracked ribs."

"Your friends were there!" Cordelia shrilly retorted.

"Yeah, but they had to rush some girl to the hospital, so I had to make my own way until someone returned for me."

"That was an accident!"

Xander stopped and considered that for a moment. "Fine," he said with a sigh, "let's look at the leg."

The examination was quick and impersonal, much to Cordelia's surprise, though the only thing that kept her from complaining was the effort it took not to scream in pain.

"You may have pulled something and I can't tell if you've dislocated it until the swelling subsides and we get your pants off."

"You're not getting my pants off!" Cordelia growled.

"Can it, Chase," he replied, annoyed. "If you don't want my help, I'm not going to force it on you."

As he started to walk away once more, she panicked. "You're not going to just leave?!"

"No," Xander assured her, "I'm just looking around to see if I can find something to make a stretcher with."

"Oh." She quieted down.

Looking down the road, he saw something promising. "I'm going to head around the curve up here, I'll be right back."

"Hurry," she said quietly.

As Xander rounded the corner he froze and just stared. Part of the road was occupied by a mudslide and a downed tree, but that wasn't what had attracted his attention. There were half a dozen cars and a firetruck on the road and they weren't empty. Scattered bones on the ground marked where at least three bodies had lain and the grinning skeletons in two of the cars waited patiently for a journey they were never going to complete. He shook it off, and returned to searching.

The stretcher on the firetruck had rotted away, the cloth not being nearly as resistant to the elements as the nylon straps that held it in place. Fortunately, there was a thick plastic body board used to stabilize those with spinal injuries that had come through everything with just a little sun bleaching.

Xander tried not to look too closely while gathering what he needed. There was a sticker on the back window of the station wagon that showed a stick figure family with several small children and a dog. He did not look inside the car while taking a hiking stroller off the roof rack.

The material of the stroller was better than the stretcher, but still not as resistant as nylon. He used Jack O'Tool's knife to cut the crumbling fabric apart as he only needed part of the frame and the wheels. Xander's makeshift stretcher was lightweight and rolled easily over the road, so it took little time to return to where the dark-haired girl lay.

Cordelia looked at the contraption Xander wheeled up to her and then into his expressionless face. "I thought at most you'd bring back a couple of branches and use your shirt to make a stretcher."

"I could have done that here," Xander replied. "I was looking for other options."

He laid it flat, the board slightly raised due to the wheels strapped to it. "Can you climb on or do you need help?"

"I'm going to need help," she admitted.

Carefully rolling her over, they managed to get her on the board and Xander began strapping her down.

"What are you doing?" she screeched, slapping at his hands as he tried to secure her arms down.

Xander stopped and explained, "The straps distribute the pressure so it's not all on your legs, where the injury is."

"You're sure this isn't just an excuse-" she began only to have Xander cut her off.

"Listen, Chase, I have zero tolerance for your shit right now. If you don't want my help, fine, I'll leave, but if you want my help, stop making it harder than it needs to be!"

Cordelia fell silent and allowed Xander to finish strapping her down. In times of stress, she usually fell back to being a queen bitch and Xander cheating on her with Willow of all people had added whole new levels of anger and pain that brought out the harpy in her, but Xander was behaving really strange and she believed him when he said he would leave her here. It made her wonder if she'd ever really known him at all.

"Wh-what happened here?" the girl asked as they rounded the corner and she saw the cars…and the bones.

Xander found the wheels handled the dirt as easily as the asphalt when he carefully pushed Cordelia across the landslide just past the vehicles. "I don't know."

"What do you think?" she asked. "I mean, what have you noticed?"

Xander sighed and for a minute Cordelia thought he was going to remain silent. "The condition of the road, the bodies, and everything says it's been years since it happened. What it is, I have no idea, but the fact that no-one has come and cleaned up means either it's still going on, or it hit a very large area."

"Still going on?" Cordelia asked nervously.

"Think Chernobyl," Xander explained. "Even long after the accident the radiation remains, so they have to wait a couple of decades before cleaning up and burying the dead."

"And the second option?" she asked, as he detoured around a fallen tree that was blocking most of the road.

"It was so widespread that years later they still haven't gotten around to cleaning up this section," Xander replied.

"So the choices are either everyone's dead or we are radioactive?" she asked. "Please tell me some other options, I don't care how unlikely or even silly they are," she begged him.

"The portal we fell through dropped us onto the set of the latest post-apocalyptic film and everything we've seen is just set dressing for tomorrow's shoot."

"A little more realistic," she suggested.

"Someone pulled a Sleeping Beauty, but forgot the preservative part of the spell so everyone died in their sleep way before a prince could come, and by the way, the original version of the story had that as literal. Prince Charming does not wake her with a kiss."

"One, is that really more realistic, and two, eww!"

"I saw Buffy kill Hansel and Gretel recently," Xander replied. "That makes it really hard to dismiss any fairy tales as just stories anymore, and yeah, I agree, eww, but remember, it's not rape if you're royalty."

"I can see why Disney re-wrote it," Cordelia said.

"Yeah, it's not rape if you're rich just doesn't hold the same symbolism," Xander replied.

"Royalty was more than simply rich," Cordelia said. "They were well-bred and educated, while the peasants were dirty, smelly, and ignorant."

"They were that way because the nobles took nearly everything they had and what was left the church stole while telling them they were born evil and-" Xander fell silent as they crested the rise and saw a row of buildings, starting with a truck stop and ending with a motel as the road curved to the left and out of their direct line of sight.

They stared silently for a minute.

"I've seen some small animals and they looked healthy," Xander noted.

"Yeah?" Cordelia asked absently as she saw the scattered bones and overgrown vegetation. "What does that mean?"

"It means we probably don't have to worry about radiation," he told her.

"And the bad news?" she asked, hearing something in his voice.

"The cars are recent and the roads aren't deteriorated enough for more than a couple of years to have passed, so radiation isn't what killed everyone as the wildlife is looking pretty healthy."

"I thought that was a good thing," she said, as he slowly wheeled her forward.

"It means we don't have to worry about radiation, but that also means we don't know what we have to worry about," Xander replied.

"Oh," Cordelia said quietly, as they approached the truck stop and saw the scattered bones and vehicles.

"It's getting towards evening," Xander said. "We need a place to crash until morning, unfortunately all that's available are public access properties."

"What's that mean?"

"It means no private residences, so no threshold protections."

"You think there are vampires around here?" Cordelia asked nervously.

"No idea," Xander admitted, "but I'm a Sunnydale boy, I always assume vampires are about. Besides, threshold protections keep out a lot of things, not just vampires. We need weapons and shelter."

"You already have a plan," Cordelia guessed.

"Plan is a bit of a strong term for what I have," he replied as he eyed a couple of semis that probably had batteries as dead as their drivers.

"And it is?" she asked, wanting a distraction from the scattered bones and turning away from the sight of a child's shoe on the pavement before she could see anymore.

"Find an empty motel room, leave you in it while I scrounge for whatever food and weapons I can find before night falls, and wait until sunrise before we set foot out of the room again."

They passed a diner and a store selling skiing equipment across from a store that had cold weather gear on display. It was readily apparent that this little bump in the road was a pit stop on the way to a skiing lodge further up the mountain.

"A weather radio!" Cordelia suddenly announced as they approached the small motor lodge, a two story building with about thirty units.

"Would let us know if people were still around," Xander agreed. "There's probably one in the lobby."

"I-I think I'll wait out here," Cordelia said nervously, not wanting to see the corpses she assumed would be there.

"OK," Xander said, leaning her against the wall so she could see. "I'll be right back."

Typing by: Elrod Albino!