Supernatural The Unholy Cause Page 9
“Yeah,” Dean said, “but—”
The phone on Daniels’ desk started ringing again.
“Here we are.” She picked it up. “Hello? Yes sir. This is Mission’s Ridge Sheriff Jacqueline Daniels calling. Sorry to bother you, but I’ve got two men here claiming to be Federal Agents, and I just wanted to verify their identification.”
“Wait,” Sam said. “Let me talk to them.”
“Not a chance.” Daniels shook her head and turned her back to them. “Yes, sir. Agents Townes and Van Zandt. That’s right, V-A-N Z-A-N-D-T. Thanks. I’ll wait.”
Sam glanced at Dean, and saw that his brother was staring straight at the sheriff.
Except he wasn’t.
He was actually staring at a nylon tote bag that rested in the corner of the office. It was the same one Daniels had carried away from the crime scene. Dean was staring straight at it, as if he could somehow see inside through sheer force of will, or levitate it into the air.
Daniels smiled, and spoke into the phone again.
“Yes, sir. I appreciate that. Thank you for your time.” She shook her head. “Jerry?” she shouted.
The paunchy deputy who had let them in came around the corner.
“What’s up, Sheriff?”
“Please escort these two men to the holding cell. The charge is posing as a law-enforcement official.” She smiled again, this time directly at Dean. “We’ll have plenty of time to figure out who they are later. Meanwhile they can rot in the drunk tank.” She glanced out of the window. “And haul their piece of crap car to the impound lot. I don’t want it cluttering up my street.”
“Whoa!” Dean snapped, a sudden rush of anger rising in his face. “Watch your damn mouth, lady. You can’t just—”
Jerry pivoted on them with unexpected intensity. His paunchy, thickly moustached face didn’t look soft or easygoing anymore. A new type of hardness had spread over his expression now, and his hand was resting on the butt of his sap.
“Easy or hard, gentlemen. Makes no difference to me.”
“Okay,” Dean said, “look...”
“Hard it is, then,” Jerry said, drawing the club from his belt. Suddenly he looked like a man who enjoyed using it on vagrants, bums, and anyone else who got in his way, whenever he had the chance.
“Wait!” Sam said, holding up his hands, palms out.
That was all he managed to get out before a bomb burst across the sky. It shook the windows of the sheriff’s office as it exploded.
FOURTEEN
The explosion caught Sheriff Daniels and her deputy completely off-guard. They both spun around in reaction to the noise.
Dean saw Jerry lowering the sap, and that was all the opportunity he needed.
“Come on!” he shouted. Barging past the deputy, he sprinted out of the office, through the lobby, and out the door. Sam was close behind.
The front steps of the sheriff’s building were still cluttered with reporters and camera crews, but they were all facing the other way, toward the outskirts of town, where a second roaring explosion had just gone off, spitting aftershocks across the horizon.
“What is that?” Sam shouted.
Dean jabbed a finger off beyond the low buildings of downtown Mission’s Ridge. The sun was up now, and lay behind them.
“It’s coming from out by the battlefield.”
Scrambling down the sidewalk, he bolted across the street and down the block to where the Impala sat waiting, then jumped behind the wheel almost without waiting to see if Sam had made the trip along with him.
But Sam was already there, climbing into the passenger seat.
Dean gunned it, and the Impala’s engine roared to life with a reassuring throb that seemed to say, What took you so long? Its wheels laid sizzling parabolas of rubber across the concrete as the car spun forward and went shooting off toward the outskirts of town.
Behind him, Dean could already see blue and white lights swirling in the rear-view mirror.
“Looks like them Duke boys are fixing to get themselves in a heap of trouble again,” he muttered in his best Merle Haggard drawl.
Sam checked his side-view mirror.
“Can’t you drive any faster?”
Dean grinned.
“No. But I can do this.” He threw the wheel hard to the right, sluicing the Impala’s back-end around at a ninety-degree angle, sending them straight into the ‘Dixie Boy Buggie Wash.’ One of the attendants—a skinny guy in a lawn chair—jumped out of the way far enough for Dean to drive completely into the car wash. Water and wet sponges splashed off the windshield, enveloping the car, and Dean craned his neck enough to watch the sheriff’s cruiser go flying up Main Street in the direction of the explosions.
“I think we lost ‘em.” Another explosion echoed off in the distance. “And here I thought the re-enactment was canceled.”
“I don’t think this is a re-enactment,” Sam offered.
“Then what the hell...” Dean stared, looking over, and the words faded on his lips. His brother was holding a small, bloodstained leather satchel on his lap, tugging loose the strip of rawhide that acted as its drawstring. “What’s that?”
Sam held it up.
“I snagged it out of the sheriff’s tote bag on the way out the door.”
“Not bad, Sammy,” Dean said. “Did you happen to see the noose in there, too?”
“I didn’t exactly have time to look.”
“Crap.”
Dean pulled out of the car wash, waved to the attendant on the other side, and slammed the accelerator again, sending the Impala shrieking around the narrow alleyway.
“Man, that bag stinks. What’s in there, anyway?”
“Check it out.” Sam removed a tarnished silver coin, holding it up to examine its markings.
“Confederate?”
Sam shook his head.
“Older than that, I think.” He took out his phone and snapped a picture of it. “I’ll send it to Bobby and see if he can help identify some of the markings.”
He did so, then continued, “Judging from these bloodstains, and the fact that this leather smells like gastric bile—”
“I’m not even gonna ask how you know that—”
“—I’m guessing it came from somewhere inside one of those bodies out on the battlefield,” Sam finished.
“So what, the rope-curse sends you psycho, then pays you for it?”
“Yup.”
“Crazy.”
“Dean! Look!” Sam pointed up ahead, perhaps a mile into the distance, where a huge cloud of black smoke was rising up into the sky. “Still think it’s a re-enactment?”
“We gotta get out there.”
“If the sheriff sees us...”
“I think she’s got her hands full right now,” Dean said, and he floored it.
BOOM!
Another explosion rocked the earth underneath them as they jumped out of the Impala and chased their shadows across the parking lot. Sirens were rising up all around them in the distance. The smoke was already thick enough to sting their eyes and make their noses water.
In front of them, the entire Mission’s Ridge battleground seemed to be on fire. Men in Confederate and Union uniforms—hundreds of them—were scurrying in all directions, heading away from burning tents and enormous smoking craters that had opened up in the well-manicured grass like giant angry mouths.
The police cruisers in the parking lot were dispensing local cops and state troopers, the officers yelling into radios and trying to be heard above the chaos.
“The shooting,” Dean shouted, “where’s it coming from?”
Sam pointed across the creek and up the hillside, perhaps a thousand yards in the distance. At the top of the hill, a row of SUVs and pickup trucks were parked overlooking the gorge below. Standing alongside them was a phalanx of siege howitzers like the ones that they had seen earlier. Two figures in uniform—at least they seemed to be in uniform—were packing ordnance into the rifled cannons.
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br /> “Look out!” He winced as one of the howitzers blasted, its projectile shrieking downward over the hillside and across the creek, where it slammed into the earth with a deafening BOOM! Great chunks of rock, dirt, and splintered tree roots sprayed up into the air and came showering down everywhere.
“I thought they were replicas!” Dean shouted.
“They are!”
“Then how—”
THOOM! Another shell slammed close enough that Sam actually felt the ground lurch up and go sideways under his feet. Before he knew it he was on his knees, his mouth and nose clogged with soil and flecks of stone.
When his vision cleared, Dean was hauling him to his feet, brushing him off, yanking him back.
“You okay, Sammy?”
“I’m all right,” he managed, wiping a stream of blood from his eyes. He was weak, dazed—the pores of his skin felt like they’d been packed with flying debris—his first instinct was to find safety, but running away wasn’t an option right now, and he knew it.
“We’re gonna get killed out here!” Dean shouted. “They’re shooting at us!”
“I don’t think so.”
“What are you talking about?”
Sam spun around, regaining his bearings, trying to take in the full scope of what was happening around him—to make it make sense somehow. Groups of re-enactors were streaming in every direction, trying to find their way back to the parking lot through the clouds of flying dirt and dust.
Up ahead, the corral of cavalry division horses were going wild with panic, bucking and trying to get free from their pen.
There were some binoculars lying in the grass next to a tent, and he scooped them up. Bringing them to his eyes, he squinted until the details came into view.
And he saw them.
The men loading the howitzers were indeed dressed in uniform, some Confederate, others Union. As Sam stared at them, they seemed to sense that they were being watched, and one of them turned and looked right back at him.
The man grinned.
His eyes flicked to total black.
The cannons roared again, three at a time now, filling the air with an explosion so loud that it seemed to blot out every other sound on earth.
“Damn it, Sam, we have to go now!” Dean screamed at him, but this time Sam hardly heard him. “They’re gonna blow us up!”
“That’s the least of it,” Sam said. “They’re demons.”
“What?”
“See for yourself.” He thrust the binoculars at Dean and waited while he stared through them.
Then Dean seemed to become very calm. He reached backward under his shirt, drawing a blade from its sheath.
“How many, you think?”
“Three, maybe four.”
“Two each?”
“Sounds good.”
“You want the blade?”
“No, I’m good.” Sam shook his head. “You take it.”
Dean frowned.
“You’re not gonna go all ‘Dark Sam’ on me, right?”
“What?”
“Sorry. Too soon?”
“Dean—”
“Fine.” Dean nodded. “I get it. We’re good.”
Sam shook his head. He honestly couldn’t tell how serious his brother’s queries were. And at the moment he didn’t care. He was simply—almost absurdly—relieved to have Dean fighting alongside him.
Tromping uphill through the choking cloud of smoke, with artillery rounds booming through the landscape below them like some cataclysmic percussion instrument, Sam almost lost sight of where he was going. Above them artillery rounds pierced the air. For a span of several minutes it seemed like every few yards he gained, another explosion sent him skidding back down the embankment, until he had to sink his fingers into the earth and claw his way to the top.
Glancing over his shoulder, he caught a brief glimpse of the battlefield below. Ambulances had arrived in the parking lot, their roof-lights pulsing through the airborne debris. Cops and paramedics were moving forward between the craters, trying to get the injured re-enactors out of harm’s way. Nobody seemed to be in charge, and if they were, nobody else seemed able to understand them.
Near the top, Sam and Dean stopped and fell motionless, gasping hard for what little air there was close to the ground. Sam’s ribs ached from the exertion. From here he was looking straight up at the undersides of the cannons, each one recoiling violently as it fired another round. He glanced over, trying to gauge his brother’s state of mind.
Dean’s face looked flush but triumphant—in his mind he’d already won this battle, or perhaps he was just happy to be fighting demons instead of bureaucratic red tape.
“How do you want to...?” Sam started, but Dean was already in motion, springing up over the top.
Scrambling to follow him, Sam was just in time to see his brother dive forward and plant Ruby’s demon-killing blade into the first of the fusiliers.
The demon sparked and flashed white, its meat-suit collapsing. Yanking the blade loose, Dean whipped around and flattened the soldier behind him with a roundhouse Billy-Jack kick. Even on its back, though, the thing was faster than Dean was, springing upright and grabbing hold of his leg, jolting Dean forward.
The blade went spinning into the grass.
Sam grabbed the knife and drove it straight down into the demon’s skull. The bone burst like crockery and it fell howling to the ground, vomiting up shrieks of rage and agony as it flashed out, the blade sticking out of its head.
On the other side of the howitzers, the two remaining demons—one garbed as a Confederate, the other in a flat-crowned Union kepi—turned to charge them.
“I feel like we’re fighting a Disneyland ride,” Dean muttered, getting to his feet. “You still have the knife?”
Sam gaped at him. “I thought you picked it up.”
The Confederate demon opened its mouth in a twisted, wide-jawed grin and lunged at Dean as if it intended to swallow him whole. Sam heard his brother let out an involuntary “uff!” of punched-out breath as the demon fell on top of him.
Behind him on the hillside, the siege howitzer that the demon had been loading stood ready to fire. Its fuse was hissing steadily down to the barrel. Vaguely—in a distracted, secondhand way—Sam noticed that it was gleaming with fresh blood.
“Sam Winchester?” a thick voice said.
Sam turned and saw the Union demon standing in front of him, holding the demon-knife.
“We’re not interested in you,” the demon said, with all the intensity of an IRS auditor going over a list of deductions. “Let us do our work here and we’ll be on our way.”
“What work is that?” Sam demanded.
When the demon didn’t answer right away, Sam realized that, for better or worse, he was going to have to act. He lunged for the demon, and it swung the knife at him in a scooping, desultory arc. Sam dodged left, recoiling, and felt the tip of the blade snag the fabric of his shirt as he sprinted around in front of the howitzer. The hillside dropped off sharply underneath his feet and he fell to his knees, starting to slide. But the Union demon kept its footing, raising the blade to deliver the killing blow.
“You should have stayed out of our way,” the demon said. “It would have been much simpler.”
Directly behind the demon, the howitzer roared. At the last second the thing seemed to realize what was happening, but it was too late. Sam shut his eyes as the entire upper half of the demon’s body disappeared in a sulfurous spray, drenching him from above.
Sam reached up and, by sheer luck, caught the blade in mid-air. It was an astonishingly cool move, which of course meant that there was no way his brother could have seen it.
And Dean hadn’t.
Because he was too busy getting the unholy snot beaten out of him by the last remaining demon on the hill.
Sam flung himself toward it. He could hear the faint gargling noises that his brother was making as the demon went about the business of strangling him.
“You wouldn’t dare intrude on this,” he said, “if you knew the mission we were given.”
Sam flicked his wrist, throwing the knife at the demon’s face. The creature laughed and ducked easily, so that the blade went whistling over his head, landing in the dirt.
“We serve a greater purpose here.” Releasing Dean, the demon stalked toward Sam, managing to look both heavy and impossibly graceful in its human meat-suit. “You’re only one part of that.”
“Yeah, well, you don’t serve any purpose at all,” Sam responded. He realized that he wasn’t shouting anymore. He didn’t have to. The guns had fallen silent.
From down below, a smell was rising up the hillside on the breeze. It was indescribably foul and rotten, as if tons of flyblown decaying flesh had been left out to bake in the sun.
“You wait,” the demon told him. “Just wait. The way our numbers have waited, for so very long, suffering in the darkest hollows of—”
“Don’t you ever shut up?” Dean shouted hoarsely from behind it, with what sounded like genuine exasperation. “You want us so bad, quit talking and kill us already!”
“An excellent idea, Dean Winchester.”
The demon in the Union uniform pivoted and strode back toward him, taking two steps, then three, then freezing when it saw the ground beneath its feet, where Dean had used the knife to carve a Devil’s Trap into the grass.
“Dumbass,” Dean muttered, and he started muttering the exorcism rite.
FIFTEEN
After the exorcism, the smell of sulfur just got worse.
“Ugh, what did they open up down there?” Dean asked, gazing down between the howitzers at the smoldering battlefield below. He covered his nose and mouth with one hand and fanned the other in front of his face, as if he could somehow sweep a hole of clean air into the thick fumes that were accumulating around them.
“Smells like...”