Old Rebel Yeller -- Chapter Two
More of the same...Civil War shenanigans reenacted by obsessed fellows in period garb, Our Fearless Lads trying to rid the field of a ghost and a crazed dog. 'nuff said -- follow the underlined link for more...
Old Rebel Yeller - Chapter 2/Farbs in the Woods
Disclamatory Remarks: Rest assured, the only thing I own of any consequence is a 1988 Toyota Corolla. You can stop laughing. Really. Rated PG13 for a whole lot of swearing and maybe the occasional bloodletting.
a/n: If you read nothing else on the subject, you could do worse than to pick up a copy of Tony Horwitz’s Confederates in the Attic, which has been the inspiration for this story. It is a hilarious and intelligent piece of journalism about the lingering affects of the Civil War on contemporary American society and a mighty fine read as well.
Bear with me: fun creepy stuff starts happening by the end of this chapter, but you’ll have to squirm through the expository bits along with poor old Dean.
--
Sam stood silently for several heartbeats, not even looking at his brother, which was evidently all the permission to proceed that Dean needed.
“And for god’s sake, don’t call him Custer,” Dean muttered as he moved forward into the lowering sun and they picked their way down the scrubby hillside toward the campfires. Everyone that Sam could see was in period dress, despite the occasional anomaly, like the truck pulling the cannons. He heard the murmur of heated discussion, the occasional burst of song. Mostly men, but a few hoop-skirted women and even the wail and squeal of children.
“Why? Is the real Custer here?” Sam asked disingenuously in the descending gloom, not expecting an answer, but the chuckle died in his throat as Dean cast him a slightly panicked glare. And Sam understood comprehensively that he had fallen into the biggest make-Dean-squirm situation possible. In his wildest dreams, he could not have come up with something this beautifully cringe-worthy.
“There’s another guy who calls himself...” Dean began, then bit it back. “Just shut up and mind your manners. You remember what those are, don’t you?”
The pot was shouting ‘black’ from the rooftops, might as well have had a megaphone. Manners. Jesus, Dean. “Yeah, I might slip up and point out that they’re all living in the 21st Century, Dean. And that would be...” he paused, failing to master his giddy grin, “inappropriate.”
He thought he heard his brother say, “You have no idea,” but he might have imagined it, because Dean had increased his stride to cover more ground and Sam now realized that they were going to stand out in this crowd. What would the reenactors do? Lynch them? And that actually didn’t seem all that funny, given the circumstances.
“Hey, Dean,” he called out and watched as Dean pulled up, a black shadow against the firelight, weight balanced on one leg, thumbs hooked into his belt loops, the picture of long-suffering patience. “I just figured out something that I’ve been working on all day.” Sam couldn’t see his brother’s expression in the half-light, which was too bad, because it was somewhat the point.
“What’s that, Sam?” Dean sounded prickly, had that particular pointed tone.
“Three twists and you turn into Cybertron Johnnie Reb, don’t you?” His laughter burbled out, delighted.
“Man,” Dean started, and Sam didn’t have to see his face to imagine the disdainful grimace of disbelief. “You amaze me. All that gray matter and this is what you come up with? Sheesh.” He kept walking, leaving Sam shaking with unbridled laughter.
--
It was kind of like his worst nightmare, the one where his brother lost all respect for him and left. Except this was worse, in a way, because Sam wasn’t leaving, he was mocking, and that was the last thing Dean thought he could cope with. All the long drive here, he’d been trying to think of a good way to broach the subject - that he was dragging Stanford-educated Samuel Winchester to a Civil War reenactment campaign - but had been defeated again and again by the probability of just this kind of reaction.
Education had never really mattered to Dean, not in the traditional get-a-decent-job sense, but a couple of times in these last few months back together with Sam, a hole had opened up between them and this thing, this collection of courses and classes and assignments, lived at the bottom of it like a many-headed monster. Used to be that Sam was just smart, which was fine in the same way that Dean was good-looking or that their Dad was single-minded. But now it carried a set of rules and assumptions that Dean didn’t much like.
Though Dean had dreaded that look on Sam’s face, he couldn’t blame him, really. When their father had dropped Dean off at a similar gathering three years ago, he hadn’t exactly been a model guest at first. Beau and his buddies were goofier than drunks at a Star Trek convention, and Dean could appreciate how wacky it would seem to Sam.
Once Sam gets a load of what we’re up against, Dean counseled himself, he’s not going to be laughing so hard. Beau had been specific on the phone and Dean knew what they had come to do was going to be difficult. He’d been on old battlefields before and he was actually more than just a little bit concerned. Concerned for Sam. Concerned for the crowds the public reenactments tended to attract. That was tomorrow’s worry, though. Maybe they could accomplish something tonight and tomorrow would take care of itself.
And really, Sam’s mocking grin aside, this was way better than being bored. The last three weeks had just about killed him. Worrying about Dad. Worrying about Sam and his stupid hinky powers. Worrying about his own future, once Sam figured out that Dean’s entire master plan consisted of simply doing this kind of stuff over and over, nothing more. Sam was a smart boy. He’d work it out soon enough. And then they’d probably have words and Sam would leave. But not tonight, and not when Sam was about to have a whole lot of fun at Dean’s expense. Dean wasn’t built for worrying, and he didn’t take teasing all that well, either, so it was going to be interesting, if nothing else.
The reenactors - historical interpreters, Dean corrected himself - were polite, but also wondering what the hell these two civilians were doing in their camp, out of costume and out of character. They were told more than once that the public were welcome...tomorrow. Dean explained that they were looking for Pvt. Beauregard McBean, 22nd Virginia Infantry, at which point he actually could not look at Sam for fear of needing to wallop him in the face.
At the eastern end of the encampment - and there were at least three hundred campfires by Dean’s calculations - his careful inquiries finally hit pay dirt. By this time it was fully dark, and he was mindful that while they were being tolerated, they were not precisely welcome. Jeans and t-shirts, sneakers, Daytons. Not exactly hand-spun cotton with era-appropriate thread count and hand-stitched wool coats with urine-patina buttons and a crumpled kepi.
They were interfering with everyone’s period rush, and Dean was acutely aware of it, felt like an intruder, for all he’d been invited. As they approached the campfire that another bunch of 22nd Virginians had pointed out, Dean picked out Beau immediately. Or rather, heard his peal of laughter above the ruckus a thousand living history buffs could make on a summer solstice.
The brothers came to a sudden halt as a tall bearded soldier in a yellowed uniform reeled from the fire as though shot, staggered some distance from the flames, and fell to his knees. Toppling onto his back as his gray-clad comrades peered raptly on, the man’s spine arced forcefully from the ground, the buttons straining. Slowly, he seemed to expand, his cheeks rounding out, his hands pulling into claws as his arms curved into a rictus of death. His belly distended grotesquely and his face pulled into a savage death mask.
Around this perfect simulation of battlefield bloat, the ring of Confederate soldiers were momentarily silent. Then, as a group, they started to clap and hoot. The dead soldier leapt to his feet, sketched a little bow, and turned to face the manifestly out of place Winchesters. His hair looked as though it’d been greased with lard, then rolled in last fall’s leaf mulch.
“Well, if this ain’t a whole new level of farbiness,” he said to them, seemingly more surprised by their attire than their presence. “You boys aren’t even trying.”
A shout came from behind the bloating soldier, who was pushed aside as a blond man, shorter, but also rail-thin, stepped in front Dean. “Hey, you found us!” and clapped Dean on the shoulder before sliding his wary gaze to Sam. “Glad you could make it!”
He dropped his voice as he pulled Dean toward the fire. “You didn’t have anything less...noticeable to wear?”
Privately wondering what would be more noticeable than a full Confederate uniform complete with musket and hobnailed boots, Dean shrugged. “Not part of the usual wardrobe, Beau.”
Beau hadn’t changed one bit: he still could earn the nickname Custer on any given day, even minus the era-specific uniform. Long yellow hair, a little well-trimmed beard, and glowing light eyes that Sam had once memorably described as serial-killer blue. He was very thin, for all appearances a Civil War-era daguerreotype, sepia toned in the firelight. Dean didn’t recognize any of Beau’s campaign buddies at the fire, which didn’t surprise him; Beau had said on the phone that he’d broken away from his former regiment because they weren’t ‘authentic’ enough.
They were introduced and each given a tin cup of what turned out to be corn whiskey before settling by the fire. Dean was giving Sam wide berth, sat at an oblique angle so he wouldn’t have to watch his face. Sam, well Sam would have fit in physically well with this bunch. Shit, he had that hollow-eyed underfed Confederate look down pat, most days. Except for that boyish glimmer of sheer delight at the whole situation. Sam’s glance kept flicking over to Dean, who took great pains to ignore it.
“So,” Sam said, and though Dean wasn’t looking at him, he could hear the smile in his voice, “You guys get paid for doing this?” And for one brief moment, Dean wondered if he would stop any of the soldiers from taking Sam out into the bush and beating him soundly.
Bloating soldier, whose name was Harry Riddicker, shifted on the log beside Dean. He smelled of gunpowder and sweat. A little like piss as well, and Dean knew that his buttons would have the correct 1860s patina to them. Hardcores, not much like them.
“Hell, no. This part of it we do for fun.” Riddicker chuckled, as did some of the others. “I sometimes pose for photographers, and I been in some documentaries for the History Channel, but it’s mostly for fun.” The way he said the word ‘fun’ was practiced and Dean knew that this was the rehearsed line, the one he’d give to the families tomorrow when they paid their five dollars and could wander around the camp. Fun did not begin to describe why these guys did this.
“Yeah,” Beau cut in, and Dean knew that he was playing up his native Mississippi accent, “but it hasn’t been much fun this last month,” he finished, soliciting nods from around the fire. “Been pretty weird.”
And that was a demonstration of such epic understatement that even Dean had a hard time keeping a straight face. Dean chanced a look at Sam, who was red from withheld laughter, and he was fairly sure now that he’d actively encourage the soldiers to take his brother behind the tent for a little tune up.
“What kind of weird?” Sam managed, choking, before Dean could speak up.
Beau settled back in his camp chair - Dean recognized it. Hand-made, with the proper issue canvas and era-appropriate hardware. Actually, Beau had made the hardware himself. At the moment, Beau was sorting through his bullets, had a small cardboard box perched on his knee from which he was examining his own handiwork: minié balls. He passed a few around to the others. Live rounds, Dean thought. What is going on that Beau is passing around live rounds the night before a public reenactment?
Beau glanced at his comrades. “These two boys, well their Daddy’s a mighty fine hunter of strange things and he’s unavailable right now. His phone message told me to call Dean, so I did. Tim, you want to tell these boys what you saw last month, over at the Spotsylvania park event?”
Tim, who was so gaunt and tiny he looked like a bearded Olsen twin in uniform, cleared his throat, embarrassed perhaps.
“It’s okay, Tim,” Beau cautioned. “Dean’s been with me before. Up at Gettysburg a few summers ago. His Daddy wanted me to teach him how to make bullets. So he’s been around a campaign before. He knows were not crazy.”
“Much,” Riddicker said with a loud laugh. “I pee on my buttons, Beau. I spend a quarter of my paycheck to make sure my boots don’t have a right or a left and that my canvas tent is made to the same pattern as the one my great-great-great granddaddy used. So don’t you be calling me normal.”
Tim shrugged, stretching his arms forward with a crack. “It’s either this or golf. At least when I get home after a weekend of this, the wife knows that I’ve been with the boys...from the smell alone.” The men all laughed. “But in Spotsylvania last month, I was ready to hand it in for a set of clubs, let me tell you.” He held out his tin mug for another hit from the crock that Riddicker kept beside him.
Dean leaned forward, forearms on bent knees. He’d heard this from Beau, and hoped Sam had cleaned the wax from his ears.
“Been seeing a ghost round here.” Oh you don’t say, Dean thought, listening to the catch in the man’s voice. The super hardcores lived for the period rush, that feeling when you’d actually stepped back into the past. No shit he was seeing things, especially here in Virginia, where you couldn’t throw a brick without hitting some Civil War battlefield. Houses and trees still had bullets buried in them, and wasn’t a spring went by without some gardener digging up a soldier’s remains while replanting the tulip bulbs. The past wasn’t so far away, here.
“What kind of ghost?” Dean asked, and he realized that these were the first words he’d spoken. Sam had had his fun; enough, now.
Tim shook his head. “Confederate. Looked like he was from North Carolina, by the insignia I could see. He seemed...confused.” Tim looked up at Dean, perhaps realizing that Dean wasn’t going to mock him, not for this. “Like he didn’t know where he was, or was looking for his unit.”
“Where did you see him?”
The logs in the fire shifted, and sparks flew up. Riddicker put on a pot of coffee, swung a blackened tin over the flames. “We seen him in Spotsylvania, in the middle of the battle. No live rounds, of course. We were part of the infantry, but a bunch of the saber fairies showed up...”
“Cavalry?” Dean clarified, more for Sam than himself.
“Yeah, the horse boys. That’s how I knew that he wasn’t...one of us.” Riddicker shrugged, a little embarrassed maybe. “Spooked the horse, and then the horse ran right through him. Appeared a couple of other times, around the pickets at night.”
“Same ghost?” Dean didn’t flinch from the word.
Tim nodded. “Yep, same uniform, same hang-dog look to him. At first I thought he was just hardcore, he was so skinny and his threads were so period correct...”
“Yeah, great jacket. Musta been a type one, early to mid ’62, with piping.”
“Cotton and wool jean.”
“Super hardcore,” in unison, the pinnacle of reenactment cool.
It was another moment where Dean wasn’t about to look at Sam, afraid of what he might see.
He heard his brother clear his throat. “So this ghost. Other than showing up and spooking horses, what’s the problem?” And only a Winchester would ask that question. It took Dean a moment to imagine how that probably sounded to someone not in their line of work.
“He’s following us around,” Tim answered softly. “Been at every event since Spotsylvania last month.”
“That must be getting tiresome,” Sam quipped and had he been sitting next to Dean, would have received an elbow to the ribs. “So he’s not tied to one spot.”
“He ever try to talk to any of you?” Dean asked, cutting off Sam.
“Nope,” Tim replied with a quick smile. “And if he just spooked horses, I’d actually be okay with that. It’d be pretty awesome, having our own ghost. But things are getting dangerous.”
“How?” Dean prompted, when all the guys fell silent. “What do you mean, dangerous?”
Beau spoke, his accent slow and soft, mixing with the warm night air. “Two weeks ago, the ghost was beside the cannons, kinda eyeing them. Then, later, when the Union guys showed up, one of the cannons exploded, killed two and maimed three others. Lucky it was a closed event,” meaning that the public wasn’t invited, that it was for reenactors only. “And then last week, one of the dog soldiers went wild and shot up a bunch of Ramada Rangers as they was leaving camp. Afterwards said that he couldn’t remember a thing but the ghost telling him to do it.” He smiled at Sam, knowing that he wasn’t following. And Dean found himself grinning too. “Dog soldiers are the guys that volunteer to guard the camp at night; Ramada Rangers are the soldiers that’d rather sleep in a motel than in camp.”
“Farbs,” one of the soldiers muttered darkly.
“And now there’s the dog,” Riddicker said, voice rough. “I’d be fine with a ghost, but that dog’s starting to freak me out.”
“Well, at least it’s only attacking the esteemed enemy,” Beau drawled. “For now.”
“What kind of dog?” Dean asked, and Riddicker poured him another mug of whiskey. It was going down better now. Dean wondered which one of them had made it and whether or not it would make him go blind. Tim got up and opened the wooden box he’d been sitting on, retrieved some beef jerky that he passed around and some homemade hardtack. Dean inspected his for weevils, knowing that these guys were so not beyond putting them in just for effect.
“Big yellow lab,” Riddicker replied, after a minute. “Mean bitch. Goes after Yankees like they’ve been rubbed with a piece of sirloin. Seems to take orders from the ghost, but that dog’s real enough. Brushed past me last time and foam from its mouth got slobbered on my pants. A horse might gallop right through the Reb, but that dog’s days are numbered.”
“That’s why you guys are carrying live rounds?” Sam asked, but his tone was a little quieter, a little less hilarity in it. Finally, Dean thought.
“Yep,” Beau verified. “One of us is gonna plug that bitch soon, if we can get a clean shot. I’ve even got some authentic minié balls to try out,” and he picked out another box from a crate that was full of period weapons, Dean could see. Beau had always been a bit of a scavenger, a human Geiger counter for bits of shrapnel in the ground. It wasn’t really legal, picking up this stuff, but since when was a Winchester going to split hairs about legal issues, especially when the contraband was a hundred and forty years old?
Beau had reconditioned period guns with rifled bores, which shot the inch-long slug known as the minié ball. This single innovation had made the Civil War a much bloodier affair, Beau had instructed a younger Dean when he’d shown him how the spin from the minié flung the slug five times farther than any bullet up to that point in history and could kill a man at half a mile. Dog, too, for that matter, Dean supposed.
“Pickets’ll be up now,” Beau continued, loading a rifle and adjusting its sit on his shoulder as he stood. “You might want to hang around a little. We haven’t seen him since we arrived here yesterday, but you never know when he might show up.”
Dean glanced at Sam, sure that he wasn’t going to have to deal with any more of his derisive humor. Sam stared steadily back before asking, “Salt gun?” to which Dean shook his head.
“For once, I’m going to suggest asking questions first,” he replied, then thanked the soldiers for the grub (and he winced a little at the word ‘grub’), before following Beau into the darkness, Sam trailing behind him.
--
The woods were so quiet after the conviviality of the fireside that it took Sam a few minutes to pick out which way his brother and Beau had gone. Both men moved well in terrain like this, silently, and the hair on the back of Sam’s neck lifted. Goddamn ghost stories and then they leave him out in the woods like a piece of cheddar in a mousetrap. Though he supposed that he probably deserved it. But, come on, Dean, this was priceless. They’d done some pretty strange things before, but this took the cake.
Finally, he heard the low murmur of voices in the underbrush ahead of him, then the scrape of a match, and a candle lantern flickered into view, glassed on three sides with a flaking silvered mirror to reflect the flame. The lantern lit a group of five or six men in mixed uniform carrying an assortment of rifles and muskets, the youngest of whom was a boy who looked no more than thirteen, dressed in butternut yellows and faded grays, a long rifle slung across his back, smudge of charcoal across one cheek. When the kid’s knowing glance landed on Sam the child smirked, looking for all the world like any too-cool-for-you thirteen year old. In clothing that hadn’t been in style for more than a century. Instinctively, Sam knew that this kid had probably been raised with a hardcore dad and that this was as normal to him as hunting ghosts was to Dean and himself.
And he just thought about that for a minute before coming up to his brother’s side. Dean looked contained and intense, the way he usually did when he was trying to figure out the rules of whatever monster or ghost or demon it was that they were hunting.
A revelation that Dean had been out campaigning with Beau at about the same time Sam had spent a summer serving up fresh squeezed juice at a boardwalk concession in Palo Alto. Sam had learned to make wheatgrass smoothies; Dean, apparently, had learned how to make bullets that could kill Union soldiers. What else Dean might have learned under wacky Beau McBean’s tutelage really didn’t bear thinking about. Sam knew his brother was a crack shot, but he’d been that since they were kids. All this arcane military knowledge, though? Shit.
Sam turned his head as a slight noise attracted his attention from the depths of the darkness, far beyond the small pool of light that the child held, that painted them all yellow down one side. A snapping of sticks. A colder than expected breeze. God, he was jumpy. Dean must have caught Sam’s sudden shift in attention because he paused in his interview of the kid to ask, “What is it?”
Sam felt like an idiot. Dean was being so grounded, so respectful, and Sam was just goofing off. “Nothing,” he said, a little too quickly, his eyes darting back to the woods.
“What, nothing?” Dean prodded, and Sam knew that his brother took most of what he said seriously. It was a little disconcerting, to have someone listen to you as much as Dean did. He doubted he’d ever said a word that Dean hadn’t caught on some level.
Sam didn’t say anything, but couldn’t shake that there was something out there, beyond the light, further into the woods where the stars had come out and pale moonlight gilded everything not gold, but silver.
Dean didn’t say, ‘let’s take a look,’ or ‘you sure?’ He just sidled softly out of the lantern’s range, stepped into the inky blackness, sure that Sam would follow, which he did.
Once away from the light, it took Sam a few minutes to adjust his vision. In the meantime, his foot turned noisily over loose rocks and he put out a hand against an oak tree to regain his lost balance. He just about jumped out of his skin when Beau’s delta accent sounded at his ear, “Good catch, Samuel. We got company.”
Ahead of him, a pale gray shadow against the darker trunk of the tree resolved itself into his brother, and Dean turned back to Sam, an arm’s length away. Sam heard the breath he took. “Where?”
“There, by the stone fence.” There was no way Sam could see anything approximating a stone fence, but he followed the dark line of Beau’s arm to a clearing ahead of them, marginally lighter than the surrounding woods. In the clearing, something moved, shifted like a smudge on a photographic negative, then stopped. Sam could feel Dean’s massed attention beside him, an animal intensity. The shift happened again, and the smudge of gray against gray solidified, became a tall thin man, kitted out with gun and bedroll, like any number of reenactors on the field behind them, beyond the trees.
A cold breeze hit them, indicating this was anything but a simple first-person interpreter out to take a piss in private. Sam watched in fascination as the specter drifted silently into the trees just to the right of them, maybe a hundred feet away, melting into the night.
“Not yet,” he heard Dean whisper in that low, concentrated voice. A warning.
Then, right beside Dean, so close that it was in between the two brothers, the shifting gray rebel soldier reappeared, wavering slightly, an expression of surprise and fear flitting across his fine boned features as he surveyed them. In the darkness, the ghost was the lightest thing. The cold was astonishing.
It lifted a hand towards Dean. Bet he wishes we’d brought the salt gun now, Sam thought, not entirely sympathetic. This was a ghost, a reflection of a soul caught in folds of time not of its own devising. All it will want is to go home. Probably.
Behind them, Sam heard a growl.
And then, just as the ghost faded into nothingness, he heard the crack of a rifle in the not-nearly-far-enough-away-distance and a splinter of bark flew across his face from the tree next to him, bloodying his cheekbone. You know, he thought, you’re not supposed to hear the shot that kills you, given the speed of sound and all. Not unless the person shooting you is only fifty feet away, which the pickets were.
The night lit up with fire, and Sam dropped to the ground beside his brother and Beau, a hard rock jamming itself unhelpfully into his sternum.
“Shit!” Dean swore.
“Live fire!” Beau shouted. “Friendlies! Friendlies!” he yelled hoarsely over his shoulder. That fucking kid, Sam recalled. That fucking kid is shooting at us.
Another bullet whizzed through the air, close enough that Sam felt the breeze pass over his head before it slammed into the tree beside him.
That fucking kid was trying to kill them.
TBC
Muchly thanks: Lemmypie, who fearlessly listens to my hysterical “...and then, and then...this could happen, and then...and then...” and still prompts me with: “So tell me about this new reenactors site you’ve found.” Also to my cheering section, Northface and alleged, who give me encouragement and good ideas (the ‘fucking squirrels’ that so torment Buttercup - all Northface’s doing).
Old Rebel Yeller - Chapter 2/Farbs in the Woods
Disclamatory Remarks: Rest assured, the only thing I own of any consequence is a 1988 Toyota Corolla. You can stop laughing. Really. Rated PG13 for a whole lot of swearing and maybe the occasional bloodletting.
a/n: If you read nothing else on the subject, you could do worse than to pick up a copy of Tony Horwitz’s Confederates in the Attic, which has been the inspiration for this story. It is a hilarious and intelligent piece of journalism about the lingering affects of the Civil War on contemporary American society and a mighty fine read as well.
Bear with me: fun creepy stuff starts happening by the end of this chapter, but you’ll have to squirm through the expository bits along with poor old Dean.
--
Sam stood silently for several heartbeats, not even looking at his brother, which was evidently all the permission to proceed that Dean needed.
“And for god’s sake, don’t call him Custer,” Dean muttered as he moved forward into the lowering sun and they picked their way down the scrubby hillside toward the campfires. Everyone that Sam could see was in period dress, despite the occasional anomaly, like the truck pulling the cannons. He heard the murmur of heated discussion, the occasional burst of song. Mostly men, but a few hoop-skirted women and even the wail and squeal of children.
“Why? Is the real Custer here?” Sam asked disingenuously in the descending gloom, not expecting an answer, but the chuckle died in his throat as Dean cast him a slightly panicked glare. And Sam understood comprehensively that he had fallen into the biggest make-Dean-squirm situation possible. In his wildest dreams, he could not have come up with something this beautifully cringe-worthy.
“There’s another guy who calls himself...” Dean began, then bit it back. “Just shut up and mind your manners. You remember what those are, don’t you?”
The pot was shouting ‘black’ from the rooftops, might as well have had a megaphone. Manners. Jesus, Dean. “Yeah, I might slip up and point out that they’re all living in the 21st Century, Dean. And that would be...” he paused, failing to master his giddy grin, “inappropriate.”
He thought he heard his brother say, “You have no idea,” but he might have imagined it, because Dean had increased his stride to cover more ground and Sam now realized that they were going to stand out in this crowd. What would the reenactors do? Lynch them? And that actually didn’t seem all that funny, given the circumstances.
“Hey, Dean,” he called out and watched as Dean pulled up, a black shadow against the firelight, weight balanced on one leg, thumbs hooked into his belt loops, the picture of long-suffering patience. “I just figured out something that I’ve been working on all day.” Sam couldn’t see his brother’s expression in the half-light, which was too bad, because it was somewhat the point.
“What’s that, Sam?” Dean sounded prickly, had that particular pointed tone.
“Three twists and you turn into Cybertron Johnnie Reb, don’t you?” His laughter burbled out, delighted.
“Man,” Dean started, and Sam didn’t have to see his face to imagine the disdainful grimace of disbelief. “You amaze me. All that gray matter and this is what you come up with? Sheesh.” He kept walking, leaving Sam shaking with unbridled laughter.
--
It was kind of like his worst nightmare, the one where his brother lost all respect for him and left. Except this was worse, in a way, because Sam wasn’t leaving, he was mocking, and that was the last thing Dean thought he could cope with. All the long drive here, he’d been trying to think of a good way to broach the subject - that he was dragging Stanford-educated Samuel Winchester to a Civil War reenactment campaign - but had been defeated again and again by the probability of just this kind of reaction.
Education had never really mattered to Dean, not in the traditional get-a-decent-job sense, but a couple of times in these last few months back together with Sam, a hole had opened up between them and this thing, this collection of courses and classes and assignments, lived at the bottom of it like a many-headed monster. Used to be that Sam was just smart, which was fine in the same way that Dean was good-looking or that their Dad was single-minded. But now it carried a set of rules and assumptions that Dean didn’t much like.
Though Dean had dreaded that look on Sam’s face, he couldn’t blame him, really. When their father had dropped Dean off at a similar gathering three years ago, he hadn’t exactly been a model guest at first. Beau and his buddies were goofier than drunks at a Star Trek convention, and Dean could appreciate how wacky it would seem to Sam.
Once Sam gets a load of what we’re up against, Dean counseled himself, he’s not going to be laughing so hard. Beau had been specific on the phone and Dean knew what they had come to do was going to be difficult. He’d been on old battlefields before and he was actually more than just a little bit concerned. Concerned for Sam. Concerned for the crowds the public reenactments tended to attract. That was tomorrow’s worry, though. Maybe they could accomplish something tonight and tomorrow would take care of itself.
And really, Sam’s mocking grin aside, this was way better than being bored. The last three weeks had just about killed him. Worrying about Dad. Worrying about Sam and his stupid hinky powers. Worrying about his own future, once Sam figured out that Dean’s entire master plan consisted of simply doing this kind of stuff over and over, nothing more. Sam was a smart boy. He’d work it out soon enough. And then they’d probably have words and Sam would leave. But not tonight, and not when Sam was about to have a whole lot of fun at Dean’s expense. Dean wasn’t built for worrying, and he didn’t take teasing all that well, either, so it was going to be interesting, if nothing else.
The reenactors - historical interpreters, Dean corrected himself - were polite, but also wondering what the hell these two civilians were doing in their camp, out of costume and out of character. They were told more than once that the public were welcome...tomorrow. Dean explained that they were looking for Pvt. Beauregard McBean, 22nd Virginia Infantry, at which point he actually could not look at Sam for fear of needing to wallop him in the face.
At the eastern end of the encampment - and there were at least three hundred campfires by Dean’s calculations - his careful inquiries finally hit pay dirt. By this time it was fully dark, and he was mindful that while they were being tolerated, they were not precisely welcome. Jeans and t-shirts, sneakers, Daytons. Not exactly hand-spun cotton with era-appropriate thread count and hand-stitched wool coats with urine-patina buttons and a crumpled kepi.
They were interfering with everyone’s period rush, and Dean was acutely aware of it, felt like an intruder, for all he’d been invited. As they approached the campfire that another bunch of 22nd Virginians had pointed out, Dean picked out Beau immediately. Or rather, heard his peal of laughter above the ruckus a thousand living history buffs could make on a summer solstice.
The brothers came to a sudden halt as a tall bearded soldier in a yellowed uniform reeled from the fire as though shot, staggered some distance from the flames, and fell to his knees. Toppling onto his back as his gray-clad comrades peered raptly on, the man’s spine arced forcefully from the ground, the buttons straining. Slowly, he seemed to expand, his cheeks rounding out, his hands pulling into claws as his arms curved into a rictus of death. His belly distended grotesquely and his face pulled into a savage death mask.
Around this perfect simulation of battlefield bloat, the ring of Confederate soldiers were momentarily silent. Then, as a group, they started to clap and hoot. The dead soldier leapt to his feet, sketched a little bow, and turned to face the manifestly out of place Winchesters. His hair looked as though it’d been greased with lard, then rolled in last fall’s leaf mulch.
“Well, if this ain’t a whole new level of farbiness,” he said to them, seemingly more surprised by their attire than their presence. “You boys aren’t even trying.”
A shout came from behind the bloating soldier, who was pushed aside as a blond man, shorter, but also rail-thin, stepped in front Dean. “Hey, you found us!” and clapped Dean on the shoulder before sliding his wary gaze to Sam. “Glad you could make it!”
He dropped his voice as he pulled Dean toward the fire. “You didn’t have anything less...noticeable to wear?”
Privately wondering what would be more noticeable than a full Confederate uniform complete with musket and hobnailed boots, Dean shrugged. “Not part of the usual wardrobe, Beau.”
Beau hadn’t changed one bit: he still could earn the nickname Custer on any given day, even minus the era-specific uniform. Long yellow hair, a little well-trimmed beard, and glowing light eyes that Sam had once memorably described as serial-killer blue. He was very thin, for all appearances a Civil War-era daguerreotype, sepia toned in the firelight. Dean didn’t recognize any of Beau’s campaign buddies at the fire, which didn’t surprise him; Beau had said on the phone that he’d broken away from his former regiment because they weren’t ‘authentic’ enough.
They were introduced and each given a tin cup of what turned out to be corn whiskey before settling by the fire. Dean was giving Sam wide berth, sat at an oblique angle so he wouldn’t have to watch his face. Sam, well Sam would have fit in physically well with this bunch. Shit, he had that hollow-eyed underfed Confederate look down pat, most days. Except for that boyish glimmer of sheer delight at the whole situation. Sam’s glance kept flicking over to Dean, who took great pains to ignore it.
“So,” Sam said, and though Dean wasn’t looking at him, he could hear the smile in his voice, “You guys get paid for doing this?” And for one brief moment, Dean wondered if he would stop any of the soldiers from taking Sam out into the bush and beating him soundly.
Bloating soldier, whose name was Harry Riddicker, shifted on the log beside Dean. He smelled of gunpowder and sweat. A little like piss as well, and Dean knew that his buttons would have the correct 1860s patina to them. Hardcores, not much like them.
“Hell, no. This part of it we do for fun.” Riddicker chuckled, as did some of the others. “I sometimes pose for photographers, and I been in some documentaries for the History Channel, but it’s mostly for fun.” The way he said the word ‘fun’ was practiced and Dean knew that this was the rehearsed line, the one he’d give to the families tomorrow when they paid their five dollars and could wander around the camp. Fun did not begin to describe why these guys did this.
“Yeah,” Beau cut in, and Dean knew that he was playing up his native Mississippi accent, “but it hasn’t been much fun this last month,” he finished, soliciting nods from around the fire. “Been pretty weird.”
And that was a demonstration of such epic understatement that even Dean had a hard time keeping a straight face. Dean chanced a look at Sam, who was red from withheld laughter, and he was fairly sure now that he’d actively encourage the soldiers to take his brother behind the tent for a little tune up.
“What kind of weird?” Sam managed, choking, before Dean could speak up.
Beau settled back in his camp chair - Dean recognized it. Hand-made, with the proper issue canvas and era-appropriate hardware. Actually, Beau had made the hardware himself. At the moment, Beau was sorting through his bullets, had a small cardboard box perched on his knee from which he was examining his own handiwork: minié balls. He passed a few around to the others. Live rounds, Dean thought. What is going on that Beau is passing around live rounds the night before a public reenactment?
Beau glanced at his comrades. “These two boys, well their Daddy’s a mighty fine hunter of strange things and he’s unavailable right now. His phone message told me to call Dean, so I did. Tim, you want to tell these boys what you saw last month, over at the Spotsylvania park event?”
Tim, who was so gaunt and tiny he looked like a bearded Olsen twin in uniform, cleared his throat, embarrassed perhaps.
“It’s okay, Tim,” Beau cautioned. “Dean’s been with me before. Up at Gettysburg a few summers ago. His Daddy wanted me to teach him how to make bullets. So he’s been around a campaign before. He knows were not crazy.”
“Much,” Riddicker said with a loud laugh. “I pee on my buttons, Beau. I spend a quarter of my paycheck to make sure my boots don’t have a right or a left and that my canvas tent is made to the same pattern as the one my great-great-great granddaddy used. So don’t you be calling me normal.”
Tim shrugged, stretching his arms forward with a crack. “It’s either this or golf. At least when I get home after a weekend of this, the wife knows that I’ve been with the boys...from the smell alone.” The men all laughed. “But in Spotsylvania last month, I was ready to hand it in for a set of clubs, let me tell you.” He held out his tin mug for another hit from the crock that Riddicker kept beside him.
Dean leaned forward, forearms on bent knees. He’d heard this from Beau, and hoped Sam had cleaned the wax from his ears.
“Been seeing a ghost round here.” Oh you don’t say, Dean thought, listening to the catch in the man’s voice. The super hardcores lived for the period rush, that feeling when you’d actually stepped back into the past. No shit he was seeing things, especially here in Virginia, where you couldn’t throw a brick without hitting some Civil War battlefield. Houses and trees still had bullets buried in them, and wasn’t a spring went by without some gardener digging up a soldier’s remains while replanting the tulip bulbs. The past wasn’t so far away, here.
“What kind of ghost?” Dean asked, and he realized that these were the first words he’d spoken. Sam had had his fun; enough, now.
Tim shook his head. “Confederate. Looked like he was from North Carolina, by the insignia I could see. He seemed...confused.” Tim looked up at Dean, perhaps realizing that Dean wasn’t going to mock him, not for this. “Like he didn’t know where he was, or was looking for his unit.”
“Where did you see him?”
The logs in the fire shifted, and sparks flew up. Riddicker put on a pot of coffee, swung a blackened tin over the flames. “We seen him in Spotsylvania, in the middle of the battle. No live rounds, of course. We were part of the infantry, but a bunch of the saber fairies showed up...”
“Cavalry?” Dean clarified, more for Sam than himself.
“Yeah, the horse boys. That’s how I knew that he wasn’t...one of us.” Riddicker shrugged, a little embarrassed maybe. “Spooked the horse, and then the horse ran right through him. Appeared a couple of other times, around the pickets at night.”
“Same ghost?” Dean didn’t flinch from the word.
Tim nodded. “Yep, same uniform, same hang-dog look to him. At first I thought he was just hardcore, he was so skinny and his threads were so period correct...”
“Yeah, great jacket. Musta been a type one, early to mid ’62, with piping.”
“Cotton and wool jean.”
“Super hardcore,” in unison, the pinnacle of reenactment cool.
It was another moment where Dean wasn’t about to look at Sam, afraid of what he might see.
He heard his brother clear his throat. “So this ghost. Other than showing up and spooking horses, what’s the problem?” And only a Winchester would ask that question. It took Dean a moment to imagine how that probably sounded to someone not in their line of work.
“He’s following us around,” Tim answered softly. “Been at every event since Spotsylvania last month.”
“That must be getting tiresome,” Sam quipped and had he been sitting next to Dean, would have received an elbow to the ribs. “So he’s not tied to one spot.”
“He ever try to talk to any of you?” Dean asked, cutting off Sam.
“Nope,” Tim replied with a quick smile. “And if he just spooked horses, I’d actually be okay with that. It’d be pretty awesome, having our own ghost. But things are getting dangerous.”
“How?” Dean prompted, when all the guys fell silent. “What do you mean, dangerous?”
Beau spoke, his accent slow and soft, mixing with the warm night air. “Two weeks ago, the ghost was beside the cannons, kinda eyeing them. Then, later, when the Union guys showed up, one of the cannons exploded, killed two and maimed three others. Lucky it was a closed event,” meaning that the public wasn’t invited, that it was for reenactors only. “And then last week, one of the dog soldiers went wild and shot up a bunch of Ramada Rangers as they was leaving camp. Afterwards said that he couldn’t remember a thing but the ghost telling him to do it.” He smiled at Sam, knowing that he wasn’t following. And Dean found himself grinning too. “Dog soldiers are the guys that volunteer to guard the camp at night; Ramada Rangers are the soldiers that’d rather sleep in a motel than in camp.”
“Farbs,” one of the soldiers muttered darkly.
“And now there’s the dog,” Riddicker said, voice rough. “I’d be fine with a ghost, but that dog’s starting to freak me out.”
“Well, at least it’s only attacking the esteemed enemy,” Beau drawled. “For now.”
“What kind of dog?” Dean asked, and Riddicker poured him another mug of whiskey. It was going down better now. Dean wondered which one of them had made it and whether or not it would make him go blind. Tim got up and opened the wooden box he’d been sitting on, retrieved some beef jerky that he passed around and some homemade hardtack. Dean inspected his for weevils, knowing that these guys were so not beyond putting them in just for effect.
“Big yellow lab,” Riddicker replied, after a minute. “Mean bitch. Goes after Yankees like they’ve been rubbed with a piece of sirloin. Seems to take orders from the ghost, but that dog’s real enough. Brushed past me last time and foam from its mouth got slobbered on my pants. A horse might gallop right through the Reb, but that dog’s days are numbered.”
“That’s why you guys are carrying live rounds?” Sam asked, but his tone was a little quieter, a little less hilarity in it. Finally, Dean thought.
“Yep,” Beau verified. “One of us is gonna plug that bitch soon, if we can get a clean shot. I’ve even got some authentic minié balls to try out,” and he picked out another box from a crate that was full of period weapons, Dean could see. Beau had always been a bit of a scavenger, a human Geiger counter for bits of shrapnel in the ground. It wasn’t really legal, picking up this stuff, but since when was a Winchester going to split hairs about legal issues, especially when the contraband was a hundred and forty years old?
Beau had reconditioned period guns with rifled bores, which shot the inch-long slug known as the minié ball. This single innovation had made the Civil War a much bloodier affair, Beau had instructed a younger Dean when he’d shown him how the spin from the minié flung the slug five times farther than any bullet up to that point in history and could kill a man at half a mile. Dog, too, for that matter, Dean supposed.
“Pickets’ll be up now,” Beau continued, loading a rifle and adjusting its sit on his shoulder as he stood. “You might want to hang around a little. We haven’t seen him since we arrived here yesterday, but you never know when he might show up.”
Dean glanced at Sam, sure that he wasn’t going to have to deal with any more of his derisive humor. Sam stared steadily back before asking, “Salt gun?” to which Dean shook his head.
“For once, I’m going to suggest asking questions first,” he replied, then thanked the soldiers for the grub (and he winced a little at the word ‘grub’), before following Beau into the darkness, Sam trailing behind him.
--
The woods were so quiet after the conviviality of the fireside that it took Sam a few minutes to pick out which way his brother and Beau had gone. Both men moved well in terrain like this, silently, and the hair on the back of Sam’s neck lifted. Goddamn ghost stories and then they leave him out in the woods like a piece of cheddar in a mousetrap. Though he supposed that he probably deserved it. But, come on, Dean, this was priceless. They’d done some pretty strange things before, but this took the cake.
Finally, he heard the low murmur of voices in the underbrush ahead of him, then the scrape of a match, and a candle lantern flickered into view, glassed on three sides with a flaking silvered mirror to reflect the flame. The lantern lit a group of five or six men in mixed uniform carrying an assortment of rifles and muskets, the youngest of whom was a boy who looked no more than thirteen, dressed in butternut yellows and faded grays, a long rifle slung across his back, smudge of charcoal across one cheek. When the kid’s knowing glance landed on Sam the child smirked, looking for all the world like any too-cool-for-you thirteen year old. In clothing that hadn’t been in style for more than a century. Instinctively, Sam knew that this kid had probably been raised with a hardcore dad and that this was as normal to him as hunting ghosts was to Dean and himself.
And he just thought about that for a minute before coming up to his brother’s side. Dean looked contained and intense, the way he usually did when he was trying to figure out the rules of whatever monster or ghost or demon it was that they were hunting.
A revelation that Dean had been out campaigning with Beau at about the same time Sam had spent a summer serving up fresh squeezed juice at a boardwalk concession in Palo Alto. Sam had learned to make wheatgrass smoothies; Dean, apparently, had learned how to make bullets that could kill Union soldiers. What else Dean might have learned under wacky Beau McBean’s tutelage really didn’t bear thinking about. Sam knew his brother was a crack shot, but he’d been that since they were kids. All this arcane military knowledge, though? Shit.
Sam turned his head as a slight noise attracted his attention from the depths of the darkness, far beyond the small pool of light that the child held, that painted them all yellow down one side. A snapping of sticks. A colder than expected breeze. God, he was jumpy. Dean must have caught Sam’s sudden shift in attention because he paused in his interview of the kid to ask, “What is it?”
Sam felt like an idiot. Dean was being so grounded, so respectful, and Sam was just goofing off. “Nothing,” he said, a little too quickly, his eyes darting back to the woods.
“What, nothing?” Dean prodded, and Sam knew that his brother took most of what he said seriously. It was a little disconcerting, to have someone listen to you as much as Dean did. He doubted he’d ever said a word that Dean hadn’t caught on some level.
Sam didn’t say anything, but couldn’t shake that there was something out there, beyond the light, further into the woods where the stars had come out and pale moonlight gilded everything not gold, but silver.
Dean didn’t say, ‘let’s take a look,’ or ‘you sure?’ He just sidled softly out of the lantern’s range, stepped into the inky blackness, sure that Sam would follow, which he did.
Once away from the light, it took Sam a few minutes to adjust his vision. In the meantime, his foot turned noisily over loose rocks and he put out a hand against an oak tree to regain his lost balance. He just about jumped out of his skin when Beau’s delta accent sounded at his ear, “Good catch, Samuel. We got company.”
Ahead of him, a pale gray shadow against the darker trunk of the tree resolved itself into his brother, and Dean turned back to Sam, an arm’s length away. Sam heard the breath he took. “Where?”
“There, by the stone fence.” There was no way Sam could see anything approximating a stone fence, but he followed the dark line of Beau’s arm to a clearing ahead of them, marginally lighter than the surrounding woods. In the clearing, something moved, shifted like a smudge on a photographic negative, then stopped. Sam could feel Dean’s massed attention beside him, an animal intensity. The shift happened again, and the smudge of gray against gray solidified, became a tall thin man, kitted out with gun and bedroll, like any number of reenactors on the field behind them, beyond the trees.
A cold breeze hit them, indicating this was anything but a simple first-person interpreter out to take a piss in private. Sam watched in fascination as the specter drifted silently into the trees just to the right of them, maybe a hundred feet away, melting into the night.
“Not yet,” he heard Dean whisper in that low, concentrated voice. A warning.
Then, right beside Dean, so close that it was in between the two brothers, the shifting gray rebel soldier reappeared, wavering slightly, an expression of surprise and fear flitting across his fine boned features as he surveyed them. In the darkness, the ghost was the lightest thing. The cold was astonishing.
It lifted a hand towards Dean. Bet he wishes we’d brought the salt gun now, Sam thought, not entirely sympathetic. This was a ghost, a reflection of a soul caught in folds of time not of its own devising. All it will want is to go home. Probably.
Behind them, Sam heard a growl.
And then, just as the ghost faded into nothingness, he heard the crack of a rifle in the not-nearly-far-enough-away-distance and a splinter of bark flew across his face from the tree next to him, bloodying his cheekbone. You know, he thought, you’re not supposed to hear the shot that kills you, given the speed of sound and all. Not unless the person shooting you is only fifty feet away, which the pickets were.
The night lit up with fire, and Sam dropped to the ground beside his brother and Beau, a hard rock jamming itself unhelpfully into his sternum.
“Shit!” Dean swore.
“Live fire!” Beau shouted. “Friendlies! Friendlies!” he yelled hoarsely over his shoulder. That fucking kid, Sam recalled. That fucking kid is shooting at us.
Another bullet whizzed through the air, close enough that Sam felt the breeze pass over his head before it slammed into the tree beside him.
That fucking kid was trying to kill them.
TBC
Muchly thanks: Lemmypie, who fearlessly listens to my hysterical “...and then, and then...this could happen, and then...and then...” and still prompts me with: “So tell me about this new reenactors site you’ve found.” Also to my cheering section, Northface and alleged, who give me encouragement and good ideas (the ‘fucking squirrels’ that so torment Buttercup - all Northface’s doing).