SPN fic: Fire in the Hole 7/9 (Part One)
Fire in the Hole, 7/9
Chapter Seven/The Wizard (Part One)
Rating: WIP, gen, PG-13, tons of swearing. My fics try (sometimes desperately) to run with canon; this one’s pre-series, first year after Sam leaves for Stanford. Fits with my other fics - Red, Dazzleland, etc. All the marbles are in Eric Kripke’s pocket, but I have chalk and I know how to draw a circle.
Where’s the Beef? The betas - Sasquashme and Lemmypie - constantly make this a better work. Thanks especially to Sasq, who correctly pointed out that I’d forgotten the pesky ‘resolution’ part of the story, and to Lemmy for forgetting to read this chapter altogether (which she did, eventually).
Read previous chapters
STF: The ‘Comstock’ storyline - Bobby Singer suspects a fire demon is (barely) imprisoned by the remaining silver left in the mines of Nevada’s Comstock Lode. Dean’s tosses his phone down an abandoned mine shaft after his father interrupts him calling Sam. Using John’s subsequent drunken behavior as leverage, Dean convinces John and Bobby that he’s recuperated enough to help them map some abandoned ratholes, those minor tunnels dug by later independent prospectors looking to find remnants of the Big Strike. Dean discovers that the rathole he’s investigating hooks up with an earlier and more major mine that was flooded more than a hundred years prior, due to a lethal underground fire. We left Dean in the mine, after having just pulled himself out a collapsed shaft, a fire demon down below with Dean’s phone - and his number.
--
Hey. This is more like it, your voice mail. About last time, I got cut off. Probably would have freaked you out, having to talk to me. I mean, what do you have to say to me, anyway?
Your friends, they sound…nice, you know? Doing something for you on your birthday and all. What was that guy’s name - Wade was it? He might have told you we’re in Nevada. It’s great, up here in the mountains, real Bonanza country. Feel like I’m gonna run across Pa Cartwright down at the saloon every freakin’ time.
We started out in Vegas, though. What a place. What a fucking place, Sam.
--
Singer squinted, glad of his cap; after the tunnel, Sierra sunlight was clear and jagged as smashed glass.
Well, that hadn’t taken long. Those ratholers sure had given up in a hurry. Maybe a hundred yards in, then his tunnel had petered into nothing and Singer had turned around, knew this one was a dead end. Nothing substantial brought up here, no significant silver, and Singer came out dusty and tired, imagining the despair of those men in the Depression, digging without reward on a mountain half a century past boomtime.
The sun was high in the sky and Singer looked down the scrubby mountainside, saw his ramshackle blue truck small like a robin’s egg delicately resting on the sidewalk. He glanced at his watch, wondering if he had enough time to test another rathole in the hour left before rendezvous.
Bad idea, changing plans in mid-stream, so he sat on a rock, poured a long slug of water down his parched throat. Down the rocky scree, he saw Winchester emerge from his assigned rathole, dark hair almost the same color as yellow brick, dusty from down beneath. Too soon out to have found anything. These ratholes were as easy and uninteresting as Singer had intended: he didn’t want the boy getting caught by anything more dangerous than a cobweb. Not his first time out, and not with his father looking like he’d kill anything that looked at him funny.
Winchester turned, peered up the mountain, shading his eyes with the flat of his hand. Singer waved his water bottle at him and stood before picking his way slowly down to where Winchester wiped his face with a kerchief, his pack on the ground by the rathole’s entrance. Skunked. Two for two.
“I appreciate it,” Winchester said after a minute, taking the water bottle Singer held out to him. Singer had mopped his face and head with a damp cloth, then replaced his battered cap on his head, was now looking for a spot of shade while they waited for Dean. They had time.
“No trouble,” Singer murmured, catching the faint scent of sweat and tequila, knew that Winchester would be hurting today for last night’s excesses. Winchester never made small talk, though. His talk was always big. Singer guessed thanks were for more important things than bottled water: “Start him out nice and easy.” He glanced at Winchester, wondered what kind of attack he ought to be preparing himself for - Winchester was that kind of conversationalist.
They sat on a sun-sheltered rock under a scrubby piñon, passing the water back and forth between them.
Winchester’s mouth twitched, beard dark against sun burnt skin, eyes bloodshot, guarded. “He shouldn’t be down there at all. He should be in that rehab unit.” Dry and brittle, the water not really helping.
Well, Singer thought, maybe you should have put your foot down, John. And wondered if he’d ever thought that about John Winchester before, that he was too lenient a father. Instead, he gave a small half-shrug, not committing to any argument.
“I don’t know how he does it.” Winchester’s voice was low, almost like he was talking to himself. “Never gives me lip, but I always end up doing what he wants.” He laughed, hard, but not quite bitter. “How he learned that from his mother in four short years, I’ll never know.”
Singer grinned through his beard. “Yeah. I know what you mean.”
They sat in a silence as close to comfortable as Singer had ever experienced with Winchester, sharing water, watching the horizon of a day so bright the sky was the same color as sidewalk lemonade. Finally, Winchester shifted a little, looked at Singer, and the older man had no idea what was coming next, but thought once again of shields and weapons.
“You’ve already helped us so much. Me. And Dean,” and he replaced the cap on the bottle, set it on the ground. “But I have another favor to ask.”
Singer held very still, because he perceived the danger, knew it was a killing blow that was coming, but couldn’t see its trajectory or its target.
“What’s that, John?” Singer spoke only because Winchester seemed to require it, needed him to open the door.
“I need you to make sure Dean gets to Palo Alto.”
Singer took a breath, and in doing so made a noise: a query, a denial.
Winchester was shaking his head. “Tim’s coming up with the truck next week. We’re going to Reno; there’s a haunted bridge up there we’re fixing to take care of. But,” and he looked down to his booted feet, wore a ridge in the dust with one heel. Back and forth.
“You’re not comin’ back?” Singer finished, appalled and somehow unsurprised. Because this is what Winchester did, repeatedly: took a bad situation and made it worse. Made hair shirts into goddamn fashion statements. “You’re just going to take off on the boy.”
Winchester flinched, and it was the first time Singer had seen that as well. Flinched, looking at the ground. Then up, eyes earnest beneath their dark brows. “It’s for his own good, Bobby. Look at what we do. No money. No stability. Jail time and death the two most likely outcomes. You’re right. You were right last night. It’s no life.”
Goddamn it, trust Winchester to take one sentence out of a drunken night and twist it round to his own perverse reasoning. “Makes it easier for you, I guess,” Singer said, unedited.
Winchester’s mouth quirked and he shook his head like he had water stuck in his ears. “I’ve been thinking about it all month, Bobby. He won’t like it, not at all. And if I tell him before I do it, he’ll just figure out a way to come along. Like I said, he follows orders, never gives me any backtalk. But I…I can’t…”
Can’t give the order. Singer knew that if leaving Dean had actually been the right course of action, this would indeed be the only way to do it, to accomplish it. “He depends on you. You made him depend on you. You can’t just ditch him, John.”
“I’m not...” And his voice trailed away. Winchester wasn’t known for letting things go. His reputation was for pit bull tenacity. But in the course of holding on, he sometimes pushed other things away and Singer saw all of this on his conflicted face. “It’s time to be honest with myself, Bobby. A clean break is the only way to go. Otherwise…”
“John-”
But Winchester shook his head firmly. “He’s gonna end up dead, or worse. I can’t do that to him. I won’t. He misses his brother something fierce, and I underestimated that. Those two together were always like…I don’t know. Functional. I raised a soldier, Bobby, but Dean raised a boy. I trained them, they know how to protect themselves. But there’s a difference between that and actually seeking it out.”
He stopped, straightened his shoulders. Looked at Singer, eyes bright. Line to his mouth that wasn’t going to take no for an answer, wasn’t looking to be reasonable. In some ways, what he said made sense.
Except.
“Dean relies on you, John. Now more than ever. Do you know how scared he was in the hospital? Do you have any idea? Probably not, because you didn’t spend any time…”
And Winchester shot to his feet, curses coming from him, hands fisted by his side, then slowly unclenching, smoothing out his hair, collecting himself. “He doesn’t need me, Bobby.” And there was the lie, the big lie that Winchester had constructed, the key that started the getaway car. “He needs something else, something more. And…” Winchester nodded once, as though making a decision. “…and after what he’s gone through. At the hospital. All last year.” His voice lifted like a bird, caught, flapped, fell back into place.
Winchester cleared his throat. “I have to hunt, Bobby. I have to hunt.” He lifted his brows: You see? “And Dean doesn’t. Shit, he shouldn’t. Because what it does to you, in the end? What it turns you into?”
There were hunters that lost themselves, out there alone on the road. Hunters that never came in, like Cold War spies set adrift after the Berlin Wall came down. Singer had Evan. He had Cathy. Even when they weren’t technically there anymore, he still had them, carried them with him, always.
Winchester was missing an essential piece; something had been taken from him and for whatever reason, loss was what mattered most, before everything else. Including two young men who deserved better, who deserved more.
For that reason, and no other, Singer nodded. “Okay, John. I’ll give you a week, then I’ll tell him. I’ll drive him to Stanford myself, if I have to.”
John nodded, kept nodding, his face turned to the dirt, walking in slow circles, sweat staining the back of his tee shirt, not looking at Singer again. Just the slow circles, the occasional slug of water, the silence between them fraught with the unspoken.
Finally, Singer checked his watch. Five minutes past rendezvous. He peered down the hillside to where Dean had gone in two hours prior. Probably just feeling his feet. Just wanting a bit of independence.
Hell, he’s gonna get it, isn’t he? And his guts twisted at that thought.
A flash of movement in the far moonscape, closer to Singer’s truck, and there was Dean at his rathole’s entrance, almost on time. Winchester didn’t notice at first, was still staring at the ground, hands on his hips, mouth clenched, attention to the interior, not the surround.
Something wasn’t right. Dean wasn’t coming out. He stood at the entrance, then slid down to the ground. Singer was already moving, not saying anything to Winchester, not having to, Winchester going from a million miles away to right there in less than a second, ahead of Singer, seeing his son down the hillside, collapsed.
Their footsteps hurried down the rocky terrain, Winchester jumping from rock to rock, sliding down the last little bit so that he came to Dean’s side, dropped to his knees. Dean leaned against the rock, still in the rathole’s shade, sweat streaking muddy runnels down his dusty face, a relieved smile gleaming white against the dust. Glad to see us.
Not just that, though: Singer recognized the look of a man coming back up who hadn’t expected fresh air and sunlight ever again.
John didn’t say anything, grabbed him roughly by the shoulder, the other hand itching to shake or hold, and Singer couldn’t tell which urge was stronger.
“You okay?” Singer asked when it became evident that nothing was making it to Winchester’s mouth. “You’re late. Makes a man worried.”
Dean’s face dipped to the canyon floor, then up again, light catching his eyes at an angle so they shone like seaglass. Shone with wary exhaustion. In pain. “I’m okay,” he murmured.
“Goddamn master of disguise, aren’t you?” Winchester sniped, but coming on the heels of his asked favor, Singer heard the concern beneath it. He wondered if Dean did too.
Singer took a few steps towards them, close enough to intervene if necessary and Winchester shook his head in warning.
“You’re hurt.” It wasn’t a gentle statement, and Singer recalled that Dean had carried his father out the bar last night, which made the next question even less gentle. “Did you strain your back?”
Dean stared at some vague point across the canyon, eyes mere slits in the fierce light. “I’m fine,” he repeated.
Winchester snorted. “You could have a goddamn arrow through your goddamn head and you’d still say that.”
“There’s something down there,” Dean said, this time appealing to Singer. “Something big. I think you’re right, Bobby. It’s something evil. This rathole connects up with the Kentuck. There’s a shaft there.” He glanced back at his father, eyes offering appeasement. “It’s at the bottom of that.”
“How do you know?” Winchester’s voice was a like a paper shredder digesting a stack of phone books. “How do you know that?”
Dean half shrugged, gratefully took the bottle of water Singer passed to him. “Goddamn thing has my fucking phone.”
--
There was enough blood to cause John concern. That, plus the fact Dean’s shoulder was at a godawful angle that John recognized from his time in the Marines, from when Deacon had popped his back in, first time for everything, jungle green around them, shoulder on fucking fire and Deacon warning him quietly this ain’t gonna be pleasant, Winchester, bite down on something.
Dean was unnaturally silent in the passenger seat, too quiet, considering. He should be screaming in pain, or demanding answers. But this? Like he’s shut down.
Fuck it if John had any time to think about Dean right this second, to think about any of it, because there were now three cop cars behind him, sirens blaring, cars screeching out of their way in front, and thinking hadn’t exactly been a forte of his in the last little while.
The truck’s rear axel swung wide as he took a corner way too fast, but the Vegas police had him in their sights and there’d been gunplay already - shots fired - and no way was this going to end well if he slowed down even a little. This road, this chase, was all they had, all John had. The wheel beneath his hands, the truck an extension of him, and there were people and cars on the night streets - never black, this was Vegas, and they were in the worst section of town for trying to get away, to be inconspicuous - gamblers and whores and dads and moms and little kids who’d bought the ‘Vegas is for Families!’ campaign hook, line and sinker.
So. Imagine yourself, old man, running through the jungle, automatic rifle in hand, pointing towards freedom, headlong through brush, enemy behind, be quiet. Calm yourself. Concentrate.
Not much quiet about a high-speed chase through the Vegas strip well after midnight, that cowboy waving his big stupid neon arm like it was happily welcoming them to the city.
Fuck, fuck, fuck.
“Dean,” John barked as he took another corner, wondering about the desert, wondering what magic he might be able to work to make him, his truck and his son disappear off the face of the planet. They were good at it, the disappearing, had become good at it over the last year, but it was about to catch up with them in the form of three - no dammit, now five - cop cars hot on their tail, screaming their need like a pack of bloodhounds.
Old McGreevey’s truck was a sweetheart, and John loved her, had gotten him out of many jams this last little while, but she couldn’t fly, hadn’t been built with goddamn wings.
“Yessir,” Dean replied from his position leaning against the door. That was all John knew of him, all he could grasp at this particular, sliding moment of pavement and headlights and the flashing pulse of red and blue and red and blue behind them. Couldn’t afford the attention to Dean, because he’d wrap them around a telephone pole if he took his eyes off the road.
“Directions,” he demanded, hoping Dean could suddenly read his mind. To be fair, Dean was actually pretty good at it.
Dean had blood all over him, some of it his, but most of it not, and John was fairly sure the cops would care about that if they were stopped. The blood, the guns, the knives, all the weird shit stored in the back. Not a good scenario, even for a traffic violation, let alone what they were running from this time. What they’d left behind them in that parking garage.
“Where to?” Dean asked in return, his voice taut, not the usual lazy drawl affected for camouflage. More than one person had mistaken Dean for an uneducated cracker, not a good mistake to make.
They were driving into a tightening net, John knew. He could almost see the walls closing in and his heart was going about a million miles an hour, and he was genuinely surprised he couldn’t hear it above the roar of the engine and the sliding tires.
“Need a corner, a curving road, unlit parking lot with some kind of building in the middle of it, but close to the road. Close to the motel as we can get. You remember anything like that?”
They were away from the neon strip, finally, John correctly calculating notions of ‘north’ out of one-way mazes, pointing them to the motel where they’d holed up earlier that week. Not permanent safety, not a safe place at all, but safer than sliding around on balding all-seasons with the police looking to shoot first.
“Son,” John prompted over the roar of the engine.
Finally, voice unnaturally held like one of those torturous yoga poses, “Turn next left.”
“Give me as much warning that it’s coming up as you can.”
“Yessir,” but now that was a whisper.
The road they now followed was in disrepair, on the edge of partially developed suburbia, house frames going up like oil derricks on the flat gulf where John had grown up. Skeletal against the soft glow of the city beyond, the housing development looked abandoned, a desultory effort at construction, modernity fallen into ruins before it had even seen life.
All backlit by downtown’s glow: you could see Vegas coming for miles and miles, sick with radiation.
Heavy machinery had chewed up the road, which meant potholes and John hit one hard and he heard Dean gasp, quickly bitten back. Good at faking a lot of things, good at denying the obvious.
“Next corner,” Dean advised, voice low, a growl, half the sound a cat made when mad or in pain. They were going so fast, the cop cars were far behind now, pinpricks of light like a faraway county fair, conscious of civilian safety in a way that John couldn’t afford to be. This might just work. “Some kinda grocery store, I think. On the right.”
And it was perfect. Dean had read his mind once again.
John rounded the corner, saw the closed market on the right side, wide empty parking lot, warehouse way in the back, and he had a split second to memorize the layout in his headlights, calculate distances and perceive potential hazards, before he slammed off his lights and savagely turned the wheel.
The truck skidded sideways into the parking lot with a screech that wouldn’t be heard above sirens, and John hoped like hell that there weren’t any speed bumps or worse, cement parking dividers, because he then pulled the wheel the other way, pumped the accelerator and swung the truck behind the darkened market. He jammed on the brakes and killed the engine as Dean braced his good hand against the dashboard.
Waited like a submarine captain who’d gone dark. Waiting for death from above. Listening.
All he heard for a moment was Dean’s quick breathing, and he unrolled his window to catch outside sounds. Sirens, coming closer, fast. Then lights on the other side of the cinderblock construction, lights touching half-framed houses and the scrubby gravel verge, bouncing off a tall signpost that read: Organic Beets $2.25/bunch. Shit, hadn’t seen that pole. Must have missed it by inches.
Then the police cruisers swept past, around the corner, going so fast they must not have even seen the grocery store, looking for the truck.
Dean cleared his throat and John heard the swallow he took. “I think…there’s a track in back. Between two of the housing developments, just past the warehouse?”
John nodded, maps and coordinates flashing in his memory because those were a hell of a lot easier to think about than other things: spray of blood, swirl of colorful stenciled numbers, blur of cloth and flesh, slippery-when-wet icon, appalled disbelief, quickly hidden tears.
Maps. Terrain. Escape routes. Much easier.
“Maybe a mile or so to the county line from here, as the crow flies,” John mused, looking for confirmation. “Tim’s garage is about three blocks to the west of that.”
Dean’s breath was still coming hard and it was rubbing John raw, removing layers and layers of accreted protection. “The motel is five blocks from the garage,” he continued, hoped Dean wouldn’t notice how strained his voice was, because he had to be strong right now, had to get them out of this. Time later to figure out how deep the damage was, how much they had actually lost this night.
What John had lost.
John heard the breath his son took, and imagined the same process of sounding strong, of ignoring the obvious hurt. Dean’s voice was wet, clogged, as though bits of him had come loose. “If you get the truck to the garage, we can walk from there.”
John turned in the seat, looked at Dean, but all he saw was darkness. Dean didn’t sound like he’d be walking anywhere. The moon didn’t hang in the sky, and the stars weren’t bright enough. “Good,” was all John said, starting the engine, but not turning on the lights.
--
This time, it could be his turn to wait up top, cocky little bastard.
That’s how John rationalized it, anyway; following a barrage of tests, Bliss had given Dean a clean bill of health, but with caveats. Do the physio. No heavy lifting. No running, jumping, or other strenuous activities. No mountain biking, rock climbing, or any sport more extreme than philately.
Demon hunting in an abandoned mine? Yeah, no way. No way was his son going back down there, not ever. Not with stupid little mine fairies chatting to him, and some kind of ancient demon trying to call him on his cell.
John would see to it before he went. He was off to Reno tomorrow, and he’d convinced Bobby that it was time to seal the demon in, really do the job, so that no other unwary explorers found themselves on the Devil’s speed dial. Most particularly not his son. Today, Bobby and John were going in with a shitload of dynamite and a sack of rock salt while Dean remained above, a new set of prescriptions helping with what Bliss had called ‘minor’ inflammation.
Aw, he doesn’t look pleased about it.
Dean’s mouth was clamped tight as he helped unload Bobby’s truck near the Kentuck hillside, John taking the heavy stuff from Dean’s hands without giving him the chance to prove he could do it, or fuck up his back some more. John knew Dean didn’t like taking orders from strangers, and the doctor’s words had been explicit - you’re on borrowed time, already. Keep it up and we’ll be seeing a lot more of you here at the hospital.
At least that’s what Bobby had told John of the conversation. According to the hospital records, John was still the uncle and in some ways it rankled and in some ways it felt just. Made John’s decision about Reno and beyond tolerable.
John adjusted the straps on his pack, checked his fuses again, trusting that Bobby knew exactly where the blast caps should go, how long to leave them and which direction to run. The sun was hot overhead, summer just around the corner.
It’s only a matter of time before I fuck up so bad that there’s no going back.
John scowled harder thinking this, and Dean misinterpreted the expression, stepped away from him, thinking it was about unloading the truck, hands up in irritated defeat: Fine, have it your way. John was too old to roll his eyes and it had never been his style anyway, so he simply looked to the side so that Dean wouldn’t see what he was hiding.
Shit, it had only been a matter of time. And that added weight to his post-Reno plans, made John more convinced than ever that letting Dean go was the best decision, the only decision.
Dean opened his mouth, maybe to give an argument, to state his case. John wasn’t willing to hear any of it and his black glance told Dean as much. His son blinked, looked away, shut his mouth for once. He’d been in bed for a day and half after they’d found him in the Kentuck rathole, and John had hired a PT to come visit the motel room, make sure Dean did the exercises. He’d made sure that he knew what the exercises were and how often Dean was supposed to do them. Only a three-hour argument had allowed Dean to accompany them this far.
No further. This was it. This was as much as John was going to permit and Dean recognized it. He didn’t like it, but then again, he didn’t have to.
“How long should I give you before I get worried?” But it was Bobby he was asking, knowing that his dad wasn’t going to give him any answers.
Bobby wasn’t going to get in the middle of it. He glanced sharply at John. “Could take awhile. We’ll set a charge to collapse the Kentuck adit, right on top of the shaft where you nearly,” veered from that hot topic, “where you heard it. Hope that there’s enough silver in the surrounding matrix to discourage the demon from making its way up. Then we’ll blast out the rathole, make sure no intrepid prospector thinks digging back in is a good idea.” He peered at them, and once again John was forced to admit that Bobby Singer knew his stuff. “We’re only going to get the one chance. We screw this up, we might get a whole lot of nasty coming up that hole.”
Not to mention that they’d be buried beneath. And with.
John had time to wonder if that’s what Bobby wanted, to be buried in a mine. He hadn’t answered John’s last question that night after the Bucket of Blood - how do you live with losing one? It had been an asshole’s question, John knew. Evan had been Bobby’s pride and joy, and did he really think Bobby could sum up losing someone so beloved?
He’d apologize if he could find the words, but it would just fuck things up worse. He was good at it, fucking things up, especially friendships. Relationships.
They deserve different. Better, he thought, pulling on the pack, wanting to say something to Dean, something that would make it sound logical, but there was nothing, no words, just a whole lot of feeling to get in the way of sense. So he followed Bobby up the hill, not looking back, because he knew what he’d see: Dean leaning against the truck, chewing on a nail. Waiting for things to improve, riding them out in the meantime.
Up the dusty track to the mound where a bushy piñon and sagebrush indicated that earth had been brought to the surface, piñon big enough to let a keen-eyed prospector know that it’d been at least fifty years since this mine had been abandoned. John remembered the fear that had clutched him, seeing Dean collapse at the entrance. He was traveling with a man who knew what it was like to have a son not come back up, for one to just slip below the surface, to not return at the end of the day.
John would have kept the insurance up, too. There had never been a body, he recalled. Dean wasn’t the only one waiting for things to improve, riding shit out.
“Okay,” Bobby stopped, testing the air temperature, flashing his light on the map. Over Bobby’s shoulder, John could see Dean’s chunky block letters on the map, spelling out the temperature, the elevation, the angle of the tunnel bends. “We’ll set the rathole blast here.”
He had a hammer and a bit. Directing John, Bobby held the bit while John swung as hard as he could in the small space. Pretty soon they had a sizeable hole. Bobby slid in a slender stick of dynamite, fuse trailing like a rat tail, hammered a yellow-headed wooden plug into the hole so they could find the fuse again in the dark, connect it up with the trail they were going to leave.
They worked their way down the length of the tunnel, and John felt the weight of the mountain as he never had before. Probably because there was dynamite behind them, ready to seal them in at the slightest provocation.
Finally, they came to a large opening, a meeting place of narrow rathole and a spacious tunnel with square-set timber and rail lines, the difference between mud hut and a mansion.
Bobby flashed his light down the Kentuck adit and motioned John to follow. They took a few steps and Bobby consulted the map again. He’d gone over it carefully with Dean, who had apparently run down this drift like a bunny down a hole, heedless of the real danger. Had set John’s teeth on edge, listening to Dean’s voice crack as he’d described the lost cell phone ringing, the way it had led him down a secondary tunnel and to a certain death. Lost cell phone - he’d thrown it away and John knew why and it gave him no satisfaction whatsoever.
I didn’t fall, Dean had said, but he’d wrenched his back bad enough for Bliss to give him extra medication, hadn’t he? Now that John saw what Dean had run into, run on top of, he felt a new wave of anger and fear.
John saw clearly what had happened. Strips of plank hung from a shoddy frame, caved in at the center where too much weight had stood. From where Dean had almost plunged to his death. Dammit. Dean hadn’t said anything about this. Only said that there was an open shaft, not that he’d gone through it. But the platform splinters were new, a week damaged, and told an eloquent story.
John swore softly, and Bobby looked at him, looked at the broken hole. “John,” Bobby warned. “John, we have a job here. You want Dean to come looking for us?”
He and Bobby had brought extra lanterns and they set them up in the secondary drift, giving them better light to work in. Tricky, setting explosives, but Bobby had done plenty of sapper work during his Army stint, and John had cause to know the man was brilliant when it came to almost any engineering task he set his mind to, putting things up, taking them out. Creating and destroying.
In most mines, you blew a whistle to let everyone know that there was a fire in the hole. But here, they couldn’t warn anyone. John hoped like hell no one else was ferreting around in the mines today, because this would come as a nasty surprise. Bobby had done as much asking around as he could without drawing suspicion. A careful man, methodical. Something to be said for that.
Bobby was now assaying the walls and he pointed out a strip of dark blue. Silver ore, John knew. The only thing keeping the monster in the hole from coming all the way up. But the silver was right there, asking someone to take it, to unlock the prison. Best to take temptation out of everyone’s hands.
The hammer sounded incredibly loud in the small space, and as John swung the mallet, he felt himself warming up, sweat running down his back, his face. It was unbearably hot, and he took off his plaid shirt, ran a forearm across his face.
Bobby, ever a researcher, took a temperature reading. By the expression on his face, John could tell they were in trouble. As he picked up the hammer again, John smelled it: sulfur. Sour, acrid, coating the back of his throat.
“Don’t lose your concentration,” Bobby advised, pulling out the lodged bit, sliding in the last of the dynamite. Their lanterns flickered once, then went out, the only light Bobby’s big flashlight.
Laughter from down below and both men turned to the shaft.
A plume of sickly yellow gas wound out from the broken hole, writhing like a snake with purpose, filling the air with fumes. It trailed slowly across the ground, staying to the shallow places like it was hiding, but building up as it did so. If it was firedamp - flammable gas - they were screwed, because to light the fuse would mean a monumental and immediate explosion.
It wasn’t firedamp, though. It was worse.
Bobby looked to John. “Run!” he said, and dropped the bit, running toward the rathole. John turned to follow, but it had been months since his last demon and he was in the mood for a fight. His Latin was better than most, better than most priests he knew. A fire demon, if Bobby was right. And it had a phone connecting both his sons. C’mon, let’s see what you’ve got.
“John!” Bobby roared, and had to, because the laughter was loud now.
“Right behind you!” John called back, but he wasn’t. He had no intention of following Bobby out. He didn’t want this thing interred. He wanted it dead.
A tremendous knocking came to his right, a percussion event: rat-a-tat-tat-tat, rat-a-tat. Go down this tunnel. And that tunnel was the Kentuck one, not the one Bobby had followed. Deeper into the mountain. It was what John wanted, to get to the bottom of this. The tommyknockers weren’t in alliance with the demon, if Bobby could be believed.
So John followed the tapping in one direction while Bobby followed it in another, John heedless of the fact that he’d never offered tommyknockers anything of value, not once, and that they had no reason to help him whatsoever.
--
The sky blurred orange and red and Dean assumed this wasn’t good, wasn’t the usual state of affairs, but this was Vegas, so sometimes the rules didn’t apply. It was like getting stoned and going on a really, really scary ride, or watching an IMAX movie about jet fighters. Like flying, kinda, but in the worst fucking way. All of that just made him think of Dazzleland’s bright lights and that made him think of Sam, and so that was his last thought before he hit.
Bounced once, and pain shot through him, might as well be hit by lightning as to feel that, a whoosh of pure white, a bounce again and there was the sky, the white light dimming to pearl gray and finally to evening’s dark blue.
Ohmygod, and Dean lay there for a moment, staring straight up at the sky, framed by circling concrete, numbers stenciled on in schoolbus yellow, spiraling up to heaven. Oh my god.
Not dead. I’m not dead.
He tried to move, but his shoulder wouldn’t work, was like he’d been impaled by something, and he turned his head, saw the strange angle and fought the sudden urge to throw up. Jesus Christ, I have to move.
He heard sirens and they were getting closer. Where the fuck is Dad?
Then his name reverberated against the concrete funnel, and he shifted slightly, pain ripping through him, shit, have to get up, because the cops are coming. I’m okay, Dad, I’m okay, see? Just get your ass down here.
The fingers of his right hand clutched chainlink fencing and he wrenched himself to a sitting position, gritting his teeth against the howl that rushed up his throat. He looked around. A parking garage. Okay. Held up his right hand. It was bloody. He was bloody all over, but it wasn’t his blood and he refused to think about that, because the sirens were getting closer and they couldn’t stay.
Faintly, mostly because his ears were humming unnaturally, he heard his name being called again. Dad, he thought, but couldn’t say anything. Looking between his bent legs, he saw a tangle of bikes below. A bike lock-up, he thought. Steel pipes made a frame and proving his hugely lucky nature, he’d landed between them, or bounced between them. He didn’t really know.
He shouted inarticulately as he tried to move, tried to swing down from the top of the lock-up to the ground. The lock-up was eight feet high and he had to lower himself down, which he couldn’t do gracefully, not with one arm. His left arm hung uselessly, worse than useless, because ‘useless’ implied that it was numb, that it didn’t hurt and it hurt, all right.
He wasn’t going to go over slowly, carefully. He came down the vertical side in a confusion of limbs, flopped like a rag doll on the cement. Muttering a compendium of abuse, Dean rested against cement imbued with the vague odor of old urine, waited for John to find him. He’d have heard the shout. And there, sure enough, the sound of running feet, and Dean knew he needed to get up now, because along with the sound of feet, he also saw a distant blue and red light reflecting from the angled anonymous surfaces of the parking complex.
Using his good arm, he pulled himself up to a sit, then a shaky stand, holding onto the chain link like it was God, thought again that he might throw up, but instead bit the inside of his lip - hard - to calm himself. Not so bad, it’s just dislocated. Snap right back in. But he’d seen his dad dislocate a shoulder and knew he had nothing to look forward to.
There was Dad now, coming at a full run from between a ticket dispenser and a support column, across the shining expanse of smooth concrete, face white, pale as a deep-water creature that’d never seen daylight and the gun was still in his hand, and blood was everywhere, a spray across his shirt like he’d fucked up with the squeeze ketchup at a school picnic.
It’s all a mistake. A mistake, an accident.
Without knowing it was coming or how to stop it, Dean’s face crumpled and he buried his face in the crease of his right elbow rather than have John see him cry.
--
Read Part Two here!
--
Chapter Seven/The Wizard (Part One)
Rating: WIP, gen, PG-13, tons of swearing. My fics try (sometimes desperately) to run with canon; this one’s pre-series, first year after Sam leaves for Stanford. Fits with my other fics - Red, Dazzleland, etc. All the marbles are in Eric Kripke’s pocket, but I have chalk and I know how to draw a circle.
Where’s the Beef? The betas - Sasquashme and Lemmypie - constantly make this a better work. Thanks especially to Sasq, who correctly pointed out that I’d forgotten the pesky ‘resolution’ part of the story, and to Lemmy for forgetting to read this chapter altogether (which she did, eventually).
Read previous chapters
STF: The ‘Comstock’ storyline - Bobby Singer suspects a fire demon is (barely) imprisoned by the remaining silver left in the mines of Nevada’s Comstock Lode. Dean’s tosses his phone down an abandoned mine shaft after his father interrupts him calling Sam. Using John’s subsequent drunken behavior as leverage, Dean convinces John and Bobby that he’s recuperated enough to help them map some abandoned ratholes, those minor tunnels dug by later independent prospectors looking to find remnants of the Big Strike. Dean discovers that the rathole he’s investigating hooks up with an earlier and more major mine that was flooded more than a hundred years prior, due to a lethal underground fire. We left Dean in the mine, after having just pulled himself out a collapsed shaft, a fire demon down below with Dean’s phone - and his number.
--
Hey. This is more like it, your voice mail. About last time, I got cut off. Probably would have freaked you out, having to talk to me. I mean, what do you have to say to me, anyway?
Your friends, they sound…nice, you know? Doing something for you on your birthday and all. What was that guy’s name - Wade was it? He might have told you we’re in Nevada. It’s great, up here in the mountains, real Bonanza country. Feel like I’m gonna run across Pa Cartwright down at the saloon every freakin’ time.
We started out in Vegas, though. What a place. What a fucking place, Sam.
--
Singer squinted, glad of his cap; after the tunnel, Sierra sunlight was clear and jagged as smashed glass.
Well, that hadn’t taken long. Those ratholers sure had given up in a hurry. Maybe a hundred yards in, then his tunnel had petered into nothing and Singer had turned around, knew this one was a dead end. Nothing substantial brought up here, no significant silver, and Singer came out dusty and tired, imagining the despair of those men in the Depression, digging without reward on a mountain half a century past boomtime.
The sun was high in the sky and Singer looked down the scrubby mountainside, saw his ramshackle blue truck small like a robin’s egg delicately resting on the sidewalk. He glanced at his watch, wondering if he had enough time to test another rathole in the hour left before rendezvous.
Bad idea, changing plans in mid-stream, so he sat on a rock, poured a long slug of water down his parched throat. Down the rocky scree, he saw Winchester emerge from his assigned rathole, dark hair almost the same color as yellow brick, dusty from down beneath. Too soon out to have found anything. These ratholes were as easy and uninteresting as Singer had intended: he didn’t want the boy getting caught by anything more dangerous than a cobweb. Not his first time out, and not with his father looking like he’d kill anything that looked at him funny.
Winchester turned, peered up the mountain, shading his eyes with the flat of his hand. Singer waved his water bottle at him and stood before picking his way slowly down to where Winchester wiped his face with a kerchief, his pack on the ground by the rathole’s entrance. Skunked. Two for two.
“I appreciate it,” Winchester said after a minute, taking the water bottle Singer held out to him. Singer had mopped his face and head with a damp cloth, then replaced his battered cap on his head, was now looking for a spot of shade while they waited for Dean. They had time.
“No trouble,” Singer murmured, catching the faint scent of sweat and tequila, knew that Winchester would be hurting today for last night’s excesses. Winchester never made small talk, though. His talk was always big. Singer guessed thanks were for more important things than bottled water: “Start him out nice and easy.” He glanced at Winchester, wondered what kind of attack he ought to be preparing himself for - Winchester was that kind of conversationalist.
They sat on a sun-sheltered rock under a scrubby piñon, passing the water back and forth between them.
Winchester’s mouth twitched, beard dark against sun burnt skin, eyes bloodshot, guarded. “He shouldn’t be down there at all. He should be in that rehab unit.” Dry and brittle, the water not really helping.
Well, Singer thought, maybe you should have put your foot down, John. And wondered if he’d ever thought that about John Winchester before, that he was too lenient a father. Instead, he gave a small half-shrug, not committing to any argument.
“I don’t know how he does it.” Winchester’s voice was low, almost like he was talking to himself. “Never gives me lip, but I always end up doing what he wants.” He laughed, hard, but not quite bitter. “How he learned that from his mother in four short years, I’ll never know.”
Singer grinned through his beard. “Yeah. I know what you mean.”
They sat in a silence as close to comfortable as Singer had ever experienced with Winchester, sharing water, watching the horizon of a day so bright the sky was the same color as sidewalk lemonade. Finally, Winchester shifted a little, looked at Singer, and the older man had no idea what was coming next, but thought once again of shields and weapons.
“You’ve already helped us so much. Me. And Dean,” and he replaced the cap on the bottle, set it on the ground. “But I have another favor to ask.”
Singer held very still, because he perceived the danger, knew it was a killing blow that was coming, but couldn’t see its trajectory or its target.
“What’s that, John?” Singer spoke only because Winchester seemed to require it, needed him to open the door.
“I need you to make sure Dean gets to Palo Alto.”
Singer took a breath, and in doing so made a noise: a query, a denial.
Winchester was shaking his head. “Tim’s coming up with the truck next week. We’re going to Reno; there’s a haunted bridge up there we’re fixing to take care of. But,” and he looked down to his booted feet, wore a ridge in the dust with one heel. Back and forth.
“You’re not comin’ back?” Singer finished, appalled and somehow unsurprised. Because this is what Winchester did, repeatedly: took a bad situation and made it worse. Made hair shirts into goddamn fashion statements. “You’re just going to take off on the boy.”
Winchester flinched, and it was the first time Singer had seen that as well. Flinched, looking at the ground. Then up, eyes earnest beneath their dark brows. “It’s for his own good, Bobby. Look at what we do. No money. No stability. Jail time and death the two most likely outcomes. You’re right. You were right last night. It’s no life.”
Goddamn it, trust Winchester to take one sentence out of a drunken night and twist it round to his own perverse reasoning. “Makes it easier for you, I guess,” Singer said, unedited.
Winchester’s mouth quirked and he shook his head like he had water stuck in his ears. “I’ve been thinking about it all month, Bobby. He won’t like it, not at all. And if I tell him before I do it, he’ll just figure out a way to come along. Like I said, he follows orders, never gives me any backtalk. But I…I can’t…”
Can’t give the order. Singer knew that if leaving Dean had actually been the right course of action, this would indeed be the only way to do it, to accomplish it. “He depends on you. You made him depend on you. You can’t just ditch him, John.”
“I’m not...” And his voice trailed away. Winchester wasn’t known for letting things go. His reputation was for pit bull tenacity. But in the course of holding on, he sometimes pushed other things away and Singer saw all of this on his conflicted face. “It’s time to be honest with myself, Bobby. A clean break is the only way to go. Otherwise…”
“John-”
But Winchester shook his head firmly. “He’s gonna end up dead, or worse. I can’t do that to him. I won’t. He misses his brother something fierce, and I underestimated that. Those two together were always like…I don’t know. Functional. I raised a soldier, Bobby, but Dean raised a boy. I trained them, they know how to protect themselves. But there’s a difference between that and actually seeking it out.”
He stopped, straightened his shoulders. Looked at Singer, eyes bright. Line to his mouth that wasn’t going to take no for an answer, wasn’t looking to be reasonable. In some ways, what he said made sense.
Except.
“Dean relies on you, John. Now more than ever. Do you know how scared he was in the hospital? Do you have any idea? Probably not, because you didn’t spend any time…”
And Winchester shot to his feet, curses coming from him, hands fisted by his side, then slowly unclenching, smoothing out his hair, collecting himself. “He doesn’t need me, Bobby.” And there was the lie, the big lie that Winchester had constructed, the key that started the getaway car. “He needs something else, something more. And…” Winchester nodded once, as though making a decision. “…and after what he’s gone through. At the hospital. All last year.” His voice lifted like a bird, caught, flapped, fell back into place.
Winchester cleared his throat. “I have to hunt, Bobby. I have to hunt.” He lifted his brows: You see? “And Dean doesn’t. Shit, he shouldn’t. Because what it does to you, in the end? What it turns you into?”
There were hunters that lost themselves, out there alone on the road. Hunters that never came in, like Cold War spies set adrift after the Berlin Wall came down. Singer had Evan. He had Cathy. Even when they weren’t technically there anymore, he still had them, carried them with him, always.
Winchester was missing an essential piece; something had been taken from him and for whatever reason, loss was what mattered most, before everything else. Including two young men who deserved better, who deserved more.
For that reason, and no other, Singer nodded. “Okay, John. I’ll give you a week, then I’ll tell him. I’ll drive him to Stanford myself, if I have to.”
John nodded, kept nodding, his face turned to the dirt, walking in slow circles, sweat staining the back of his tee shirt, not looking at Singer again. Just the slow circles, the occasional slug of water, the silence between them fraught with the unspoken.
Finally, Singer checked his watch. Five minutes past rendezvous. He peered down the hillside to where Dean had gone in two hours prior. Probably just feeling his feet. Just wanting a bit of independence.
Hell, he’s gonna get it, isn’t he? And his guts twisted at that thought.
A flash of movement in the far moonscape, closer to Singer’s truck, and there was Dean at his rathole’s entrance, almost on time. Winchester didn’t notice at first, was still staring at the ground, hands on his hips, mouth clenched, attention to the interior, not the surround.
Something wasn’t right. Dean wasn’t coming out. He stood at the entrance, then slid down to the ground. Singer was already moving, not saying anything to Winchester, not having to, Winchester going from a million miles away to right there in less than a second, ahead of Singer, seeing his son down the hillside, collapsed.
Their footsteps hurried down the rocky terrain, Winchester jumping from rock to rock, sliding down the last little bit so that he came to Dean’s side, dropped to his knees. Dean leaned against the rock, still in the rathole’s shade, sweat streaking muddy runnels down his dusty face, a relieved smile gleaming white against the dust. Glad to see us.
Not just that, though: Singer recognized the look of a man coming back up who hadn’t expected fresh air and sunlight ever again.
John didn’t say anything, grabbed him roughly by the shoulder, the other hand itching to shake or hold, and Singer couldn’t tell which urge was stronger.
“You okay?” Singer asked when it became evident that nothing was making it to Winchester’s mouth. “You’re late. Makes a man worried.”
Dean’s face dipped to the canyon floor, then up again, light catching his eyes at an angle so they shone like seaglass. Shone with wary exhaustion. In pain. “I’m okay,” he murmured.
“Goddamn master of disguise, aren’t you?” Winchester sniped, but coming on the heels of his asked favor, Singer heard the concern beneath it. He wondered if Dean did too.
Singer took a few steps towards them, close enough to intervene if necessary and Winchester shook his head in warning.
“You’re hurt.” It wasn’t a gentle statement, and Singer recalled that Dean had carried his father out the bar last night, which made the next question even less gentle. “Did you strain your back?”
Dean stared at some vague point across the canyon, eyes mere slits in the fierce light. “I’m fine,” he repeated.
Winchester snorted. “You could have a goddamn arrow through your goddamn head and you’d still say that.”
“There’s something down there,” Dean said, this time appealing to Singer. “Something big. I think you’re right, Bobby. It’s something evil. This rathole connects up with the Kentuck. There’s a shaft there.” He glanced back at his father, eyes offering appeasement. “It’s at the bottom of that.”
“How do you know?” Winchester’s voice was a like a paper shredder digesting a stack of phone books. “How do you know that?”
Dean half shrugged, gratefully took the bottle of water Singer passed to him. “Goddamn thing has my fucking phone.”
--
There was enough blood to cause John concern. That, plus the fact Dean’s shoulder was at a godawful angle that John recognized from his time in the Marines, from when Deacon had popped his back in, first time for everything, jungle green around them, shoulder on fucking fire and Deacon warning him quietly this ain’t gonna be pleasant, Winchester, bite down on something.
Dean was unnaturally silent in the passenger seat, too quiet, considering. He should be screaming in pain, or demanding answers. But this? Like he’s shut down.
Fuck it if John had any time to think about Dean right this second, to think about any of it, because there were now three cop cars behind him, sirens blaring, cars screeching out of their way in front, and thinking hadn’t exactly been a forte of his in the last little while.
The truck’s rear axel swung wide as he took a corner way too fast, but the Vegas police had him in their sights and there’d been gunplay already - shots fired - and no way was this going to end well if he slowed down even a little. This road, this chase, was all they had, all John had. The wheel beneath his hands, the truck an extension of him, and there were people and cars on the night streets - never black, this was Vegas, and they were in the worst section of town for trying to get away, to be inconspicuous - gamblers and whores and dads and moms and little kids who’d bought the ‘Vegas is for Families!’ campaign hook, line and sinker.
So. Imagine yourself, old man, running through the jungle, automatic rifle in hand, pointing towards freedom, headlong through brush, enemy behind, be quiet. Calm yourself. Concentrate.
Not much quiet about a high-speed chase through the Vegas strip well after midnight, that cowboy waving his big stupid neon arm like it was happily welcoming them to the city.
Fuck, fuck, fuck.
“Dean,” John barked as he took another corner, wondering about the desert, wondering what magic he might be able to work to make him, his truck and his son disappear off the face of the planet. They were good at it, the disappearing, had become good at it over the last year, but it was about to catch up with them in the form of three - no dammit, now five - cop cars hot on their tail, screaming their need like a pack of bloodhounds.
Old McGreevey’s truck was a sweetheart, and John loved her, had gotten him out of many jams this last little while, but she couldn’t fly, hadn’t been built with goddamn wings.
“Yessir,” Dean replied from his position leaning against the door. That was all John knew of him, all he could grasp at this particular, sliding moment of pavement and headlights and the flashing pulse of red and blue and red and blue behind them. Couldn’t afford the attention to Dean, because he’d wrap them around a telephone pole if he took his eyes off the road.
“Directions,” he demanded, hoping Dean could suddenly read his mind. To be fair, Dean was actually pretty good at it.
Dean had blood all over him, some of it his, but most of it not, and John was fairly sure the cops would care about that if they were stopped. The blood, the guns, the knives, all the weird shit stored in the back. Not a good scenario, even for a traffic violation, let alone what they were running from this time. What they’d left behind them in that parking garage.
“Where to?” Dean asked in return, his voice taut, not the usual lazy drawl affected for camouflage. More than one person had mistaken Dean for an uneducated cracker, not a good mistake to make.
They were driving into a tightening net, John knew. He could almost see the walls closing in and his heart was going about a million miles an hour, and he was genuinely surprised he couldn’t hear it above the roar of the engine and the sliding tires.
“Need a corner, a curving road, unlit parking lot with some kind of building in the middle of it, but close to the road. Close to the motel as we can get. You remember anything like that?”
They were away from the neon strip, finally, John correctly calculating notions of ‘north’ out of one-way mazes, pointing them to the motel where they’d holed up earlier that week. Not permanent safety, not a safe place at all, but safer than sliding around on balding all-seasons with the police looking to shoot first.
“Son,” John prompted over the roar of the engine.
Finally, voice unnaturally held like one of those torturous yoga poses, “Turn next left.”
“Give me as much warning that it’s coming up as you can.”
“Yessir,” but now that was a whisper.
The road they now followed was in disrepair, on the edge of partially developed suburbia, house frames going up like oil derricks on the flat gulf where John had grown up. Skeletal against the soft glow of the city beyond, the housing development looked abandoned, a desultory effort at construction, modernity fallen into ruins before it had even seen life.
All backlit by downtown’s glow: you could see Vegas coming for miles and miles, sick with radiation.
Heavy machinery had chewed up the road, which meant potholes and John hit one hard and he heard Dean gasp, quickly bitten back. Good at faking a lot of things, good at denying the obvious.
“Next corner,” Dean advised, voice low, a growl, half the sound a cat made when mad or in pain. They were going so fast, the cop cars were far behind now, pinpricks of light like a faraway county fair, conscious of civilian safety in a way that John couldn’t afford to be. This might just work. “Some kinda grocery store, I think. On the right.”
And it was perfect. Dean had read his mind once again.
John rounded the corner, saw the closed market on the right side, wide empty parking lot, warehouse way in the back, and he had a split second to memorize the layout in his headlights, calculate distances and perceive potential hazards, before he slammed off his lights and savagely turned the wheel.
The truck skidded sideways into the parking lot with a screech that wouldn’t be heard above sirens, and John hoped like hell that there weren’t any speed bumps or worse, cement parking dividers, because he then pulled the wheel the other way, pumped the accelerator and swung the truck behind the darkened market. He jammed on the brakes and killed the engine as Dean braced his good hand against the dashboard.
Waited like a submarine captain who’d gone dark. Waiting for death from above. Listening.
All he heard for a moment was Dean’s quick breathing, and he unrolled his window to catch outside sounds. Sirens, coming closer, fast. Then lights on the other side of the cinderblock construction, lights touching half-framed houses and the scrubby gravel verge, bouncing off a tall signpost that read: Organic Beets $2.25/bunch. Shit, hadn’t seen that pole. Must have missed it by inches.
Then the police cruisers swept past, around the corner, going so fast they must not have even seen the grocery store, looking for the truck.
Dean cleared his throat and John heard the swallow he took. “I think…there’s a track in back. Between two of the housing developments, just past the warehouse?”
John nodded, maps and coordinates flashing in his memory because those were a hell of a lot easier to think about than other things: spray of blood, swirl of colorful stenciled numbers, blur of cloth and flesh, slippery-when-wet icon, appalled disbelief, quickly hidden tears.
Maps. Terrain. Escape routes. Much easier.
“Maybe a mile or so to the county line from here, as the crow flies,” John mused, looking for confirmation. “Tim’s garage is about three blocks to the west of that.”
Dean’s breath was still coming hard and it was rubbing John raw, removing layers and layers of accreted protection. “The motel is five blocks from the garage,” he continued, hoped Dean wouldn’t notice how strained his voice was, because he had to be strong right now, had to get them out of this. Time later to figure out how deep the damage was, how much they had actually lost this night.
What John had lost.
John heard the breath his son took, and imagined the same process of sounding strong, of ignoring the obvious hurt. Dean’s voice was wet, clogged, as though bits of him had come loose. “If you get the truck to the garage, we can walk from there.”
John turned in the seat, looked at Dean, but all he saw was darkness. Dean didn’t sound like he’d be walking anywhere. The moon didn’t hang in the sky, and the stars weren’t bright enough. “Good,” was all John said, starting the engine, but not turning on the lights.
--
This time, it could be his turn to wait up top, cocky little bastard.
That’s how John rationalized it, anyway; following a barrage of tests, Bliss had given Dean a clean bill of health, but with caveats. Do the physio. No heavy lifting. No running, jumping, or other strenuous activities. No mountain biking, rock climbing, or any sport more extreme than philately.
Demon hunting in an abandoned mine? Yeah, no way. No way was his son going back down there, not ever. Not with stupid little mine fairies chatting to him, and some kind of ancient demon trying to call him on his cell.
John would see to it before he went. He was off to Reno tomorrow, and he’d convinced Bobby that it was time to seal the demon in, really do the job, so that no other unwary explorers found themselves on the Devil’s speed dial. Most particularly not his son. Today, Bobby and John were going in with a shitload of dynamite and a sack of rock salt while Dean remained above, a new set of prescriptions helping with what Bliss had called ‘minor’ inflammation.
Aw, he doesn’t look pleased about it.
Dean’s mouth was clamped tight as he helped unload Bobby’s truck near the Kentuck hillside, John taking the heavy stuff from Dean’s hands without giving him the chance to prove he could do it, or fuck up his back some more. John knew Dean didn’t like taking orders from strangers, and the doctor’s words had been explicit - you’re on borrowed time, already. Keep it up and we’ll be seeing a lot more of you here at the hospital.
At least that’s what Bobby had told John of the conversation. According to the hospital records, John was still the uncle and in some ways it rankled and in some ways it felt just. Made John’s decision about Reno and beyond tolerable.
John adjusted the straps on his pack, checked his fuses again, trusting that Bobby knew exactly where the blast caps should go, how long to leave them and which direction to run. The sun was hot overhead, summer just around the corner.
It’s only a matter of time before I fuck up so bad that there’s no going back.
John scowled harder thinking this, and Dean misinterpreted the expression, stepped away from him, thinking it was about unloading the truck, hands up in irritated defeat: Fine, have it your way. John was too old to roll his eyes and it had never been his style anyway, so he simply looked to the side so that Dean wouldn’t see what he was hiding.
Shit, it had only been a matter of time. And that added weight to his post-Reno plans, made John more convinced than ever that letting Dean go was the best decision, the only decision.
Dean opened his mouth, maybe to give an argument, to state his case. John wasn’t willing to hear any of it and his black glance told Dean as much. His son blinked, looked away, shut his mouth for once. He’d been in bed for a day and half after they’d found him in the Kentuck rathole, and John had hired a PT to come visit the motel room, make sure Dean did the exercises. He’d made sure that he knew what the exercises were and how often Dean was supposed to do them. Only a three-hour argument had allowed Dean to accompany them this far.
No further. This was it. This was as much as John was going to permit and Dean recognized it. He didn’t like it, but then again, he didn’t have to.
“How long should I give you before I get worried?” But it was Bobby he was asking, knowing that his dad wasn’t going to give him any answers.
Bobby wasn’t going to get in the middle of it. He glanced sharply at John. “Could take awhile. We’ll set a charge to collapse the Kentuck adit, right on top of the shaft where you nearly,” veered from that hot topic, “where you heard it. Hope that there’s enough silver in the surrounding matrix to discourage the demon from making its way up. Then we’ll blast out the rathole, make sure no intrepid prospector thinks digging back in is a good idea.” He peered at them, and once again John was forced to admit that Bobby Singer knew his stuff. “We’re only going to get the one chance. We screw this up, we might get a whole lot of nasty coming up that hole.”
Not to mention that they’d be buried beneath. And with.
John had time to wonder if that’s what Bobby wanted, to be buried in a mine. He hadn’t answered John’s last question that night after the Bucket of Blood - how do you live with losing one? It had been an asshole’s question, John knew. Evan had been Bobby’s pride and joy, and did he really think Bobby could sum up losing someone so beloved?
He’d apologize if he could find the words, but it would just fuck things up worse. He was good at it, fucking things up, especially friendships. Relationships.
They deserve different. Better, he thought, pulling on the pack, wanting to say something to Dean, something that would make it sound logical, but there was nothing, no words, just a whole lot of feeling to get in the way of sense. So he followed Bobby up the hill, not looking back, because he knew what he’d see: Dean leaning against the truck, chewing on a nail. Waiting for things to improve, riding them out in the meantime.
Up the dusty track to the mound where a bushy piñon and sagebrush indicated that earth had been brought to the surface, piñon big enough to let a keen-eyed prospector know that it’d been at least fifty years since this mine had been abandoned. John remembered the fear that had clutched him, seeing Dean collapse at the entrance. He was traveling with a man who knew what it was like to have a son not come back up, for one to just slip below the surface, to not return at the end of the day.
John would have kept the insurance up, too. There had never been a body, he recalled. Dean wasn’t the only one waiting for things to improve, riding shit out.
“Okay,” Bobby stopped, testing the air temperature, flashing his light on the map. Over Bobby’s shoulder, John could see Dean’s chunky block letters on the map, spelling out the temperature, the elevation, the angle of the tunnel bends. “We’ll set the rathole blast here.”
He had a hammer and a bit. Directing John, Bobby held the bit while John swung as hard as he could in the small space. Pretty soon they had a sizeable hole. Bobby slid in a slender stick of dynamite, fuse trailing like a rat tail, hammered a yellow-headed wooden plug into the hole so they could find the fuse again in the dark, connect it up with the trail they were going to leave.
They worked their way down the length of the tunnel, and John felt the weight of the mountain as he never had before. Probably because there was dynamite behind them, ready to seal them in at the slightest provocation.
Finally, they came to a large opening, a meeting place of narrow rathole and a spacious tunnel with square-set timber and rail lines, the difference between mud hut and a mansion.
Bobby flashed his light down the Kentuck adit and motioned John to follow. They took a few steps and Bobby consulted the map again. He’d gone over it carefully with Dean, who had apparently run down this drift like a bunny down a hole, heedless of the real danger. Had set John’s teeth on edge, listening to Dean’s voice crack as he’d described the lost cell phone ringing, the way it had led him down a secondary tunnel and to a certain death. Lost cell phone - he’d thrown it away and John knew why and it gave him no satisfaction whatsoever.
I didn’t fall, Dean had said, but he’d wrenched his back bad enough for Bliss to give him extra medication, hadn’t he? Now that John saw what Dean had run into, run on top of, he felt a new wave of anger and fear.
John saw clearly what had happened. Strips of plank hung from a shoddy frame, caved in at the center where too much weight had stood. From where Dean had almost plunged to his death. Dammit. Dean hadn’t said anything about this. Only said that there was an open shaft, not that he’d gone through it. But the platform splinters were new, a week damaged, and told an eloquent story.
John swore softly, and Bobby looked at him, looked at the broken hole. “John,” Bobby warned. “John, we have a job here. You want Dean to come looking for us?”
He and Bobby had brought extra lanterns and they set them up in the secondary drift, giving them better light to work in. Tricky, setting explosives, but Bobby had done plenty of sapper work during his Army stint, and John had cause to know the man was brilliant when it came to almost any engineering task he set his mind to, putting things up, taking them out. Creating and destroying.
In most mines, you blew a whistle to let everyone know that there was a fire in the hole. But here, they couldn’t warn anyone. John hoped like hell no one else was ferreting around in the mines today, because this would come as a nasty surprise. Bobby had done as much asking around as he could without drawing suspicion. A careful man, methodical. Something to be said for that.
Bobby was now assaying the walls and he pointed out a strip of dark blue. Silver ore, John knew. The only thing keeping the monster in the hole from coming all the way up. But the silver was right there, asking someone to take it, to unlock the prison. Best to take temptation out of everyone’s hands.
The hammer sounded incredibly loud in the small space, and as John swung the mallet, he felt himself warming up, sweat running down his back, his face. It was unbearably hot, and he took off his plaid shirt, ran a forearm across his face.
Bobby, ever a researcher, took a temperature reading. By the expression on his face, John could tell they were in trouble. As he picked up the hammer again, John smelled it: sulfur. Sour, acrid, coating the back of his throat.
“Don’t lose your concentration,” Bobby advised, pulling out the lodged bit, sliding in the last of the dynamite. Their lanterns flickered once, then went out, the only light Bobby’s big flashlight.
Laughter from down below and both men turned to the shaft.
A plume of sickly yellow gas wound out from the broken hole, writhing like a snake with purpose, filling the air with fumes. It trailed slowly across the ground, staying to the shallow places like it was hiding, but building up as it did so. If it was firedamp - flammable gas - they were screwed, because to light the fuse would mean a monumental and immediate explosion.
It wasn’t firedamp, though. It was worse.
Bobby looked to John. “Run!” he said, and dropped the bit, running toward the rathole. John turned to follow, but it had been months since his last demon and he was in the mood for a fight. His Latin was better than most, better than most priests he knew. A fire demon, if Bobby was right. And it had a phone connecting both his sons. C’mon, let’s see what you’ve got.
“John!” Bobby roared, and had to, because the laughter was loud now.
“Right behind you!” John called back, but he wasn’t. He had no intention of following Bobby out. He didn’t want this thing interred. He wanted it dead.
A tremendous knocking came to his right, a percussion event: rat-a-tat-tat-tat, rat-a-tat. Go down this tunnel. And that tunnel was the Kentuck one, not the one Bobby had followed. Deeper into the mountain. It was what John wanted, to get to the bottom of this. The tommyknockers weren’t in alliance with the demon, if Bobby could be believed.
So John followed the tapping in one direction while Bobby followed it in another, John heedless of the fact that he’d never offered tommyknockers anything of value, not once, and that they had no reason to help him whatsoever.
--
The sky blurred orange and red and Dean assumed this wasn’t good, wasn’t the usual state of affairs, but this was Vegas, so sometimes the rules didn’t apply. It was like getting stoned and going on a really, really scary ride, or watching an IMAX movie about jet fighters. Like flying, kinda, but in the worst fucking way. All of that just made him think of Dazzleland’s bright lights and that made him think of Sam, and so that was his last thought before he hit.
Bounced once, and pain shot through him, might as well be hit by lightning as to feel that, a whoosh of pure white, a bounce again and there was the sky, the white light dimming to pearl gray and finally to evening’s dark blue.
Ohmygod, and Dean lay there for a moment, staring straight up at the sky, framed by circling concrete, numbers stenciled on in schoolbus yellow, spiraling up to heaven. Oh my god.
Not dead. I’m not dead.
He tried to move, but his shoulder wouldn’t work, was like he’d been impaled by something, and he turned his head, saw the strange angle and fought the sudden urge to throw up. Jesus Christ, I have to move.
He heard sirens and they were getting closer. Where the fuck is Dad?
Then his name reverberated against the concrete funnel, and he shifted slightly, pain ripping through him, shit, have to get up, because the cops are coming. I’m okay, Dad, I’m okay, see? Just get your ass down here.
The fingers of his right hand clutched chainlink fencing and he wrenched himself to a sitting position, gritting his teeth against the howl that rushed up his throat. He looked around. A parking garage. Okay. Held up his right hand. It was bloody. He was bloody all over, but it wasn’t his blood and he refused to think about that, because the sirens were getting closer and they couldn’t stay.
Faintly, mostly because his ears were humming unnaturally, he heard his name being called again. Dad, he thought, but couldn’t say anything. Looking between his bent legs, he saw a tangle of bikes below. A bike lock-up, he thought. Steel pipes made a frame and proving his hugely lucky nature, he’d landed between them, or bounced between them. He didn’t really know.
He shouted inarticulately as he tried to move, tried to swing down from the top of the lock-up to the ground. The lock-up was eight feet high and he had to lower himself down, which he couldn’t do gracefully, not with one arm. His left arm hung uselessly, worse than useless, because ‘useless’ implied that it was numb, that it didn’t hurt and it hurt, all right.
He wasn’t going to go over slowly, carefully. He came down the vertical side in a confusion of limbs, flopped like a rag doll on the cement. Muttering a compendium of abuse, Dean rested against cement imbued with the vague odor of old urine, waited for John to find him. He’d have heard the shout. And there, sure enough, the sound of running feet, and Dean knew he needed to get up now, because along with the sound of feet, he also saw a distant blue and red light reflecting from the angled anonymous surfaces of the parking complex.
Using his good arm, he pulled himself up to a sit, then a shaky stand, holding onto the chain link like it was God, thought again that he might throw up, but instead bit the inside of his lip - hard - to calm himself. Not so bad, it’s just dislocated. Snap right back in. But he’d seen his dad dislocate a shoulder and knew he had nothing to look forward to.
There was Dad now, coming at a full run from between a ticket dispenser and a support column, across the shining expanse of smooth concrete, face white, pale as a deep-water creature that’d never seen daylight and the gun was still in his hand, and blood was everywhere, a spray across his shirt like he’d fucked up with the squeeze ketchup at a school picnic.
It’s all a mistake. A mistake, an accident.
Without knowing it was coming or how to stop it, Dean’s face crumpled and he buried his face in the crease of his right elbow rather than have John see him cry.
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Read Part Two here!
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