SPN fic: This Wheel's On Fire 4/7 (Gen, R)
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Dean had grown up in the Impala. He'd been driving that car since the day he was old enough to put his feet on the pedals and still see over the dashboard. He knew exactly what she could do. And he knew the way she was tearing down the Embarcadero now was impossible.
It wasn't just the speed, though the speedometer needle was out of sight at the right side of the dial and the city lights streaked across Dean's line of vision in a way that made him think "space shuttle" rather than "classic car." It was the effortless way she zigzagged through the evening traffic, edging into gaps that should've been way too small, careening from lane to lane as if the laws of physics were something that just happened to other cars.
Their passage wasn't going unnoticed. Dean heard the blare of horns, the squeal of tires on asphalt, the shriek of tearing metal. He had a sense that he was leaving a trail of wrecks behind him, but there was no way to know for sure. The Impala was moving so fast that the images in the rearview mirror receded from sight before Dean could make them out. Several times, he thought he saw flashing lights and heard the wail of sirens but they too fell behind in seconds.
Dean fought to take control of the steering, to stomp on the brakes, to do anything other than just sit there, a helpless passenger in his own car and his own body. But his hands were stuck fast to the wheel, his right foot a dead weight on the gas pedal, and all his straining efforts didn't produce so much as a twitch in his arms or legs.
After a while, the sounds outside the car became more distant and muted, the lights dimmer and farther apart. This wasn't the city anymore; they'd hit one of the local highways. The traffic was sparser here, and the Impala's engine gave a low, contented purr as she picked up still more speed. Dean could feel the acceleration pressing him back into the seat.
Despite the complete fucked-up craziness of it all, he felt kind of relieved. The farther they got from the city, the less likely they were to cause the sort of pileup that left multiple casualties behind.
By the time he stopped struggling it was full dark, and he had no idea where he was. The headlights hadn't come on, and the periodic glimpses of illuminated billboards, exit signs and distant lights zoomed by too fast to let him make out the details. The road was getting curvier - Dean could feel the Impala's frame straining as she rounded the bends -- and once he thought he saw mountains against a starry sky, but given that he'd started out in northern California, "mountains" wasn't exactly a clue.
There was a bottle of holy water and a rosary in the glove compartment, but Dean couldn't move his hands to reach them. He muttered an exorcism under his breath anyway, but apparently neither he nor the car were actually possessed, or maybe it just didn't work without the props. Either way he was out of options (not that he'd had that many to start with), so he resigned himself to sitting back and waiting for the ride to end. It had to end, didn't it? The demon wouldn't have sent him off like that if it hadn't wanted him to get somewhere, presumably in one piece. Dean leaned his head back against the bench seat and let the Impala take him where she would.
He wasn't sure how much time had passed before they started to slow down. Didn't even notice they were slowing down until a billboard for a Jeep dealership went by and he realized he could actually read the big red letters promising zero-percent financing. Dean leaned forward to peer through the windshield, picking up more details with every passing mile. A Motel 6. Another billboard, this one for Econofoods. A sign considerately informing him that he was going east on 80, with the junction for 789 South coming up. Dean frowned as he summoned up his internal road atlas and tried to place himself.
"Dude, no fucking way..." Either he'd completely lost his grip on geography, or they'd made it from northern California to Wyoming in about a quarter of the normal travel time.
There was a sudden, gut-churning twist in his center of gravity as the Impala swerved right onto an exit ramp. Dean's arms strained and his bad shoulder screamed in protest as the turn sent him skidding across the seat while his hands still gripped the wheel. He swore under his breath and pulled himself back into position just in time to see the Impala's headlights go on.
Ahead was a chain-link fence topped with coils of barbed wire. The gate was chained and padlocked. He had just enough time to think oh man, that's gonna fuck up the paintjob before the Impala smashed through. She spun in a tight circle, gravel crunching under the tires, and finally stopped.
For a minute or so, the whole world seemed to hold perfectly still, silent except for Dean's panting breaths. Then the driver's-side door swung open. Dean pulled, and his hands came away from the wheel. The relief of his returned freedom didn't last long, however, because the rush of heat he'd felt in the motel room earlier was back, only now it was worse.
Dean fell out of the car, climbed to his feet, and managed maybe five swaying steps before collapsing to his knees. He tried to pull his jacket off, but his arms were too weak and his fingers wouldn't grip the leather. The heat was unbearable now, like standing inside a furnace. A cloud of smoke billowed in front of Dean's face, glowing faintly in the Impala's high beams, and he realized that it was coming off him. He looked down and saw flames licking up his legs.
Oh God...
Panic rose up to choke him, more consuming and overwhelming than the pain. Dean dropped to the ground and rolled, batting frantically at the flames. It was no use. The fire came from inside him and would not be smothered. Trying only set his hands ablaze too. The skin across his knuckles cracked and split, and liquid fire poured down his arms like blood. Flesh blackened and crumbled to ash, leaving soot-stained bones behind.
Ohgodmakeitstopmakeitstopmakeitstopmakeitstop......
And then it did stop, just like that, between one agonized breath and the next. The pain peaked and vanished, leaving a strange tingling numbness behind. The panic receded into a small dark corner at the back of Dean's mind, and a cold, stony calm took over. He stood up, rolled his shoulders, and felt his miraculously undamaged clothes settle on a new, narrower frame. He raised one hand to explore his face, and felt the dry scratchy rasp of bone against bone.
His hands were still on fire, but the flames felt like no threat now. They were just another part of him, the way his skin and muscle used to be. Beneath them, his bones looked porcelain-smooth, like the model skeletons that sometimes got put on display in doctors' offices. Dean had seen enough human remains in his life to know that they didn't normally look like that, but the difference inspired only a mild curiosity. It wasn't important.
What was important was the new, nagging sense of urgency that tugged at him like an impatient hand, drawing him away from the Impala and the busted fence, deeper into this unknown place he'd arrived at. This way. Now. Hunt.
Dean took a dragging step forward before his hunter's instincts kicked in, fighting the pull. He didn't know where he was, didn't know the terrain or what he might be facing. It took an effort of will, but he made himself stay where he was and take stock of his surroundings.
Whatever else the fire may have done to him, it had sure improved his night vision. After hours of being trapped in darkness inside his own car, Dean could suddenly see everything, clear as daylight. If he still had eyelids, he would've blinked.
He appeared to be in an abandoned railroad station. There was a one-story brick building that must've been the waiting area once, with a covered platform beyond it. Several battered wooden boxcars sat on the track, a thick coating of grime darkening their sloped roofs.
A small, rustic cabin was just visible on the far side of tracks. Its windows were lit, and Dean knew the moment he saw it that this was where he was supposed to go.
The sense of urgency increased. Dean shook it off again and headed for the Impala's trunk. Just because he was a flaming skeleton was no reason to go into a hunt unarmed.
That small, smothered voice at the back of his mind -- the one that was still half-gibbering in panic because he was a freakin' flaming skeleton -- yelped in protest when he laid his burning hand on the trunk. But the paint job seemed as unaffected by the flames as his clothes were, and the trunk sprung open at his touch even though he hadn't popped it first.
The odds that the red-eyed demon had carjacked him all this way just to face a plain vanilla ghost seemed slim, so he left the salt guns in their place and grabbed an iron-loaded shotgun instead. It would've been nice to have some silver bullets, too, but those, along with the gun that held them, had been lost in the aftermath of the aswang hunt. Dean grabbed a couple of silver knives instead and slammed the trunk shut.
The sound of boots on gravel made him snap to attention. It seemed that while he'd been arming himself, the enemy had come to him.
The man standing on the other side of the tracks looked ordinary enough, just a short, middle-aged guy with a receding hairline. But when Dean looked at him more closely (he thought of it as squinting even though he didn't actually have eyelids at the moment), he could see something dark and slimy and wrong squirming beneath the surface.
"Let me guess," Dean said, "Azazel?"
The demon tilted its head to one side and regarded Dean with an amused expression. "A Ghostrider? Again, after all this time? Mephistopheles must be feeling desperate."
Mephistopheles? The name made Dean pause for a moment, but he shoved the issue aside. There would be time to think through the implications later.
"If you know who I am," he said, "you know you're going down. A really long way down, in your case."
"I don't think so." Azazel's eyes flashed yellow. The darkness inside him churned like boiling tar.
One of the boxcars rocked back and forth on the tracks and rose into the air. Dean staggered back, but he wasn't fast enough. The car spun around, wobbling, and came down at him with all the speed and precision of a guided missile.
It hurt, but not nearly as much as it should've. That in itself was enough to leave Dean stunned for a moment. The impact knocked him flat and reduced the railroad car to a pile of rubble, but to Dean it felt sort of like being smacked down with a giant sandbag. Considering that he should've been crushed to powder, he wasn't about to complain.
The car had been a freight car, and apparently the freight in question had been scrap metal. Dean moved to get up and found himself tangled in what felt like a thousand feet of steel chain, nearly as thick as his wrist. Dean swore, thrashed around as much as the weight of the mess on top of him allowed, and finally fought his way through to stand up. He'd hung on to the shotgun when the car had smashed into him, and held it ready to fire now, but Azazel was no longer there.
The chain lay in a tangled heap at his feet. Dean picked up one end and gave it a tug. The flames jumped from his hand onto the links, flickering red and yellow over the metal, and the chain moved of its own accord, spiraling into a neat, even coil. Dean slung it over his left shoulder, leaped off the platform and over the tracks, and set off at a quick march toward the cabin.
He suspected the door wouldn't be locked, but he kicked it in anyway, just for the hell of it. Apparently his kick had a lot more oomph to it than it used to, because the nice, sturdy-looking door buckled and flew off the hinges with a satisfying crash.
"Hi honey, I'm home!" Dean called out.
The cabin looked like there'd been a fight, though not a very big one. A bookcase and a chair were turned over and a lamp lay in pieces on the floor, next to a puddle of coffee with bits of broken mug in it. A door at the back stood partly open, giving a glimpse of a bedroom. Azazel was still nowhere in sight, but a woman in jeans and a cropped red leather jacket stood in front of the door, looking as if she'd been patiently waiting for Dean to show up. She had short blonde hair and might've been kind of hot if she didn't have the same twisting darkness inside her that Azazel had.
"So you're the Ghostrider." She sneered. "I thought you'd be taller."
"Aww," Dean drawled. "You've been thinking about me? I'm flattered."
He took a step forward and aimed the shotgun at the chick's face. Iron shot wouldn't kill a demon, but with any luck it would incapacitate the host body for a while. Long enough for Dean to figure out what to do next.
Before he could get a shot off, the wall to his left exploded in a cloud of dust and splinters. A dark shape rumbled through the opening, and Dean had just enough time to identify it as a forklift before it slammed into him, pinning him to the opposite wall between two massive steel prongs. The entire cabin shuddered, and plaster rained from the ceiling in chunks.
"Fuck," Dean muttered. As with the railroad car earlier, the hit hurt a lot less than it should've, but it still hurt enough.
The guy who climbed down from the driver's seat had a demon inside him too, but Dean decided he actually found that less offensive than his over-tight jeans and pussy designer leather jacket. The dude looked like he should've been modeling for a Gap catalog, not throwing down for a fight in a train yard.
"See?" Pretty-Boy strutted over to Blonde-Chick and clapped her on the shoulder. "I told you he wouldn't be so tough."
Dean braced his back against the wall behind him, planted both hands and one foot against the forklift and heaved. There was a prolonged grinding noise, and more bits of ceiling came down, but the lift moved, rolling back far enough for Dean to work himself free.
"You should've checked with the boss," he told Pretty-Boy. "He would've told you that throwing heavy machinery at me doesn't work."
He let the chain slide down his arm, catching one end in his hand while the rest of it clanked to the floor. He snapped it like a whip and it coiled around Pretty-Boy, pinning his arms against his sides. Flames danced along the links and Pretty-Boy screamed as his eyes bulged and turned black.
Dean could see the demon inside him struggling, but the fire seemed to trap it just as the chain trapped the physical body. As he watched, the demon began to burn. Glowing red patches spread sizzling over the blackness. The screams grew louder, then cut off abruptly as Pretty-Boy collapsed in a heap. A small cloud of ashy grey dust puffed from his mouth and settled harmlessly on the floor.
The blonde chick must've made a break for it at some point, because the cabin was silent and empty now. Dean tugged at the chain and it coiled itself up again, leaving Pretty-Boy's body to sprawl limply across the floor. He'd intended to check for signs of life, but one look at the slack face and dull, no-longer-black eyes told him there was no point
"Rest in peace if you can," Dean told the corpse, and went to explore the cabin.
It seemed ordinary enough, with its faded area rugs and cheap plywood furniture. The books scattered across the floor were mostly American history, with a focus on the 19th century. If there had ever been anything occult in the mix, it was gone now.
Dean went to check out the bedroom, and nearly tripped over another corpse.
The guy must've been attacked in his sleep, if the blood-soaked pajamas were any indication. He was old and frail-looking, face twisted into a grimace of pain and terror above the gaping wound in his throat.
A leather wallet lay on the dresser, monogrammed with the initials J.E. The Wyoming driver's license inside identified the dead guy as Joshua Elkins, born October third, 1947. Besides the license there were a couple of credit cards, thirty bucks in cash, a faded photo of a young couple in their wedding clothes, and an alumni ID card from Princeton. In other words, nothing useful.
The rest of the house held nothing useful, either. No weapons. No letters except bills and junk mail. The ancient-looking desktop computer had been smashed into a useless lump, and the pile of handwritten papers next to it turned out to be notes about the early history of American railroads.
Dean poked around in the closets and the kitchen cabinets, found nothing he wouldn't have expected to find in the closets and kitchen cabinets of an old guy living alone in the middle of nowhere, and went to fetch the salt and lighter fluid from the Impala. Given the circumstances of their deaths, both Joshua Elkins and Pretty Boy stood a pretty high chance of coming back as angry spirits, and Dean figured the least he could do was make sure that didn't happen.
With the cabin blazing away behind him, he climbed back into the Impala and just sat there for a while with his hands resting on the steering wheel. He could feel the low, vibrating purr of her engine and beneath it, a strange, steady rhythm, almost like a heartbeat. Considering that he himself didn't have a heartbeat or even a heart at the moment, Dean found it kind of comforting.
"Hey, girl," he murmured softly, "no more running away with me, okay? Let's see what the two of us can do together."
The engine revved in response. Dean shifted into drive, floored the gas pedal, and let out a joyful whoop as the Impala leaped forward. When he looked in the rearview mirror, he saw flames dancing in the tire tracks.
Back on the highway, he headed east and then north. He needed information, and if he'd judged his location right then Bobby was the closest guy to get it from. Dean still wasn't sure he'd entirely forgiven Bobby for calling Sam on him, and the "Hi, I'm a burning skeleton now" conversation was going to be awkward, but he was willing to let the matter slide for the time being. He had bigger problems to worry about. Problems with names like Azazel and Mephistopheles.
It felt great to have the Impala under his control again. She was moving even faster and smoother than before, impossible as it seemed, and with no other cars on the road there was nothing to keep Dean from just kicking back and enjoying the speed. He was so distracted by the pure, giddy rush of it that he didn't even notice the faint mental tug that guided him off the highway and onto a small local road until he'd gone several miles out of his way.
"What the fuck?" he muttered and prepared to hit the brakes a moment before he recognized that he was feeling a weaker version of the same hunting call that had drawn him toward Azazel at the railroad yard. This wasn't Azazel, he was pretty sure of it, but it was... something he needed to deal with. So he slowed the Impala but kept moving, until the road ended in front of what looked like a broken-down, abandoned farmhouse.
Someone was screaming inside. Several someones. Dean could tell that even before he opened the car door. He left the Impala idling as he ran up the rickety porch steps and through the open front door.
A couple of teenagers, a boy and a girl, were huddled together at the bottom of a staircase. Looming over them was a huge, faintly glowing figure of a man holding an axe.
Dean reached out without thinking, acting purely on instinct. His burning skeleton hands gripped the ghost as if it was corporeal, pulling it away from the kids and spinning it around. The ghost's face was wild, contorted with rage. Dean knew, without knowing how he knew, that the man it had once been had hacked apart his wife and her lover in a fit of jealous rage before hanging himself from the rafters. It had happened over a century ago, and the spirit had been roaming the house all this time, killing anyone foolish enough to wander inside.
"You don't belong here," Dean told it. The words echoed inside his skull, strange and alien. It felt as if someone else was speaking with his voice. "You have been judged and found guilty. Go and face your punishment."
The ghost shrieked and burst into flames. A few seconds of burning, and it was gone. Dean turned toward the kids, who whimpered and clung to each other as he came toward them. He supposed that to them, he didn't look like much of an improvement over the axe-wielding ghost.
"You know what?" he told them. "Next time you want to make out, borrow a car and do it in the back seat like normal people. Because haunted houses? Not nearly as romantic as everyone seems to think." And he stomped back outside without waiting for an answer.
The sky was just starting to brighten when Dean crossed the South Dakota border, and the first rays of sunlight broke through the clouds on the horizon when he parked the Impala in Bobby's driveway. He no longer felt giddy and high on speed; he felt achy and exhausted, his vision hazy and his skull throbbing.
He stumbled out onto the driveway, vaguely aware of Rumsfeld growling somewhere nearby. The ground seemed to sway beneath him. He clung to the Impala for balance, dizzy and desperate, fighting to get enough breath to yell for Bobby. Then daylight hit him for the first time, and the pain came with it.
The change in the train yard had been bad enough, with the flesh burning from his bones. This was worse. This wasn't just the physical pain but also all the fear and rage and pure blind panic that he should've been feeling all night flooding out to hit him at once. Dean didn't feel himself falling, didn't hear himself screaming, didn't know anything except the blind agony inside his own head for what seemed like forever. Then a voice broke through, calling his name over and over. Dean clung to that voice, followed it like a lifeline until he could breathe and open his eyes again.
He was lying on his back in the dirt in front of Bobby's porch and Bobby was leaning over him, frowning and worried.
"Dean! What happened, boy, what the hell is wrong?"
"Hey, Bobby..." Dean murmured weakly, and blacked out.
Chapter 5
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Dean had grown up in the Impala. He'd been driving that car since the day he was old enough to put his feet on the pedals and still see over the dashboard. He knew exactly what she could do. And he knew the way she was tearing down the Embarcadero now was impossible.
It wasn't just the speed, though the speedometer needle was out of sight at the right side of the dial and the city lights streaked across Dean's line of vision in a way that made him think "space shuttle" rather than "classic car." It was the effortless way she zigzagged through the evening traffic, edging into gaps that should've been way too small, careening from lane to lane as if the laws of physics were something that just happened to other cars.
Their passage wasn't going unnoticed. Dean heard the blare of horns, the squeal of tires on asphalt, the shriek of tearing metal. He had a sense that he was leaving a trail of wrecks behind him, but there was no way to know for sure. The Impala was moving so fast that the images in the rearview mirror receded from sight before Dean could make them out. Several times, he thought he saw flashing lights and heard the wail of sirens but they too fell behind in seconds.
Dean fought to take control of the steering, to stomp on the brakes, to do anything other than just sit there, a helpless passenger in his own car and his own body. But his hands were stuck fast to the wheel, his right foot a dead weight on the gas pedal, and all his straining efforts didn't produce so much as a twitch in his arms or legs.
After a while, the sounds outside the car became more distant and muted, the lights dimmer and farther apart. This wasn't the city anymore; they'd hit one of the local highways. The traffic was sparser here, and the Impala's engine gave a low, contented purr as she picked up still more speed. Dean could feel the acceleration pressing him back into the seat.
Despite the complete fucked-up craziness of it all, he felt kind of relieved. The farther they got from the city, the less likely they were to cause the sort of pileup that left multiple casualties behind.
By the time he stopped struggling it was full dark, and he had no idea where he was. The headlights hadn't come on, and the periodic glimpses of illuminated billboards, exit signs and distant lights zoomed by too fast to let him make out the details. The road was getting curvier - Dean could feel the Impala's frame straining as she rounded the bends -- and once he thought he saw mountains against a starry sky, but given that he'd started out in northern California, "mountains" wasn't exactly a clue.
There was a bottle of holy water and a rosary in the glove compartment, but Dean couldn't move his hands to reach them. He muttered an exorcism under his breath anyway, but apparently neither he nor the car were actually possessed, or maybe it just didn't work without the props. Either way he was out of options (not that he'd had that many to start with), so he resigned himself to sitting back and waiting for the ride to end. It had to end, didn't it? The demon wouldn't have sent him off like that if it hadn't wanted him to get somewhere, presumably in one piece. Dean leaned his head back against the bench seat and let the Impala take him where she would.
He wasn't sure how much time had passed before they started to slow down. Didn't even notice they were slowing down until a billboard for a Jeep dealership went by and he realized he could actually read the big red letters promising zero-percent financing. Dean leaned forward to peer through the windshield, picking up more details with every passing mile. A Motel 6. Another billboard, this one for Econofoods. A sign considerately informing him that he was going east on 80, with the junction for 789 South coming up. Dean frowned as he summoned up his internal road atlas and tried to place himself.
"Dude, no fucking way..." Either he'd completely lost his grip on geography, or they'd made it from northern California to Wyoming in about a quarter of the normal travel time.
There was a sudden, gut-churning twist in his center of gravity as the Impala swerved right onto an exit ramp. Dean's arms strained and his bad shoulder screamed in protest as the turn sent him skidding across the seat while his hands still gripped the wheel. He swore under his breath and pulled himself back into position just in time to see the Impala's headlights go on.
Ahead was a chain-link fence topped with coils of barbed wire. The gate was chained and padlocked. He had just enough time to think oh man, that's gonna fuck up the paintjob before the Impala smashed through. She spun in a tight circle, gravel crunching under the tires, and finally stopped.
For a minute or so, the whole world seemed to hold perfectly still, silent except for Dean's panting breaths. Then the driver's-side door swung open. Dean pulled, and his hands came away from the wheel. The relief of his returned freedom didn't last long, however, because the rush of heat he'd felt in the motel room earlier was back, only now it was worse.
Dean fell out of the car, climbed to his feet, and managed maybe five swaying steps before collapsing to his knees. He tried to pull his jacket off, but his arms were too weak and his fingers wouldn't grip the leather. The heat was unbearable now, like standing inside a furnace. A cloud of smoke billowed in front of Dean's face, glowing faintly in the Impala's high beams, and he realized that it was coming off him. He looked down and saw flames licking up his legs.
Oh God...
Panic rose up to choke him, more consuming and overwhelming than the pain. Dean dropped to the ground and rolled, batting frantically at the flames. It was no use. The fire came from inside him and would not be smothered. Trying only set his hands ablaze too. The skin across his knuckles cracked and split, and liquid fire poured down his arms like blood. Flesh blackened and crumbled to ash, leaving soot-stained bones behind.
Ohgodmakeitstopmakeitstopmakeitstopmakeitstop......
And then it did stop, just like that, between one agonized breath and the next. The pain peaked and vanished, leaving a strange tingling numbness behind. The panic receded into a small dark corner at the back of Dean's mind, and a cold, stony calm took over. He stood up, rolled his shoulders, and felt his miraculously undamaged clothes settle on a new, narrower frame. He raised one hand to explore his face, and felt the dry scratchy rasp of bone against bone.
His hands were still on fire, but the flames felt like no threat now. They were just another part of him, the way his skin and muscle used to be. Beneath them, his bones looked porcelain-smooth, like the model skeletons that sometimes got put on display in doctors' offices. Dean had seen enough human remains in his life to know that they didn't normally look like that, but the difference inspired only a mild curiosity. It wasn't important.
What was important was the new, nagging sense of urgency that tugged at him like an impatient hand, drawing him away from the Impala and the busted fence, deeper into this unknown place he'd arrived at. This way. Now. Hunt.
Dean took a dragging step forward before his hunter's instincts kicked in, fighting the pull. He didn't know where he was, didn't know the terrain or what he might be facing. It took an effort of will, but he made himself stay where he was and take stock of his surroundings.
Whatever else the fire may have done to him, it had sure improved his night vision. After hours of being trapped in darkness inside his own car, Dean could suddenly see everything, clear as daylight. If he still had eyelids, he would've blinked.
He appeared to be in an abandoned railroad station. There was a one-story brick building that must've been the waiting area once, with a covered platform beyond it. Several battered wooden boxcars sat on the track, a thick coating of grime darkening their sloped roofs.
A small, rustic cabin was just visible on the far side of tracks. Its windows were lit, and Dean knew the moment he saw it that this was where he was supposed to go.
The sense of urgency increased. Dean shook it off again and headed for the Impala's trunk. Just because he was a flaming skeleton was no reason to go into a hunt unarmed.
That small, smothered voice at the back of his mind -- the one that was still half-gibbering in panic because he was a freakin' flaming skeleton -- yelped in protest when he laid his burning hand on the trunk. But the paint job seemed as unaffected by the flames as his clothes were, and the trunk sprung open at his touch even though he hadn't popped it first.
The odds that the red-eyed demon had carjacked him all this way just to face a plain vanilla ghost seemed slim, so he left the salt guns in their place and grabbed an iron-loaded shotgun instead. It would've been nice to have some silver bullets, too, but those, along with the gun that held them, had been lost in the aftermath of the aswang hunt. Dean grabbed a couple of silver knives instead and slammed the trunk shut.
The sound of boots on gravel made him snap to attention. It seemed that while he'd been arming himself, the enemy had come to him.
The man standing on the other side of the tracks looked ordinary enough, just a short, middle-aged guy with a receding hairline. But when Dean looked at him more closely (he thought of it as squinting even though he didn't actually have eyelids at the moment), he could see something dark and slimy and wrong squirming beneath the surface.
"Let me guess," Dean said, "Azazel?"
The demon tilted its head to one side and regarded Dean with an amused expression. "A Ghostrider? Again, after all this time? Mephistopheles must be feeling desperate."
Mephistopheles? The name made Dean pause for a moment, but he shoved the issue aside. There would be time to think through the implications later.
"If you know who I am," he said, "you know you're going down. A really long way down, in your case."
"I don't think so." Azazel's eyes flashed yellow. The darkness inside him churned like boiling tar.
One of the boxcars rocked back and forth on the tracks and rose into the air. Dean staggered back, but he wasn't fast enough. The car spun around, wobbling, and came down at him with all the speed and precision of a guided missile.
It hurt, but not nearly as much as it should've. That in itself was enough to leave Dean stunned for a moment. The impact knocked him flat and reduced the railroad car to a pile of rubble, but to Dean it felt sort of like being smacked down with a giant sandbag. Considering that he should've been crushed to powder, he wasn't about to complain.
The car had been a freight car, and apparently the freight in question had been scrap metal. Dean moved to get up and found himself tangled in what felt like a thousand feet of steel chain, nearly as thick as his wrist. Dean swore, thrashed around as much as the weight of the mess on top of him allowed, and finally fought his way through to stand up. He'd hung on to the shotgun when the car had smashed into him, and held it ready to fire now, but Azazel was no longer there.
The chain lay in a tangled heap at his feet. Dean picked up one end and gave it a tug. The flames jumped from his hand onto the links, flickering red and yellow over the metal, and the chain moved of its own accord, spiraling into a neat, even coil. Dean slung it over his left shoulder, leaped off the platform and over the tracks, and set off at a quick march toward the cabin.
He suspected the door wouldn't be locked, but he kicked it in anyway, just for the hell of it. Apparently his kick had a lot more oomph to it than it used to, because the nice, sturdy-looking door buckled and flew off the hinges with a satisfying crash.
"Hi honey, I'm home!" Dean called out.
The cabin looked like there'd been a fight, though not a very big one. A bookcase and a chair were turned over and a lamp lay in pieces on the floor, next to a puddle of coffee with bits of broken mug in it. A door at the back stood partly open, giving a glimpse of a bedroom. Azazel was still nowhere in sight, but a woman in jeans and a cropped red leather jacket stood in front of the door, looking as if she'd been patiently waiting for Dean to show up. She had short blonde hair and might've been kind of hot if she didn't have the same twisting darkness inside her that Azazel had.
"So you're the Ghostrider." She sneered. "I thought you'd be taller."
"Aww," Dean drawled. "You've been thinking about me? I'm flattered."
He took a step forward and aimed the shotgun at the chick's face. Iron shot wouldn't kill a demon, but with any luck it would incapacitate the host body for a while. Long enough for Dean to figure out what to do next.
Before he could get a shot off, the wall to his left exploded in a cloud of dust and splinters. A dark shape rumbled through the opening, and Dean had just enough time to identify it as a forklift before it slammed into him, pinning him to the opposite wall between two massive steel prongs. The entire cabin shuddered, and plaster rained from the ceiling in chunks.
"Fuck," Dean muttered. As with the railroad car earlier, the hit hurt a lot less than it should've, but it still hurt enough.
The guy who climbed down from the driver's seat had a demon inside him too, but Dean decided he actually found that less offensive than his over-tight jeans and pussy designer leather jacket. The dude looked like he should've been modeling for a Gap catalog, not throwing down for a fight in a train yard.
"See?" Pretty-Boy strutted over to Blonde-Chick and clapped her on the shoulder. "I told you he wouldn't be so tough."
Dean braced his back against the wall behind him, planted both hands and one foot against the forklift and heaved. There was a prolonged grinding noise, and more bits of ceiling came down, but the lift moved, rolling back far enough for Dean to work himself free.
"You should've checked with the boss," he told Pretty-Boy. "He would've told you that throwing heavy machinery at me doesn't work."
He let the chain slide down his arm, catching one end in his hand while the rest of it clanked to the floor. He snapped it like a whip and it coiled around Pretty-Boy, pinning his arms against his sides. Flames danced along the links and Pretty-Boy screamed as his eyes bulged and turned black.
Dean could see the demon inside him struggling, but the fire seemed to trap it just as the chain trapped the physical body. As he watched, the demon began to burn. Glowing red patches spread sizzling over the blackness. The screams grew louder, then cut off abruptly as Pretty-Boy collapsed in a heap. A small cloud of ashy grey dust puffed from his mouth and settled harmlessly on the floor.
The blonde chick must've made a break for it at some point, because the cabin was silent and empty now. Dean tugged at the chain and it coiled itself up again, leaving Pretty-Boy's body to sprawl limply across the floor. He'd intended to check for signs of life, but one look at the slack face and dull, no-longer-black eyes told him there was no point
"Rest in peace if you can," Dean told the corpse, and went to explore the cabin.
It seemed ordinary enough, with its faded area rugs and cheap plywood furniture. The books scattered across the floor were mostly American history, with a focus on the 19th century. If there had ever been anything occult in the mix, it was gone now.
Dean went to check out the bedroom, and nearly tripped over another corpse.
The guy must've been attacked in his sleep, if the blood-soaked pajamas were any indication. He was old and frail-looking, face twisted into a grimace of pain and terror above the gaping wound in his throat.
A leather wallet lay on the dresser, monogrammed with the initials J.E. The Wyoming driver's license inside identified the dead guy as Joshua Elkins, born October third, 1947. Besides the license there were a couple of credit cards, thirty bucks in cash, a faded photo of a young couple in their wedding clothes, and an alumni ID card from Princeton. In other words, nothing useful.
The rest of the house held nothing useful, either. No weapons. No letters except bills and junk mail. The ancient-looking desktop computer had been smashed into a useless lump, and the pile of handwritten papers next to it turned out to be notes about the early history of American railroads.
Dean poked around in the closets and the kitchen cabinets, found nothing he wouldn't have expected to find in the closets and kitchen cabinets of an old guy living alone in the middle of nowhere, and went to fetch the salt and lighter fluid from the Impala. Given the circumstances of their deaths, both Joshua Elkins and Pretty Boy stood a pretty high chance of coming back as angry spirits, and Dean figured the least he could do was make sure that didn't happen.
With the cabin blazing away behind him, he climbed back into the Impala and just sat there for a while with his hands resting on the steering wheel. He could feel the low, vibrating purr of her engine and beneath it, a strange, steady rhythm, almost like a heartbeat. Considering that he himself didn't have a heartbeat or even a heart at the moment, Dean found it kind of comforting.
"Hey, girl," he murmured softly, "no more running away with me, okay? Let's see what the two of us can do together."
The engine revved in response. Dean shifted into drive, floored the gas pedal, and let out a joyful whoop as the Impala leaped forward. When he looked in the rearview mirror, he saw flames dancing in the tire tracks.
Back on the highway, he headed east and then north. He needed information, and if he'd judged his location right then Bobby was the closest guy to get it from. Dean still wasn't sure he'd entirely forgiven Bobby for calling Sam on him, and the "Hi, I'm a burning skeleton now" conversation was going to be awkward, but he was willing to let the matter slide for the time being. He had bigger problems to worry about. Problems with names like Azazel and Mephistopheles.
It felt great to have the Impala under his control again. She was moving even faster and smoother than before, impossible as it seemed, and with no other cars on the road there was nothing to keep Dean from just kicking back and enjoying the speed. He was so distracted by the pure, giddy rush of it that he didn't even notice the faint mental tug that guided him off the highway and onto a small local road until he'd gone several miles out of his way.
"What the fuck?" he muttered and prepared to hit the brakes a moment before he recognized that he was feeling a weaker version of the same hunting call that had drawn him toward Azazel at the railroad yard. This wasn't Azazel, he was pretty sure of it, but it was... something he needed to deal with. So he slowed the Impala but kept moving, until the road ended in front of what looked like a broken-down, abandoned farmhouse.
Someone was screaming inside. Several someones. Dean could tell that even before he opened the car door. He left the Impala idling as he ran up the rickety porch steps and through the open front door.
A couple of teenagers, a boy and a girl, were huddled together at the bottom of a staircase. Looming over them was a huge, faintly glowing figure of a man holding an axe.
Dean reached out without thinking, acting purely on instinct. His burning skeleton hands gripped the ghost as if it was corporeal, pulling it away from the kids and spinning it around. The ghost's face was wild, contorted with rage. Dean knew, without knowing how he knew, that the man it had once been had hacked apart his wife and her lover in a fit of jealous rage before hanging himself from the rafters. It had happened over a century ago, and the spirit had been roaming the house all this time, killing anyone foolish enough to wander inside.
"You don't belong here," Dean told it. The words echoed inside his skull, strange and alien. It felt as if someone else was speaking with his voice. "You have been judged and found guilty. Go and face your punishment."
The ghost shrieked and burst into flames. A few seconds of burning, and it was gone. Dean turned toward the kids, who whimpered and clung to each other as he came toward them. He supposed that to them, he didn't look like much of an improvement over the axe-wielding ghost.
"You know what?" he told them. "Next time you want to make out, borrow a car and do it in the back seat like normal people. Because haunted houses? Not nearly as romantic as everyone seems to think." And he stomped back outside without waiting for an answer.
The sky was just starting to brighten when Dean crossed the South Dakota border, and the first rays of sunlight broke through the clouds on the horizon when he parked the Impala in Bobby's driveway. He no longer felt giddy and high on speed; he felt achy and exhausted, his vision hazy and his skull throbbing.
He stumbled out onto the driveway, vaguely aware of Rumsfeld growling somewhere nearby. The ground seemed to sway beneath him. He clung to the Impala for balance, dizzy and desperate, fighting to get enough breath to yell for Bobby. Then daylight hit him for the first time, and the pain came with it.
The change in the train yard had been bad enough, with the flesh burning from his bones. This was worse. This wasn't just the physical pain but also all the fear and rage and pure blind panic that he should've been feeling all night flooding out to hit him at once. Dean didn't feel himself falling, didn't hear himself screaming, didn't know anything except the blind agony inside his own head for what seemed like forever. Then a voice broke through, calling his name over and over. Dean clung to that voice, followed it like a lifeline until he could breathe and open his eyes again.
He was lying on his back in the dirt in front of Bobby's porch and Bobby was leaning over him, frowning and worried.
"Dean! What happened, boy, what the hell is wrong?"
"Hey, Bobby..." Dean murmured weakly, and blacked out.
Chapter 5