FIC: The Long Narrow Rope 2/2
Title: The Long Narrow Rope 2/2
Author: pdragon76
Rating: PG-13 (sailor-mouths, tornadoes, horny toads)
Genre: Gen
Characters: John, Dean, Sam
Spoilers: Pre-series, circa summer '97
Disclaimer: It’s Kripke’s world, we’re all just living in it. *snaps fingers, points*
Summary: It’s been said that roots and wings are the only two lasting bequests you can give your kids, but sometimes all you’ve got is guns and how to use ‘em.
A/N#1: This fic was commissioned for Sweet Charity by the incredibly generous harleyjames, who put the prompts to a poll and ended up with this. I sure hope you like it, babe. Beta’d by the applause-worthy graduate
july_july_julyand the ever dazzling ultraviolet9a. Gorgeous JDub icon by the ethereal smilla02
A/N#2: Those unfamiliar with the street rules of Bloody Knuckles may brush up here.
Back to Part I
The trouble with weather forecasting is that it's right
too often for us to ignore it and wrong
too often for us to rely on it.
~ Patrick Young
Stacey Herbert was going to be a problem. John should have asked about her age, because what the hell was he thinking, bringing Dean into a house with a seventeen year old bombshell? The kid had just spent four weeks with his right hand.
He kicked at Dean’s shoe under the table a third time, and the boy’s eyes started sheepishly off her cleavage back to his plate. He looked from his knife to his fork like he’d clean forgotten what they were for, and then set about his steak again. To give him credit, the girl’s tits were busting so far out of her top, even Sam was making a fulltime job of looking everywhere but. And he was so sick he could hardly keep his forehead off the tablecloth.
Stacey wasn’t helping. She’d been stuck on Dean like glue since they came through the door, all coquettish smiles and sparkle-eyes and laying hands on him every chance she got.
Down the end of the table, Nicholas Herbert sat beside his pretty blond wife looking like a man who’d let a pack of wild dogs inside his house.
“This is a lovely meal,” John told Sue. It was an awkward nod at normalcy, but she smiled and wiped her mouth on her napkin, returned it to her lap.
“You’re very welcome. It’s the least we can do. I’m sorry we can’t offer you anything in the way of payment.”
“Roof and a good home-cooked meal goes a long way. This is fine.”
Dean had forgotten to eat again. John tapped his knife on the edge of his plate, got the boy’s attention and motioned to his food. Dean gave him a helpless, lost look like he didn’t have enough blood going to his brain to be interpreting hand signals.
Eat your food, John mouthed at him, face a slab of granite.
Dean dutifully sawed off a piece of steak and jammed it between his teeth. He seemed to have selected the salt shaker as an alternate point of focus, which was a sound idea as long as Stacey didn’t ask him to pass it.
“So, did the spray work?” Nicholas asked John politely, and John felt his face redden for a second time.
“Uh, no. Not really. Listen, I gotta apologize again for my behavior at the gas station. It’s been a long day, and I saw your name badge there but… I just didn’t make the connection. Jim said you were a farming family.”
Nicholas cleared his throat. “Well, mostly we are. We’ve been hit pretty hard the last couple of years. I do a shift three times a week at the gas station, just for some extra cash. Helps with incidentals. And hopefully, Stacey’ll be away to college soon…we try and put a bit away. It all counts.”
“Sure.”
“What’re you gonna study?” Dean asked Stacey in a rush, mouth full of steak and eyes studiously on the condiments.
She plucked some invisible strings in the air. “Music. I play guitar.”
“Yeah?” Dean’s gaze slipped off the salt shaker, managed to find her face at least. He gave her a lopsided grin. “Cool.”
“Do you play?” She leaned into his attention.
Dean shook his head. “Nah.”
“What are you good at?”
John almost choked on his steak. Oh, good God.
“Guns,” Dean told her, without a shred of hesitation. “I’m good at guns.” His elbow hit the table and John kicked his boot again until it came off.
When he risked a glance at Nicholas, the poor man was the color of his ivory napkin.
“Can I be excused?” Sam asked suddenly, sounding breathless and strange. He pushed back his chair and rose unsteadily to his feet.
John started to rise, too, because he could see the kid was going down. He wasn’t getting there in time, so he snapped his fingers at Dean.
“Dean, grab your-”
Dean whirled from Stacey as Sam buckled, caught him awkwardly when he slumped against the chair. “Whoa.” He grimaced, looked to John as his grip began to slip. “Dad?”
John high-tailed it around the table to where Sue was already out of her chair, but Dean wasn’t having any of her help.
“I got him, I got him,” he told her, crowded her out with his body as he shifted to deposit Sam on the floor against the wall.
“I don’t feel very good,” John heard Sam say thinly as he crouched beside Dean.
“You don’t look very good,” Dean said bluntly.
“Maybe now’s a good time to show you to the guest rooms.” Sue suggested. “He can lay down there.”
Sue and Stacey helped Dean carry Sam out the front door and across the porch to the guest quarters on the western wing of the house. John stayed at the table with Nicholas.
“I need to get up to speed on what’s been going on around your property.”
Nicholas waved him off. “Your son’s sick, we can-”
“Sam’s fine. Like I said, it’s been a long day. He just needs some rest.”
The man’s mouth dropped open in horror. “If that were my son? I’d be thinking about a trip to the ER right now.”
“He’s not your son.”
Nicholas stop-started over a perplexed response, and John held up a hand to silence him.
“With all due respect, Nicholas, I’m doing this job as a favor to a friend, and yeah, that means I don’t get paid. My priority here is to get your problem cleaned up ASAP so I can go find a job that does pay. And I appreciate your concern, but my boys are tough kids and they know the score. So, why don’t you forget about Sam and start talkin’ to me about what’s goin’ on.”
Nicholas’ gaze fell from John’s bruised face to his forearm, where the bandage poked out beneath his upturned sleeve. “You’re not in pest control, are you?”
John shook his head. “No. I’m not.”
“You don’t think I have a wild dog on my property.”
“No. I don’t.”
“But you know what it is.”
“I’ve got an idea, yeah.”
“And you can get rid of it?”
“If you’re straight with me? Yeah, I can.”
Nicholas leaned forward in his chair, and his face crumpled in repulsion. “I saw it,” he whispered. His hands began to shake on the tablecloth. “That thing…” he said, eyes flitted toward the window, “that thing is no dog.”
Based on the sightings, John had a solid idea of where to start searching by the time Sue and Stacey returned. He took that as his cue to leave, and when he stepped out of the stormy night into the guesthouse, Dean was stockpiling a small Everest of blankets on the couch.
“Jesus, is your brother under there?” John couldn’t actually see if Sam was buried beneath.
“You’re supposed to feed a fever, right?” Dean threw his arms out. “That’s it. That’s every blanket in this stupid place.” He dusted his hands in frustration, as if his work was done.
“You wanna get his temperature down, not fry him like an egg.” John whipped a couple of the blankets back until he spied Sam’s flushed face. “How you doin’ in there, kiddo?”
“Now I’m hot,” he replied weakly.
“I put you in the shower, you gonna keel over on me?”
“Yes.”
John grabbed his upper arm, lifted. “No, you’re not. Come on. Up and at ‘em. We’re gonna cool you off.”
By the time he got Sam showered and into a pair of too-short sweatpants that had fit him six weeks ago, Dean was sprawled face down on the mattress in one of the bedrooms. John rapped the wall with his knuckles and sent a gruff goodnight through the door before he pulled it shut. He plied Sam with more ibuprofen, and settled him back on the couch. At the dining table, he set up shop to review the local maps.
You got a certain type of hearing when you had kids, and an extra special brand of it when you were a single parent. John couldn’t have said exactly what moved him down the hall half an hour later, except that he knew the arrhythmic sounds of his son sleeping, and he’d become suddenly aware he couldn’t hear any of them.
John could count on one hand the number of times he’d been glad Mary wasn’t around, but he was probably going to add this to the list. When he opened the bedroom door, Dean had Stacey on the dresser near the open window. Her legs were wrapped around his waist, and the curtain was twisting into the room on the icy night wind. Nobody had any clothes off yet, but it wasn’t for lack of Dean trying. Stacey was stuck to his neck like a leech, and Dean was so far gone, he tried to shrug off John’s hand when it first contacted his shoulder.
“Hey!” John clipped, and Dean’s brain snapped to.
They broke apart guiltily, and Dean’s hands didn’t know where to go first - the smeared lipstick on his mouth or the open button fly of his jeans.
“Jesus Christ, you’re bringin’ ‘em in the window now? Are you fuckin’ kidding me?”
Stacey’s hands went to her buttons, and John caught the smirk on her lips as she secured her shirt across a flash of lacy bra. He wanted to grab her by the arm and drag her forcibly out of the room, but he was one hundred percent certain he didn’t want to be accused of manhandling her.
He pointed a furious finger at Dean instead. “Do up your pants, and get into bed.”
Dean frowned at the apparent discord of that order.
John turned on Stacey. “Fix your shirt. You’re comin’ with me.”
He marched her across the verandah to the main house through a buffeting, howling wind. When Nicholas opened the door, John let him have it. “My kid’s eighteen, Nicholas. Remember eighteen?”
Nicholas clearly did. He reached out and yanked Stacey into the foyer like that shit might be contagious.
“I have to bring her back here again tonight, you can find someone else to deal with your dog problem.”
Then John about-faced and headed back into the wild night.
**********
Human misery must somewhere have a stop;
there is no wind that always blows a storm.
~ Euripides
Dean lasted all of an hour in the bedroom by himself, the novelty of solitude evidently short-lived. It wasn’t an arrangement either of them would tolerate under normal circumstances, but Dean was finding sleep easier to come by on the couch with his lap serving as Sam’s pillow. As far as family snapshots went, it wasn’t much - two passed-out kids on a borrowed couch, bathed in the light of a television that didn’t belong to them - but it held John’s gaze from his research awhile.
A knocking shifted his attention. John paused at the TV en route to the door, muted an enthusiastic weather reporter issuing the third tornado warning he’d heard since they crossed into Texas.
“We missed dessert in all the excitement with Sam.” Sue held up two plates of pie. “I know he probably doesn’t feel up to it, but I figured Dean might still be awake.”
John didn’t know if Nicholas knew she was there, and he hesitated to invite her across the threshold. A renewed gust of wind and rain blew under the porch awning, and John could see she was getting wet. He relented, stood back to let her pass.
“Oh,” she said, disappointed to find Dean asleep. “I’m too late.”
“Yeah, he’s crashed.” John took the plates and moved them to the kitchen counter. “But thank you. And don’t worry, it’s pie. He’ll hoover that up in the morning.”
“I wanted to apologize for Stacey. Your son’s very handsome and she’s…well, she’s a bit of a handful.”
“Yeah.” John rubbed the back of his neck, sniffed a laugh. “Well, not just her. They were pretty obvious at dinner. I shoulda kept a closer eye.”
“Us, too. How’s Sam?”
“He’s got a pretty nasty fever. At least he’s stopped puking.”
Sue crossed her arms and gave him an awkward, rueful smile. “The joys of parenthood. Somebody should warn you about all the vomit.”
“In cars,” John agreed, shaking his head, and Sue brought up a hand to cover her laughter.
“I’m sorry. I’m not laughing at you.”
“Yeah, you are. That’s because it’s not your classic ’67 Chevy.”
She nodded, but her lingering smile belied her forced composure. “I have a home remedy, this herbal stuff. You mix it in water. It always helps when Stacey has a fever.” She produced a zip lock bag from her pocket. “I know it looks like dope,” she added apologetically, “but it’s not, I swear. You can smell it if you want. Do you mind?”
She moved to Sam, and John did. He absolutely minded, because the way that woman bent beside his boys ripped anew something old and gaping across his ribs.
“No, go ahead,” he lied, his voice flinty. He busied himself filling a glass from the kitchen faucet and brought it to her.
“The way Pastor Jim tells it, you’re on the road a lot,” she said conversationally as she fixed the concoction.
“Yeah.”
“It must be very hard. Moving around all the time with these two.”
John shrugged. “The boys don’t really know any different.”
“I meant on you.”
Dean woke then, head snapping up, and his arm moved to shield Sam’s face.
“Huh,” he grunted, surprised by her proximity, and Sue touched his arm lightly.
“Sorry, it’s just me.”
Dean didn’t seem to find that very reassuring. His fist balled in Sam’s blankets and his groggy gaze asked a wordless question of John.
“It’s okay, Dean. Why don’t you just go to bed?”
“No, I’m okay here.”
“Is it morning?” Sam asked sleepily, stirring under the rugs, and Sue smiled down at his upturned face.
“Not yet, honey,” she said.
“Who’re you? Are we getting Dean now?” Sam wanted to know, rubbing at his lidded eyes and only half awake.
“You already did, you dumbass.” Dean flicked his ear. “I’m right here.”
“Don’t tell Dean I got sick.”
“Too late, yak boy. You puked all over the car, remember?”
“Dean, hit the hay,” John tried again. “You can’t sleep there all night.”
Dean’s expression seemed to suggest he could. He dealt Sue another wary look. “What are you doing here?” he asked tactlessly.
“I have some medicine for your brother. It’ll make him feel better.”
John gave Dean his last marching orders, before he could have anything to say about that. “Dean. Bed. Now.” The tone did the trick. Dean extracted himself reluctantly from his limp brother and headed for the hall. “Night, Mrs. Herbert.”
John narrowed his eyes as the boy passed. Sorry I groped your daughter, Mrs. Herbert.
“Night, Dean.” She watched him go, then smiled at John. “They seem very close.”
“Dean’s a little…territorial. Sorry.”
Sue helped Sam down the tonic, settled him back and pulled the blankets to his chin. “I think that’s sweet,” she decided.
John managed to stall the laugh in his throat. He didn’t intend to tell her, but the confession came of its own accord. “Yeah, he blew up a carport in Poughkeepsie last month. A week after the cops picked him up for D and D. I just got him back this morning from a month at a friend’s place, and that was supposed to be a straighten-up-and-fly-right, but about two hours ago, he was groping your daughter in that bedroom back there. So yeah, he’s a real sweetheart.”
Sue grimaced, but she didn’t seem very shocked to hear the latest highlights of Dean’s rap sheet. “It’s hard, isn’t it? Raising good kids?”
John didn’t know what to say to that. Tomorrow he’d leave a sick fourteen year old sweating on a stranger’s couch while he took his eldest tracking for a dangerous, unpredictable creature in unfamiliar terrain. And why? Because if he didn’t take Dean with him, the kid was almost certainly going to put his dick in Stacey Herbert. And right at this moment, that seemed worse than death by chupacabra.
’97 didn’t look set to bring in any Father of the Year awards. And while he was being honest, ’98 wasn’t looking any better. So yeah, he didn’t exactly feel qualified to answer that question.
“Anyway.” Sue moved to the door. “I should be getting back. Thank you for coming here and helping us.”
John nodded. “Well, don’t thank me yet. Job’s not done.”
She opened the door and a cold blast rushed the room. She stopped, fingers dragging a mess of blown blond from her face. “Sometimes I get a space to catch my breath, and the last seventeen years are like…I don’t know where I am or what hit me. You know?”
He saw it all there mirrored in her face; the fear and uncertainty and guilt and resignation and awe, and that rip in his chest widened with the sudden release of something shared.
**********
The wise man in the storm prays to God,
not for safety from danger,
but deliverance from fear.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
In the morning, the Impala smelled like the vomit had thrown up on itself. Nicholas knew a car detailer in town, and John was willing to part with every dollar of the five hundred he’d extracted from Victor Milo if the God-forsaken scent of Sam’s insides could be removed to the outside.
He spent an hour emptying the trunk into the front room of the guesthouse under a persistent spitting rain, and then followed Nicholas’ pick up into Jarrell, left the Impala with a guy named Bob for the day.
On the way back to the Herbert’s farm, the radio reported widespread tornado warnings for the area. John flicked a finger at the ancient stereo.
“You get those things often?”
“Tornadoes or warnings?”
“Both.”
“Tornadoes, no. Warnings, yeah. We get a few. I’m sure you noticed the weather’s been kinda hinky. It’s that time of year.”
John ducked his head, eyed off the grumbling sky through the windshield. A half-hearted rain spattered the glass. Compared to the previous night, the weather didn’t look too bad. It had that weird summer-storm feel about it, but he’d seen far more ominous skies.
“You ever seen one of those things?”
Nicholas scratched at his ear. “Me and Stacey stopped on the side of the road and watched one a few years back, when we were coming through Arkansas. It was only little, and we weren’t very close, but it was close enough, you know? Stacey was about twelve, and man, she thought that thing was the shit. Eyes lit up like a Christmas tree. Shoulda known then I had a firecracker on my hands.”
John let out a wry chuckle. “Yeah, I know that look.”
“Strikes fear into your very heart, doesn’t it? That look on your kid’s face?”
John gave the sky another apprehensive glance. “Among other things, yeah.”
**********
…air masses advance and clash and retreat like armies,
and then advance and clash again across
shifting fronts and flanking lines…
~ Mark Svenvold, Big Weather
Dean couldn’t shut up about Grant’s fucking clown story. The whole way out to the woods off County Road 305, the sky pissed down an uncomfortable drizzle and Dean went on about the freakin’ suit like he was walking on goddamn sunshine.
“You know, Toby was tellin’ this same story twenty-five years ago,” John interrupted, as they passed beneath the dimming influence of the treetop canopy, lost sight of the swirling storm clouds overhead. “Think the sonuvabitch mighta dug up some new material by now.” He pointed up into the trees. “We better keep an eye on this weather. Starts turning nasty, we move. They were handing out warnings on the radio this morning.”
“Those things are bullshit. They fart those puppies out the minute a cloud cops a half-spin.”
“Yeah, well, sometimes they’re right.”
“Three miles before anyone spotted him, Dad. In a goddamn clown suit.”
“Yeah, yeah.” John conceded. “Guy’s pretty good at what he does.”
“You ever do any shit like that?”
“Uh, no. Most of my tour I chose not to wear the clown suit.”
Dean sniffed a laugh, turned back to look at him, and John hit him in the hip with the butt of Remington. “Eyes up front, kiddo. Get your game on.”
They shut up and got stealthier, earned their first track a few minutes later, just as a peal of thunder sounded overhead. Dean bent to examine the prints across the path, clapped his binoculars to his face as he straightened again.
John stood back and let him scan the undergrowth. A moment later, Dean stopped statue-still, then lifted a fist over his shoulder, signaled an eyeball at two o’clock.
Chupacabras were unpleasant, hyena-gone-wrong sons of bitches who were mostly in need of serious cosmetic dentistry. When John took the offered binoculars and confirmed the sighting, he saw this one was conveniently carrying a calf in its jaws. If clapping eyes on the ugly bastard didn’t fit the rules for engagement, the hand in the cookie jar certainly did.
John held out the Remington.
“You wanna show me how it’s done, hotshot?”
Dean’s hand closed on the stock of the rifle, snatched it up. “Fuck, yes.”
“Can you tell me how far away that is?”
“Hundred yards,” Dean estimated, weapon against his cheek, and he probably wasn’t far off. He’d know for sure in a second, when he got the scope to do the work for him. “Ninety-eight,” he corrected.
John snorted. “Cakewalk. You can do that with your eyes closed. You got a line?”
He was still moving into place behind him to check the shot when Dean said, “Sending it,” exhaled, and pulled the trigger. The weapon punched Dean’s shoulder back and the load shaved a whistle through the damp brush. A split second later the foliage in the distance bowed and shook. John checked through the binoculars and found the felled target obscured. When he dropped the glasses to his chest Dean was already gone, loping through the undergrowth to confirm the kill.
John didn’t go after him. The sky had darkened, and the rain was getting heavier. He turned up his collar against the brisk wind and the drops seeking passage down the nape of his neck. He waited for Dean while an irrational irritation brewed and festered behind his brow.
A couple of minutes later the walkie-talkie at his hip crackled and Dean’s triumphant voice sounded over the airwaves.
“That is one dead chupacabra. I got that thing right in the neck.”
“Great. When you’re done chargin’ off and blowin’ your own horn, why don’t you get your ass over here so I can kick it back to Arkansas?”
For a moment there was no response.
“Uh, gee, as inviting as that sounds…I got some more movement east of you. Hang on.”
John lifted the binoculars again, scanned the brush to the east. He nearly broke his teeth getting the walkie-talkie back to his mouth.
“Dean, stand down. Client in the killzone. Repeat, that is our client in the killzone.”
“No fucking shit,” Dean returned wildly over the radio. “I just nearly blew his head off.”
“Well, don’t.”
“I’m not.”
“Good.”
Nicholas Herbert was crashing through the trees like a man possessed, pointing at the sky.
“Tornado!” he shouted. “There’s a tornado coming!”
**********
Safety first has been the motto of the human race for
half a million years; but it has never been the motto
of leaders. A leader must face danger. He must take
the risk and the blame, and the brunt of the storm.
~ Herbert Casson
He was aware of the dull roar now, but John didn’t get a visual until they broke cover from the trees at the south-west end of Herbert’s property. He confirmed Dean was on his way, via the crash and whip of the foliage behind him, and then looked up. John had seen a tornado before. Wispy looking pencil-thin thing, weaving down from the sky to the ground in the distance.
He was completely unprepared for the magnitude of the lazy, listing V-shaped funnel visible over the treetops. It took up almost his entire field of view, charcoal dark against the relief of the lighter horizon behind it. A ticker-tape parade’s worth of black confetti swirled around its outer shell - debris from the hapless landmarks already caught in its path.
It looked damn near like the end of the world.
Dean exploded out of the woods, rifle raised to keep it from the damp undergrowth, and he made the mistake of twisting back to follow John’s line of sight. His eyes widened and his feet forgot what they were doing. His boots stilled and he kept going, hit the deck with a slap and the rifle spun out of his hands.
He rolled, came up on his elbows, heels digging for purchase, but the sight in the sky stalled him again. His ass dropped back to earth. The rain turned on a sudden, fleeting pelt, then eased. Dean’s eyes fluttered against the precipitation and a deceptively mild gust of wind shifted his fringe.
“Hoooooly…”
“Move.” The word came out of John low and panicked, completely unlike his normal voice. He closed an iron grip on Dean’s upper arm, hauled him to his feet like the last fourteen years had never happened and sent the order directly into his face. “Get to the house as fast as you can. Don’t look back. Now, Dean. Go.”
He sent him towards the boundary fence with a shove. Nicholas had fled, and as John ran he caught a shuddering view of him tripping through the four strand, struggling up on the other side.
Dean took the path of least resistance, clapped a hand on an upright and vaulted clean over the top, hit the ground at a dead run on the other side. John followed his lead. They were halfway up the last paddock to the house when John felt the air pressure drop like a stone, and the oxygen sucked out of his lungs like God had decided Texas could do with a vacuum. Someone dropped a throw-rug over the sun, and the freight train roar of the wind rose. There was a sharp popping sound that might have been the Remington, and a violent punch of wind, the first with any real power he’d felt, knocked John three steps sideways mid-sprint. He was struck with a terrible prescience.
That’s a first kiss.
A few steps ahead of him, Dean forgot his instructions and glanced over his shoulder. He flung himself forward with renewed purpose, chin tucked down, arms like pistons.
John knew he shouldn’t look back. Knew it was mistake to look back.
The dirt behind them was rising like a transparent sheet above the ground. The whip and sting of the particle-filled air began to burn the exposed skin on John’s face and arms.
“Go!Go!Go!GO!” he bellowed, but he couldn’t hear his own voice above the deafening roar.
The three of them hit the back porch shoulder to shoulder, slammed against the front wall of the house. Nicholas wrenched open the door and they clambered inside.
Dean pressed his awed face to the window pane beside the door, and John saw the flare of lightning reflected against his cheeks as he yanked his son back from the glass.
“Get away from there!”
“Where’s Sam?” Dean shouted back, and Nicholas shook his head.
“He’s with my wife. Yard cellar.”
Dean made a move to the door and Nicholas chopped a hand down in front of him, shook his head. “We won’t make it.” He pointed down the hall. “Closet. Under the stairs.”
Debris began to slap against the house.
Thunk! Thunkthunk! Thunkthunkthunk!
John felt his head go light, his mouth tang with the distillate of old fear. Sam. Mary, forgive me.
Dean was in one place and his brother was in the other, and John could see from his face he wasn’t having that. Dean planted both palms against Nicholas’s chest and pushed him violently clear. John had to get his arms around the boy from behind, pick him up and deposit him facing the other way.
Above their heads, he heard the wind making a discordant xylophonic run down the scales of the roof, the tiles peeling off.
“Under the stairs,” Nicholas shouted. “Closet!”
“Sam!” Dean screamed, made another play for the door, and John was wrestling him back when the windows exploded and the front of the house bowed in like a bomb had gone off. A claymore of debris showered the foyer, sent a rogue javelin of wood spearing into the wall behind them. Something big and solid glanced off John’s shoulder, caught Dean in the face, and sent them both to the ground.
When John struggled up, Dean didn’t. John rolled him, saw his face bloody, nose crinkled in stunned confusion. Nicholas hauled on John’s collar.
“Stairs!”
John didn’t try to get Dean on his feet. He stayed low and dragged him haphazardly down the hall over the showered glass. Visibility was shot to hell, the entire house a maelstrom of stinging sand and wreckage. John didn’t know if he was pointing east or west or up or down, but he knew he had a hold of Dean, and he was getting the both of them into that closet. The last thing John saw before Nicholas closed the door behind them was the hallway wall curving like the inside pipe of a wave, and the house lit up with two bright blue flashes. Then there was darkness, and roaring, and the booming crack and pop of electricity loosed from its confines.
John bundled Dean into the furthest corner of the closet, pulled him into a ball he could flatten against the floor with his body. He wrapped his arms around Dean’s chest and pressed his face into the muddy, coppery smell of his son’s neck. Dean was starting to come to his senses and John felt, more than heard, the desolate realization rising inside his ribcage.
They didn’t have Sam.
“Sam!” Dean screamed, his voice lost in the jet engine whine of the world coming apart.
The closet wasn’t going to hold. John tightened his embrace until he didn’t know how Dean’s chest could heave again.
“Sam!”
Mary, forgive me.
***********************************************************************************
You can run on for a long time
Run on for a long time
Run on for a long time
Sooner or later God’ll cut you down
Sooner or later God’ll cut you down.
~ Johnny Cash
John woke with empty arms.
There was mud in his mouth, and a chill wind flapped his wet shirt against his stomach. He rolled, shuddering with a bone-deep ache of cold, and rode the stab and flare of his battered, pummeled body to his feet.
The house was gone.
In its place a hundred yard stretch of sticks and rubble remained. When he looked to the east, he saw the long, narrow rope of the dissipating tornado departing upward - a harmless wisp of smoke against someone else’s sky.
He found Dean near a felled tree, its exposed root system testament to the twister’s force. He was bloody and mud-caked and disheveled, shirt hanging off his shoulder, and John could tell from the way he was standing he’d taken a hell of a hammering. Left boot was gone, too, but the boy was upright. John stumbled in relief over the detritus of the house, an entire two story building reduced to matchsticks beneath his feet.
We should be dead. We should all be dead.
“Dean!”
Dean didn’t respond, and when John closed hands on his son’s shoulders and bodily turned him, he saw blood tracking from both ears and understood why. The kid had that brutalized look you didn’t see much outside of warzones, and it made John’s throat tight and his heart thud staccato in his chest. His hands ran a frantic course over Dean’s torso in search of wounds the shredded clothes might be hiding. Dean submitted to the inspection loosely, let John’s hands move him while his eyes flicked dully back to the ground.
“Oh, no,” John uttered, when he saw what held Dean’s attention. “Jesus Christ.”
Nicholas was lying twisted and broken on the ground, one arm missing and eyes staring dead and cold into the clearing sky.
John clapped his hands to Dean’s cheeks and physically moved his gaze from the body. “Dean, look at me. You okay?” He shook him when Dean stared blankly. “Watch my lips: are you okay?”
Dean blinked, and the whisper of a frown creased his brow. He looked across the strewn remains of the property and his mouth worked on the word until his ruined voice caught up. “Sam.”
They found the cellar entrance beneath the splintered skeleton of a curios cabinet John couldn’t remember seeing in the Herbert’s house. He discovered three of his fingers were broken while shifting the mangled wood from the trapdoor. There was something wrong with his back. When he bent to haul the cellar open, the pain sent him to one knee. Dean picked up the slack, and between the two of them they got the twisted panels pried apart. A shaft of daylight spilled down the stone steps.
“Sam!” John bellowed into the shadows.
“Sammy!” Dean echoed, his voice a raw and desperate appeal.
John waited - heart stilled in his chest - until Sam’s frantic voice came back at him like permission to live.
“Dean?”
**********
Pray send me some storms.
~ Mary Maclane, 1902
The cellar had done its job admirably - neither Sam nor the girls had a scratch on them. Stacey wouldn’t set foot outside the safety of the rabbit hole, and standing aboveground with the wind still whipping desolately over the devastation, John couldn’t really blame her.
They hadn’t all fared so well.
He’d only just convinced a distraught Sue Herbert she really didn’t need to see her husband’s body, when Sam let out a shout.
Dean - the one who was with John, the one he’d had hold of - was on his back in the grass, and Sam was losing his shit in a spine-jangling, hysterical way that redlined every single one of John’s parental gauges.
“Dad! DAD!”
They didn’t have any phones. John’s cell had been in his jacket, but which state that had landed in was now anyone’s guess. He’d had it powered off while they were hunting, but if anyone ever found it and turned it on, they’d also discover the three missed calls Sue said Nicholas had attempted before he’d made the ultimately fatal decision to head out and physically bring them home.
That could keep John awake nights later. Right then he had bigger things to worry about, like making sure Nicholas Herbert stayed the only dead body on that property.
It was a long time before anyone found them. At least, it felt that way to John, kneeling in the wet grass with a grieving widow and her shocked-silent kid, trying to keep his son off the list of fatalities.
At the overloaded hospital in Georgetown, they removed a six-inch chunk of the house from John’s back, straightened out his fingers, and put forty-eight stitches in a scattering of lacerations over his face, chest and arms. They didn’t have any free beds, and John couldn’t have been persuaded to get on one if they had. Instead, they gave him a plastic chair next to Sam’s in the crowded ER, where they waited for Dean to get out of surgery.
He’d punctured a lung and perforated both his eardrums. The doctors closed his collection of cuts with sixty-four stitches, and later that would mean he’d won. John would let him have that, because it looked like the poor son of a bitch was going to be stone deaf for a while.
They left town ten days later beneath a dawn sky as bruised and raw as Jarrell. The paper on the table in the breakfast diner was still telling it stark and plain: 27 DEAD IN TERROR TORNADO. John had departed a lot of locales in a lot of different types of hurry, but he couldn’t remember ever being so glad to leave a place that wasn’t under direct enemy fire.
He wrapped his taped fingers around his coffee mug and watched Dean not hear a word his brother was saying to him. Sam was still spouting off about how his puke had saved the Impala, and how they should all be thanking him for the fact the car was at the spared car detailer’s and not in the Herbert’s driveway when the tornado hit. But he kept forgetting you had to wave a hand or something, get Dean’s attention before you started speaking. In a second, he was gonna realize, and then get pissy at John about it.
Dean was doodling an M-24 on his napkin with the pen he’d lifted from the waitress when she bent to take John’s menu. To his left, she was behind the counter discovering it was missing, hands patting first on her apron and then going to her ponytail in search of it.
John reached across the table and relieved Dean of the ballpoint, whistled to the waitress and held it up.
“Did I drop that?” she asked as she came over, and John shook his head.
“No, my son stole it when you leaned over him. You’re lucky that’s all he did.”
He watched her depart, and when he returned his gaze to Dean, the boy was already casting eyes around the table, looking for something else to loot.
John settled the tab, and on the way back to I-35, the weather report told him there were severe weather warnings current for both Temple and Round Rock. He let the car cruise to a stop on the shoulder, watched the two storm systems darkening the skies at either end of the horizon. If he had to guess between the two roiling bookends, he’d have said the one to the North looked a little worse. A flash of mute, distant lightning seemed to support the case. John ducked his chin and squinted up at the relatively clear sky above them. Waited for some internal needle to point.
He had a sudden recollection of Sue standing in the doorway of the guest house, her windblown hair covering her eyes.
Sometimes I get a space to catch my breath...
Dean followed his gaze, frowned. “What are you waiting for?” he said too loudly, the way he was saying everything without the guidance of external feedback.
John sniffed, dragged a hand down the wheel and touched the gas to put them back on the blacktop, head them North toward Temple.
“Nothin’.”
.
Author: pdragon76
Rating: PG-13 (sailor-mouths, tornadoes, horny toads)
Genre: Gen
Characters: John, Dean, Sam
Spoilers: Pre-series, circa summer '97
Disclaimer: It’s Kripke’s world, we’re all just living in it. *snaps fingers, points*
Summary: It’s been said that roots and wings are the only two lasting bequests you can give your kids, but sometimes all you’ve got is guns and how to use ‘em.
A/N#1: This fic was commissioned for Sweet Charity by the incredibly generous harleyjames, who put the prompts to a poll and ended up with this. I sure hope you like it, babe. Beta’d by the applause-worthy graduate
july_july_julyand the ever dazzling ultraviolet9a. Gorgeous JDub icon by the ethereal smilla02
A/N#2: Those unfamiliar with the street rules of Bloody Knuckles may brush up here.
Back to Part I
The trouble with weather forecasting is that it's right
too often for us to ignore it and wrong
too often for us to rely on it.
~ Patrick Young
Stacey Herbert was going to be a problem. John should have asked about her age, because what the hell was he thinking, bringing Dean into a house with a seventeen year old bombshell? The kid had just spent four weeks with his right hand.
He kicked at Dean’s shoe under the table a third time, and the boy’s eyes started sheepishly off her cleavage back to his plate. He looked from his knife to his fork like he’d clean forgotten what they were for, and then set about his steak again. To give him credit, the girl’s tits were busting so far out of her top, even Sam was making a fulltime job of looking everywhere but. And he was so sick he could hardly keep his forehead off the tablecloth.
Stacey wasn’t helping. She’d been stuck on Dean like glue since they came through the door, all coquettish smiles and sparkle-eyes and laying hands on him every chance she got.
Down the end of the table, Nicholas Herbert sat beside his pretty blond wife looking like a man who’d let a pack of wild dogs inside his house.
“This is a lovely meal,” John told Sue. It was an awkward nod at normalcy, but she smiled and wiped her mouth on her napkin, returned it to her lap.
“You’re very welcome. It’s the least we can do. I’m sorry we can’t offer you anything in the way of payment.”
“Roof and a good home-cooked meal goes a long way. This is fine.”
Dean had forgotten to eat again. John tapped his knife on the edge of his plate, got the boy’s attention and motioned to his food. Dean gave him a helpless, lost look like he didn’t have enough blood going to his brain to be interpreting hand signals.
Eat your food, John mouthed at him, face a slab of granite.
Dean dutifully sawed off a piece of steak and jammed it between his teeth. He seemed to have selected the salt shaker as an alternate point of focus, which was a sound idea as long as Stacey didn’t ask him to pass it.
“So, did the spray work?” Nicholas asked John politely, and John felt his face redden for a second time.
“Uh, no. Not really. Listen, I gotta apologize again for my behavior at the gas station. It’s been a long day, and I saw your name badge there but… I just didn’t make the connection. Jim said you were a farming family.”
Nicholas cleared his throat. “Well, mostly we are. We’ve been hit pretty hard the last couple of years. I do a shift three times a week at the gas station, just for some extra cash. Helps with incidentals. And hopefully, Stacey’ll be away to college soon…we try and put a bit away. It all counts.”
“Sure.”
“What’re you gonna study?” Dean asked Stacey in a rush, mouth full of steak and eyes studiously on the condiments.
She plucked some invisible strings in the air. “Music. I play guitar.”
“Yeah?” Dean’s gaze slipped off the salt shaker, managed to find her face at least. He gave her a lopsided grin. “Cool.”
“Do you play?” She leaned into his attention.
Dean shook his head. “Nah.”
“What are you good at?”
John almost choked on his steak. Oh, good God.
“Guns,” Dean told her, without a shred of hesitation. “I’m good at guns.” His elbow hit the table and John kicked his boot again until it came off.
When he risked a glance at Nicholas, the poor man was the color of his ivory napkin.
“Can I be excused?” Sam asked suddenly, sounding breathless and strange. He pushed back his chair and rose unsteadily to his feet.
John started to rise, too, because he could see the kid was going down. He wasn’t getting there in time, so he snapped his fingers at Dean.
“Dean, grab your-”
Dean whirled from Stacey as Sam buckled, caught him awkwardly when he slumped against the chair. “Whoa.” He grimaced, looked to John as his grip began to slip. “Dad?”
John high-tailed it around the table to where Sue was already out of her chair, but Dean wasn’t having any of her help.
“I got him, I got him,” he told her, crowded her out with his body as he shifted to deposit Sam on the floor against the wall.
“I don’t feel very good,” John heard Sam say thinly as he crouched beside Dean.
“You don’t look very good,” Dean said bluntly.
“Maybe now’s a good time to show you to the guest rooms.” Sue suggested. “He can lay down there.”
Sue and Stacey helped Dean carry Sam out the front door and across the porch to the guest quarters on the western wing of the house. John stayed at the table with Nicholas.
“I need to get up to speed on what’s been going on around your property.”
Nicholas waved him off. “Your son’s sick, we can-”
“Sam’s fine. Like I said, it’s been a long day. He just needs some rest.”
The man’s mouth dropped open in horror. “If that were my son? I’d be thinking about a trip to the ER right now.”
“He’s not your son.”
Nicholas stop-started over a perplexed response, and John held up a hand to silence him.
“With all due respect, Nicholas, I’m doing this job as a favor to a friend, and yeah, that means I don’t get paid. My priority here is to get your problem cleaned up ASAP so I can go find a job that does pay. And I appreciate your concern, but my boys are tough kids and they know the score. So, why don’t you forget about Sam and start talkin’ to me about what’s goin’ on.”
Nicholas’ gaze fell from John’s bruised face to his forearm, where the bandage poked out beneath his upturned sleeve. “You’re not in pest control, are you?”
John shook his head. “No. I’m not.”
“You don’t think I have a wild dog on my property.”
“No. I don’t.”
“But you know what it is.”
“I’ve got an idea, yeah.”
“And you can get rid of it?”
“If you’re straight with me? Yeah, I can.”
Nicholas leaned forward in his chair, and his face crumpled in repulsion. “I saw it,” he whispered. His hands began to shake on the tablecloth. “That thing…” he said, eyes flitted toward the window, “that thing is no dog.”
Based on the sightings, John had a solid idea of where to start searching by the time Sue and Stacey returned. He took that as his cue to leave, and when he stepped out of the stormy night into the guesthouse, Dean was stockpiling a small Everest of blankets on the couch.
“Jesus, is your brother under there?” John couldn’t actually see if Sam was buried beneath.
“You’re supposed to feed a fever, right?” Dean threw his arms out. “That’s it. That’s every blanket in this stupid place.” He dusted his hands in frustration, as if his work was done.
“You wanna get his temperature down, not fry him like an egg.” John whipped a couple of the blankets back until he spied Sam’s flushed face. “How you doin’ in there, kiddo?”
“Now I’m hot,” he replied weakly.
“I put you in the shower, you gonna keel over on me?”
“Yes.”
John grabbed his upper arm, lifted. “No, you’re not. Come on. Up and at ‘em. We’re gonna cool you off.”
By the time he got Sam showered and into a pair of too-short sweatpants that had fit him six weeks ago, Dean was sprawled face down on the mattress in one of the bedrooms. John rapped the wall with his knuckles and sent a gruff goodnight through the door before he pulled it shut. He plied Sam with more ibuprofen, and settled him back on the couch. At the dining table, he set up shop to review the local maps.
You got a certain type of hearing when you had kids, and an extra special brand of it when you were a single parent. John couldn’t have said exactly what moved him down the hall half an hour later, except that he knew the arrhythmic sounds of his son sleeping, and he’d become suddenly aware he couldn’t hear any of them.
John could count on one hand the number of times he’d been glad Mary wasn’t around, but he was probably going to add this to the list. When he opened the bedroom door, Dean had Stacey on the dresser near the open window. Her legs were wrapped around his waist, and the curtain was twisting into the room on the icy night wind. Nobody had any clothes off yet, but it wasn’t for lack of Dean trying. Stacey was stuck to his neck like a leech, and Dean was so far gone, he tried to shrug off John’s hand when it first contacted his shoulder.
“Hey!” John clipped, and Dean’s brain snapped to.
They broke apart guiltily, and Dean’s hands didn’t know where to go first - the smeared lipstick on his mouth or the open button fly of his jeans.
“Jesus Christ, you’re bringin’ ‘em in the window now? Are you fuckin’ kidding me?”
Stacey’s hands went to her buttons, and John caught the smirk on her lips as she secured her shirt across a flash of lacy bra. He wanted to grab her by the arm and drag her forcibly out of the room, but he was one hundred percent certain he didn’t want to be accused of manhandling her.
He pointed a furious finger at Dean instead. “Do up your pants, and get into bed.”
Dean frowned at the apparent discord of that order.
John turned on Stacey. “Fix your shirt. You’re comin’ with me.”
He marched her across the verandah to the main house through a buffeting, howling wind. When Nicholas opened the door, John let him have it. “My kid’s eighteen, Nicholas. Remember eighteen?”
Nicholas clearly did. He reached out and yanked Stacey into the foyer like that shit might be contagious.
“I have to bring her back here again tonight, you can find someone else to deal with your dog problem.”
Then John about-faced and headed back into the wild night.
**********
Human misery must somewhere have a stop;
there is no wind that always blows a storm.
~ Euripides
Dean lasted all of an hour in the bedroom by himself, the novelty of solitude evidently short-lived. It wasn’t an arrangement either of them would tolerate under normal circumstances, but Dean was finding sleep easier to come by on the couch with his lap serving as Sam’s pillow. As far as family snapshots went, it wasn’t much - two passed-out kids on a borrowed couch, bathed in the light of a television that didn’t belong to them - but it held John’s gaze from his research awhile.
A knocking shifted his attention. John paused at the TV en route to the door, muted an enthusiastic weather reporter issuing the third tornado warning he’d heard since they crossed into Texas.
“We missed dessert in all the excitement with Sam.” Sue held up two plates of pie. “I know he probably doesn’t feel up to it, but I figured Dean might still be awake.”
John didn’t know if Nicholas knew she was there, and he hesitated to invite her across the threshold. A renewed gust of wind and rain blew under the porch awning, and John could see she was getting wet. He relented, stood back to let her pass.
“Oh,” she said, disappointed to find Dean asleep. “I’m too late.”
“Yeah, he’s crashed.” John took the plates and moved them to the kitchen counter. “But thank you. And don’t worry, it’s pie. He’ll hoover that up in the morning.”
“I wanted to apologize for Stacey. Your son’s very handsome and she’s…well, she’s a bit of a handful.”
“Yeah.” John rubbed the back of his neck, sniffed a laugh. “Well, not just her. They were pretty obvious at dinner. I shoulda kept a closer eye.”
“Us, too. How’s Sam?”
“He’s got a pretty nasty fever. At least he’s stopped puking.”
Sue crossed her arms and gave him an awkward, rueful smile. “The joys of parenthood. Somebody should warn you about all the vomit.”
“In cars,” John agreed, shaking his head, and Sue brought up a hand to cover her laughter.
“I’m sorry. I’m not laughing at you.”
“Yeah, you are. That’s because it’s not your classic ’67 Chevy.”
She nodded, but her lingering smile belied her forced composure. “I have a home remedy, this herbal stuff. You mix it in water. It always helps when Stacey has a fever.” She produced a zip lock bag from her pocket. “I know it looks like dope,” she added apologetically, “but it’s not, I swear. You can smell it if you want. Do you mind?”
She moved to Sam, and John did. He absolutely minded, because the way that woman bent beside his boys ripped anew something old and gaping across his ribs.
“No, go ahead,” he lied, his voice flinty. He busied himself filling a glass from the kitchen faucet and brought it to her.
“The way Pastor Jim tells it, you’re on the road a lot,” she said conversationally as she fixed the concoction.
“Yeah.”
“It must be very hard. Moving around all the time with these two.”
John shrugged. “The boys don’t really know any different.”
“I meant on you.”
Dean woke then, head snapping up, and his arm moved to shield Sam’s face.
“Huh,” he grunted, surprised by her proximity, and Sue touched his arm lightly.
“Sorry, it’s just me.”
Dean didn’t seem to find that very reassuring. His fist balled in Sam’s blankets and his groggy gaze asked a wordless question of John.
“It’s okay, Dean. Why don’t you just go to bed?”
“No, I’m okay here.”
“Is it morning?” Sam asked sleepily, stirring under the rugs, and Sue smiled down at his upturned face.
“Not yet, honey,” she said.
“Who’re you? Are we getting Dean now?” Sam wanted to know, rubbing at his lidded eyes and only half awake.
“You already did, you dumbass.” Dean flicked his ear. “I’m right here.”
“Don’t tell Dean I got sick.”
“Too late, yak boy. You puked all over the car, remember?”
“Dean, hit the hay,” John tried again. “You can’t sleep there all night.”
Dean’s expression seemed to suggest he could. He dealt Sue another wary look. “What are you doing here?” he asked tactlessly.
“I have some medicine for your brother. It’ll make him feel better.”
John gave Dean his last marching orders, before he could have anything to say about that. “Dean. Bed. Now.” The tone did the trick. Dean extracted himself reluctantly from his limp brother and headed for the hall. “Night, Mrs. Herbert.”
John narrowed his eyes as the boy passed. Sorry I groped your daughter, Mrs. Herbert.
“Night, Dean.” She watched him go, then smiled at John. “They seem very close.”
“Dean’s a little…territorial. Sorry.”
Sue helped Sam down the tonic, settled him back and pulled the blankets to his chin. “I think that’s sweet,” she decided.
John managed to stall the laugh in his throat. He didn’t intend to tell her, but the confession came of its own accord. “Yeah, he blew up a carport in Poughkeepsie last month. A week after the cops picked him up for D and D. I just got him back this morning from a month at a friend’s place, and that was supposed to be a straighten-up-and-fly-right, but about two hours ago, he was groping your daughter in that bedroom back there. So yeah, he’s a real sweetheart.”
Sue grimaced, but she didn’t seem very shocked to hear the latest highlights of Dean’s rap sheet. “It’s hard, isn’t it? Raising good kids?”
John didn’t know what to say to that. Tomorrow he’d leave a sick fourteen year old sweating on a stranger’s couch while he took his eldest tracking for a dangerous, unpredictable creature in unfamiliar terrain. And why? Because if he didn’t take Dean with him, the kid was almost certainly going to put his dick in Stacey Herbert. And right at this moment, that seemed worse than death by chupacabra.
’97 didn’t look set to bring in any Father of the Year awards. And while he was being honest, ’98 wasn’t looking any better. So yeah, he didn’t exactly feel qualified to answer that question.
“Anyway.” Sue moved to the door. “I should be getting back. Thank you for coming here and helping us.”
John nodded. “Well, don’t thank me yet. Job’s not done.”
She opened the door and a cold blast rushed the room. She stopped, fingers dragging a mess of blown blond from her face. “Sometimes I get a space to catch my breath, and the last seventeen years are like…I don’t know where I am or what hit me. You know?”
He saw it all there mirrored in her face; the fear and uncertainty and guilt and resignation and awe, and that rip in his chest widened with the sudden release of something shared.
**********
The wise man in the storm prays to God,
not for safety from danger,
but deliverance from fear.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
In the morning, the Impala smelled like the vomit had thrown up on itself. Nicholas knew a car detailer in town, and John was willing to part with every dollar of the five hundred he’d extracted from Victor Milo if the God-forsaken scent of Sam’s insides could be removed to the outside.
He spent an hour emptying the trunk into the front room of the guesthouse under a persistent spitting rain, and then followed Nicholas’ pick up into Jarrell, left the Impala with a guy named Bob for the day.
On the way back to the Herbert’s farm, the radio reported widespread tornado warnings for the area. John flicked a finger at the ancient stereo.
“You get those things often?”
“Tornadoes or warnings?”
“Both.”
“Tornadoes, no. Warnings, yeah. We get a few. I’m sure you noticed the weather’s been kinda hinky. It’s that time of year.”
John ducked his head, eyed off the grumbling sky through the windshield. A half-hearted rain spattered the glass. Compared to the previous night, the weather didn’t look too bad. It had that weird summer-storm feel about it, but he’d seen far more ominous skies.
“You ever seen one of those things?”
Nicholas scratched at his ear. “Me and Stacey stopped on the side of the road and watched one a few years back, when we were coming through Arkansas. It was only little, and we weren’t very close, but it was close enough, you know? Stacey was about twelve, and man, she thought that thing was the shit. Eyes lit up like a Christmas tree. Shoulda known then I had a firecracker on my hands.”
John let out a wry chuckle. “Yeah, I know that look.”
“Strikes fear into your very heart, doesn’t it? That look on your kid’s face?”
John gave the sky another apprehensive glance. “Among other things, yeah.”
**********
…air masses advance and clash and retreat like armies,
and then advance and clash again across
shifting fronts and flanking lines…
~ Mark Svenvold, Big Weather
Dean couldn’t shut up about Grant’s fucking clown story. The whole way out to the woods off County Road 305, the sky pissed down an uncomfortable drizzle and Dean went on about the freakin’ suit like he was walking on goddamn sunshine.
“You know, Toby was tellin’ this same story twenty-five years ago,” John interrupted, as they passed beneath the dimming influence of the treetop canopy, lost sight of the swirling storm clouds overhead. “Think the sonuvabitch mighta dug up some new material by now.” He pointed up into the trees. “We better keep an eye on this weather. Starts turning nasty, we move. They were handing out warnings on the radio this morning.”
“Those things are bullshit. They fart those puppies out the minute a cloud cops a half-spin.”
“Yeah, well, sometimes they’re right.”
“Three miles before anyone spotted him, Dad. In a goddamn clown suit.”
“Yeah, yeah.” John conceded. “Guy’s pretty good at what he does.”
“You ever do any shit like that?”
“Uh, no. Most of my tour I chose not to wear the clown suit.”
Dean sniffed a laugh, turned back to look at him, and John hit him in the hip with the butt of Remington. “Eyes up front, kiddo. Get your game on.”
They shut up and got stealthier, earned their first track a few minutes later, just as a peal of thunder sounded overhead. Dean bent to examine the prints across the path, clapped his binoculars to his face as he straightened again.
John stood back and let him scan the undergrowth. A moment later, Dean stopped statue-still, then lifted a fist over his shoulder, signaled an eyeball at two o’clock.
Chupacabras were unpleasant, hyena-gone-wrong sons of bitches who were mostly in need of serious cosmetic dentistry. When John took the offered binoculars and confirmed the sighting, he saw this one was conveniently carrying a calf in its jaws. If clapping eyes on the ugly bastard didn’t fit the rules for engagement, the hand in the cookie jar certainly did.
John held out the Remington.
“You wanna show me how it’s done, hotshot?”
Dean’s hand closed on the stock of the rifle, snatched it up. “Fuck, yes.”
“Can you tell me how far away that is?”
“Hundred yards,” Dean estimated, weapon against his cheek, and he probably wasn’t far off. He’d know for sure in a second, when he got the scope to do the work for him. “Ninety-eight,” he corrected.
John snorted. “Cakewalk. You can do that with your eyes closed. You got a line?”
He was still moving into place behind him to check the shot when Dean said, “Sending it,” exhaled, and pulled the trigger. The weapon punched Dean’s shoulder back and the load shaved a whistle through the damp brush. A split second later the foliage in the distance bowed and shook. John checked through the binoculars and found the felled target obscured. When he dropped the glasses to his chest Dean was already gone, loping through the undergrowth to confirm the kill.
John didn’t go after him. The sky had darkened, and the rain was getting heavier. He turned up his collar against the brisk wind and the drops seeking passage down the nape of his neck. He waited for Dean while an irrational irritation brewed and festered behind his brow.
A couple of minutes later the walkie-talkie at his hip crackled and Dean’s triumphant voice sounded over the airwaves.
“That is one dead chupacabra. I got that thing right in the neck.”
“Great. When you’re done chargin’ off and blowin’ your own horn, why don’t you get your ass over here so I can kick it back to Arkansas?”
For a moment there was no response.
“Uh, gee, as inviting as that sounds…I got some more movement east of you. Hang on.”
John lifted the binoculars again, scanned the brush to the east. He nearly broke his teeth getting the walkie-talkie back to his mouth.
“Dean, stand down. Client in the killzone. Repeat, that is our client in the killzone.”
“No fucking shit,” Dean returned wildly over the radio. “I just nearly blew his head off.”
“Well, don’t.”
“I’m not.”
“Good.”
Nicholas Herbert was crashing through the trees like a man possessed, pointing at the sky.
“Tornado!” he shouted. “There’s a tornado coming!”
**********
Safety first has been the motto of the human race for
half a million years; but it has never been the motto
of leaders. A leader must face danger. He must take
the risk and the blame, and the brunt of the storm.
~ Herbert Casson
He was aware of the dull roar now, but John didn’t get a visual until they broke cover from the trees at the south-west end of Herbert’s property. He confirmed Dean was on his way, via the crash and whip of the foliage behind him, and then looked up. John had seen a tornado before. Wispy looking pencil-thin thing, weaving down from the sky to the ground in the distance.
He was completely unprepared for the magnitude of the lazy, listing V-shaped funnel visible over the treetops. It took up almost his entire field of view, charcoal dark against the relief of the lighter horizon behind it. A ticker-tape parade’s worth of black confetti swirled around its outer shell - debris from the hapless landmarks already caught in its path.
It looked damn near like the end of the world.
Dean exploded out of the woods, rifle raised to keep it from the damp undergrowth, and he made the mistake of twisting back to follow John’s line of sight. His eyes widened and his feet forgot what they were doing. His boots stilled and he kept going, hit the deck with a slap and the rifle spun out of his hands.
He rolled, came up on his elbows, heels digging for purchase, but the sight in the sky stalled him again. His ass dropped back to earth. The rain turned on a sudden, fleeting pelt, then eased. Dean’s eyes fluttered against the precipitation and a deceptively mild gust of wind shifted his fringe.
“Hoooooly…”
“Move.” The word came out of John low and panicked, completely unlike his normal voice. He closed an iron grip on Dean’s upper arm, hauled him to his feet like the last fourteen years had never happened and sent the order directly into his face. “Get to the house as fast as you can. Don’t look back. Now, Dean. Go.”
He sent him towards the boundary fence with a shove. Nicholas had fled, and as John ran he caught a shuddering view of him tripping through the four strand, struggling up on the other side.
Dean took the path of least resistance, clapped a hand on an upright and vaulted clean over the top, hit the ground at a dead run on the other side. John followed his lead. They were halfway up the last paddock to the house when John felt the air pressure drop like a stone, and the oxygen sucked out of his lungs like God had decided Texas could do with a vacuum. Someone dropped a throw-rug over the sun, and the freight train roar of the wind rose. There was a sharp popping sound that might have been the Remington, and a violent punch of wind, the first with any real power he’d felt, knocked John three steps sideways mid-sprint. He was struck with a terrible prescience.
That’s a first kiss.
A few steps ahead of him, Dean forgot his instructions and glanced over his shoulder. He flung himself forward with renewed purpose, chin tucked down, arms like pistons.
John knew he shouldn’t look back. Knew it was mistake to look back.
The dirt behind them was rising like a transparent sheet above the ground. The whip and sting of the particle-filled air began to burn the exposed skin on John’s face and arms.
“Go!Go!Go!GO!” he bellowed, but he couldn’t hear his own voice above the deafening roar.
The three of them hit the back porch shoulder to shoulder, slammed against the front wall of the house. Nicholas wrenched open the door and they clambered inside.
Dean pressed his awed face to the window pane beside the door, and John saw the flare of lightning reflected against his cheeks as he yanked his son back from the glass.
“Get away from there!”
“Where’s Sam?” Dean shouted back, and Nicholas shook his head.
“He’s with my wife. Yard cellar.”
Dean made a move to the door and Nicholas chopped a hand down in front of him, shook his head. “We won’t make it.” He pointed down the hall. “Closet. Under the stairs.”
Debris began to slap against the house.
Thunk! Thunkthunk! Thunkthunkthunk!
John felt his head go light, his mouth tang with the distillate of old fear. Sam. Mary, forgive me.
Dean was in one place and his brother was in the other, and John could see from his face he wasn’t having that. Dean planted both palms against Nicholas’s chest and pushed him violently clear. John had to get his arms around the boy from behind, pick him up and deposit him facing the other way.
Above their heads, he heard the wind making a discordant xylophonic run down the scales of the roof, the tiles peeling off.
“Under the stairs,” Nicholas shouted. “Closet!”
“Sam!” Dean screamed, made another play for the door, and John was wrestling him back when the windows exploded and the front of the house bowed in like a bomb had gone off. A claymore of debris showered the foyer, sent a rogue javelin of wood spearing into the wall behind them. Something big and solid glanced off John’s shoulder, caught Dean in the face, and sent them both to the ground.
When John struggled up, Dean didn’t. John rolled him, saw his face bloody, nose crinkled in stunned confusion. Nicholas hauled on John’s collar.
“Stairs!”
John didn’t try to get Dean on his feet. He stayed low and dragged him haphazardly down the hall over the showered glass. Visibility was shot to hell, the entire house a maelstrom of stinging sand and wreckage. John didn’t know if he was pointing east or west or up or down, but he knew he had a hold of Dean, and he was getting the both of them into that closet. The last thing John saw before Nicholas closed the door behind them was the hallway wall curving like the inside pipe of a wave, and the house lit up with two bright blue flashes. Then there was darkness, and roaring, and the booming crack and pop of electricity loosed from its confines.
John bundled Dean into the furthest corner of the closet, pulled him into a ball he could flatten against the floor with his body. He wrapped his arms around Dean’s chest and pressed his face into the muddy, coppery smell of his son’s neck. Dean was starting to come to his senses and John felt, more than heard, the desolate realization rising inside his ribcage.
They didn’t have Sam.
“Sam!” Dean screamed, his voice lost in the jet engine whine of the world coming apart.
The closet wasn’t going to hold. John tightened his embrace until he didn’t know how Dean’s chest could heave again.
“Sam!”
Mary, forgive me.
***********************************************************************************
You can run on for a long time
Run on for a long time
Run on for a long time
Sooner or later God’ll cut you down
Sooner or later God’ll cut you down.
~ Johnny Cash
John woke with empty arms.
There was mud in his mouth, and a chill wind flapped his wet shirt against his stomach. He rolled, shuddering with a bone-deep ache of cold, and rode the stab and flare of his battered, pummeled body to his feet.
The house was gone.
In its place a hundred yard stretch of sticks and rubble remained. When he looked to the east, he saw the long, narrow rope of the dissipating tornado departing upward - a harmless wisp of smoke against someone else’s sky.
He found Dean near a felled tree, its exposed root system testament to the twister’s force. He was bloody and mud-caked and disheveled, shirt hanging off his shoulder, and John could tell from the way he was standing he’d taken a hell of a hammering. Left boot was gone, too, but the boy was upright. John stumbled in relief over the detritus of the house, an entire two story building reduced to matchsticks beneath his feet.
We should be dead. We should all be dead.
“Dean!”
Dean didn’t respond, and when John closed hands on his son’s shoulders and bodily turned him, he saw blood tracking from both ears and understood why. The kid had that brutalized look you didn’t see much outside of warzones, and it made John’s throat tight and his heart thud staccato in his chest. His hands ran a frantic course over Dean’s torso in search of wounds the shredded clothes might be hiding. Dean submitted to the inspection loosely, let John’s hands move him while his eyes flicked dully back to the ground.
“Oh, no,” John uttered, when he saw what held Dean’s attention. “Jesus Christ.”
Nicholas was lying twisted and broken on the ground, one arm missing and eyes staring dead and cold into the clearing sky.
John clapped his hands to Dean’s cheeks and physically moved his gaze from the body. “Dean, look at me. You okay?” He shook him when Dean stared blankly. “Watch my lips: are you okay?”
Dean blinked, and the whisper of a frown creased his brow. He looked across the strewn remains of the property and his mouth worked on the word until his ruined voice caught up. “Sam.”
They found the cellar entrance beneath the splintered skeleton of a curios cabinet John couldn’t remember seeing in the Herbert’s house. He discovered three of his fingers were broken while shifting the mangled wood from the trapdoor. There was something wrong with his back. When he bent to haul the cellar open, the pain sent him to one knee. Dean picked up the slack, and between the two of them they got the twisted panels pried apart. A shaft of daylight spilled down the stone steps.
“Sam!” John bellowed into the shadows.
“Sammy!” Dean echoed, his voice a raw and desperate appeal.
John waited - heart stilled in his chest - until Sam’s frantic voice came back at him like permission to live.
“Dean?”
**********
Pray send me some storms.
~ Mary Maclane, 1902
The cellar had done its job admirably - neither Sam nor the girls had a scratch on them. Stacey wouldn’t set foot outside the safety of the rabbit hole, and standing aboveground with the wind still whipping desolately over the devastation, John couldn’t really blame her.
They hadn’t all fared so well.
He’d only just convinced a distraught Sue Herbert she really didn’t need to see her husband’s body, when Sam let out a shout.
Dean - the one who was with John, the one he’d had hold of - was on his back in the grass, and Sam was losing his shit in a spine-jangling, hysterical way that redlined every single one of John’s parental gauges.
“Dad! DAD!”
They didn’t have any phones. John’s cell had been in his jacket, but which state that had landed in was now anyone’s guess. He’d had it powered off while they were hunting, but if anyone ever found it and turned it on, they’d also discover the three missed calls Sue said Nicholas had attempted before he’d made the ultimately fatal decision to head out and physically bring them home.
That could keep John awake nights later. Right then he had bigger things to worry about, like making sure Nicholas Herbert stayed the only dead body on that property.
It was a long time before anyone found them. At least, it felt that way to John, kneeling in the wet grass with a grieving widow and her shocked-silent kid, trying to keep his son off the list of fatalities.
At the overloaded hospital in Georgetown, they removed a six-inch chunk of the house from John’s back, straightened out his fingers, and put forty-eight stitches in a scattering of lacerations over his face, chest and arms. They didn’t have any free beds, and John couldn’t have been persuaded to get on one if they had. Instead, they gave him a plastic chair next to Sam’s in the crowded ER, where they waited for Dean to get out of surgery.
He’d punctured a lung and perforated both his eardrums. The doctors closed his collection of cuts with sixty-four stitches, and later that would mean he’d won. John would let him have that, because it looked like the poor son of a bitch was going to be stone deaf for a while.
They left town ten days later beneath a dawn sky as bruised and raw as Jarrell. The paper on the table in the breakfast diner was still telling it stark and plain: 27 DEAD IN TERROR TORNADO. John had departed a lot of locales in a lot of different types of hurry, but he couldn’t remember ever being so glad to leave a place that wasn’t under direct enemy fire.
He wrapped his taped fingers around his coffee mug and watched Dean not hear a word his brother was saying to him. Sam was still spouting off about how his puke had saved the Impala, and how they should all be thanking him for the fact the car was at the spared car detailer’s and not in the Herbert’s driveway when the tornado hit. But he kept forgetting you had to wave a hand or something, get Dean’s attention before you started speaking. In a second, he was gonna realize, and then get pissy at John about it.
Dean was doodling an M-24 on his napkin with the pen he’d lifted from the waitress when she bent to take John’s menu. To his left, she was behind the counter discovering it was missing, hands patting first on her apron and then going to her ponytail in search of it.
John reached across the table and relieved Dean of the ballpoint, whistled to the waitress and held it up.
“Did I drop that?” she asked as she came over, and John shook his head.
“No, my son stole it when you leaned over him. You’re lucky that’s all he did.”
He watched her depart, and when he returned his gaze to Dean, the boy was already casting eyes around the table, looking for something else to loot.
John settled the tab, and on the way back to I-35, the weather report told him there were severe weather warnings current for both Temple and Round Rock. He let the car cruise to a stop on the shoulder, watched the two storm systems darkening the skies at either end of the horizon. If he had to guess between the two roiling bookends, he’d have said the one to the North looked a little worse. A flash of mute, distant lightning seemed to support the case. John ducked his chin and squinted up at the relatively clear sky above them. Waited for some internal needle to point.
He had a sudden recollection of Sue standing in the doorway of the guest house, her windblown hair covering her eyes.
Sometimes I get a space to catch my breath...
Dean followed his gaze, frowned. “What are you waiting for?” he said too loudly, the way he was saying everything without the guidance of external feedback.
John sniffed, dragged a hand down the wheel and touched the gas to put them back on the blacktop, head them North toward Temple.
“Nothin’.”
.