A Hunter's Guide to Zombie and Guns . Ch 11 . BtVS/SPN . Road to Morning .
Author: Faithunbreakable/ pprfaith
Title: A Hunter's Guide to Zombies and Guns - Chapter 11
Series: Road to Morning Series.
Rating: R
Summary: There are zombies close by. And they seem to have an agenda.
Disclaimer: I do not own.
Beta: Unbetaed from here on in. I think.
A/N: I have nothing to say. That is noteworthy.
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Eleven
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Sam was surprised to find his and Dean’s room empty when they got back. Buffy didn’t usually need them there to slip into their beds. As long as she knew that she’d get someone to snuggle up to eventually, she was fine. But then she’d said something vague and uninformative about making phone calls before they’d left and looking at Dean, Sam could see that they were thinking the same thing.
Princess was acting strange. Well, stranger than she had recently. They trooped into her and Victor’s room, found her sitting on her bed, legs stretched in front of her, making notes in her journal.
Sam slipped into the room last and shuddered as a wave of sensationmemoryfeelingmagic crashed over him. The room was filled with it, ripe with a memory so strong he could smell it. Dean and Victor didn’t react at all, so he knew it was just him, his extra sense acting up.
He inhaled carefully as he shoved the sensation down, categorizing it, controlling it. Light. Warmth. Ashes. The scent of a melody, the feeling of ozone smell on his skin. Extra senses were funny that way, withstanding any attempts at explanation, at definition. It was all confusion, but despite that, the feeling reminded him of how Buffy felt, scorched desert air and cool night.
“Someone was here,” he said before he caught up with his mouth and Dean automatically went for his gun, whipping around to take in Sam’s stance, relaxed, eyes closed. Sam could feel Dean looking at him, could feel his worry, apprehension, exhaustion.
He could feel Victor, too, yellow with curiosity and that was when he knew he needed to shut it off. He came out of it with a great heaving breath and almost stumbled. His head was throbbing and the scent of sunshine still hung in his nose, unwilling to go away, to be forgotten.
Buffy looked mildly surprised but not alarmed. “I didn’t think you’d pick up on him,” she said, “Sorry. I would’ve aired out the room if I knew you would. He’s kind of… much, if you’re not used to it.”
Dean shoved into the conversation. “Who the hell is ‘he’ and what just happened? Sammy?”
Sam shrugged, unsure as always of how to put into words what he sensed. “There’s an… imprint. In the room. From someone not human. It smells like… sunlight. Ashes. Summer. Rain.”
Dean’s expression said he wanted to make a New Age comment. Possibly including the word ‘pussy’ somewhere in his statement.
Buffy was faster. “An old friend dropped by. Not human, not a danger to any of you. It’s fine, Dean.”
But Dean, being Dean, couldn’t let it go. Not after how Sam had reacted. Sometimes, Sam thought, his brother was painfully predictable. Protect Sammy. Protect innocents. Worship the car, love the hunt, forget yourself. Patterns over patterns, one sadder than the other. Some days, Sam hated his father. Most of those days, he hated him on his brother’s behalf.
“What did he want, princess?”
Buffy shrugged. “He’s helping me look for the amulet,” she said. “I’m kind of starting to think the thing never existed. No-one can find anything. It’s getting annoying.”
Then she stuck her pen into the binding of her journal and flipped it shut, putting it away. “So. Is the psychic our girl?”
Sam shook his head and slapped Victor on the back hard as he moved past him to sit down. “Nope. But our newbie just saw his first zombie.”
Buffy straightened. “Seriously? You ran into one? What happened?”
Dean tucked away his real gun, finally, made a finger-gun, and shot at the blonde with a wiggle of his eyebrows and accompanying sound effects. Everyone groaned. “Before that, Dean. Before.”
They dutifully reported their entire little adventure and her expression got stormier as they progressed. “So it was just… wandering around until it heard the party and then, what? It headed toward it? What for?”
“Brains?” Dean suggested, innocently.
His brother shook his head. “It would have gone for us then. Well, me and Vic, anyway.” He smirked and ducked Dean’s arm as the other man made to smack him.
“Very funny, Francine.”
Buffy just rolled her eyes and yawned widely. “Boys,” she snapped when she could close her mouth again. “Focus. Either the thing wanted something at that party, which is unlikely, seeing as how the sounds put it on the party’s trail in the first place, or it wanted what everyone wants at a party.”
“Girls and booze?” Dean suggested and went ignored.
“Attention,” Sam answered. He received a nod.
“Attention. Which means whoever controls the zombies wanted attention. Which means…”
Buffy trailed off and Vic, who tended to fade into the background when they had these little pow-wows, asked, “What?”
The slayer shrugged. “I have no idea what that means. But prior experience suggests it’s nothing good.”
+
They spent the entirety of the next day, after a lousy five hours of sleep, digging through the local library, newspapers, the internet and whatever else they could get their hands on. They even went down the unlikelier path and found out as much as they could about the party the zombie had crashed the night before.
It turned out to have been a birthday party that had gotten a bit out of hand. There had been something like twenty-five guests, all of them teenagers. None of them had ever done anything worse than speeding. There weren’t even the usual Goths and New Age kids among them. It cost Buffy and Sam half a day to come to the conclusion that there had been absolutely nothing at the party that would be desirable for a necromancer. Of course they couldn’t rule out personal motives entirely, but everything about the situation and about fifty other zombies said that wasn’t it.
So they widened their search parameters and started over. And over. And over. They took a break for dinner and then went out zombie-scouting again. They found two, both of which did nothing but amble around town for a few hours. One of them stopped at its mother’s house and stared in through a window for a couple of hours. The other just kept walking. Eventually, both of them returned to their graves, burrowed back down and, for all intents and purposes, died again.
The whole endeavor was, as Dean put it, “An amazingly boring way to waste a perfectly good Friday night.”
They crashed for a few hours and went back to research, going so far as to call Bobby and ask for any insights. After he was done laughing at them for failing at a standard zombie hunt, he had to admit that he had no clue what was going on either.
So they widened their search parameters and started over. And over. And over.
“This is useless,” Buffy snapped on the third day of getting nowhere slowly. She flung her pen on the table she was half lying on and straightened, pushing her laptop away. “We’ve been at this for days and we have nothing. This should have been a hit’n’run job, and here we are, completely stuck. No-one’s dead. No-one’s dying. The zombies obviously aren’t dangerous. And we have no idea who’s doing it, or where, or even how!”
Victor, who’s limited research experience had landed him on errand boy duty the day before, frowned from where he was sitting on one of the beds, going over notes he already knew by heart. This was almost, almost as frustrating as trying to bring mobsters down by reviewing the past twenty years of their taxes. He was ready to shoot someone, and he was the least annoyed person in the room. Buffy and Dean had both been ready to kill something by lunchtime the day before and Sam was looking kind of trigger happy, too, by now.
They had absolutely nothing.
Zilch.
Nada.
Niente.
Nichts.
Zero.
And if something didn’t give soon, one of the three hunters was going to sucker punch another for no other reason than something to do.
Okay. Time for something to change. And while Victor didn’t know much about hunting, he knew about this, about cases that went nowhere and evidence that just didn’t change, no matter how long you stared at it. He’d played the meek apprentice for the past week, but he had twenty years of law enforcement under his belt and even if he didn’t know much about monsters, he still knew things.
“Back to zero,” he declared, shifting so he was sitting closer to the other three.
Buffy, who had slouched down on the table again, wriggled her fingers at him negligently. Sam and Dean gave him baleful glares.
He rolled his eyes. “Look. Obviously we’re missing something.” He said ‘we’, not ‘you’, because he liked his teeth better in his mouth than on the ground, thanks a lot. “And this is getting us nowhere. So scrap what we’ve got and start over. What do we know?”
Dean actually kicked the end of one of the beds and crossed his arms, glare turning into an outright glower. “Nothing. We know absolutely diddly-squat, Vic. Get with the program.”
“Jesus,” Victor cursed, “Are you grown hunters or are you sulky preschoolers? Buckle the fuck up, Winchester.”
He had no idea whether it was the words themselves or merely the tone, but both men straightened in their chairs and looked like they were actually listening. Buffy remained sprawled where she was, but he got the impression that he held her attention and he’d learned, over the past few days, that she was a lot like a big cat. Her posture didn’t show it, but that woman was always ready to leap and kill.
“Good. Now, wha’da we got?”
“Sightings started almost four weeks ago,” Sam supplied form memory.
“One a night at first, then more. A lot of them went back to their families and scared the bejesus out of them. Some of them were sighted around bars, the diner, or WalMart.” Dean interrupted his report to chortle. Zombies at WalMart seemed to amuse him to no end. “Then, as far as we know, they just go back to their grave and buh-bye. Gone.”
Buffy finally rolled her head so she was actually looking at the others. “We don’t know who’s doing it or where they are or what kind of spell they’re using. All we can do is shoot the symptoms in the head.”
Victor nodded. “What else?”
The brothers shrugged and Buffy answered, “Nothing. That’s all we got.”
“You’re forgetting one important question.”
Dean didn’t look convinced. “And that would be?”
“You’re forgetting to ask why.”
This time the older Winchester snorted and slouched further in his chair, obviously dismissing the idea. “Yeah. Right. This isn’t the FBI anymore, Vic. We don’t need a motive to kill the monsters. We just gank them and move on.”
Victor shot him a patronizing smile. “Yeah. And that’s working so well for you, isn’t it?”
“It was working just fine when we saved your ass, didn’t it?”
“That was a goddamn siege!”
“It’s always a goddamn siege! It’s always kill or be killed. Shoot the fuckers in the head, move on. There’s no shrink talk with monsters! You take as many with them as you can and hope to hell it’s-“
“Boys!” Buffy interrupted, stepping between them, shoving them apart with a bit more force than necessary. When had they both stood up anyway? Victor stumbled as he hit the bed frame with the backs of his knees and landed on his ass. Sam caught his brother. “This isn’t helping!”
She glared at them in turn, but Dean seemed immune. He crossed his arms again and sulked. “Well, neither is he. Why the hell’s he here anyway?”
With a sigh, the blonde dismissed his grumbling, hands on her hips. “He’s not wrong. We’ve gone through all the other questions and come up empty. Trying it his way is not going to cause you physical pain, Dean.”
“There’s no time!” the oldest Winchester yelled and then, as soon as the words had left his mouth, he slumped, studiously avoiding everyone’s gaze. Sam made a little sound, like he was in pain, but didn’t move otherwise. It was Buffy who sighed, eyes going soft. She stepped up to the grumbling idiot and hugged him. He let his forehead rest against her abdomen for a moment while she ran her fingers through his hair. Then he pulled back, abruptly, game face back on, like an embarrassed teenager who’d just been caught kissing his mom goodbye in front of the school.
Buffy let go of him and simply sat herself in his lap without so much as a by-your-leave, asking, “Why?”
There was a beat of silence before Sam suggested. “To draw attention. It’s the only logical conclusion. Someone’s using the zombies to draw attention.”
“To what?” Victor threw in, eyes still half on Dean, weary of the man going off again, despite the blonde hindrance sitting on him. “And whose attention?”
More silence as they all mulled over the questions. Then Dean said. “Ours.”
“No,” he cut in when everyone started protesting at once. “Think about it. This hunt is weird from the get go. It’s flashy, but no-one’s died. It attracts attention, but not enough to be high on anyone’s priority list. And we said it ourselves, it’s right in Bobby’s backyard. Which is as close to a home base as we’ve got. What were the odds that we’d take this hunt and no-one else?”
From the looks on the three seasoned hunters’ faces, the odds were pretty high. Victor had no idea if hunters were territorial or anything, but Bobby had given him the impression that taking care of the area around their home base was a matter of pride for them. Not In My Backyard, or something along those lines. He was kind of impressed by how Dean had put it together, though. He’d known, after last night’s lecture on protective sigils, that there was more in the man’s head than echoes and space, but rattling off facts was one thing. Putting together details like this was another entirely. He understood now why Sam got defensive every time someone called his brother a dumb pretty boy. Not because they were right, but because they weren’t. Those boys just had to be made of about two dozen more layers than he’d expected, didn’t they?
“Well,” Buffy summarized, “Crap.”
Sam patted her on the arm. “At least we know where to start searching now.”
“We do?”
“Sure. The only place in town we haven’t been. Because it’s too obvious.”
Dean groaned. “The cemetery.”
Sam made a face and nodded. Victor, feeling a tiny bit smug about having been right, still didn’t get one thing. “So it’s a trap. What do they want?”
“Knowing our luck,” Dean theorized, “They either want Sammy on a throne or all of us on a stick.”
“Is it wrong that I hope it’s the second?” Sam asked.
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Title: A Hunter's Guide to Zombies and Guns - Chapter 11
Series: Road to Morning Series.
Rating: R
Summary: There are zombies close by. And they seem to have an agenda.
Disclaimer: I do not own.
Beta: Unbetaed from here on in. I think.
A/N: I have nothing to say. That is noteworthy.
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+
Eleven
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Sam was surprised to find his and Dean’s room empty when they got back. Buffy didn’t usually need them there to slip into their beds. As long as she knew that she’d get someone to snuggle up to eventually, she was fine. But then she’d said something vague and uninformative about making phone calls before they’d left and looking at Dean, Sam could see that they were thinking the same thing.
Princess was acting strange. Well, stranger than she had recently. They trooped into her and Victor’s room, found her sitting on her bed, legs stretched in front of her, making notes in her journal.
Sam slipped into the room last and shuddered as a wave of sensationmemoryfeelingmagic crashed over him. The room was filled with it, ripe with a memory so strong he could smell it. Dean and Victor didn’t react at all, so he knew it was just him, his extra sense acting up.
He inhaled carefully as he shoved the sensation down, categorizing it, controlling it. Light. Warmth. Ashes. The scent of a melody, the feeling of ozone smell on his skin. Extra senses were funny that way, withstanding any attempts at explanation, at definition. It was all confusion, but despite that, the feeling reminded him of how Buffy felt, scorched desert air and cool night.
“Someone was here,” he said before he caught up with his mouth and Dean automatically went for his gun, whipping around to take in Sam’s stance, relaxed, eyes closed. Sam could feel Dean looking at him, could feel his worry, apprehension, exhaustion.
He could feel Victor, too, yellow with curiosity and that was when he knew he needed to shut it off. He came out of it with a great heaving breath and almost stumbled. His head was throbbing and the scent of sunshine still hung in his nose, unwilling to go away, to be forgotten.
Buffy looked mildly surprised but not alarmed. “I didn’t think you’d pick up on him,” she said, “Sorry. I would’ve aired out the room if I knew you would. He’s kind of… much, if you’re not used to it.”
Dean shoved into the conversation. “Who the hell is ‘he’ and what just happened? Sammy?”
Sam shrugged, unsure as always of how to put into words what he sensed. “There’s an… imprint. In the room. From someone not human. It smells like… sunlight. Ashes. Summer. Rain.”
Dean’s expression said he wanted to make a New Age comment. Possibly including the word ‘pussy’ somewhere in his statement.
Buffy was faster. “An old friend dropped by. Not human, not a danger to any of you. It’s fine, Dean.”
But Dean, being Dean, couldn’t let it go. Not after how Sam had reacted. Sometimes, Sam thought, his brother was painfully predictable. Protect Sammy. Protect innocents. Worship the car, love the hunt, forget yourself. Patterns over patterns, one sadder than the other. Some days, Sam hated his father. Most of those days, he hated him on his brother’s behalf.
“What did he want, princess?”
Buffy shrugged. “He’s helping me look for the amulet,” she said. “I’m kind of starting to think the thing never existed. No-one can find anything. It’s getting annoying.”
Then she stuck her pen into the binding of her journal and flipped it shut, putting it away. “So. Is the psychic our girl?”
Sam shook his head and slapped Victor on the back hard as he moved past him to sit down. “Nope. But our newbie just saw his first zombie.”
Buffy straightened. “Seriously? You ran into one? What happened?”
Dean tucked away his real gun, finally, made a finger-gun, and shot at the blonde with a wiggle of his eyebrows and accompanying sound effects. Everyone groaned. “Before that, Dean. Before.”
They dutifully reported their entire little adventure and her expression got stormier as they progressed. “So it was just… wandering around until it heard the party and then, what? It headed toward it? What for?”
“Brains?” Dean suggested, innocently.
His brother shook his head. “It would have gone for us then. Well, me and Vic, anyway.” He smirked and ducked Dean’s arm as the other man made to smack him.
“Very funny, Francine.”
Buffy just rolled her eyes and yawned widely. “Boys,” she snapped when she could close her mouth again. “Focus. Either the thing wanted something at that party, which is unlikely, seeing as how the sounds put it on the party’s trail in the first place, or it wanted what everyone wants at a party.”
“Girls and booze?” Dean suggested and went ignored.
“Attention,” Sam answered. He received a nod.
“Attention. Which means whoever controls the zombies wanted attention. Which means…”
Buffy trailed off and Vic, who tended to fade into the background when they had these little pow-wows, asked, “What?”
The slayer shrugged. “I have no idea what that means. But prior experience suggests it’s nothing good.”
+
They spent the entirety of the next day, after a lousy five hours of sleep, digging through the local library, newspapers, the internet and whatever else they could get their hands on. They even went down the unlikelier path and found out as much as they could about the party the zombie had crashed the night before.
It turned out to have been a birthday party that had gotten a bit out of hand. There had been something like twenty-five guests, all of them teenagers. None of them had ever done anything worse than speeding. There weren’t even the usual Goths and New Age kids among them. It cost Buffy and Sam half a day to come to the conclusion that there had been absolutely nothing at the party that would be desirable for a necromancer. Of course they couldn’t rule out personal motives entirely, but everything about the situation and about fifty other zombies said that wasn’t it.
So they widened their search parameters and started over. And over. And over. They took a break for dinner and then went out zombie-scouting again. They found two, both of which did nothing but amble around town for a few hours. One of them stopped at its mother’s house and stared in through a window for a couple of hours. The other just kept walking. Eventually, both of them returned to their graves, burrowed back down and, for all intents and purposes, died again.
The whole endeavor was, as Dean put it, “An amazingly boring way to waste a perfectly good Friday night.”
They crashed for a few hours and went back to research, going so far as to call Bobby and ask for any insights. After he was done laughing at them for failing at a standard zombie hunt, he had to admit that he had no clue what was going on either.
So they widened their search parameters and started over. And over. And over.
“This is useless,” Buffy snapped on the third day of getting nowhere slowly. She flung her pen on the table she was half lying on and straightened, pushing her laptop away. “We’ve been at this for days and we have nothing. This should have been a hit’n’run job, and here we are, completely stuck. No-one’s dead. No-one’s dying. The zombies obviously aren’t dangerous. And we have no idea who’s doing it, or where, or even how!”
Victor, who’s limited research experience had landed him on errand boy duty the day before, frowned from where he was sitting on one of the beds, going over notes he already knew by heart. This was almost, almost as frustrating as trying to bring mobsters down by reviewing the past twenty years of their taxes. He was ready to shoot someone, and he was the least annoyed person in the room. Buffy and Dean had both been ready to kill something by lunchtime the day before and Sam was looking kind of trigger happy, too, by now.
They had absolutely nothing.
Zilch.
Nada.
Niente.
Nichts.
Zero.
And if something didn’t give soon, one of the three hunters was going to sucker punch another for no other reason than something to do.
Okay. Time for something to change. And while Victor didn’t know much about hunting, he knew about this, about cases that went nowhere and evidence that just didn’t change, no matter how long you stared at it. He’d played the meek apprentice for the past week, but he had twenty years of law enforcement under his belt and even if he didn’t know much about monsters, he still knew things.
“Back to zero,” he declared, shifting so he was sitting closer to the other three.
Buffy, who had slouched down on the table again, wriggled her fingers at him negligently. Sam and Dean gave him baleful glares.
He rolled his eyes. “Look. Obviously we’re missing something.” He said ‘we’, not ‘you’, because he liked his teeth better in his mouth than on the ground, thanks a lot. “And this is getting us nowhere. So scrap what we’ve got and start over. What do we know?”
Dean actually kicked the end of one of the beds and crossed his arms, glare turning into an outright glower. “Nothing. We know absolutely diddly-squat, Vic. Get with the program.”
“Jesus,” Victor cursed, “Are you grown hunters or are you sulky preschoolers? Buckle the fuck up, Winchester.”
He had no idea whether it was the words themselves or merely the tone, but both men straightened in their chairs and looked like they were actually listening. Buffy remained sprawled where she was, but he got the impression that he held her attention and he’d learned, over the past few days, that she was a lot like a big cat. Her posture didn’t show it, but that woman was always ready to leap and kill.
“Good. Now, wha’da we got?”
“Sightings started almost four weeks ago,” Sam supplied form memory.
“One a night at first, then more. A lot of them went back to their families and scared the bejesus out of them. Some of them were sighted around bars, the diner, or WalMart.” Dean interrupted his report to chortle. Zombies at WalMart seemed to amuse him to no end. “Then, as far as we know, they just go back to their grave and buh-bye. Gone.”
Buffy finally rolled her head so she was actually looking at the others. “We don’t know who’s doing it or where they are or what kind of spell they’re using. All we can do is shoot the symptoms in the head.”
Victor nodded. “What else?”
The brothers shrugged and Buffy answered, “Nothing. That’s all we got.”
“You’re forgetting one important question.”
Dean didn’t look convinced. “And that would be?”
“You’re forgetting to ask why.”
This time the older Winchester snorted and slouched further in his chair, obviously dismissing the idea. “Yeah. Right. This isn’t the FBI anymore, Vic. We don’t need a motive to kill the monsters. We just gank them and move on.”
Victor shot him a patronizing smile. “Yeah. And that’s working so well for you, isn’t it?”
“It was working just fine when we saved your ass, didn’t it?”
“That was a goddamn siege!”
“It’s always a goddamn siege! It’s always kill or be killed. Shoot the fuckers in the head, move on. There’s no shrink talk with monsters! You take as many with them as you can and hope to hell it’s-“
“Boys!” Buffy interrupted, stepping between them, shoving them apart with a bit more force than necessary. When had they both stood up anyway? Victor stumbled as he hit the bed frame with the backs of his knees and landed on his ass. Sam caught his brother. “This isn’t helping!”
She glared at them in turn, but Dean seemed immune. He crossed his arms again and sulked. “Well, neither is he. Why the hell’s he here anyway?”
With a sigh, the blonde dismissed his grumbling, hands on her hips. “He’s not wrong. We’ve gone through all the other questions and come up empty. Trying it his way is not going to cause you physical pain, Dean.”
“There’s no time!” the oldest Winchester yelled and then, as soon as the words had left his mouth, he slumped, studiously avoiding everyone’s gaze. Sam made a little sound, like he was in pain, but didn’t move otherwise. It was Buffy who sighed, eyes going soft. She stepped up to the grumbling idiot and hugged him. He let his forehead rest against her abdomen for a moment while she ran her fingers through his hair. Then he pulled back, abruptly, game face back on, like an embarrassed teenager who’d just been caught kissing his mom goodbye in front of the school.
Buffy let go of him and simply sat herself in his lap without so much as a by-your-leave, asking, “Why?”
There was a beat of silence before Sam suggested. “To draw attention. It’s the only logical conclusion. Someone’s using the zombies to draw attention.”
“To what?” Victor threw in, eyes still half on Dean, weary of the man going off again, despite the blonde hindrance sitting on him. “And whose attention?”
More silence as they all mulled over the questions. Then Dean said. “Ours.”
“No,” he cut in when everyone started protesting at once. “Think about it. This hunt is weird from the get go. It’s flashy, but no-one’s died. It attracts attention, but not enough to be high on anyone’s priority list. And we said it ourselves, it’s right in Bobby’s backyard. Which is as close to a home base as we’ve got. What were the odds that we’d take this hunt and no-one else?”
From the looks on the three seasoned hunters’ faces, the odds were pretty high. Victor had no idea if hunters were territorial or anything, but Bobby had given him the impression that taking care of the area around their home base was a matter of pride for them. Not In My Backyard, or something along those lines. He was kind of impressed by how Dean had put it together, though. He’d known, after last night’s lecture on protective sigils, that there was more in the man’s head than echoes and space, but rattling off facts was one thing. Putting together details like this was another entirely. He understood now why Sam got defensive every time someone called his brother a dumb pretty boy. Not because they were right, but because they weren’t. Those boys just had to be made of about two dozen more layers than he’d expected, didn’t they?
“Well,” Buffy summarized, “Crap.”
Sam patted her on the arm. “At least we know where to start searching now.”
“We do?”
“Sure. The only place in town we haven’t been. Because it’s too obvious.”
Dean groaned. “The cemetery.”
Sam made a face and nodded. Victor, feeling a tiny bit smug about having been right, still didn’t get one thing. “So it’s a trap. What do they want?”
“Knowing our luck,” Dean theorized, “They either want Sammy on a throne or all of us on a stick.”
“Is it wrong that I hope it’s the second?” Sam asked.
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