Chapter 12: Not So Great At Laying Low
He materializes in a bar in Chicago. It’s a Wednesday night and it’s packed to the rafters with college students. For a few seconds they think Dean’s appearance is a trick, staged for their benefit. It doesn’t take long for them to realize otherwise. Dean still has the Blade in one hand and the dirk in the other and he sweeps them out in a wide circle. The dirk doesn’t do much, but the Blade slices through sequins, cotton, fat, gristle and bone as though they were nothing more than wind resistance.
It takes a moment for the panic to filter through the crowd but once it does there is chaos. People fight their way out of the doors, as many being injured in the crush as by Dean’s attack. He’s a dervish of brutal chaos, blades lashing like extensions of his arms, teeth bared in a feral snarl and his shadow still cast, demonic, upon the walls.
The pink light hasn’t faded from his veins. It glows out through his skin, casting him in a harsh neon glow that only serves to exaggerate his unearthly fury. The crowd near him has thinned, his wild slashes cutting through air more often than flesh now. He drops the dirk and throws himself forward, knocking down a burly looking guy in a University of Chicago hoodie. They roll together on the floor for a brief moment, Dean savoring the rancid stench of his terror followed by the distinct reek of piss. Dean laughs, stowing his weapons and digging his thumbs into the flesh of the guy’s cheeks on either side. His nails pierce through and the student screams pitifully. Dean grabs hold of a fistful of artfully messy brown hair and rips it out, savoring the move to silent rasps of abject terror and fear.
Dean pulls in a deep breath, drinking in the stench of terror and violence. He licks one of his thumbs clean and the taste of blood sparks something deep down where he used to have a soul. He leans down slowly, thumb gently tracing a patch of unmarred skin on the boy’s left cheek, and then carefully latches his mouth onto his victim’s neck. He worries it gently between his teeth, and then he clamps down and wrenches. The skin comes away from the throat with a sound like someone shredding wet cardboard. Dean spits out the mess of epidermal tissue and then buries his face back in the wound, gnawing through to the gullet.
By the time Dean has done playing the bar is empty. His head whips back and forth, scanning the area, looking for something else he can attack. The reek of fear has faded a little and now he can smell stale sweat, vomit and booze. He hops over the bar and snags a bottle of whiskey, taking long gulps as he meanders towards the exit. The door is locked and when he rattles it he can hear chains on the other side. No sirens yet. Shame. Defenseless teenagers are all very well, fucking hilarious in fact, but he wants to fight something that’s a challenge. The pissbaby student satisfied his urgent need to kill, but now he wants something else. He wants a chase or a fight.
He yanks at the door a few times to no avail and then backs up. He charges forward, body-slamming his way out, smashing the chains and earning a glut of terrified screams. He laughs as he barrels through splintered wood and creaking metal. He could have teleported out, but there’s no fun in that. Some of the fucking morons from the bar have stuck around. They saw him rampaging around and thought, nah, he’s only got a sword, he won’t get through the door and they stuck around to watch the police rip him into pieces.
They want a show, they’re getting one. He dances his way through the crowd, never staying long enough to torment, just dealing out stabs and gouges to whoever takes his fancy. By the time the police arrive he’s carving his way through a panicking crowd that have trapped themselves with their own morbid fascination.
They can’t open fire on him until everyone else is out of the way, so he has plenty of time to grab himself a hostage. Some slightly too curious passer-by. Not a college student this time, just a random innocent bystander. Maybe she had her whole life head of her, maybe she was destined to work forever in McDonalds- like that somehow makes her less worthy than some multibillionaire working for a bank.
Not that Dean cares about any of this. All he sees is a beating human heart, blood that can be spilled on the ground. He hugs her tight to his chest, Blade snicking lightly at her throat.
“Let go of the hostage,” A megaphone voice demands of him, and he acquiesces, springing and rolling to the side. They aren’t expecting that. It takes a few beats before bullets strafe across the now almost deserted street. He gets pierced by a few-arms, legs, head. They’re regular bullets though, just an itch until the flesh under them heals and he pops them out onto the ground with a metallic clink.
He doesn’t teleport away. That would be like giving up and he’s so full of pure demonic bloodlust that the very thought burns him. Demons have self-preservation instincts up to the hilt; if they’re going to lose a fight they’ll play dirty or leave. If they’re going to win though, it goes against every grain of their hell fashioned fury to leave a battle unfinished.
So Dean rips apart the cops, swallows their bullets and spits them out through chipped teeth. He charges into a hail of gunfire and by the time he reaches the pigs he’s a fleshy zombie riddled with bullet holes. He could heal himself, but he enjoys the fear. The terrified realization that this man is more air holes than flesh, and yet he’s still pushing forward with only his teeth and nails and a prehistoric looking weapon. He likes to look them in the eye and see the slow ticking realization, this is how I am going to die.
*
Dean carves a swathe the streets of Chicago on foot, forsaking the easy escape of teleporting for the thrill of the chase. He hurls himself down blind alleys and into subways, pushing his body beyond the limits of any human endurance as he outruns cop cars. You wouldn’t think there’s much fun in fleeing cops, especially not for a demon who could kill them with barely a thought, but that’s the point. Dean knows the power he has, knows he’s the apex predator, stretching his legs until he gets bored, decides to flip around and snap up his pursuers in his gaping maw. He’s playing with them, plain and simple.
Once he gets tired of running he plants himself in the middle of the street and braces himself, expecting them to try and run him over rather than risk open combat. Either these guys are stupid or they don’t know what happened to their buddies because they swing their cars to a halt and surround him, guns drawn and yelling at him to drop his weapon and lay down on the ground. Dean does neither. He bull-rushes the nearest, shrugging off the bullets and hefting the guy up, throwing him at one of his compatriots.
He takes out the cops in the immediate area and throws himself into an abandoned car. For all that he’s done, he expected there to be more chaos, helicopters and TV news and screaming panic in the streets. Aside from the crowd outside the bar where he materialized, there hasn’t really been anything. He’s almost disappointed as he careers down the road at the top speed his newest vehicle can manage.
It takes a few miles for the sirens to pick up and the chase to start again. He leads them down Route 41 for a bit before he gets fed up of dodging between shitty traffic. It’s hard to have a serious car chase when the chased car can barely get above 50 without having to duck and weave between idiots who don’t know how to drive.
He punches out onto more abandoned roads and leads his pursuers on a merry chase half way to Indianapolis before he gets bored. He keeps driving until he comes to some national park looking place with a steep grassy bank leading to dark, haunted forest-esque woodland. He spins the car off the edge, going for an even more dramatic burnout than the Impala. He gets it. The car lands, skidding to a halt in a scream of twisting metal and shattered glass. It erupts in a towering fireball.
Dean sits in the flaming wreck for a few minutes, intrigued by the feel of his skin trying to melt. He wonders if this is what hell is like for demons, all of them going about their business having to constantly keep a tiny corner of their minds dedicated to stopping themselves turning into slop.
He lets a patch of the skin on his face blister and burn off, instinctively glances towards the mirror to see what he looks like and then remembers it’s in pieces all around him. He lets go completely, allowing the flames to do as they will to him. He touches the weeping sores where his face used to be, feels the meat cooking and dropping off to let him run his fingers over the bone underneath. He wonders how long he’d have to sit here to pass the point of no return. Would he, even? Maybe his body, his meat suit he supposes, would die and he’d float his merry way back to hell. He probably shouldn’t test that. Crowley was right when he said hell was the last place Dean Winchester ought to be. There have to be a lot of demons in line there, vying for their chance to stick a knife in his back.
He barrels out of the car, stopping dropping and rolling to put out the flames in what little is left of him. Which has the added bonus of getting a metric fuckton of mud and road grit in his fresh wounds. It’s a good job he can heal on cue because otherwise, hello gangrene city, and that is not how he wants to die, limping and disheveled in some nature reserve outside Indianapolis, of all places.
The police are milling around on the bank up top, none of them quite willing to get near Dean Winchester’s fireball of doom. One of them spots him crawling his way into the tree line, alerts the others and a volley of shots ring out. A couple of bullets pierce the soft mud around him before they finally find their mark and clip him between the shoulders. He’s thrown forward, but he carries on crawling. He makes it into the trees, heals himself once he’s out of sight, feeling flesh thickening and spreading to fill the places it’d been burned off, skin slathering back across like thick cream. On the upper left side of his chest black spirals out from a single point, the ink blurring and washing in a mockery of the symbol that was there before- flames melting into a smudged, bloody drip, the star into a toothy, gaping maw.
He tries to will himself some clothes but they don’t come, so he’s left mostly naked as he teleports to a spot behind the cluster of officers. He hears one of them talking into his radio.
“Suspect fireballed off the road. Saw him crawling into the forest but he’s barely more than a charcoaled skeleton. Injuries like that he’ll already be dead by the time we can get a team down there…yep….okay, sure.”
The plan was to wait for a bit, see how long it takes them to twig that he’s here, but honestly, he gets bored. His attention span just isn’t what it used to be. He doesn’t know how demons get anything done in the long term. Ruby must have been a saint in life to retain the self-control she needed to manipulate Sam. Or maybe it settles down after a bit, he just has to get it out of his system, as it were. If that’s the case he’s certainly made a dent today.
He decides to cover his tracks somewhat. Things are gonna get real boring real fast if this all gets onto the news and some hunter comes down to investigate. Really he’s been titanically stupid already. Other hunters will be a pain, but he can deal with them easy enough; it’s Sam and Cas that he wants to avoid. Slicing his way through a chunk of the Chicago PD was maybe not the best way of laying low. He needs to cut the trail off here and then teleport somewhere far, far away. Maybe he’ll go visit Europe. He doesn’t have to fly now, perfect excuse to travel.
He comes up right behind one of the cops, slips the Blade up to his neck.
“Now, guys, stay calm and this’ll all be okay.”
They’re too stunned to do much more than gawk at him. How long does it take to train a police offer? 6 months, a year? What do they spend that time doing, fucking working out the circumference of the perfect donut? ‘Cause it sure as shit isn’t any combat training judging by these pricks.
Dean fits his palm over the cop’s trigger hand, lifting the weapon up and firing in rapid succession. His aim is solid. He drops all the other cops cleanly and then relinquishes the gun. It falls to the ground, covered in his captive’s prints and none of his own. He’s already been radioed in dead, now hopefully they’ll take these deaths as some rogue cop bullshit while he gets to have some fun with mister cop killer. What can he say, he’s weak.
He teleports them both back to the forest and lets the cop go, sans weapon and communication devices. He gives him a head start before running after. He’s not a monster, after all.
*
Dean is in the process of working out the best way to dispose of the pieces when he feels that nagging itching tingle in his shoulder. For fucks sake. He could warp away but he doesn’t. Fuck it, if they’re going to have it out, let’s have it out. This way he won’t have to spend his whole life watching his back at least. He’ll cull the pair of them here and now.
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