Cut the Cord 1/2
Title: Cut the Cord
Characters : Dean, Castiel, Sam (Gen, H/C)
Ratings/Warnings: PG-13, for language and violence
Spoilers: Through S.5 and specifically for 5.10, Abandon All Hope
Word Count: 8675 over 2 parts
Summary: Dean just wants his car back. Something else just wants a meal.
Note: This is for unoshot for an exchange of fic. It’s not spooky & beautiful & evocative like yours, but I thumped the angel, and it could be worse: during the writing of this, at work I cataloged a book series Tales of Horror & learned there’s an eastern European legend that pumpkins kept ten days past Christmas will turn into vampires.
So you almost got vampire pumpkins.
But since all they seem to do is roll around and growl, I couldn’t figure to how to turn that into a chase. Instead I made up a bunch of stuff about jilaiyas.
Part One
Metal rang against metal somewhere in the depths of the salvage yard. Only Singer’s angry presence sparked along Castiel’s nerve endings as he paused at the iron gates. No one came out to meet him, but no one challenged him when he crossed beneath the gate, either.
Alone, he started out down the dirt lane to the house, and still alone, he navigated the boards slanted over the porch steps.
No one answered his knock.
The hinges creaked when he pushed at the door with the pads of his fingers. Singer would have left them unoiled not from neglect, but as one more flag in the layers of protection built around his house. No weapon popped up to take aim, though, as the creak faded, so he stepped over the salt-filled groove in the sill and down the front hall, skating glances through the doorways on either side until he reached the back room.
“I want my car back.”
A bottle dangled loosely from Dean’s fingers; his dull gaze was fixed on the window opposite the chair he slouched in. Beyond the glass one of Bobby’s outbuildings was visible, its door rolled aside to catch the late-afternoon sunshine. The metallic clanging was loud enough to make the thin panes shiver.
When Dean’s announcement received no response, he rolled his head with a wince.
“Well? Can you zap it here?”
Castiel drifted around the doorframe, coat rustling softly. Dust motes swirled. Dean was nothing but smooth blankness against his senses, but he could still read the belligerence in the taut lines of his body.
He slid through the dusty bands of light to the table taking up the center of the room and ran his thumb down the spines of one of the stacks of books piled on it. “No.”
Dean grunted. “Figures.” The bottle hit the floor with a hollow clonk, and he drew his feet in, slowly, tilting forward in the chair until his elbows rested on his knees. His breath caught only once. “Get ‘er myself,” he muttered to the floorboards.
“From Carthage?”
“The hell else would she be? Of course Carthage.”
“It’s far too dangerous to return there.”
“Yeah, well, you don’t like it, you can always stay here, do some reading.” Pushing to his feet, Dean disguised another wince as a scowl at the book Castiel had drawn from the pile. “Or flap off to wherever the hell you were last night.”
The book closed softly between his palms. “I didn’t know Ellen and Joanna the way you three did,” Castiel pointed out stiffly. “I thought my presence would be an intrusion.” The corners of his eyes creased. “How do you intend to reach Missouri?”
“Yard full of junkers to pick from. Some of ‘em run.”
“Your judgment is clouded. You’re injured. And intoxicated.”
“Can you do anything to fix me up?”
“No.”
“What can you do?”
The accusing question, an echo of the demon’s mocking one, struck like a physical blow. Castiel blinked; and then, very carefully, he replaced the book on the pile. “If you insist on retrieving your car, I can take you there.”
“Hell, yeah, I insist. Just one sec.” Waving off Castiel’s raised hand, Dean limped into the hall. “Sam!” he bellowed up the staircase.
There was a pause, followed by a muffled “Yeah?” from one of the upstairs rooms.
“Gonna go get the car! Stay here, keep Bobby company!” Dean strode back to the angel. “Zap us, quick.”
Castiel lowered his hand to Dean’s shoulder, and Sam’s cry of “What? Dean, no, wait…” was snatched away along with Dean’s breath.
-----
Hot smoke choked off his next breath. Dean doubled over, coughing, boots rolling on broken ground, and Castiel’s hand tightened again.
“Step back.” An insistent tug dragged Dean behind a tall board fence. “Don’t move-there are soldiers.”
Headlights pierced the blowing smoke; Dean forced back another racking cough as heavy tires rumbled toward them on the rubble-strewn road. In his pocket his phone caroled, and he silenced it hurriedly before dragging his sleeve across his streaming eyes and lining them up to a gap in the boards. A breeze snatched at the smoke, revealing a Humvee, up-armored and bristling with guns, followed by a swaying troop truck, both rolling deliberately down the center of the road.
“National Guard,” Dean said. “You can bet they’re not letting anyone in town to sightsee.” He squinted as smoke billowed across the road again, thick enough to obscure all but the vehicles’ taillights. “The car’s stashed behind the police station-can you mojo me there?”
Castiel hesitated. “We’re only a short distance from the center of town. We should walk.” He cast a glance from the corner of his eye at Dean. “If you can manage?”
“It’s just a few bruises,” Dean responded automatically. He frowned at the angel. “All of a sudden you’re jonesin’ to hike?”
“For a short distance, and so you can look over the road out, yes.”
“Okay, you wanna walk, we’ll walk. Might clear my head, I guess.”
His phone chirped, and Dean slapped at his pocket in reflex. Sliding the gun from his waistband, he ducked around the end of the fence and motioned Castiel to follow.
-----
Later, authorities would wonder at tornados that could pluck up every citizen of a small city, deposit the women and children beneath a churned layer of dirt in an outer field, and leave the men fanned around them like toppled dominos. Later they’d wonder at the strange deep rifts in the earth, edges beaded with sallow crystals of sulfur.
Later. At the moment, they were still occupied with securing the area, clearing paths into the city, knocking down the persistent fires triggered by ruptured gas lines and fallen transformers.
Carthage crackled with radio traffic, callsigns and ten-codes snapping across the airwaves. State troopers from the barracks down the highway herded a clump of reporters back out of the smoke and falling ash and into a hastily-constructed enclosure of traffic barrels and an overturned van.
“Stay behind the barricade!” one trooper shouted. His eyes were rimmed in raw-looking red above the mask clapped to his mouth. “Anyone without a badge found outside the barricade will be shot!”
The journalists circled the enclosure and then surged back to the front boundary. None quite dared to pass through the cordon, but they hovered just inside it, shouting protests. The trooper set his feet in a wide stance and unholstered his service revolver, triggering a renewed wave of outrage.
At the rear of the pack, one newscaster began to extract herself from the crush, easing backwards with subtle shiftings of her shoulders and hips. When her colleagues had elbowed ahead of her, she jerked her head at the cameraman pacing nearby. “See if you can get down into the ditch without being seen,” she mouthed.
“I think they’re serious about shooting people.” Nevertheless, he let the bulky camera slide off his shoulder to a more secure grip against his side and glanced back, gauging the distance to the edge of the road.
The newscaster flicked a polished nail on the photo ID clipped to her blazer. “They wouldn’t dare. Come on, Danny, you want to miss out on the biggest thing to hit since Katrina?” She edged another step backwards, one eye on the commotion distracting the trooper, and then another. The square heel of her boot hovered over open air. Another fleeting glance at the trooper and she bent and skidded down the embankment. “I heard there’s a mass grave out there,” she hissed from the bottom of the weedy ditch. “We get footage of that, we’re golden! Forget working up from St. Louis, we can write our own tickets to L.A.!”
She paused as the cameraman wavered above her. “Danny! Chance of a lifetime here! Danny!”
He squatted down abruptly. “Take my rig-both hands!” he snapped as he passed it over, and then he slid down to reclaim the camera. Dropping below the lip of the ditch, they scurried, bent double, away from the other detained reporters. “Where to?”
“I saw a fence still standing a few blocks over; we can sneak behind it, cut across the main street, and head out the far side of town.” Her flowing hair snagged on a trailing bramble and she tore it free with a careless yank, teeth gleaming in a sudden manic grin. “A mass grave on American soil-we have got it made, Danny!”
-----
In the boughs of a huge old maple, something stirred. A head lifted from its cradle of folded arms, tilting as keen ears sifted through a clutter of meaningless sounds to isolate the one with any import.
Its caved-in belly shivered. When it had followed the bitter cold drafts to the surface, only a puzzlingly deserted village awaited. Even when potential fare had begun trickling in, they had called to their fellows in numeric ciphers, not names. And so it had found a new roost in which to wait.
It was nothing if not enduringly patient. One would name another eventually.
They always did.
The voice drifted in under all the irrelevant noise, slid into waiting ears and down, to set like a barb in the empty pleats of its belly. When it rose into a crouch, an invisible line tugged.
Strong feet flexed on the branch. It launched itself in a leisurely glide out into the smoky air.
-----
“What the hell happened to your coat?”
Castiel stepped over a twisted piece of metal and glanced down. “Nothing I’m aware of.”
“In the back, dude.” Dean snatched at the fluttering coattail, bringing the angel up short. He twisted the fistful of cloth around to the front and shook it accusingly. “It’s all charred.”
“Oh, that.” Castiel gave the blackened hem a disinterested glance and tugged free of Dean’s grasp. “There appear to be police vehicles behind that building-I think we’ve arrived.”
“Yeah, great.” The back wall of the police station had a hole fringed with dangling wires blown through it, and Dean followed the angel over cinderblocks littering the parking lot. “How’d it get burnt without you noticing?”
“I noticed.” Castiel circled a patrol car with a caved-in windshield and a concrete block resting on its front seat and lifted his chin toward the back of the lot. “I’m afraid there’s fencing on top of your car.”
“Aww, hell.” Momentarily diverted, Dean hurried over. Flipping aside a piece of bent metal with “Impound” and a phone number stenciled on it, he rocked experimentally at the chain link. “Shit, her paint’s scratched! If I lift it off her, can you flick it aside?”
Tucking his gun away, Dean hooked his fingers into the mesh and heaved. Its airy appearance belied its true weight-the collapsed section barely moved under his efforts. A second later Castiel ducked beneath one edge and lifted, ‘walking’ it up off the car with hands above his head. Dean caught the top row of links and dragged at it, groaning quietly from the strain, until the whole thing finally folded back and off the car.
“Yeah, I guess that works as well as putting an angel whammy on it,” Dean said, a little breathlessly, rolling his shoulders in an effort to ease the hot ache down his spine. Castiel cut his eyes to the side and Dean froze, frowning, because he couldn’t always read the blank expressions, but that? That right there was patented ‘angelic guilt’.
Castiel moved away, studiously absorbed in kicking rubble away from the tires. “Hey,” Dean started, and then his attention was snagged by the Impala again.
“Dammit, these won’t buff out.” He slid a palm back and forth on the hood, futilely trying to smooth divots gouged to bare metal. For a second he stared down at the car, as if he was watching some other story play out in the reflection of her glossy paint. Then he gave himself a hard shake. “Got touch-up paint back at the yard, though.”
He patted at his pocket for the keys. Castiel was standing silently behind the Impala now, arms lax at his sides and chin raised in that ‘stoic warrior of God’ pose that made Dean want to shake him until he loosened up. “Coming or going, dude?”
“I have nowhere I need to be at the moment.”
“Cool. I could use a second pair of eyes on lookout.” Dean paused with the door half-open, eyebrows rising questioningly when the angel didn’t move. Castiel's eyes were fixed on the car with disquieting intensity. “Just get in, okay? You’re gonna blister the paint with that stare.”
That got the angel jump-started. He walked, a little stiffly, to the passenger side, and with awkward care curved his hand around the door handle and depressed the button. He watched the door move while he swung it open enough to slide inside.
Dean shook his head as he dropped behind the wheel. All the times he’d objected to the angel popping out of thin air with zero warning, and Cas never seemed to remember not to do it. Now out of the blue he was making an effort? “What did you do, sneak up on Ellen and get an earful from her?”
Castiel turned to regard him with a fathomless blue gaze. “What?”
Yeah, okay, major mistake to say her name so casually yet. Dean clenched his jaw against the yawning pit that had opened up in his stomach and fumbled the key to the ignition. “Never mind.”
-----
That is the biggest-ass vulture I have ever seen in my life, Danny thought blankly when he crossed from behind the fenceline and found a dark thing touching down in front of him. He was swinging his rig up in an ingrained reflex to film anything out of the ordinary when its wings - featherless, he realized with growing shock - folded neatly onto its back and a gaunt brown arm uncurled from its chest.
Danny took a step back and the not-a-bird paced him, hand outstretched.
“Amanda, run.”
She didn’t react to his quiet command beyond looking up from picking her way across the uneven ground. “Do what now?”
“Run. Back to the cops or the Guard, as fast…”
Her scream cut off the rest of his words. Danny heaved the camera up and around into the thing’s side; it hunched a shoulder against the crunch of glass and plastic without even recoiling and stabbed its sharp hand to his chest.
Over the roaring in his ears he heard the wild scramble as his partner fled down the road.
-----
The street fronting the police station was deserted, clogged with debris. Wires dipped low halfway down the block, trailing from a snapped pole buried in the roof of a pick-up. Dean cranked down his window to listen over the deep grumble of the engine. “We good?” he asked finally. “I don’t hear any trucks. I think we’re good to go, but you’d know better’n me.”
Ramrod straight against the seat, hands resting flat on his thighs, Castiel started into the distance. “The soldiers we saw earlier are four streets over, disembarking and spreading outward,” he said after an almost-too-long pause.
“Then I’m goin’ now, before they disembark themselves any closer.” Dean’s cell chirped, muffled by layers of cloth and the crunch of glass beneath the tires, but he ignored it and hunched over the wheel, gaze fixed on the end of the block.
“Your phone…”
“Yeah, yeah, I have another message. I know who it is - again - and I don’t wanna deal with his bitching while I’m trying to get us out of here.” He cut the wheel sharply to dodge a spill of broken goods trailing from a shattered storefront. “We clear ahead?”
Another pause, and then, “So far.”
A car with one rear door left wide open was abandoned in the middle of the road. Dean turned into a cross street to avoid it. The block was lined with stately old trees and broad sidewalks and a series of crisply square holes where houses had stood. He suppressed a shudder and sped up.
“Interstate’s out past that shopping center,” he said a few minutes later, idling at an intersection. What was left of the building’s walls cycled pale red and blue in steady succession. “Got it roadblocked, though.”
“Turning right will return us to the back road we arrived on.”
Dean turned right. Smoke was blowing heavily again, thick with the stench of burning rubber. Tree limbs, some of them ground to sawdust by the military vehicles, were strewn on the road, along with twisted panels of colored metal, and books, dozens of them, splayed brokenly with pages ruffling in the breeze.
“You’ll break the spine, Dean!” Sam squawked in his memory, huge mitt swiping up the book tented over his stomach as he dozed. “Don’t dog ear the pages, that’s why I gave you sticky notes!”
Dean averted his eyes.
The fence was just barely visible ahead, and beyond it lay unguarded road. They’d be clear of Carthage, heading north, in another two minutes.
“What’s-Is that what I think it is?”
Castiel braced one hand on the dash as they rocked to a halt, craning to peer out the window. “It appears to be a body.”
“That’s what I thought. First one we’ve seen outside that killing field.”
“Perhaps you shouldn’t…” Castiel made a grab for Dean’s arm, but Dean was already swinging out of the car. The angel swiveled back and fumbled for the door handle - it worked differently than the outer one, prying outward instead of pressing in - and by the time he’d extricated himself, Dean was standing over the body, prodding at it with the toe of his boot.
“Weird - it’s dried out - dehydrated - but the clothes are fresh.” He nudged again and the body rolled easily onto its back. The hands clacked to rest on the pavement. “Rigor mortis hasn’t even set in.” An uneasy little shiver worked its way down his back, and he raised his head and swept the smoke-blurred horizon sharply.
“He is beyond help; we should leave him and go.”
“In a sec.” Dean crouched down, fingers tracing a hole punched through the field jacket the body wore. When he flipped back the jacket flap, a corresponding hole punctured the shirt over the heart. He rapped a knuckle on the chest and it made a hollow drumming sound. “Drained dry,” he muttered. “I’ve seen something like this before somewhere.”
It hovered just out of reach, another corpse with skin shriveled tight over cheekbones and jaw. The sun had been brilliant, the air piercingly cold, and he’d been squinting through a pounding hangover. The rest of the memory was cloudy, edged with hurt that warned not to poke deeper. Sammy’s Stanford time, maybe? Everything had ached then, and the drinking hadn’t blunted the right memories.
Stanford didn’t feel right, though.
“Vampires?” Castiel asked solemnly, and when Dean jerked his head up, surprised, reminded him, “You told me about your encounters with them during our drive to Maine. Although I still fail to see how sparkling makes any sense whatsoever.”
“It doesn’t-don’t try to understand it.” Dean shifted on his heels, patting down the body. “Vampires don’t sparkle and they don’t make neat holes like this, they rip entire throats out. This is something else.”
He snapped a thick plastic card free of the body’s belt. “This says the guy’s Daniel Wayne, cameraman for KPLR in St. Louis. He came in from outside to cover the mess here and he must’ve been killed less than an hour ago because we walked right down this fenceline and didn’t see him. Shit.” He rose, rubbing his hands hard on his jeans, and sent another long look around the area.
“We should leave.”
“Yeah, I think maybe you’re right.”
He dug out his phone once they were back in the car. The screen showed seven messages, and he sighed, propped his wrist on the wheel, and let them play.
“Dean? Dean! Call me back!”
“Did you really go to Carthage? Are you crazy, Dean? Are you getting these and ignoring me?”
“You are crazy, you pain in the ass! Dean, what’s going on there? Call back and tell me you’re okay."
“Did you get the car, or are you dead? It’s a war zone there, Dean, or didn’t you see the news?”
Siiigh. “You’re a jerk.”
“What the hell, Dean? Ten seconds. It takes ten seconds to hit speed dial and say you’re okay. There better be no cell service. Or working landlines. Or any truckers with radios. Send the angel back with a message or something, Dean, I mean it.”
“Call your brother, ya dumbass.”
Dean blew out a breath and dialed. He got as far as “Hey,” before a cascade of yelping cut him off. He rolled his eyes and draped his wrist back over the wheel. “Gonna let him wind down some,” he explained when he caught Castiel’s sidelong glance.
Sam’s voice grew thinner and shriller and finally broke off to suck in a breath. Dean tucked the phone back against his ear. “Hey, I wanted to hang around and have a nice long strategy session about picking up the car, but you know Angel Transport-it waits for no man.” Beside him, Castiel turned slowly and deliberately. Dean offered a disarming grin, but it faded rapidly under the weight of the angel’s glower.
Shit.
“Keep your panties on, everything’s fine. Banged in and right back out with the car no problem… Hell yeah, that’s relevant, it was the whole purpose of… Because I didn’t see any point in dragging your ass along, that’s why. I told you, we left in a hurry… I am not trying to blame the angel.”
Castiel’s stony stare was leaving a palpable heat on the side of Dean’s face. He switched the phone to his other ear for an excuse to half-turn away. With it held in place by a hunched shoulder, he shot a look at his watch. “About seven hours, give or take. I’m on the road now-I said, I’m on the road. I’ll drive straight through-save me some dinner.”
Sam had hung up on him. Dean made a face at the cell and snapped it shut, wriggling himself comfortable for the long drive.
“You are the one who requested I ‘zap us quick’.”
“Yeah, I was just… he won’t bitch as much if he thinks it was your idea.”
Shit. So not helping his case. Disapproval was pouring through that glacial blue stare, and Dean had the grace to squirm beneath it. “Look, okay, I’m…”
“I will meet up with you back at the salvage yard,” Castiel interrupted, voice rougher even than usual, and the seat was empty.
Dean blinked against the faint swirl of air against his skin. Ahead, the road climbed; the sun went down as he crossed the crest of the hill. In his mirror, Carthage lit up, searchlights cracking on in the shadowed streets. The world stilled around him, steel and glass and leather, and Dean leaned forward, popped in the waiting cassette with his thumb, and bore down on the accelerator.
-----
The second husk rolled to rest beneath a charred metal carriage, yellow hair caught in a pool of melted rubber. The creature drifted away, stomach pleasantly stretched, and pushed lazily up into the nearest tree.
Already another quarry beckoned, the line between playing out as it retreated into gathering dusk. No need for haste; the creature wrapped long feet around a branch and half-closed its eyes. When it was a little less sated, it would slide along the connection and find its next meal waiting.
Scraping a long talon around its mouth, it scooped up the last smears of blood and licked them clean.
-----
On to Part 2