SN/FW Crossover Fic: Deadlights
x-posted on supernaturalfic
Title: Deadlights
Rating: same as the show, some language
Category: Crossover (both in canon)
Spoilers: season 1, between Hook Man and Asylum
Characters: the Winchesters, a few of my own characters, and a few not my own (credited at the end).
Notable Credts: thanks to diamondback for the beta-read.... and some awesome ideas!!
Summary: Be careful who you flick your lights at...
Even in madness I know you still believe;
Paint me on canvass so I become
what you could never be.
I dare you to tell me to walk through fire
Wear my soul and call me a liar...
~ Shinedown, ©2005
Outside Hillsdale, Michigan
Ray Bucknell was on his way home to his apartment from work in the early hours of Saturday morning. Being in the middle of December, the nights were still getting longer, and at 1 a.m., the back road was dark, save for the blue cast of the car’s headlights on the road in front of Ray.
He’d left his job at the factory a little later than he was scheduled, as he had to wait for his relief to arrive. He hated that factory some days. This night was no exception. His mind, as he drove in the relative quiet, was on a nice hot shower, watching SportsCenter, and burrowing under his warm covers until morning.
So when the car came around the bend with its lights off, Ray was startled. Being the good citizen that he was, Ray alerted the driver that his headlights were off by flicking his own lights at the oncoming car.
As the car passed him, Ray realized three things in that one instant. The first was that the driver did turn on the car’s lights. The second was that there were four or five young, rough-looking men in the car.
The third was that he knew he wasn’t going to make it home alive.
~*~
Chief Chester Hamilton could not remember a scene like the one that confronted him the next morning on the Old Country Road, near mile marker 35. Chief Hamilton amended that - there was one other scene he could remember, and to be honest, he’d rather not.
The late-model two-door sports car was pulled over on the shoulder of the road, looking as if the driver had simply pulled off to look at a map or make a call on his cell phone. At a first glance, the car looked perfectly fine, ready for the driver to come back and take the car home. Except for the smashed headlights.
And the fact that Ray Bucknell was still sitting in the front seat with his throat slashed by what looked like claw marks from some wild animal.
Chief Hamilton had his own pack of wild animals to deal with - the local media. The local television station wanted footage from all angles, the
newspaper stringers wanted their chance at an interview and a photograph of the dead driver. There were more officers keeping the media hounds at bay than policemen cordoning off the scene until the detectives could arrive, and offer any number of opinions.
In all the melee, the chief missed seeing the two men in their 20s near the edge of the crowd, silently observing the scene.
~*~
Dean Winchester closed the panel in the trunk before closing the lid itself on his ‘67 Impala, which was parked in the lot of the Hillsdale Motel, further down Old Country Road from the late-model sports car, and went into the room he and his brother Sam had rented.
Inside the dimly-lit room, Sam sat at the small table in front of his open laptop, entering keywords into an internet search engine. Those claw marks nagged at Sam’s mind as he tried various other possibilities, including “animal attacks” with “vehicle accidents,” and “vehicle homicides” and “wild animals.” Finally after searching on a string of words including “headlights,” “slash marks,” and “auto accidents,” the younger Winchester found an article describing a very similar scene.
“Hey Dean, check this out - found a news item from about five years ago, a young woman was killed in a mysterious accident on the same stretch of road. The only damage was to the headlights. Nothing about those slashes, though.” He looked up from the monitor at his brother. “Hey, do we know who that poor guy was yet?”
“Yeah,” answered Dean, his voice husky, “some local named Ray Bucknell. Worked down at the local factory, second shift. Was on his way home when he wrecked. That’s all I got.”
Sam was still searching online. There had to be more to this than the obvious. Sure enough, he found another article five year before that. And after more clicks and searching archives, a pattern emerged that every fives years, someone was found dead in their car with their headlights smashed out.
There were no more archives before 1975. It was to this article, however, that Sam drew his brother’s attention.
“Dean?” Sam called him over.
Dean was staring out the window, distracted. He needed to find his father, he needed to find the thing that killed his and Sam’s mom 22 years ago, the same thing that killed Jessica, Sam was too young to know loss like that... It was into these thoughts Dean heard his name.
“Huh? Yeah?” he asked, returning to the room and the present. “Whatcha got?” He came over to the table, and looked over his brother’s shoulder.
“Lights Out!” screamed the headline from the monitor. The article from the Hillsdale Times from October of 1975 told of a group of kids who were driving down the Old Country Road, drinking and smoking, and they took the curve too fast. The car skidded off the road, down the embankment, and after flipping over several times, it landed at the bottom.
“Nothin’ weird about that,” Dean commented.
Sam read further. “Says here the police think it was supposed to be some part of a gang initiation.”
Dean raised his eyebrows. “Keep going,” he encouraged, thinking he might know where this was possibly headed.
Sam summarized, “The kids in the car were driving with their headlights off, waiting for an oncoming car to flash its lights at the kids’ car, to indicate their lights were out. When an unsuspecting person would flash their lights at the kids, that was their target. The kids would then go after the car, and kill the driver. Then they were in the gang.” Sam stopped scanning the article. “That sounds familiar...” he trailed off.
“Search on ‘Lights Out,’ and see if those dates match,” Dean suggested, his thoughts searching his own knowledge, and then went over to his bag on the bed, and pulled out his father’s journal. He gingerly leafed though it, hoping his father had left some kind of clue.
Sam typed a few words into the search engine, and cross-referenced the dates he’d identified. In each case, there was a follow-up article some days after each accident, suggesting this “gang initiation” theory.
Sam looked over at Dean. “I thought that was an urban legend.”
“So was Bloody Mary and Hook Man, and see what happened there,” Dean said matter-of-factly. “We need to find out more about those kids in ’75,” he added. “There’s nothing before that.”
“We could try the local library - ” Sam started, but Dean groaned. “ - or not,” Sam finished. “Maybe I could talk to the police chief we saw at the scene.”
Dean started walking back and forth in front of the bed. He stopped a moment, looked at Sam and said, “We’re still missing something, Sammy.” He glanced out the window again, a thoughtful look crossing his features.
“Ready to go?” Sam asked.
Dean headed for the door. “Yep.” He had a funny look on his face.
“You behave at the police station, Dean,” Sam warned him.
Dean’s face was the picture of innocence. “Who me? Always,” he grinned.
~*~
Chief Hamilton sat behind his desk observing the two men sitting opposite him, finding it difficult to believe these men were from the Department of Transportation. Hamilton had looked at their identification - DOT Agents Hetfield and Ulrich - and knew they were forged but certainly couldn’t prove it, they were too well-made for an obvious counterfeit.
But while studying the two, Hamilton recognized the fatigue in their faces, the weariness in their eyes, and their travel-worn demeanor. They were searching for something, and had been for a while.
Hamilton leaned back, his 60-year-old frame creaking with the chair.
“What can I do for you boys this afternoon?” he asked casually.
“We’re looking into the death of Ray Bucknell,” Sam started.
“Awfully quick for you boys, eh?”
“I’m sorry?” Dean asked.
“Them DOT boys aren’t usually here the afternoon after a fatality. So who are you really?”
“We’re - ” Sam started, and Dean knew his brother would more than likely try to tell the truth. Dean quickly interrupted.
“I’m Dean and this is Sam,” Dean started, and Sam was rather surprised his brother used their real names. “We were college buddies of Ray’s.” There went Sam’s surprise. “When we heard he was in an accident we came right away.”
“You three all went to Hillsdale College, eh?” the chief asked, inadvertently giving the brothers the name of the school they would use later to their advantage.
“Yes, sir,” Dean said, respectfully. Sam was trying not to laugh at this act of his brother’s.
“Well, that makes much more sense,” the chief mused aloud. “You shoulda just said that in the first place.” The chief leaned back a little more in the chair, and put his arms up behind his head.
“Don’t know what more I can tell you about what happened.” At that moment, something clicked into place for the chief. “I’ve seen you two,” he said with certainty. “You were there this morning, thought I recognized you boys.”
“We were hoping you could tell us about those claw marks we saw on Ray,” Sam said helpfully. Dean flashed a look that said, good going, just jump right on in.
“Must have been some kind of animal, from what I could tell.”
“Have you ever seen anything like it before, sir?” asked Sam.
Hamilton was silent for a moment, and Dean was able to study this older man. The police chief was lost in his thoughts, wrestling with what to tell the brothers. Finally, all he said was, “Yeah.”
Sam leaned forward in the stiff-backed chair he was sitting on, and urged the older man to continue.
“Back 30 years ago, there was a group of kids who wrecked their car in what they said was a gang initiation. I was a rookie detective back in ’75, and that was my first case. They went off the road at that mile marker - 35. Since then, well, this is going to sound strange - ” Hamilton trailed off.
“Try us,” Dean said.
“You gotta understand, I started out as a beat cop. I wanted off the streets, so I made Detective in early ’75. This was my first case that September. I’m a man who deals with the facts and evidence, and what I can prove. I can’t prove, in my right mind, that that corner is haunted.”
Hamilton braced for the ridicule and the laughing. He’d never offered this theory to any of his detectives, knowing the rumors that would circulate, and probably mean the end of his career on the force.
“Were there any witnesses to any of the other accidents?” Sam asked.
Hamilton was momentarily silenced. “Other accidents?” he finally asked.
“Every five years,” Dean interjected.
“Ah.” Hamilton said. “No, there weren’t.” He was quiet a moment. “When we were able to get down into the brush where the car ended up, the bodies were gone, and there were these huge claw marks on inside of the car doors, like something was trying to desperately get out.”
“And you think it got out,” Sam speculated.
“Yeah. I know how silly that sounds - ”
“No, it doesn’t sound silly,” Sam reassured him. After a quiet moment, he stood, and held his hand out to the police chief. “I know you’re busy, sir, thanks for your time.”
Hamilton stood and shook Sam’s hand, then held his hand out for Dean. Dean
stood and took the proffered hand. It was cold, the hand of someone with poor circulation. “Is there anyone else in town who might know something, you think?” Dean asked.
Hamilton shook his head. “Unless you count Loony Larry, lives in a trailer on the other edge of town, off of State Road. He runs some internet magazine on government conspiracy theories, or urban legends, or some such nonsense. Don’t tell him I sent you, though.”
“Sure thing, thanks,” Dean said, knowing he could relate to the conspiracy-theory types. Sam and Dean started to leave the office.
“Oh, and, uh - ” Hamilton’s voice stopped them in the doorway and they turned back. “Just a friendly warning to quit using them phony IDs, boys. I could arrest you two just for that, but you seem like nice fellas. Just try to stay outta trouble ‘round here.”
“Yes, sir,” Sam smiled back. As they left, Dean tried to suppress an outright laugh.
~*~
“Roads to Madness” by Queensryche blared from Dean’s speakers as they drove through Hillsdale in search of a trailer supposedly parked on the edge of town. As if a location couldn’t have been any more ambiguous.
“So what do you think, Sammy?” Dean asked over the music.
Sam reached over from the passenger’s seat and turned the music down a few hundred decibels.
“I think Hamilton might be onto something. Maybe those kids didn’t die in the crash, but clawed their way out and died down there of exposure or something. And I think every five years, they recreate their initiation ritual, and kill the person who flashes their lights. They leave the claw marks.” Sam was quiet a moment, thinking, “I can’t explain the every-five-years pattern though.”
“Even if we find this trailer,” Dean spoke his thoughts aloud, “I wonder who the hell this ‘Loony Larry’ is.”
“Guess we’ll find out soon enough,” Sam pointed out the old, rusty Airstream trailer ahead on the right. The trailer was parked in a gravel lot off the right side of the road, in the front of a wooded area, which looked like a park to the brothers.
Dean pulled off the road in front of the trailer, turned off the car and got out. Sam followed suit. Their boots crunched on the gravel as they circled the trailer.
“Doesn’t look like anyone’s home, Sammy,” Dean stated, observing the obvious, but noting the two lawn chairs near the door.
“Sam,” the younger Winchester said absently, heading back to the Impala.
A moment later, Dean found himself at sword point. The man wielding it was older than Dean - about 10 years older, had a receding hairline; the hair he did have was long, wavy and stringy. And there was a wild, almost manic, look in his eyes. His words came out in a rush.
“Who are you snooping around my trailer? What are you doing here?”
Dean took a step back. “Whoa, man, easy,” he said. He’d dealt with demons, shape shifters, and a wendigo, but a sword-wielding lunatic was too much.
“I’m looking for someone called Loony Larry.” Dean told the man. “Sam!” he
called out louder. Sam turned away from the car door to see the man holding the sword on his brother, and he ran back to Dean. The man with the sword heard the footsteps and turned to see a second young man heading right for him. Dean lunged for the swordsman’s arm, intending to knock the sword away.
The man turned back to Dean, and as he did so, Sam got the jump on him. The two rolled around on the dusty ground, fighting for a few minutes. At the same time Dean reached out to pull Sam off this man, he’d heard a car pull up and stop on the gravel. It was an old Caddie that Dean admired for a moment.
As Dean pulled his brother apart from the other man, he now noticed a newcomer had arrived, and was also separating the two fighters. For a moment Dean blinked, taken aback, thinking he’d seen a vision of his slightly older self, and then focused on the newcomer. The new guy was taller and younger looking; he dragged the sword-wielding psycho by the collar aside, and over to the door of the trailer.
They spoke together for a few moments, and Dean could hear some hisses and heavy breathing, and every now and then a word, although it was impossible to understand what was actually being said. After a few minutes, the older man seemed to calm down a little. He jabbed the sword into the ground, and Dean relaxed somewhat.
Dean helped his brother stand up, and Sam dusted off his jacket and the brothers observed the two men, wondering who would speak first. The two men walked over to the brothers, but it was Sam who spoke first, holding his hand out.
“I’m Sam, and this is my brother Dean. We’re - ”
“ - sorry to have bothered you guys,” Dean said, realizing this was looking like a mistake, and turned to leave.
The older of the two men called him back. “No. No, Dean, was it?” Dean turned around. The man continued.
“There was a reason you were snooping around my trailer.” Something occurred to the man. “Who sent you? Was it Hamilton? Who was it?” he demanded.
Hearing the man ramble with paranoid delusions, Dean felt defiant. “Yeah, so what if it was?”
“I knew it, Foster, I just knew it,” the man mumbled to his younger friend.
So, Dean thought, the younger man was Foster. The older man had to have been Loony Larry. He was aptly named, Dean realized. Until....
“Maybe we should talk to ‘em, Eddie,” Foster hissed at the other man.
Eddie? thought Dean. Who the hell was Eddie? Dean exchanged a look with Sam, who was apparently wondering the same thing.
The man called Foster sighed, and ran his fingers through his hair, which was starting to show some grey. Dean kept his eye on this man; as far as he knew, Sam was his only brother. This was starting to creep Dean out.
Foster approached the brothers with a calculated stride as he looked them over. The younger one, Sam, he’d said, looked like he could use a haircut. He was taller than his brother, and there was still something child-like in his face.
Looking at the older brother, Cade Foster thought he could see himself in his younger days: the look of distrust in his eyes, the hardest expression of someone who had seen more than he should have in his time.
Foster’s voice was husky, as if he hadn’t used it in a while.
“Why do you want to see Loony Larry?” Foster asked.
“Why did you call him ‘Eddie’?” Dean shot back. Cade smiled to himself. Yeah, this was his younger self all right.
“You wouldn’t happen to know anything about what happened to Ray Bucknell, would you?” Sam asked.
“Hamilton sent you.” Foster stated. It was not a question.
“Yes, sir,” Sam said politely.
Cade flicked his glance up at Sam. While this was the younger one, Cade realized there was wisdom in this one too. More than there should have been.
“Don’t know anything about Bucknell, but we could run a search for you, see what comes up?”
Eddie, Larry, or whatever his name was, came running over to Cade, a paranoid look on his face.
“What? Are you crazy? I’m not letting them into my trailer! No way, Foster!”
Foster turned to the older man, and hissed, “You want all of Hillsdale to hear you? I’m tired of all this, still hiding. I was cleared almost five years ago, I shouldn’t have to live like this.”
“Yeah, but you know you like it.”
Foster sighed. Eddie was right, damn it. Remembering that they had two “guests,” Foster turned back to them, and gestured to the chairs set outside the trailer.
Sam sat, and Dean went over to the chairs and remained standing. Cade sat in the other chair, and watched as Eddie yanked the sword out of the ground.
“Nice sword, man,” Dean said.
“Sword that killed Lincoln,” Eddie smiled proudly.
Sam looked up. “Lincoln was shot,” he said, as if everyone knew that.
“That’s what they tell you,” Eddie replied, and Cade rolled his eyes and smiled. He’d heard this already, but it was still amusing even seven years
later, after he’d first met Eddie ... also at sword point.
“So Hamilton was right - you are into conspiracies,” Dean commented.
“Government conspiracies, cover-ups, little green men - ”
“Eddie...” Cade warned.
“ - alien abductions - ”
“Eddie...”
“ - the Illuminati - ”
“Eddie!” Cade fairly yelled.
“Sorry, Foster. Got carried away.” Eddie turned back to the brothers. “I’ve always said believe the unbelievable. Got it on the masthead of my e-zine.” Eddie’s eyes narrowed at the brothers. “What do you think?”
“Sounds about right,” Dean muttered.
>Sam jumped right in with his child-like honestly. “What do you know about the urban legend called ‘Lights Out!’?” he asked.
Eddie walked from where he was standing by the door around next to Sam’s chair.
“Urban legends?” Eddie asked, a maniacal tone in his voice. “You kids believe in that stuff?” Dean and Sam exchanged looks again. Dean leaned back on one heel and crossed his arms over his chest.
“So what if we do?”
“We investigate happenings that some people think are urban legends,” Sam started, “ghost hunters - ” Dean cut him off with a look, and Sam became quiet at that moment.
Eddie smiled. “That’s cool.”
Dean was now standing behind Sam’s chair, and he muttered to his brother, “Now this guy’s creeping me out. Why did Hamilton give us this guy’s name anyway?”
“No idea,” Sam said out of the corner of his mouth.
“So,” Dean said in his normal voice to Eddie, “Who the hell is Loony Larry anyway? And who are you guys?”
Now it was Cade and Eddie’s turn to exchange looks.
“Tell you boys what,” Eddie said after a moment. “We’ll see what we can do for you now, and if you’re still here later, we’ll tell you whatever you need to know.”
“Seems to me those are mutually exclusive,” Dean said. But Sam had gotten up and was headed to the car. He opened the door, grabbed his laptop, and
went back to sit down. He opened the laptop, logged on, and opened several websites he’d bookmarked earlier. He turned the portable computer so Eddie and Cade could see the pages he’d found.
Eddie clicked through the information, sites, and archives with interest.
“Foster, come here, take a look at this,” Eddie mumbled at one point. Sam had gotten up and was now looking over Eddie’s shoulder at the “Lights Out!” archive article. Cade, who had been watching Eddie use the laptop with obvious envy for the younger man, came over to stand behind Eddie.
Dean, still standing with his arms crossed, watched the interaction with some amusement. At least he knew that they weren’t the only ones hunting things that go bump in the night. What was it that Foster had muttered? Something about his name being cleared, still living in a trailer. He wondered what that was all about, but something this Eddie guy was saying caught his attention.
“We’ve done this before. We’ve been here before, Foster. Literally.” He got up so sudden, Sam had to catch the laptop before it fell in the dust.
“Hold that thought, guys,” Eddie said as he flung open the trailer door. The spring snapped the door shut, and a moment later, Eddie returned outside holding an old, leather-bound book rather gingerly.
“We did this already.”
“You said that, Eddie,” Foster said. “Even after seven years, you’re still as cryptic as ever. What the hell are you mumbling about?”
Eddie carefully turned the parchment pages of the book, and Dean noticed it had a jeweled eye in a triangle on the front cover - the Illuminati. Who was this guy? Dean asked himself, not for the first time.
“Except,” Eddie continued rambling, “when we were here in 2000, we thought it meant us. It wasn’t us, Foster, it’s them.” After a few more pages, Eddie stopped and showed the four-lined poem to Cade. Sam stood up to see the pages. Eddie turned the big book so the younger Winchester could read the quatrain.
He looked up. “What does this mean?” He looked behind him. “Dean, you gotta see this!” he called
Dean walked over and looked in the book at where Sam was indicating. He was never one for poetry, but he got a sudden chill down his spine when he read the calligraphied words:
Century 11, Quatrain 2:
The plague in the form of a spectre
Shall haunt the roads of the Northern Midwest
In five years, and five again, and again five
Until the Hunters come.
Dean was silent, staring at the pages. After some time, he pointed at the quatrain heading
“Wanna tell me what this is all about? Who wrote this? What’s going on here anyway?”
“They’re the lost quatrains of Michel de Nostradame,” Cade explained softly.
“Nostradamus,” Sam said in awe. Cade nodded and continued. “They were written in 1564, predicting the end of the world. It was supposed to come in three waves, unless humanity was saved by someone called the Twice-Bless’d Man. Some of the quatrains’ numbers seem to have meanings to some people at times, and at other times, they’re just random numbers.”
Dean looked up at this last thing Cade said, and his eyes went back to the top of the quatrain. His expression changed, softened, and Sam saw where Dean was looking, and followed his brother’s gaze.
Sam tried to speak. “They’re - ” but thinking of Jessica, he could not continue. Dean realized Sam was also looking at the numbers, and had to swallow before speaking.
“It’s the date our mom was killed by something. And the same date Sam’s girlfriend was killed twenty-two years later. By the same something. It’s still out there, mocking us.” Dean said bitterly. He bit off the last word, having not intended to say so much.
“What - ” Sam started, cleared his throat, and then started again. “What were these ‘three waves’?”
Cade took the book from Eddie, marked the quatrain, closed the book and sat down. Sam immediately sat in the other chair. Eddie disappeared around the back of the Airstream and returned with two more chairs. He offered one to Dean, who shook his head.
“You’re gonna want this, trust me.”
Dean accepted the chair and sat down next to his brother. Eddie sat a little distance from the group. Cade smiled a moment at the brothers before saying, “I’m not sure you’ll believe us.”
“We’re still here,” Sam pointed out.
“Aliens,” Cade said, the huskiness in his voice returning.
Dean swallowed again, and then leaned back in his chair. “Aliens?” he repeated. “As in the little green men you mentioned before?”
“Not exactly.” This was from Eddie. “The third wave was Armageddon. The second wave was the invasion. The first wave - ”
“- was an advance scout party,” Cade finished, “to study humanity and see if Earth was a planet that would be suitable for their homeworld.”
A look of dawning seemed to creep into Sam’s eyes. “And these … quatrains? They helped this ‘Twice Bless’d Man’ save humanity?”
“He saved humanity,” Cade began, “but no one ever even knew it. The government never knew what had happened, the Gua had infiltrated the highest levels, and could have taken over. And believe me, no one would have been the wiser.” All of Cade’s old anger surfaced, and the pain of losing Hannah. Who were these kids? Cade hadn’t talked to anyone about this since the day they’d vanquished Mabus.
Guided by some instinct Sam would never be able to name, he reached out and put a comforting hand on Foster’s shoulder -
- a flash of a woman with wavy brown hair smiling ...a flash of the same woman with Foster ...then with tentacles writhing and twisting coming from her neck -
Sam gasped and moved his hand.
Dean sat up in his chair. “You ok, Sammy?”
“Yeah.” Sam relaxed into the chair, and he was, in fact, all right.
Dean still had more questions. “Who the hell are the Gua?”
“That’s what the aliens called themselves,” Cade said. “They looked like humans, and that’s how they were able to plan this takeover right under our noses. Or, try to take over, anyway.”
Dean leaned forward on the edge of his chair. This was good. Real good.
“Tell me more,” he encouraged Foster to continue.
“Never did find out what they looked like in their true form, and I’m glad for that. What we did learn was they sent their consciousness to Earth in, well, little metal balls.”
Eddie continued, “They used human DNA to create bodies for themselves, and then essentially, would upload their consciousness into the body - or husk - just like a computer. Gotta hand it to them, they were organized, well-structured, well-connected - and could be anyone they’d wanted. I’d hate to think what could have happened if they had taken over.” Eddie sounded quite sane as be spoke. But then, his and Cade’s dealings with the Gua were a sobering experience.
“While they looked like us,” Cade said, “their energy was still a part of them, just lurking beneath the surface. When something angered them, you could see this energy ripple just below the surface of their skin.”
“They had to have a plan, right?” Sam asked. “I mean, what to do with humanity.”
“Sure, enslave humanity,” Eddie answered flippantly, as if all alien invaders had the same plan.
“What did you mean when you said,” Dean paused, trying to remember what Eddie had been saying in all his mumbled excitement, “‘it’s them.’ What does that mean?”
Eddie stood up, and got the book from Cade, and turned to the quatrain again.
“Those accounts of the accidents - every five years, right?” Eddie asked, and Sam nodded.
“‘In five years, and five again, and again five,’” Eddie read from the book. “Every five years. ‘Until the Hunters come.’ We thought that was us. This was Nostradamus’ guide book to stopping the first wave.” Eddie was getting wound up again, like an eager professor, lecturing on his pet subject. “Foster here stopped more alien experiments and scouting missions single-handedly than any other human alive.” Cade let that exaggeration slip through. He was the only human ever to stop the Gua experiments.
“Alien experiments?” Dean asked, a little rougher than he’d intended.
“Tests, designed to see how far humans would go,” Cade answered, “and how much psychological stress we could handle, before we’d break. I’d bore you to tears if I told you all of them. I’m sure Eddie still has them online, though,” he smiled wryly.
Sam had silently asked Eddie for the book, which he now held on his lap, and looked at the first two lines of the quatrain.
“‘The plague in the form of a spectre/Shall haunt the roads of the Northern Midwest.’” Sam muttered, reading. “‘Northern Midwest’ must be this area of the US...Michigan isn’t exactly the Midwest. Wait - ” Sam pondered a moment. “’The plague in the form of a spectre.’ Spectres are ghosts, but I don’t understand ‘the plague.’”
It was Eddie again who replied. “I don’t think Nostradamus understood ‘alien invasion.’ And the Gua were like a plague on society.”
“Dean, do you have any idea what this might mean?” Sam asked his brother.
Dean was quiet a moment, processing everything Foster and Eddie had said that afternoon.
After several false starts, at what to say, Dean settled on, “Yeah, I think so. They’re not the ghosts of the kids. I think we just got ourselves into a bigger mess than we thought.”
Sam turned in his seat to face Cade.
“Who did they take from you?” he asked softly.
“My wife,” Cade heard himself say.
Sam had turned back several pages, and was reading more of Nostradamus’ encrypted poems. He studied them with awe, wonder, and a sudden sense of dawning. He finally closed the book and returned it to Cade.
“You’re the Twice-Bless'd Man, aren’t you?”
“Twice-Cursed is more like it,” Cade couldn’t help returning.
~*~
“Damn it, Eddie, that kid is me,” Foster said later, after the Winchesters had left. Cade sat down on Eddie’s beat-up couch in
the Airstream, and sipped at his hot coffee.
“He liked my car, Cade.” Eddie was sitting at his computer, uploading something new onto his web page.
“Oh, Eddie,” Cade sighed. He leaned back into the couch and picked up the paperback he was currently reading. He opened to the page he’d stopped at, and tried to continue reading.
His thoughts kept returning to the boys. It had been four years since they’d defeated Mabus, the next Anti-Christ, so Mabus called himself. With Mabus in control, ready to launch the Army of the Gua, humanity would have been doomed. By destroying the orb that held the consciousnesses of thousands of Gua, Cade had insured that humanity would wake up the next day, never knowing their lives could have been vastly different.
And while there had been followers of Cade’s journals, and Jordan Radcliffe’s army, Raven Nation, it hadn’t been the “right” people. It was true what Cade had told Sam - the Gua killed his wife. But that wasn’t all. They’d framed Cade for her murder.
Distraught, Cade searched out Crazy Eddie, who published The Paranoid Times. Cade found Eddie, merely intending to sell him his story. Instead, Cade got a believer and a friend.
Jordan was an heiress whose brother had been driven mad by the Gua, and killed their parents. Something stopped him as he was about to kill her. Through Eddie’s webpage, Jordan and her Raven Nation army made themselves known to Cade, and it was with her monetary backing they were able to
fortify their own army.
But Mabus had been too strong. Overnight, Mabus had wiped out Raven Nation, leaving Cade, Eddie, Jordan, and a traitor Gua, a fighter named Joshua, to stand their ground against the Gua. And as history can attest to, this small band of believers won the day.
But at what cost? Cade wondered. Here he was, 35 years old, still living on the road with Eddie, Eddie’s Caddie, and the Airstream. Why hadn’t he settled down again? Because the damn Gua took everything he’d ever wanted, and things would never be the same, no matter how much time had passed.
These boys were the same way, Cade realized. Something killed their mother 22 years ago, and killed Sam’s girlfriend just last month. That was rough. But there was more. There was a hardened look on both boys, but more so in Dean’s eyes, and Cade recognized that determined look from his own face. The look that said “I know what’s out there, and I’m going to stop it, no matter what.”
~*~
Sunlight seeped into Dean’s closed eyelids, waking him from a surprisingly restful sleep. He looked at the clock on the
nightstand, and groaned when he saw it was barely 7 in the morning. He heard a familiar tapping, and looked around. Sam was sitting on his bed, searching the web. Again.
“Whatcha got, Sammy?” Dean asked groggily, dragging himself to a sitting position on the bed. He rubbed his eyes to wake up fully.
“Well, they’re not complete crack-pots, if that’s what you’re asking,” Sam said smiling.
“I’m not. What did you find?” Dean asked, slowly standing up, still wearing his jeans from yesterday. He’d tossed his shirt into a duffel bag, and now looked in that same bag for a shirt that was relatively clean. Sam was already dressed.
“Listen to this: ‘Wherever something weird is going on, you’re gonna find Cade Foster. With the help of my friend Eddie Nambulous, what I find will fill the pages of The Paranoid Times. Maybe it will be a road map for others in the months and years ahead, ‘cause we got a long way to go if we’re gonna save this earth.
‘We know they’re here, they live in beautiful human shells. Maybe our race is too attracted to beauty to be able to spot the evil that lies within. On my bad days, I wonder if the human race is even worth saving. But then I think of Hannah. We can beat them, believe in ourselves and each other. As my buddy Eddie says, “Sometimes madmen turn out to be prophets.”’”(1)
“That’s beautiful, Sammy,” Dean said, trying to keep the sarcasm to a minimum. He pulled on his jacket, and then ruffled his younger brother’s already mussed hair. This was interesting, Dean realized, although he’d be hard pressed to admit it, especially to his brother. “Ready
to check out that crash site?” Dean grabbed his duffel bag in one hand.
Sam clicked one more time to bookmark the page, and then shut the computer down. Tucking the laptop into its backpack, Sam pulled on his hooded sweatshirt and jacket. He slung the backpack over his shoulder.
After locking the motel room, Dean called his brother’s name. When the younger Winchester looked up, Dean tossed him the keys.
“Remember where we’re going?”
“Yeah, looked at some maps of the area last night, too.”
“Too?” Dean raised his eyebrows. “How long were you up for? Half the night?” Dean opened his car door, tossed the duffel bag on the floor, and got it, as Sam got behind the wheel.
“I’m good, Dean.”
Knowing how much he hated all that being open and sharing crap, Dean chose not to push it any further. He knew that Sam was up most of the previous night reading that guy Foster’s journal.
After a quick stop at a local donut shop for what passed for breakfast, they were on their way to investigate the site where so many deaths had occurred.
Dean reached into the back seat where Sam had put his bag, and pulled out the thin portable computer. Connecting his cell phone to a USB hook-up, he plugged it into the back of the computer and was able to log online, and pull up the bookmarked journals.
“As usual, the aliens covered their tracks, leaving me nothing but a report in the pages of this journal...And maybe I learned not to give up hope. We can all work together, respect each others’ skills, no matter what they are. Then maybe I won’t have to walk this road alone,”(2) Dean read aloud. “Hmm, maybe there is something to all this, after all,” Dean muttered.
“He says in there he used to be a thief. And then worked for a security firm. That’s handy,” Sam said, keeping alert for the mile marker.
“Here’s the thing, Sammy,” Dean was saying as he scrolled though over three years of journal entries. “This is all in the past. We’re in the present. We’re tracking paranormal creatures, and we’re trying to find Dad. This stuff is dated four years ago. How do we know this wasn’t made up by a crazy fan of a TV show or something?”
“We don’t, Dean,” Sam said, now slowing down and pulling off the shoulder across the road from where Bucknell’s car had been.
“Whoa, this guy has had a few aliases. We could use a few of these, Sammy,” Dean looked up grinning. Sam had parked the car, turned it off and now tossed the keys back to Dean.
Sam reached into the backseat and pulled his digital camera out of the bag and put it in his jacket pocket. Dean was still in the passenger’s seat with the computer on.
“What else did you find, Dean?” Sam asked, now curious at his brother’s newfound interest in these journals.
“Two little blurbs here: ‘The battle ahead will be difficult, so we must be determined to fight. We have to keep our faith in each other, to work together, to trust.’(3) And this one I like:‘Two years, and what have Eddie and I accomplished? A few dead aliens, and a small group of believers who are regarded as lunatics.’(4) Seems to me that for almost two years, no one believed him, or wanted not to believe.”
“There’s more to everyone than you can see on the outside,” Sam said philosophically, “including this Foster guy.” Sam closed the door, and waited for Dean to emerge from the car with his duffel.
“You’re right,” Dean said, as they trekked down the slope covered with underbrush, brambles and branches.
Sam’s head whipped around to look at his brother. “Are you feeling okay there, Deano?” he asked suspiciously.
“Yep, just fine. I’m only agreeing to what you said about there being more that just what you see. I’m just hoping we can deal with these kids’ ghosts, and keep on moving. I’m running out of ideas here.”
The brothers were quiet the rest of the way down. The climb was slow-going with all the branches and debris. At the bottom of the slope, the ground was covered in small rocks and pebbles, and a trickle of water someone would call a stream ran through the rocks. Based on the amount of rocks there, at one time the stream was much wider.
At the place where the incline met this rocky ground, there was a section the size of a car roof, that was bare. Just dirt. Nothing grew there, the underbrush even grew around it.
Sam positioned his camera to get the best angles of the site, hoping that something might show up in his viewfinder. He took several normal
looking pictures of a patch of dirt. Dean had pulled out his homemade EMF detector - looking suspiciously like a Walkman that had been through the wringer - and was scanning the area for any signs of paranormal activity.
Unfortunately, with the exception of the dirt patch, all indications showed normal activity. It was either back to the internet archives; or back to Loony Larry, Crazy Eddie, or whatever the hell his name was.
Sword that killed Lincoln, my ass, Dean thought, as the brothers headed back to the motel before it was completely dark. Scary thing about this was, Dean believed it all. And seeing the look on Sam’s face with that book of poems, or quatrains, Sam believed it all, too.
~*~
“Sam! Watch where you’re going! You just missed the motel!” Dean was more startled than anything, and driving by a hot shower and comfy bed brought him out of his reverie. Why hadn’t there been any readings? After 30 years, the ground should at least have weeds growing in it. This was weirder than usual all around.
“I think we need to go back and talk to Foster and Eddie.”
“Larry. Hamilton told us his name was Larry.”
“It used to be Larry. He changed it,” Sam glanced over at Dean. “You didn’t read the journals. It was in there,” he pointed out with a hint of a smile. Dean just shook his head.
“Yeah, whatever, Sammy.”
The gravel crunched under the Impala’s wheels as Sam parked it beside Eddie’s light blue Cadillac. The trailer door was open even before the brothers were out of the car. It wasn’t Eddie, but Cade who greeted them.
The four chairs were still outside, and even though it was cold that night, they arranged the chairs around the fire pit and Cade kept the fire going while they spoke.
“Why do you guys still do it?” Sam asked softly. Dean flashed a look at Sam, but had to admit he was curious of the answer, too.
“It’s who I am,” Cade said after a moment. Sam nodded in agreement, having read this in Foster’s journal. “Their leader, Mabus, may be gone, but there are still Gua out there who haven’t gotten the message, I’m sure.” Cade idly poked at the burning twigs.
When the trailer door opened again, it was Dean who looked up, knowing to who it was.
“Knew you’d be back,” Eddie said, quite sure of himself. “Find your ghosts?” he asked, getting the fourth chair and setting it near the fire. He looked around a moment, as if he had misplaced something, and then sat down.
Dean bit back a sarcastic retort, as he realized there was no maliciousness in Eddie’s voice. It was just a question, nothing more.
“No,” Sam offered, ignoring Dean’s look again. “But there’s certainly something weird going on here.”
The four were quiet for a few moments, Sam having a million questions to ask all at once, Dean wishing he was already in that nice warm bed. Cade regarded the brothers almost as the two parts of himself: the stubborn fighter who didn’t back down; and the humanitarian, who wanted to give this race the benefit of the doubt. Eddie watched the brothers with a bit of suspicion still, but admiration as well. In spite of his cynicism, he realized there were still warriors out there, fighting the things that go bump in the night.
“You pass that corner on the way out of town the other way,” Eddie offered. The brothers looked up from the fire at him.
“You think that these ‘kids’ are actually the… Gua?” Dean asked.
Eddie looked over at Foster, who was now watching the fire. “Cade?” he called, “Helloo?? Anyone in there? Hello, Foster?” Eddie waved his hand in front of Cade’s face in an exaggerating gesture. Cade looked up.
“Oh, no, I know that look,” Eddie said. “You want to check this out with them.”
Cade was silent.
Dean stood up, almost knocking the chair back behind him. “Well, what are we waiting for? Let’s go.”
Eddie was suddenly apprehensive. “Uhh, Foster, I have the next issue to upload... you go. I’ll - I’ll see you when you get back.”
Cade waved half-heartedly at Eddie and his sappy moment, and went over to the Impala with the brothers, where Dean opened the trunk, then released the latch that opened the floor panel in the trunk. Cade whistled at the cache of weapons, crosses, rosaries, dreamcatchers, and other amulets and totems to ward off evil.
“Nice toys you have there,” he commented. Dean tossed a shotgun to Cade, and while the brothers selected and loaded a few weapons for themselves.
“I hope you know how to kill these guys,” Sam said, and Cade nodded.
“Think buckshot would do it?” Dean asked.
Cade laughed lightly. “Oh yeah. Quite nicely, too.”
~*~
AC/DC’s “Highway to Hell” was playing rather loudly in the tape deck as the car sped down the road, and was approaching the curve where the brothers had just been earlier that day. Cade had explained that salt was a weakness to most of the Gua - like heroin for mere mortals. Once the Gua figured this out, they engineered this weakness out of later husks. But any mortal wound would kill them.
The almost-full moon cast an eerie glow to the land, at which the brothers sat up in their seats to notice. Dean let up on the gas as he took the bend
And there it was. The outline of an oncoming car just ahead. Dean slowed a just enough that when the car passed them - with its lights out - those in the Impala were able to see the oncoming car was a red ‘68 Camaro SS white-top convertible.
Once the car disappeared around the bend, and out of Dean’s rear-view mirror, Dean banked a u-turn, and followed the road the other direction. Cade did a double-take at seeing the passing car. Could it be? he wondered. He hadn’t seen his old car since his life had been turned upside down all those years ago.
Back at cruising speed, Dean caught up with the red car in a matter of moments. Wrestling with what he had to do, and loathing to do it, Dean took a deep breath, and tapped his front bumper into the back of the red car.
“Dean, what the hell - ” Sam yelled over the music. “Your car!”
“Gotta piss ‘em off somehow,” Dean replied, his mind on the task at hand. “The energy ripple. Need to see if they really are this...Gua.” And
he bumped the SS again. Now he could see there were five kids in the car, two in the front and three in the back seats. One of the faces was glaring
out the window at Dean.
Sam, who was sitting in the backseat, leaned forward to Cade. “Your journals mention the salt. But if they look like us, how do you know they aren’t human?” Sam sounded panicked; he only had a short time until the Camaro did pull over for them.
“You can’t really tell by looking,” Cade said, “But if you cut them, they’ll heal instantly. Of course, you could piss them off, as Dean is doing here... We’ll know soon enough.”
“Oh that’s just great, man,” Sam muttered, as Dean bumped the red car again. As Sam watched out the front window, the red car pulled off on to the gravel shoulder. When Dean turned off the car, the music stopped, and the brothers heard Cade say, very clearly,
“Also, if they are Gua, they’ll dissolve when you shoot them.”
“Aww, crap,” Dean muttered, realizing they were in way over their heads. This went beyond paranormal. Dad should have warned me I’d have days like these, he cursed to himself.
~*~
The driver of the SS turned the car off, got out, slammed the door, and stomped back to the Impala, which had parked right behind the red car. Dean turned to Sam and Cade, and smiled a wolfish grin. “Watch this,” he said.
Dean got out of his car, and met the other driver on the side of the road. Since Dean had left his door open, the other two could hear the heated exchange.
“What the hell are you doing, man? This car is a classic, and you’re dissin’ my fender!” the driver yelled.
“I could’ve hit you, you didn’t have your lights on,” Dean shot back. The other man fumed a moment, and then looked back at his car. The doors on the SS opened and the other four started getting out.
“You wanna make something of it?” he snarled.
From the car, Cade’s eyes never left the other driver. As he was growling at Dean, Cade saw the red energy ripple in the youth’s face. He grabbed his weapon, and yanked open his door. Sam pushed Dean’s seat forward, grabbed both his and Dean’s weapons, got out of the car, and went to stand behind Dean. The other four from the other car also held a various assortment of guns. Cade gripped his shotgun and waited for someone to make the first aim. Sam slipped Dean his handgun.
One of the older looking kids raised his Glock, aiming at the brothers, and Cade took his shot. The kid stood for just a moment before falling to the ground. After a moment, the body shimmered with a red energy before dissolving.
“Whoa,” Dean said, watching this sight in amazement.
The three remaining kids backed up, as if to get back in the car. The driver remained standing in the same spot, as if holding his ground.
“Don’t let them get to that car!” Cade called to the brothers. Shots rang out as the Winchesters fired their rounds of buckshot, and hit the other three kids who had backed off. All dissolved. Dean and Sam went over to where the bodies had disappeared. Dean had pulled out his Walkman EMF reader, and to anyone who didn’t know what it was, it would appear Dean was just listening to music. Sam knelt on the ground to see if there was any residue.
“So, still hunting us, one-one-seven?” the driver asked Cade as he faced him one on one. Cade cringed at hearing the number the Gua had assigned him. By the time Cade had realized the Gua were here, he was already unwittingly part of an experiment that was a test of human will. The Gua’s research indicated there were one hundred and seventeen different types of human personalities. Cade was Subject 117.
The Gua thought they’d broken him. When they realized their tests, experiments and mind games only made him stronger, the Gua sought to capture, kill and dissect Cade Foster to find out why this was so. If one person out of 117 was a Cade Foster, the Gua were facing a formidable force. Fortunately for the Gua, the rest of humanity didn’t seem to give a damn - they wanted Foster dead for murdering his wife. They were ready to lock him up for blaming the aliens; no matter how stranger the truth was than any madman’s ramblings.
“I will always hunt you,” Cade said through clenched teeth. He raised the gun at the Gua standing before him and fired. Even while the final Gua was dissolving, Cade had placed the shotgun on the ground and was over at the car.
He opened the driver’s side door and sat in the seat. He put his hands on the wheel, the radio, the gear shift...it was all so familiar, it had to be his old car. He reached over and opened the glove compartment.
The brothers watched as a gold oval fell out into Cade’s hand. With trembling hands, he opened the oval locket, and gasped. After a moment, he closed it again. With a ragged sigh, he closed his eyes and leaned his head back on the driver’s seat headrest. It was the fake locket he’d pulled off the duplicate Hannah all those years ago.
“You okay, man?” Cade heard Sam’s voice in the midst of all the memories, but couldn’t trust himself to speak. With his eyes still closed, all he could do was nod.
“Ready to go, Sammy?” Dean called over his shoulder, picking up the gun Cade had put down.
Sam looked at Dean, then back at Cade. “Does the pain ever go away, Cade?”
Cade opened his eyes and looked at Sam. To lose someone you loved so young, such a short time ago. Cade remembered it as if it were yesterday.
“No, Sam, it doesn’t,” he said softly.
“Sam?” Dean called again, this time from behind the Impala as he was putting the weapons back under the hidden panel in the trunk.
“Go on,” Cade told the younger Winchester. “You still have your work to do, and apparently, so do I.” Cade turned the key and the engine roared to life. “Gotta get this back to Eddie, see what they did to my old car,” he smiled. Sam held out his hand, and Cade shook it warmly.
“We’ll be in touch,” Sam said, turning towards the Impala.
Dean stood outside his driver’s side door.
“Hey Foster!” he called. Cade looked over. “Awesome car!” Dean called again, and then got in the driver’s seat and started the car. Spinning gravel and dust, the Impala squealed back onto the road, and into the night.
~*~
Journal of Cade Foster: All urban legends have to start somewhere. The legend of “Lights Out!” was merely perpetuated by the proliferation of emails and action by the Gua. Whenever the legend would start circulating, the Gua would bring it to life, thus perpetuating the legend even more.
So, which came first, the Gua or the legend? I would say the Gua, as the first record of the legend was in the early ‘80s, and the first accident in Hillsdale, Michigan, was in ’75. But is that proof? Probably not.
The car was my old SS. Even though the VIN number had been removed, I knew it was mine. You never forget your first car. The Gua did a number on the engine, though. Eddie gave it a thorough look-over at least three or four times. The engine was designed for wormhole travel on the earth, which would transport the Gua to wherever roads and whenever they needed to be to keep the fear alive. Eddie is still working on getting the coordinates as to where my car had been.
Eddie and I first came to Hillsdale five years ago, when we first found the quatrain. If the Gua were here five years ago, the legend wasn’t as rampant then. Or, as I learned after meeting the Winchester brothers, we weren’t the right hunters. What will happen in five years? We can only wait and see if Sam and Dean Winchester were the hunters Nostradamus predicted...
And that night, I learned two things. The Gua will never leave Earth alone. As long as their homeworld is dying, and ours is desirable, Eddie and I will still be fighting this battle. And that there will always be Hunters to keep us safe from the ghosts, demons, and the things that go bump in the night.
~*~
Sam looked up as he finished reading Cade’s most recent journal entry to Dean. It was the next afternoon, and the brothers were getting ready to move out to continue the search for their father.
Sam was finally packing up the laptop when his cell phone rang. He didn’t recognize the number, but answered it nonetheless. Dean had taken the several articles down from the wall and was putting them in his bag when Sam answered the call.
“Hello?” he asked, and he heard static, a hiss, and the silence. He looked at the display on the phone, which told him the call had been
dropped.
“Think it coulda been Dad?” Dean asked.
“Maybe,” Sam said. “I can check out the number on the road, try to see where it came from. Give us a lead, hopefully,” he said, slinging the backpack over his shoulder.
The brothers checked out of the motel, and said goodbye to Hillsdale. Dean handed Sam the keys as they got in the car.
“You can drive, but I get the music,” Dean said, putting his box of tapes on his lap.
“Wait, what about your rules?” Sam asked.
“They’re my rules. I can break ‘em if I need to,” Dean flashed a lopsided grin, looking though the tapes. Sam started the car, and turned out into the road. Dean picked a tape at random and popped it into the cassette deck. They were off again, just the open road, the two of them, and Metallica.“Welcome to where time stands still
No one leaves and no one will.
Moon is full, never seems to change
Just labeled mentally deranged.
Dream the same thing every night,
I see our freedom in my sight.
No locked doors, no windows barred,
No things to make my brain seem scarred.
Sleep my friend and you will see
That dream is my reality:
They keep me locked up in this cage.
Can’t they see it’s why my brain says “Rage”?
Sanitarium, leave me be!
Sanitarium, just leave me alone...”
~*~
Supernatural Fan Fiction
For entertainment only
© 2005 by Caren Franco
Only Ray Bucknell and Chief Chester Hamilton are original. Beta-read and great input by Diamondback. Dean, Sam, and Jack Winchester, and Jessica
Lee Moore were created by Eric Kripke, Robert Singer, Kripke Enterprises Scrap Metal and Entertainment; and Warner Brothers. SportsCenter is the property of ESPN. “I Dare You” from “Us & Them” by Shinedown ©2005. “Roads to Madness” from “The Warning” by Queensryche ©1984. “Highway to Hell” from “Highway to Hell” by AC/DC ©1979. “Welcome Home (Sanitarium)” from “Master of Puppets” by Metallica ©1986. Nostradamus belongs to history, as does the Illuminati, if you will. Cade Foster, the Twice-Bless’d Man, Eddie “Loony Larry” Nambulous, the Paranoid Times, Hannah Foster, Jordan Radcliffe, Raven Nation, Joshua, the Gua, Subject 117, Mabus, and the Army of the Gua were created by Chris Brancato, Francis Ford Coppola, Larry Sugar, and Pearson Television. “Sword that killed Lincoln” dialogue from “Crazy Eddie,” Season 1, episode 2. Quotes from the Journals of Cade Foster: (1) Crazy Eddie, (2) Marker 262, (3) The Harvest, (4) The Believers.
-
Title: Deadlights
Rating: same as the show, some language
Category: Crossover (both in canon)
Spoilers: season 1, between Hook Man and Asylum
Characters: the Winchesters, a few of my own characters, and a few not my own (credited at the end).
Notable Credts: thanks to diamondback for the beta-read.... and some awesome ideas!!
Summary: Be careful who you flick your lights at...
Even in madness I know you still believe;
Paint me on canvass so I become
what you could never be.
I dare you to tell me to walk through fire
Wear my soul and call me a liar...
~ Shinedown, ©2005
Outside Hillsdale, Michigan
Ray Bucknell was on his way home to his apartment from work in the early hours of Saturday morning. Being in the middle of December, the nights were still getting longer, and at 1 a.m., the back road was dark, save for the blue cast of the car’s headlights on the road in front of Ray.
He’d left his job at the factory a little later than he was scheduled, as he had to wait for his relief to arrive. He hated that factory some days. This night was no exception. His mind, as he drove in the relative quiet, was on a nice hot shower, watching SportsCenter, and burrowing under his warm covers until morning.
So when the car came around the bend with its lights off, Ray was startled. Being the good citizen that he was, Ray alerted the driver that his headlights were off by flicking his own lights at the oncoming car.
As the car passed him, Ray realized three things in that one instant. The first was that the driver did turn on the car’s lights. The second was that there were four or five young, rough-looking men in the car.
The third was that he knew he wasn’t going to make it home alive.
~*~
Chief Chester Hamilton could not remember a scene like the one that confronted him the next morning on the Old Country Road, near mile marker 35. Chief Hamilton amended that - there was one other scene he could remember, and to be honest, he’d rather not.
The late-model two-door sports car was pulled over on the shoulder of the road, looking as if the driver had simply pulled off to look at a map or make a call on his cell phone. At a first glance, the car looked perfectly fine, ready for the driver to come back and take the car home. Except for the smashed headlights.
And the fact that Ray Bucknell was still sitting in the front seat with his throat slashed by what looked like claw marks from some wild animal.
Chief Hamilton had his own pack of wild animals to deal with - the local media. The local television station wanted footage from all angles, the
newspaper stringers wanted their chance at an interview and a photograph of the dead driver. There were more officers keeping the media hounds at bay than policemen cordoning off the scene until the detectives could arrive, and offer any number of opinions.
In all the melee, the chief missed seeing the two men in their 20s near the edge of the crowd, silently observing the scene.
~*~
Dean Winchester closed the panel in the trunk before closing the lid itself on his ‘67 Impala, which was parked in the lot of the Hillsdale Motel, further down Old Country Road from the late-model sports car, and went into the room he and his brother Sam had rented.
Inside the dimly-lit room, Sam sat at the small table in front of his open laptop, entering keywords into an internet search engine. Those claw marks nagged at Sam’s mind as he tried various other possibilities, including “animal attacks” with “vehicle accidents,” and “vehicle homicides” and “wild animals.” Finally after searching on a string of words including “headlights,” “slash marks,” and “auto accidents,” the younger Winchester found an article describing a very similar scene.
“Hey Dean, check this out - found a news item from about five years ago, a young woman was killed in a mysterious accident on the same stretch of road. The only damage was to the headlights. Nothing about those slashes, though.” He looked up from the monitor at his brother. “Hey, do we know who that poor guy was yet?”
“Yeah,” answered Dean, his voice husky, “some local named Ray Bucknell. Worked down at the local factory, second shift. Was on his way home when he wrecked. That’s all I got.”
Sam was still searching online. There had to be more to this than the obvious. Sure enough, he found another article five year before that. And after more clicks and searching archives, a pattern emerged that every fives years, someone was found dead in their car with their headlights smashed out.
There were no more archives before 1975. It was to this article, however, that Sam drew his brother’s attention.
“Dean?” Sam called him over.
Dean was staring out the window, distracted. He needed to find his father, he needed to find the thing that killed his and Sam’s mom 22 years ago, the same thing that killed Jessica, Sam was too young to know loss like that... It was into these thoughts Dean heard his name.
“Huh? Yeah?” he asked, returning to the room and the present. “Whatcha got?” He came over to the table, and looked over his brother’s shoulder.
“Lights Out!” screamed the headline from the monitor. The article from the Hillsdale Times from October of 1975 told of a group of kids who were driving down the Old Country Road, drinking and smoking, and they took the curve too fast. The car skidded off the road, down the embankment, and after flipping over several times, it landed at the bottom.
“Nothin’ weird about that,” Dean commented.
Sam read further. “Says here the police think it was supposed to be some part of a gang initiation.”
Dean raised his eyebrows. “Keep going,” he encouraged, thinking he might know where this was possibly headed.
Sam summarized, “The kids in the car were driving with their headlights off, waiting for an oncoming car to flash its lights at the kids’ car, to indicate their lights were out. When an unsuspecting person would flash their lights at the kids, that was their target. The kids would then go after the car, and kill the driver. Then they were in the gang.” Sam stopped scanning the article. “That sounds familiar...” he trailed off.
“Search on ‘Lights Out,’ and see if those dates match,” Dean suggested, his thoughts searching his own knowledge, and then went over to his bag on the bed, and pulled out his father’s journal. He gingerly leafed though it, hoping his father had left some kind of clue.
Sam typed a few words into the search engine, and cross-referenced the dates he’d identified. In each case, there was a follow-up article some days after each accident, suggesting this “gang initiation” theory.
Sam looked over at Dean. “I thought that was an urban legend.”
“So was Bloody Mary and Hook Man, and see what happened there,” Dean said matter-of-factly. “We need to find out more about those kids in ’75,” he added. “There’s nothing before that.”
“We could try the local library - ” Sam started, but Dean groaned. “ - or not,” Sam finished. “Maybe I could talk to the police chief we saw at the scene.”
Dean started walking back and forth in front of the bed. He stopped a moment, looked at Sam and said, “We’re still missing something, Sammy.” He glanced out the window again, a thoughtful look crossing his features.
“Ready to go?” Sam asked.
Dean headed for the door. “Yep.” He had a funny look on his face.
“You behave at the police station, Dean,” Sam warned him.
Dean’s face was the picture of innocence. “Who me? Always,” he grinned.
~*~
Chief Hamilton sat behind his desk observing the two men sitting opposite him, finding it difficult to believe these men were from the Department of Transportation. Hamilton had looked at their identification - DOT Agents Hetfield and Ulrich - and knew they were forged but certainly couldn’t prove it, they were too well-made for an obvious counterfeit.
But while studying the two, Hamilton recognized the fatigue in their faces, the weariness in their eyes, and their travel-worn demeanor. They were searching for something, and had been for a while.
Hamilton leaned back, his 60-year-old frame creaking with the chair.
“What can I do for you boys this afternoon?” he asked casually.
“We’re looking into the death of Ray Bucknell,” Sam started.
“Awfully quick for you boys, eh?”
“I’m sorry?” Dean asked.
“Them DOT boys aren’t usually here the afternoon after a fatality. So who are you really?”
“We’re - ” Sam started, and Dean knew his brother would more than likely try to tell the truth. Dean quickly interrupted.
“I’m Dean and this is Sam,” Dean started, and Sam was rather surprised his brother used their real names. “We were college buddies of Ray’s.” There went Sam’s surprise. “When we heard he was in an accident we came right away.”
“You three all went to Hillsdale College, eh?” the chief asked, inadvertently giving the brothers the name of the school they would use later to their advantage.
“Yes, sir,” Dean said, respectfully. Sam was trying not to laugh at this act of his brother’s.
“Well, that makes much more sense,” the chief mused aloud. “You shoulda just said that in the first place.” The chief leaned back a little more in the chair, and put his arms up behind his head.
“Don’t know what more I can tell you about what happened.” At that moment, something clicked into place for the chief. “I’ve seen you two,” he said with certainty. “You were there this morning, thought I recognized you boys.”
“We were hoping you could tell us about those claw marks we saw on Ray,” Sam said helpfully. Dean flashed a look that said, good going, just jump right on in.
“Must have been some kind of animal, from what I could tell.”
“Have you ever seen anything like it before, sir?” asked Sam.
Hamilton was silent for a moment, and Dean was able to study this older man. The police chief was lost in his thoughts, wrestling with what to tell the brothers. Finally, all he said was, “Yeah.”
Sam leaned forward in the stiff-backed chair he was sitting on, and urged the older man to continue.
“Back 30 years ago, there was a group of kids who wrecked their car in what they said was a gang initiation. I was a rookie detective back in ’75, and that was my first case. They went off the road at that mile marker - 35. Since then, well, this is going to sound strange - ” Hamilton trailed off.
“Try us,” Dean said.
“You gotta understand, I started out as a beat cop. I wanted off the streets, so I made Detective in early ’75. This was my first case that September. I’m a man who deals with the facts and evidence, and what I can prove. I can’t prove, in my right mind, that that corner is haunted.”
Hamilton braced for the ridicule and the laughing. He’d never offered this theory to any of his detectives, knowing the rumors that would circulate, and probably mean the end of his career on the force.
“Were there any witnesses to any of the other accidents?” Sam asked.
Hamilton was momentarily silenced. “Other accidents?” he finally asked.
“Every five years,” Dean interjected.
“Ah.” Hamilton said. “No, there weren’t.” He was quiet a moment. “When we were able to get down into the brush where the car ended up, the bodies were gone, and there were these huge claw marks on inside of the car doors, like something was trying to desperately get out.”
“And you think it got out,” Sam speculated.
“Yeah. I know how silly that sounds - ”
“No, it doesn’t sound silly,” Sam reassured him. After a quiet moment, he stood, and held his hand out to the police chief. “I know you’re busy, sir, thanks for your time.”
Hamilton stood and shook Sam’s hand, then held his hand out for Dean. Dean
stood and took the proffered hand. It was cold, the hand of someone with poor circulation. “Is there anyone else in town who might know something, you think?” Dean asked.
Hamilton shook his head. “Unless you count Loony Larry, lives in a trailer on the other edge of town, off of State Road. He runs some internet magazine on government conspiracy theories, or urban legends, or some such nonsense. Don’t tell him I sent you, though.”
“Sure thing, thanks,” Dean said, knowing he could relate to the conspiracy-theory types. Sam and Dean started to leave the office.
“Oh, and, uh - ” Hamilton’s voice stopped them in the doorway and they turned back. “Just a friendly warning to quit using them phony IDs, boys. I could arrest you two just for that, but you seem like nice fellas. Just try to stay outta trouble ‘round here.”
“Yes, sir,” Sam smiled back. As they left, Dean tried to suppress an outright laugh.
~*~
“Roads to Madness” by Queensryche blared from Dean’s speakers as they drove through Hillsdale in search of a trailer supposedly parked on the edge of town. As if a location couldn’t have been any more ambiguous.
“So what do you think, Sammy?” Dean asked over the music.
Sam reached over from the passenger’s seat and turned the music down a few hundred decibels.
“I think Hamilton might be onto something. Maybe those kids didn’t die in the crash, but clawed their way out and died down there of exposure or something. And I think every five years, they recreate their initiation ritual, and kill the person who flashes their lights. They leave the claw marks.” Sam was quiet a moment, thinking, “I can’t explain the every-five-years pattern though.”
“Even if we find this trailer,” Dean spoke his thoughts aloud, “I wonder who the hell this ‘Loony Larry’ is.”
“Guess we’ll find out soon enough,” Sam pointed out the old, rusty Airstream trailer ahead on the right. The trailer was parked in a gravel lot off the right side of the road, in the front of a wooded area, which looked like a park to the brothers.
Dean pulled off the road in front of the trailer, turned off the car and got out. Sam followed suit. Their boots crunched on the gravel as they circled the trailer.
“Doesn’t look like anyone’s home, Sammy,” Dean stated, observing the obvious, but noting the two lawn chairs near the door.
“Sam,” the younger Winchester said absently, heading back to the Impala.
A moment later, Dean found himself at sword point. The man wielding it was older than Dean - about 10 years older, had a receding hairline; the hair he did have was long, wavy and stringy. And there was a wild, almost manic, look in his eyes. His words came out in a rush.
“Who are you snooping around my trailer? What are you doing here?”
Dean took a step back. “Whoa, man, easy,” he said. He’d dealt with demons, shape shifters, and a wendigo, but a sword-wielding lunatic was too much.
“I’m looking for someone called Loony Larry.” Dean told the man. “Sam!” he
called out louder. Sam turned away from the car door to see the man holding the sword on his brother, and he ran back to Dean. The man with the sword heard the footsteps and turned to see a second young man heading right for him. Dean lunged for the swordsman’s arm, intending to knock the sword away.
The man turned back to Dean, and as he did so, Sam got the jump on him. The two rolled around on the dusty ground, fighting for a few minutes. At the same time Dean reached out to pull Sam off this man, he’d heard a car pull up and stop on the gravel. It was an old Caddie that Dean admired for a moment.
As Dean pulled his brother apart from the other man, he now noticed a newcomer had arrived, and was also separating the two fighters. For a moment Dean blinked, taken aback, thinking he’d seen a vision of his slightly older self, and then focused on the newcomer. The new guy was taller and younger looking; he dragged the sword-wielding psycho by the collar aside, and over to the door of the trailer.
They spoke together for a few moments, and Dean could hear some hisses and heavy breathing, and every now and then a word, although it was impossible to understand what was actually being said. After a few minutes, the older man seemed to calm down a little. He jabbed the sword into the ground, and Dean relaxed somewhat.
Dean helped his brother stand up, and Sam dusted off his jacket and the brothers observed the two men, wondering who would speak first. The two men walked over to the brothers, but it was Sam who spoke first, holding his hand out.
“I’m Sam, and this is my brother Dean. We’re - ”
“ - sorry to have bothered you guys,” Dean said, realizing this was looking like a mistake, and turned to leave.
The older of the two men called him back. “No. No, Dean, was it?” Dean turned around. The man continued.
“There was a reason you were snooping around my trailer.” Something occurred to the man. “Who sent you? Was it Hamilton? Who was it?” he demanded.
Hearing the man ramble with paranoid delusions, Dean felt defiant. “Yeah, so what if it was?”
“I knew it, Foster, I just knew it,” the man mumbled to his younger friend.
So, Dean thought, the younger man was Foster. The older man had to have been Loony Larry. He was aptly named, Dean realized. Until....
“Maybe we should talk to ‘em, Eddie,” Foster hissed at the other man.
Eddie? thought Dean. Who the hell was Eddie? Dean exchanged a look with Sam, who was apparently wondering the same thing.
The man called Foster sighed, and ran his fingers through his hair, which was starting to show some grey. Dean kept his eye on this man; as far as he knew, Sam was his only brother. This was starting to creep Dean out.
Foster approached the brothers with a calculated stride as he looked them over. The younger one, Sam, he’d said, looked like he could use a haircut. He was taller than his brother, and there was still something child-like in his face.
Looking at the older brother, Cade Foster thought he could see himself in his younger days: the look of distrust in his eyes, the hardest expression of someone who had seen more than he should have in his time.
Foster’s voice was husky, as if he hadn’t used it in a while.
“Why do you want to see Loony Larry?” Foster asked.
“Why did you call him ‘Eddie’?” Dean shot back. Cade smiled to himself. Yeah, this was his younger self all right.
“You wouldn’t happen to know anything about what happened to Ray Bucknell, would you?” Sam asked.
“Hamilton sent you.” Foster stated. It was not a question.
“Yes, sir,” Sam said politely.
Cade flicked his glance up at Sam. While this was the younger one, Cade realized there was wisdom in this one too. More than there should have been.
“Don’t know anything about Bucknell, but we could run a search for you, see what comes up?”
Eddie, Larry, or whatever his name was, came running over to Cade, a paranoid look on his face.
“What? Are you crazy? I’m not letting them into my trailer! No way, Foster!”
Foster turned to the older man, and hissed, “You want all of Hillsdale to hear you? I’m tired of all this, still hiding. I was cleared almost five years ago, I shouldn’t have to live like this.”
“Yeah, but you know you like it.”
Foster sighed. Eddie was right, damn it. Remembering that they had two “guests,” Foster turned back to them, and gestured to the chairs set outside the trailer.
Sam sat, and Dean went over to the chairs and remained standing. Cade sat in the other chair, and watched as Eddie yanked the sword out of the ground.
“Nice sword, man,” Dean said.
“Sword that killed Lincoln,” Eddie smiled proudly.
Sam looked up. “Lincoln was shot,” he said, as if everyone knew that.
“That’s what they tell you,” Eddie replied, and Cade rolled his eyes and smiled. He’d heard this already, but it was still amusing even seven years
later, after he’d first met Eddie ... also at sword point.
“So Hamilton was right - you are into conspiracies,” Dean commented.
“Government conspiracies, cover-ups, little green men - ”
“Eddie...” Cade warned.
“ - alien abductions - ”
“Eddie...”
“ - the Illuminati - ”
“Eddie!” Cade fairly yelled.
“Sorry, Foster. Got carried away.” Eddie turned back to the brothers. “I’ve always said believe the unbelievable. Got it on the masthead of my e-zine.” Eddie’s eyes narrowed at the brothers. “What do you think?”
“Sounds about right,” Dean muttered.
>Sam jumped right in with his child-like honestly. “What do you know about the urban legend called ‘Lights Out!’?” he asked.
Eddie walked from where he was standing by the door around next to Sam’s chair.
“Urban legends?” Eddie asked, a maniacal tone in his voice. “You kids believe in that stuff?” Dean and Sam exchanged looks again. Dean leaned back on one heel and crossed his arms over his chest.
“So what if we do?”
“We investigate happenings that some people think are urban legends,” Sam started, “ghost hunters - ” Dean cut him off with a look, and Sam became quiet at that moment.
Eddie smiled. “That’s cool.”
Dean was now standing behind Sam’s chair, and he muttered to his brother, “Now this guy’s creeping me out. Why did Hamilton give us this guy’s name anyway?”
“No idea,” Sam said out of the corner of his mouth.
“So,” Dean said in his normal voice to Eddie, “Who the hell is Loony Larry anyway? And who are you guys?”
Now it was Cade and Eddie’s turn to exchange looks.
“Tell you boys what,” Eddie said after a moment. “We’ll see what we can do for you now, and if you’re still here later, we’ll tell you whatever you need to know.”
“Seems to me those are mutually exclusive,” Dean said. But Sam had gotten up and was headed to the car. He opened the door, grabbed his laptop, and
went back to sit down. He opened the laptop, logged on, and opened several websites he’d bookmarked earlier. He turned the portable computer so Eddie and Cade could see the pages he’d found.
Eddie clicked through the information, sites, and archives with interest.
“Foster, come here, take a look at this,” Eddie mumbled at one point. Sam had gotten up and was now looking over Eddie’s shoulder at the “Lights Out!” archive article. Cade, who had been watching Eddie use the laptop with obvious envy for the younger man, came over to stand behind Eddie.
Dean, still standing with his arms crossed, watched the interaction with some amusement. At least he knew that they weren’t the only ones hunting things that go bump in the night. What was it that Foster had muttered? Something about his name being cleared, still living in a trailer. He wondered what that was all about, but something this Eddie guy was saying caught his attention.
“We’ve done this before. We’ve been here before, Foster. Literally.” He got up so sudden, Sam had to catch the laptop before it fell in the dust.
“Hold that thought, guys,” Eddie said as he flung open the trailer door. The spring snapped the door shut, and a moment later, Eddie returned outside holding an old, leather-bound book rather gingerly.
“We did this already.”
“You said that, Eddie,” Foster said. “Even after seven years, you’re still as cryptic as ever. What the hell are you mumbling about?”
Eddie carefully turned the parchment pages of the book, and Dean noticed it had a jeweled eye in a triangle on the front cover - the Illuminati. Who was this guy? Dean asked himself, not for the first time.
“Except,” Eddie continued rambling, “when we were here in 2000, we thought it meant us. It wasn’t us, Foster, it’s them.” After a few more pages, Eddie stopped and showed the four-lined poem to Cade. Sam stood up to see the pages. Eddie turned the big book so the younger Winchester could read the quatrain.
He looked up. “What does this mean?” He looked behind him. “Dean, you gotta see this!” he called
Dean walked over and looked in the book at where Sam was indicating. He was never one for poetry, but he got a sudden chill down his spine when he read the calligraphied words:
Century 11, Quatrain 2:
The plague in the form of a spectre
Shall haunt the roads of the Northern Midwest
In five years, and five again, and again five
Until the Hunters come.
Dean was silent, staring at the pages. After some time, he pointed at the quatrain heading
“Wanna tell me what this is all about? Who wrote this? What’s going on here anyway?”
“They’re the lost quatrains of Michel de Nostradame,” Cade explained softly.
“Nostradamus,” Sam said in awe. Cade nodded and continued. “They were written in 1564, predicting the end of the world. It was supposed to come in three waves, unless humanity was saved by someone called the Twice-Bless’d Man. Some of the quatrains’ numbers seem to have meanings to some people at times, and at other times, they’re just random numbers.”
Dean looked up at this last thing Cade said, and his eyes went back to the top of the quatrain. His expression changed, softened, and Sam saw where Dean was looking, and followed his brother’s gaze.
Sam tried to speak. “They’re - ” but thinking of Jessica, he could not continue. Dean realized Sam was also looking at the numbers, and had to swallow before speaking.
“It’s the date our mom was killed by something. And the same date Sam’s girlfriend was killed twenty-two years later. By the same something. It’s still out there, mocking us.” Dean said bitterly. He bit off the last word, having not intended to say so much.
“What - ” Sam started, cleared his throat, and then started again. “What were these ‘three waves’?”
Cade took the book from Eddie, marked the quatrain, closed the book and sat down. Sam immediately sat in the other chair. Eddie disappeared around the back of the Airstream and returned with two more chairs. He offered one to Dean, who shook his head.
“You’re gonna want this, trust me.”
Dean accepted the chair and sat down next to his brother. Eddie sat a little distance from the group. Cade smiled a moment at the brothers before saying, “I’m not sure you’ll believe us.”
“We’re still here,” Sam pointed out.
“Aliens,” Cade said, the huskiness in his voice returning.
Dean swallowed again, and then leaned back in his chair. “Aliens?” he repeated. “As in the little green men you mentioned before?”
“Not exactly.” This was from Eddie. “The third wave was Armageddon. The second wave was the invasion. The first wave - ”
“- was an advance scout party,” Cade finished, “to study humanity and see if Earth was a planet that would be suitable for their homeworld.”
A look of dawning seemed to creep into Sam’s eyes. “And these … quatrains? They helped this ‘Twice Bless’d Man’ save humanity?”
“He saved humanity,” Cade began, “but no one ever even knew it. The government never knew what had happened, the Gua had infiltrated the highest levels, and could have taken over. And believe me, no one would have been the wiser.” All of Cade’s old anger surfaced, and the pain of losing Hannah. Who were these kids? Cade hadn’t talked to anyone about this since the day they’d vanquished Mabus.
Guided by some instinct Sam would never be able to name, he reached out and put a comforting hand on Foster’s shoulder -
- a flash of a woman with wavy brown hair smiling ...a flash of the same woman with Foster ...then with tentacles writhing and twisting coming from her neck -
Sam gasped and moved his hand.
Dean sat up in his chair. “You ok, Sammy?”
“Yeah.” Sam relaxed into the chair, and he was, in fact, all right.
Dean still had more questions. “Who the hell are the Gua?”
“That’s what the aliens called themselves,” Cade said. “They looked like humans, and that’s how they were able to plan this takeover right under our noses. Or, try to take over, anyway.”
Dean leaned forward on the edge of his chair. This was good. Real good.
“Tell me more,” he encouraged Foster to continue.
“Never did find out what they looked like in their true form, and I’m glad for that. What we did learn was they sent their consciousness to Earth in, well, little metal balls.”
Eddie continued, “They used human DNA to create bodies for themselves, and then essentially, would upload their consciousness into the body - or husk - just like a computer. Gotta hand it to them, they were organized, well-structured, well-connected - and could be anyone they’d wanted. I’d hate to think what could have happened if they had taken over.” Eddie sounded quite sane as be spoke. But then, his and Cade’s dealings with the Gua were a sobering experience.
“While they looked like us,” Cade said, “their energy was still a part of them, just lurking beneath the surface. When something angered them, you could see this energy ripple just below the surface of their skin.”
“They had to have a plan, right?” Sam asked. “I mean, what to do with humanity.”
“Sure, enslave humanity,” Eddie answered flippantly, as if all alien invaders had the same plan.
“What did you mean when you said,” Dean paused, trying to remember what Eddie had been saying in all his mumbled excitement, “‘it’s them.’ What does that mean?”
Eddie stood up, and got the book from Cade, and turned to the quatrain again.
“Those accounts of the accidents - every five years, right?” Eddie asked, and Sam nodded.
“‘In five years, and five again, and again five,’” Eddie read from the book. “Every five years. ‘Until the Hunters come.’ We thought that was us. This was Nostradamus’ guide book to stopping the first wave.” Eddie was getting wound up again, like an eager professor, lecturing on his pet subject. “Foster here stopped more alien experiments and scouting missions single-handedly than any other human alive.” Cade let that exaggeration slip through. He was the only human ever to stop the Gua experiments.
“Alien experiments?” Dean asked, a little rougher than he’d intended.
“Tests, designed to see how far humans would go,” Cade answered, “and how much psychological stress we could handle, before we’d break. I’d bore you to tears if I told you all of them. I’m sure Eddie still has them online, though,” he smiled wryly.
Sam had silently asked Eddie for the book, which he now held on his lap, and looked at the first two lines of the quatrain.
“‘The plague in the form of a spectre/Shall haunt the roads of the Northern Midwest.’” Sam muttered, reading. “‘Northern Midwest’ must be this area of the US...Michigan isn’t exactly the Midwest. Wait - ” Sam pondered a moment. “’The plague in the form of a spectre.’ Spectres are ghosts, but I don’t understand ‘the plague.’”
It was Eddie again who replied. “I don’t think Nostradamus understood ‘alien invasion.’ And the Gua were like a plague on society.”
“Dean, do you have any idea what this might mean?” Sam asked his brother.
Dean was quiet a moment, processing everything Foster and Eddie had said that afternoon.
After several false starts, at what to say, Dean settled on, “Yeah, I think so. They’re not the ghosts of the kids. I think we just got ourselves into a bigger mess than we thought.”
Sam turned in his seat to face Cade.
“Who did they take from you?” he asked softly.
“My wife,” Cade heard himself say.
Sam had turned back several pages, and was reading more of Nostradamus’ encrypted poems. He studied them with awe, wonder, and a sudden sense of dawning. He finally closed the book and returned it to Cade.
“You’re the Twice-Bless'd Man, aren’t you?”
“Twice-Cursed is more like it,” Cade couldn’t help returning.
~*~
“Damn it, Eddie, that kid is me,” Foster said later, after the Winchesters had left. Cade sat down on Eddie’s beat-up couch in
the Airstream, and sipped at his hot coffee.
“He liked my car, Cade.” Eddie was sitting at his computer, uploading something new onto his web page.
“Oh, Eddie,” Cade sighed. He leaned back into the couch and picked up the paperback he was currently reading. He opened to the page he’d stopped at, and tried to continue reading.
His thoughts kept returning to the boys. It had been four years since they’d defeated Mabus, the next Anti-Christ, so Mabus called himself. With Mabus in control, ready to launch the Army of the Gua, humanity would have been doomed. By destroying the orb that held the consciousnesses of thousands of Gua, Cade had insured that humanity would wake up the next day, never knowing their lives could have been vastly different.
And while there had been followers of Cade’s journals, and Jordan Radcliffe’s army, Raven Nation, it hadn’t been the “right” people. It was true what Cade had told Sam - the Gua killed his wife. But that wasn’t all. They’d framed Cade for her murder.
Distraught, Cade searched out Crazy Eddie, who published The Paranoid Times. Cade found Eddie, merely intending to sell him his story. Instead, Cade got a believer and a friend.
Jordan was an heiress whose brother had been driven mad by the Gua, and killed their parents. Something stopped him as he was about to kill her. Through Eddie’s webpage, Jordan and her Raven Nation army made themselves known to Cade, and it was with her monetary backing they were able to
fortify their own army.
But Mabus had been too strong. Overnight, Mabus had wiped out Raven Nation, leaving Cade, Eddie, Jordan, and a traitor Gua, a fighter named Joshua, to stand their ground against the Gua. And as history can attest to, this small band of believers won the day.
But at what cost? Cade wondered. Here he was, 35 years old, still living on the road with Eddie, Eddie’s Caddie, and the Airstream. Why hadn’t he settled down again? Because the damn Gua took everything he’d ever wanted, and things would never be the same, no matter how much time had passed.
These boys were the same way, Cade realized. Something killed their mother 22 years ago, and killed Sam’s girlfriend just last month. That was rough. But there was more. There was a hardened look on both boys, but more so in Dean’s eyes, and Cade recognized that determined look from his own face. The look that said “I know what’s out there, and I’m going to stop it, no matter what.”
~*~
Sunlight seeped into Dean’s closed eyelids, waking him from a surprisingly restful sleep. He looked at the clock on the
nightstand, and groaned when he saw it was barely 7 in the morning. He heard a familiar tapping, and looked around. Sam was sitting on his bed, searching the web. Again.
“Whatcha got, Sammy?” Dean asked groggily, dragging himself to a sitting position on the bed. He rubbed his eyes to wake up fully.
“Well, they’re not complete crack-pots, if that’s what you’re asking,” Sam said smiling.
“I’m not. What did you find?” Dean asked, slowly standing up, still wearing his jeans from yesterday. He’d tossed his shirt into a duffel bag, and now looked in that same bag for a shirt that was relatively clean. Sam was already dressed.
“Listen to this: ‘Wherever something weird is going on, you’re gonna find Cade Foster. With the help of my friend Eddie Nambulous, what I find will fill the pages of The Paranoid Times. Maybe it will be a road map for others in the months and years ahead, ‘cause we got a long way to go if we’re gonna save this earth.
‘We know they’re here, they live in beautiful human shells. Maybe our race is too attracted to beauty to be able to spot the evil that lies within. On my bad days, I wonder if the human race is even worth saving. But then I think of Hannah. We can beat them, believe in ourselves and each other. As my buddy Eddie says, “Sometimes madmen turn out to be prophets.”’”(1)
“That’s beautiful, Sammy,” Dean said, trying to keep the sarcasm to a minimum. He pulled on his jacket, and then ruffled his younger brother’s already mussed hair. This was interesting, Dean realized, although he’d be hard pressed to admit it, especially to his brother. “Ready
to check out that crash site?” Dean grabbed his duffel bag in one hand.
Sam clicked one more time to bookmark the page, and then shut the computer down. Tucking the laptop into its backpack, Sam pulled on his hooded sweatshirt and jacket. He slung the backpack over his shoulder.
After locking the motel room, Dean called his brother’s name. When the younger Winchester looked up, Dean tossed him the keys.
“Remember where we’re going?”
“Yeah, looked at some maps of the area last night, too.”
“Too?” Dean raised his eyebrows. “How long were you up for? Half the night?” Dean opened his car door, tossed the duffel bag on the floor, and got it, as Sam got behind the wheel.
“I’m good, Dean.”
Knowing how much he hated all that being open and sharing crap, Dean chose not to push it any further. He knew that Sam was up most of the previous night reading that guy Foster’s journal.
After a quick stop at a local donut shop for what passed for breakfast, they were on their way to investigate the site where so many deaths had occurred.
Dean reached into the back seat where Sam had put his bag, and pulled out the thin portable computer. Connecting his cell phone to a USB hook-up, he plugged it into the back of the computer and was able to log online, and pull up the bookmarked journals.
“As usual, the aliens covered their tracks, leaving me nothing but a report in the pages of this journal...And maybe I learned not to give up hope. We can all work together, respect each others’ skills, no matter what they are. Then maybe I won’t have to walk this road alone,”(2) Dean read aloud. “Hmm, maybe there is something to all this, after all,” Dean muttered.
“He says in there he used to be a thief. And then worked for a security firm. That’s handy,” Sam said, keeping alert for the mile marker.
“Here’s the thing, Sammy,” Dean was saying as he scrolled though over three years of journal entries. “This is all in the past. We’re in the present. We’re tracking paranormal creatures, and we’re trying to find Dad. This stuff is dated four years ago. How do we know this wasn’t made up by a crazy fan of a TV show or something?”
“We don’t, Dean,” Sam said, now slowing down and pulling off the shoulder across the road from where Bucknell’s car had been.
“Whoa, this guy has had a few aliases. We could use a few of these, Sammy,” Dean looked up grinning. Sam had parked the car, turned it off and now tossed the keys back to Dean.
Sam reached into the backseat and pulled his digital camera out of the bag and put it in his jacket pocket. Dean was still in the passenger’s seat with the computer on.
“What else did you find, Dean?” Sam asked, now curious at his brother’s newfound interest in these journals.
“Two little blurbs here: ‘The battle ahead will be difficult, so we must be determined to fight. We have to keep our faith in each other, to work together, to trust.’(3) And this one I like:‘Two years, and what have Eddie and I accomplished? A few dead aliens, and a small group of believers who are regarded as lunatics.’(4) Seems to me that for almost two years, no one believed him, or wanted not to believe.”
“There’s more to everyone than you can see on the outside,” Sam said philosophically, “including this Foster guy.” Sam closed the door, and waited for Dean to emerge from the car with his duffel.
“You’re right,” Dean said, as they trekked down the slope covered with underbrush, brambles and branches.
Sam’s head whipped around to look at his brother. “Are you feeling okay there, Deano?” he asked suspiciously.
“Yep, just fine. I’m only agreeing to what you said about there being more that just what you see. I’m just hoping we can deal with these kids’ ghosts, and keep on moving. I’m running out of ideas here.”
The brothers were quiet the rest of the way down. The climb was slow-going with all the branches and debris. At the bottom of the slope, the ground was covered in small rocks and pebbles, and a trickle of water someone would call a stream ran through the rocks. Based on the amount of rocks there, at one time the stream was much wider.
At the place where the incline met this rocky ground, there was a section the size of a car roof, that was bare. Just dirt. Nothing grew there, the underbrush even grew around it.
Sam positioned his camera to get the best angles of the site, hoping that something might show up in his viewfinder. He took several normal
looking pictures of a patch of dirt. Dean had pulled out his homemade EMF detector - looking suspiciously like a Walkman that had been through the wringer - and was scanning the area for any signs of paranormal activity.
Unfortunately, with the exception of the dirt patch, all indications showed normal activity. It was either back to the internet archives; or back to Loony Larry, Crazy Eddie, or whatever the hell his name was.
Sword that killed Lincoln, my ass, Dean thought, as the brothers headed back to the motel before it was completely dark. Scary thing about this was, Dean believed it all. And seeing the look on Sam’s face with that book of poems, or quatrains, Sam believed it all, too.
~*~
“Sam! Watch where you’re going! You just missed the motel!” Dean was more startled than anything, and driving by a hot shower and comfy bed brought him out of his reverie. Why hadn’t there been any readings? After 30 years, the ground should at least have weeds growing in it. This was weirder than usual all around.
“I think we need to go back and talk to Foster and Eddie.”
“Larry. Hamilton told us his name was Larry.”
“It used to be Larry. He changed it,” Sam glanced over at Dean. “You didn’t read the journals. It was in there,” he pointed out with a hint of a smile. Dean just shook his head.
“Yeah, whatever, Sammy.”
The gravel crunched under the Impala’s wheels as Sam parked it beside Eddie’s light blue Cadillac. The trailer door was open even before the brothers were out of the car. It wasn’t Eddie, but Cade who greeted them.
The four chairs were still outside, and even though it was cold that night, they arranged the chairs around the fire pit and Cade kept the fire going while they spoke.
“Why do you guys still do it?” Sam asked softly. Dean flashed a look at Sam, but had to admit he was curious of the answer, too.
“It’s who I am,” Cade said after a moment. Sam nodded in agreement, having read this in Foster’s journal. “Their leader, Mabus, may be gone, but there are still Gua out there who haven’t gotten the message, I’m sure.” Cade idly poked at the burning twigs.
When the trailer door opened again, it was Dean who looked up, knowing to who it was.
“Knew you’d be back,” Eddie said, quite sure of himself. “Find your ghosts?” he asked, getting the fourth chair and setting it near the fire. He looked around a moment, as if he had misplaced something, and then sat down.
Dean bit back a sarcastic retort, as he realized there was no maliciousness in Eddie’s voice. It was just a question, nothing more.
“No,” Sam offered, ignoring Dean’s look again. “But there’s certainly something weird going on here.”
The four were quiet for a few moments, Sam having a million questions to ask all at once, Dean wishing he was already in that nice warm bed. Cade regarded the brothers almost as the two parts of himself: the stubborn fighter who didn’t back down; and the humanitarian, who wanted to give this race the benefit of the doubt. Eddie watched the brothers with a bit of suspicion still, but admiration as well. In spite of his cynicism, he realized there were still warriors out there, fighting the things that go bump in the night.
“You pass that corner on the way out of town the other way,” Eddie offered. The brothers looked up from the fire at him.
“You think that these ‘kids’ are actually the… Gua?” Dean asked.
Eddie looked over at Foster, who was now watching the fire. “Cade?” he called, “Helloo?? Anyone in there? Hello, Foster?” Eddie waved his hand in front of Cade’s face in an exaggerating gesture. Cade looked up.
“Oh, no, I know that look,” Eddie said. “You want to check this out with them.”
Cade was silent.
Dean stood up, almost knocking the chair back behind him. “Well, what are we waiting for? Let’s go.”
Eddie was suddenly apprehensive. “Uhh, Foster, I have the next issue to upload... you go. I’ll - I’ll see you when you get back.”
Cade waved half-heartedly at Eddie and his sappy moment, and went over to the Impala with the brothers, where Dean opened the trunk, then released the latch that opened the floor panel in the trunk. Cade whistled at the cache of weapons, crosses, rosaries, dreamcatchers, and other amulets and totems to ward off evil.
“Nice toys you have there,” he commented. Dean tossed a shotgun to Cade, and while the brothers selected and loaded a few weapons for themselves.
“I hope you know how to kill these guys,” Sam said, and Cade nodded.
“Think buckshot would do it?” Dean asked.
Cade laughed lightly. “Oh yeah. Quite nicely, too.”
~*~
AC/DC’s “Highway to Hell” was playing rather loudly in the tape deck as the car sped down the road, and was approaching the curve where the brothers had just been earlier that day. Cade had explained that salt was a weakness to most of the Gua - like heroin for mere mortals. Once the Gua figured this out, they engineered this weakness out of later husks. But any mortal wound would kill them.
The almost-full moon cast an eerie glow to the land, at which the brothers sat up in their seats to notice. Dean let up on the gas as he took the bend
And there it was. The outline of an oncoming car just ahead. Dean slowed a just enough that when the car passed them - with its lights out - those in the Impala were able to see the oncoming car was a red ‘68 Camaro SS white-top convertible.
Once the car disappeared around the bend, and out of Dean’s rear-view mirror, Dean banked a u-turn, and followed the road the other direction. Cade did a double-take at seeing the passing car. Could it be? he wondered. He hadn’t seen his old car since his life had been turned upside down all those years ago.
Back at cruising speed, Dean caught up with the red car in a matter of moments. Wrestling with what he had to do, and loathing to do it, Dean took a deep breath, and tapped his front bumper into the back of the red car.
“Dean, what the hell - ” Sam yelled over the music. “Your car!”
“Gotta piss ‘em off somehow,” Dean replied, his mind on the task at hand. “The energy ripple. Need to see if they really are this...Gua.” And
he bumped the SS again. Now he could see there were five kids in the car, two in the front and three in the back seats. One of the faces was glaring
out the window at Dean.
Sam, who was sitting in the backseat, leaned forward to Cade. “Your journals mention the salt. But if they look like us, how do you know they aren’t human?” Sam sounded panicked; he only had a short time until the Camaro did pull over for them.
“You can’t really tell by looking,” Cade said, “But if you cut them, they’ll heal instantly. Of course, you could piss them off, as Dean is doing here... We’ll know soon enough.”
“Oh that’s just great, man,” Sam muttered, as Dean bumped the red car again. As Sam watched out the front window, the red car pulled off on to the gravel shoulder. When Dean turned off the car, the music stopped, and the brothers heard Cade say, very clearly,
“Also, if they are Gua, they’ll dissolve when you shoot them.”
“Aww, crap,” Dean muttered, realizing they were in way over their heads. This went beyond paranormal. Dad should have warned me I’d have days like these, he cursed to himself.
~*~
The driver of the SS turned the car off, got out, slammed the door, and stomped back to the Impala, which had parked right behind the red car. Dean turned to Sam and Cade, and smiled a wolfish grin. “Watch this,” he said.
Dean got out of his car, and met the other driver on the side of the road. Since Dean had left his door open, the other two could hear the heated exchange.
“What the hell are you doing, man? This car is a classic, and you’re dissin’ my fender!” the driver yelled.
“I could’ve hit you, you didn’t have your lights on,” Dean shot back. The other man fumed a moment, and then looked back at his car. The doors on the SS opened and the other four started getting out.
“You wanna make something of it?” he snarled.
From the car, Cade’s eyes never left the other driver. As he was growling at Dean, Cade saw the red energy ripple in the youth’s face. He grabbed his weapon, and yanked open his door. Sam pushed Dean’s seat forward, grabbed both his and Dean’s weapons, got out of the car, and went to stand behind Dean. The other four from the other car also held a various assortment of guns. Cade gripped his shotgun and waited for someone to make the first aim. Sam slipped Dean his handgun.
One of the older looking kids raised his Glock, aiming at the brothers, and Cade took his shot. The kid stood for just a moment before falling to the ground. After a moment, the body shimmered with a red energy before dissolving.
“Whoa,” Dean said, watching this sight in amazement.
The three remaining kids backed up, as if to get back in the car. The driver remained standing in the same spot, as if holding his ground.
“Don’t let them get to that car!” Cade called to the brothers. Shots rang out as the Winchesters fired their rounds of buckshot, and hit the other three kids who had backed off. All dissolved. Dean and Sam went over to where the bodies had disappeared. Dean had pulled out his Walkman EMF reader, and to anyone who didn’t know what it was, it would appear Dean was just listening to music. Sam knelt on the ground to see if there was any residue.
“So, still hunting us, one-one-seven?” the driver asked Cade as he faced him one on one. Cade cringed at hearing the number the Gua had assigned him. By the time Cade had realized the Gua were here, he was already unwittingly part of an experiment that was a test of human will. The Gua’s research indicated there were one hundred and seventeen different types of human personalities. Cade was Subject 117.
The Gua thought they’d broken him. When they realized their tests, experiments and mind games only made him stronger, the Gua sought to capture, kill and dissect Cade Foster to find out why this was so. If one person out of 117 was a Cade Foster, the Gua were facing a formidable force. Fortunately for the Gua, the rest of humanity didn’t seem to give a damn - they wanted Foster dead for murdering his wife. They were ready to lock him up for blaming the aliens; no matter how stranger the truth was than any madman’s ramblings.
“I will always hunt you,” Cade said through clenched teeth. He raised the gun at the Gua standing before him and fired. Even while the final Gua was dissolving, Cade had placed the shotgun on the ground and was over at the car.
He opened the driver’s side door and sat in the seat. He put his hands on the wheel, the radio, the gear shift...it was all so familiar, it had to be his old car. He reached over and opened the glove compartment.
The brothers watched as a gold oval fell out into Cade’s hand. With trembling hands, he opened the oval locket, and gasped. After a moment, he closed it again. With a ragged sigh, he closed his eyes and leaned his head back on the driver’s seat headrest. It was the fake locket he’d pulled off the duplicate Hannah all those years ago.
“You okay, man?” Cade heard Sam’s voice in the midst of all the memories, but couldn’t trust himself to speak. With his eyes still closed, all he could do was nod.
“Ready to go, Sammy?” Dean called over his shoulder, picking up the gun Cade had put down.
Sam looked at Dean, then back at Cade. “Does the pain ever go away, Cade?”
Cade opened his eyes and looked at Sam. To lose someone you loved so young, such a short time ago. Cade remembered it as if it were yesterday.
“No, Sam, it doesn’t,” he said softly.
“Sam?” Dean called again, this time from behind the Impala as he was putting the weapons back under the hidden panel in the trunk.
“Go on,” Cade told the younger Winchester. “You still have your work to do, and apparently, so do I.” Cade turned the key and the engine roared to life. “Gotta get this back to Eddie, see what they did to my old car,” he smiled. Sam held out his hand, and Cade shook it warmly.
“We’ll be in touch,” Sam said, turning towards the Impala.
Dean stood outside his driver’s side door.
“Hey Foster!” he called. Cade looked over. “Awesome car!” Dean called again, and then got in the driver’s seat and started the car. Spinning gravel and dust, the Impala squealed back onto the road, and into the night.
~*~
Journal of Cade Foster: All urban legends have to start somewhere. The legend of “Lights Out!” was merely perpetuated by the proliferation of emails and action by the Gua. Whenever the legend would start circulating, the Gua would bring it to life, thus perpetuating the legend even more.
So, which came first, the Gua or the legend? I would say the Gua, as the first record of the legend was in the early ‘80s, and the first accident in Hillsdale, Michigan, was in ’75. But is that proof? Probably not.
The car was my old SS. Even though the VIN number had been removed, I knew it was mine. You never forget your first car. The Gua did a number on the engine, though. Eddie gave it a thorough look-over at least three or four times. The engine was designed for wormhole travel on the earth, which would transport the Gua to wherever roads and whenever they needed to be to keep the fear alive. Eddie is still working on getting the coordinates as to where my car had been.
Eddie and I first came to Hillsdale five years ago, when we first found the quatrain. If the Gua were here five years ago, the legend wasn’t as rampant then. Or, as I learned after meeting the Winchester brothers, we weren’t the right hunters. What will happen in five years? We can only wait and see if Sam and Dean Winchester were the hunters Nostradamus predicted...
And that night, I learned two things. The Gua will never leave Earth alone. As long as their homeworld is dying, and ours is desirable, Eddie and I will still be fighting this battle. And that there will always be Hunters to keep us safe from the ghosts, demons, and the things that go bump in the night.
~*~
Sam looked up as he finished reading Cade’s most recent journal entry to Dean. It was the next afternoon, and the brothers were getting ready to move out to continue the search for their father.
Sam was finally packing up the laptop when his cell phone rang. He didn’t recognize the number, but answered it nonetheless. Dean had taken the several articles down from the wall and was putting them in his bag when Sam answered the call.
“Hello?” he asked, and he heard static, a hiss, and the silence. He looked at the display on the phone, which told him the call had been
dropped.
“Think it coulda been Dad?” Dean asked.
“Maybe,” Sam said. “I can check out the number on the road, try to see where it came from. Give us a lead, hopefully,” he said, slinging the backpack over his shoulder.
The brothers checked out of the motel, and said goodbye to Hillsdale. Dean handed Sam the keys as they got in the car.
“You can drive, but I get the music,” Dean said, putting his box of tapes on his lap.
“Wait, what about your rules?” Sam asked.
“They’re my rules. I can break ‘em if I need to,” Dean flashed a lopsided grin, looking though the tapes. Sam started the car, and turned out into the road. Dean picked a tape at random and popped it into the cassette deck. They were off again, just the open road, the two of them, and Metallica.“Welcome to where time stands still
No one leaves and no one will.
Moon is full, never seems to change
Just labeled mentally deranged.
Dream the same thing every night,
I see our freedom in my sight.
No locked doors, no windows barred,
No things to make my brain seem scarred.
Sleep my friend and you will see
That dream is my reality:
They keep me locked up in this cage.
Can’t they see it’s why my brain says “Rage”?
Sanitarium, leave me be!
Sanitarium, just leave me alone...”
~*~
Supernatural Fan Fiction
For entertainment only
© 2005 by Caren Franco
Only Ray Bucknell and Chief Chester Hamilton are original. Beta-read and great input by Diamondback. Dean, Sam, and Jack Winchester, and Jessica
Lee Moore were created by Eric Kripke, Robert Singer, Kripke Enterprises Scrap Metal and Entertainment; and Warner Brothers. SportsCenter is the property of ESPN. “I Dare You” from “Us & Them” by Shinedown ©2005. “Roads to Madness” from “The Warning” by Queensryche ©1984. “Highway to Hell” from “Highway to Hell” by AC/DC ©1979. “Welcome Home (Sanitarium)” from “Master of Puppets” by Metallica ©1986. Nostradamus belongs to history, as does the Illuminati, if you will. Cade Foster, the Twice-Bless’d Man, Eddie “Loony Larry” Nambulous, the Paranoid Times, Hannah Foster, Jordan Radcliffe, Raven Nation, Joshua, the Gua, Subject 117, Mabus, and the Army of the Gua were created by Chris Brancato, Francis Ford Coppola, Larry Sugar, and Pearson Television. “Sword that killed Lincoln” dialogue from “Crazy Eddie,” Season 1, episode 2. Quotes from the Journals of Cade Foster: (1) Crazy Eddie, (2) Marker 262, (3) The Harvest, (4) The Believers.
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