The exorcist, part 3
+++
The sound of the cuffs’ locking mechanism sliding out of its rightful place was faint and barely perceptible. To Dean’s ears, it was the sweetest symphony ever composed.
He rubbed his raw wrists, hissing at the burn even as he savored the absent feeling of metal constricting his circulation and turning his fingers into numb sausages. He stretched his arms for the first time in what felt like months, joints popping after the lack of use. Dean looked around even as he worked the kinks out of his stiff body, searching for something that could be used as a weapon. Chances were that Crazy-no-pants was close by and Dean had no intention of letting the man get the drop on him a second time.
The small length of chain that he’d just gotten rid of seemed like the only thing solid enough to do some damage. Reluctantly, Dean took that with him.
The heavy beam of wood jammed across the front door eliminated that as an escape route. Dean squeezed his eyes shut and tried to remember if Mr. Sickfuck had ever used that door or if there was another way in and out of that place. As far as he could see, the front door was it.
Looking around, Dean searched for a crack on the walls, for some hidden door. The altar, although bare of any artifacts and decorations, was closer to him than the wall behind it. There had to be some sort of room behind it, hopefully one with a connection to the outside. After all, that was the direction Mr. Lunatic always seemed to arrive and retreated to after his... visits.
The second Dean got to his feet, the room tilted around him; gravity sent him back to his knees, chain clattering to the ground as he tried to use both hands to catch himself and failed. The sound of fluttering wings filled the empty church as the crows scattered away, scared by the noise.
“Smooth, Dean...” he coughed, throat dry and tight. “Real smooth.”
If Crazy-man were anywhere near, he would’ve surely heard all the clatter. Dean looked around, tense and ready for a fight, waiting to see if anyone would come. The place, however, remained empty.
Dean tried to get up a second time. His legs shook, limbs unused for more than four days... or had it been five? He could no longer tell, but it had been long enough to make walking seem like a hard task.
He staggered ahead, bare feet dragging across the dirty floor. They felt heavy, like two anchors that decided every five seconds that that was a good place to park his ass. Dean had to work at winning each argument with his frigging limbs and somehow manage to keep using them. It wasn’t exactly graceful, but at least he was on the move.
Just as he’d hoped, there was a door on the right side of the altar; it was made of heavy wood and the hinges had several layers of rust, but so long as it meant freedom, Dean had no complaints. He pulled it open, angry at the realization that there was barely enough strength in his arms to get that simple task done.
The door dragged across the floor, clearing a path of dust and dry leaves. The room beyond was dark. There were no stained glass windows in there; there were no windows at all.
Dean left the door open, taking advantage of the pale moonlight that streamed in through the windows from the main room of the church. He leaned against the door frame, giving into the oppressive exhaustion and allowing himself a moment’s rest as his eyes adjusted to the gloom. Maybe, just maybe, the crazy bastard had stored his clothes somewhere in that place. Dean missed his jeans...
Taking in the room, his eyes held at one point and he straightened. “The hell…?”
At first glance, the walls had seemed painted black, paint flaking away from old age. While the color choice had seemed faintly odd to him, Dean hadn’t given it that much thought. Now, however, he could see it was a paint job at all.
Writing.
Covering every single wall, from top to bottom.
‘Black world, filled with pus and contempt; black souls conspiring, infecting, leaking their vile fluids and eating all, eating the whole world. Black world, black dreams, I wake to see the light and burn the infected away. I am the light...’
‘And the angel appeared onto me and I saw the light. We shine with the same brightness; he is the fire, I am the match. Fester, disease ridden souls, we descend upon you as clean fire to save all...’
‘And the light cast away the shadows and I could see; and the light cast away the poison and I could eat; and the light cast away the putrid smell and I could breath...’
The letters were so tiny and meticulously inscribed that Dean had to almost touch his nose to the wall to make sure he was seeing right.
Miles and miles of text, like an army of microscopic ants crawling over the aged plaster. Deranged ramblings of a seriously one-track mind.
Dean shivered, backing away from the walls without even realizing what he was doing. Like the writings could somehow jump off the plaster and attack him.
He did not wanted to dwell on the sort of mind that could dedicate so much time and effort into pouring his thoughts, his message, or whatever the hell that was. It must have taken diaper-man months, even years, to do all of that. It was a little too much Se7en for Dean’s liking.
In one of the corners, there were two small cages. The surviving snake was curled in on itself, a mount of black menace, ignoring Dean even as its tongue forked in and out, sensing his presence. Cage number two was empty and Dean had to smile at the small victory.
Crazy-no-pants wasn’t there, that much was plain to see, but his presence seemed to permeate every molecule of air in that place. The writing on the wall seemed to close in on Dean, like it was the madman’s skin and the hunter was trapped in there, surrounded by the madman’s essence.
The place smelled heavily of incense, iron and wax. Evidence of the latter was plain to see; dozens of candlesticks were scattered all about the room. Literally every flat surface, littered with them; some were new, some already way past melted, their now cooled waxy coating either hanging precariously toward the floor, or in large pools.
The room was sparsely furnished. An old desk occupied one wall and on it were stacks of papers and books scattered haphazardly about the surface. The two large jars with pickled onions sat atop the desk seemed displaced in there; too average, too every day life to be in a place like that.
Maybe crazy man had a thing for pickled goods; liked to nibble while he wrote his deranged texts. Dean couldn’t really give a fuck.
Pickles totally counted as vegetables and, what was more important for Dean’s current condition, as food.
Mouthwatering, Dean curled one arm around the nearest jar and unscrewed the lid with his free hand. The smell of ether hit his nose with a slap and he turned his face away, eyes stinging. Who the hell kept his canned goods in medicinal solutions?
Too hungry to care, Dean plucked the top one out and gazed at the stringy bits attached to the vegetable. He blinked in confusion; the strings didn’t look like strings at all. They looked like… ligaments. As far as he could remember, onions had no ligaments. Meat did.
Dean stilled. A sudden, cold shiver raced down his spine. He turned the ‘onion’ in his fingers, blanching at the odd, spongy texture. While the iris’ color was all but gone, eaten away by the ether, the round sphere was still present. There was no question in Dean’s mind; he was holding an eye. Human, if he was to guess by the size.
Bile rising, Dean placed the macabre item back in its place and backed away. There were two jars, filled to the brim with human eyeballs. He wanted to believe that they’d come from dead bodies, that diaper-man was a grave-robbing freak that went around collecting the eyes of the dearly departed.
Given the level of conservation of those eyes, however, the truth was hard to ignore, no matter how much Dean tried.
The eyes those had undoubtedly come from living people. People that fucking freak had killed. People that had met the same fate diaper-man probably had in store for Dean himself.
Wasting no more time in that chilling place, Dean took a second glance around.
There was only one way out, a second door opposite from the one he’d just crossed.
Praying to anyone listening that he wouldn’t have to find a way to pick that lock as well, Dean grabbed the handle and closed his eyes.
+
Mr. Groton was little more than a shadow of a man. Filthy beard that barely disguised the gauntness of his face, the man who opened the door at Sam’s third ring, had clearly given up.
“Mr. Groton?” Sam asked, pulling out the fake card that identified him as Dr. Stevenson, forensic psychiatrist. “Do you mind if I take a minute of your time?”
The man looked up, barely taking notice of either the card or Sam, and stared. The heavy bags under his blood shot eyes spoke of countless sleepless nights, even as his rumpled clothes told of no lack of trying.
To Sam, that man looked so lost in mourning that he could bet Mr. Groton wasn’t even aware which day of the week it was.
“What do you want from me?” Groton asked briskly in a raspy voice. “I don’t need no shrink, I told them-did Lizzie send you? She did, didn’t she? That bitch-“
“I work for the police, Mr. Groton,” Sam lied, ending the man’s tirade smoothly. “I have a few questions about your wife’s mental condition, prior to her murder. It’s very important tha-”
The attempt to close the door in his face had been expected. Honestly, Sam would’ve done the same thing if he were in the widower’s shoes. His foot was already lodged between the door and the doorframe even before the man pushed it completely close. “The man who killed your wife is still out there, Mr. Groton... you can help us to bring him to justice,” Sam called out, appealing to the man’s integrity.
“What do I care? Will that bring my Doll back?” the man shouted back as he heaved against the door, putting all of his body weight into it.
Sam’s weight and built, however, were more persuasive than the smaller man. All he had to do was give it a sudden push and the door flung open. The man scrambled back, unbalanced in more ways than just physically. “Get out! This is home invasion!”
Hands raised in a non threatening way, Sam kept his distance, even though there was no way he was going away without the answers he’d come looking for. “Truth is, your wife was long gone before she was taken by the Exorcist, wasn’t she, Mr. Groton?”
Green eyes that were a shade darker than Dean’s filled with tears as all fight abandoned the grieving man. “What does that have to do with anything?” he asked without meeting Sam’s eyes, his voice all but a defeated whisper.
“May I?” Sam ventured, pointing towards the house. This was not a conversation that either of them would want to have in a doorway.
Mr. Groton turned around, disappearing behind an opened door on the left. Sam closed the front door and followed the man inside, doing his best to avoid stumbling on the clutter of mail and trash scattered through the hall.
The living room still showed vestigial remains of a once normal, carefree life.
The mantle over the fireplace was packed with pictures of the happy couple and two identical little girls. An abandoned doll, with a pink dress and blond curls, lay on the floor near the brown leather couch. A number of vases with flowers and plants in various degrees of decay were scattered decoratively through the room.
By the window, a reclining chair with a thick book, open and forgotten over a blue wool shawl, matching blue slippers neatly lined up on the floor. Sam could almost imagine the ghost of this man’s wife sitting there, reading her book late in the afternoon as the sun set. The whole set looked undisturbed, like it was just waiting for her to return and finish her read.
“Are you gonna answer my question or just stand there, staring?” Mr. Groton demanded.
His hands were shaking as he pulled a pack of cigarettes from the pocket of his robe.
“Are your daughters home, Mr. Groton?” Sam asked, taking a seat on the couch. A beer bottle rolled away as he tucked his feet close to the seat, accentuating the silence of the house.
“My sister has them,” the man said, pulling a smoke in. “She said it was best while I... you know.”
Sam didn’t, but he could imagine. He hated this part of the job, the pushing and bullying of people who were already on the verge of losing it, after having lost so much already… But it was the only way to get some answers and Sam had no choice but to push through. “Mr. Groton, I know thi-“
“Greg... just call me Greg.”
Sam nodded. “Greg... what can you tell me about your wife’s...” he paused, searching for the less grating form of out it. “... delusions prior to her death?”
Another shaky drag on the cigarette, ash carelessly dumped on the beige carpet. “I already told the police about Doll’s... illness,” Greg said, his eyes darting all over the room, too nervous to settle in one spot. “She... she started hearing things, seeing things in the house, things that no one else saw. Stuff that wasn’t real.”
“What kind of things?”
“She wouldn’t say. She would just get very still, round eyes staring at nothing,” the man said, his voice faltering as he remembered. “And she complained about the smell all the time.”
“Smell?” Sam jumped in. If Dolores had smelled sulphur in the house maybe she’d been truly possessed... which would put a completely different spin on Sam’s theory. “What did she say she could smell, Greg?”
“Jasmine. She said it was so sweet she couldn’t stand it anymore.”
No demons then. “And that was when she was diagnosed with schizophrenia?” Sam asked, needing to move the talk along. There was something in the man’s stance and behavior... the hunter couldn’t quite put his finger on it, but his instincts kept telling him that there was something off in Greg’s grief.
Greg shook his head, eyes filling with fresh tears. “I didn’t want to see it... didn’t want to believe that my Doll was sick,” he said, wiping his cheeks with an angry gesture. “She started saying that there were voices inside her head... demons, she called them. Said they wanted her to do things... to hurt people. She tried to... our baby girls-” A sob broke through the man’s speech and he hid his face in his hands, lit cigarette forgotten between his fingers.
Sam sat quietly, patiently waiting for the man to get himself together. Sometimes, he had learned, silence was better than the right words to comfort someone.
There were a couple of shelves with books, lined up above the TV set. The smaller titles were hard to read, but the ones Sam could get were, at the very least, interesting thematic. There were a couple of Bibles, all well used, judging by the wrinkles in their spines; next to those was a bigger book, entitled ‘Lives of Saints and Prophets’. Further down the shelf, there was another of which Sam could only make out part of the title as ‘... of the end of days’.
All in all, perfectly innocent books that Sam was sure graced the shelves of countless people all over the world. But in this house, with what had happened to this man’s wife, Sam couldn’t help but find their presence peculiar.
“After that,” Greg went on, his voice raspy with pain, “we went looking for a doctor who c-“
“The doctors weren’t the first people you went to for help, were they, Greg?” Sam found himself asking. He was practically certain now; what he was witnessing wasn’t a man eaten by just grief and loss. Sam was pretty sure that there was guilt in there as well. Maybe Dolores hadn’t been the one to go looking for the Exorcist at all.
“What-what do you mean?” Greg asked, red eyes blinking in Sam’s direction.
“Are you a man of faith, Greg?” Sam asked, eyes going once more to the books on the shelf.
“What does that have to do with anything?”
There it was. The defensive tone Sam had been expecting.
There was absolutely nothing wrong with believing in something, in some higher power. Sam himself had been a believer almost all of his life. Would still be, if he didn’t know the things that he knew.
People placed their faith in a lot of different beliefs and religions, practiced their faith in many and varied forms. What people of faith didn’t usually displayed was guilt over their beliefs; not like Greg was pouring out right now.
Guilt was usually a sentiment that came only from doing something wrong.
“Your wife believed she was possessed by demons, Greg. She was suffering, she was lost and in pain,” Sam ventured, pushing the man closer and closer to the brim wit each bull’s-eyed word. “I know how it hurts to see a loved one suffer like that... we want to help them, want to do anything to stop their pain. And you went looking for help for your wife, didn’t you, Greg?”
The man shrunk in his seat. The cigarette, burned to just a butt, fell from the man’s fingers and he put it out with a stomp of his foot. The black stain on the carpet went unnoticed. “I have no idea wha-I mean, of course I-“
“The Catholic Church listened to your claims but wouldn’t lift a finger. Not fast enough, anyway. They’re too cautious, take took long, don’t take a step without conducting their own investigations,” Sam went on, ignoring the man’s stuttering denials. He could see in Greg’s eyes that he was damn near the truth. “But Dolores was fading fast, getting more and more violent, so you searched for an alternative. You found someone else who claimed to be able to exorcise the demons out of your wife, didn’t you Greg?”
“You have no idea what you’re talking about,” Greg whispered faintly. The defensive tone and the denials were gone. The masks were gone. All that remained was man who had tried to save the woman he loved and failed. “You don’t know what it’s like-“
“I know exactly what it’s like, Greg,” Sam said gently, allowing the lingering pain and sorrow of not having been able to save Dean from Hell to soak his words and shine through. “To feel powerless; to feel like a failure at every step of the way; to know that, no matter what you do, your efforts won’t be enough to help them.”
Greg looked him in the eyes, hard enough to see the heavy burden in Sam’s soul, the see a kindred failure in his heart.
“Where did you go, Greg?” Sam pushed forward, feeling like he was finally getting somewhere. “Who did you talk to?”
Greg shook his head, nicotine-yellow fingertips racing through his flat hair. “It’s no use... I never saw him, never talked with him directly,” he said, nervous words running over each other. “If I thought it would help I would’ve mentioned it to the cops earlier, but I didn’t see... it was always a different acolyte-“
“Acolyte?”
Greg nodded. “His followers,” he explained. “They were the ones who contacted people, who took note of whomever needed help from him. The Good Shepherd... that’s what they called him.”
Sam sat at the edge of the couch, eagerly absorbing every word Greg spoke. “Where? Where did these people meet you? How did you find them?”
Greg’s eyes filled with sorrow, as if he could guess how important this was for Sam, how much it meant to him. “I heard one of them talking, one day when I stopped at the bakery to get a cake for the girls. I thought it was a sign from God, an answer to my prayers.”
“Which bakery?”
“Doesn’t matter,” Greg said with a sight. “After Dolores was diagnosed, I forgot about them. And then, when she disappeared, I went back to the same place countless times; I even gave the address to the police, anonymously. The guy had just stopped there to buy bread... I never saw any of them again.”
Sam sagged against the couch. A dead lead. That was all he had to show for his afternoon.
A dead lead that only got him a step closer to a dead Dean.
+
A metallic click, a give in the handle and Dean stumbled outside. Fresh air hit him like a wet wall, cold and crisp and real and so very much less insane than what he’d been breathing for the past days that he almost giggled.
Dean took a deep breath and filled his lungs with the crispiness of the night, feeling it permeate his every pore, awakening his numb senses. Taking a quick look around his surroundings, Dean wasn’t surprised to find woods all around him. He’d figured that the church had to be in some secluded place, far away from any chance of people hearing what was happening inside those walls.
God... how many people had died in that place, frightened and alone, at the hands of a mad man?
Trying his best to keep his mind away from that kind of thoughts, Dean took a good look around, hoping to find some sort of reference point that could tell him where the hell he was.
The mansion to the left, not ten yards away from the church, was a surprising presence. Decayed and half in ruins, the obviously once majestic house was now little more than three stories of foliage-covered walls and a front door blocked by the remains of a crumpled high balcony. Its collapse had left a gaping hole in the front of the structure, like a picture in some anatomy textbook of the human jaw, where the flesh and muscle had been torn away to reveal a clear view of a row of teeth and gums.
What Dean had assumed to be a church seemed now to be nothing more than a chapel, annexed to the main house.
Whoever owned the place had either died or abandoned it a long time ago and that just sucked because Dean would’ve really appreciated a car nearby that he could hotwire. Or a working phone…
Watching his breath turn into fog as soon as it left his mouth, Dean would’ve just settled for a warm coat.
There was a path leading down the woods and he could hear traffic some distance away, but Dean feared his legs wouldn’t cooperate for much longer.
Already the pain and exhaustion were rising up to thwart his escape and he had to grit his teeth against the nearly overwhelming need to just stop and not move. Ever. But he drew on the need to survive alone and stumbled on, half walking, half dragging his feet over the unforgiving ground.
Hurt or not, instinct and survival had become life-skills honed by years of hunting and danger, from it the adrenaline flowed, it set Dean’s teeth on edge, senses on high alert, and despite the cold of the night and the fact that he was all but naked, Dean was sweating. He wiped his forehead with his left hand, right one still gripping tightly the chains he’d brought with him.
The trees had eyes.
At least, that was what Dean felt as he made his way through the forest. Hundreds of tiny, beady eyes, following his every step and just waiting for him to trip and land on their waiting roots. Some, he noticed, were thicker than his torso; one revolving twist of those wooden snakes and he would disappear forever.
Twice he gazed back, sure that there was someone, something following him; twice he almost landed face first on the floor, body not limber enough to juggle such contradictory actions as walking forward and looking back. Dean ignored the feeling of ants crawling down his neck, hair standing on attention and focused on getting as far away from the chapel as he could.
He was being paranoid, he was sure of that; it was just the added stress and strain of having been kept chained and abused for close to a week.
Dean almost laughed. Forty years of torture in Hell, at the hands of the most ruthless bastards that the Pitt had to offer and yet, a week with loony-in-diapers had shaken him hard enough to give him the jitters.
He could hear voices. At first, Dean convinced himself that the whispered words in the night were as real as the eyeballs on the trees.
The sound came and went with the wind, but the more he stumbled forward, the more defined the voices became.
There were definitely people in those woods.
For a second, Dean pondered his next move. In as much as he questioned the wisdom of relying on strangers to get him out of the damn woods and to safety, he didn’t see that he had much choice. His body was shaking, from fatigue, from the cold, from every crap that had been flung his way in the past days; and Dean knew that, with his strength waning that fast, there was no way he would ever make it out of there on his own.
He wasn’t thinking straight, Dean was aware of that much. It wasn’t just the added paranoid or the shadows of things that he kept seeing through the corner of his eye. Easy decisions, choices that had required little effort on his part for most of his life, were becoming harder and harder to make, like his brain had been marinate in booze. Not for the first time, Dean wondered if the water that weirdo kept giving him was only water.
Case in point, Dean realized slowly that, while following the wavering sound of the disembodied voices, he’d completely lost track of the sounds of driving cars he’d heard near the derelict house.
And even if, by some miracle, he stumbled across the road, who in his right mind would stop in the middle of nowhere to pick up a bloody man in tattered boxers?
Granted, the odds of someone just shooting him the minute Dean staggered into the wrong camp were about as high, but at least there they wouldn’t have the choice of to just drive by and ignore him.
The orange glow of an open fire started peeking through the large tree trunks and Dean reset his internal compass in that direction. The proximity of help gave him strength, legs trembling less and almost able to carry his weight without complaint. The warm light, after wandering so long in the cold light of the moon had, apparently, made the decision for him.
The smell of roasted chicken and pork sausages frying in their own fat wafted across the crisp air and Dean felt his mouth water so hard and fast that he was one short step away from drooling. After a diet of dead snake, bile and water for the last several days, the smell of tofu stew would be delicious to him. The smell of crackling meat... was orgasmic.
Screw rescue, Dean decided. He would give his left nut for a bite of that barbeque.
Walking faster, Dean forced himself to think about what he would say to the people he was about to surprise. As far as he could hear, there were at least three young guys, talking about the last game they’d seen, apparently.
If Dean got there and admitted that he’d been kidnapped and kept a prisoner, there was no way those kids wouldn’t drive him straight to a police station. Or a hospital, where in turn the police would be called just the same.
Thinking about his attire and the visible marks on his body, Dean figured his best chance was to call the whole thing a hazing gone bad. It would explain the lack of clothes, his presence in the woods and if he was convincing enough, no police would have to be involved.
The hunter in him made Dean stop before walking straight into the camp. Despite the despair, despite feeling like the last of his strength was rapidly waning away, there were some instincts that were ingrained too deeply to be ignored, even in dire circumstances.
Using a tree as cover, Dean looked the camp over. There were more guys than what he’d figured. A lot more.
He counted at least three fires going, each with about four to seven men and women sitting in badly shaped circles. They were all cooking and happily chatting, relaxed enough to not get a sense of the stranger spying on them.
Over two dozen strangers camping in the middle of woods who, as far as Dean could tell, were not boy-scouts. Could be that it was some kind of college gathering, or a really big group of friends who liked camping in the wild, or maybe one of those weird surviv-
It was hard to think over the tantalizing smell of food.
“Hey... is someone there?” one of the kids called out. He had a green hoodie and black jeans and was staring right at Dean. “Hey, mister! Are you okay?”
It was too late. The rest of the camp had already caught on to what was going on and everywhere Dean looked, people were getting up to come see who the new comer was.
Dean resisted the primal urge to puff out his chest and make himself look bigger. It was no use.
The camp’s inhabitants looked harmless enough and Dean could read nothing but concern as they approached him with the same care one would a wild, wounded animal.
Dean supposed he kind of looked like one.
A kid, no more than four, peeked from behind his father’s leg, and stared wide-eyed at Dean.
Now that he looked more closely, Dean could see more children, from toddlers to first graders, scattered around. What sort of camp was that?
Try as he might, Dean couldn’t spot any official looking building, or even a celebration banner to tell him who these people were and whether he should run or ask for their help.
The presence of children, however, calmed some of Dean’s uncertainties and he took a step forward, escaping the shadow of the large tree trunk and nearing the approaching group.
There were a few gasps that Dean could not pinpoint as either pity or fear, but they managed to make him feel self-conscious in a way that he hadn’t felt in decades.
“Good Shepherd...” a young woman whispered, lowering the hand she’d risen to hide her open-mouthed surprise. “What happened to you?” She was cute, young girl with long blond hair caught in a loose ponytail.
“It’s not as bad as it looks,” Dean hurried to point out, hiding the tiredness in his voice with his most casual stance. Proximity to the fire was making him shake harder with cold. “I ju--just ne--need to use a pho--phone... please?”
Dean jumped at the feeling of a warm blanket falling over his chilled shoulders, heart racing out of compass and hands coming up as fists. “Shit!”
He looked to his side; the blond guy, about Dean’s age, with a reddish goatee and matching sideburns, who had effortlessly sneaked up on Dean, was backing away, hands raised in defense. Before the embarrassment of being so easily caught off guard could register, the warmth of the extra piece of clothing sunk in and Dean pulled the edges of the blanket closer to his chin. “Sorry about that man,” he offered with a nod. “Thanks.”
The little kid who’d been gaping up at him lost some of his shyness and let go of his dad’s leg, taking two steps forward as his thumb flew to his mouth. “You don’t need to be afraid of me, little man,” Dean offered him with his best smile.
Sam had his puppy-dog eyes that, like lethal laser beams, that never failed to melt anyone they were aimed at, but Dean knew he wasn’t entirely unarmed in the matter of endearing features. If there was one thing that Dean always knew he could count on was the fact that his smile had the inane ability to conquer the trust of small children and disarm the panties out of hot women.
Except for that kid. Dean’s smile made him run for cover all over again.
“Daddy...” the little kid said in between heartfelt sucks of his thumb. “Is dath man a demon? Like the bad ones you told me about?”
Dean was sure he’d heard wrong. What were the odds of coming across two groups of people aware of supernatural beings such as demons, in the span of the same week? Or maybe he was still in Blue Earth and these people were part of that same community...
The man picked up the kid, and ruffled his brown, curly hair. “You know we need not fear demons, Gil,” the kid’s father said, hushing the child. “The good Shepherd is here to protect us from them. He is the light that protects us all.”
All of a sudden, Dean got a very uneasy feeling about these people. For some reason, he got the impression that the ’good shepherd’ was not a generic reference to God and there was something very wrong about the looks they were giving him. Dean could feel his skin crawling all over again.
Defenseless, he curled his hands into empty fists under the protection of the blanket; he’d tossed the metal chain away. There had been no point in approaching anyone for help while armed with a lengthy weapon.
Dean really, really regretted that decision now as this group raised more and more suspicions in his mind. “Cute kid,” he pointed out sarcastically before turning his attention to the rest of the group. “Look, I have no idea what you guys are talking about, but the thing is,” he said as he backed away slowly. There really was no where to run. “I was robbed... they took my car, my clothes... it’s been a really shitty day, so, if you don’t mind-“
“You’re that poor lost soul the Good Shepherd told us about,” one of the women said, coming closer to Dean, detachedly analyzing the marks on his body. “The one he’s been working so hard to save,” she said with such reverence and awe for this ‘good shepherd’ guy that it sounded like Jesus walked the Earth.
“I know your face,” another said, stepping to the front of the crowd. “The Good Shepherd told us about you, the one the angels warned him about,” the woman said, her eyes round with recognition and fear.
Dean took another step back, cursing when his back hit a tree trunk. He was trapped. “I have no idea what you’re on about, lady.” Dean’s hands curled into fists. As a rule, he really, really didn’t enjoy hurting clueless civilians and these sounded more clueless than most. That freak in diapers seemed to have convinced them that he was some kind of savior because he heard angels, but if they knew what their ‘shepherd’ had been doing locked in that abandoned chapel... “Your shepherd is hurting people! Killing them! You guys are not safe here,” Dean tried to warn them.
“That is Dean Winchester!” someone else called out, followed by agreeing voices. “The angels told our Shepherd all about him! The beacon of Satan, the bringer of damnation!”
Dean’s eyebrow rose on its own accord. He was what?
The face of man holding the little kid lost its earlier pleasantness; he was frowning at Dean. “The Good Shepherd warned us about the many lying faces of evil, of the devil’s forked tongue of silver,” he spat out, putting the kid down. “This is his test, and we will not fail. Let us pray.”
Dean threw the first blow before their ‘prayers’ could reach his skin, hoping to play the surprise card and punch his way out of the surrounding crowd. There was no way he was letting these weirdos take him back to head-weirdo.
The nose of the guy Dean managed to hit exploded in a bloody mess and he went down with a yelp. Two more replaced him even before he’d touched the ground.
Dean lost track of whom he hit. There was no time to take care in avoiding punching women and children. They all joined in, their eyes filled with the fevered notion that they were doing the right thing.
They were too many.
There had been this one moment in the Pitt, one particular time Alastair had lost his patience with Dean’s continuous denials, when he had put down his blade and walked away. Dean remembered it clearly, crisply, because of the fleeting second of triumph he had felt then.
When Alastair came back, shortly after, he wasn’t alone.
For one who didn’t like to share his toys, the demon had opened an exception that time. ‘Happy hour with Dean Winchester’, he had called it, a free access pass open to every demon in the Pitt to Hell’s most famous soul.
Alastair had sat back, crossed his arms and smiled as he watched the frenzy of blood and guts.
As someone shoved him down on the earth and stepped on his back, Dean found himself thinking that Earth wasn’t so different from Hell after all.
This was it. Game over.
+
Sam felt the vibration in his pocket as his cell phone announced that he’d received a message. His head still reeling from what he’d heard from Greg Groton, he numbly picked the phone out of his pocket and looked at the screen.
Bobby. A simple message saying ‘Meet me at 2527, Oakton Street’.
Heart hammering against his chest and brain steadily supplying him with the worst possible scenarios, Sam hit the gas and sped his way through the streets of Chicago’s harbor to the outskirts of the city.
Five days. It had been five days since Dean had gone missing and in between looking for him in the wrong city at first, and not getting a single break in finding his whereabouts, Sam couldn’t help but feel the weight of disaster looming over his head. All he could think of was that Dean’s body had been found at the address Bobby had given him; that the hunt was over and he’d failed at saving his brother. Again.
Sam was speeding to meet Dean’s mangled body. That was the only possibility, he was sure of that.
And Castiel was too weak to bring Dean back; after all, Bobby was still stuck in that wheelchair because the angel couldn’t even fix a spine these days. And this deranged killer, he cut out people’s eyes and ripped open their chests...
The drive was over before Sam could decide that he wasn’t strong enough to do this. Bobby’s van was parked at the end of the street, outside a place marked as North Shore Recycling. The older hunter was waiting for him at the entrance, Castiel standing by his side. The grim looks on their faces made Sam start to sweat.
“Thought you might want to see this for yourself,” Bobby said as soon as Sam was within hearing distance. “It looks pretty bad.”
Sam’s vision disappeared for a couple of seconds, only to return under a veil of water. “Is it- where?“
He couldn’t even finish the sentence. Putting it to words would only make it real sooner than it had to be.
“Second row, end of the line,” Bobby told him, an odd look on his face.
Shock, Sam thought absently as he left them behind and tore off down through the salvage yard.
The yard was bigger than Bobby’s, filled with the same mix of mangled cars and loose pieces. For some reason, Sam figured it was fitting that this should be Dean’s final resting place.
At the end of the row there was a familiar sight, but it wasn’t Dean’s mangled body. It was mangled, certainly, in a way that was painful to see, but it had no flesh.
The Impala.
The front hood was twisted and bent out of shape; a butt had been carved in the middle, like the car had been driven straight against a light pole.
Sam felt like laughing. Dean would kill him if he ever caught Sam laughing at his damaged ‘baby’, but mangled steel was infinitely better than mangled flesh. Dean’s flesh.
And then Sam remembered that Dean had probably been at the wheel of the car when the damage was done and all the relief he’d felt for not having to face his brother’s dead body, evaporated from Sam’s mind.
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