NEW (SPN): Joshua Tree 1/6 (Bob, teen)
Title: Joshua Tree
Author: cofax (cofax7)
Rating: teen (language, imagery)
Genre: Bob (gen with small amounts of het in the corners)
Spoilers: through "The Magnificent Seven" (301)
Summary: The Winchesters take a break from demon-hunting to help solve the mysterious death of a rock-climber in Joshua Tree National Park. 41,500 words.
Notes: Beta by vee_fic, minim_calibre, and cass404. Cover art by tripoli8. Other notes at end.
*
They got dinner around sunset in one of the small farm towns north of Bakersfield. Sam slid behind the wheel while Dean sweet-talked the girl in the taqueria into extra guacamole. When Dean came back to the car, swinging the grease-stained paper bag, he was silhouetted against the sunset, a broad-shouldered shadow against the purple and orange sky.
"How much longer?" Dean asked around a mouthful of carnitas, as Sam pulled back onto the road. Dean uncapped one of the Mexican Cokes and propped it on the seat for Sam, wedged between the seat back and Dad's journal so it wouldn't tip over.
Sam shrugged, glancing at his watch. From here on, the traffic would be a lot uglier, as they skirted around LA before swinging east on I-10. "Five, six hours," he guessed, if the holiday traffic wasn't too bad. If they were lucky, they'd have a moon, but he wasn't counting on it. They were staying off the highways where they could, trying to lay low; just one interested cop calling in their description would be enough to fuck them up for days. Maybe forever, though Dean's definition of forever was down to five months and change. On this plane of existence, anyway.
"Fantastic," said Dean, his expression unreadable against the sunset. "Well, watch the traffic, 'kay? My baby doesn't love LA. You get a scratch on her--"
"I know, I know. Blah blah blah, never find my body. I'll be careful."
Dean grunted, stuffed the tinfoil wrapper from his burrito into the paper sack, and slumped in his seat, head tilting back and eyes drifting closed. He was always able to sleep just about anywhere.
They pulled into the Park around ten o'clock; the traffic around LA had been as bad as Sam had expected. When the ranger on duty at the gate asked how long they were staying, Sam shrugged and said he didn't know, maybe three days. The ranger nodded, gave him the tag for the window, and circled Jumbo Rocks on a map before passing it through the window on top of a handful of pamphlets. "Enjoy your stay!" he said with a smile. Every federal employee should be so helpful.
From the west gate, the road climbed up and up, winding through dark hills. Sam passed several turns, always heading south and deeper into the park. Strange lumpy shapes were outlined against the stars, but Sam couldn't see them clearly until the Impala came out on the top of the plateau.
He took a breath and slowed the car down; he'd turned the tape deck off to talk to the ranger and never turned it back on. As they coasted down the dark two-lane road, he turned the headlights off, too. Now the only sources of light were the stars and the nearly-full moon above.
Dean, who'd been motionless for the last hour, kicked, grumbled something, and sat up suddenly. "Sam!"
"Yeah," said Sam, keeping his voice low, as if to preserve the silence and the darkness.
He heard Dean breathing harshly, and then more quietly, as the Impala swung around a curve. Something pale whisked across the road in front of them, gone before Sam could identify it in the darkness. "You see that?" He craned his head as they passed, but whatever it was, it was gone.
"Sam?" Dean's voice was soft as well. "You mind telling me why we're driving on the fucking moon?"
It really did look like the moon, after all: open plains and hillsides, barren but for scrub brush and the startling forms of the Joshua trees. They were freaky, with their serrated trunks and spiky leaves; looking, more than anything, like extraterrestrials come to steal something nobody on Earth ever valued. In the moonlight, they might have just moved a moment ago, caught in place while they lurched around the desert. The other oddity of Joshua Tree National Park was the way the way the landscape was dotted with enormous boulders. The rock was piled on top of itself, stacked like bowling balls, left lying in the middle of an empty plain as if placed there intentionally. Worn, cracked, shattered--but always something apart from the ground. Out of place, like the ruins of a civilization only the earth remembered.
Early this morning Sam and Dean had been in the Willamette Valley, all green and soft shapes, wheat fields and sheepyards below the snow-capped peaks of the Cascades. Now the land around them was sere and stark and inhuman, a place that Sam couldn't imagine people ever living. And--he touched the window --damned cold.
"We're there, I think," he said, and turned the headlights back on. Blinked at two green eyes on the shoulder, which disappeared before the Impala passed. "I think Jumbo Rocks, where Anatole is staying, is the next turnoff."
"Christ, Sam," said Dean, leaning forward to look up through the windshield at the empty sky. "This better be our sort of job. You know how I feel about camping."
"Anatole was sure it was something we'd want to check out. And I'd rather camp than stay in another moldy motel room. At least we're out of Oregon." No need to mention the near-miss with the local sheriff, and how close she'd come to arresting them for interfering with her investigation.
"Hey, the motel was fine--the mold was from your shoes! I wasn't the one who stepped on the giant slug!"
"No, but you were the one who left his wet shorts on the floor of the bathroom for three days. I can't believe--" Sam stopped. I can't believe Dad let you get away with that shit. "I can't believe how gross that bathroom was. Next time I pick the motel." He wasn't going to start a fight; they only had five months and three days left. Of course, he'd been telling himself that for six months and twenty-seven days so far, and the frequency of inter-Winchester warfare hadn't decreased noticeably.
The sign ahead said, "Jumbo Rocks Campground," and Sam pulled off, slowing down to a crawl as the road looped its way past campsite after campsite, all occupied. It was late enough that most people were asleep, but there was still light coming from several tents, glowing through the green or yellow nylon. Most of the cars, Sam noticed, were pickups or SUVs; in the darkness he couldn't read the numbers on the plates, but a lot of them looked like they were from out of state. They passed a small gathering around a fire, and two spots down was Site 43, where Anatole had said he was waiting for them.
A rattletrap old Toyota pickup was already parked there; Sam squeezed the Impala in next to it, ignoring Dean's warning hiss at any threat to his paint job. The headlights illuminated a small tent, a picnic table, and a lot of rock; Sam had to tilt his head back to see the stars above the top of the huge boulder at the rear of the campsite.
"So, this is pretty great, Sammy," drawled Dean, as he got out of the car and went around to the trunk. "We gonna hunt some Boy Scouts? Litterbugs? Smoky the Bear, maybe?"
Turning off the headlights, Sam got out as well, and blinked at the instant chill. "Shit, it's cold!"
"Desert, Sammy," noted Dean, digging in the trunk, whose capacious depths hid at least one sleeping bag, Sam knew, since he'd stashed it there four months ago. "Hah!" Dean said in triumph, and pulled out a pair of fingerless gloves that looked a revolting green in the light from the open trunk.
"Sam?" Another voice interrupted Sam's opportunity to wonder at how his brother could simultaneously be so dangerous and so dorky. "Could that possibly be the infinitely tall and increasingly broad, the one, the only, the legendary Sam Winchester?"
"Legendary?" muttered Dean, as Sam turned with a smile to greet Anatole, who swung him up in a hug.
"Dude, gimme a break! You're gonna pull something!" But it was good to see Anatole anyway, even if only dimly. The last time Sam had seen Anatole was... wow, nearly three years ago, the summer before Jess died. Six of them had gone to Lake Tahoe for a week at Marcus' uncle's place. On the way back Anatole had taken them climbing in Truckee; they'd gotten hammered on margaritas afterwards, and Sam had had to use his last emergency card to get them a motel room. He didn't think Dean realized that his care packages almost never got used: of what value was Tinkerman's Guide to the Folklore of the Mid-Atlantic or a silver-chased knife to a philosophy student at Stanford?
Anatole let him down, pulled away to examine Sam's face, dark eyes sharp and searching. He gripped Sam's shoulder hard, fingers pressing painfully against the bone. "I heard about Jessica, Sam. I am so very sorry."
Jess. The grief wasn't ever going away, but it was dulling now, not raw or loaded with regrets the way Dad's death was. Sam managed a smile around the sudden lump in his throat. "Thanks, Anatole." At Dean's impatient cough, Sam continued, "Oh, Anatole, this is my brother Dean."
"Dean!" crowed Anatole, shaking Dean's hand eagerly in both his hands. Dean nodded, on his face a patently false smile, and extracted his hand as quickly as he could. Sam controlled a smile of his own; this was going to be fun.
*
Frank--Dean thought it was Frank--passed the cup of Jack Daniels to Dean again, before continuing his argument with Anatole. "But man, you don't know. Two bad placements are all it takes. I saw Monty hit the deck at Lover's Leap last summer, and that line just zipped--"
"No." Anatole's mobile face twisted with determination, and he waved his own mug dangerously close to Sam, who leaned away. "I tell you--" under the influence, Anatole's accent--Eastern European, Serbian or some shit like that--was stronger, and he tended to drop words. "I tell you, Lori is strong, safe climber. We climb together at Tahquitz, at the Valley, at Red Rocks. She knows, she is safe. This--what happened, it should not have happened."
Okay, this had been going on for at least five minutes, and Dean was getting seriously annoyed. "So tell us already, what did happen?" All he knew was that Anatole had called Sam about this chick Lori's death, and the longer they were here, the more Dean thought Sam was just yanking his chain. Fucking rock-climbers, man--of course they were going to fall off cliffs and die. There didn't have to be anything supernatural about it. When Sam glared at him, he smirked and took another drink of the Jack. It might be fucking freezing, even huddled around the fire, but at least they had decent alcohol.
"Lori was guiding," said Anatole, speaking into the fire more than anything else. "Blue Moon is easy route, good for novices. Solid placements, and Lori is conservative, she protects more than me. Also richer, hah. She finishes the pitch--a rope-length," he explained to Dean, "and she sets anchor, and her client, he begins to follow her up. And then she falls? Then her anchor fails, and the top three placements? No, it makes no sense. I cannot make it make sense."
So much for an explanation. Dean turned his head and glared at Sam, who shrugged. "I think he means that she was safe, she was tied down, and then she fell, for no reason. Right, Anatole?"
"Yes, no reason!" Anatole practically bounced with agreement. "And that is not all! This is why I wanted you here tonight, before these losers go back to lives--" he waved a hand at the three other men clustered around the fire. Frank, Jose, and Dustin, although Dean couldn't say which was which--in the firelit darkness, they all looked alike, with their caps and their dark fleece jackets, hands bundled in their pockets and a week's growth of beard. Almost like hunters, if you didn't know better. "Tell them," Anatole said to Dustin (Dean thought), "tell them what you saw!"
Dustin shifted his weight on the camp chair he was perched on. "I dunno. I mean, it's weird, but I don't see what it matters."
Christ already. "Just tell us anyway," said Dean. Sam raised his eyebrows and gave that I'm so interested look he usually put on for grieving widows, not smelly college students blowing Dad's cash on camping trips to the desert.
"Okay, fine." Dustin shrugged but kept talking. "There's a whole thing about Indian art around here, you can't mess with it. It's protected by the Park and they don't let you climb there. So I was up over on Lost Horse the other day with Denise, a five-pitch five-ten, and on the second pitch, I get to the anchor ledge, and there's a fucking petroglyph on it, right on top of the anchor bolts. Huge."
Sam pulled his hat down a little further. His hair stuck out underneath it. "And that's a problem because?"
Dustin pursed his lips and shook his head. "Look, man, I led that route three times this fall, and I know damn well there's no art on it."
"Could be some kids messing around, right?" Dean suggested.
"It's carved images, not paintings. Take forever to do it. And it's a solid five-ten, with an ugly traverse at the crux. You'd have to be a climber to do it, and why bother?" Dustin hesitated; Dean cocked his head and waved a hand to continue. "And I didn't see any debris, nothing. There was even some lichen grown over it. Like it had been there for years."
"What was the symbol?" asked Sam.
Dustin shrugged. "Some animal. I don't know much about that stuff."
"So, one death and a mystery rock carving." Dean took another swallow of the Jack. "Anything else freaky going on?"
"You mean, aside from the coyotes?" That was one of the other guys--Jose, maybe.
"What about the coyotes?" asked Sam. He looked freaking silly in that cap, but Dean suspected he was warmer than Dean was.
"Oh, c'mon, dude, you're just making shit up now!"
"I am not! You didn't see it! It was--weird. Fucking freaky!"
"They're just coyotes!"
"And they were staring at me!"
Dean smothered a sigh and glanced at Sam, who shrugged in return. "Hey, Anatole," Sam said, under the ongoing argument about whether coyotes were ordinary-freaky or freaky-freaky, and Jose's issues with same. "We had a long day, we really need to crash. You got a spare tent or something?"
What? "Sam, I am not sleeping on the damn ground--" For one thing, it was cold as hell. For another, the ground was hard. If Dean was gonna die in five months, he wasn't gonna suffer along the way.
"You're the one who bought burritos for dinner, Dean. And you might fit into the back seat of the Impala, but I sure don't."
Boy had a point there. Dean scowled, but slapped Frank--or Jose--on the back and followed Sam and Anatole back toward their own campsite. He hated when Sam was right, although he was getting used to it once in a while. Still, he didn't have to like it.
*
The smell of coffee--and not just diner coffee, but the good stuff, flown in from South America or Jamaica or Hawaii and carefully roasted that morning--swept over Sam as he came through the coffee-house door. He would have paused to appreciate it, but Dean shoved him from behind, and he stumbled forward, nearly knocking over a backpack balanced against one of the couches in the large seating area.
"Hey, do you mind?" said the woman on the couch, hands curled protectively around a large blue mug.
"Sorry, sorry," said Sam, elbowed Dean out of the way, and beat him to the counter. "Coffee, large, milk," he said, to the kid at the register, all black rubber bracelets and piercings. When Dean made a sound behind him that might have been a whimper, Sam caved and added, "Two."
Tent or Impala, it had been damned cold in the Park last night. Sam suspected that his sleeping bag--a relic he'd picked up at a yard sale in Nebraska, and which had cheerful ducks printed on the red flannel lining--might not be up to the demands of the occasion. He shuddered, shoulders hunched in his jacket, and cursed the fluke of mid-60s wiring that meant the best Dean could ever tease out of the Impala's heater was tepid air. When their order came, he threw six dollars down on the counter--California coffee required California prices--and snatched up his cup in both hands.
When he turned around, doing his best to ignore the pornographic sounds Dean was making with his mug, he realized Anatole had only gotten as far as the first couch. He glanced up at Sam and with a big smile, waved Sam over. Sam wove his way through the cafe, dodging the chess game, two laptops running what looked like P2P software, and a battered guitar on a stand, ready for anyone to pick it up and play. Sam made a note to keep Dean away from that. Brotherly love only went so far.
Anatole slapped his hands down on his knees as Sam approached the table, as if about to leap up and race out the door. "Terry, this is my friend Sam I told you about! Sam, this is Terry Kim, one of my climbing partners."
"Uh-huh," said the tiny woman sitting next to Anatole, her face a study in skepticism. She raised an eyebrow at Anatole, then put out a hand, smiling only civilly. "Nice to meet you, Sam. You're not quite as tall as Anatole described you."
Sam shuffled his coffee-mug from one hand to the next so he could put his laptop case down on the floor, before shaking her hand. "Ah, right, well, Anatole's, you know. Been known to exaggerate."
She just nodded in return, her thoughtful gaze shifting from Sam to something over his shoulder. Sitting down, she looked like she was possibly half Sam's size--if she was over five feet tall, he'd be surprised. Dark hair pulled back in a ponytail, a dark complexion that looked less like a tan and more like ancestry, but the shape of her face and something in her voice said Asia, not Latin America to Sam. Like Anatole, she wore a fleece jacket over sturdy trousers and light hiking boots, as if at any moment she would be commanded into the wilderness, although the silver earrings ascending the curve of her left ear didn't quite fit the mountaineering image. Looking from Terry to Anatole, quiet mistrust to exuberant confidence, Sam couldn't imagine a less likely partnership.
Without warning, Sam's balance shifted as Dean flopped onto the couch. "Hi, I'm Dean," he said, smiling that cocky grin that had charmed waitresses, barmaids, and nurses from Florida to Vancouver. "You must be Terry."
Terry stared at Dean for a moment, her eyes flickering over his weather-defying leather jacket, jeans, and t-shirt, before looking back at Anatole. "You're kidding, right?" Her voice was flat with skepticism.
Great. Sam was beginning to suspect Anatole had pulled one of his usual tricks. "Ah, Anatole, what did you--"
"No," said Anatole, shaking his head at Terry and completely ignoring Sam. "This is--these are good men, they will help us."
Terry was not reassured. "These guys? Jesus, Anatole, I thought you said you weren't smoking anymore! Lori deserved better than this."
"Hey, hey, hey!" protested Dean. "I guarantee, we know what we're doing--"
Terry folded her arms. "Do you know the first thing about the Park? About climbing? Have you ever been on the rock before? Used a belay device? Anything?" When neither Dean nor Sam could summon up more than a mumble, she turned back to Anatole. "I thought you said you were hiring professionals!"
Sam's "We are professionals!" overlapped with Anatole's "I couldn't afford them!", drawing enough attention that three other conversations paused while people turned to stare at the four of them.
"Terry, I swear," Sam said, dropping his voice and leaning forward, "we're not private investigators, but we can help. This is what we do, we investigate strange deaths and stop them. We've been doing it all our lives, and we're good at it."
"Right," Terry dubiously, with another glance at Dean. Sam really hated this: it was much easier when nobody knew who the Winchesters were, what they knew. It was so hard to convince people, especially people who weren't willing to have their view of the world overturned.
"Come on," said Dean, leaning forward across the table. "It's not like you're paying us. Give us a chance; we might be able to help."
Terry stared at Dean for a few long seconds, then shifted her gaze to Sam, her face a study in skepticism. Sam cupped his hands around his cooling coffee and tried to project earnest trustworthiness. Eventually she shifted back in her seat, the furrow between her brows smoothing out, and sighed audibly. "Fine." But she didn't smile.
Anatole clapped her shoulder, a grin creasing his sunburned face. Terry reached up comfortably and tugged at his disheveled ponytail in response. "Crazyman," she said, "I should have known you'd pull this kind of shit. Okay," she went on, meeting first Sam's eyes, then Dean's. "Let's do this, but you gotta promise me one thing."
"What?" said Dean, his hands deep in his jacket pockets, his face as blandly skeptical as Terry's had been a minute before. This was one reason not to tell people the truth about them, Sam thought--it put Dean on the defensive, put him on the outside. Weakened his position, when they knew more than he did, even if he wouldn't admit it.
"You follow our lead," Terry said, indicating Anatole and herself. "When we're on the rock, you do what we say, no questions. This is what we do, and we can keep you safe, but you have to trust us. Got it?"
Crap. Sam glanced at Dean, whose face had entirely shut down: lips in a distrustful line, brows lowered. But after a moment, Dean shrugged minutely, and Sam could almost hear him say it: What the hell, little brother, we're here. Might as well give it a shot. "All right," Sam said. "You got a deal."
"Excellent!" cried Anatole, leaping out of his chair, to the detriment of Sam's coffee. "Now we get you guys geared up, and we go see what you need to see!" Terry stood as well, swinging her pack to her back, and giving Dean another suspicious glance before following Anatole to the door.
"I don't think she likes you much," pointed out Sam, as he shrugged back into his jacket.
"No, really?" said Dean, scowling, and led the way to the door. "But what did he mean about gearing us up?"
Sam grinned all the way to the car.
*
"You're sure you're okay with this." Terry didn't look up at Dean, keeping her eyes on the blue-and-purple rope that she was carefully coiling on the ground in front of her. She'd taken her jacket off as the sun warmed the canyon at the foot of the Blue Moon route, the "easy climb" on which Lori Masterson had died. The brown skin on her forearms flexed as she worked, hands moving smoothly, instinctively. "It's a long way up, and a long way down. You don't have to--"
"I'm going!" snapped Dean. It wasn't like he had a choice: Sammy was already up there, long legs kicking as he followed Anatole over a clump of rock sticking out from the face. An overhand, right. "I've belayed before." Though to be fair, it was kind of an emergency thing, when Dad had gone down the cliff after that woman in New Hampshire. Dean hadn't had a harness then--he picked uncomfortably at the tight loops of nylon webbing he now wore over his jeans--or a belay device. He fiddled with the thing, just a short steel tube on a metal loop hooked to his harness. Terry and Anatole had given them a quick run-down on how to use the gear, but Dean couldn't say he was exactly comfortable with it all.
"Recently?" Terry just wasn't letting this go.
Dean grimaced; but then he looked up the wall. If that were him in front, he'd want to make sure, too. "Not very."
"Okay, let's go over it again." Terry's quick fingers, scabbed and scarred, the wrists wrapped in white athletic tape, pulled a loop of rope through the belay device. "Left hand on the end that goes to me, like this, right? The bight goes through the carabiner--" she snapped it shut and locked it in one motion, "--and then the right hand is the brake hand. If I fall, all you have to do is bring the brake hand down, like this--" She pulled his hand down and back, leaning across the front of his body. Her fingers were hard, her hands calloused, and if Dean sniffed just a little bit, he could smell dust and sweat and coffee on her. Not that he was interested in a short bitchy woman who was determined to make him look stupid. "You got it?"
"Yeah. Left hand to you, right hand brake hand."
Terry frowned, still uncertain. "One more thing--"
"Well, I didn't expect to see anyone on this route for a while."
Dean jerked his head up; one of the rangers was watching them, a tall woman whose eyes were hidden behind mirrored sunglasses and a dorky hat. Shit, more feds. He wished he'd followed Sam's lead and worn a hat. Did the FBI send out notices and photographs of fugitives to national parks, or just to real cops?
"Hey, Mel," said Terry, looking up only briefly. "Got a job, and it's a good route. Dean, this is Mel Frye."
Oh, right; Dean was a client. So he went for puzzled. "Why? Shouldn't we be here, Ranger?" It wasn't too hard to play tourist: the great outdoors wasn't really his element, not when he was unarmed and about to be hanging from the edge of a cliff.
Frye tilted her head back to look up the cliff. "No, it's fine, it's just there was an accident here a week or so back, so the route was closed for the investigation." She cocked her head. "That Anatole up there? Who's following?"
Investigation, Dean thought, and imagined the way a body would fall from that high, bouncing off the cliff face, gear flying. Once when he was a kid, they had passed a wrecked motorcycle, an ambulance and police cars clustered around it. Dean didn't really think much of it until, as the Impala crept along, his dad pointed silently out the window at a smear on the asphalt, and Dean realized he was looking at the inside of someone's head. He didn't wake up Sammy to see it, and didn't eat much for dinner afterwards, even though it was pizza.
"His brother," said Terry, nodding at Dean, and then sliding her hands inside his harness to check the fit. He grunted a little as she tugged upwards once, hard. "They came out for a couple of days climbing. And it's not like the route is haunted, right?"
"So, what caused the accident?" Dean asked Frye, stepping back from Terry and re-adjusting his harness loops. Christ, this was uncomfortable over jeans: no wonder Sam put on those stupid stretchy pants.
The ranger pulled her sunglasses off, the movement transforming her immediately from a faceless figure of authority to a tired-looking woman about ten years older than Dean, laugh-lines etched around her eyes. She hesitated openly, turning her glasses over in her hands. "We're not sure," she finally said. "It looked as though the anchor had never been placed, but even if that were true, there was no reason for, for the climber to fall."
Frye knew the climber who had died, Dean realized; probably very well, if she couldn't even bring herself to mention Lori Masterson's name. "What, like, she jumped?"
Terry scowled and Frye just looked baffled. "No! No, it's--well, nobody could have pushed her because there's no way anyone else could have been up there. We think maybe there was a bee or something, something that startled her and she didn't realize how close she was to the edge of the ledge."
Dean smiled grimly. "You're really making me feel secure about this whole climbing thing, Ranger."
Frye's bafflement shifted immediately into reassurance. "Don't worry, sir. Terry's one of the best guides in the park. Just do what she says, and you'll be fine." She checked her watch. "You'd better get up there if you want to come down in the daylight, though. Good luck on your climb, folks." With an archaic tap on the rim of her hat, like someone in a western, she moved on down the trail, dust puffing under her boots.
"Huh," said Dean. He watched Terry sort through equipment in her backpack, clipping metal wedges on wire springs onto her harness. She handed him a loop of nylon webbing and he slung it across his chest, bandolier-style. "But even if it was a bee, she shouldn't have fallen, right? Because of the anchors?"
Terry stayed where she was, crouched over her pack. The tendons in her hand suddenly stood out in sharp relief as she closed her hand on another length of multi-colored nylon rope. "Yeah."
"That's just... that's just great," Dean said, and leaned back to look up the cliff face, at where Anatole and Sam were hidden behind tons of stone, a hundred feet above.
*
"Holy shit!" Sam gasped as he struggled over the last move, forcing his hands to close on just one more hold, his legs to push him the last few feet to safety. When he made it onto the ledge, he rolled over, still gasping, and didn't even move when Anatole put a water bottle in his hand. He could barely close his fingers around it.
There was some clinking of gear--carabiner gates opening and closing--and a tug at his waist. "Huh? Anatole--"
"It is nothing, Sam, I am just anchoring you better."
Sam opened his eyes to see that in addition to the rope attaching him to Anatole, now there was a length of purple nylon webbing running from his harness to a tangle of rope and nylon extending from the cracks at the rear of the narrow ledge. He put his hand on the webbing and tugged gently; no movement. They were solidly anchored to at least four points; they weren't going anywhere.
"Gear?" Anatole tugged at Sam's belt, and Sam sat up, shakily. He had to use both hands to uncap the water bottle, but once he'd had a few sips, he was able to begin unclipping from his harness the equipment he'd removed from the cliff as he followed Anatole up.
The few times Sam had gone climbing before, with Jess and some of her friends--including Anatole's sister Ileana, which is how they'd met--they had climbed routes which were already bolted, so the climbers only had to attach the rope to the wall with carabiners. This more traditional kind of climbing was harder, slower, and scarier: the leader had to wedge nuts or spring-loaded devices into cracks in the rock, and then attach those to the rope. Without that protection, if someone fell, both leader and follower could die. But the protection could fail, too--if there was something wrong with the equipment, or if the leader miscalculated the strength of the rock, the direction of forces, the size of the crack.
Anatole had led the way up two pitches, pausing only briefly at a small ledge at the end of the first pitch, moving slowly but solidly, so far as Sam could tell, taking no chances. When Anatole reached the top of each pitch, he had anchored himself to the wall and then yelled down to Sam that he was on belay and could climb. Sam then followed Anatole, removing the protection from the rock and clipping it to his own harness. It was slow, unsettling work, bracing himself against the cliff and fumbling one-handed with the gear. Once he had nearly dropped a "Friend", and only stopped it from falling all the way down to Dean and Terry by trapping it against the wall with his knee. It was one of the big ones, and from what Sam had learned was worth close to a hundred dollars: money Anatole couldn't afford to lose.
Sam managed to unclip all the gear from his harness without Anatole's help, and then shifted around so he could shake out and coil the rope while Anatole prepared protection for the next pitch. "Where are those guys? They started yet?"
Anatole hooked a hand in the tangle of the anchor and leaned precariously outwards. "No, I cannot--oh! Yes, there. They are on the first pitch, Dean is about halfway. Terry is always slower than me. But safe! Your brother will be fine."
Sam grinned at the thought of Dean following tiny prickly Terry, cleaning up after her. "I'm sure."
This ledge was large, roomy enough to spread out in, and Sam sprawled a bit, leaning back against the rock and staring out over the park. They were about three hundred feet up, facing southwest in the mid-afternoon light. From here Sam could see for dozens of miles, across thousands of acres of desert and then more desert, until the horizon blurred in the brown haze of Riverside County and then LA. It was warm, tucked into their little alcove out of the wind, and Sam took another drink of water, munching cheerfully on the Oreos Anatole had brought for them. Somehow it always seemed more acceptable to eat junk food when you were outside, as if the fresh air and exercise made it healthier.
"So this is what you do now, Sam? You just ... drive around?" Anatole was finished sorting gear; he dangled his legs over the ledge, apparently unconscious of the deadly drop before him. He'd taken his tiny purple climbing shoes off and swung his bare feet in the sunshine.
Sam shrugged. He couldn't tell Anatole the truth about Jess and Mom and Dad, for Anatole's sake as well as his own. But he could tell him a bit; Sam knew Anatole wasn't going to freak. Anatole was already as freaky as he could get, after all, Sam thought, looking at the iridescent black polish on Anatole's toenails. "Pretty much, yeah. It's kind of a thing we do, like some people drive to all the baseball parks in the country or spend all their time hanging off cliffs. We go looking for strange phenomena." And try to weasel our way out of a demon contract, while not getting picked up by the FBI.
It was good to be out of the car, Sam thought. See something like this view, the twisted Joshua trees and alien rock formations, talk with people he wasn't trying to con. He wasn't an insurance investigator, a reporter, a cop or a fugitive right now--just Sam Winchester, hanging out with an old friend.
"And do you find it? Your strange phenomena?"
"Yeah, you'd be--" began Sam.
The shove between his shoulder blades cut him off, the words lost as he flew suddenly towards the lip of the ledge. Sand and rock scuffed under his feet as he tried to brace himself, the straps of webbing flopping loose where they had been taut a moment before. He saw the gulf approaching, the empty space he'd climbed through so comfortably half an hour before, and flung out a hand desperately, trying to stop himself from going over the edge.
*
Part 2 here.
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
Author: cofax (cofax7)
Rating: teen (language, imagery)
Genre: Bob (gen with small amounts of het in the corners)
Spoilers: through "The Magnificent Seven" (301)
Summary: The Winchesters take a break from demon-hunting to help solve the mysterious death of a rock-climber in Joshua Tree National Park. 41,500 words.
Notes: Beta by vee_fic, minim_calibre, and cass404. Cover art by tripoli8. Other notes at end.
*
They got dinner around sunset in one of the small farm towns north of Bakersfield. Sam slid behind the wheel while Dean sweet-talked the girl in the taqueria into extra guacamole. When Dean came back to the car, swinging the grease-stained paper bag, he was silhouetted against the sunset, a broad-shouldered shadow against the purple and orange sky.
"How much longer?" Dean asked around a mouthful of carnitas, as Sam pulled back onto the road. Dean uncapped one of the Mexican Cokes and propped it on the seat for Sam, wedged between the seat back and Dad's journal so it wouldn't tip over.
Sam shrugged, glancing at his watch. From here on, the traffic would be a lot uglier, as they skirted around LA before swinging east on I-10. "Five, six hours," he guessed, if the holiday traffic wasn't too bad. If they were lucky, they'd have a moon, but he wasn't counting on it. They were staying off the highways where they could, trying to lay low; just one interested cop calling in their description would be enough to fuck them up for days. Maybe forever, though Dean's definition of forever was down to five months and change. On this plane of existence, anyway.
"Fantastic," said Dean, his expression unreadable against the sunset. "Well, watch the traffic, 'kay? My baby doesn't love LA. You get a scratch on her--"
"I know, I know. Blah blah blah, never find my body. I'll be careful."
Dean grunted, stuffed the tinfoil wrapper from his burrito into the paper sack, and slumped in his seat, head tilting back and eyes drifting closed. He was always able to sleep just about anywhere.
They pulled into the Park around ten o'clock; the traffic around LA had been as bad as Sam had expected. When the ranger on duty at the gate asked how long they were staying, Sam shrugged and said he didn't know, maybe three days. The ranger nodded, gave him the tag for the window, and circled Jumbo Rocks on a map before passing it through the window on top of a handful of pamphlets. "Enjoy your stay!" he said with a smile. Every federal employee should be so helpful.
From the west gate, the road climbed up and up, winding through dark hills. Sam passed several turns, always heading south and deeper into the park. Strange lumpy shapes were outlined against the stars, but Sam couldn't see them clearly until the Impala came out on the top of the plateau.
He took a breath and slowed the car down; he'd turned the tape deck off to talk to the ranger and never turned it back on. As they coasted down the dark two-lane road, he turned the headlights off, too. Now the only sources of light were the stars and the nearly-full moon above.
Dean, who'd been motionless for the last hour, kicked, grumbled something, and sat up suddenly. "Sam!"
"Yeah," said Sam, keeping his voice low, as if to preserve the silence and the darkness.
He heard Dean breathing harshly, and then more quietly, as the Impala swung around a curve. Something pale whisked across the road in front of them, gone before Sam could identify it in the darkness. "You see that?" He craned his head as they passed, but whatever it was, it was gone.
"Sam?" Dean's voice was soft as well. "You mind telling me why we're driving on the fucking moon?"
It really did look like the moon, after all: open plains and hillsides, barren but for scrub brush and the startling forms of the Joshua trees. They were freaky, with their serrated trunks and spiky leaves; looking, more than anything, like extraterrestrials come to steal something nobody on Earth ever valued. In the moonlight, they might have just moved a moment ago, caught in place while they lurched around the desert. The other oddity of Joshua Tree National Park was the way the way the landscape was dotted with enormous boulders. The rock was piled on top of itself, stacked like bowling balls, left lying in the middle of an empty plain as if placed there intentionally. Worn, cracked, shattered--but always something apart from the ground. Out of place, like the ruins of a civilization only the earth remembered.
Early this morning Sam and Dean had been in the Willamette Valley, all green and soft shapes, wheat fields and sheepyards below the snow-capped peaks of the Cascades. Now the land around them was sere and stark and inhuman, a place that Sam couldn't imagine people ever living. And--he touched the window --damned cold.
"We're there, I think," he said, and turned the headlights back on. Blinked at two green eyes on the shoulder, which disappeared before the Impala passed. "I think Jumbo Rocks, where Anatole is staying, is the next turnoff."
"Christ, Sam," said Dean, leaning forward to look up through the windshield at the empty sky. "This better be our sort of job. You know how I feel about camping."
"Anatole was sure it was something we'd want to check out. And I'd rather camp than stay in another moldy motel room. At least we're out of Oregon." No need to mention the near-miss with the local sheriff, and how close she'd come to arresting them for interfering with her investigation.
"Hey, the motel was fine--the mold was from your shoes! I wasn't the one who stepped on the giant slug!"
"No, but you were the one who left his wet shorts on the floor of the bathroom for three days. I can't believe--" Sam stopped. I can't believe Dad let you get away with that shit. "I can't believe how gross that bathroom was. Next time I pick the motel." He wasn't going to start a fight; they only had five months and three days left. Of course, he'd been telling himself that for six months and twenty-seven days so far, and the frequency of inter-Winchester warfare hadn't decreased noticeably.
The sign ahead said, "Jumbo Rocks Campground," and Sam pulled off, slowing down to a crawl as the road looped its way past campsite after campsite, all occupied. It was late enough that most people were asleep, but there was still light coming from several tents, glowing through the green or yellow nylon. Most of the cars, Sam noticed, were pickups or SUVs; in the darkness he couldn't read the numbers on the plates, but a lot of them looked like they were from out of state. They passed a small gathering around a fire, and two spots down was Site 43, where Anatole had said he was waiting for them.
A rattletrap old Toyota pickup was already parked there; Sam squeezed the Impala in next to it, ignoring Dean's warning hiss at any threat to his paint job. The headlights illuminated a small tent, a picnic table, and a lot of rock; Sam had to tilt his head back to see the stars above the top of the huge boulder at the rear of the campsite.
"So, this is pretty great, Sammy," drawled Dean, as he got out of the car and went around to the trunk. "We gonna hunt some Boy Scouts? Litterbugs? Smoky the Bear, maybe?"
Turning off the headlights, Sam got out as well, and blinked at the instant chill. "Shit, it's cold!"
"Desert, Sammy," noted Dean, digging in the trunk, whose capacious depths hid at least one sleeping bag, Sam knew, since he'd stashed it there four months ago. "Hah!" Dean said in triumph, and pulled out a pair of fingerless gloves that looked a revolting green in the light from the open trunk.
"Sam?" Another voice interrupted Sam's opportunity to wonder at how his brother could simultaneously be so dangerous and so dorky. "Could that possibly be the infinitely tall and increasingly broad, the one, the only, the legendary Sam Winchester?"
"Legendary?" muttered Dean, as Sam turned with a smile to greet Anatole, who swung him up in a hug.
"Dude, gimme a break! You're gonna pull something!" But it was good to see Anatole anyway, even if only dimly. The last time Sam had seen Anatole was... wow, nearly three years ago, the summer before Jess died. Six of them had gone to Lake Tahoe for a week at Marcus' uncle's place. On the way back Anatole had taken them climbing in Truckee; they'd gotten hammered on margaritas afterwards, and Sam had had to use his last emergency card to get them a motel room. He didn't think Dean realized that his care packages almost never got used: of what value was Tinkerman's Guide to the Folklore of the Mid-Atlantic or a silver-chased knife to a philosophy student at Stanford?
Anatole let him down, pulled away to examine Sam's face, dark eyes sharp and searching. He gripped Sam's shoulder hard, fingers pressing painfully against the bone. "I heard about Jessica, Sam. I am so very sorry."
Jess. The grief wasn't ever going away, but it was dulling now, not raw or loaded with regrets the way Dad's death was. Sam managed a smile around the sudden lump in his throat. "Thanks, Anatole." At Dean's impatient cough, Sam continued, "Oh, Anatole, this is my brother Dean."
"Dean!" crowed Anatole, shaking Dean's hand eagerly in both his hands. Dean nodded, on his face a patently false smile, and extracted his hand as quickly as he could. Sam controlled a smile of his own; this was going to be fun.
*
Frank--Dean thought it was Frank--passed the cup of Jack Daniels to Dean again, before continuing his argument with Anatole. "But man, you don't know. Two bad placements are all it takes. I saw Monty hit the deck at Lover's Leap last summer, and that line just zipped--"
"No." Anatole's mobile face twisted with determination, and he waved his own mug dangerously close to Sam, who leaned away. "I tell you--" under the influence, Anatole's accent--Eastern European, Serbian or some shit like that--was stronger, and he tended to drop words. "I tell you, Lori is strong, safe climber. We climb together at Tahquitz, at the Valley, at Red Rocks. She knows, she is safe. This--what happened, it should not have happened."
Okay, this had been going on for at least five minutes, and Dean was getting seriously annoyed. "So tell us already, what did happen?" All he knew was that Anatole had called Sam about this chick Lori's death, and the longer they were here, the more Dean thought Sam was just yanking his chain. Fucking rock-climbers, man--of course they were going to fall off cliffs and die. There didn't have to be anything supernatural about it. When Sam glared at him, he smirked and took another drink of the Jack. It might be fucking freezing, even huddled around the fire, but at least they had decent alcohol.
"Lori was guiding," said Anatole, speaking into the fire more than anything else. "Blue Moon is easy route, good for novices. Solid placements, and Lori is conservative, she protects more than me. Also richer, hah. She finishes the pitch--a rope-length," he explained to Dean, "and she sets anchor, and her client, he begins to follow her up. And then she falls? Then her anchor fails, and the top three placements? No, it makes no sense. I cannot make it make sense."
So much for an explanation. Dean turned his head and glared at Sam, who shrugged. "I think he means that she was safe, she was tied down, and then she fell, for no reason. Right, Anatole?"
"Yes, no reason!" Anatole practically bounced with agreement. "And that is not all! This is why I wanted you here tonight, before these losers go back to lives--" he waved a hand at the three other men clustered around the fire. Frank, Jose, and Dustin, although Dean couldn't say which was which--in the firelit darkness, they all looked alike, with their caps and their dark fleece jackets, hands bundled in their pockets and a week's growth of beard. Almost like hunters, if you didn't know better. "Tell them," Anatole said to Dustin (Dean thought), "tell them what you saw!"
Dustin shifted his weight on the camp chair he was perched on. "I dunno. I mean, it's weird, but I don't see what it matters."
Christ already. "Just tell us anyway," said Dean. Sam raised his eyebrows and gave that I'm so interested look he usually put on for grieving widows, not smelly college students blowing Dad's cash on camping trips to the desert.
"Okay, fine." Dustin shrugged but kept talking. "There's a whole thing about Indian art around here, you can't mess with it. It's protected by the Park and they don't let you climb there. So I was up over on Lost Horse the other day with Denise, a five-pitch five-ten, and on the second pitch, I get to the anchor ledge, and there's a fucking petroglyph on it, right on top of the anchor bolts. Huge."
Sam pulled his hat down a little further. His hair stuck out underneath it. "And that's a problem because?"
Dustin pursed his lips and shook his head. "Look, man, I led that route three times this fall, and I know damn well there's no art on it."
"Could be some kids messing around, right?" Dean suggested.
"It's carved images, not paintings. Take forever to do it. And it's a solid five-ten, with an ugly traverse at the crux. You'd have to be a climber to do it, and why bother?" Dustin hesitated; Dean cocked his head and waved a hand to continue. "And I didn't see any debris, nothing. There was even some lichen grown over it. Like it had been there for years."
"What was the symbol?" asked Sam.
Dustin shrugged. "Some animal. I don't know much about that stuff."
"So, one death and a mystery rock carving." Dean took another swallow of the Jack. "Anything else freaky going on?"
"You mean, aside from the coyotes?" That was one of the other guys--Jose, maybe.
"What about the coyotes?" asked Sam. He looked freaking silly in that cap, but Dean suspected he was warmer than Dean was.
"Oh, c'mon, dude, you're just making shit up now!"
"I am not! You didn't see it! It was--weird. Fucking freaky!"
"They're just coyotes!"
"And they were staring at me!"
Dean smothered a sigh and glanced at Sam, who shrugged in return. "Hey, Anatole," Sam said, under the ongoing argument about whether coyotes were ordinary-freaky or freaky-freaky, and Jose's issues with same. "We had a long day, we really need to crash. You got a spare tent or something?"
What? "Sam, I am not sleeping on the damn ground--" For one thing, it was cold as hell. For another, the ground was hard. If Dean was gonna die in five months, he wasn't gonna suffer along the way.
"You're the one who bought burritos for dinner, Dean. And you might fit into the back seat of the Impala, but I sure don't."
Boy had a point there. Dean scowled, but slapped Frank--or Jose--on the back and followed Sam and Anatole back toward their own campsite. He hated when Sam was right, although he was getting used to it once in a while. Still, he didn't have to like it.
*
The smell of coffee--and not just diner coffee, but the good stuff, flown in from South America or Jamaica or Hawaii and carefully roasted that morning--swept over Sam as he came through the coffee-house door. He would have paused to appreciate it, but Dean shoved him from behind, and he stumbled forward, nearly knocking over a backpack balanced against one of the couches in the large seating area.
"Hey, do you mind?" said the woman on the couch, hands curled protectively around a large blue mug.
"Sorry, sorry," said Sam, elbowed Dean out of the way, and beat him to the counter. "Coffee, large, milk," he said, to the kid at the register, all black rubber bracelets and piercings. When Dean made a sound behind him that might have been a whimper, Sam caved and added, "Two."
Tent or Impala, it had been damned cold in the Park last night. Sam suspected that his sleeping bag--a relic he'd picked up at a yard sale in Nebraska, and which had cheerful ducks printed on the red flannel lining--might not be up to the demands of the occasion. He shuddered, shoulders hunched in his jacket, and cursed the fluke of mid-60s wiring that meant the best Dean could ever tease out of the Impala's heater was tepid air. When their order came, he threw six dollars down on the counter--California coffee required California prices--and snatched up his cup in both hands.
When he turned around, doing his best to ignore the pornographic sounds Dean was making with his mug, he realized Anatole had only gotten as far as the first couch. He glanced up at Sam and with a big smile, waved Sam over. Sam wove his way through the cafe, dodging the chess game, two laptops running what looked like P2P software, and a battered guitar on a stand, ready for anyone to pick it up and play. Sam made a note to keep Dean away from that. Brotherly love only went so far.
Anatole slapped his hands down on his knees as Sam approached the table, as if about to leap up and race out the door. "Terry, this is my friend Sam I told you about! Sam, this is Terry Kim, one of my climbing partners."
"Uh-huh," said the tiny woman sitting next to Anatole, her face a study in skepticism. She raised an eyebrow at Anatole, then put out a hand, smiling only civilly. "Nice to meet you, Sam. You're not quite as tall as Anatole described you."
Sam shuffled his coffee-mug from one hand to the next so he could put his laptop case down on the floor, before shaking her hand. "Ah, right, well, Anatole's, you know. Been known to exaggerate."
She just nodded in return, her thoughtful gaze shifting from Sam to something over his shoulder. Sitting down, she looked like she was possibly half Sam's size--if she was over five feet tall, he'd be surprised. Dark hair pulled back in a ponytail, a dark complexion that looked less like a tan and more like ancestry, but the shape of her face and something in her voice said Asia, not Latin America to Sam. Like Anatole, she wore a fleece jacket over sturdy trousers and light hiking boots, as if at any moment she would be commanded into the wilderness, although the silver earrings ascending the curve of her left ear didn't quite fit the mountaineering image. Looking from Terry to Anatole, quiet mistrust to exuberant confidence, Sam couldn't imagine a less likely partnership.
Without warning, Sam's balance shifted as Dean flopped onto the couch. "Hi, I'm Dean," he said, smiling that cocky grin that had charmed waitresses, barmaids, and nurses from Florida to Vancouver. "You must be Terry."
Terry stared at Dean for a moment, her eyes flickering over his weather-defying leather jacket, jeans, and t-shirt, before looking back at Anatole. "You're kidding, right?" Her voice was flat with skepticism.
Great. Sam was beginning to suspect Anatole had pulled one of his usual tricks. "Ah, Anatole, what did you--"
"No," said Anatole, shaking his head at Terry and completely ignoring Sam. "This is--these are good men, they will help us."
Terry was not reassured. "These guys? Jesus, Anatole, I thought you said you weren't smoking anymore! Lori deserved better than this."
"Hey, hey, hey!" protested Dean. "I guarantee, we know what we're doing--"
Terry folded her arms. "Do you know the first thing about the Park? About climbing? Have you ever been on the rock before? Used a belay device? Anything?" When neither Dean nor Sam could summon up more than a mumble, she turned back to Anatole. "I thought you said you were hiring professionals!"
Sam's "We are professionals!" overlapped with Anatole's "I couldn't afford them!", drawing enough attention that three other conversations paused while people turned to stare at the four of them.
"Terry, I swear," Sam said, dropping his voice and leaning forward, "we're not private investigators, but we can help. This is what we do, we investigate strange deaths and stop them. We've been doing it all our lives, and we're good at it."
"Right," Terry dubiously, with another glance at Dean. Sam really hated this: it was much easier when nobody knew who the Winchesters were, what they knew. It was so hard to convince people, especially people who weren't willing to have their view of the world overturned.
"Come on," said Dean, leaning forward across the table. "It's not like you're paying us. Give us a chance; we might be able to help."
Terry stared at Dean for a few long seconds, then shifted her gaze to Sam, her face a study in skepticism. Sam cupped his hands around his cooling coffee and tried to project earnest trustworthiness. Eventually she shifted back in her seat, the furrow between her brows smoothing out, and sighed audibly. "Fine." But she didn't smile.
Anatole clapped her shoulder, a grin creasing his sunburned face. Terry reached up comfortably and tugged at his disheveled ponytail in response. "Crazyman," she said, "I should have known you'd pull this kind of shit. Okay," she went on, meeting first Sam's eyes, then Dean's. "Let's do this, but you gotta promise me one thing."
"What?" said Dean, his hands deep in his jacket pockets, his face as blandly skeptical as Terry's had been a minute before. This was one reason not to tell people the truth about them, Sam thought--it put Dean on the defensive, put him on the outside. Weakened his position, when they knew more than he did, even if he wouldn't admit it.
"You follow our lead," Terry said, indicating Anatole and herself. "When we're on the rock, you do what we say, no questions. This is what we do, and we can keep you safe, but you have to trust us. Got it?"
Crap. Sam glanced at Dean, whose face had entirely shut down: lips in a distrustful line, brows lowered. But after a moment, Dean shrugged minutely, and Sam could almost hear him say it: What the hell, little brother, we're here. Might as well give it a shot. "All right," Sam said. "You got a deal."
"Excellent!" cried Anatole, leaping out of his chair, to the detriment of Sam's coffee. "Now we get you guys geared up, and we go see what you need to see!" Terry stood as well, swinging her pack to her back, and giving Dean another suspicious glance before following Anatole to the door.
"I don't think she likes you much," pointed out Sam, as he shrugged back into his jacket.
"No, really?" said Dean, scowling, and led the way to the door. "But what did he mean about gearing us up?"
Sam grinned all the way to the car.
*
"You're sure you're okay with this." Terry didn't look up at Dean, keeping her eyes on the blue-and-purple rope that she was carefully coiling on the ground in front of her. She'd taken her jacket off as the sun warmed the canyon at the foot of the Blue Moon route, the "easy climb" on which Lori Masterson had died. The brown skin on her forearms flexed as she worked, hands moving smoothly, instinctively. "It's a long way up, and a long way down. You don't have to--"
"I'm going!" snapped Dean. It wasn't like he had a choice: Sammy was already up there, long legs kicking as he followed Anatole over a clump of rock sticking out from the face. An overhand, right. "I've belayed before." Though to be fair, it was kind of an emergency thing, when Dad had gone down the cliff after that woman in New Hampshire. Dean hadn't had a harness then--he picked uncomfortably at the tight loops of nylon webbing he now wore over his jeans--or a belay device. He fiddled with the thing, just a short steel tube on a metal loop hooked to his harness. Terry and Anatole had given them a quick run-down on how to use the gear, but Dean couldn't say he was exactly comfortable with it all.
"Recently?" Terry just wasn't letting this go.
Dean grimaced; but then he looked up the wall. If that were him in front, he'd want to make sure, too. "Not very."
"Okay, let's go over it again." Terry's quick fingers, scabbed and scarred, the wrists wrapped in white athletic tape, pulled a loop of rope through the belay device. "Left hand on the end that goes to me, like this, right? The bight goes through the carabiner--" she snapped it shut and locked it in one motion, "--and then the right hand is the brake hand. If I fall, all you have to do is bring the brake hand down, like this--" She pulled his hand down and back, leaning across the front of his body. Her fingers were hard, her hands calloused, and if Dean sniffed just a little bit, he could smell dust and sweat and coffee on her. Not that he was interested in a short bitchy woman who was determined to make him look stupid. "You got it?"
"Yeah. Left hand to you, right hand brake hand."
Terry frowned, still uncertain. "One more thing--"
"Well, I didn't expect to see anyone on this route for a while."
Dean jerked his head up; one of the rangers was watching them, a tall woman whose eyes were hidden behind mirrored sunglasses and a dorky hat. Shit, more feds. He wished he'd followed Sam's lead and worn a hat. Did the FBI send out notices and photographs of fugitives to national parks, or just to real cops?
"Hey, Mel," said Terry, looking up only briefly. "Got a job, and it's a good route. Dean, this is Mel Frye."
Oh, right; Dean was a client. So he went for puzzled. "Why? Shouldn't we be here, Ranger?" It wasn't too hard to play tourist: the great outdoors wasn't really his element, not when he was unarmed and about to be hanging from the edge of a cliff.
Frye tilted her head back to look up the cliff. "No, it's fine, it's just there was an accident here a week or so back, so the route was closed for the investigation." She cocked her head. "That Anatole up there? Who's following?"
Investigation, Dean thought, and imagined the way a body would fall from that high, bouncing off the cliff face, gear flying. Once when he was a kid, they had passed a wrecked motorcycle, an ambulance and police cars clustered around it. Dean didn't really think much of it until, as the Impala crept along, his dad pointed silently out the window at a smear on the asphalt, and Dean realized he was looking at the inside of someone's head. He didn't wake up Sammy to see it, and didn't eat much for dinner afterwards, even though it was pizza.
"His brother," said Terry, nodding at Dean, and then sliding her hands inside his harness to check the fit. He grunted a little as she tugged upwards once, hard. "They came out for a couple of days climbing. And it's not like the route is haunted, right?"
"So, what caused the accident?" Dean asked Frye, stepping back from Terry and re-adjusting his harness loops. Christ, this was uncomfortable over jeans: no wonder Sam put on those stupid stretchy pants.
The ranger pulled her sunglasses off, the movement transforming her immediately from a faceless figure of authority to a tired-looking woman about ten years older than Dean, laugh-lines etched around her eyes. She hesitated openly, turning her glasses over in her hands. "We're not sure," she finally said. "It looked as though the anchor had never been placed, but even if that were true, there was no reason for, for the climber to fall."
Frye knew the climber who had died, Dean realized; probably very well, if she couldn't even bring herself to mention Lori Masterson's name. "What, like, she jumped?"
Terry scowled and Frye just looked baffled. "No! No, it's--well, nobody could have pushed her because there's no way anyone else could have been up there. We think maybe there was a bee or something, something that startled her and she didn't realize how close she was to the edge of the ledge."
Dean smiled grimly. "You're really making me feel secure about this whole climbing thing, Ranger."
Frye's bafflement shifted immediately into reassurance. "Don't worry, sir. Terry's one of the best guides in the park. Just do what she says, and you'll be fine." She checked her watch. "You'd better get up there if you want to come down in the daylight, though. Good luck on your climb, folks." With an archaic tap on the rim of her hat, like someone in a western, she moved on down the trail, dust puffing under her boots.
"Huh," said Dean. He watched Terry sort through equipment in her backpack, clipping metal wedges on wire springs onto her harness. She handed him a loop of nylon webbing and he slung it across his chest, bandolier-style. "But even if it was a bee, she shouldn't have fallen, right? Because of the anchors?"
Terry stayed where she was, crouched over her pack. The tendons in her hand suddenly stood out in sharp relief as she closed her hand on another length of multi-colored nylon rope. "Yeah."
"That's just... that's just great," Dean said, and leaned back to look up the cliff face, at where Anatole and Sam were hidden behind tons of stone, a hundred feet above.
*
"Holy shit!" Sam gasped as he struggled over the last move, forcing his hands to close on just one more hold, his legs to push him the last few feet to safety. When he made it onto the ledge, he rolled over, still gasping, and didn't even move when Anatole put a water bottle in his hand. He could barely close his fingers around it.
There was some clinking of gear--carabiner gates opening and closing--and a tug at his waist. "Huh? Anatole--"
"It is nothing, Sam, I am just anchoring you better."
Sam opened his eyes to see that in addition to the rope attaching him to Anatole, now there was a length of purple nylon webbing running from his harness to a tangle of rope and nylon extending from the cracks at the rear of the narrow ledge. He put his hand on the webbing and tugged gently; no movement. They were solidly anchored to at least four points; they weren't going anywhere.
"Gear?" Anatole tugged at Sam's belt, and Sam sat up, shakily. He had to use both hands to uncap the water bottle, but once he'd had a few sips, he was able to begin unclipping from his harness the equipment he'd removed from the cliff as he followed Anatole up.
The few times Sam had gone climbing before, with Jess and some of her friends--including Anatole's sister Ileana, which is how they'd met--they had climbed routes which were already bolted, so the climbers only had to attach the rope to the wall with carabiners. This more traditional kind of climbing was harder, slower, and scarier: the leader had to wedge nuts or spring-loaded devices into cracks in the rock, and then attach those to the rope. Without that protection, if someone fell, both leader and follower could die. But the protection could fail, too--if there was something wrong with the equipment, or if the leader miscalculated the strength of the rock, the direction of forces, the size of the crack.
Anatole had led the way up two pitches, pausing only briefly at a small ledge at the end of the first pitch, moving slowly but solidly, so far as Sam could tell, taking no chances. When Anatole reached the top of each pitch, he had anchored himself to the wall and then yelled down to Sam that he was on belay and could climb. Sam then followed Anatole, removing the protection from the rock and clipping it to his own harness. It was slow, unsettling work, bracing himself against the cliff and fumbling one-handed with the gear. Once he had nearly dropped a "Friend", and only stopped it from falling all the way down to Dean and Terry by trapping it against the wall with his knee. It was one of the big ones, and from what Sam had learned was worth close to a hundred dollars: money Anatole couldn't afford to lose.
Sam managed to unclip all the gear from his harness without Anatole's help, and then shifted around so he could shake out and coil the rope while Anatole prepared protection for the next pitch. "Where are those guys? They started yet?"
Anatole hooked a hand in the tangle of the anchor and leaned precariously outwards. "No, I cannot--oh! Yes, there. They are on the first pitch, Dean is about halfway. Terry is always slower than me. But safe! Your brother will be fine."
Sam grinned at the thought of Dean following tiny prickly Terry, cleaning up after her. "I'm sure."
This ledge was large, roomy enough to spread out in, and Sam sprawled a bit, leaning back against the rock and staring out over the park. They were about three hundred feet up, facing southwest in the mid-afternoon light. From here Sam could see for dozens of miles, across thousands of acres of desert and then more desert, until the horizon blurred in the brown haze of Riverside County and then LA. It was warm, tucked into their little alcove out of the wind, and Sam took another drink of water, munching cheerfully on the Oreos Anatole had brought for them. Somehow it always seemed more acceptable to eat junk food when you were outside, as if the fresh air and exercise made it healthier.
"So this is what you do now, Sam? You just ... drive around?" Anatole was finished sorting gear; he dangled his legs over the ledge, apparently unconscious of the deadly drop before him. He'd taken his tiny purple climbing shoes off and swung his bare feet in the sunshine.
Sam shrugged. He couldn't tell Anatole the truth about Jess and Mom and Dad, for Anatole's sake as well as his own. But he could tell him a bit; Sam knew Anatole wasn't going to freak. Anatole was already as freaky as he could get, after all, Sam thought, looking at the iridescent black polish on Anatole's toenails. "Pretty much, yeah. It's kind of a thing we do, like some people drive to all the baseball parks in the country or spend all their time hanging off cliffs. We go looking for strange phenomena." And try to weasel our way out of a demon contract, while not getting picked up by the FBI.
It was good to be out of the car, Sam thought. See something like this view, the twisted Joshua trees and alien rock formations, talk with people he wasn't trying to con. He wasn't an insurance investigator, a reporter, a cop or a fugitive right now--just Sam Winchester, hanging out with an old friend.
"And do you find it? Your strange phenomena?"
"Yeah, you'd be--" began Sam.
The shove between his shoulder blades cut him off, the words lost as he flew suddenly towards the lip of the ledge. Sand and rock scuffed under his feet as he tried to brace himself, the straps of webbing flopping loose where they had been taut a moment before. He saw the gulf approaching, the empty space he'd climbed through so comfortably half an hour before, and flung out a hand desperately, trying to stop himself from going over the edge.
*
Part 2 here.
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6