SPN FIC - Deluge (Part 2 of 5)
Yes, yes, I know: it took longer than I planned. But RL is what it is, and "slow" is better than "nothing," right? In any event, here's part 2, with the hope that the succeeding 3 chapters will come about one a week. As a former boss of mine used to say, "God willing and the creek don't rise."
This is for charis_kalos , who donated a truly impressive amount of money towards Australian flood relief in exchange for my giving her (and all of you) some fic. She requested brothers, working together, helping flood victims, which certainly seemed do-able. To my delight, when I did a bit of research, I even found an Aussie to blend into the mix.
Brothers. The Impala. A flood. And things that slither in the night. Hang in there. And try to stay dry.
The kid blinks a couple of times, rainwater sluicing off his head. "We're...shit, man. We're not on high ground."
Part 1 is here.
CHARACTERS: Sam, Dean, various OCs
GENRE: Gen
RATING: PG, for language
SPOILERS: None (though this takes place now-ish)
LENGTH: Remains to be seen; this part is 4370 words
DELUGE
By Carol Davis
Part 2
"Maybe -" Sam ventures.
Dean silences him with a raised eyebrow. That's all it takes, because they're John Winchester's sons. They might try to argue what they saw (silently, with themselves; with each other; or with other people), but Dad trained them to SEE.
"Road's maybe twenty feet wide," Dean says.
"So it was -"
"Longer than that."
"And built like a 'gator."
"Flat," Dean replies, then demurs with, "-ish."
"Legs?"
"Yeah."
"Not a serpent, then."
"'Gator, Sam," Dean sputters.
"But…thirty feet long? I don't think they come that big, Dean. Outside of movies on the SyFy channel."
Bigger is possible, of course. There are…mutations, right? Down in Florida, Sam thinks. People have seen all sorts of crazy shit in the Everglades. 'Gators big enough to eat an outboard motor. Giant rats. It's all that vegetation, he thinks. Things can hide in there.
Like they can hide in the trees and underbrush around here. The area's pretty heavily wooded, so there's more than enough vegetation surrounding the road to conceal something pretty good-sized, and the rain's providing it with another layer of protection.
So it can lay low until it's…
Hungry.
But if it's an alligator, then it's not their problem, no matter how big it is - any more than a grizzly or a timber wolf would be.
Maybe it's taking down some deer. Hell, maybe it's taken out a coyote or two. Or a hundred. But that's not what they do, he and Dean: worry about wildlife, anything that belongs in this world, no matter how big it is.
"Are you not listening to me?" Dean says, his voice raspy and strained.
"What? Yes."
"I said 'ish'. 'Gator-ISH. The hell do I care if the real ones don't get to thirty feet? I friggin' said ISH."
"So it wasn't an alligator."
Dean's eyes narrow.
"Okay, okay," Sam demurs, gesturing away Dean's pique with a hand held palm-out. "Not an alligator."
They were going to look for a new case. That was part of their plan for the couple of days they'd figured on spending in this area.
But this isn't a case, exactly. It's a thing. On the road. In the wee hours of the morning.
Something Dean saw and Sam didn't.
Something that ran out in front of Dean's car.
"We need to find someplace dry," Sam says. "Someplace we can get a WiFi connection, so we can see if there's anything weird going on around here. Sightings of something that big. Or -"
"Things getting eaten?"
"I'm kind of hoping it won't be people getting eaten."
That, apparently, is all the prompting Dean needs; before Sam can issue any kind of protest, Dean thrusts open the car door and scrambles out into the downpour.
It's a rural road, without streetlamps, and this stretch of it is pretty much void of manmade structures. They passed a little cluster of houses a couple of miles back, but here there's nothing but trees and the occasional route designation sign. The only light comes courtesy of the Impala's headlights, which do nothing to break the gloom more than a couple of yards into the brush, that much only because Dean stopped the car at an angle, with the front end of the passenger side canted a little to the right.
If a fifteen-foot 'gator can eat an outboard motor, Sam thinks as he climbs out of the car, then what can something twice that size gulp down?
"Dean," he yells over the wind and rain. "I don't think we ought to -"
Dean's got that look on his face: one born of exhaustion and frustration and sheer stubbornness. Whether they got out of bed looking for something to chase, or not, they've found one. And Dean's in the mood to kick something's ass.
"You think it's out here in the woods living on squirrels?" Dean yells back, shoulders hunched up toward his ears, though that does nothing to shield any part of him from the rain. "Or maybe it eats leaves and berries. Huh? You think?"
"I think if it's thirty feet long, we'd need a cannon to take it down."
"Wuss."
"Dean. Man. Come ON."
"Friggin' thing looked me in the eye, Sam."
"If it comes back? I'd kind of rather be inside the car."
An instant later Dean's got his gun in his hand, but it makes him look no more threatening than he did before he pulled it out of the small of his back, where it was tucked between his sopping-wet jacket and his equally sopped button-down. Standing in the middle of the road with water streaming off of him like somebody upstairs is emptying a reservoir over his head, brandishing a gun that - considering he's going up against something thirty feet long - looks like a kid's toy, he's not Badass Dean Winchester.
He looks kind of fragile, standing there.
If that thing's got the hide of a 'gator…
"Get back in the car, man," Sam says.
He really, really does not want his brother to be bitten in half while he tries to fill a thirty-foot-long something full of bullets.
Or the other way around.
At the side of the road, a little ways ahead of the car, there's a broad stripe of squashed vegetation. Saplings, weeds, shrubbery, it's all been broken and flattened, as if something wide and heavy rolled through, heading into the woods.
That thing can't turn on a dime. If it's built like a 'gator, it's got a pretty wide turning radius. It won't come back out of the woods where it went in.
Or maybe it will.
To Sam's dismay, Dean strides off the pavement, stomping through the little roiling creek at the shoulder and on into that stripe of beaten-down plant life, gun at the ready, his head arcing back and forth, taking in every bit of what's visible in the wash from the Impala's headlights. He won't come back out, not until he's satisfied himself of…something, so Sam returns to the car just long enough to pull a couple of big flashlights and a shotgun out of the trunk, then joins his brother on that smashed-down ribbon in the woods.
Standing in it, the ribbon's even wider than it looked from the road. With a grimace, Sam says, "We're gonna need a bigger boat."
Dean shrugs at the Jaws reference, grabs one of the flashlights and flips it on.
"There's nobody out here," Sam says. "Everybody's inside. Everything's inside. It's not going to find much in the way of prey out in the middle of a storm. Let's go find someplace dry. Figure out what to do."
Dean doesn't answer him; instead, he tips his head back and looks up at the sky, flinching at the force of the water as it pounds against his face. He stands that way for a minute, his gun hand slowly descending until the muzzle is pointed at the ground alongside his right foot.
It wouldn't surprise Sam at all if Dean upped and shot something out of sheer annoyance.
It's not like they've never dealt with anything this big. Not like they've never dealt with anything fast and deadly. But my God, Sam thinks: if it's a 'gator, or anything like a 'gator, the teeth on those things…
Being eaten isn't really high on his list of ways he'd like to go out.
A quick sweep with the flashlights tells them that the flattened vegetation goes quite a ways into the woods. The path could be fresh, or the thing, whatever it is, could have made it some time ago, and simply uses its previous tracks to move around, rather than bothering to create anything new. Could be it's got a nest, or a den, near here. Or its preferred body of water: a pond, or a good-sized stream.
"Looked smooth," Dean says, scowling.
"What?"
"'Gators are…you know. Scaly. Bumpy. This one looked smooth. Shiny."
"And it turned its head and looked at you."
Dean twitches a shoulder. "Got those eyes, like a 'gator." He's silent for a moment, his face betraying that he's looking for a word he likes. "Malevolent."
Swell, Sam thinks.
They press forward a couple hundred yards, boots squelching against the saturated ground. There's still some snow in here, where it was deep enough that the rain hasn't had a chance to melt it completely away, and in one long patch there's a print.
The thing has feet the size of a dinner plate. And that's minus the toes.
"Teeth?" Sam asks.
"Dunno. It didn't smile for the camera."
There was a 'gator in Ohio, he remembers reading - one state west of here. It was menacing a condo complex full of old people. Didn't actually attack anyone, he doesn't think, but maybe that was because the 'gator realized the meat would be tough. Stringy. Maybe it was biding its time, waiting for something a little juicier to come along.
This? With the big feet and the creepy eyes?
Not a 'gator.
As much as he would prefer that it be, this isn't -
"Sam," Dean says.
When he looks, Dean is focused on something lying on the ground, half hidden by the brush at the edge of that ribbon of flattened plant life. Old shirt, Sam thinks, the kind of rag you see in the woods sometimes, plucked off somebody's clothesline by the wind and carried along until it snags on something and ends up soggy and muddy and torn, tangled up on the ground and no longer worth anything to anybody.
Old shirt.
This one has an arm still in it.
Dean, moving now as if it's not raining at all, as if the weather's mundane and normal and it's the middle of the day, walks over to the shirt and prods at it with the toe of his boot. The arm looks like it's been there maybe a couple of days, has been gnawed on a little. Two fingers are missing off the hand.
Sam wonders, Where's the rest -
Then something makes him turn. Not a glimpse of movement, and not a sound, he doesn't think, though he can't be sure; there's so much noise out here that it's tough to sort out anything that's being added to the mix. What it is, is that one moment nothing's there in the woods with him and Dean, nothing except that wrecked shirt and its ruined arm, and the next moment something very much is there.
Watching them.
It circled around. Came back.
Sam's mouth opens a little and he thinks, Fuck ME.
'Gator-like, yeah. Low to the ground, maybe six feet wide, and it has legs; he can see the two up front. But the resemblance ends there. Smooth hide, like Dean said. Eyes that are something more than reptilian.
Something…wiser. More calculating.
The thing's got to weigh a ton. Maybe more.
A couple of paces away, Dean is slowly, deliberately shifting his gun hand into position. Nothing abrupt, nothing that would startle the thing into attacking, although Sam is pretty sure it'll attack when it feels the inclination, startled or not. Fast, he remembers Dean saying, and his stomach does a slow roll.
They were looking for a case. They were in the mood to tackle something - to battle the frustration of spending long days and nights driving around looking for something to do that isn't drinking or staring at the TV or trying to sleep when it seems like sleep is something other people do, something he and Dean remember vaguely but can't quite master.
But this?
He didn't have this in mind, and he's pretty sure Dean didn't, either.
He's certain of that when the thing ripples and shifts its weight and begins to rise up, lifting its front end off the ground, its weight moving to what Sam first thinks are its back legs then realizes they're not, they're its middle legs; by the time it's settled onto what are more or less its haunches, its head is a good twenty feet off the ground and the front two sets of legs (all four of them short - ish - and stumpy, but powerful-looking, thickly muscled) are extended forward, like the damn thing wants to shake hands. Wants to say Howdy.
Dean aims at the thing. Pulls the trigger. Fires. Three times, rapid succession. The gunfire's muffled by the racket of the storm, as if Dean's firing from underneath a thick pile of blankets. All three shots find their mark: two of them in the area where the creature's heart might be (assuming it's got one) and the other one in its neck, where the bullet might sever the thing's spinal cord if it travels far enough.
The thing doesn't seem bothered.
That's a plus, maybe, that it doesn't seem pissed off, doesn't seem ready to pounce, although that might only buy them a few seconds. With a glance at Dean, Sam swings the shotgun into position and fires.
It's like something off of Mythbusters, he thinks, one of those episodes where the Busters are shooting a pig carcass to see what kind of results they get. His shots, and Dean's, make quarter-sized dark holes in the thing's pale underbelly, but they don't produce any blood. He and Dean don't have a lot more ammo with them, but it wouldn't matter much if they did. They might as well be shooting a pig carcass.
A thirty-foot-long, two-thousand-pound pig carcass.
The thing blinks at them, and Sam half expects it to grin.
Instead, it turns.
And it's gone.
Just…gone.
"Mother of CRAP," Dean sputters, and for a second it seems like he's sorry he didn't yank out his cell phone and take a couple of pictures of the thing, something he could show off the next time they're hanging out at Bobby's. Look at this ugly son of a bitch, he'd say, and the three of them would toss back another drink.
"We need to go someplace dry," Sam murmurs, more to himself than to Dean.
Apparently, though, Dean hears him perfectly well - and agrees with him. Without a word or a gesture aimed at Sam, Dean turns on one heel and strides away, back through the woods to the road, with Sam half a dozen steps behind.
They've been back in the car for a minute when Dean finally grumbles, "Something ain't right."
"You think?"
Everything's an "ish," Sam thinks. It's quiet-ish in here. Dry-ish, although he and Dean are both soaked to the skin and then some, and big puddles of water have begun to collect on the car seat and the floor.
It seems safe in here, surrounded by all this metal.
Ish.
Dean's silent again for a while, eyes half-closed as if he's having some sort of Zen moment. Trying to communicate with his inner self, with his chi or his katra or what the hell ever. When he finally speaks, it's not what Sam expected him to say.
"Where's the thunder and lightning?"
"The - what?"
"This ain't natural. Where's the thunder and lightning, man?"
Sam can't manage words. What he very much wants to discuss, right now, is the size of the thing that just confronted them. The fact that it stood there pondering them, even after they shot it. The fact that it could have eaten both of them whole, the way he and Dean would gulp down jumbo shrimp.
Lightning?
Seriously?
Apparently so, because Dean's sitting there looking at him, waiting for an answer. An answer about the weather, as if the two of them never got out of the car. As if they didn't see what they saw.
Weather.
Jesus.
Meteorology isn't Sam's thing - or Dean's. The weather just is what it is, they've always figured, although they pay attention to the Weather Channel now and then, just to see what they're going to be driving into, and how it might affect what they intend to do. Like most people, Sam thinks. This storm? It's got something to do with air masses and jet streams and relative altitude, high pressure and low pressure and…who the hell knows. Should there be thunder and lightning?
Why not. It'd put a cherry on top of this whole situation.
"You're telling me you don't feel like something's not right out here," Dean challenges his brother.
"I don't know, man."
He doesn't have Dean's instincts, Sam thinks sometimes. He's good at what he does, yeah, but Dean inherited something from Dad (or allowed it to be pounded into him), a hunter's sixth sense times ten. Dad taught both of them to see, to hear, smell, taste, all of that. But in Dean it took hold a little bit better.
Maybe because Dean let it.
Wrong?
Sam lets himself go still for a minute, trying to shift himself away from that godforsaken pounding on the roof, the way his cold, soaked clothing feels against his skin, the awareness of being tired and hungry and that his head and neck are throbbing (and, yes, the fact that a thirty-foot-long, two-thousand-pound thing that definitely isn't an alligator could have EATEN him), keeping time with the rhythm of the rain in a deep, numbing ache.
It's been raining here for almost a week.
Just here.
Other places around the country, yes (deep South, he thinks, down around the Gulf), but here it's been raining for almost a week, and the storm hasn't moved. Screw the lack of thunder and lightning; shouldn't the damn thing be moving?
"Am I right?" Dean asks him.
"Yeah," Sam says. "There's something…off. Something's not right."
He feels a wash of relief when Dean shifts the car into gear, but it's not much of one, and it doesn't last long. They're moving, which is a plus, but moving toward what? The Twilight Zone, Sam thinks; Twilight Zone, or a damn Stephen King novel. They'll drive for five or six hours and they'll still be inside the storm.
A couple of years back, he wouldn't have felt that way. He would have been sure that a couple of hours of driving would take them out of this thing. If not into sunlight, at least out of this relentless downpour. But this past few years, he's lost some of his hold on what's real - where the rules of nature apply and where they don't. He and Dean - they've been jacked around too many times, by too many…
Things.
Beings.
The limits of the storm?
It's a long, narrow ribbon. They saw it on TV, on a satellite image: it has boundaries.
But this area has a bad history with water.
He doesn't object to the way Dean's inching the car down the road. Dean's worried about that thing running out in front of him again, Sam figures; thinks he might not be able to stop in time. Might collide with the thing. Two tons of metal hitting a ton of…not-'gator…ought to injure it at least a little, but who knows.
They're moving forward.
That's good. Forward. Away from that thing.
But they've gone less than a mile when Dean presses down on the brake and brings them to a stop, then cuts a careful K-turn and turns the car around.
"Where -?" Sam frowns.
Dean looks over at him, rainwater dripping from his hair, hands moving restlessly on the steering wheel.
"Back," he says after a moment. "We gotta go back."
~~~~~~~~~~
There's an old barn tucked off the road a little ways, a couple of miles back. It probably belongs to somebody (to whom, exactly, is a mystery; there are no other buildings nearby), but it's not locked, and there's more than enough empty space inside to accommodate the Impala. Best of all, the roof and the walls are solid enough that the interior is completely dry, which to Sam's mind puts it right up there with the Holiday Inn.
Ten minutes, a quick towel-down, and a change of clothes and shoes later, he feels pretty much human again.
Dean, still in his wet clothes, is pacing the length of the barn, trying his phone, then Sam's phone, and Dad's old phones, and the spares they keep in the trunk. He gets a couple of bars on one of them, but by the time he's punched through Bobby's number, the signal's gone.
"Where are we?" he complains. "The ass end of Jupiter?"
"Feels like it."
"You remember anything in Dad's journal about anything that looks like…that thing? Whatever the hell that was?"
"No. I - no."
Dean reaches into the car for the book, then stops, scowling at the way his clothes are dripping. They don't keep the book under museum-like conditions by any means, but if he drips onto the pages, the ink will run, maybe badly enough to render Dad's notes unreadable.
They ought to make a copy, Sam thinks. A couple of them. Just in case.
"Let me," he offers.
Dad encountered big any number of times. Ditto with fast. Serpent-like? Yeah, that merits a few mentions. But there's nothing in the book about anything that even superficially resembles an alligator, and Sam can't recall Dad, or Bobby, or any of the other hunters they've spent time with over the years saying anything about a giant 'gator.
Nothing's what it's supposed to be, any more, he thinks.
Like they needed this job to be more challenging.
"Pen it in," Dean says from behind Sam. "Pen the son of a bitch in, and then -" He pauses, gnawing at his lower lip. "We got any C4?"
"How do you figure on penning it in?"
"You figure on being a pain in my ass?"
"Fine, then. We'll pen it in." Sam sweeps a look around, points to a corner of the barn, where whoever owns the place has left a messy collection of building materials: some flimsy wooden slats, a couple of dozen concrete blocks, some roofing shingles. "There's some chicken wire. That ought to do it."
"Feels like we're in a friggin' Godzilla movie."
With a long, tired sigh Dean scrubs a hand through his hair, sweeping out a spatter of rainwater, then wanders over to sit on the pile of concrete blocks. "It's like I said: it ain't out there eating roots and berries. That poor bastard we - that part of him we found. Maybe he's not the only one. Maybe he's not anywhere near the only one. Could be a lot of disappearances around here. We gotta figure out a way to take that thing down, Sammy. And I'm really kinda liking the C4."
"Or a bazooka."
"A bazooka and C4."
Dean returns to the car and changes clothes like he's sleepwalking. His movements grow progressively slower, and a little bit hesitant, like he'd enjoy doing nothing more than curling up on the floor of the barn and dropping off into oblivion, but he settles for resuming his seat on the concrete blocks and propping his head in his hands. "Never figured we'd be going up against Godzilla," he says mildly, with a note of humor. "You and me, we used to love those movies. Remember that? You used to pretend you knew Japanese."
"That was you," Sam corrects him with a small smile.
"They always sent in those guys in the little planes. Strafe the thing, rat-tat-tat-tat-tat, and he'd swat 'em right out of the sky."
"We need - what are those things? Something out of Battlestar Galactica, with the laser weapons."
"Yeah!" Dean whoops, more enthusiasm bubbling out of him than Sam's seen in months as he mimes a ferocious aerial battle with his hands, coloring it with the same sound effects he used as a kid: explosions, gunfire, the shrieks of injured pilots, finishing up with cheers of triumph as he high-fives himself on an invisible victory. "Be like friggin' Luke Skywalker, man. Dive-bomb that freak and blow it to Kingdom Come. Wouldn't even know what hit it."
He allows himself the thrill of victory for a minute. Then his expression sombers.
"Without the X-wing fighters," Sam says. "What's our best chance against this thing?"
"Damned if I know," Dean sighs.
~~~~~~~~~~
In a perfect world, they'd be able to work alongside regular law enforcement: the guys with the helicopters and the heavy weaponry. Motion detectors, heat sensors, the kind of high-tech gadgetry that could track the creature wherever it chooses to go, wherever it tries to hide. Sam and Dean do have a few toys, mostly courtesy of Bobby, but the arsenal they put together was meant to combat small (ish) things. Things that a silver blade would kill.
If he could stab that Godzilla-thing with a silver blade, Sam wonders, would it even feel the wound?
Or would it just turn and disappear again?
They wait, and rest a little, until sunrise - such that it is. When Sam cracks open the barn door to peer outside, the rain hasn't let up at all (which makes him wonder where all that water is coming from; surely, there's got to be an end to it at some point) but the thickly clouded sky is a slightly paler gray. They'll be able to see where they're going, if they venture back into the woods.
If?
Yeah. Like there's an "if" involved in this.
A nuke would come in handy, he thinks. Just a small one.
"We got some Ring-Dings," Dean announces, his head and upper body inside the car, where he's rooting around in the back seat. "Couple of Slim Jims. And a - the hell's in here? Looks like a donut. Kinda squashed, though."
Coffee. They need coffee. They seriously need coffee.
"We're gonna have to -" Sam begins, and stops.
Dean comes up behind him, chewing something as he says, "Maybe we oughta go get some real breakfast. Build up our -"
He's right behind Sam as he says, "What?"
Sam doesn't say anything. Just points.
And Dean says, vehemently, "Shit."
About fifteen feet past the barn doors, lying sprawled in the mud with rain hammering down on the bloody, tattered mess of his body, is Juney, the fat kid who was the desk clerk at their motel.
Neither Sam nor Dean bothers wondering how he got there, or how he died.
Part 3…
This is for charis_kalos , who donated a truly impressive amount of money towards Australian flood relief in exchange for my giving her (and all of you) some fic. She requested brothers, working together, helping flood victims, which certainly seemed do-able. To my delight, when I did a bit of research, I even found an Aussie to blend into the mix.
Brothers. The Impala. A flood. And things that slither in the night. Hang in there. And try to stay dry.
The kid blinks a couple of times, rainwater sluicing off his head. "We're...shit, man. We're not on high ground."
Part 1 is here.
CHARACTERS: Sam, Dean, various OCs
GENRE: Gen
RATING: PG, for language
SPOILERS: None (though this takes place now-ish)
LENGTH: Remains to be seen; this part is 4370 words
DELUGE
By Carol Davis
Part 2
"Maybe -" Sam ventures.
Dean silences him with a raised eyebrow. That's all it takes, because they're John Winchester's sons. They might try to argue what they saw (silently, with themselves; with each other; or with other people), but Dad trained them to SEE.
"Road's maybe twenty feet wide," Dean says.
"So it was -"
"Longer than that."
"And built like a 'gator."
"Flat," Dean replies, then demurs with, "-ish."
"Legs?"
"Yeah."
"Not a serpent, then."
"'Gator, Sam," Dean sputters.
"But…thirty feet long? I don't think they come that big, Dean. Outside of movies on the SyFy channel."
Bigger is possible, of course. There are…mutations, right? Down in Florida, Sam thinks. People have seen all sorts of crazy shit in the Everglades. 'Gators big enough to eat an outboard motor. Giant rats. It's all that vegetation, he thinks. Things can hide in there.
Like they can hide in the trees and underbrush around here. The area's pretty heavily wooded, so there's more than enough vegetation surrounding the road to conceal something pretty good-sized, and the rain's providing it with another layer of protection.
So it can lay low until it's…
Hungry.
But if it's an alligator, then it's not their problem, no matter how big it is - any more than a grizzly or a timber wolf would be.
Maybe it's taking down some deer. Hell, maybe it's taken out a coyote or two. Or a hundred. But that's not what they do, he and Dean: worry about wildlife, anything that belongs in this world, no matter how big it is.
"Are you not listening to me?" Dean says, his voice raspy and strained.
"What? Yes."
"I said 'ish'. 'Gator-ISH. The hell do I care if the real ones don't get to thirty feet? I friggin' said ISH."
"So it wasn't an alligator."
Dean's eyes narrow.
"Okay, okay," Sam demurs, gesturing away Dean's pique with a hand held palm-out. "Not an alligator."
They were going to look for a new case. That was part of their plan for the couple of days they'd figured on spending in this area.
But this isn't a case, exactly. It's a thing. On the road. In the wee hours of the morning.
Something Dean saw and Sam didn't.
Something that ran out in front of Dean's car.
"We need to find someplace dry," Sam says. "Someplace we can get a WiFi connection, so we can see if there's anything weird going on around here. Sightings of something that big. Or -"
"Things getting eaten?"
"I'm kind of hoping it won't be people getting eaten."
That, apparently, is all the prompting Dean needs; before Sam can issue any kind of protest, Dean thrusts open the car door and scrambles out into the downpour.
It's a rural road, without streetlamps, and this stretch of it is pretty much void of manmade structures. They passed a little cluster of houses a couple of miles back, but here there's nothing but trees and the occasional route designation sign. The only light comes courtesy of the Impala's headlights, which do nothing to break the gloom more than a couple of yards into the brush, that much only because Dean stopped the car at an angle, with the front end of the passenger side canted a little to the right.
If a fifteen-foot 'gator can eat an outboard motor, Sam thinks as he climbs out of the car, then what can something twice that size gulp down?
"Dean," he yells over the wind and rain. "I don't think we ought to -"
Dean's got that look on his face: one born of exhaustion and frustration and sheer stubbornness. Whether they got out of bed looking for something to chase, or not, they've found one. And Dean's in the mood to kick something's ass.
"You think it's out here in the woods living on squirrels?" Dean yells back, shoulders hunched up toward his ears, though that does nothing to shield any part of him from the rain. "Or maybe it eats leaves and berries. Huh? You think?"
"I think if it's thirty feet long, we'd need a cannon to take it down."
"Wuss."
"Dean. Man. Come ON."
"Friggin' thing looked me in the eye, Sam."
"If it comes back? I'd kind of rather be inside the car."
An instant later Dean's got his gun in his hand, but it makes him look no more threatening than he did before he pulled it out of the small of his back, where it was tucked between his sopping-wet jacket and his equally sopped button-down. Standing in the middle of the road with water streaming off of him like somebody upstairs is emptying a reservoir over his head, brandishing a gun that - considering he's going up against something thirty feet long - looks like a kid's toy, he's not Badass Dean Winchester.
He looks kind of fragile, standing there.
If that thing's got the hide of a 'gator…
"Get back in the car, man," Sam says.
He really, really does not want his brother to be bitten in half while he tries to fill a thirty-foot-long something full of bullets.
Or the other way around.
At the side of the road, a little ways ahead of the car, there's a broad stripe of squashed vegetation. Saplings, weeds, shrubbery, it's all been broken and flattened, as if something wide and heavy rolled through, heading into the woods.
That thing can't turn on a dime. If it's built like a 'gator, it's got a pretty wide turning radius. It won't come back out of the woods where it went in.
Or maybe it will.
To Sam's dismay, Dean strides off the pavement, stomping through the little roiling creek at the shoulder and on into that stripe of beaten-down plant life, gun at the ready, his head arcing back and forth, taking in every bit of what's visible in the wash from the Impala's headlights. He won't come back out, not until he's satisfied himself of…something, so Sam returns to the car just long enough to pull a couple of big flashlights and a shotgun out of the trunk, then joins his brother on that smashed-down ribbon in the woods.
Standing in it, the ribbon's even wider than it looked from the road. With a grimace, Sam says, "We're gonna need a bigger boat."
Dean shrugs at the Jaws reference, grabs one of the flashlights and flips it on.
"There's nobody out here," Sam says. "Everybody's inside. Everything's inside. It's not going to find much in the way of prey out in the middle of a storm. Let's go find someplace dry. Figure out what to do."
Dean doesn't answer him; instead, he tips his head back and looks up at the sky, flinching at the force of the water as it pounds against his face. He stands that way for a minute, his gun hand slowly descending until the muzzle is pointed at the ground alongside his right foot.
It wouldn't surprise Sam at all if Dean upped and shot something out of sheer annoyance.
It's not like they've never dealt with anything this big. Not like they've never dealt with anything fast and deadly. But my God, Sam thinks: if it's a 'gator, or anything like a 'gator, the teeth on those things…
Being eaten isn't really high on his list of ways he'd like to go out.
A quick sweep with the flashlights tells them that the flattened vegetation goes quite a ways into the woods. The path could be fresh, or the thing, whatever it is, could have made it some time ago, and simply uses its previous tracks to move around, rather than bothering to create anything new. Could be it's got a nest, or a den, near here. Or its preferred body of water: a pond, or a good-sized stream.
"Looked smooth," Dean says, scowling.
"What?"
"'Gators are…you know. Scaly. Bumpy. This one looked smooth. Shiny."
"And it turned its head and looked at you."
Dean twitches a shoulder. "Got those eyes, like a 'gator." He's silent for a moment, his face betraying that he's looking for a word he likes. "Malevolent."
Swell, Sam thinks.
They press forward a couple hundred yards, boots squelching against the saturated ground. There's still some snow in here, where it was deep enough that the rain hasn't had a chance to melt it completely away, and in one long patch there's a print.
The thing has feet the size of a dinner plate. And that's minus the toes.
"Teeth?" Sam asks.
"Dunno. It didn't smile for the camera."
There was a 'gator in Ohio, he remembers reading - one state west of here. It was menacing a condo complex full of old people. Didn't actually attack anyone, he doesn't think, but maybe that was because the 'gator realized the meat would be tough. Stringy. Maybe it was biding its time, waiting for something a little juicier to come along.
This? With the big feet and the creepy eyes?
Not a 'gator.
As much as he would prefer that it be, this isn't -
"Sam," Dean says.
When he looks, Dean is focused on something lying on the ground, half hidden by the brush at the edge of that ribbon of flattened plant life. Old shirt, Sam thinks, the kind of rag you see in the woods sometimes, plucked off somebody's clothesline by the wind and carried along until it snags on something and ends up soggy and muddy and torn, tangled up on the ground and no longer worth anything to anybody.
Old shirt.
This one has an arm still in it.
Dean, moving now as if it's not raining at all, as if the weather's mundane and normal and it's the middle of the day, walks over to the shirt and prods at it with the toe of his boot. The arm looks like it's been there maybe a couple of days, has been gnawed on a little. Two fingers are missing off the hand.
Sam wonders, Where's the rest -
Then something makes him turn. Not a glimpse of movement, and not a sound, he doesn't think, though he can't be sure; there's so much noise out here that it's tough to sort out anything that's being added to the mix. What it is, is that one moment nothing's there in the woods with him and Dean, nothing except that wrecked shirt and its ruined arm, and the next moment something very much is there.
Watching them.
It circled around. Came back.
Sam's mouth opens a little and he thinks, Fuck ME.
'Gator-like, yeah. Low to the ground, maybe six feet wide, and it has legs; he can see the two up front. But the resemblance ends there. Smooth hide, like Dean said. Eyes that are something more than reptilian.
Something…wiser. More calculating.
The thing's got to weigh a ton. Maybe more.
A couple of paces away, Dean is slowly, deliberately shifting his gun hand into position. Nothing abrupt, nothing that would startle the thing into attacking, although Sam is pretty sure it'll attack when it feels the inclination, startled or not. Fast, he remembers Dean saying, and his stomach does a slow roll.
They were looking for a case. They were in the mood to tackle something - to battle the frustration of spending long days and nights driving around looking for something to do that isn't drinking or staring at the TV or trying to sleep when it seems like sleep is something other people do, something he and Dean remember vaguely but can't quite master.
But this?
He didn't have this in mind, and he's pretty sure Dean didn't, either.
He's certain of that when the thing ripples and shifts its weight and begins to rise up, lifting its front end off the ground, its weight moving to what Sam first thinks are its back legs then realizes they're not, they're its middle legs; by the time it's settled onto what are more or less its haunches, its head is a good twenty feet off the ground and the front two sets of legs (all four of them short - ish - and stumpy, but powerful-looking, thickly muscled) are extended forward, like the damn thing wants to shake hands. Wants to say Howdy.
Dean aims at the thing. Pulls the trigger. Fires. Three times, rapid succession. The gunfire's muffled by the racket of the storm, as if Dean's firing from underneath a thick pile of blankets. All three shots find their mark: two of them in the area where the creature's heart might be (assuming it's got one) and the other one in its neck, where the bullet might sever the thing's spinal cord if it travels far enough.
The thing doesn't seem bothered.
That's a plus, maybe, that it doesn't seem pissed off, doesn't seem ready to pounce, although that might only buy them a few seconds. With a glance at Dean, Sam swings the shotgun into position and fires.
It's like something off of Mythbusters, he thinks, one of those episodes where the Busters are shooting a pig carcass to see what kind of results they get. His shots, and Dean's, make quarter-sized dark holes in the thing's pale underbelly, but they don't produce any blood. He and Dean don't have a lot more ammo with them, but it wouldn't matter much if they did. They might as well be shooting a pig carcass.
A thirty-foot-long, two-thousand-pound pig carcass.
The thing blinks at them, and Sam half expects it to grin.
Instead, it turns.
And it's gone.
Just…gone.
"Mother of CRAP," Dean sputters, and for a second it seems like he's sorry he didn't yank out his cell phone and take a couple of pictures of the thing, something he could show off the next time they're hanging out at Bobby's. Look at this ugly son of a bitch, he'd say, and the three of them would toss back another drink.
"We need to go someplace dry," Sam murmurs, more to himself than to Dean.
Apparently, though, Dean hears him perfectly well - and agrees with him. Without a word or a gesture aimed at Sam, Dean turns on one heel and strides away, back through the woods to the road, with Sam half a dozen steps behind.
They've been back in the car for a minute when Dean finally grumbles, "Something ain't right."
"You think?"
Everything's an "ish," Sam thinks. It's quiet-ish in here. Dry-ish, although he and Dean are both soaked to the skin and then some, and big puddles of water have begun to collect on the car seat and the floor.
It seems safe in here, surrounded by all this metal.
Ish.
Dean's silent again for a while, eyes half-closed as if he's having some sort of Zen moment. Trying to communicate with his inner self, with his chi or his katra or what the hell ever. When he finally speaks, it's not what Sam expected him to say.
"Where's the thunder and lightning?"
"The - what?"
"This ain't natural. Where's the thunder and lightning, man?"
Sam can't manage words. What he very much wants to discuss, right now, is the size of the thing that just confronted them. The fact that it stood there pondering them, even after they shot it. The fact that it could have eaten both of them whole, the way he and Dean would gulp down jumbo shrimp.
Lightning?
Seriously?
Apparently so, because Dean's sitting there looking at him, waiting for an answer. An answer about the weather, as if the two of them never got out of the car. As if they didn't see what they saw.
Weather.
Jesus.
Meteorology isn't Sam's thing - or Dean's. The weather just is what it is, they've always figured, although they pay attention to the Weather Channel now and then, just to see what they're going to be driving into, and how it might affect what they intend to do. Like most people, Sam thinks. This storm? It's got something to do with air masses and jet streams and relative altitude, high pressure and low pressure and…who the hell knows. Should there be thunder and lightning?
Why not. It'd put a cherry on top of this whole situation.
"You're telling me you don't feel like something's not right out here," Dean challenges his brother.
"I don't know, man."
He doesn't have Dean's instincts, Sam thinks sometimes. He's good at what he does, yeah, but Dean inherited something from Dad (or allowed it to be pounded into him), a hunter's sixth sense times ten. Dad taught both of them to see, to hear, smell, taste, all of that. But in Dean it took hold a little bit better.
Maybe because Dean let it.
Wrong?
Sam lets himself go still for a minute, trying to shift himself away from that godforsaken pounding on the roof, the way his cold, soaked clothing feels against his skin, the awareness of being tired and hungry and that his head and neck are throbbing (and, yes, the fact that a thirty-foot-long, two-thousand-pound thing that definitely isn't an alligator could have EATEN him), keeping time with the rhythm of the rain in a deep, numbing ache.
It's been raining here for almost a week.
Just here.
Other places around the country, yes (deep South, he thinks, down around the Gulf), but here it's been raining for almost a week, and the storm hasn't moved. Screw the lack of thunder and lightning; shouldn't the damn thing be moving?
"Am I right?" Dean asks him.
"Yeah," Sam says. "There's something…off. Something's not right."
He feels a wash of relief when Dean shifts the car into gear, but it's not much of one, and it doesn't last long. They're moving, which is a plus, but moving toward what? The Twilight Zone, Sam thinks; Twilight Zone, or a damn Stephen King novel. They'll drive for five or six hours and they'll still be inside the storm.
A couple of years back, he wouldn't have felt that way. He would have been sure that a couple of hours of driving would take them out of this thing. If not into sunlight, at least out of this relentless downpour. But this past few years, he's lost some of his hold on what's real - where the rules of nature apply and where they don't. He and Dean - they've been jacked around too many times, by too many…
Things.
Beings.
The limits of the storm?
It's a long, narrow ribbon. They saw it on TV, on a satellite image: it has boundaries.
But this area has a bad history with water.
He doesn't object to the way Dean's inching the car down the road. Dean's worried about that thing running out in front of him again, Sam figures; thinks he might not be able to stop in time. Might collide with the thing. Two tons of metal hitting a ton of…not-'gator…ought to injure it at least a little, but who knows.
They're moving forward.
That's good. Forward. Away from that thing.
But they've gone less than a mile when Dean presses down on the brake and brings them to a stop, then cuts a careful K-turn and turns the car around.
"Where -?" Sam frowns.
Dean looks over at him, rainwater dripping from his hair, hands moving restlessly on the steering wheel.
"Back," he says after a moment. "We gotta go back."
~~~~~~~~~~
There's an old barn tucked off the road a little ways, a couple of miles back. It probably belongs to somebody (to whom, exactly, is a mystery; there are no other buildings nearby), but it's not locked, and there's more than enough empty space inside to accommodate the Impala. Best of all, the roof and the walls are solid enough that the interior is completely dry, which to Sam's mind puts it right up there with the Holiday Inn.
Ten minutes, a quick towel-down, and a change of clothes and shoes later, he feels pretty much human again.
Dean, still in his wet clothes, is pacing the length of the barn, trying his phone, then Sam's phone, and Dad's old phones, and the spares they keep in the trunk. He gets a couple of bars on one of them, but by the time he's punched through Bobby's number, the signal's gone.
"Where are we?" he complains. "The ass end of Jupiter?"
"Feels like it."
"You remember anything in Dad's journal about anything that looks like…that thing? Whatever the hell that was?"
"No. I - no."
Dean reaches into the car for the book, then stops, scowling at the way his clothes are dripping. They don't keep the book under museum-like conditions by any means, but if he drips onto the pages, the ink will run, maybe badly enough to render Dad's notes unreadable.
They ought to make a copy, Sam thinks. A couple of them. Just in case.
"Let me," he offers.
Dad encountered big any number of times. Ditto with fast. Serpent-like? Yeah, that merits a few mentions. But there's nothing in the book about anything that even superficially resembles an alligator, and Sam can't recall Dad, or Bobby, or any of the other hunters they've spent time with over the years saying anything about a giant 'gator.
Nothing's what it's supposed to be, any more, he thinks.
Like they needed this job to be more challenging.
"Pen it in," Dean says from behind Sam. "Pen the son of a bitch in, and then -" He pauses, gnawing at his lower lip. "We got any C4?"
"How do you figure on penning it in?"
"You figure on being a pain in my ass?"
"Fine, then. We'll pen it in." Sam sweeps a look around, points to a corner of the barn, where whoever owns the place has left a messy collection of building materials: some flimsy wooden slats, a couple of dozen concrete blocks, some roofing shingles. "There's some chicken wire. That ought to do it."
"Feels like we're in a friggin' Godzilla movie."
With a long, tired sigh Dean scrubs a hand through his hair, sweeping out a spatter of rainwater, then wanders over to sit on the pile of concrete blocks. "It's like I said: it ain't out there eating roots and berries. That poor bastard we - that part of him we found. Maybe he's not the only one. Maybe he's not anywhere near the only one. Could be a lot of disappearances around here. We gotta figure out a way to take that thing down, Sammy. And I'm really kinda liking the C4."
"Or a bazooka."
"A bazooka and C4."
Dean returns to the car and changes clothes like he's sleepwalking. His movements grow progressively slower, and a little bit hesitant, like he'd enjoy doing nothing more than curling up on the floor of the barn and dropping off into oblivion, but he settles for resuming his seat on the concrete blocks and propping his head in his hands. "Never figured we'd be going up against Godzilla," he says mildly, with a note of humor. "You and me, we used to love those movies. Remember that? You used to pretend you knew Japanese."
"That was you," Sam corrects him with a small smile.
"They always sent in those guys in the little planes. Strafe the thing, rat-tat-tat-tat-tat, and he'd swat 'em right out of the sky."
"We need - what are those things? Something out of Battlestar Galactica, with the laser weapons."
"Yeah!" Dean whoops, more enthusiasm bubbling out of him than Sam's seen in months as he mimes a ferocious aerial battle with his hands, coloring it with the same sound effects he used as a kid: explosions, gunfire, the shrieks of injured pilots, finishing up with cheers of triumph as he high-fives himself on an invisible victory. "Be like friggin' Luke Skywalker, man. Dive-bomb that freak and blow it to Kingdom Come. Wouldn't even know what hit it."
He allows himself the thrill of victory for a minute. Then his expression sombers.
"Without the X-wing fighters," Sam says. "What's our best chance against this thing?"
"Damned if I know," Dean sighs.
~~~~~~~~~~
In a perfect world, they'd be able to work alongside regular law enforcement: the guys with the helicopters and the heavy weaponry. Motion detectors, heat sensors, the kind of high-tech gadgetry that could track the creature wherever it chooses to go, wherever it tries to hide. Sam and Dean do have a few toys, mostly courtesy of Bobby, but the arsenal they put together was meant to combat small (ish) things. Things that a silver blade would kill.
If he could stab that Godzilla-thing with a silver blade, Sam wonders, would it even feel the wound?
Or would it just turn and disappear again?
They wait, and rest a little, until sunrise - such that it is. When Sam cracks open the barn door to peer outside, the rain hasn't let up at all (which makes him wonder where all that water is coming from; surely, there's got to be an end to it at some point) but the thickly clouded sky is a slightly paler gray. They'll be able to see where they're going, if they venture back into the woods.
If?
Yeah. Like there's an "if" involved in this.
A nuke would come in handy, he thinks. Just a small one.
"We got some Ring-Dings," Dean announces, his head and upper body inside the car, where he's rooting around in the back seat. "Couple of Slim Jims. And a - the hell's in here? Looks like a donut. Kinda squashed, though."
Coffee. They need coffee. They seriously need coffee.
"We're gonna have to -" Sam begins, and stops.
Dean comes up behind him, chewing something as he says, "Maybe we oughta go get some real breakfast. Build up our -"
He's right behind Sam as he says, "What?"
Sam doesn't say anything. Just points.
And Dean says, vehemently, "Shit."
About fifteen feet past the barn doors, lying sprawled in the mud with rain hammering down on the bloody, tattered mess of his body, is Juney, the fat kid who was the desk clerk at their motel.
Neither Sam nor Dean bothers wondering how he got there, or how he died.
Part 3…