Casualties 2/8: Lend-Lease
Title: Casualties 2/8: Lend-Lease
Author: July
Rating: R
Genre: Gen
Spoilers: right up through S3 finale
Disclaimer: So. Broke. So very, very broke.
Notes:Thanks again to montisello, whose advice is always bodacious.
Summary: How much clearance did a girl really need? Could you back a Prius over a wendigo?
Chapter Two: Lend-Lease
In the past we have had a light which flickered, in the present we have a light which flames, and in the future there will be a light which shines over all the land and sea.
-Churchill, December 8, 1941
You’ve gotta help me. I’ve gotta get better. I’ve gotta get back there. I mean, you haven’t called a soul for help. You haven’t even tried. Aren’t you going to do anything? Aren’t you even going to say anything? I’ve done everything you’ve ever asked me. Everything. I have given everything I’ve ever had. And you’re just going to sit there and watch me die?
-In My Time of Dying
I-91 South
May 19th, 2008
Gas now officially cost an arm and a fucking leg. Damn. What, was she supposed to find space to build a gun locker in a sub-compact now? Sleep in a hatchback? How much clearance did a girl really need? Could you back a Prius over a wendigo? Thanking the clerk with a tight little smile, she took her coffee and her receipt. When Robin came out of the little quick-E mart, Jo was in the driver’s seat.
“Your turn to sleep,” she said, accepting the coffee. Robin shrugged and put on her seatbelt. The car was quiet. She turned off the police scanner as they pulled back onto the freeway.
“Hybrids are looking better and better.”
“EMF disruption would fuck with the fancy battery,” Jo said.
“Good point.”
Jo shifted a little in the driver’s seat. “So…what was college like?” She sounded guardedly curious.
“It was fun.” Robin smiled in spite of herself. “It was really fun. I studied hard and I partied a lot. And I played hockey.”
“When did you graduate?”
“Commencement was the day before yesterday.” Unexpectedly, she felt her throat tighten up a little. “I’ll get my diploma in the mail.”
“You skipped graduation to bring us the Colt?” Jo asked, incredulous. Robin shrugged.
“I never thought I’d be here, you know. Not until last year, anyway.” There was an awkward pause. “I didn’t want to go to grad school. There’s no NHL for girls.”
“And then your modeling career fell through,” Jo said. Robin laughed out loud-hard. “Shit,” she heard Jo say. “That was tacky. I didn’t mean-“
“No, it’s okay, it’s okay,” Robin said. “I’d rather you...people don’t talk about it. My dad died and nobody talked about that. And then this happened,” she gestured to her left cheek, “and nobody talked about it. I felt like the invisible woman.” There was a pause while Jo merged onto the highway.
“I thought about it,” Jo said, in the same tone that everyone used when they were justifying things to themselves. “College. My grades were good enough and Nebraska’s a great school. But what was I going to study: demonology 101? The chemistry of salting and burning? An introduction to Shamanism?”
“I’m pretty sure they teach that last one in California.”
Jo sighed. “Where’d you go? Iowa? Wisconsin?” Robin rolled her eyes.
“Fuck no. Minnesota. UM Duluth, actually.” Another awkward pause.
“I lived in Duluth for a while.”
“Yeah, I know. After my Dad...I started putting the pieces together. There was a shots fired report filed for a bar on the lake. The bar had a W2 for one Martha Cannary-Burke. That was a nice touch.”
“Everybody’s got a signature,” Jo said, smiling. “Dean used classic rock. Mom likes to use First Ladies. I liked that job.” She cleared her throat. “Look, I can’t tell any of the others but I think you should know, in Duluth, Sam, whatever was wearing Sam, it came for me. And I was terrified. I’m pretty sure it wanted to rape me or kill me, and I thought...”
“Look, if you decide you’ve said too much, you can always shoot me,” Robin said dryly. Jo didn’t smile. “As far as I’m concerned this conversation never happened,” she added with more gravity.
“I thought it was Sam. I didn’t think he was possessed. I thought it was Sam and that Sam had turned, you know, like they said he would. I thought he had turned.” She was blushing a little with shame.
“I heard about that. Gordon Walker had a pretty big mouth. I get the feeling that a lot of people thought-“
“Dean hates me,” Jo said. “He knew I thought it was Sam and not something else and even though I saved his ass he hates me and he should and I owe him and I owe Sam and someone here has got to be watching out for just Sam and I owe Dean that much for everything. Everybody else has one eye on Sam and one eye on Lilith and somebody has to be watching just Sam.”
“Why?” Robin asked quietly. “What do you think is going to happen?” Jo shook her head, suddenly brushing tears from her eyes.
“Dean’s dead and I don’t think he’s coming back. And the others, they’re not watching hard enough. We’ve got to make sure. We’ve got to make sure he doesn’t turn.” Jo looked at her, for half a second and Robin almost started at the look in her eyes. “Dean’s dead.”
“Okay,” Robin said, swallowing hard.
“I’m sorry your dad died,” the other woman said, apropos of nothing.
“Thanks. Wake me up in Driftwood.” Robin pulled out her pillow from the back. She leaned up against the window and closed her eyes and tried not to think too much. Do not go out into the country, she heard Steve say. Do not walk the roads! For the sword of the enemy is there, terror on every side. Seconds later, Jo was shaking her awake. Robin cussed with feeling.
“Was that German? It was nice, very guttural,” Jo said appreciatively as she put the car in park. They were outside whatever passed for a grocery store here. “Come on. First ones in town get supplies.”
“How long are we staying?” Robin asked as they made their way into the store, snagging a cart.
“Couple nights, probably. Why do you ask?”
“Just wondering how long it needs to keep. We don’t have a lot of time tonight. Maybe spaghetti? We should see if they have a bakery. Garlic bread is always easy.” Jo threw out an arm and stopped both of them and the cart right inside the entrance. Robin stumbled to a halt.
“You can cook?” Jo asked, like she’d just discovered a cure for cancer.
“It was either that or die of scurvy in my house,” Robin admitted. “You can’t?”
“I grew up in a bar.”
Driftwood, Pennsylvania
Robin crouched next to the oven in the cramped, but clean cabin they were staying in. Everyone else was crowded around the table outside the kitchenette talking shop. She had made the garlic bread the right way: one stick of butter per loaf. Carefully, she wedged the foil-wrapped loaves into the comically small oven. On the stove, a pot of water was coming to a boil for pasta. She dumped in the angel hair and passed the time by chopping small yellow onions and listening.
“How was the drive?”
“Long.”
“You sleep any?”
“A little, Mom. Jesus, I’m not twelve.”
“Where’s the beer?”
“Cold ones are in the fridge.”
“Nice of Jefferson to lend us the cabin.”
“’Lend’ might be a little generous.”
“We’re squatting?”
“Yeah, but he won’t mind. I’m pretty sure he’s in a bomb shelter in Nunavut somewhere waiting for all this to blow over.”
“The car doesn’t sound right.”
“Yeah?”
“The car…he would know what to do with it. He tried to show me, but…”
“I’ll take a look at it after supper.”
“Thanks.”
“She give you any trouble?”
“She’s four feet away.”
“And?”
“And if she’d given me any trouble do you really think I’d give her access to the knives?”
“You hear from Rufus?”
“I called him maybe two dozen times. He picked up once and told me some new things I could do with a tire iron. I don’t need that kind of education.”
“He’ll cool off.”
“Maybe. And maybe Ed McMahon will show up with a check tomorrow morning and I can move my old, sorry ass to Florida and take up scuba diving.”
“And what, leave all this?”
“Besides, Bobby, you don’t have the figure for neoprene.”
“Har dee har har.”
“Jesus, I’m starving. Is that garlic bread?”
“She says she can cook.”
“I haven’t eaten since Vermont.”
“Would turn anybody off food for a while.”
“The fuck was with the rawheads?”
“Damn if I know.”
“You ever see shit like that? Attacking adults? In groups?”
“What the hell was that, anyway?”
“Total war,” Robin answered, focusing on dicing the onions evenly. It was the first thing she’d said since the Impala had pulled up outside. The onions didn’t make her eyes water anymore, they just felt funny on the inside of her sinuses.
“Beg pardon?” Bobby asked.
“It’s total war. It’s a different way of fighting; it’s the difference between the World Wars.” She swept the onions off of the cutting board and into heavy skillet coated with olive oil. She picked up the fresh yellow squash.
“We’re waiting,” Sam said, leaned back, hands shoved into jacket pockets. If he was a dog, his ears would be pricked up.
“In the First World War, the boys went off to fight. It was the war to end all wars and it dragged on and on and it was horrible. But the soldiers started it and the soldiers ended it.” She removed the stems from the squash and tossed them into the trash and cut the squash long-wise. “And then Hitler comes to power. And all of a sudden, it’s not just an army and a navy. It’s the Hitler Youth and Lebensborn and the SS and Mein Kampf and the Blitz. Suddenly, Europe is on its knees and Churchill is writing emergency back-up speeches for when the Nazis cross the channel and invade England. ‘The hour has come. Kill the Hun.’ It was total war.”
“Are you comparing Lilith and Hitler?” Sam asked, eyebrows halfway to his hairline.
“No, I’m comparing evil and evil.” She started in on the squash: nice, evenly matched pieces. “Total war. I think she’s digging deep. I think she’s pulling support from everywhere. I think she’s using rawheads and I think she’s using vampires and I think she’s going to use every soulless piece of trash she can to get her hands on you.”
“That’s comforting,” Ellen said. Robin shrugged.
“That’s the idea, anyway. The US really made an art out of it: WACs, WAVs, internment camps, Victory Gardens, the home front, rations, nylons, and let’s not forget Rosie the Riveter. And Station X! There were stenographers at Bletchley Park who killed more men than Napoleon.” She looked up, realized there was an awkward silence. She was rambling.
“Okay...” Ellen said, clearly trying to segue out.
“Maybe we should start to think about-” Jo began but Sam cut her off.
“The US didn’t believe in total war,” he said, dismissively. A little anxiously, Robin met his eyes again. They were occupied and engaged. “Until the end of 1941 FDR was resolutely opposed to any foreign wars in Europe.”
“In public,” she amended. “Behind the scenes, he was producing and shipping everything but the kitchen sink to the Battle of Britain.”
“But there was no propaganda, no total war in America,” Sam insisted. She shook her head. “Not until...”
“Pearl Harbor,” Bobby said, with a cutting look at Robin. She set the knife down. Sam was still looking at her, she could feel it.
“It was a fatal error,” she said quietly. “The Axis pushed the world’s greatest latent superpower into a war and the survivors begged for peace on their knees.”
“’A date which will live in infamy’,” Sam said, spinning the ring on his right hand with the pad of his thumb. She met Sam’s eyes again and they were all lit up from the inside. “’This means war’,” Sam quoted more. He was smiling and it wasn’t pretty. “They lost the war on December 7th and they didn’t even know it.”
“I’m not sure I like where this is going,” Bobby said. He tried to get her attention, but Robin was back with the squash. She was sautéing the vegetables and looking for some oregano. She knew it was down here somewhere. “We need to not do anything stupid, Sam, nothing half-ass. We stay alive and in the meantime, we’re going to keep trying-“
“We’ve been trying for more than a year, Bobby,” Sam said, on an exasperated laugh. “There’s nothing left for us to do. Nothing left for us to try.”
“That’s not true, Sam,” Jo said. “We’re going to find something.”
“No we’re not!” Sam was suddenly screaming. “Not like this, Jo! Not sitting in some cabin in Bumblefuck, Pennsylvania!”
“Then how, Sam?” she asked quietly, a little cowed.
“I’m going to write a new spell, or a new ritual, or whatethefuckever,” he said with a heat that Robin could practically feel. “We’re going to use every Catholic ritual and every Greek incantation and every Babylonian spell that’s been preserved and so help me I will find some hoodoo priest to lay some mojo on me if that’s what it takes. I will say anything. I will make anything. I will steal anything. I will use anything. I will break out another goddamn Ouija board if I have to.
“Sam, kid, this sounds...”
“A little crazy,” Ellen said, finishing Bobby’s sentence. Sam laughed.
“They told me I couldn’t save my brother and I believed them,” he said. He was smiling again and it was mean. “Dean said I had to let him go and I did. He told me not to listen to Ruby and I didn’t. And guess what? Everything came to pass just like they said it would. So, this? This is the new plan: Fuck ‘em.”
“Fuck ‘em?” Bobby asked, gently.
“Fuck ‘em all, Bobby,” Sam said.
Des Moines, Iowa
March 22nd, 2007
She had worked on really hard at being able to cultivate a Zen-like state under duress. One afternoon, coming back from an afternoon of running stairs because the legs feed the wolf, Steve had explained it to her. You’re only wasting energy if you’re spending it on hating the stairs. Yeah? Yeah. You have to embrace the suck. Embrace the suck? Yeah. Okay, then.
And it worked. The next day they’d done nothing but suicides on the ice. The legs feed the wolf. And instead of hating the drill, she embraced the suck. She thought about it now and a smile pulled up at the corner of her mouth. Behind her, Becky was watching. Robin still couldn’t believe that the congregation had assigned her a minder for the day.
“It’s time to go,” Becky said. “Do you have your shoes?”
Embrace the suck, Robin said, or tried to say. It took her a moment to realize she hadn’t actually spoken at all. Then she went to find the plain black pumps that she’d bought for the occasion. She was wearing black hose, too. And she hated hose.
“Do you have a coat?”
Embrace the suck, Robin repeated to herself. She took Steve’s double breasted black wool monstrosity off of the bed. He kept it in the same closet with his parka and his longshoreman’s jacket and it smelled of him, too. She turned to bury her face in the lapel and caught sight of herself in a mirror. The dress was charcoal grey and plain. She looked pale, even for her, and severe with all of her hair pulled back into a tight bun. The shoes felt strange and so did the dress.
Most of the service was a blur. The rabbi blessed her and tore her dress at the left elbow. God has given, God has taken. Blessed be the name of God. There wasn’t much else to say. She and Steve came to services maybe half a dozen times a year. Nobody knew them there, beyond the surface, which was kind of the whole point. Her teammates were there and some friends from high school, Adam, an ex-boyfriend or two. A couple women towards the back that she was pretty sure Steve had slept with at some point or another.
Then the hard part: it was a plain pine box. She couldn’t help but wonder what he looked like. He had lain in their house for a week. He should have been accompanied from the moment of death. Psalms should have been recited to him. He should have been buried at once. Because of the blood, the Chevra Kaddisha would not have washed his body. They would have taken what was left of him and wrapped him in a shroud and his tallit. Rotten, decomposing, unclean, and wrapped in his winding sheet and his prayer shawl.
She hadn’t thought to worry about pall-bearers, but a number of men came forward. Robin knew at once that they were hunters. They were rangy or burly and young or old and scarred. All of them looked like they’d like to set fire to their suits. They picked up her father and took him away. More prayers were said: may our memory of him be without bitterness, may our remembrance inspire us, may his soul be bound up in the bonds of eternal life. It rained.
There was no headstone yet, of course, so she stared at the blank spot in the ground where it would stand in one year and listened to her father’s voice whispering over her shoulder. Many will be purified and purged and refined; the wicked will act wickedly and none of the wicked will understand but the knowledgeable will understand. The kethuvim, the prophets, had always been a particular favorite of Steve’s.
A while later, someone put a hand under her elbow. Robin realized she was soaked through and wondered how long she’d been standing out here. The hand was ungloved and steady and looking down she saw grease deep under the nails. A hunter.
“Time to come in,” he said. She turned to look at him. “Singer. Bobby Singer.” Maybe he’d looked respectable earlier that day, but now he looked like a drowned rat sorely in need of a poly-fill vest and a trucker hat.
“Singer,” she said, thinking hard. Steve had said something about... “Did you ever find those Impala parts you were looking for?”
“Yeah,” he said, and cleared his throat. “I did.”
“Good,” she said absently. “Did you know him?”
“Not very well. We were talking about it earlier, and, um-“
“’We’ the hunters?” Singer nodded.
“He was a good man. And he thought you hung the moon.”
“I don’t have any family left.”
“It’s time to come in,” he repeated and she allowed him to lead her away. Her heels sank into the wet earth of the cemetery so Robin stepped out of them and continued without them, letting the rain soak through her stockings.
“Singer.”
“Yeah?”
“Do you know what did this to my father?”
He stiffened a little and took a breath, released it in a painful way. His eyes were on the ground as he guided her around a small plaque. Even then she wondered if he was lying or if it was just hard to talk to sleep-deprived, half-crazy grieving daughters.
“No. I don’t.”
Driftwood, Pennsylvania
June 9th, 2008
The beg, borrow, or steal part of Sam’s plan was in full swing. The hunters had been in and out over the last three weeks, coming and going with various sacred texts, reliquaries, rare herbs, talismans, precious stones, charms, soil samples, and what Robin was pretty sure was once somebody’s scalp. She was holding down the fort. She laid salt lines, recited blessings, tied charms and wards to fence posts for miles around. It was boring. She cleaned things. She took out her stitches. She ran a lot, once the irritating torpor of blood loss had passed.
Today had been a good run, she thought as she stripped off her gamey running gear and stepped into the shower, turning the hot water all the way up. That was one nice thing about being alone in the house: no cold showers. That, and she could sing as loud as she wanted. She stepped out, avoided her reflection in the fogged up mirror, and walked into the living room with nothing but her pack towel around her.
“Nice.”
“Fuck!” She jumped about four feet in the air and barely kept a hold of the towel. She whirled to face the man sitting on the couch, arms spread across the length of the back. “Fucking fucking fuck, Sam. Fuck.” Robin put one hand over her chest, trapping the necklace next to her skin, waiting for her heart to slow down, and trying not to think about what Sam thought of her rousing rendition of ‘The Farmer and the Cowman’.
“Get dressed. We’re going to Queens.” His eyes looked sharper; he’d lost more weight in his face. He was also cultivating a serious Putin-level dead-behind-the-eyes mien. She wished she could have said that Jo was wrong to worry.
“New York?”
“Did I stutter?”
“Jo and Ellen should be back tomorrow,” she said, with all the equanimity she could muster. “I’m not sure...”
“I don’t need eye candy.”
“Yeah, okay. I’ll change.”
Queens, New York
“Sam?” Robin was eyeing the building. A yuppie in a Chanel dress came out on the arm of a man in an Armani double breasted suit. “We are not dressed for this.”
“It’ll be fine.”
“Do we have a plan?”
“We’re servicing a security system.” He reached into the glove box and handed her an ID badge to hang around her neck. “Make sure and show them your good side. And be quick about it. We have maybe 15 minutes before they actually run our badge numbers.”
It surprised her how easy it was to get in. Most of her hunting experience had been with the killing side of the business, not the con work. Robin started to wonder again about why he picked her for this job. But she kept her UMD cap pulled low and followed Sam into the elevator like the lackey she was and everything went pretty well. As soon as the elevator opened, though, she could smell it. She must have made a noise, because he turned to look at her.
“Sam...I’m pretty sure there’s a dead cat in there.”
“Huh. Dean didn’t say she had any pets.”
Robin pulled her t-shirt up over her face and when the door opened even Sam seemed disturbed by the smell. Or, maybe not the smell. His lip curled up but he approached the dead cat with no hesitation.
“That arrogant bitch.” He said, standing over its small body, crawling with flies. “She just left it here. She really thought she was going to make it.” Sam kicked the little corpse, disturbing the insects and the decomposition. Something oozed out of its belly. “What a waste of life.”
He threw her a duffel bag and they started loading things up. There was as much supernatural paraphernalia here as their motley crew had collected in the last three weeks. She cleaned out the bedroom and returned to the living room just in time to see Sam set it on fire. Whatever accelerant he used worked like gangbusters.
“Dude!” she yelled, spreading her arms in disbelief.
“Time to go,” he said, hauling his duffel over his shoulder
They hauled ass down the stairs, taking the back exit directly towards the Impala. To her surprise, Sam threw her the keys. She was hardly going to argue, though; the car was magnificent. Robin turned the engine over, threw the car in gear, and got the hell out of Dodge. No wonder he’d taken her. Bobby or Ellen would have figured him for arson the minute he opened the apartment door. It took her about two minutes to figure out what else was wrong.
“Where are the sirens, Sam?”
“Oh yeah. I may have pulled that wire, too.” He shrugged. “I needed it to burn.”
Robin kept her mouth shut and her eyes on the road. As soon as they were out of the city, Sam procured a large bottle of something from one of the bags. She couldn’t read the label, but it had a lot of umlauts. He pulled the cap off and drank straight from the bottle. He winced, coughed a little, and offered it to her.
“Thanks. Maybe later,” she said.
It was a long five hours home. She was tired and she couldn’t shake the smell of dead cat. Next to her, Sam got progressively drunker. By the time they crossed I-81, he was totally sloshed. He turned on the radio, listened for a few songs, and then angrily punched it off again.
“He likes Metallica,” Sam said. “I never got it, you know, too much yelling, but he likes Metallica. And Zeppelin. Jesus, if I have to listen to ‘No Quarter’ one more time...” Robin tightened her grip on the steering wheel. She didn’t want to hear this.
“Look, Sam-“
“I thought it would be like with my Dad, you know?” he posited. “Like, he loves Dad’s stuff so then maybe I would love Dean’s stuff? But I don’t. It’s not just that it’s hard to listen to. It’ll be easier when he gets back, I know. But I just...I don’t like classic rock. I should. I don’t. But I should.”
She pressed her lips together, nodded, and prayed to God that he wouldn’t remember this in the morning. His eyes were glassy and his posture was relaxed. Please, please, let him be too drunk to recall this.
“I ever tell you about the time I rescued him and this chick? He was tied to a tree, I swear to God…” The rest of the trip went like this. A song, a story, another drink. The stories got longer and more incoherent. The last one was something totally ridiculous involving a possessed racist truck and that was when they finally pulled up into the driveway of Jefferson’s cabin. No one else was there.
“Come on,” she said.
“I miss my brother,” he whispered. It hung there for a moment before she nodded a little and turned to face him.
“Yeah? I miss my father.”
Then she got out, slammed the door as hard as she could, and left him in the Impala.
Driftwood, Pennsylvania
June 10th, 2008
“Come on, Wandell,” Sam taunted, pulling ahead of her. Robin narrowed her eyes and lengthened her stride a little. The legs feed the wolf. On speed alone, she was pretty sure she was beat; she was also damn sure she would leave his sorry ass in the dust eventually.
“Jackass,” she muttered under her breath. First of all, he was cheating. You couldn’t join a girl on a ten mile run at mile seven and start goading her. Second of all, holy HELL his legs were long. Third of all, where did he get the right to run so fast hung over?
Robin caught sight of the break in the tree line and just like that they were in the homestretch. Who made my leg like a deer’s, and set me firm upon the heights. Normally, this was where she would slow down a little, jog for that last quarter-mile or so. Sam had made that impossible. She smiled a grim little smile and began to kick.
“That all you got?” Sam was breathless. She wasn’t sure if he was talking to her. “No wonder you couldn’t outrun the bear that mauled you.” Oh yeah. He was talking to her. You have let me stride on freely and my feet have not slipped. Robin forced herself to stop thinking about anything except for rhythm until she burst into the clearing, neck and neck with him.
“Fuck you,” she said, sucking air with her hands on her knees.
“Good morning to you, too,” he smirked. She flipped him the bird. She was pretty impressed he was vertical, much less running. In fact, he looked pretty good for a guy who- Scratch that, she thought, as the contents of Sam’s stomach made a repeat appearance, apparently without much warning.
“You okay?” she asked, after it looked like he was finished.
“’M good,” he groaned.
“You look good,” she said sarcastically. Nobody looked particularly attractive on their knees in the dirt tossing their cookies.
“You, too. Who took out your stitches?”
“Me,” she looked down the inside of her arms. They looked like they belonged to a heroin junky with self-harm baggage. So, yeah, maybe she’d looked better, too.
“Both sides?” he sounded impressed. She shrugged.
“I broke my left hand when I was little and I had to have surgery. I had to re-learn everything with my right for a couple of months.”
“I still remember the first time I had to stitch up my br-oh, dammit,” he hurled again.
“This too shall pass,” she said sagely. “What were you drinking?”
“Aquavit, I think,” he said. “It should have been good. The bitch who bought it had pretty refined tastes.”
Robin swallowed her caustic retort, straightened up and turned sharply towards the road. “Somebody driving a diesel now?” she asked.
“Jo may have acquired a new truck. Fuck,” he groaned and dry heaved. “Don’t tell her.”
“That you can’t hold your liquor or that you tied a girl with seven miles on you in a sprint to the finish?” He was going to say something, but was interrupted by another round. She waited, unable to stop smirking, until he was able to speak again.
“Dad always said it was better to sweat it out,” he said, standing up again. He looked a little grey and pinched around the eyes. “Then again, he also told me soccer was for pussies just to try and bully me into bow-hunting.”
“Soccer is for pussies.”
“I was eight.”
“If it makes you feel any better, bow-hunting is for pussies, too.”
Driftwood, Pennsylvania
June 11th, 2008
“Guess what I bought today?” Jo asked, grinning like a kid. “Soaker hoses. Got ‘em at a garage sale for a song.”
“Are you planning on doing some yard work for Jefferson?” Ellen asked, helping clear the dinner plates.
“No, I was thinking about Bobby’s trick with the sprinklers. I’m thinking this could be a good way to set up a boundary. I think it might work better than a huge devil’s trap to keep them out.”
“They could step over it,” Bobby said.
“Not if you give it time to soak into the earth,” Robin said. “It’s a perfect area-denial weapon. Land mines for demons.”
“That reminds me,” Ellen said, “whatever came of that Molotov cocktail formula you were working on?”
“That was just for shits and giggles,” Bobby said. “But I did have a thought about pouring our own shot. I’m thinking about making some silver minie balls. More holes, fewer bullets.”
The timer went off and Robin popped up like a whack-a-mole and headed for the oven. She retrieved dessert and set it on the burner and grabbed the large dinner plate she had standing by. Quickly, she put the plate over the pan and with her oven mitts still on, flipped it over easily.
“Is that-“Ellen started.
“Pineapple upside down cake,” she said, smiling.
“I love pineapple upside down cake,” Bobby said brightly.
“What’s the occasion?” Sam asked.
“Last night in Jefferson’s place,” Robin shrugged. “That’s all.”
While the cake cooled, plates and forks were passed around. Coffee was made, the cake was cut, the cake was devoured. She did make a damn good pineapple upside down cake. They were discussing the weather forecast and all permutable road conditions for tomorrow when the phone rang. The land line.
“Go get it,” Bobby ordered her. She looked at him askance. “Nobody knows your voice. If they need to know, say you’re Jefferson’s gal.” Robin nodded and stood and crossed the room to the wall where the old fashioned phone was anchored.
“And for God’s sakes don’t blow our cover,” he added.
“No pressure,” Jo said. Robin rolled her eyes and picked up the phone, facing the wall so she wouldn’t have to look at any of them.
“Hello?” she asked, slightly breathless. “No, no, it's no trouble. Now is a fine time, thank you.” She furrowed her brows. It had to be a wrong number. “I’m sorry. Would you hold for one moment, please?” She covered with the receiver with her hand and turned around.
“Well?” Bobby asked. She shrugged.
“Who the hell is Malcolm McGillicuddy?”
Chapter 3
Author: July
Rating: R
Genre: Gen
Spoilers: right up through S3 finale
Disclaimer: So. Broke. So very, very broke.
Notes:Thanks again to montisello, whose advice is always bodacious.
Summary: How much clearance did a girl really need? Could you back a Prius over a wendigo?
Chapter Two: Lend-Lease
In the past we have had a light which flickered, in the present we have a light which flames, and in the future there will be a light which shines over all the land and sea.
-Churchill, December 8, 1941
You’ve gotta help me. I’ve gotta get better. I’ve gotta get back there. I mean, you haven’t called a soul for help. You haven’t even tried. Aren’t you going to do anything? Aren’t you even going to say anything? I’ve done everything you’ve ever asked me. Everything. I have given everything I’ve ever had. And you’re just going to sit there and watch me die?
-In My Time of Dying
I-91 South
May 19th, 2008
Gas now officially cost an arm and a fucking leg. Damn. What, was she supposed to find space to build a gun locker in a sub-compact now? Sleep in a hatchback? How much clearance did a girl really need? Could you back a Prius over a wendigo? Thanking the clerk with a tight little smile, she took her coffee and her receipt. When Robin came out of the little quick-E mart, Jo was in the driver’s seat.
“Your turn to sleep,” she said, accepting the coffee. Robin shrugged and put on her seatbelt. The car was quiet. She turned off the police scanner as they pulled back onto the freeway.
“Hybrids are looking better and better.”
“EMF disruption would fuck with the fancy battery,” Jo said.
“Good point.”
Jo shifted a little in the driver’s seat. “So…what was college like?” She sounded guardedly curious.
“It was fun.” Robin smiled in spite of herself. “It was really fun. I studied hard and I partied a lot. And I played hockey.”
“When did you graduate?”
“Commencement was the day before yesterday.” Unexpectedly, she felt her throat tighten up a little. “I’ll get my diploma in the mail.”
“You skipped graduation to bring us the Colt?” Jo asked, incredulous. Robin shrugged.
“I never thought I’d be here, you know. Not until last year, anyway.” There was an awkward pause. “I didn’t want to go to grad school. There’s no NHL for girls.”
“And then your modeling career fell through,” Jo said. Robin laughed out loud-hard. “Shit,” she heard Jo say. “That was tacky. I didn’t mean-“
“No, it’s okay, it’s okay,” Robin said. “I’d rather you...people don’t talk about it. My dad died and nobody talked about that. And then this happened,” she gestured to her left cheek, “and nobody talked about it. I felt like the invisible woman.” There was a pause while Jo merged onto the highway.
“I thought about it,” Jo said, in the same tone that everyone used when they were justifying things to themselves. “College. My grades were good enough and Nebraska’s a great school. But what was I going to study: demonology 101? The chemistry of salting and burning? An introduction to Shamanism?”
“I’m pretty sure they teach that last one in California.”
Jo sighed. “Where’d you go? Iowa? Wisconsin?” Robin rolled her eyes.
“Fuck no. Minnesota. UM Duluth, actually.” Another awkward pause.
“I lived in Duluth for a while.”
“Yeah, I know. After my Dad...I started putting the pieces together. There was a shots fired report filed for a bar on the lake. The bar had a W2 for one Martha Cannary-Burke. That was a nice touch.”
“Everybody’s got a signature,” Jo said, smiling. “Dean used classic rock. Mom likes to use First Ladies. I liked that job.” She cleared her throat. “Look, I can’t tell any of the others but I think you should know, in Duluth, Sam, whatever was wearing Sam, it came for me. And I was terrified. I’m pretty sure it wanted to rape me or kill me, and I thought...”
“Look, if you decide you’ve said too much, you can always shoot me,” Robin said dryly. Jo didn’t smile. “As far as I’m concerned this conversation never happened,” she added with more gravity.
“I thought it was Sam. I didn’t think he was possessed. I thought it was Sam and that Sam had turned, you know, like they said he would. I thought he had turned.” She was blushing a little with shame.
“I heard about that. Gordon Walker had a pretty big mouth. I get the feeling that a lot of people thought-“
“Dean hates me,” Jo said. “He knew I thought it was Sam and not something else and even though I saved his ass he hates me and he should and I owe him and I owe Sam and someone here has got to be watching out for just Sam and I owe Dean that much for everything. Everybody else has one eye on Sam and one eye on Lilith and somebody has to be watching just Sam.”
“Why?” Robin asked quietly. “What do you think is going to happen?” Jo shook her head, suddenly brushing tears from her eyes.
“Dean’s dead and I don’t think he’s coming back. And the others, they’re not watching hard enough. We’ve got to make sure. We’ve got to make sure he doesn’t turn.” Jo looked at her, for half a second and Robin almost started at the look in her eyes. “Dean’s dead.”
“Okay,” Robin said, swallowing hard.
“I’m sorry your dad died,” the other woman said, apropos of nothing.
“Thanks. Wake me up in Driftwood.” Robin pulled out her pillow from the back. She leaned up against the window and closed her eyes and tried not to think too much. Do not go out into the country, she heard Steve say. Do not walk the roads! For the sword of the enemy is there, terror on every side. Seconds later, Jo was shaking her awake. Robin cussed with feeling.
“Was that German? It was nice, very guttural,” Jo said appreciatively as she put the car in park. They were outside whatever passed for a grocery store here. “Come on. First ones in town get supplies.”
“How long are we staying?” Robin asked as they made their way into the store, snagging a cart.
“Couple nights, probably. Why do you ask?”
“Just wondering how long it needs to keep. We don’t have a lot of time tonight. Maybe spaghetti? We should see if they have a bakery. Garlic bread is always easy.” Jo threw out an arm and stopped both of them and the cart right inside the entrance. Robin stumbled to a halt.
“You can cook?” Jo asked, like she’d just discovered a cure for cancer.
“It was either that or die of scurvy in my house,” Robin admitted. “You can’t?”
“I grew up in a bar.”
Driftwood, Pennsylvania
Robin crouched next to the oven in the cramped, but clean cabin they were staying in. Everyone else was crowded around the table outside the kitchenette talking shop. She had made the garlic bread the right way: one stick of butter per loaf. Carefully, she wedged the foil-wrapped loaves into the comically small oven. On the stove, a pot of water was coming to a boil for pasta. She dumped in the angel hair and passed the time by chopping small yellow onions and listening.
“How was the drive?”
“Long.”
“You sleep any?”
“A little, Mom. Jesus, I’m not twelve.”
“Where’s the beer?”
“Cold ones are in the fridge.”
“Nice of Jefferson to lend us the cabin.”
“’Lend’ might be a little generous.”
“We’re squatting?”
“Yeah, but he won’t mind. I’m pretty sure he’s in a bomb shelter in Nunavut somewhere waiting for all this to blow over.”
“The car doesn’t sound right.”
“Yeah?”
“The car…he would know what to do with it. He tried to show me, but…”
“I’ll take a look at it after supper.”
“Thanks.”
“She give you any trouble?”
“She’s four feet away.”
“And?”
“And if she’d given me any trouble do you really think I’d give her access to the knives?”
“You hear from Rufus?”
“I called him maybe two dozen times. He picked up once and told me some new things I could do with a tire iron. I don’t need that kind of education.”
“He’ll cool off.”
“Maybe. And maybe Ed McMahon will show up with a check tomorrow morning and I can move my old, sorry ass to Florida and take up scuba diving.”
“And what, leave all this?”
“Besides, Bobby, you don’t have the figure for neoprene.”
“Har dee har har.”
“Jesus, I’m starving. Is that garlic bread?”
“She says she can cook.”
“I haven’t eaten since Vermont.”
“Would turn anybody off food for a while.”
“The fuck was with the rawheads?”
“Damn if I know.”
“You ever see shit like that? Attacking adults? In groups?”
“What the hell was that, anyway?”
“Total war,” Robin answered, focusing on dicing the onions evenly. It was the first thing she’d said since the Impala had pulled up outside. The onions didn’t make her eyes water anymore, they just felt funny on the inside of her sinuses.
“Beg pardon?” Bobby asked.
“It’s total war. It’s a different way of fighting; it’s the difference between the World Wars.” She swept the onions off of the cutting board and into heavy skillet coated with olive oil. She picked up the fresh yellow squash.
“We’re waiting,” Sam said, leaned back, hands shoved into jacket pockets. If he was a dog, his ears would be pricked up.
“In the First World War, the boys went off to fight. It was the war to end all wars and it dragged on and on and it was horrible. But the soldiers started it and the soldiers ended it.” She removed the stems from the squash and tossed them into the trash and cut the squash long-wise. “And then Hitler comes to power. And all of a sudden, it’s not just an army and a navy. It’s the Hitler Youth and Lebensborn and the SS and Mein Kampf and the Blitz. Suddenly, Europe is on its knees and Churchill is writing emergency back-up speeches for when the Nazis cross the channel and invade England. ‘The hour has come. Kill the Hun.’ It was total war.”
“Are you comparing Lilith and Hitler?” Sam asked, eyebrows halfway to his hairline.
“No, I’m comparing evil and evil.” She started in on the squash: nice, evenly matched pieces. “Total war. I think she’s digging deep. I think she’s pulling support from everywhere. I think she’s using rawheads and I think she’s using vampires and I think she’s going to use every soulless piece of trash she can to get her hands on you.”
“That’s comforting,” Ellen said. Robin shrugged.
“That’s the idea, anyway. The US really made an art out of it: WACs, WAVs, internment camps, Victory Gardens, the home front, rations, nylons, and let’s not forget Rosie the Riveter. And Station X! There were stenographers at Bletchley Park who killed more men than Napoleon.” She looked up, realized there was an awkward silence. She was rambling.
“Okay...” Ellen said, clearly trying to segue out.
“Maybe we should start to think about-” Jo began but Sam cut her off.
“The US didn’t believe in total war,” he said, dismissively. A little anxiously, Robin met his eyes again. They were occupied and engaged. “Until the end of 1941 FDR was resolutely opposed to any foreign wars in Europe.”
“In public,” she amended. “Behind the scenes, he was producing and shipping everything but the kitchen sink to the Battle of Britain.”
“But there was no propaganda, no total war in America,” Sam insisted. She shook her head. “Not until...”
“Pearl Harbor,” Bobby said, with a cutting look at Robin. She set the knife down. Sam was still looking at her, she could feel it.
“It was a fatal error,” she said quietly. “The Axis pushed the world’s greatest latent superpower into a war and the survivors begged for peace on their knees.”
“’A date which will live in infamy’,” Sam said, spinning the ring on his right hand with the pad of his thumb. She met Sam’s eyes again and they were all lit up from the inside. “’This means war’,” Sam quoted more. He was smiling and it wasn’t pretty. “They lost the war on December 7th and they didn’t even know it.”
“I’m not sure I like where this is going,” Bobby said. He tried to get her attention, but Robin was back with the squash. She was sautéing the vegetables and looking for some oregano. She knew it was down here somewhere. “We need to not do anything stupid, Sam, nothing half-ass. We stay alive and in the meantime, we’re going to keep trying-“
“We’ve been trying for more than a year, Bobby,” Sam said, on an exasperated laugh. “There’s nothing left for us to do. Nothing left for us to try.”
“That’s not true, Sam,” Jo said. “We’re going to find something.”
“No we’re not!” Sam was suddenly screaming. “Not like this, Jo! Not sitting in some cabin in Bumblefuck, Pennsylvania!”
“Then how, Sam?” she asked quietly, a little cowed.
“I’m going to write a new spell, or a new ritual, or whatethefuckever,” he said with a heat that Robin could practically feel. “We’re going to use every Catholic ritual and every Greek incantation and every Babylonian spell that’s been preserved and so help me I will find some hoodoo priest to lay some mojo on me if that’s what it takes. I will say anything. I will make anything. I will steal anything. I will use anything. I will break out another goddamn Ouija board if I have to.
“Sam, kid, this sounds...”
“A little crazy,” Ellen said, finishing Bobby’s sentence. Sam laughed.
“They told me I couldn’t save my brother and I believed them,” he said. He was smiling again and it was mean. “Dean said I had to let him go and I did. He told me not to listen to Ruby and I didn’t. And guess what? Everything came to pass just like they said it would. So, this? This is the new plan: Fuck ‘em.”
“Fuck ‘em?” Bobby asked, gently.
“Fuck ‘em all, Bobby,” Sam said.
Des Moines, Iowa
March 22nd, 2007
She had worked on really hard at being able to cultivate a Zen-like state under duress. One afternoon, coming back from an afternoon of running stairs because the legs feed the wolf, Steve had explained it to her. You’re only wasting energy if you’re spending it on hating the stairs. Yeah? Yeah. You have to embrace the suck. Embrace the suck? Yeah. Okay, then.
And it worked. The next day they’d done nothing but suicides on the ice. The legs feed the wolf. And instead of hating the drill, she embraced the suck. She thought about it now and a smile pulled up at the corner of her mouth. Behind her, Becky was watching. Robin still couldn’t believe that the congregation had assigned her a minder for the day.
“It’s time to go,” Becky said. “Do you have your shoes?”
Embrace the suck, Robin said, or tried to say. It took her a moment to realize she hadn’t actually spoken at all. Then she went to find the plain black pumps that she’d bought for the occasion. She was wearing black hose, too. And she hated hose.
“Do you have a coat?”
Embrace the suck, Robin repeated to herself. She took Steve’s double breasted black wool monstrosity off of the bed. He kept it in the same closet with his parka and his longshoreman’s jacket and it smelled of him, too. She turned to bury her face in the lapel and caught sight of herself in a mirror. The dress was charcoal grey and plain. She looked pale, even for her, and severe with all of her hair pulled back into a tight bun. The shoes felt strange and so did the dress.
Most of the service was a blur. The rabbi blessed her and tore her dress at the left elbow. God has given, God has taken. Blessed be the name of God. There wasn’t much else to say. She and Steve came to services maybe half a dozen times a year. Nobody knew them there, beyond the surface, which was kind of the whole point. Her teammates were there and some friends from high school, Adam, an ex-boyfriend or two. A couple women towards the back that she was pretty sure Steve had slept with at some point or another.
Then the hard part: it was a plain pine box. She couldn’t help but wonder what he looked like. He had lain in their house for a week. He should have been accompanied from the moment of death. Psalms should have been recited to him. He should have been buried at once. Because of the blood, the Chevra Kaddisha would not have washed his body. They would have taken what was left of him and wrapped him in a shroud and his tallit. Rotten, decomposing, unclean, and wrapped in his winding sheet and his prayer shawl.
She hadn’t thought to worry about pall-bearers, but a number of men came forward. Robin knew at once that they were hunters. They were rangy or burly and young or old and scarred. All of them looked like they’d like to set fire to their suits. They picked up her father and took him away. More prayers were said: may our memory of him be without bitterness, may our remembrance inspire us, may his soul be bound up in the bonds of eternal life. It rained.
There was no headstone yet, of course, so she stared at the blank spot in the ground where it would stand in one year and listened to her father’s voice whispering over her shoulder. Many will be purified and purged and refined; the wicked will act wickedly and none of the wicked will understand but the knowledgeable will understand. The kethuvim, the prophets, had always been a particular favorite of Steve’s.
A while later, someone put a hand under her elbow. Robin realized she was soaked through and wondered how long she’d been standing out here. The hand was ungloved and steady and looking down she saw grease deep under the nails. A hunter.
“Time to come in,” he said. She turned to look at him. “Singer. Bobby Singer.” Maybe he’d looked respectable earlier that day, but now he looked like a drowned rat sorely in need of a poly-fill vest and a trucker hat.
“Singer,” she said, thinking hard. Steve had said something about... “Did you ever find those Impala parts you were looking for?”
“Yeah,” he said, and cleared his throat. “I did.”
“Good,” she said absently. “Did you know him?”
“Not very well. We were talking about it earlier, and, um-“
“’We’ the hunters?” Singer nodded.
“He was a good man. And he thought you hung the moon.”
“I don’t have any family left.”
“It’s time to come in,” he repeated and she allowed him to lead her away. Her heels sank into the wet earth of the cemetery so Robin stepped out of them and continued without them, letting the rain soak through her stockings.
“Singer.”
“Yeah?”
“Do you know what did this to my father?”
He stiffened a little and took a breath, released it in a painful way. His eyes were on the ground as he guided her around a small plaque. Even then she wondered if he was lying or if it was just hard to talk to sleep-deprived, half-crazy grieving daughters.
“No. I don’t.”
Driftwood, Pennsylvania
June 9th, 2008
The beg, borrow, or steal part of Sam’s plan was in full swing. The hunters had been in and out over the last three weeks, coming and going with various sacred texts, reliquaries, rare herbs, talismans, precious stones, charms, soil samples, and what Robin was pretty sure was once somebody’s scalp. She was holding down the fort. She laid salt lines, recited blessings, tied charms and wards to fence posts for miles around. It was boring. She cleaned things. She took out her stitches. She ran a lot, once the irritating torpor of blood loss had passed.
Today had been a good run, she thought as she stripped off her gamey running gear and stepped into the shower, turning the hot water all the way up. That was one nice thing about being alone in the house: no cold showers. That, and she could sing as loud as she wanted. She stepped out, avoided her reflection in the fogged up mirror, and walked into the living room with nothing but her pack towel around her.
“Nice.”
“Fuck!” She jumped about four feet in the air and barely kept a hold of the towel. She whirled to face the man sitting on the couch, arms spread across the length of the back. “Fucking fucking fuck, Sam. Fuck.” Robin put one hand over her chest, trapping the necklace next to her skin, waiting for her heart to slow down, and trying not to think about what Sam thought of her rousing rendition of ‘The Farmer and the Cowman’.
“Get dressed. We’re going to Queens.” His eyes looked sharper; he’d lost more weight in his face. He was also cultivating a serious Putin-level dead-behind-the-eyes mien. She wished she could have said that Jo was wrong to worry.
“New York?”
“Did I stutter?”
“Jo and Ellen should be back tomorrow,” she said, with all the equanimity she could muster. “I’m not sure...”
“I don’t need eye candy.”
“Yeah, okay. I’ll change.”
Queens, New York
“Sam?” Robin was eyeing the building. A yuppie in a Chanel dress came out on the arm of a man in an Armani double breasted suit. “We are not dressed for this.”
“It’ll be fine.”
“Do we have a plan?”
“We’re servicing a security system.” He reached into the glove box and handed her an ID badge to hang around her neck. “Make sure and show them your good side. And be quick about it. We have maybe 15 minutes before they actually run our badge numbers.”
It surprised her how easy it was to get in. Most of her hunting experience had been with the killing side of the business, not the con work. Robin started to wonder again about why he picked her for this job. But she kept her UMD cap pulled low and followed Sam into the elevator like the lackey she was and everything went pretty well. As soon as the elevator opened, though, she could smell it. She must have made a noise, because he turned to look at her.
“Sam...I’m pretty sure there’s a dead cat in there.”
“Huh. Dean didn’t say she had any pets.”
Robin pulled her t-shirt up over her face and when the door opened even Sam seemed disturbed by the smell. Or, maybe not the smell. His lip curled up but he approached the dead cat with no hesitation.
“That arrogant bitch.” He said, standing over its small body, crawling with flies. “She just left it here. She really thought she was going to make it.” Sam kicked the little corpse, disturbing the insects and the decomposition. Something oozed out of its belly. “What a waste of life.”
He threw her a duffel bag and they started loading things up. There was as much supernatural paraphernalia here as their motley crew had collected in the last three weeks. She cleaned out the bedroom and returned to the living room just in time to see Sam set it on fire. Whatever accelerant he used worked like gangbusters.
“Dude!” she yelled, spreading her arms in disbelief.
“Time to go,” he said, hauling his duffel over his shoulder
They hauled ass down the stairs, taking the back exit directly towards the Impala. To her surprise, Sam threw her the keys. She was hardly going to argue, though; the car was magnificent. Robin turned the engine over, threw the car in gear, and got the hell out of Dodge. No wonder he’d taken her. Bobby or Ellen would have figured him for arson the minute he opened the apartment door. It took her about two minutes to figure out what else was wrong.
“Where are the sirens, Sam?”
“Oh yeah. I may have pulled that wire, too.” He shrugged. “I needed it to burn.”
Robin kept her mouth shut and her eyes on the road. As soon as they were out of the city, Sam procured a large bottle of something from one of the bags. She couldn’t read the label, but it had a lot of umlauts. He pulled the cap off and drank straight from the bottle. He winced, coughed a little, and offered it to her.
“Thanks. Maybe later,” she said.
It was a long five hours home. She was tired and she couldn’t shake the smell of dead cat. Next to her, Sam got progressively drunker. By the time they crossed I-81, he was totally sloshed. He turned on the radio, listened for a few songs, and then angrily punched it off again.
“He likes Metallica,” Sam said. “I never got it, you know, too much yelling, but he likes Metallica. And Zeppelin. Jesus, if I have to listen to ‘No Quarter’ one more time...” Robin tightened her grip on the steering wheel. She didn’t want to hear this.
“Look, Sam-“
“I thought it would be like with my Dad, you know?” he posited. “Like, he loves Dad’s stuff so then maybe I would love Dean’s stuff? But I don’t. It’s not just that it’s hard to listen to. It’ll be easier when he gets back, I know. But I just...I don’t like classic rock. I should. I don’t. But I should.”
She pressed her lips together, nodded, and prayed to God that he wouldn’t remember this in the morning. His eyes were glassy and his posture was relaxed. Please, please, let him be too drunk to recall this.
“I ever tell you about the time I rescued him and this chick? He was tied to a tree, I swear to God…” The rest of the trip went like this. A song, a story, another drink. The stories got longer and more incoherent. The last one was something totally ridiculous involving a possessed racist truck and that was when they finally pulled up into the driveway of Jefferson’s cabin. No one else was there.
“Come on,” she said.
“I miss my brother,” he whispered. It hung there for a moment before she nodded a little and turned to face him.
“Yeah? I miss my father.”
Then she got out, slammed the door as hard as she could, and left him in the Impala.
Driftwood, Pennsylvania
June 10th, 2008
“Come on, Wandell,” Sam taunted, pulling ahead of her. Robin narrowed her eyes and lengthened her stride a little. The legs feed the wolf. On speed alone, she was pretty sure she was beat; she was also damn sure she would leave his sorry ass in the dust eventually.
“Jackass,” she muttered under her breath. First of all, he was cheating. You couldn’t join a girl on a ten mile run at mile seven and start goading her. Second of all, holy HELL his legs were long. Third of all, where did he get the right to run so fast hung over?
Robin caught sight of the break in the tree line and just like that they were in the homestretch. Who made my leg like a deer’s, and set me firm upon the heights. Normally, this was where she would slow down a little, jog for that last quarter-mile or so. Sam had made that impossible. She smiled a grim little smile and began to kick.
“That all you got?” Sam was breathless. She wasn’t sure if he was talking to her. “No wonder you couldn’t outrun the bear that mauled you.” Oh yeah. He was talking to her. You have let me stride on freely and my feet have not slipped. Robin forced herself to stop thinking about anything except for rhythm until she burst into the clearing, neck and neck with him.
“Fuck you,” she said, sucking air with her hands on her knees.
“Good morning to you, too,” he smirked. She flipped him the bird. She was pretty impressed he was vertical, much less running. In fact, he looked pretty good for a guy who- Scratch that, she thought, as the contents of Sam’s stomach made a repeat appearance, apparently without much warning.
“You okay?” she asked, after it looked like he was finished.
“’M good,” he groaned.
“You look good,” she said sarcastically. Nobody looked particularly attractive on their knees in the dirt tossing their cookies.
“You, too. Who took out your stitches?”
“Me,” she looked down the inside of her arms. They looked like they belonged to a heroin junky with self-harm baggage. So, yeah, maybe she’d looked better, too.
“Both sides?” he sounded impressed. She shrugged.
“I broke my left hand when I was little and I had to have surgery. I had to re-learn everything with my right for a couple of months.”
“I still remember the first time I had to stitch up my br-oh, dammit,” he hurled again.
“This too shall pass,” she said sagely. “What were you drinking?”
“Aquavit, I think,” he said. “It should have been good. The bitch who bought it had pretty refined tastes.”
Robin swallowed her caustic retort, straightened up and turned sharply towards the road. “Somebody driving a diesel now?” she asked.
“Jo may have acquired a new truck. Fuck,” he groaned and dry heaved. “Don’t tell her.”
“That you can’t hold your liquor or that you tied a girl with seven miles on you in a sprint to the finish?” He was going to say something, but was interrupted by another round. She waited, unable to stop smirking, until he was able to speak again.
“Dad always said it was better to sweat it out,” he said, standing up again. He looked a little grey and pinched around the eyes. “Then again, he also told me soccer was for pussies just to try and bully me into bow-hunting.”
“Soccer is for pussies.”
“I was eight.”
“If it makes you feel any better, bow-hunting is for pussies, too.”
Driftwood, Pennsylvania
June 11th, 2008
“Guess what I bought today?” Jo asked, grinning like a kid. “Soaker hoses. Got ‘em at a garage sale for a song.”
“Are you planning on doing some yard work for Jefferson?” Ellen asked, helping clear the dinner plates.
“No, I was thinking about Bobby’s trick with the sprinklers. I’m thinking this could be a good way to set up a boundary. I think it might work better than a huge devil’s trap to keep them out.”
“They could step over it,” Bobby said.
“Not if you give it time to soak into the earth,” Robin said. “It’s a perfect area-denial weapon. Land mines for demons.”
“That reminds me,” Ellen said, “whatever came of that Molotov cocktail formula you were working on?”
“That was just for shits and giggles,” Bobby said. “But I did have a thought about pouring our own shot. I’m thinking about making some silver minie balls. More holes, fewer bullets.”
The timer went off and Robin popped up like a whack-a-mole and headed for the oven. She retrieved dessert and set it on the burner and grabbed the large dinner plate she had standing by. Quickly, she put the plate over the pan and with her oven mitts still on, flipped it over easily.
“Is that-“Ellen started.
“Pineapple upside down cake,” she said, smiling.
“I love pineapple upside down cake,” Bobby said brightly.
“What’s the occasion?” Sam asked.
“Last night in Jefferson’s place,” Robin shrugged. “That’s all.”
While the cake cooled, plates and forks were passed around. Coffee was made, the cake was cut, the cake was devoured. She did make a damn good pineapple upside down cake. They were discussing the weather forecast and all permutable road conditions for tomorrow when the phone rang. The land line.
“Go get it,” Bobby ordered her. She looked at him askance. “Nobody knows your voice. If they need to know, say you’re Jefferson’s gal.” Robin nodded and stood and crossed the room to the wall where the old fashioned phone was anchored.
“And for God’s sakes don’t blow our cover,” he added.
“No pressure,” Jo said. Robin rolled her eyes and picked up the phone, facing the wall so she wouldn’t have to look at any of them.
“Hello?” she asked, slightly breathless. “No, no, it's no trouble. Now is a fine time, thank you.” She furrowed her brows. It had to be a wrong number. “I’m sorry. Would you hold for one moment, please?” She covered with the receiver with her hand and turned around.
“Well?” Bobby asked. She shrugged.
“Who the hell is Malcolm McGillicuddy?”
Chapter 3