Crescendo of the Moon: (5/?)
Previous chapters can be found here.
Five
Sam wanted a different motel room, even in a different state, to stay at, not liking the idea of being eaten in the middle of the night. Dean, on the other hand, refused to leave, arguing that he had already dropped serious cash to bribe the man into getting their room in the first place and that if there was something out there, then he was going to be the one to kill it. Let it come to them, he argued.
With that said, Sam turned to look at Dean in the car when they parked back at the motel. “Let it come to us?” Sam echoed incredulously, his voice rising in pitch as he stepped out of the Impala “That’s got to be the dumbest idea we’ve had yet. And we’ve had some really dumb ideas before.”
“And why’s that?”
“Then we’re playing by its rules, and we don’t even know what those rules are, let alone what it is. We should get a new place, then, if we really have to, study it from afar before we move in for the kill. This is just asking for trouble.”
Dean laughed, and he popped the trunk latch with a muffled click. His dark glasses caught the pieces of the sun as he turned his head in Sam’s direction. Sam squinted against the light, but Dean, except for where the sun reflected off his glasses and ring, had disappeared into the sun. “Oh, Sammy,” Dean responded, examining his prized collection of weapons in the shadows of his trunk, “I don’t ask for trouble, I demand it.”
Exasperated by his brother and knowing that with the keys in Dean’s possession, they weren’t leaving the motel anytime soon, Sam rolled his eyes with a dismissive shake of his head. However, Dean ignored Sam’s frustration and shoved a chunky bag at him, who looked down at it in bewilderment. “What the hell?”
“Weapons,” Dean replied, stepping out of the sunlight so Sam could see him clearly. “Lots of weapons. If Godzilla thinks I’m going to be his next Lunchable, then he’s got another thing comin’.” Dean grinned, his teeth dazzlingly white against tanned skin. “You ever wanted snakeskin boots?”
Sam had no choice but to follow Dean into the motel to prepare their room for what Sam figured was going to be a very long night.
While Dean scrawled ancient symbols he copied from their father’s notebook onto the wall, Sam sat on the bed, fighting the urge to cross his arms like a pouting four year old and tell Dean that he was stupid for doing this. Their motel room, once a stale-smelling room in need of a modern decorator, had been transformed into a mess of rock salt, Latin phrases and scattered guns. When Dean began humming one of his rock songs, Sam decided that the room looked like something out of a futuristic movie where the main heroes waited for the hand of evil to smite them to hell so that they could blow away the god effortlessly. Sam wished his life would really stop looking like an Armageddon flick gone bad with his older brother supplying the soundtrack.
Dean rose from his crouched position and stepped away from the wall to admire his work. He wasn’t sure what kind of creature they were dealing with, but he had prepared everything according to his father’s journal’s pages. Although there were curses and protections against nearly twenty different supernatural monsters, he assumed that at least one of his hand-drawn charms would work. And if pencil outlines didn’t work, then he would resort to one of the variant firearms lined up beneath their beds.
With the idea of a new creature to hunt, Dean forced himself to feel excited enough to block out the rising dread in the back of his mind. In spite of Sam’s continual complains, Dean was undeterred in this sudden hunt against a monster that the scientists did not know and the locals hadn’t talked about. He grinned to the wall, imagining the look on his father’s face when he told him that Sam and he had brought down a brand new creature-together. At last, he would be able to write his own entry in the journal.
The brothers drank enough caffeine to remain awake through the night and tucked themselves into bed to lure the creature back into the room. Sam clutched a curved blade under his pillow, fighting to keep his breathing smooth and easy. Across the space between their beds, Dean’s eyes glittered in the pale moonlight trickling through the curtains and focused themselves on Sam’s. Although Sam could not see Dean’s hands, he knew that they were tightly wrapped around a metallic firearm loaded with silver bullets Dean himself had expertly crafted.
As they lay in their separate beds, eyes concentrating on the other pair, each was reminded of all the nights they stayed awake similar to this. Except when they were children, they spoke of the hunts with their father and told stories about their school lives that, in their blatant ordinariness, had seemed surreal. Now, their lips were silent, but they told their stories once again, and both hoped that the story of the night would end with victory over the unknown.
Sam had lost track of time when their door creaked open to briefly illuminate the room before closing again. If he had been asleep, he never would have heard the soft noise, but as he was concentrating so heavily, the hushed squeak seemed enormous. He tightened his sweating fingers around the handle of his knife, and he saw Dean’s forearm contract in a similar manner. Light steps padded across the carpet in a steady pattern that grew louder as they approached the twin beds. By the sounds alone, Sam assumed that there was more than one of whatever had entered their room. There was the swish of flesh rubbing against flesh, a silken foreign whisper, and he felt the blankets by his leg rustle slightly when the figure passed by.
Dean and Sam had the same thought when they both snapped upward to a standing position in their beds, lashing towards the dark shadows in the middle of their room. There was the explosion of gunfire, and suddenly, an overpowering hiss like that of a massive snake. As had been planned, Sam scuttled to the doorway and flipped on the light switch, back pressed to the wall and knife held out in front of him. When the room was illuminated, he felt his stomach drop and mouth go dry. Until Dean bellowed at him and blasted him back to reality, Sam’s knife wavered at the sight of what stood in their presence.
They appeared to be lizards, if lizards were to stand on their hind legs and had a height of men. One of the monsters was scaled in luminescent black, while the other wore a muddy green coloring. Both of them, however, had thick back legs, each foot featuring multiple massive claws at the end. They had long arms with four fingers and an opposable thumb, as well as an elongated, sinewy tail that had its own daggered spikes digging into the carpet. Their yellow eyes were pinched in anger, and while two large fangs dipped over the bottom jaw, when they opened their mouths, Sam saw endless rows of white teeth coated in saliva and blood dried brown on their upper lips.
“Sam!” Dean shouted, shooting again, but the creatures darted out of the way, faster than something so large should have been able to move in such a small room. “Sam! Li’l bit of help here!”
Snapping out of his paralyzing fear, Sam dashed back to his bed, knife in one hand and grabbing a flamethrower in the other fist. As soon as he had picked up the new weapon, the green monster turned its eyes on Sam and swatted him across the room with its tail, where he crashed into the wall and cracked the dilapidating drywall, landing with a groan on the gasp and the wind knocked out of him. With Sam temporarily disabled, the lizards turned their attention back to Dean.
In a motion quicker than Dean was able to follow, the black creature knocked the guns out of his hands. The green one latched a hooked hand around his throat and dragged him from his standing position on the bed to the floor, where his knees buckled underneath him when he met the creature’s eyes. There was a child screaming again, and he could smell burning flesh while he gasped for air. Dean gave a choked cry of pain, fingers fumbling to pry the suffocating grip away from his neck and mouth gaping in a struggle to breathe. As Dean sputtered and thrashed, blood springing from where the lizard’s nails punctured the back of his neck, the creatures gave a silent look of communication between the two of them. They began to drag Dean, who was still writhing on his knees, across the floor to the doorway.
However, Sam was on his feet again and rushing towards them, rapidly firing and screaming obscenities. “No! Stop! No!” In one smooth gesture, the black lizard turned and faced Sam. It gave a malicious roar unlike anything he had ever heard before, and with the back of its hand, it hit Sam so hard in the head, he heard a sharp crack fire through his brain. All thought was blasted from his mind when his skull snapped loosely on his neck. In a heap of twisted limbs, he tumbled to the ground, and his eyes rolled back in their sockets while thin threads of blood hurried from his nostrils and over his warm lips.
Seeing his younger brother, Dean gave one final, valiant twist and managed to get enough air to scream, “Sam!” Something hot fell across his cheek, and he did not know if it was a fresh tear or a droplet of blood that caressed his skin when he cried out again. As if answering the call he gave to his sibling, the green creature gave a violent squeeze of its clawed talon. With a strangled whisper that resembled his brother’s name, Dean slipped under the blackness.
Chapter Six
Five
Sam wanted a different motel room, even in a different state, to stay at, not liking the idea of being eaten in the middle of the night. Dean, on the other hand, refused to leave, arguing that he had already dropped serious cash to bribe the man into getting their room in the first place and that if there was something out there, then he was going to be the one to kill it. Let it come to them, he argued.
With that said, Sam turned to look at Dean in the car when they parked back at the motel. “Let it come to us?” Sam echoed incredulously, his voice rising in pitch as he stepped out of the Impala “That’s got to be the dumbest idea we’ve had yet. And we’ve had some really dumb ideas before.”
“And why’s that?”
“Then we’re playing by its rules, and we don’t even know what those rules are, let alone what it is. We should get a new place, then, if we really have to, study it from afar before we move in for the kill. This is just asking for trouble.”
Dean laughed, and he popped the trunk latch with a muffled click. His dark glasses caught the pieces of the sun as he turned his head in Sam’s direction. Sam squinted against the light, but Dean, except for where the sun reflected off his glasses and ring, had disappeared into the sun. “Oh, Sammy,” Dean responded, examining his prized collection of weapons in the shadows of his trunk, “I don’t ask for trouble, I demand it.”
Exasperated by his brother and knowing that with the keys in Dean’s possession, they weren’t leaving the motel anytime soon, Sam rolled his eyes with a dismissive shake of his head. However, Dean ignored Sam’s frustration and shoved a chunky bag at him, who looked down at it in bewilderment. “What the hell?”
“Weapons,” Dean replied, stepping out of the sunlight so Sam could see him clearly. “Lots of weapons. If Godzilla thinks I’m going to be his next Lunchable, then he’s got another thing comin’.” Dean grinned, his teeth dazzlingly white against tanned skin. “You ever wanted snakeskin boots?”
Sam had no choice but to follow Dean into the motel to prepare their room for what Sam figured was going to be a very long night.
While Dean scrawled ancient symbols he copied from their father’s notebook onto the wall, Sam sat on the bed, fighting the urge to cross his arms like a pouting four year old and tell Dean that he was stupid for doing this. Their motel room, once a stale-smelling room in need of a modern decorator, had been transformed into a mess of rock salt, Latin phrases and scattered guns. When Dean began humming one of his rock songs, Sam decided that the room looked like something out of a futuristic movie where the main heroes waited for the hand of evil to smite them to hell so that they could blow away the god effortlessly. Sam wished his life would really stop looking like an Armageddon flick gone bad with his older brother supplying the soundtrack.
Dean rose from his crouched position and stepped away from the wall to admire his work. He wasn’t sure what kind of creature they were dealing with, but he had prepared everything according to his father’s journal’s pages. Although there were curses and protections against nearly twenty different supernatural monsters, he assumed that at least one of his hand-drawn charms would work. And if pencil outlines didn’t work, then he would resort to one of the variant firearms lined up beneath their beds.
With the idea of a new creature to hunt, Dean forced himself to feel excited enough to block out the rising dread in the back of his mind. In spite of Sam’s continual complains, Dean was undeterred in this sudden hunt against a monster that the scientists did not know and the locals hadn’t talked about. He grinned to the wall, imagining the look on his father’s face when he told him that Sam and he had brought down a brand new creature-together. At last, he would be able to write his own entry in the journal.
The brothers drank enough caffeine to remain awake through the night and tucked themselves into bed to lure the creature back into the room. Sam clutched a curved blade under his pillow, fighting to keep his breathing smooth and easy. Across the space between their beds, Dean’s eyes glittered in the pale moonlight trickling through the curtains and focused themselves on Sam’s. Although Sam could not see Dean’s hands, he knew that they were tightly wrapped around a metallic firearm loaded with silver bullets Dean himself had expertly crafted.
As they lay in their separate beds, eyes concentrating on the other pair, each was reminded of all the nights they stayed awake similar to this. Except when they were children, they spoke of the hunts with their father and told stories about their school lives that, in their blatant ordinariness, had seemed surreal. Now, their lips were silent, but they told their stories once again, and both hoped that the story of the night would end with victory over the unknown.
Sam had lost track of time when their door creaked open to briefly illuminate the room before closing again. If he had been asleep, he never would have heard the soft noise, but as he was concentrating so heavily, the hushed squeak seemed enormous. He tightened his sweating fingers around the handle of his knife, and he saw Dean’s forearm contract in a similar manner. Light steps padded across the carpet in a steady pattern that grew louder as they approached the twin beds. By the sounds alone, Sam assumed that there was more than one of whatever had entered their room. There was the swish of flesh rubbing against flesh, a silken foreign whisper, and he felt the blankets by his leg rustle slightly when the figure passed by.
Dean and Sam had the same thought when they both snapped upward to a standing position in their beds, lashing towards the dark shadows in the middle of their room. There was the explosion of gunfire, and suddenly, an overpowering hiss like that of a massive snake. As had been planned, Sam scuttled to the doorway and flipped on the light switch, back pressed to the wall and knife held out in front of him. When the room was illuminated, he felt his stomach drop and mouth go dry. Until Dean bellowed at him and blasted him back to reality, Sam’s knife wavered at the sight of what stood in their presence.
They appeared to be lizards, if lizards were to stand on their hind legs and had a height of men. One of the monsters was scaled in luminescent black, while the other wore a muddy green coloring. Both of them, however, had thick back legs, each foot featuring multiple massive claws at the end. They had long arms with four fingers and an opposable thumb, as well as an elongated, sinewy tail that had its own daggered spikes digging into the carpet. Their yellow eyes were pinched in anger, and while two large fangs dipped over the bottom jaw, when they opened their mouths, Sam saw endless rows of white teeth coated in saliva and blood dried brown on their upper lips.
“Sam!” Dean shouted, shooting again, but the creatures darted out of the way, faster than something so large should have been able to move in such a small room. “Sam! Li’l bit of help here!”
Snapping out of his paralyzing fear, Sam dashed back to his bed, knife in one hand and grabbing a flamethrower in the other fist. As soon as he had picked up the new weapon, the green monster turned its eyes on Sam and swatted him across the room with its tail, where he crashed into the wall and cracked the dilapidating drywall, landing with a groan on the gasp and the wind knocked out of him. With Sam temporarily disabled, the lizards turned their attention back to Dean.
In a motion quicker than Dean was able to follow, the black creature knocked the guns out of his hands. The green one latched a hooked hand around his throat and dragged him from his standing position on the bed to the floor, where his knees buckled underneath him when he met the creature’s eyes. There was a child screaming again, and he could smell burning flesh while he gasped for air. Dean gave a choked cry of pain, fingers fumbling to pry the suffocating grip away from his neck and mouth gaping in a struggle to breathe. As Dean sputtered and thrashed, blood springing from where the lizard’s nails punctured the back of his neck, the creatures gave a silent look of communication between the two of them. They began to drag Dean, who was still writhing on his knees, across the floor to the doorway.
However, Sam was on his feet again and rushing towards them, rapidly firing and screaming obscenities. “No! Stop! No!” In one smooth gesture, the black lizard turned and faced Sam. It gave a malicious roar unlike anything he had ever heard before, and with the back of its hand, it hit Sam so hard in the head, he heard a sharp crack fire through his brain. All thought was blasted from his mind when his skull snapped loosely on his neck. In a heap of twisted limbs, he tumbled to the ground, and his eyes rolled back in their sockets while thin threads of blood hurried from his nostrils and over his warm lips.
Seeing his younger brother, Dean gave one final, valiant twist and managed to get enough air to scream, “Sam!” Something hot fell across his cheek, and he did not know if it was a fresh tear or a droplet of blood that caressed his skin when he cried out again. As if answering the call he gave to his sibling, the green creature gave a violent squeeze of its clawed talon. With a strangled whisper that resembled his brother’s name, Dean slipped under the blackness.
Chapter Six