The Killing Moon
13. Forest Grump
Turmoil is such a fuckin' sublime word, Dean thinks as he schleps his way along the tunnel, not really paying much attention to anything apart from not tripping over and knocking himself out cold again because of the fuckin' turmoil, thoughts bouncing, colliding, rebounding off each other, whizzing, zooming around in his head, as his mind desperately tries to dodge them like the Millennium Falcon steering through the asteroid field. It hangs a right to avoid crashing into the fact that Bobby might be no, so not going there, veers left so it doesn't sideswipe the too fuckin' awful to contemplate buzzing, whispering, chattering, aching sensation in his head that's been dogging him since he set foot in the woods again, but not here in this mine for some reason. It brakes sharply so it doesn't smash head-on into the gigantic fuckin' error in judgment he just committed with someone who barely knows him yet has given so much in return for backchat, a bad attitude, and a quickie he's pretty sure she'll-
"Fuck!" he cries, as bright light sizzles his eyes so intensely it hurts. "Jesus! Sam! Point it down!"
"Dean… Dean? Is that you?"
Sam's voice sounds far away, muffled, and the flashlight beam scoots away and up, to strobe erratically across the roof of the tunnel.
"Who the hell else would it be?" Dean grouses back at him, and then he recalls what Hudak told him back up at the mine entrance. "No, don't answer that."
He plays his own flashlight around ahead of him, sees armor-plated things with eleventy-billion legs skedaddle out of the glow it casts, finally shines the beam on what looks like a wall of rocks. "Please tell me you're not under that cave-in," he barks in sudden panic, bending, craning his neck to see what he hopes won't be his brother's body partly covered by boulders he has no hope of shifting.
"No… up. Up here, I'm on top of it. There's a gap… I climbed over, got stuck coming back…"
Dean steps back, stares up. He's almost afraid to call the words up, even though he already knows the answer. "Is Bobby in there with you?"
There's a brief silence that speaks volumes, then, "No. He isn't."
It's faint, reluctant, subdued, and for a second Dean feels his heart hitch and flip-flop in a way that's all-too-familiar. He doubles over, a hand pressed hard on his chest, just like he did so many times on the taxicab ride the night he checked himself out of hospital so he could be with his brother when he died, and didn't think he'd make the motel without the brutal, tight sensation squeezing the life out of him. He sucks in dank, moldy air until the rushing sound in his ears fades and the stabbing phantom pain dead center of his sternum eases off.
"Dean?"
"Yeah. 'M coming," Dean manages, and he starts pushing up, slithering back as loose rocks tumble, thinking exhaustedly that some of those little metal spikes mountaineers strap to their boots would be damned useful. He shouts as much up to his brother, finally peers in to see Sam's face is a picture of relief mixed with huh?
"Tampons?" he's asking, puzzled. "What the hell are you talking about, Dean?"
"Tampons," Dean clarifies. "Those little metal spikes on your boots that help you climb."
"Crampons," Sam says through a world-weary grimace.
"I'm not surprised, dude," Dean replies, wincing himself as he sees how tightly his brother is caught. "How long you been stuck?"
"No, not cramps… I mean… God." Sam drops his head down onto his forearm. "It doesn't matter. Please just get me out of here."
Trying to get his brother out of there is a welcome distraction, even if Dean's heaving doesn't seem to be having any effect. "You're goin' on a fuckin' diet," he snipes as he wriggles in as far as he can and starts scrabbling at the pile, pushing the smaller rocks aside, pulling his gun out from the small of his back to hammer at the stubborn ones with the butt. He pauses for a minute, to study the weapon closely. "Dude, shine the flashlight just there."
Lit up, Sam's face is patched with grime and grazed, his eyes shadowed. "Please tell me you haven't just been bashing away with that thing without checking the safety," he breathes.
Dean is doing precisely that now, and he meets his brother's eyes unrepentantly. "Safety's dangerous Sam. Highly dangerous. Having the safety on can get you killed." He slams the butt against the rocks again.
"You're going to shoot yourself in the ass one of these days, Dean," Sam mutters, sinking his face back down again. "But I guess there are worse things than a bullet to the brain."
Dean snorts, pulls. "I think you moved."
He gets a pessimistic grunt for his trouble. "Don't think so."
Even when Dean hauls so hard he can't hold onto his groan of effort, it's like he has a rock the size of a house on tow. "Christ," he huffs out. "Can you help? Push with your feet or something?"
"Don't you think I'm trying?" Sam snaps. "My feet are dangling in thin air, Dean."
Dean doesn't really want to think of how the hell his brother got so big when he wasn't looking, but still he mutters, "Fuckin' sasquatch."
"Well, if you'd put some back into it," Sam counters.
"You outweigh me by twenty fuckin' pounds at least." Dean hauls at him again. "Jesus, you need to-"
"Dean," Sam cuts in suddenly quiet. "It's something to see you. It really is."
It's out of the blue, and Sam's eyes are naked with relief, and Dean can't let the moment last. "You're fat," he accuses. "You know that?"
Seems like his brother wants to move them past the chick-flick lapse too, because, "Yeah," Sam agrees blandly. "These four-foot wide shoulders and Schwarzenegger pecs sure can be a problem at times. Not that you'd know anything about that."
"Bitch," Dean tells him.
"Jerk."
Dean thinks he'll give it one last try before taking a timeout to think up plan B. "Christ," he says as he pulls again. "We got flares and silver bullets galore, and we forget to pack the fuckin' lube."
"Maybe if I just-ow! No, wait, Dean, don't…"
Sam comes loose and shoots out of the gap like a greased hog, sending Dean tumbling down flat on his back, and then Sam's on him, draped all over him, smothering him, panting in his ear and Christ it's too much. Dean pushes, shoves, heaves, starts beating at his brother's back, his shoulders, wriggling wildly and all the time he knows he's safe, that it's Sam, but all the same he just can't, can't breathe. He's caught, pinned down, trapped, and someone's shouting, maybe even screaming, and suddenly he's free and he's on his butt, knees pulled up, his back pressed hard up against the wall, a hand out in front of him, a blocking tactic, a plea for fuckin' mercy, like it ever worked before.
And it is just Sam, pushing onto his hands and knees before planting himself on his ass and regarding Dean from four or five feet away.
Dean floats back down from dizzying heights of terror, closes his eyes, starts to breathe deeper, blow out through pursed lips, murmur the same phrase over and over.
"Dean fucking Winchester, hell yeah?" his brother says softly, shifting closer, carefully, bit by bit, until he's next to him leaning up against the wall himself.
"Mantra," Dean confirms thinly. "Kathleen's idea."
There's a moment of silence before Sam speaks again, his tone gone cautious. "Did Kathleen tell you that you've been in some sort of fugue state, and-"
"Yes," Dean says sharply. "And no, I can't remember any of it. So now we've cleared that up I guess we go back for the stuff and then come back, press on past this to-"
"There isn't any more of it, Dean," Sam says, scratching his head. "The shaft ends right there behind the cave in, about ten or twelve yards further on."
Dean swallows thickly past the no of it. "But that means-"
"Yeah. It does."
But the no is still there, on the back of Dean's tongue, and he shoves it down, along with the wave of nausea that's swelling behind it. There's a way around this, a solution, there must be. He pushes up. "Come on. Bobby marked the other mines on the map."
"Yeah," Sam answers, and now his voice is as dead as his eyes were in the flashlight's glow. "The map he had in his pack when that thing grabbed him. We only found this one because you remembered where it was. You passed by it. Back then."
Dean is standing but suddenly the world is rocking, and maybe he's even careering from side to side, from wall to wall, like those cheesy side effects in Star Trek when they just wobbled the camera. He's just expecting the ground to smack him in the face when his brother folds a hand around his bicep and supports him all the way to his ass. Once Dean is seated, Sam squats and bends his knees for him like he's a poseable GI Joe doll, that's action fuckin' figure to you, dude, before he fishes a bottle of water out of his pack.
Dean snatches at it, drinks long and deep. "I feel really ill," he admits, and his voice catches in his throat.
"I know," Sam says, flopping down onto his own butt and shuffling to sit beside Dean. "I know."
"Christ," Dean hears himself croak through his disbelief, through the image of the old man in his mind's eye. "Bobby."
"I know."
They sit there, neither one of them saying anything.
"How it was done," Sam breaks the quiet after a few moments. And then, after a brief pause, "How, why, when and where it happened." He chuckles softly. "I think I must've driven Bobby about crazy with the why, why. One day he caught me reading a bunch of old newspapers he had lining his drawers… Jesus, when was that? Maybe I was ten, about that anyway, reading all this old stuff about the fall of the Berlin Wall and Bobby's clothes scattered all over the place. And a couple of weeks later these big boxes came in the mail and it was… Jesus." Sam's voice breaks. "Readers Digest Book Club. How It Was Done. How, Why, When and Where it Happened. I don't think I spoke or ate or slept for a month, just reading them."
They sit there in dead, heavy silence for another few minutes, leaning on each other, and Dean finds he is lost in memories of drifting from town to town, sleeping in the car, and John Winchester not really there, miles away, lost in his grief. "I don't even know how dad knew Bobby," he says hoarsely into the stillness, and he catches his brother glancing at him in his peripheral vision. "Through the grapevine maybe," he goes on. "We just pitched up there. And dad, he never said much afterwards. So I never said much either. Never said a damn thing in fact. It was fuckin' pointless, because no one answered me any more. Maybe I even forgot how to talk."
Dean slants his eyes left, sees that Sam is hanging on every word, because he has never told his brother this. He manages a weak grin. "And Bobby kept his distance at first, but then he started following me round the lot, making sure I was safe while dad slept it off. And one day he turned up with all these boxes. Clothes, toys. Fuckin' toys." Dean knows his voice has gone awestruck, because he remembers how he ran grubby fingers over the gaudy plastic and metal, remembers how he sank to his haunches and feasted his eyes on it all. "Jesus, I forgot what those even were… all mine burned with the house. He had toy cars and stuff. Little soldier guys. They were his kid's, I guess. And he set it all up there on the porch, and he painted racetracks on there for me. And we played wacky fuckin' races, and I had a reason to talk again. Someone to talk to, who listened and talked back. And so I wasn't the invisible boy any more." He stares into the darkness, doesn't weep and his voice doesn't break or even waver. "We're talking about him like he's dead, but he's alive."
Sam exhales long and slow. "Then we should get moving. So we can find him."
Bobby jerks awake to find a can on his lap. A can of Spaghettios, to be precise, and he thinks that if he was going to hallucinate something surely he could have managed Bo Derek. But the cramping hunger tearing at his gut is assuaged somewhat by the feel of the can, the knowledge it contains food that he can daub his fingers in and raise up to his mouth and taste and…
"What the fuck?"
Because it's real, it has a gaping hole in the top and it's food, Christ it's food, and he crams handfuls of it into his mouth, swallows it down without even chewing.
He's partway through it when he sees the two red glowing lights in the corner, and shit, he almost cries.
He manges to suck his scream back down and stares. He can just about pick out its edges in the light glimmering through from somewhere above him. It's curled up over there among the bodies, watching him. "Fatten me up, huh?" he murmurs. "More meat on the bones, more to get your teeth into. Clever little fucker. Don't mean I have to eat it though."
But he does, and the full feeling in his belly is some comfort amid his despair and the awful knowledge that his number is up this time.
The thing watches him all the while, snuggled on its bed of broken, battered bodies, even hugs one of them close like a fuckin' teddy bear, until Bobby is so exhausted he gives in and drifts off imagining the creature pushing a shopping cart around the local WallyWorld, checking use-by dates, choosing fat-free options, and offering the cashier a handful of coupons at the checkout.
Hudak has loosened the chain slightly and pushed open the doors, and weak sunlight is streaming into the mine entrance through a foot-wide gap. She's sitting with her legs crossed, face up to the light, eyes closed, and as Sam draws closer he can see that her cheekbone is swollen, a livid bruise already bordering a graze just under her eye.
She opens her one good eye as they approach, and her face falls. "No Bobby?"
"No," Sam says, flopping gracelessly down onto his butt next to her. "And what the hell happened to your face?"
Hudak's eyes dart up to where Dean is standing next to Samm, and Sam follows her gaze, sees his brother's expression flit from surprised to puzzled and then finish up somewhere colder, before he looks down at his boots and starts toeing the dirt as Sam puts two and two together.
After an awkward moment, Sam clears his throat. "I'm sorry. I should've told you to keep your distance when he's waking up. He's socked me a couple of times coming round."
Hudak shrugs. "He didn't know. And under the circumstances, I didn't think it was worth making him feel any worse than he does." She stares up at Dean, a meaningful look. "Dean. Not your fault."
Dean looks away, his expression one of abject misery. "I don't hit women," he replies.
"It was an accident," Hudak clarifies. "It wasn't even you, really. It was, well, Gabe, I guess. He didn't much like being chained to the door with that thing right up outside. He thought it was Bender."
Dean frowns at the change of subject, steps around Sam to peer through the gap between the doors. "Speaking of which. Has it come back at all?"
"Haven't heard it since I woke," Hudak reports carefully. "That was five-fifteen. What time did you leave?"
Dean pauses before he responds to the question, and there is something in his caginess, and the fact he and Hudak seem to be walking on eggshells around each other, that Sam thinks might be significant. He considers it, whether it might be the fact his brother just belted her right in the kisser or might be something else, as he roots a power bar out of his pack.
"About five," Dean says finally, with a quick glance at her, and his tone is level but Sam thinks the way he swivels his head back to stare through the gap between the doors is too fast.
"I think we're in the clear first half of the day when the sun's high," Dean adds. "But afternoons mean staying frosty where the canopy's thick and it's darker."
"No Bobby," Hudak broaches again.
Her tone is the same forced calm as before, and maybe that's it, Sam thinks. Bobby, and he knows the woman grew close to the old man the last time they were in these woods together. "No," he tells her. "The shaft isn't all that deep, guess they must've mined it out and abandoned it. I got stuck behind a cave-in… looks like the thing was using it at one point, there were old bodies in behind the blockage."
Hudak's eyebrows go up. "Any ID?"
Sam swallows down his mouthful, shaking his head. "No, I mean real old, decades old."
She gives him an odd look. "Someone might still be looking for them."
Her voice is a combination of sharp and sad, and it suddenly hits Sam that she's talking about herself and the fact that she'll never stop looking. He remembers her saying it as if it were yesterday, remembers that her brother's car was parked out at the Bender place, that those monsters hunted Riley out here, killed him or maybe drove him straight into the gaping mouth of the beast they're here to put down. "Honestly Kathleen, I don't think so," he says. "I checked for ID, all of the bodies. They're real old, crumbling bones, could even be turn of the century."
Dean squats down next to Sam, leans over to pull at his bedroll, and starts folding it. "Maybe they're this thing's trapper buddies from back in the day."
"Would a cave-in make this thing move house?" Hudak asks. "I wouldn't have thought a pile of rocks would make that big of a difference, wouldn't it just knock through?"
Sam ponders for a moment, concludes that she has a point. "You're right. These things are pretty territorial, far as we know. I don't see how a cave-in would drive it out of here." He's still musing when his brother gives him a jab in the ribs.
"Come on. We're burning daylight. If the bodies are that old, it means the thing overslept. It'll be even hungrier than usual."
When Sam tilts his head to look, he sees that Dean has that savage, fluorescent glow in his eyes that he gets on the hunt, that he gets when he's lusting for the kill, when nothing matters except pinning that piece of crud down and slicing and dicing until he's treading water in a river of blood and still hacking away. And those brilliant eyes are blazing holes in him and his brother is handing him his Desert Eagle, butt first.
"Knock me out."
Sam's jaw flaps uselessly for a few seconds. "What do you mean by that?" he finally manages, briefly shooting right up into a crazed falsetto somewhere in there.
"You said I found this place, Sam," his brother answers steadily. "You lied. I've never been here in my life. You both said I flipped back to Gabe. Gabe found the mine and he might know where the others are."
Sam's speechless at his brother's twisted logic. "And you think that if I club you senseless you'll wake up Gabe?"
"It's worth a try," his brother challenges.
After gaping for a few seconds, Sam shakes his head damned decisively. "Bullshit, Dean, it isn't worth a try at all."
"You didn't hit your head the last time anyway," Hudak chips in tensely. "Something else set it off. And Gabe said this was the only mine he'd seen."
Sam can see the explosion coming, can see the rage almost dancing along his brother's skin, can feel a static in the air that makes him think that if he reaches out to touch Dean, he'll get one of those crepe-soled-shoes-on-nylon-carpet electric shocks that'll have the hairs on his arms and the back of his neck standing up. He's just starting to reach out a hand to repel the attack when Dean's reserve cracks and he swipes a hand across his brow.
"Well what then?" he says hoarsely. "What the fuck else can we do? Help me out here, because I don't know."
When Hudak speaks, cool, calm and authoritative, Sam knows he sags in pathetic gratitude.
"As far as I see it we have two options," she offers. "We trek back into town for another map, and that's going to add a couple or three days to this. Or we take pot luck and keep looking without the map."
Sam finds his voice again. "It could take days to find another mine."
Hudak throws up her hands. "Yeah, it could. But this mine must be on a seam, or why bother digging it out? Bobby said all the deep pit mines were in the ballpark, so if we work two or three miles away from here in every direction and then double back to cover it all again, well… We could do it today at least, and then think about the other option if we have to. But heck, maybe we'll get lucky."
Dean snorts despondently. "It'll be the first fuckin' time."
"Oh I don't know Dean," Hudak returns flatly. "Seems like you got real lucky right here a couple of hours ago."
Sam sees his brother's head snap up, eyes huge and a furious blush shooting up to his hairline, and he wonders about it for a split second before Hudak continues.
"I mean," she says, her lips curling in a tight smile. "You could still be Gabe, huh?"
Maybe about twenty minutes after they start walking Sam notices it: Dean rubbing at his brow, his features draining of color, a pinched, anxious look around his eyes as he glances this way and that. It isn't that Dean's on his guard, watchful, it's that he's twitching, and it's far too close to what he was doing before he flipped for Sam to feel comfortable about it.
"Dean, what is it?" he says, not remotely expecting his brother to share, and so not altogether surprised when Dean just waves a dismissive hand at him and keeps walking. He's a few feet over to the right of his brother, sees Hudak break off scanning the woods to her left and give Dean the once-over in response to Sam's words, and she raises her eyebrows at Sam. He falls back a few feet out of Dean's line of sight, mouths, I have no clue.
"Stop talking about me like I'm not here," Dean says gruffly from ahead of them. "I'm fine. It's just a headache. Keep walking."
Rumbled, Sam retorts, "But you're twitching just like you did before-"
"I'm not twitching," Dean barks. "I'm staying frosty, like you should be."
"Do you feel like you're being watched?" Sam persists. "That's what you said before. Dude, if you feel like you're being watched you need to clue us in… you might be able to sense this thing better than us-"
"Fuck! I have not bonded with this thing!" Dean yelps, rounding on Sam. "Give it a rest or so help me I'll-" And abruptly he stops, presses the heel of his hand to his temple and reels, and if he hadn't been standing right up in Sam's space, Sam thinks his knees would have buckled.
Grabbing a handful of Dean's jacket, Sam lowers him to the ground much as he did in the mine, and as he does so it occurs to him that his brother must be starving. "Jesus, Dean, when did you last eat…" he chides, motioning to Hudak, who roots through her pack, pulls out a cellophane-wrapped chunk of beef jerky, and tosses it over.
Sam rips it open, waves it under Dean's nose. There's little response and he thinks he might even have to wedge it in between Dean's lips, but then his brother grudgingly takes it, snatches it in fact, in a burst of temper that's so juvenile Sam smiles as Dean bites off a large mouthful and starts chewing lethargically.
"Your head," Sam queries. "Does it feel okay?" He peers closely at his brother, reaches out and cards Dean's hair back from an inch-long cut along his hairline. "Where did that come from? Did you fall and hit your head in the mine?"
"He got that headbutting me," Hudak calls over. She has moved off a few feet, is standing guard, and Sam thanks God someone has the presence of mind to stay focused on the job because his brother is becoming a distraction who's going to get them all killed.
He pushes up, moves over to stand next to her. "He isn't right," he says, low so Dean can't hear him. "I can't put my finger on it, but his mind isn't on this and that just isn't him, especially with Bobby at stake."
"Well, isn't it the whole Bobby thing that's distracting him?" Hudak suggests. "They're very close…"
"I'm fine," Dean growls from behind them. "My head's just fuzzy. Noise, buzzing."
That's a red flag, and Sam turns around, steps back to kneel in front of Dean again. "Voices?" he says slowly. "Do you hear voices? A voice? Dean?" He stops because his brother is glaring up at him now, his eyes narrowed. "That's it, isn't it?" Sam realizes, aghast, feeling an awful growing sadness. "It's not just Gabe who hears him. You're hearing his voice in your head too… it's like the dreams. God, Dean, has it been like this all along? Why didn't you tell me?"
Dean forces down his beef jerky, swallows hard. "Tell you? Tell you what? That I hear that bastard even when I'm awake? That I'm losing my fuckin' mind, that I'm so cracked in the head I'm even seeing him now?" He shakes his head and his eyes are shaded with despair and hurt. "Tell me how I find the words, Sam. Tell me how I find the words to tell you I'm done with this. I want it over. I want peace, I want to rest, even if it means taking my gun and-"
This is coming out of left field, and Sam can't, won't hear it. He slams his hand over his brother's mouth, hisses, "Don't you fucking dare, Dean. That's too much information, you selfish prick. I don't want to hear that from you ever again. I am not burying you. Ever."
Dean reaches up to grip Sam's wrist, pulls his hand away, and his voice is chilly, controlled. "I can hear him right now. You keep saying you want to know… so do you want to know what he's saying right the fuck now, what sweet nothings he's whispering in my ear?"
A shadow falls over them, and Hudak's voice is almost as wintry as Dean's. "I hate to interrupt you, boys, but don't we have something better to do?" She's already hefting her pack, starts walking, glancing back at them. "Maybe instead of your hissy fit you should both be working out why Gabe said his head was clear as a bell at the mine. I'd have thought if anyone was going to imagine Lee Bender out of nowhere, it'd be Gabe."
Sam chews his lip for a minute, finally rises, stares down at his brother. And after a long moment Dean sighs, holds a hand up.
"It's true," he says quietly, as Sam pulls him to his feet. "My head was clear at the mine."
"But it's not clear now," Sam ventures.
"Nope. Hasn't really been since we got here. To the woods I mean."
Sam huffs. "Jesus, Dean. You should have told me."
"I think I'm going crazy," Dean replies, his voice faint.
"Do you really hear him now? Was that a lie?" Sam's hoping, knows his voice is alive with it.
His brother is stony-faced. "Yeah, Sammy, I hear him right now." And he shoulders his pack and walks off after Hudak.
That the thing didn't even bother taking his Bowie is the real irony, Bobby huffs to himself, like it knows damn well he can do no damage to it without a silver blade. He holds it up in front of him, tilts the blade back and forth in a thin sliver of light, and he remembers what Hudak asked him and wonders if he has the guts. A vertical cut to each wrist and he can just drift off from this mess like he's going to sleep.
He's leaning on a wooden support beam, soft rotting wood. He muses that the sharper the blade is the easier it'll be, less painful to make the cuts. He sighs, turns around, starts picking away at the wood with the blade. Give me a b, give me an o…
He guesses that when the time comes and the blade is blunt he'll just have to hack at his wrists. "Won't be any worse than being eaten piece by piece," he mumbles under his breath as he carves.
Dean knows he's twitching just as much as Sam says he is, and he's trying to deal, trying to ignore the voice as it waxes and wanes, as it shouts from over there, then whispers right in his ear. He knows he's rubbing his brow, knows he's clapped one hand over his ear, now the other, knows the thud he hears is his gun hitting the ground as he sinks to his knees.
He knows Hudak and Sam are both there talking at him but the whispering drowns them out, and he knows he's imagining it, that it's some mental collapse set off by the wendigo and Christ, how fuckin' idiotic he was to think that coming back here would help. But she was in trouble and he promised. And he knows, knows that the shadowy figure he can suddenly see ducking in and out of the trees isn't real, isn't there, is nothing more than a figment of his addled, damaged mind, because his brother killed the bastard, told him so, and he even asks again, "Sammy, tell me again how you killed him, you killed him didn't you? You said you killed him…"
Sam stares earnestly out from under his hair, nods. "I killed him Dean, I swear to God. He's dead."
Dean knows Sam wouldn't lie, wouldn't keep secrets from him, would he? He can hear Hudak from a distance, something about how this is so over, and they're carting him back to Hibbing now, and he grinds out, "No we need to find Bobby. We're close, so close, I know we are."
And suddenly he hears Hudak's voice change, get all choked and high pitched, and then she's shouting at Sam, shaking him and pointing. It all sounds so far away, like they're under water or something, and Sam is shouting back and he's fuckin' horrified, and he's pulling Dean up, hauling him along.
And that's the moment clarity comes screaming back in a crescendo of yelling and Dean knows that he really is seeing Lee Bender standing over in the trees. Because Sam and Hudak see him too.
He pushes violently at Sam, whirls and runs, because he's leaving, he's getting away just like he was supposed to. He crashes into the trees, hears the noise of his brother, Lee? Sam? crashing after him, and he wonders in a split second of rationality if he did this before and maybe Lee caught him and beat the memory out of him.
Sam has a moment of appalled stillness, eyes darting between his brother disappearing between the trees and Lee Bender staring at them from a hundred yards further on, flickering in and out of phase because we didn't burn the fucking body, and then he spins and races after Dean, with Hudak hot on his heels. And Dean is so damn fast, always has been unless he's hurt, and Sam has always suspected his brother's slightly bowed legs give him an advantage when it comes to pelting along at warp fucking speed, which is pretty much what he's doing now in his panic.
Dean sprints across a clearing and then, thank fuck, stops dead just past the tree line, snapping to a halt and crumpling so suddenly Sam spares a second to think it looks as if he ran face-first into an invisible forcefield and ricocheted off it flat onto his back.
The impact must have knocked him out, because Dean is dead to the world when Sam skids down onto his knees next to him. "Dean! Dean!" Sam pats lightly at his brother's cheek, looks up and all around him. He's still shellshocked by the sheer revulsion of seeing Bender staring back at them, and all the pieces are falling into place now, why Dean has been so edgy, why his face has been so drawn and his eyes so haunted.
He glances at Hudak as she drops to her knees opposite him. "He must've been seeing Lee all along. Fuck. Why didn't he say something." Hudak is scanning the trees, white-faced, and Sam snaps at her. "Come on. We need to get him back to the mine."
Her bewilderment shows through her fear when she looks back at Sam. "The mine?"
"It's the iron," Sam bites out. "Spirits don't like it, it's a pure element, repels them. That's why he couldn't hear Bender when we were there."
He reaches under his brother's shoulders, pushes up onto his feet, pulls Dean up, but he's heavy all of a sudden, won't move. Sam pulls harder, and Dean lets out a weak, strangled cry that makes no sense because he's unconscious.
And then Hudak is hollering at Sam to stop, shaking him, pointing frantically towards the undergrowth, at Dean's feet.
At the rusted metal teeth of the gin trap where they're gripping Dean's lower leg.
Next
Turmoil is such a fuckin' sublime word, Dean thinks as he schleps his way along the tunnel, not really paying much attention to anything apart from not tripping over and knocking himself out cold again because of the fuckin' turmoil, thoughts bouncing, colliding, rebounding off each other, whizzing, zooming around in his head, as his mind desperately tries to dodge them like the Millennium Falcon steering through the asteroid field. It hangs a right to avoid crashing into the fact that Bobby might be no, so not going there, veers left so it doesn't sideswipe the too fuckin' awful to contemplate buzzing, whispering, chattering, aching sensation in his head that's been dogging him since he set foot in the woods again, but not here in this mine for some reason. It brakes sharply so it doesn't smash head-on into the gigantic fuckin' error in judgment he just committed with someone who barely knows him yet has given so much in return for backchat, a bad attitude, and a quickie he's pretty sure she'll-
"Fuck!" he cries, as bright light sizzles his eyes so intensely it hurts. "Jesus! Sam! Point it down!"
"Dean… Dean? Is that you?"
Sam's voice sounds far away, muffled, and the flashlight beam scoots away and up, to strobe erratically across the roof of the tunnel.
"Who the hell else would it be?" Dean grouses back at him, and then he recalls what Hudak told him back up at the mine entrance. "No, don't answer that."
He plays his own flashlight around ahead of him, sees armor-plated things with eleventy-billion legs skedaddle out of the glow it casts, finally shines the beam on what looks like a wall of rocks. "Please tell me you're not under that cave-in," he barks in sudden panic, bending, craning his neck to see what he hopes won't be his brother's body partly covered by boulders he has no hope of shifting.
"No… up. Up here, I'm on top of it. There's a gap… I climbed over, got stuck coming back…"
Dean steps back, stares up. He's almost afraid to call the words up, even though he already knows the answer. "Is Bobby in there with you?"
There's a brief silence that speaks volumes, then, "No. He isn't."
It's faint, reluctant, subdued, and for a second Dean feels his heart hitch and flip-flop in a way that's all-too-familiar. He doubles over, a hand pressed hard on his chest, just like he did so many times on the taxicab ride the night he checked himself out of hospital so he could be with his brother when he died, and didn't think he'd make the motel without the brutal, tight sensation squeezing the life out of him. He sucks in dank, moldy air until the rushing sound in his ears fades and the stabbing phantom pain dead center of his sternum eases off.
"Dean?"
"Yeah. 'M coming," Dean manages, and he starts pushing up, slithering back as loose rocks tumble, thinking exhaustedly that some of those little metal spikes mountaineers strap to their boots would be damned useful. He shouts as much up to his brother, finally peers in to see Sam's face is a picture of relief mixed with huh?
"Tampons?" he's asking, puzzled. "What the hell are you talking about, Dean?"
"Tampons," Dean clarifies. "Those little metal spikes on your boots that help you climb."
"Crampons," Sam says through a world-weary grimace.
"I'm not surprised, dude," Dean replies, wincing himself as he sees how tightly his brother is caught. "How long you been stuck?"
"No, not cramps… I mean… God." Sam drops his head down onto his forearm. "It doesn't matter. Please just get me out of here."
Trying to get his brother out of there is a welcome distraction, even if Dean's heaving doesn't seem to be having any effect. "You're goin' on a fuckin' diet," he snipes as he wriggles in as far as he can and starts scrabbling at the pile, pushing the smaller rocks aside, pulling his gun out from the small of his back to hammer at the stubborn ones with the butt. He pauses for a minute, to study the weapon closely. "Dude, shine the flashlight just there."
Lit up, Sam's face is patched with grime and grazed, his eyes shadowed. "Please tell me you haven't just been bashing away with that thing without checking the safety," he breathes.
Dean is doing precisely that now, and he meets his brother's eyes unrepentantly. "Safety's dangerous Sam. Highly dangerous. Having the safety on can get you killed." He slams the butt against the rocks again.
"You're going to shoot yourself in the ass one of these days, Dean," Sam mutters, sinking his face back down again. "But I guess there are worse things than a bullet to the brain."
Dean snorts, pulls. "I think you moved."
He gets a pessimistic grunt for his trouble. "Don't think so."
Even when Dean hauls so hard he can't hold onto his groan of effort, it's like he has a rock the size of a house on tow. "Christ," he huffs out. "Can you help? Push with your feet or something?"
"Don't you think I'm trying?" Sam snaps. "My feet are dangling in thin air, Dean."
Dean doesn't really want to think of how the hell his brother got so big when he wasn't looking, but still he mutters, "Fuckin' sasquatch."
"Well, if you'd put some back into it," Sam counters.
"You outweigh me by twenty fuckin' pounds at least." Dean hauls at him again. "Jesus, you need to-"
"Dean," Sam cuts in suddenly quiet. "It's something to see you. It really is."
It's out of the blue, and Sam's eyes are naked with relief, and Dean can't let the moment last. "You're fat," he accuses. "You know that?"
Seems like his brother wants to move them past the chick-flick lapse too, because, "Yeah," Sam agrees blandly. "These four-foot wide shoulders and Schwarzenegger pecs sure can be a problem at times. Not that you'd know anything about that."
"Bitch," Dean tells him.
"Jerk."
Dean thinks he'll give it one last try before taking a timeout to think up plan B. "Christ," he says as he pulls again. "We got flares and silver bullets galore, and we forget to pack the fuckin' lube."
"Maybe if I just-ow! No, wait, Dean, don't…"
Sam comes loose and shoots out of the gap like a greased hog, sending Dean tumbling down flat on his back, and then Sam's on him, draped all over him, smothering him, panting in his ear and Christ it's too much. Dean pushes, shoves, heaves, starts beating at his brother's back, his shoulders, wriggling wildly and all the time he knows he's safe, that it's Sam, but all the same he just can't, can't breathe. He's caught, pinned down, trapped, and someone's shouting, maybe even screaming, and suddenly he's free and he's on his butt, knees pulled up, his back pressed hard up against the wall, a hand out in front of him, a blocking tactic, a plea for fuckin' mercy, like it ever worked before.
And it is just Sam, pushing onto his hands and knees before planting himself on his ass and regarding Dean from four or five feet away.
Dean floats back down from dizzying heights of terror, closes his eyes, starts to breathe deeper, blow out through pursed lips, murmur the same phrase over and over.
"Dean fucking Winchester, hell yeah?" his brother says softly, shifting closer, carefully, bit by bit, until he's next to him leaning up against the wall himself.
"Mantra," Dean confirms thinly. "Kathleen's idea."
There's a moment of silence before Sam speaks again, his tone gone cautious. "Did Kathleen tell you that you've been in some sort of fugue state, and-"
"Yes," Dean says sharply. "And no, I can't remember any of it. So now we've cleared that up I guess we go back for the stuff and then come back, press on past this to-"
"There isn't any more of it, Dean," Sam says, scratching his head. "The shaft ends right there behind the cave in, about ten or twelve yards further on."
Dean swallows thickly past the no of it. "But that means-"
"Yeah. It does."
But the no is still there, on the back of Dean's tongue, and he shoves it down, along with the wave of nausea that's swelling behind it. There's a way around this, a solution, there must be. He pushes up. "Come on. Bobby marked the other mines on the map."
"Yeah," Sam answers, and now his voice is as dead as his eyes were in the flashlight's glow. "The map he had in his pack when that thing grabbed him. We only found this one because you remembered where it was. You passed by it. Back then."
Dean is standing but suddenly the world is rocking, and maybe he's even careering from side to side, from wall to wall, like those cheesy side effects in Star Trek when they just wobbled the camera. He's just expecting the ground to smack him in the face when his brother folds a hand around his bicep and supports him all the way to his ass. Once Dean is seated, Sam squats and bends his knees for him like he's a poseable GI Joe doll, that's action fuckin' figure to you, dude, before he fishes a bottle of water out of his pack.
Dean snatches at it, drinks long and deep. "I feel really ill," he admits, and his voice catches in his throat.
"I know," Sam says, flopping down onto his own butt and shuffling to sit beside Dean. "I know."
"Christ," Dean hears himself croak through his disbelief, through the image of the old man in his mind's eye. "Bobby."
"I know."
They sit there, neither one of them saying anything.
"How it was done," Sam breaks the quiet after a few moments. And then, after a brief pause, "How, why, when and where it happened." He chuckles softly. "I think I must've driven Bobby about crazy with the why, why. One day he caught me reading a bunch of old newspapers he had lining his drawers… Jesus, when was that? Maybe I was ten, about that anyway, reading all this old stuff about the fall of the Berlin Wall and Bobby's clothes scattered all over the place. And a couple of weeks later these big boxes came in the mail and it was… Jesus." Sam's voice breaks. "Readers Digest Book Club. How It Was Done. How, Why, When and Where it Happened. I don't think I spoke or ate or slept for a month, just reading them."
They sit there in dead, heavy silence for another few minutes, leaning on each other, and Dean finds he is lost in memories of drifting from town to town, sleeping in the car, and John Winchester not really there, miles away, lost in his grief. "I don't even know how dad knew Bobby," he says hoarsely into the stillness, and he catches his brother glancing at him in his peripheral vision. "Through the grapevine maybe," he goes on. "We just pitched up there. And dad, he never said much afterwards. So I never said much either. Never said a damn thing in fact. It was fuckin' pointless, because no one answered me any more. Maybe I even forgot how to talk."
Dean slants his eyes left, sees that Sam is hanging on every word, because he has never told his brother this. He manages a weak grin. "And Bobby kept his distance at first, but then he started following me round the lot, making sure I was safe while dad slept it off. And one day he turned up with all these boxes. Clothes, toys. Fuckin' toys." Dean knows his voice has gone awestruck, because he remembers how he ran grubby fingers over the gaudy plastic and metal, remembers how he sank to his haunches and feasted his eyes on it all. "Jesus, I forgot what those even were… all mine burned with the house. He had toy cars and stuff. Little soldier guys. They were his kid's, I guess. And he set it all up there on the porch, and he painted racetracks on there for me. And we played wacky fuckin' races, and I had a reason to talk again. Someone to talk to, who listened and talked back. And so I wasn't the invisible boy any more." He stares into the darkness, doesn't weep and his voice doesn't break or even waver. "We're talking about him like he's dead, but he's alive."
Sam exhales long and slow. "Then we should get moving. So we can find him."
Bobby jerks awake to find a can on his lap. A can of Spaghettios, to be precise, and he thinks that if he was going to hallucinate something surely he could have managed Bo Derek. But the cramping hunger tearing at his gut is assuaged somewhat by the feel of the can, the knowledge it contains food that he can daub his fingers in and raise up to his mouth and taste and…
"What the fuck?"
Because it's real, it has a gaping hole in the top and it's food, Christ it's food, and he crams handfuls of it into his mouth, swallows it down without even chewing.
He's partway through it when he sees the two red glowing lights in the corner, and shit, he almost cries.
He manges to suck his scream back down and stares. He can just about pick out its edges in the light glimmering through from somewhere above him. It's curled up over there among the bodies, watching him. "Fatten me up, huh?" he murmurs. "More meat on the bones, more to get your teeth into. Clever little fucker. Don't mean I have to eat it though."
But he does, and the full feeling in his belly is some comfort amid his despair and the awful knowledge that his number is up this time.
The thing watches him all the while, snuggled on its bed of broken, battered bodies, even hugs one of them close like a fuckin' teddy bear, until Bobby is so exhausted he gives in and drifts off imagining the creature pushing a shopping cart around the local WallyWorld, checking use-by dates, choosing fat-free options, and offering the cashier a handful of coupons at the checkout.
Hudak has loosened the chain slightly and pushed open the doors, and weak sunlight is streaming into the mine entrance through a foot-wide gap. She's sitting with her legs crossed, face up to the light, eyes closed, and as Sam draws closer he can see that her cheekbone is swollen, a livid bruise already bordering a graze just under her eye.
She opens her one good eye as they approach, and her face falls. "No Bobby?"
"No," Sam says, flopping gracelessly down onto his butt next to her. "And what the hell happened to your face?"
Hudak's eyes dart up to where Dean is standing next to Samm, and Sam follows her gaze, sees his brother's expression flit from surprised to puzzled and then finish up somewhere colder, before he looks down at his boots and starts toeing the dirt as Sam puts two and two together.
After an awkward moment, Sam clears his throat. "I'm sorry. I should've told you to keep your distance when he's waking up. He's socked me a couple of times coming round."
Hudak shrugs. "He didn't know. And under the circumstances, I didn't think it was worth making him feel any worse than he does." She stares up at Dean, a meaningful look. "Dean. Not your fault."
Dean looks away, his expression one of abject misery. "I don't hit women," he replies.
"It was an accident," Hudak clarifies. "It wasn't even you, really. It was, well, Gabe, I guess. He didn't much like being chained to the door with that thing right up outside. He thought it was Bender."
Dean frowns at the change of subject, steps around Sam to peer through the gap between the doors. "Speaking of which. Has it come back at all?"
"Haven't heard it since I woke," Hudak reports carefully. "That was five-fifteen. What time did you leave?"
Dean pauses before he responds to the question, and there is something in his caginess, and the fact he and Hudak seem to be walking on eggshells around each other, that Sam thinks might be significant. He considers it, whether it might be the fact his brother just belted her right in the kisser or might be something else, as he roots a power bar out of his pack.
"About five," Dean says finally, with a quick glance at her, and his tone is level but Sam thinks the way he swivels his head back to stare through the gap between the doors is too fast.
"I think we're in the clear first half of the day when the sun's high," Dean adds. "But afternoons mean staying frosty where the canopy's thick and it's darker."
"No Bobby," Hudak broaches again.
Her tone is the same forced calm as before, and maybe that's it, Sam thinks. Bobby, and he knows the woman grew close to the old man the last time they were in these woods together. "No," he tells her. "The shaft isn't all that deep, guess they must've mined it out and abandoned it. I got stuck behind a cave-in… looks like the thing was using it at one point, there were old bodies in behind the blockage."
Hudak's eyebrows go up. "Any ID?"
Sam swallows down his mouthful, shaking his head. "No, I mean real old, decades old."
She gives him an odd look. "Someone might still be looking for them."
Her voice is a combination of sharp and sad, and it suddenly hits Sam that she's talking about herself and the fact that she'll never stop looking. He remembers her saying it as if it were yesterday, remembers that her brother's car was parked out at the Bender place, that those monsters hunted Riley out here, killed him or maybe drove him straight into the gaping mouth of the beast they're here to put down. "Honestly Kathleen, I don't think so," he says. "I checked for ID, all of the bodies. They're real old, crumbling bones, could even be turn of the century."
Dean squats down next to Sam, leans over to pull at his bedroll, and starts folding it. "Maybe they're this thing's trapper buddies from back in the day."
"Would a cave-in make this thing move house?" Hudak asks. "I wouldn't have thought a pile of rocks would make that big of a difference, wouldn't it just knock through?"
Sam ponders for a moment, concludes that she has a point. "You're right. These things are pretty territorial, far as we know. I don't see how a cave-in would drive it out of here." He's still musing when his brother gives him a jab in the ribs.
"Come on. We're burning daylight. If the bodies are that old, it means the thing overslept. It'll be even hungrier than usual."
When Sam tilts his head to look, he sees that Dean has that savage, fluorescent glow in his eyes that he gets on the hunt, that he gets when he's lusting for the kill, when nothing matters except pinning that piece of crud down and slicing and dicing until he's treading water in a river of blood and still hacking away. And those brilliant eyes are blazing holes in him and his brother is handing him his Desert Eagle, butt first.
"Knock me out."
Sam's jaw flaps uselessly for a few seconds. "What do you mean by that?" he finally manages, briefly shooting right up into a crazed falsetto somewhere in there.
"You said I found this place, Sam," his brother answers steadily. "You lied. I've never been here in my life. You both said I flipped back to Gabe. Gabe found the mine and he might know where the others are."
Sam's speechless at his brother's twisted logic. "And you think that if I club you senseless you'll wake up Gabe?"
"It's worth a try," his brother challenges.
After gaping for a few seconds, Sam shakes his head damned decisively. "Bullshit, Dean, it isn't worth a try at all."
"You didn't hit your head the last time anyway," Hudak chips in tensely. "Something else set it off. And Gabe said this was the only mine he'd seen."
Sam can see the explosion coming, can see the rage almost dancing along his brother's skin, can feel a static in the air that makes him think that if he reaches out to touch Dean, he'll get one of those crepe-soled-shoes-on-nylon-carpet electric shocks that'll have the hairs on his arms and the back of his neck standing up. He's just starting to reach out a hand to repel the attack when Dean's reserve cracks and he swipes a hand across his brow.
"Well what then?" he says hoarsely. "What the fuck else can we do? Help me out here, because I don't know."
When Hudak speaks, cool, calm and authoritative, Sam knows he sags in pathetic gratitude.
"As far as I see it we have two options," she offers. "We trek back into town for another map, and that's going to add a couple or three days to this. Or we take pot luck and keep looking without the map."
Sam finds his voice again. "It could take days to find another mine."
Hudak throws up her hands. "Yeah, it could. But this mine must be on a seam, or why bother digging it out? Bobby said all the deep pit mines were in the ballpark, so if we work two or three miles away from here in every direction and then double back to cover it all again, well… We could do it today at least, and then think about the other option if we have to. But heck, maybe we'll get lucky."
Dean snorts despondently. "It'll be the first fuckin' time."
"Oh I don't know Dean," Hudak returns flatly. "Seems like you got real lucky right here a couple of hours ago."
Sam sees his brother's head snap up, eyes huge and a furious blush shooting up to his hairline, and he wonders about it for a split second before Hudak continues.
"I mean," she says, her lips curling in a tight smile. "You could still be Gabe, huh?"
Maybe about twenty minutes after they start walking Sam notices it: Dean rubbing at his brow, his features draining of color, a pinched, anxious look around his eyes as he glances this way and that. It isn't that Dean's on his guard, watchful, it's that he's twitching, and it's far too close to what he was doing before he flipped for Sam to feel comfortable about it.
"Dean, what is it?" he says, not remotely expecting his brother to share, and so not altogether surprised when Dean just waves a dismissive hand at him and keeps walking. He's a few feet over to the right of his brother, sees Hudak break off scanning the woods to her left and give Dean the once-over in response to Sam's words, and she raises her eyebrows at Sam. He falls back a few feet out of Dean's line of sight, mouths, I have no clue.
"Stop talking about me like I'm not here," Dean says gruffly from ahead of them. "I'm fine. It's just a headache. Keep walking."
Rumbled, Sam retorts, "But you're twitching just like you did before-"
"I'm not twitching," Dean barks. "I'm staying frosty, like you should be."
"Do you feel like you're being watched?" Sam persists. "That's what you said before. Dude, if you feel like you're being watched you need to clue us in… you might be able to sense this thing better than us-"
"Fuck! I have not bonded with this thing!" Dean yelps, rounding on Sam. "Give it a rest or so help me I'll-" And abruptly he stops, presses the heel of his hand to his temple and reels, and if he hadn't been standing right up in Sam's space, Sam thinks his knees would have buckled.
Grabbing a handful of Dean's jacket, Sam lowers him to the ground much as he did in the mine, and as he does so it occurs to him that his brother must be starving. "Jesus, Dean, when did you last eat…" he chides, motioning to Hudak, who roots through her pack, pulls out a cellophane-wrapped chunk of beef jerky, and tosses it over.
Sam rips it open, waves it under Dean's nose. There's little response and he thinks he might even have to wedge it in between Dean's lips, but then his brother grudgingly takes it, snatches it in fact, in a burst of temper that's so juvenile Sam smiles as Dean bites off a large mouthful and starts chewing lethargically.
"Your head," Sam queries. "Does it feel okay?" He peers closely at his brother, reaches out and cards Dean's hair back from an inch-long cut along his hairline. "Where did that come from? Did you fall and hit your head in the mine?"
"He got that headbutting me," Hudak calls over. She has moved off a few feet, is standing guard, and Sam thanks God someone has the presence of mind to stay focused on the job because his brother is becoming a distraction who's going to get them all killed.
He pushes up, moves over to stand next to her. "He isn't right," he says, low so Dean can't hear him. "I can't put my finger on it, but his mind isn't on this and that just isn't him, especially with Bobby at stake."
"Well, isn't it the whole Bobby thing that's distracting him?" Hudak suggests. "They're very close…"
"I'm fine," Dean growls from behind them. "My head's just fuzzy. Noise, buzzing."
That's a red flag, and Sam turns around, steps back to kneel in front of Dean again. "Voices?" he says slowly. "Do you hear voices? A voice? Dean?" He stops because his brother is glaring up at him now, his eyes narrowed. "That's it, isn't it?" Sam realizes, aghast, feeling an awful growing sadness. "It's not just Gabe who hears him. You're hearing his voice in your head too… it's like the dreams. God, Dean, has it been like this all along? Why didn't you tell me?"
Dean forces down his beef jerky, swallows hard. "Tell you? Tell you what? That I hear that bastard even when I'm awake? That I'm losing my fuckin' mind, that I'm so cracked in the head I'm even seeing him now?" He shakes his head and his eyes are shaded with despair and hurt. "Tell me how I find the words, Sam. Tell me how I find the words to tell you I'm done with this. I want it over. I want peace, I want to rest, even if it means taking my gun and-"
This is coming out of left field, and Sam can't, won't hear it. He slams his hand over his brother's mouth, hisses, "Don't you fucking dare, Dean. That's too much information, you selfish prick. I don't want to hear that from you ever again. I am not burying you. Ever."
Dean reaches up to grip Sam's wrist, pulls his hand away, and his voice is chilly, controlled. "I can hear him right now. You keep saying you want to know… so do you want to know what he's saying right the fuck now, what sweet nothings he's whispering in my ear?"
A shadow falls over them, and Hudak's voice is almost as wintry as Dean's. "I hate to interrupt you, boys, but don't we have something better to do?" She's already hefting her pack, starts walking, glancing back at them. "Maybe instead of your hissy fit you should both be working out why Gabe said his head was clear as a bell at the mine. I'd have thought if anyone was going to imagine Lee Bender out of nowhere, it'd be Gabe."
Sam chews his lip for a minute, finally rises, stares down at his brother. And after a long moment Dean sighs, holds a hand up.
"It's true," he says quietly, as Sam pulls him to his feet. "My head was clear at the mine."
"But it's not clear now," Sam ventures.
"Nope. Hasn't really been since we got here. To the woods I mean."
Sam huffs. "Jesus, Dean. You should have told me."
"I think I'm going crazy," Dean replies, his voice faint.
"Do you really hear him now? Was that a lie?" Sam's hoping, knows his voice is alive with it.
His brother is stony-faced. "Yeah, Sammy, I hear him right now." And he shoulders his pack and walks off after Hudak.
That the thing didn't even bother taking his Bowie is the real irony, Bobby huffs to himself, like it knows damn well he can do no damage to it without a silver blade. He holds it up in front of him, tilts the blade back and forth in a thin sliver of light, and he remembers what Hudak asked him and wonders if he has the guts. A vertical cut to each wrist and he can just drift off from this mess like he's going to sleep.
He's leaning on a wooden support beam, soft rotting wood. He muses that the sharper the blade is the easier it'll be, less painful to make the cuts. He sighs, turns around, starts picking away at the wood with the blade. Give me a b, give me an o…
He guesses that when the time comes and the blade is blunt he'll just have to hack at his wrists. "Won't be any worse than being eaten piece by piece," he mumbles under his breath as he carves.
Dean knows he's twitching just as much as Sam says he is, and he's trying to deal, trying to ignore the voice as it waxes and wanes, as it shouts from over there, then whispers right in his ear. He knows he's rubbing his brow, knows he's clapped one hand over his ear, now the other, knows the thud he hears is his gun hitting the ground as he sinks to his knees.
He knows Hudak and Sam are both there talking at him but the whispering drowns them out, and he knows he's imagining it, that it's some mental collapse set off by the wendigo and Christ, how fuckin' idiotic he was to think that coming back here would help. But she was in trouble and he promised. And he knows, knows that the shadowy figure he can suddenly see ducking in and out of the trees isn't real, isn't there, is nothing more than a figment of his addled, damaged mind, because his brother killed the bastard, told him so, and he even asks again, "Sammy, tell me again how you killed him, you killed him didn't you? You said you killed him…"
Sam stares earnestly out from under his hair, nods. "I killed him Dean, I swear to God. He's dead."
Dean knows Sam wouldn't lie, wouldn't keep secrets from him, would he? He can hear Hudak from a distance, something about how this is so over, and they're carting him back to Hibbing now, and he grinds out, "No we need to find Bobby. We're close, so close, I know we are."
And suddenly he hears Hudak's voice change, get all choked and high pitched, and then she's shouting at Sam, shaking him and pointing. It all sounds so far away, like they're under water or something, and Sam is shouting back and he's fuckin' horrified, and he's pulling Dean up, hauling him along.
And that's the moment clarity comes screaming back in a crescendo of yelling and Dean knows that he really is seeing Lee Bender standing over in the trees. Because Sam and Hudak see him too.
He pushes violently at Sam, whirls and runs, because he's leaving, he's getting away just like he was supposed to. He crashes into the trees, hears the noise of his brother, Lee? Sam? crashing after him, and he wonders in a split second of rationality if he did this before and maybe Lee caught him and beat the memory out of him.
Sam has a moment of appalled stillness, eyes darting between his brother disappearing between the trees and Lee Bender staring at them from a hundred yards further on, flickering in and out of phase because we didn't burn the fucking body, and then he spins and races after Dean, with Hudak hot on his heels. And Dean is so damn fast, always has been unless he's hurt, and Sam has always suspected his brother's slightly bowed legs give him an advantage when it comes to pelting along at warp fucking speed, which is pretty much what he's doing now in his panic.
Dean sprints across a clearing and then, thank fuck, stops dead just past the tree line, snapping to a halt and crumpling so suddenly Sam spares a second to think it looks as if he ran face-first into an invisible forcefield and ricocheted off it flat onto his back.
The impact must have knocked him out, because Dean is dead to the world when Sam skids down onto his knees next to him. "Dean! Dean!" Sam pats lightly at his brother's cheek, looks up and all around him. He's still shellshocked by the sheer revulsion of seeing Bender staring back at them, and all the pieces are falling into place now, why Dean has been so edgy, why his face has been so drawn and his eyes so haunted.
He glances at Hudak as she drops to her knees opposite him. "He must've been seeing Lee all along. Fuck. Why didn't he say something." Hudak is scanning the trees, white-faced, and Sam snaps at her. "Come on. We need to get him back to the mine."
Her bewilderment shows through her fear when she looks back at Sam. "The mine?"
"It's the iron," Sam bites out. "Spirits don't like it, it's a pure element, repels them. That's why he couldn't hear Bender when we were there."
He reaches under his brother's shoulders, pushes up onto his feet, pulls Dean up, but he's heavy all of a sudden, won't move. Sam pulls harder, and Dean lets out a weak, strangled cry that makes no sense because he's unconscious.
And then Hudak is hollering at Sam to stop, shaking him, pointing frantically towards the undergrowth, at Dean's feet.
At the rusted metal teeth of the gin trap where they're gripping Dean's lower leg.
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