The Woods are Lonely, Dark and Deep
4. Off to Never-Never Land
"Jesus!" Sam bites out as the Jeep tools along the asphalt. "Go faster!"
But Hudak replies, with pristine logic: "They don't know it's us, Sam. We follow at a safe distance, see where they go…" She glances over at him where he sits, hunched in the passenger seat. "If your brother's hurt, a car chase isn't going to help him."
And Sam knows she's right, so he keeps chewing his knuckles as they cruise along, a hundred or so yards behind the truck, all the way out of town to where the road forks and heads out to the sticks. At this distance they can see a figure - the kid? Sam wonders - sitting in the bed of the truck, but she doesn't seem to have noticed them at all.
The forced calm is unbearable, and Sam can see that Hudak's knuckles are white as she grips the steering wheel and curses under her breath.
"What?" he snaps, looking back and forth from her to the truck in the distance.
"They're speeding up," she says, frowning. And it's true, because Sam is now aware of the almost imperceptible increase in their own speed.
"I think we've been made," Hudak murmurs, and it's as if the truck's occupants heard her, because Sam suddenly hears the roar of its engine as it screams out of sight in a cloud of dust.
Hudak floors the gas pedal, the Jeep responds, and Sam is officially part of his first car chase since he hefted his duffel and left his brother standing in the rain outside some no-name motel in some no-name one-horse Oklahoma town, almost three years before. And now he can hear the heavy blat of gunfire, and something pings off the right-hand side mirror. Some sixth sense tells him to duck, pulling Hudak down with him as the windshield shatters over them both.
"Jesus!" Hudak cries, as they swerve wildly, and Sam feels the world going ass over tip, while Hudak's dog barks in excitement.
The top-heavy SUV seems to hang in the air for an eternity before flipping over onto its side and sliding along the blacktop, sparks flying and metal shrieking as it grinds slowly to a halt. Suspended sideways by his seatbelt, Sam braces himself against the driver's seat, gazes out at the road ahead. The empty road ahead.
And he and Hudak share a look that speaks volumes.
A mile or so down the road, Lee Bender pulls off into the endless woods, eases into the trees as far as he can. He leaps out of the truck, whooping. "Did you see that!" he crows at his sister. "That's goldarn the best thing I ever saw, damn straight! I sure hope I get to do that one day!"
Missy glowers, and after a minute or two, Lee pipes down. He knows who's the boss of him. "Well I think I laughed hard enough to bust me a rib," he remarks thoughtfully, rubbing at his ample gut. He glances into the truck bed. "Gabe doin' okay?"
"It's Gabriel," Missy snaps. "He's fine."
Still out cold in fact, Lee notes, peering in to where his ashen-faced new brother bonelessly reclines.
Missy hops nimbly over the side of the truck, stands for a second, chewing on her bottom lip. And then her shoulders tense, her eyes going slitty and devious, and suddenly she's all business, cold and calculating.
"You got a plan, Missy?" Lee nudges, because he knows that look, remembers how Pa used to say it made her look as cunning as a fox who remembered to take his really big knife with him when he stopped by the henhouse.
"We need to lose the truck," she says.
Sam hauls Hudak up and out of the passenger door window, and she stands and examines the wreck of her car as Sam stands and stares at the horizon.
"That was my first car chase," she says, and he moves over to stand next to her in front of the Jeep.
"I'm sorry about your car," he says distantly, his mind miles away. Dean…
She rubs at the back of her head. "It's not my car," she says, ruefully. "Ex-husband's. I'm taking care of it for him while he's in Iraq."
And Sam thinks to himself that irony can be pretty ironic sometimes, and he laughs. He sits down heavily in the dust and laughs and laughs, until he cries. And Hudak squats next to him and rubs his back while he sobs.
It's only as the tow-truck rides them back down the main street a half-hour later that Sam remembers, and once they pull up outside the sheriff's office he jumps out of the cabin and walks fast and purposefully up the sidewalk.
Hudak leaps down, dog in tow, and calls after Sam, torn between following and bailing out of this mission. Her head aches, crap knows how she's going to tell Travis about his Jeep. She's been beaten up, locked in the trunk of her own squad car, shot at. She should be going through channels instead of playing duck-duck-wild-goose-chase with this kid she doesn't even know.
She starts after him, stops, retraces her steps, looks up at the office door. The FBI should have finished with the preliminaries now, there might be news. But the look that had been on the boy's face…
She suddenly thinks of his brother: his impossibly perfect features, the gleam in his eyes, the pathetic excuse when she asked him why he wasn't a three-hundred pound African-American. Whatever he might have done in St. Louis - or not done, as she's now inclined to think - he doesn't deserve to be filleted by the local cannibals. And she feels a sudden upsurge of her own grief and rage, as she thinks that her brother didn't deserve it either.
And so she starts out after Sam again, only to be pulled up by a hand on her arm. Cal Mobley, with an expression like a bulldog chewing a wasp.
"Glad I caught you, Deputy," the old man hails her jovially. "Suits in your office don't seem to know nothin'!"
Hudak gives him a tight smile, turns to keep walking. "Yeah, Cal, look I'm kind of in a hurry," she throws back over her shoulder. "Police business. Can this wait?"
"Well not if you want to be catching them, ma'am, no," Mobley grumbles. "That waste of skin Bender kid."
She whips around. "Bender kid? Lee Bender?"
"Well, either him or his brother. Goldarn coldcocked me out in my upper forty, and when I came round both my mules was gone."
Hudak gets an eyeful of Swenson flying past the inside of his window as she races up the porch steps, and she muses abstractedly that he's taking a licking even as he tries to keep on ticking. But he has twenty-five years on Sam, and the age difference is beginning to tell as Hudak skids to a halt in the doorway to his office to see the man fly through the air and crash against the bookcase.
It topples with the force, books and papers scattering everywhere, and Sam face set, single-minded and utterly ruthless, barrels towards the man again, dodging past Hudak as she protests.
"Sam! Jesus! No, stop-" She has to crouch down on the floor as Swenson starts grabbing books and hurling them in an attempt to hold Sam off.
"Where would they take my brother?" Sam grits out, his rage barely controlled.
"I don't know," Swenson yells back. "They were waiting in the garage. I didn't know they were there! They held a gun to my head… ow, no-"
Sam has him by the scruff, snarls, "You lie," and all at once, Hudak is aware of a change in the air: a buildup of tension, like the pressure before a storm. The doctor seems to sense it too, and his face drains of any color it still had.
And Hudak doesn't know quite what happens but there's a shockwave, a release of something, and Sam casually flicks the man through the air as if he were weightless, the boy's lack of effort inexplicable even for his height and the breadth of his shoulders. And Hudak thinks, what the fuck?
Sam starts toward the barely conscious man again, and something tells Hudak she needs to get in there and end this now, but as she pushes up from the floor, she sees something that makes her heart stop. Right there, where they landed, having fallen out from one of the books Swenson threw, all fanned out in front of her. And she murmurs, "oh no, no, no…"
She picks a couple of them up, these awful, awful things that she knows will break this boy's heart for sure. But she's already thinking ahead, knows they can use them.
Sam heaves the man up from the floor, runs him up against the wall, pulls back a ham-sized fist - and Hudak is there in his face even before her brain has started telling her feet to move.
"You need to stop," she says loudly, clearly.
"I need this sonofabitch to tell me about my brother," Sam replies, and his voice is a flat calm that is terrifying.
She puts her hand on his arm, stays neutral. "Sam. You need to stop. I need to show you something."
It's like he's on autopilot when he looks at her, his eyes are vacant, as if the Sam she's so far seen has exited his body. She holds the photographs right up in front of his eyes, and he looks at them without seeming to comprehend at first.
"What are they…?" He puzzles, slowly at first, and then suddenly realizing. "That's…" He stops, looks at Swenson and then back again at the photographs, poorly lit but clear as day what they show. "And that's Lee Bender…"
He lets go of the doctor, who slides to the floor, walks slowly over to the one chair that hasn't been reduced to kindling, sits, and starts wringing his hands. "That man has my brother," he says dully. "That man has my brother."
Hudak leaves Swenson where he fell, kneels down on the floor in front of Sam, cups her hands around his. "We'll find him," she soothes. "I promise. I've got a lead." She looks over at the doctor's slumped body. "And he'll tell us what he knows now we have the pictures."
They don't make such good time with the mules and cart, but they can keep off the roads, and Gabe's comfortable. Best of all, Missy is happy, and she smiles her satisfaction at Lee.
"This was a great idea, Lee. I think your brain must be growin' back."
Lee smiles, sits up straighter, his chest swelling with pride, until his moment in the spotlight is interrupted by the increasingly loud keening coming from the cart. He glances back at the occupant. "Missy, he done started bleedin' again," he says, and Missy vaults off her mule, her consternation apparent.
Lee climbs down after her, hauls Gabe off the cart, easily carries him over to a sheltering tree, and lays him down on the icy ground. Gabe isn't awake, but he's hurting alright, Lee thinks, unhappily. "It just ain't right," he mutters, and looks over at the dog, sitting close by, panting. "You're a bad dog," Lee snaps, shaking his fist at the mutt. "One of these days…"
Missy tugs the bandage aside slightly, inspects the leg.
Lee hovers. "We can try giving him one of those pills Mikey gave us," he offers, helpfully. "Mikey said they'd stop him getting sickness in his leg."
Missy nods her consent and Lee roots Pa's bag off the saddle of Missy's mule, hands it over.
"This ain't good, Lee," Missy announces, as she pulls out a bottle of pills and shakes it. "Don't Pa always say to shoot them right there in the leg?"
Lee nods, because Missy's right, like always.
"Well that's cuz there's a lot of blood in a man's leg, Lee," she goes on. "It's 'portant. If you get shot in the leg, all your blood comes out. And then you're dead."
She touches Gabe's face tenderly as his head grinds from side to side in the dirt, looks up at Lee and sighs. "Lee. Make up a fire."
Missy rouses Gabe enough to push another one of the 'biotics in between his lips and dribbles water into his mouth until she can be reasonably sure it's gone. He's muttering and crying out nonsense, shivering, and his teeth clatter together uncontrollably. She bullies Lee's sweater off him, maneuvers it onto Gabe. He's buried in it, but it'll keep him warm.
"Gabe, you need to go back to sleep," she says, but if anything the keening is getting worse.
Lee looks up from the crackling flames. "Maybe he should take my medicine," he says. "Makes me feel powerful tired. Maybe help Gabe get some sleep?"
Missy crawls over to Pa's bag, pulls out another bottle, the another, squints at the labels. "S-e-c-o…" She looks over at her brother. "What color are your pills?"
Lee thinks for a minute, scratches his head. "Blue. I think."
Missy looks from one bottle to the other. Missy likes pink. And red. Pink and red it is, then. She shuffles over to Gabe and repeats the process, poking in the pills and then dribbling in the water, just like before.
Once done, she carefully unwraps the bandage from his leg, peers down at the wounds, slowly leaking a steady stream of blood. The butterfly stitches are all awry and she carefully picks them off. She roots in Pa's bag again for that bottle of stuff he uses on Lee whenever her brother has a funny spell and cuts himself, pours it over the bites. Gabe cries out, writhes around a bit.
"Well, no sense in puttin' it off any longer, Lee," she says. "Get over here and hold him real tight now while I do this."
Lee settles himself next to Gabe, pulls him up against his chest, tight as he can. Looks at Missy, nods. "I got him."
And Missy leans over to the flames, pulls the knife from where it has been resting, its blade buried in the embers. She presses it down on the wounds, and recoils as Gabe explodes into violent motion, eyes snapping open in utter shock and terror. His arms flail and he hammers his skull back against Lee's chest, hips thrashing, crying out an exhausted scream that fades into hoarse, garbled sounds of such intense distress that Missy sees fat tears pop out of Lee's eyes and start trickling down his cheeks.
"It's okay," Lee whispers in Gabe's ear. "It's okay, boy."
Missy places the blade back in the embers.
Next
"Jesus!" Sam bites out as the Jeep tools along the asphalt. "Go faster!"
But Hudak replies, with pristine logic: "They don't know it's us, Sam. We follow at a safe distance, see where they go…" She glances over at him where he sits, hunched in the passenger seat. "If your brother's hurt, a car chase isn't going to help him."
And Sam knows she's right, so he keeps chewing his knuckles as they cruise along, a hundred or so yards behind the truck, all the way out of town to where the road forks and heads out to the sticks. At this distance they can see a figure - the kid? Sam wonders - sitting in the bed of the truck, but she doesn't seem to have noticed them at all.
The forced calm is unbearable, and Sam can see that Hudak's knuckles are white as she grips the steering wheel and curses under her breath.
"What?" he snaps, looking back and forth from her to the truck in the distance.
"They're speeding up," she says, frowning. And it's true, because Sam is now aware of the almost imperceptible increase in their own speed.
"I think we've been made," Hudak murmurs, and it's as if the truck's occupants heard her, because Sam suddenly hears the roar of its engine as it screams out of sight in a cloud of dust.
Hudak floors the gas pedal, the Jeep responds, and Sam is officially part of his first car chase since he hefted his duffel and left his brother standing in the rain outside some no-name motel in some no-name one-horse Oklahoma town, almost three years before. And now he can hear the heavy blat of gunfire, and something pings off the right-hand side mirror. Some sixth sense tells him to duck, pulling Hudak down with him as the windshield shatters over them both.
"Jesus!" Hudak cries, as they swerve wildly, and Sam feels the world going ass over tip, while Hudak's dog barks in excitement.
The top-heavy SUV seems to hang in the air for an eternity before flipping over onto its side and sliding along the blacktop, sparks flying and metal shrieking as it grinds slowly to a halt. Suspended sideways by his seatbelt, Sam braces himself against the driver's seat, gazes out at the road ahead. The empty road ahead.
And he and Hudak share a look that speaks volumes.
A mile or so down the road, Lee Bender pulls off into the endless woods, eases into the trees as far as he can. He leaps out of the truck, whooping. "Did you see that!" he crows at his sister. "That's goldarn the best thing I ever saw, damn straight! I sure hope I get to do that one day!"
Missy glowers, and after a minute or two, Lee pipes down. He knows who's the boss of him. "Well I think I laughed hard enough to bust me a rib," he remarks thoughtfully, rubbing at his ample gut. He glances into the truck bed. "Gabe doin' okay?"
"It's Gabriel," Missy snaps. "He's fine."
Still out cold in fact, Lee notes, peering in to where his ashen-faced new brother bonelessly reclines.
Missy hops nimbly over the side of the truck, stands for a second, chewing on her bottom lip. And then her shoulders tense, her eyes going slitty and devious, and suddenly she's all business, cold and calculating.
"You got a plan, Missy?" Lee nudges, because he knows that look, remembers how Pa used to say it made her look as cunning as a fox who remembered to take his really big knife with him when he stopped by the henhouse.
"We need to lose the truck," she says.
Sam hauls Hudak up and out of the passenger door window, and she stands and examines the wreck of her car as Sam stands and stares at the horizon.
"That was my first car chase," she says, and he moves over to stand next to her in front of the Jeep.
"I'm sorry about your car," he says distantly, his mind miles away. Dean…
She rubs at the back of her head. "It's not my car," she says, ruefully. "Ex-husband's. I'm taking care of it for him while he's in Iraq."
And Sam thinks to himself that irony can be pretty ironic sometimes, and he laughs. He sits down heavily in the dust and laughs and laughs, until he cries. And Hudak squats next to him and rubs his back while he sobs.
It's only as the tow-truck rides them back down the main street a half-hour later that Sam remembers, and once they pull up outside the sheriff's office he jumps out of the cabin and walks fast and purposefully up the sidewalk.
Hudak leaps down, dog in tow, and calls after Sam, torn between following and bailing out of this mission. Her head aches, crap knows how she's going to tell Travis about his Jeep. She's been beaten up, locked in the trunk of her own squad car, shot at. She should be going through channels instead of playing duck-duck-wild-goose-chase with this kid she doesn't even know.
She starts after him, stops, retraces her steps, looks up at the office door. The FBI should have finished with the preliminaries now, there might be news. But the look that had been on the boy's face…
She suddenly thinks of his brother: his impossibly perfect features, the gleam in his eyes, the pathetic excuse when she asked him why he wasn't a three-hundred pound African-American. Whatever he might have done in St. Louis - or not done, as she's now inclined to think - he doesn't deserve to be filleted by the local cannibals. And she feels a sudden upsurge of her own grief and rage, as she thinks that her brother didn't deserve it either.
And so she starts out after Sam again, only to be pulled up by a hand on her arm. Cal Mobley, with an expression like a bulldog chewing a wasp.
"Glad I caught you, Deputy," the old man hails her jovially. "Suits in your office don't seem to know nothin'!"
Hudak gives him a tight smile, turns to keep walking. "Yeah, Cal, look I'm kind of in a hurry," she throws back over her shoulder. "Police business. Can this wait?"
"Well not if you want to be catching them, ma'am, no," Mobley grumbles. "That waste of skin Bender kid."
She whips around. "Bender kid? Lee Bender?"
"Well, either him or his brother. Goldarn coldcocked me out in my upper forty, and when I came round both my mules was gone."
Hudak gets an eyeful of Swenson flying past the inside of his window as she races up the porch steps, and she muses abstractedly that he's taking a licking even as he tries to keep on ticking. But he has twenty-five years on Sam, and the age difference is beginning to tell as Hudak skids to a halt in the doorway to his office to see the man fly through the air and crash against the bookcase.
It topples with the force, books and papers scattering everywhere, and Sam face set, single-minded and utterly ruthless, barrels towards the man again, dodging past Hudak as she protests.
"Sam! Jesus! No, stop-" She has to crouch down on the floor as Swenson starts grabbing books and hurling them in an attempt to hold Sam off.
"Where would they take my brother?" Sam grits out, his rage barely controlled.
"I don't know," Swenson yells back. "They were waiting in the garage. I didn't know they were there! They held a gun to my head… ow, no-"
Sam has him by the scruff, snarls, "You lie," and all at once, Hudak is aware of a change in the air: a buildup of tension, like the pressure before a storm. The doctor seems to sense it too, and his face drains of any color it still had.
And Hudak doesn't know quite what happens but there's a shockwave, a release of something, and Sam casually flicks the man through the air as if he were weightless, the boy's lack of effort inexplicable even for his height and the breadth of his shoulders. And Hudak thinks, what the fuck?
Sam starts toward the barely conscious man again, and something tells Hudak she needs to get in there and end this now, but as she pushes up from the floor, she sees something that makes her heart stop. Right there, where they landed, having fallen out from one of the books Swenson threw, all fanned out in front of her. And she murmurs, "oh no, no, no…"
She picks a couple of them up, these awful, awful things that she knows will break this boy's heart for sure. But she's already thinking ahead, knows they can use them.
Sam heaves the man up from the floor, runs him up against the wall, pulls back a ham-sized fist - and Hudak is there in his face even before her brain has started telling her feet to move.
"You need to stop," she says loudly, clearly.
"I need this sonofabitch to tell me about my brother," Sam replies, and his voice is a flat calm that is terrifying.
She puts her hand on his arm, stays neutral. "Sam. You need to stop. I need to show you something."
It's like he's on autopilot when he looks at her, his eyes are vacant, as if the Sam she's so far seen has exited his body. She holds the photographs right up in front of his eyes, and he looks at them without seeming to comprehend at first.
"What are they…?" He puzzles, slowly at first, and then suddenly realizing. "That's…" He stops, looks at Swenson and then back again at the photographs, poorly lit but clear as day what they show. "And that's Lee Bender…"
He lets go of the doctor, who slides to the floor, walks slowly over to the one chair that hasn't been reduced to kindling, sits, and starts wringing his hands. "That man has my brother," he says dully. "That man has my brother."
Hudak leaves Swenson where he fell, kneels down on the floor in front of Sam, cups her hands around his. "We'll find him," she soothes. "I promise. I've got a lead." She looks over at the doctor's slumped body. "And he'll tell us what he knows now we have the pictures."
They don't make such good time with the mules and cart, but they can keep off the roads, and Gabe's comfortable. Best of all, Missy is happy, and she smiles her satisfaction at Lee.
"This was a great idea, Lee. I think your brain must be growin' back."
Lee smiles, sits up straighter, his chest swelling with pride, until his moment in the spotlight is interrupted by the increasingly loud keening coming from the cart. He glances back at the occupant. "Missy, he done started bleedin' again," he says, and Missy vaults off her mule, her consternation apparent.
Lee climbs down after her, hauls Gabe off the cart, easily carries him over to a sheltering tree, and lays him down on the icy ground. Gabe isn't awake, but he's hurting alright, Lee thinks, unhappily. "It just ain't right," he mutters, and looks over at the dog, sitting close by, panting. "You're a bad dog," Lee snaps, shaking his fist at the mutt. "One of these days…"
Missy tugs the bandage aside slightly, inspects the leg.
Lee hovers. "We can try giving him one of those pills Mikey gave us," he offers, helpfully. "Mikey said they'd stop him getting sickness in his leg."
Missy nods her consent and Lee roots Pa's bag off the saddle of Missy's mule, hands it over.
"This ain't good, Lee," Missy announces, as she pulls out a bottle of pills and shakes it. "Don't Pa always say to shoot them right there in the leg?"
Lee nods, because Missy's right, like always.
"Well that's cuz there's a lot of blood in a man's leg, Lee," she goes on. "It's 'portant. If you get shot in the leg, all your blood comes out. And then you're dead."
She touches Gabe's face tenderly as his head grinds from side to side in the dirt, looks up at Lee and sighs. "Lee. Make up a fire."
Missy rouses Gabe enough to push another one of the 'biotics in between his lips and dribbles water into his mouth until she can be reasonably sure it's gone. He's muttering and crying out nonsense, shivering, and his teeth clatter together uncontrollably. She bullies Lee's sweater off him, maneuvers it onto Gabe. He's buried in it, but it'll keep him warm.
"Gabe, you need to go back to sleep," she says, but if anything the keening is getting worse.
Lee looks up from the crackling flames. "Maybe he should take my medicine," he says. "Makes me feel powerful tired. Maybe help Gabe get some sleep?"
Missy crawls over to Pa's bag, pulls out another bottle, the another, squints at the labels. "S-e-c-o…" She looks over at her brother. "What color are your pills?"
Lee thinks for a minute, scratches his head. "Blue. I think."
Missy looks from one bottle to the other. Missy likes pink. And red. Pink and red it is, then. She shuffles over to Gabe and repeats the process, poking in the pills and then dribbling in the water, just like before.
Once done, she carefully unwraps the bandage from his leg, peers down at the wounds, slowly leaking a steady stream of blood. The butterfly stitches are all awry and she carefully picks them off. She roots in Pa's bag again for that bottle of stuff he uses on Lee whenever her brother has a funny spell and cuts himself, pours it over the bites. Gabe cries out, writhes around a bit.
"Well, no sense in puttin' it off any longer, Lee," she says. "Get over here and hold him real tight now while I do this."
Lee settles himself next to Gabe, pulls him up against his chest, tight as he can. Looks at Missy, nods. "I got him."
And Missy leans over to the flames, pulls the knife from where it has been resting, its blade buried in the embers. She presses it down on the wounds, and recoils as Gabe explodes into violent motion, eyes snapping open in utter shock and terror. His arms flail and he hammers his skull back against Lee's chest, hips thrashing, crying out an exhausted scream that fades into hoarse, garbled sounds of such intense distress that Missy sees fat tears pop out of Lee's eyes and start trickling down his cheeks.
"It's okay," Lee whispers in Gabe's ear. "It's okay, boy."
Missy places the blade back in the embers.
Next