Rite of Passage

by John Passarella

Sam, startled, focused on Dean’s face. “I’m okay. Fine. What?”

  Dean pointed to the far side of the crowded overpass. “Bowler!”

  Sam looked where Dean pointed. “Where? Oh, I saw the hat—for a moment.”

  “We’ll lose him in the crowd unless we cross the highway,” Dean said.

  “Right.” Sam nodded. “Good idea.”

  “Sam, are you with me?”

  Dean had a horrible fleeting image of his brother freezing halfway across the highway, staring off into space as a pickup truck bowled him over like a tenpin, shattering every bone in his body. “On second thought, you wait here. I’ll cross. We can trap him between us.”

  As Dean ran toward the highway, the overpass deterioration accelerated. The whole caged tunnel began to roll over like a log in a stream. Chunks of concrete dropped to the highway, followed by falling people, slipping through the loose fencing. When a few attempted to exit the far side of the bridge, the man in the bowler struck them down. Everyone who had reached the bridge was trapped, screaming, falling and dying. Cars smashed into falling pedestrians or slammed into other vehicles, creating fuel spills, ruptured fuel tanks and more explosions. If racing across the highway had been a dangerous proposition before, now it was certain death.

  Dean hesitated for a fraction of a second, then trotted briskly back to his brother. “Plan B.”

  Unable to assist the fallen, they guided people away from the overturned stairwell.

  “This way,” Sam shouted, directing people east, parallel to the fires and explosions.

  Dean nodded and steered people west. By splitting the crowd into two groups, they minimized the potential for trampling.

  For a quarter-mile on either side of the overpass collapse, wrecked and burning vehicles jammed all lanes of traffic. Because many drivers had swerved off the road to avoid major collisions, the shoulders were also packed with vehicles. Several ambulances approached from the east and west on Route 38, but their drivers had to stop well short of the injured and proceed on foot with emergency kits and stretchers. Other emergency vehicles—fire trucks and police cruisers—entered the mall parking lot from the east and north entrances to tackle the fires and treat the injured.

  After the crowd from the caged staircase had dispersed, Dean and Sam approached the wreckage. Movement on the other side of the highway caught Dean’s eye. Metal creaked and twanged as the staircase on the far side tilted forward, performing a slow-motion collapse onto the road surface. Dean tried to remember when he had lost track of the man in the bowler. He had seen the man striking down pedestrians who tried to make it across the bridge, immediately before it collapsed. Somehow Dean doubted the stranger had suffered the same fate as his victims. His staircase had stood long enough for him to retreat to the south, and the smaller shopping center on the other side of Route 38 would provide cover for his escape. By the time they crossed the highway, the man in the bowler would be long gone.

  “Dean!” Sam called.

  This time Dean had been the one staring off into space.

  Sam scrambled over the toppled staircase and edged into the remains of the smoking demolition derby. Within seconds, he was coughing uncontrollably.

  * * *

  With the cruiser’s siren wailing and lights flashing, Sergeant McClary drove with controlled recklessness through the streets of Laurel Hill. Initially, the mall shooting had been the destination, but reports soon came in about the collapsing pedestrian overpass, along with an impromptu demolition derby on Route 38. Riding shotgun, Bobby realized before McClary that the logjam ahead posed a real problem to any further forward progress.

  “Looks like we hoof it from here.”

  McClary shook his head. “Not just yet.”

  With short, strategic blasts of his siren, the sergeant managed to coax several drivers far enough out of the lane for him to squeeze through. But he gained only a hundred yards at best and the pace was so deliberate Bobby wondered if walking would have been faster.

  He saw the overpass ahead, in the final stages of a violent collapse, and spotted one lone tall, dark figure escape on the right side. Bobby leaned forward for a better look, but the man slipped between parked cars in the Hillcrest Shopping Plaza.

  “Let’s go!” McClary said, now out of the cruiser and already moving toward the mall.

  Bobby nodded, then turned back to where he had last seen the tall man, but he was gone.

  Tires had exploded, sending chunks of burning rubber in all directions. Radiators had burst, and car upholsteries continued to burn, releasing toxic fumes over the area in a sickening cloud. Before following Sam onto the highway, Dean rifled through several dropped shopping bags and found a cotton dress. He ripped it to form a long strip of cloth that he tied like a kerchief, covering his nose and mouth, to cut down on the amount of noxious fumes he inhaled. After ripping another strip, he passed it to Sam.

  “Wear this,” Dean said. “Maybe you won’t get lung cancer by next Wednesday.”

  They looked like Wild West bank robbers.

  The masks helped with their breathing, but offered no relief for their eyes. As Dean squeezed through the wreckage, looking for survivors, his eyes burned and swam with tears. A mass of bodies lined the west edge of the collapsed overpass. Dean lost track of the number of severed limbs, but noted three decapitated heads. In the jumble of corpses they found no survivors, so they worked back away from the bridge, checking cars.

  They searched for several minutes before finding a survivor, a young man buckled in the back seat of a car in which three other passengers had died. The rear passenger door had crumpled in the frame, pinning it shut, but Dean reached in through the broken window and, with Sam’s help, pulled him clear and carried him to the side of the road. He looked like he had broken both ankles and the wrist of the arm he had flung out to brace himself

  Firefighters on both sides of the collapsed pedestrian bridge were spraying foam over the gasoline fires, working their way inward. Paramedics eased wheeled stretchers in between wrecked and disabled cars, seeking injured to treat. By this time, police from the mall and both sides of Route 38 had made their way into the heart of the destruction. Once the official first responders had control of the vast accident area, one of the cops ordered Sam and Dean off the highway.

  Sam started to protest, to insist that they could help, but Dean caught his arm and whispered, “Low profile, remember?”

  So they nodded and returned to the side of the road.

  “I wonder if the junker survived,” Dean said.

  “What?”

  “The Monte Carlo,” Dean explained, “stuck in car hell back there.”

  Sam noticed a couple of men approaching them, one in an overcoat, a thick folder under one arm, hurrying to gain separation from the other in a charcoal gray police uniform. He pointed them out to Dean.

  “Bobby. About time he showed up.”

  When Bobby was close enough to whisper to them, he said, “Sent you boys to stop a lone gunman, not blow up an overpass. The hell happened here?”

  “The perp in the bowler hat,” Dean said. “We saw him on the bridge.”

  “Spotted someone on the other side. Too far away to do diddly,” Bobby said.

  “Agent Willis!” the cop, a sergeant, called.

  “Go on ahead, McClary,” Bobby called back to him. “Getting a statement from these witnesses. I’ll catch up.”

  McClary waved and strode out into the highway to assess the situation.

  “What’s up with Sergeant McClary?” Sam asked.

  “Assigned to me by the chief,” Bobby said. “Supervised Roy’s son.”

  “Are those police files?” Dean asked, indicating the folder under Bobby’s arm.

  “Back up,” Bobby said. “‘Bowler hat’?”

  Sam briefed Bobby on Michelle Sloney’s account of the three roofers and the man in a dark suit and bowler walking past her house at the time of the accident.

  “You definitely both saw hi
m here?” Bobby asked.

  “Dean saw him,” Sam said. “I … missed him in the crowd.”

  “Hold on.” Bobby opened the Manila folder and flicked through pages of reports and photocopies of crime scene photos. “Here,” he said, finding a grainy still image and pulling it out to show Dean. “Taken from a traffic cam feed.”

  Dean looked at the photo of a tall man in a dark suit standing at an intersection. Because the traffic camera focused on vehicular traffic and not pedestrians, the man was almost out of the frame and most of his body was obstructed by the traffic light pole. But Dean had no doubt that the hat obscuring his face from the camera’s eye was a bowler.

  “Gotta be the same guy,” Dean said. “Where was this taken?”

  “Ground zero at this morning’s rush-hour pile-up.”

  Tora settled onto a bar stool at Dale’s Fireside Tavern with a frosty glass beer mug and ordered a round for the house. He was in a celebratory mood and the burst of appreciative cheers and applause almost made him regret what he planned next. A flat-screen TV mounted on the wall showed a news bulletin with helicopter footage of the overpass collapse. He tried not to stare. A smile would have been as unavoidable as it was inappropriate in a sympathetic environment. But the audio was turned down and nobody among the after-work crowd seemed to notice the human tragedy.

  “What’s the occasion?” the bartender asked.

  After a sip of draft beer, he smiled and said, “I gave a killer presentation today.”

  “Good for you.”

  The beer was an excuse to mingle in a crowded environment. When the bartender drifted away to take an order, Tora left his stool and walked into the men’s room. Alone, he opened his third eye just enough to see what lived on the surfaces of door handles, counter, faucets, and the towel dispenser. Within a few seconds, he located a common strain of flu virus on the edge of a stall door and proceeded to make it uncommon and highly virulent.

  Because the personal touch was so important, before he left the bar, he circulated for a few minutes, shaking the hands of some of those enjoying their free drink—and spreading the virus on multiple surfaces for maximum impact.

  As he crossed the parking lot to his stolen van, he imagined he heard the sound of dry coughing from within the tavern. If the incubation period for the viral strain he mutated was that brief, he really had outdone himself. A stellar day.

  Ten

  Sam stood in the Laurel Hill Mall, beside the mirrored support column near Sparkles Jewelry. Against his own advice to Dean, he took out his gun and aimed it at the head of the crazed gunman. For the moment, the man hadn’t noticed Sam. He faced the frightened saleswoman, waving his own gun around while demanding a refund for the engagement ring.

  Instead of returning the diamond ring in its padded jewelry box, the gunman had brought it back on the ring finger of his fiancée’s severed left hand. Blood dripped from just behind the wrist. It looked like the hand had been chopped off with an axe.

  “I put it on her finger,” the man said, spraying spittle as he raised the severed hand. “But apparently this doesn’t count!”

  He slapped the severed hand onto the glass countertop for emphasis.

  The saleswoman shrieked.

  “Gotta put him down, Sam. He is one sick puppy,” Lucifer whispered in Sam’s ear. He patted Sam’s shoulder. “Takes one to know one, right?”

  The automatic trembled in Sam’s hand.

  “In five seconds, that saleswoman’s brain is tapioca,” Lucifer said. “But, hey, I love me some tapioca.”

  “No!” Sam said, drawing the man’s attention.

  The gunman’s head whipped around. Sam fired the automatic, blasting a hole through his forehead. At the exact moment his head snapped back, the face changed, became Dean’s.

  Dean collapsed to his knees, staring vacantly at Sam as blood trickled down either side of his nose. Then he fell over sideways.

  “Oops,” Lucifer said. “Did not see that coming.”

  Sam started forward, in shock, but stopped as someone rushed toward him from the right. He spun to face the crazed gunman again.

  “Who the hell are you?” the man shouted, raising his gun.

  In reply, Sam raised his own gun in a smooth, practiced motion and fired three rounds into the man’s chest.

  Stopping abruptly, the gunman looked down and pressed his hand against the fabric of his shirt. Blood welled over his fingers, oozing downward in thick streams. When he looked back up at Sam he wore a trucker hat and his face belonged to Bobby.

  “Son, why … ?” he asked, before pitching forward.

  “Oh, my,” Lucifer said. “What are the odds?”

  “No,” Sam said, shaking his head violently. “No! This is not happening.”

  Lucifer smiled, arms spread, palms up. “Bright side, buddy,” he said. “Just the two of us from now on.” He crossed the index and middle fingers of his left hand. “And we’re like this.”

  “No!” Sam shouted again. He lunged forward—

  And almost fell off Roy’s sofa.

  He breathed deeply in the predawn light and ran a trembling hand through his hair. So much for a restful night’s sleep, he thought.

  Of the three of them, Dean woke last on Friday morning. Sam stood over the breakfast nook table, papers and photos spread out, while Bobby had covered every square inch of space on the kitchen counter with more police files. Dean stretched, looked from one man to the other. “Tell me that’s coffee I smell.”

  “A fresh pot,” Sam confirmed.

  “Help yourself, Mr. Van Winkle,” Bobby said without looking up.

  “Hey, I still got harpy smackdown aches and pains.” Dean poured himself a mug of coffee and downed about half of it before speaking again. “Anything make sense yet?”

  Before Dean had nodded off the night before, they had gone through the police reports, accident scene photos and witness statements until his vision blurred. After hours of analysis they had come to the conclusion that Laurel Hill was an unlucky town. Incredibly unlucky. If it hadn’t been for the presence of the man in the bowler hat near all the accidents, Dean might just have advised the mayor to start passing out rabbit’s feet and four-leaf clovers to all residents.

  “Like something telling us where to find Waldo?” Bobby asked. “No. Nothing like that.”

  “These witness statements,” Sam said, thinking out loud, “maybe the police are asking the wrong questions.”

  “Do the victims have anything in common?” Dean wondered.

  Bobby picked up a legal tablet filled with handwritten notes. “First known incident, three experienced roofers fall, one after the other.”

  “The woman who owned the house gave herself a black eye running back to dial 911,” Sam added. “Then injured her hand.”

  “Plain old clumsiness,” Dean suggested.

  “Maybe,” Bobby said. “The timing of her clumsiness, though … Some kind of after-effect of whatever made the roofers fall?”

  “It was just after she saw Steed,” Dean said. “Bowler guy.”

  Bobby read from his notes. “Few blocks away, David Boyce chainsaws his femoral artery, bleeds out.”

  “Close enough for bowler guy to have walked there,” Dean said.

  “Thursday morning rush-hour pile-up is next,” Bobby continued. “Everyone in the accident died. From the traffic cam, we know bowler man was there.” He flipped through several pages. “McClary gave me a list of witnesses. Bystanders. Few drivers far back enough they weren’t involved in the chain reaction.”

  “Okay, but if it is him, what’s his M.O.? Was there anything helpful on the traffic cam footage?” Sam asked.

  “Stands there like he ain’t got a care in the world,” Bobby said. “Walks away when the emergency vehicles show up.”

  “The bus accident’s next,” Sam said. “Excluding the fitness center casualties, the bus driver died and one passenger. But is there a connection to our guy?”

  “Hold on,”
Bobby said. “Got a transit map here.

  “Yup. Intersection of the pile-up is a scheduled stop for that bus.”

  “So he saw the bus passing or—”

  “He was on the bus,” Sam finished for Dean, “and got off at that stop.”

  “Do we have names for the other passengers?”

  “That we do,” Bobby said, holding up a page. “When the police questioned them, nobody mentioned our tall stranger. But, like you said, maybe they didn’t ask the right questions.”

  “Sam and I can question them,” Dean suggested.

  Bobby nodded. “After the pile-up and bus crash,” he said, “we have a series of accidents: Deanna Roe, married mother of two boys, trips down the stairs carrying a laundry hamper, breaks her neck. Hal Norville, divorced anesthesiologist, falls stepping out of the shower and splits his head open. Suffers massive stroke. Gertrude Finney, retired spinster, dies in a lint-trap fire. Only pattern so far is no pattern.”

  “How far apart were the accidents, geographically?” Sam asked.

  Bobby checked his notes, rubbed his eyes. “Same block. Parry Lane. Location is the pattern.”

  Dean frowned. “Being round this guy is like having a black cat cross your path, times a hundred.”

  “Better watch out for Roy’s stray, then,” Bobby commented.

  “Actually, having a black cat cross your path is considered lucky in some cultures, like Britain and Japan,” Sam said.

  “Anyway, the skydivers were friends back in college,” he continued quickly, seeing Dean and Bobby’s blank expressions.

  “Reeks of wrong plane, wrong time,” Bobby said, shaking his head. “Could’ve been three strangers.”

  “The three roofers knew each other, too,” Dean said.

  “Wrong roof,” Bobby countered. “Victims of opportunity.”

  He lifted a page from a neat stack. “Two more incidents before the mall: Roger Basely fell asleep on the couch while smoking, and Mildred Dottery suffocated under newspapers.”

  “Suffocated?”

  “Newspapers from Jimmy Carter’s heyday,” Bobby explained. “Hoarder. Both victims lived on Lafferty Lane.”