That was the only place she hadn’t checked, as it was invisible to casual inspection. But it seemed like the only place he could have gone.
“Dave!” she called, rubbing her arm in anticipation of the awkward tangle of branches and prickly leaves that awaited her if he failed to come out on his own. “Dave, are you back there?” A deep breath. “Are you hurt?”
Silence.
She stepped forward, snapped a few branches to allow her as much unmolested passage through the bushes as possible without the benefit of garden shears. That’s when she noticed bright red spots on some of the leaves… drying blood.
With a renewed sense of urgency, she flung herself forward, eyes closed, left forearm shielding her face as she broke through the last of the bushes and thorny vines. Stumbling free, she rounded the corner of the shed and saw more blood splattered across the old fencing, some patches so wet that long crimson drip lines had formed underneath them. Numb, she took a step forward and her foot struck something, throwing her off balance. A frantic windmilling of her arms helped her avoid a fall, but in the process of catching herself, her gaze had dropped to the obstruction at her feet and an involuntary gasp escaped her throat.
Dave. Sprawled face down before her, motionless, right arm tucked under his midsection, left arm above his head, fingers clutching loose weeds, his legs splayed inelegantly to the sides. For a few agonizing seconds, her heart seemed to pause as she strained to see if he was breathing, the slightest rise and fall of his chest.
“Oh, my God! Dave!”
She dropped to her knees beside him, shook him and called his name again and received no response, not even a moan or grunt of pain. If not for the blood all over the fence, she might have thought he’d had a heart attack and simply collapsed, unnoticed back here. She spared no time speculating on the reason why he’d gone behind the shed. Instead, she focused on what she could do now, alone, since she’d left her cell phone in the kitchen. Although she’d never taken a CPR class, she’d seen the procedure performed on television often enough to give it a try. Grabbing his right shoulder and hip, she flipped him over to—
“Oh! Oh—oh, oh, God, please no,” she sputtered as she recoiled, flinging herself backward and slamming painfully into the back wall of the utility shed. “No, no, no, no!”
For a terrifying moment, it seemed as if Dave was staring accusingly at her, but that was impossible. He couldn’t stare. Not without eyes. Only bloody gaping sockets where his ice-blue eyes had been. Dark voids in a blood-smeared face, shockingly pale. And less than an instant must have passed before she noticed another bloody void, a ragged hole in his midsection, extending from beneath his ribcage to his waistline, and framed in the dripping, shredded remains of intestines. Small twigs and bits of dried leaves clung to the gore. And insects were already—
Whipping her head to the side, Sally dropped to all fours and expelled the remains of her food court lunch, gagging interspersed with uncontrollable sobbing until only thin strings of bile remained. She pushed herself to her feet, shaking as she stumbled away from her husband’s body, shrieking once as her foot slipped in blood-matted leaves. Irrational fear surged through her. She imagined some evil presence—a monster born of nightmares—had caught her ankle, determined to pull her back to finish its macabre task.
Screaming as conscious thought abandoned her, she flung herself around the corner of the shed, tearing several fingernails, and charged through the tangle of overlapping bushes as if her very survival depended on it.
TWO
Two minutes in, and Dean was gone.
Preferring a more cautious approach, Sam took in their surroundings. The setting sun leached all color from the graffiti decorating the drab and cracked walls of the abandoned three-story factory that dominated this particular city block of urban decay. A poured concrete foundation supported a ground floor of bleached cinderblock beneath two additional stories of faded and crumbling red brick. The hundreds of upper level windowpanes, perhaps intended to provide visual relief from the oppressive monotony of brick, had been transformed into endless daggers of glass, which caught the fading light in a golden glow and seemed to set the condemned structure ablaze. Whatever dark secrets the building held, they were hidden from the street view.
At some point after the factory closure, most likely after the majority of the graffiti artists tagged the then-fresh urban canvas, the building owners had erected a cyclone fence topped with loops of barbed wire around the perimeter, in case the metal No TRESPASSING – PRIVATE PROPERTY sign—now tagged as well—affixed to the padlocked gate provided insufficient deterrent.
Rather than scale the fence and navigate the barbed wire, Dean had removed a pair of bolt cutters from the trunk of the Impala and made short work of the padlock. Then, exchanging the bolt cutters for a long-handled ax, Dean slipped through the gate, told Sam to take the front, and sprinted toward the rear of the forgotten factory.
“Dean!” Sam whispered, too late for his brother to hear, and shook his head in resignation. Not that they needed a big discussion or an elaborate plan, but he doubted their quarry had any intention of slipping out the back and fleeing. And it might have been wise to stick together for this final assault.
After a week of brutal assaults perpetrated by what several terrified eyewitnesses described as strange, mutated beasts, the Winchesters had determined the abominations had somehow been created by the mythological Chimera, a creature described in lore as a lion with the head of a goat rising from its back and a snake’s head for a tail. While the Chimera itself had remained in the shadows during the attacks, a couple of witnesses caught glimpses of its telltale features, but they also had the impression of a massive, lumbering presence, indicating something larger and more fearsome than the sum of the Chimera’s supposed parts. Unfortunately, as the frequency and ferocity of the assaults escalated, the Chimera had become more elusive. The brothers speculated that it had retreated to some kind of lair, a place secluded enough to avoid chance discovery while orchestrating its expanding reign of terror. In order to find it, the Winchesters needed to wait for one of its minions to “escape” a battle long enough to report back to the lair and secretly follow it to its master.
Sam assumed once Dean and he located the lair, they would plan and coordinate their attack together. But one of the consequences of Dean’s bearing the Mark of Cain was a penchant for expediency, straight line thinking. In a way, Sam supposed Dean had made a concession by not barging in through the front door, figurative guns blazing. Sam suspected Dean merely wanted to wade into the battle without discussion or delay and the quickest way to accomplish that was to forge ahead on his own, whether Sam had his back or not.
While Dean insisted he remained in control of the Mark, and to all appearances he hadn’t succumbed to the unreasoning bloodlust it induced in its owner, this particular hunt might prove too much for Dean to handle alone. Hell, if the creature was as massive as those early reports suggested, Sam worried both of them together didn’t stand a chance. They’d witnessed firsthand the deadly nature of the Chimera’s creations, which the Winchesters discovered were actually supernaturally fused combinations of one or more animals with a human victim in the mix. Not that the word “nature” applied to these bizarre hybrids. At best, they were short-term weapons, animate grenades.
The last one had practically ripped a police officer’s spine out of her back before hurling her from an overpass into the path of an oncoming semi. The resulting twenty-three-car rush-hour pileup would occupy police and emergency services throughout the night. But the Winchesters had managed to track the Chimera’s minion back to this gutted factory. Unless they ganked the source of the hybrids, the reign of terror would continue unabated.
Sam crept along the interior of the fence, taking note of the shadows gathered near the building’s front entrance and along the walls, wondering what type of madness they might contain. In passing, he spotted a few sections where the chain-link fence had been snipped i
n a vertical line to allow furtive passage onto the factory grounds. Of course, the Chimera and its creations—at least those which couldn’t fly—would need a way in and out of the building. With the padlocked gate undisturbed, the area would appear secure to the occasional patrol car sweep.
Finally, Sam stepped forward, toward the front door and the impermeable shadows, hefting the meat cleaver he’d taken from the Impala’s trunk. Let Dean have the long-handled ax. Sam had a feeling the night would involve a lot of close combat. They’d already discovered guns and knives weren’t up to the task of dispatching the strange creatures.
From the rear of the factory, Sam heard a clang of metal on metal. Dean? Knocking? Doesn’t get much more direct than that, he thought, with another shake of his head.
Distracted, Sam almost missed the growing shadow—or rather something dark rising from within the shadows. With a loud, brutish snort, the creature lumbered toward him, gathering momentum. In the fading light, Sam glimpsed the black bear’s head, and the fur pelt covering the shoulders in an uneven line above a man’s torso, with human arms terminating in clawed bear paws. Eerily the eyes and ears appeared to be human, the right one milky, as if it hadn’t adapted well to hybridization. The same creature that had tossed the police officer off the overpass, now on guard duty.
Assuming—and hoping—the bear–human hybrid was blind in its right eye, Sam darted to his left. While the hybrid was fast, it relied on one bear leg and one human leg for movement and its gait included a lot of dipping and swaying, especially on turns. Sam imagined he could hear the mismatched bones in its legs and spine grinding together with each ungainly step.
He moved beyond its blind spot to its rear and drove his right foot into the creature’s lower back, shoving it toward the fence and letting its own momentum work against it. With a grunt, the hybrid reached up with both arms to catch itself against the fencing, bear claws scraping against metal, seeking purchase. Approaching from the creature’s blind side, Sam raised the cleaver and brought it down in a two-handed grip. The blow jarred him momentarily before the blade severed the creature’s forearm above the bear portion of the limb. The key was to attack the unnatural joins. The fresher the hybridization, the weaker the connections between one species and the other.
Briefly, the severed forearm dangled from the fence, claws snared in the gaps, before slipping free. The creature’s stump dripped blood, much less than expected for such a grievous wound. Which helped explain why bullet and knife wounds were ineffective. Whatever preternatural energy allowed the hybrids to live in the first place, it kept them ticking even after they suffered what should have been mortal wounds. A dozen Detroit cops had learned that lesson the hard way. Their instincts and logic had failed them. And yet, the key to destroying the hybrids was logical after all. The trick to their undoing was to, literally, undo the hybridization itself. In layman’s terms—or rather, hunter’s terms—that meant strategic dismemberment.
Seemingly unperturbed by the loss of its right arm, the hybrid spun around and swiped at Sam’s face with its remaining bear paw. Sam ducked beneath the formidable set of claws, but the bear limb passed so close to his head that ursine musk filled his nostrils.
Before the hybrid could recover its balance from the missed blow, Sam propped himself on his left palm and drove his right foot into the kneecap of the creature’s human right leg. The joint buckled the wrong way and, with an animal roar, the man-bear fell on its left side, mangled right leg high and dangling unnaturally—even for a hybrid.
But the shattered right leg was not Sam’s target. He planted his foot just below the human elbow of the left arm and hacked off the bear paw, the tip of the cleaver sparking as it struck the busted concrete below.
Undeterred, the man-bear curled its body upward, attempting to lash out with the claws on its one bear leg. With a backhand blow, Sam drove the butt of the cleaver’s handle into the temple of the bear head, just above and in front of a human ear. The one functioning eye rolled upward. The deep-throated bear growl turned into a groggy grumble of pain and confusion. Long enough for Sam to remove the head of the creature. Although the body continued to twitch with preternatural life and the bear’s jaws worked as if attempting human speech, Sam hacked the bear leg free of the human torso. Seconds later, the disparate pieces of flesh sagged and decayed eerily fast as the unnatural energy that had kept the hybrid alive dissipated.
Sam rushed the front door of the factory to join Dean inside.
* * *
The oversized hybrid guarding the rear door charged, determined to keep Dean out—for good. If Dean had to name the creature barreling toward him out of the shadows, he would have said Minotaur. Horned bull’s head on a man’s body: check. Murderous attitude: check. One slight problem with the Minotaur comparison—well, two actually: a pair of problems in the shape of oversized lobster claws for hands.
Dean stood his ground, swinging the long-handled ax behind his right shoulder then bringing it forward in a powerful two-handed grip a moment before the Minotaur’s horns would have gored him. The wedge-shaped blade of the ax drove through the center of the bull’s skull, three inches deep into bone and brain matter. Keeping his grip on the wooden handle kept the twin horns at a safe distance, but the jumbo lobster claws were another matter.
As the Minotaur’s charge continued unabated, lifting Dean clear off the ground and carrying him backward, one claw snapped at Dean’s face. Twisting away, Dean avoided that claw but left himself open to attack from the other. On a sudden impulse, Dean released the ax handle and switched his grip to the base of the horns, one in each hand, his face now close enough to the bull’s head to feel the hot snort of moist air from its flared nostrils. Grabbed the bull by the horns, Dean thought. Now what?
He pulled downward, using the creature’s own momentum against it and, as they both fell, Dean drove his feet into the human torso the same instant he released the horns. If the creature had the full body and mass of a bull, the throw wouldn’t have worked and Dean would have been summarily trampled. Instead, the hybrid slammed into a nearby overflowing dumpster with an impressive thud and fell on its side, dislodging the ax from its skull.
Dean scrambled to his feet and retrieved the weapon.
Groggy, the Minotaur shook its head, seemingly oblivious to the ooze of blood ferrying dislodged bits of gray matter down its broad face. Lobster claws scraped against cracked concrete as the hybrid attempted to rise. Dean had no intention of giving it a second chance to make Winchester kabob with its horns.
He raised the ax overhead. “Party’s over, Surf and Turf.”
The hybrid raised one lobster-claw arm to shield itself from the blow.
Dean took it off at the elbow, the ax blade slicing through flesh and bone at the seam and rebounding off the side of the dumpster with a metallic clang loud enough to wake the dead—or rouse the recently vivisected. If the Winchesters had expected to benefit from the slightest element of surprise, that hope was dashed.
No time to waste.
The Minotaur reached for its severed appendage with the stump of its right arm and the bloody end of the lost claw twitched, like a piece of metal the instant before it surrenders to the pull of a nearby magnet. Once before, Dean had watched in amazement as a dismembered hybrid reassembled itself. As long as the head was attached…
Despite the gruesome head wound, the Minotaur remained a threat. Taking a moment to kick the dismembered claw away, Dean swung the ax overhead, again driving the blade into the split skull. This time the blade bit much deeper, sinking down the back of the skull and spine. Enough damage to subdue the creature, but Dean wouldn’t be fooled again. Changing the angle of attack, he chopped through the thick neck until the head rolled away from the torso. Quick work to remove the other limbs.
With the Minotaur dismemberment complete, Dean loped toward the back door, which hung askew on rusted hinges, and kicked it in. The base of the door scraped the floor as it whipped inward before striking som
ething partially human that emitted a startled squeal-growl. One of many similar creatures, waiting to pounce on Dean as he entered the gutted factory.
Before they circled him, he had a moment to assess the factory’s interior: An expansive and gloomy rectangular space nearly three stories high, exposed girders, banks of window panes, many broken, floor space littered with wooden and metallic debris. A second-story walkway, its safety railing in disrepair, bisected the factory and housed several cramped offices in a single row. Currently dark, the glass-enclosed rooms would have given supervisors a clear view of the factory floor. Across the dark factory—moonlight filtering through the banks of windows and irregular gaps in the ceiling provided the only illumination—Dean caught a glimpse of Sam near the front door, facing a few mismatched problems of his own.
Once again, Dean’s mind tried to make sense of the hybrids. This time, the task remained relatively simple as he faced five identical half-human creatures. All had wiry human torsos, replete with an assortment of tattoos, but grafted hyena heads, arms and legs. At one time, Dean imagined, they had been human teenagers, possibly gang members, captured and hybridized together to form an internal security force for the Chimera. And they operated as a pack, human individuality absent as their hyena heads circled him warily, each one seeking an opening, after which the others would move in a concerted attack to bring him down.
Rather than delay the inevitable, Dean feigned a vulnerability, stepping deeper into the factory and away from the doorway. As expected, one of the hyena-teens slipped behind him, no doubt intending to tear into an Achilles tendon to bring him down. At the first sound of scrabbling claws, Dean swiveled and drilled the butt of the ax handle into the head of the attacking hybrid. With a pained squeal, the hyena-teen stumbled, fell and scrambled away, shaking its head.
Supernatural--Cold Fire Page 2