Supernatural--Cold Fire

by John Passarella

  The Chimera’s mass leaned forward, its center of gravity close to a tipping point if not for the wide base of the tentacles, and the lion’s head stretched forward with a roar. Dean figured that this was the Chimera’s command center, despite all the talking human heads that riddled its flesh like a scattering of warts. Leaning against the wall to catch his breath, he grabbed the hilt of a throwing knife hidden in his belt and fired it at the lion’s head, grinning when the flat blade sank deep into its left eye.

  The resultant roar, accompanied by the indignant screams of all the other Chimera faces, was deafening. Dean doubted the wound was life-threatening, but it struck at the core of the monster, blinding one of its primary eyes and inflicting a substantial amount of trauma to the lion’s brain. The Chimera lurched forward so suddenly, Dean had no time to evade the body slam it delivered. The malleability of the Chimera’s ever-expanding fleshy frame saved him from serious injury, but it smothered him in a suffocating embrace. Turning his head aside, he gasped for the slightest sip of air while the creature’s unrelenting stench burned his eyes. If the military had been involved in the hunt, Dean imagined they’d spare the Chimera’s life in hope of weaponizing its body odor.

  Fortunately for Dean, the creature’s rage was too pure to grant him death by suffocation. It backed away, looped Dean’s leg in a tentacle and hoisted him into the air, spinning around on a procession of lion legs. As Dean dangled upside down in the tentacle’s grip, wishing he’d packed more throwing knives or, hell, maybe a flamethrower, he glanced down and his eyes widened in alarm. In about two seconds, the Chimera would have him directly above the roiling flesh pit. He’d be dropped into that infernal soup of miscreation. Before he could be reassembled as part of a hybrid—or grafted onto the Chimera itself—he’d be disassembled: his head, limbs and organs dispersed but still somehow alive, awaiting whatever horrific reassignment the Chimera deemed appropriate.

  Lion claws tap-tap-tapped across the broken concrete flooring, spinning the Chimera’s body, the tentacle swooping in an arc like an airplane carnival ride. The pit was six feet away… four feet…

  Sam yelled, swinging a section of twisted rebar overhead, striking the tentacle inches away from where it gripped Dean by the ankle. Instantly, the tentacle flinched, flinging Dean two feet from the hellish pit. Skidding forward, his legs flailed wildly over the edge before he could steady himself.

  Below, the mass of flesh rolled like a wave. As it crested beneath him, a forlorn face rose to the surface, wide mouth moaning. Then an enlarged scorpion tail rolled toward him, its tip striking the near wall before sliding back into the mass, giving way to a pair of mismatched arms whose fingers strained to reach Dean’s right leg as it hung over the pit.

  “Hey!” Dean shouted, yanking his leg clear. “I’m not spare parts!”

  “Uh, Dean,” Sam said beside him. “Any suggestions?”

  Dean scrambled to his feet. His hatchet was momentarily lost on the other side of the Chimera, but he’d somehow retained his hold on the hunting knife. Sam held the rusty section of rebar in his left hand, spear-like—though Dean doubted the warped metal would fly true—and a bloody cleaver in his right.

  The Chimera surged toward them, a chaotic but effective pursuit aided by dragon wings, lion legs and seething tentacles.

  “Separate—away from that damned pit!”

  They spread out, Dean to the left, Sam to the right, far enough apart that the Chimera had to choose which Winchester to attack. Normally that would leave the attacker vulnerable on the opposite flank, but the Chimera had faces, arms and clawed legs scattered around its bulk.

  “Now what?” Sam said. “Where do we start?”

  “Anywhere,” Dean said. “Keep whaling on it until it runs out of parts.”

  One of the Chimera’s human arms yanked the throwing knife from the lion’s eye and hurled it at Dean. But the arm protruded from the creature’s flesh at an awkward angle and the throw was obviously unpracticed. Dean dodged the blade easily and heard it skitter across the concrete without taking his eyes off the monster, even for a moment.

  Sam attacked the same instant the Chimera threw the knife, lunging forward to drive the tip of the rebar deep into the rolls of flesh, barely avoiding the powerful claws of a lion as he jumped backward, abandoning the makeshift weapon.

  Dean doubted the attack inflicted much damage on the Chimera. Other than the reflexive swipe with its claws, it hardly reacted to the impalement. Nothing like the roar and screams of the beast when Dean punctured the lion’s head eye with the throwing knife. Almost as if the—

  Two tentacles whipped around in opposing arcs, attempting to loop around Dean’s legs as the Chimera surged forward again. As both tentacles swept across the ground Dean leapt straight up, avoiding the trap, but a third struck the point of his shoulder, spinning him away to land awkwardly and stagger into a concrete pillar.

  Sensing an advantage, the Chimera rumbled forward with frightening acceleration. Dean spun around to the back of the pillar a second before the Chimera struck the front with the full force of its weight. Wary of the long reach of the tentacles, Dean almost fell to his hands and knees as he stumbled away. Then the tip of a tentacle swatted the heel of his back foot and he went down. He rolled away awkwardly as the Chimera shambled around the obstructing column to continue its pursuit.

  Damn thing’s on a mission to destroy me.

  “Sam,” Dean called. “Spare parts!”

  “What?” Sam asked, tracking the Chimera from behind, his cleaver poised to attack the nearest limb.

  “Ignore the spare parts,” Dean said, finally understanding. “They’re like—decoys! Distractions. Sever the original parts.”

  They’d both studied the illustrations from mythological texts. Sam would know what and where to attack. From behind the creature, Sam tossed his jacket over the multi-headed snake tail, blunting its attack long enough for his cleaver to slice through its base. One of those snake heads had been part of the original Chimera body and now it was gone. The Chimera reared back, multiple faces shrieking as the lion head roared. Before making a strategic retreat, Sam snatched the embedded rebar from the Chimera’s body.

  “That’s more like it,” Dean said, approaching carefully but with renewed purpose, hunting knife clutched at his side.

  As the Chimera spun around on its lion legs and mass of tentacles, dragon wings beating furiously, to retaliate against its most recent attacker, Dean caught sight of his hatchet and, a bit farther away, the broken-handled ax. For the moment, Dean held no interest for Chimera-prime. But some of the tortured human and animal faces looking down on him raised quite a vocal protest, in the combined form of howls, screeches, and useless shouts: “No!” “Stop him!” “Kill him!”

  Whoever had most recently attacked the original Chimera body became enemy number one. Though its spare parts became distracted, the Chimera’s attack retained laser focus. As Dean retrieved his other weapons, Sam backed away from the creature, evading the vicious swipes of its original forelegs, his rusty rebar and cleaver poor but more lethal substitutes for a lion tamer’s whip and chair.

  Nevertheless, they’d stumbled upon an effective strategy of alternating tag-team attacks, ultimately targeting the Chimera’s original heads and limbs, whenever they sensed an opening, blinding and dismembering. Dean’s ax and knife became natural extensions of his arms and he entered a zone where he anticipated the path and strike of each claw and tentacle, meeting them with sharp steel, chopping and slicing to devastating effect. Then Sam lopped off the blinded lion’s head. A moment later Dean countered with the decapitation of the similarly incapacitated goat’s head. And it was basically over.

  * * *

  Sam noticed the difference immediately.

  Without the original Chimera heads to take charge, the monster lost any semblance of focus in its attacks. Any distraction set it on a new course, as if a dozen feuding minds vied for control of the massive body. Given time, one of the voices m
ight establish itself as the new leader—at least until the Chimera could reattach or possibly regrow its original heads—but Sam and Dean were unwilling to give the abomination time to recover from internal anarchy. Taking turns, the Winchesters attacked one side, then the other, completing one dismemberment after another.

  When only the legless, armless, headless and tailless husk of the body remained, a bloody mass of quivering flesh and fur, Dean made a quick trip to the Impala and returned with a few containers of lighter fluid. Sam checked on the snake-woman, whose head remained far from her scaled, armless body. She presented no immediate threat. After the Chimera’s body and severed parts burned, her snake-skinned form would succumb to the rapid decaying process, ending any chance of an unnatural resurrection. Spared the gruesome chore of skinning her from head to toe to separate snake from woman, Sam’s relief was palpable. After several intense days and nights of beheadings and dismemberments had turned the Winchesters and the Impala into a mobile slaughterhouse, that was a final mercy.

  He couldn’t recall a time he’d been more grateful at the end of a hunt. Which made him turn his attention to Dean, standing beside him as the Chimera’s flesh sizzled and charred to ash. Twice during the final battle, Sam had noticed the intensity with which Dean had torn into the Chimera, first when he’d been backed against the wall and later, when he’d faced an onslaught of tentacles. Though Dean insisted he was in control of himself, Sam couldn’t help but worry that the Mark seized any opportunity for violence to take over.

  Dean noticed Sam staring at him. “What?”

  “You okay, Dean?”

  “Other than bruises,” Dean said, spreading his arms, “I’m fine.”

  His tone seemed casual, rather than evasive.

  “And the Mark never…?”

  “Took control?” Dean finished. “No. Of course not.”

  Sam nodded, wanting that to be true. But took in the surfeit of blood smeared across his brother’s face, the torn and bloody clothes, and yet more blood slowly dripping from his shirt cuffs and fingertips. As if he’d bathed in the stuff.

  Again, Dean noticed the wordless appraisal, took note of his own appearance, smiled and shook his head.

  “What?”

  “You’re worried about how I look?”

  “Well,” Sam began, cleared his throat. “Now that you mention it.”

  “Dude, look in the mirror.”

  Sam examined his own hands, streaked with tacky red fluid layered over dried, almost black blood, caked into his knuckles. His shredded jacket was sodden and speckled with gore, from finger-sized chunks to confetti-sized bits. Neither his pants nor his shoes had been spared the reeking mess of the slaughtered hybrids and their maker. If Sam and Dean had brought a spare set of clothes, their outfits would have certainly ended up in the Chimera bonfire without a second thought. Nothing worth trying to salvage in a basic spin cycle.

  Without a mirror, Sam couldn’t examine his own face, but he imagined it looked no better than his brother’s frightening visage. They looked like a pair of serial killers after a murderous bender, the stuff of nightmares.

  “Point taken,” Sam said.

  Feeling vindicated, Dean replied with an emphatic nod, “Damn right!”

  Nevertheless, Sam couldn’t forget the unbridled glee with which Dean had attacked the Chimera. Though not without satisfaction, hunting was grim work. Sam never considered it a source of entertainment. It was a job. Sometimes the killing felt like a necessary evil. They’d both had to cross some gray lines over the years, often with regrets and sometimes resentments that lingered.

  They’d agreed to be honest with each other. No more secrets. Dean said he remained in control of himself, that he wore the Mark without it controlling him. But they both knew that couldn’t last. The Mark would eventually have its way. And when the scales tilted, when the Mark claimed its inevitable hold over Dean, would his brother even know that moment had arrived? Or would his own will be swept away as he lost the battle for control? And if that fateful day arrived, would Dean still retain enough of himself to admit the truth to Sam?

  FOUR

  The newest Braden Heights housing development remained a work in progress.

  Yet from Day One, the builder had made sure to have the decorative wooden sign erected at the eventual entrance, facing the busy highway, with COVENTRY CROSSING emblazoned in a flowing script font, painted green, very official, as if the houses had already been built and were home to many happy families. If not for the white vinyl banner below the wooden sign, stating FAMILY HOMES IN THE $200,000S – COMING SOON! A year later, the permanent sign and a new vinyl banner with an updated enticement remained, with twenty percent of the projected 110 homes unfinished. Traveling from one of the developments to the other, finished homes gave way to skeletal wooden frameworks of future homes, which gave way to several lots which had seen utility work completed but little else.

  Since Sal Fanizzi operated his bulldozer on the edge of the development farthest from the finished homes and the families living in them, he had no qualms about blasting the volume on the old radio he’d duct-taped to the window of the cab. Listening and singing along to the classic rock station helped the day go by faster, especially when stuck in the noisy bulldozer, cut off from the rest of the construction team. All afternoon he’d worked his way along the packed earth roads between the lots, clearing the building sites of trees and brush.

  Driving from one end of the development to the other seemed like traveling through time. It reminded him of fast-forwarding through a movie or watching time-lapse photography. Head toward the finished homes and you jumped to the future where the homes had already been built. Turn around and drive away from the completed section and you traveled into the past, watching roofs and walls vanish, lumber come down to reveal rectangular foundations, exposed earth and finally open land, nothing but trees and brush and the occasional patch of wildflowers. At the moment, Sal worked in the past while listening to a commercial-free block of music from what seemed an equally distant time.

  He’d been tasked with clearing the far perimeter of the land the builder had purchased for the development. Sal couldn’t believe this preliminary work hadn’t been done already, but he’d heard some whispers about “bad mojo” and the “creeps” or the “willies” that others had experienced while working this portion of the property. Hardly mattered if it was the guys getting their hands dirty or the supervisors directing the operation, they all seemed to find something better to do a little farther away and the work never got done. Sal had laughed, called it a bunch of superstitious bullshit. Guys looking for any excuse to get out of some work. How long before one of them said he spotted Bigfoot roaming through the woods? Eventually, the task of clearing the final bit of land fell in Sal’s lap. So he put on a brave face, tugged down his trucker hat and told his foreman, “No problem.”

  Naturally, within an hour or so, the other guys had wandered off and he worked the final lots alone. The bulldozer’s blade rumbled through the dirt and ripped out the snarls of brush same as anywhere else. Yes, the air seemed unnaturally still, the breeze from earlier in the day gone, but on the “unusual” meter, that hardly budged the needle. True, he neither saw nor heard any signs of wildlife out here, but why would he? The powerful growl of the bulldozer’s engine combined with the gouging destruction of the blade would have scared off any bird, mammal or reptile with the slightest instinct for self-preservation. As for the occasional chill Sal felt down his spine, he imagined he might be coming down with the flu bug going around.

  He made a mental note to toss back some vitamin C and zinc tablets soon as he got home. In the meantime, he sang along to the radio, Mellencamp’s “Rain on the Scarecrow” segueing into Zevon’s “Werewolves of London.”

  Besides, he was almost done with that section of the property. All that was left was the removal of a stand of dead trees, not a bit of foliage on them. The trunks had shed most of their bark, their branches brittle, s
keletal limbs. A bunch of dried timber too stubborn to fall down and crumble to mulch or turn into a massive buffet for termites. Enter Sal Fanizzi to help the process along.

  If he was honest with himself and beyond earshot of any of the superstitious bozos on his crew, he would admit how odd it was for this one stand of trees to have died in the middle of lush growth. They were like a stain on the landscape. He wondered if the previous owner of the land had dumped something toxic on the back corner of his land. Out of sight, out of mind. Whatever it was, it happened long ago and the effect hadn’t spread. Tucked away in the cab of the bulldozer, Sal had no worries about exposing himself to whatever might have killed those trees. He simply took a great deal of satisfaction in watching them tumble over, their withered roots tugging clumps of earth up with them, giving way almost too easily after all the superstitious mumblings had bestowed this block of the land with almost mystical powers.

  As one tree after another toppled over, seemingly in slow motion, Sal accelerated into the muck and drove them back beyond the perimeter, backing up and circling around to repeat the process as many times as needed. Once the trees were well clear of the final lots, he dropped the blade into the tossed earth, plowing the excess back into the darkness of the surrounding woods and packing the earth left behind in the process.

  * * *

  Mangling the lyrics to Springsteen’s “The Rising,” Sal smiled as the last of the dead trees fell.

  Focused on the removal of the trees and the bragging rights he now possessed for finishing what the others had been too scared to attempt, he never noticed the long shapes scooped up within the mounds of earth. Partially obscured from view by the bulldozer’s massive blade, the shapes offered no more resistance than the withered trees. Rootless and silent, they made no protest to this latest mistreatment, beyond the fluttering of ragged cloth that continued to cling to them after so many years.