A woman with frizzy red hair grabbed Dean’s arm and said urgently, “A man is pinned back there, bleeding and dying!”
The lights in the ceiling of the promenade had burnt out. With the partial collapse of the upper box seats, the promenade looked more like a tunnel. Vibrations continued to shake the walls and the floor under their feet. To Dean, it felt like a ticking bomb. If they weren’t careful, the whole friggin’ shebang would come down on their heads.
The first vendor stall looked like it had gone a couple of rounds with an auto compactor. A white-aproned burger-flipper had the misfortune of leaning over his grill when the first slab of concrete fell, striking his back and pulping the upper half of his torso. Flames burned his clothes in the few patches not soaked with blood. Sam crouched and stepped through the gap that led to the remainder of the promenade. Dean followed, looking nervously over his head a half-dozen times, expecting the next slab of death-dealing concrete to fall the moment he became inattentive.
The next several stalls had suffered damaged from falling debris. One contained a dead woman whose head had been crushed by a massive chunk of concrete. By another was a lifeless man who had been impaled through the eye by an exposed piece of rebar that still held him upright. Everywhere Dean looked, blood had spattered the walls and floor. Closer to the exits than the fans, the other vendors had probably been the first to flee when the destruction began.
A pronounced shudder shook the stadium. Several chunks of dislodged concrete fell around them. Above them, frightened cries rang out from people in the upper box suites. Belatedly, Dean wondered if the first responders had turned off natural gas lines feeding into the stadium. That should be standard protocol, but with the oni’s powers in the mix, crucial details might have been overlooked.
“We’re courting disaster here, Sammy,” Dean said.
“I know.”
As the promenade opened up, beyond the collapsed upper box sections, they moved down to the upper tier of seats. They found a swarthy man on his knees with his right arm pinned against the back of the last row of bleachers by a slab of concrete wedged against one of the support struts. His eyes squeezed shut in pain, the man moaned softly. Blood ran down his arm and dripped from his fingertips.
Sam pulled Dean aside.
“Arm’s a goner,” Sam whispered.
“So we go 127 Hours on him, ’cause I left my penknife in the car.”
“No,” Sam said. “But that concrete might be the only thing stopping the next section from coming down.”
“Shove and run?”
Sam nodded. He crouched beside the man. “Buddy, can you hear me?”
The man’s eyes fluttered open and took a moment to focus. “What … ?”
“Can you hear me?”
The man nodded. Dean feared he was slipping into shock.
“Mister—Sir, what’s your name?” Sam asked.
“Ruben,” he said softly, attempting a weak smile. “Ruben Cordova.”
“Ruben, we have a situation here,” Sam said evenly. “Are you with me?”
The man nodded again.
“When we shove this concrete block out of the way, I need you to head down to the field. Got it?”
Again the man nodded, then gave a hesitant thumbs up with his free hand.
Dean stood next to Sam against the concrete slab, closer to the support strut than to the pinned man. They would try to push it away from the strut, releasing the pressure on the man’s pinned arm.
“On three,” Dean said. “One … two … THREE!”
The upper tip of the slab screeched against the strut, shifting a couple of inches, but not enough to fall. Ruben cried out in pain. “Dios mío!”
“That woke him up,” Dean said grimly.
“Again,” Sam said.
On the next count of three, the slab of concrete scraped away from the strut and fell with a thunderous impact, breaking in half. The sound of shrieking metal filled the air. Ruben climbed awkwardly to his feet, his ruined arm limp against his body. Sam caught him under his good arm and helped him upright and into the aisle.
The three of them rushed down the rows of bleacher seating, some of which contained the sprawled and bloodied bodies of those struck and killed by flying debris.
Behind them, steel screeched and large chunks of concrete fell like mortar rounds. Glass popped and shattered, pelting them like hail. Alarmed cries rang out from above. Turning back, Dean saw groups of people flailing around inside the box enclosures. Their only exit was the walkway that ran in front of the box seats and it had become a treacherous incline.
A paramedic hurried over to Sam and Ruben and led the Hispanic man across the field to where the others had gathered. The police had begun to lead people, single file, to the cutout in the cyclone fencing.
“Sam, we’ve got people trapped up top!”
A frightening tremor shook the ground beneath them. Cracks raced under their feet and the rows of bleachers started to collapse into the foundations below.
On the far side of the field more metal shrieked, demanding Dean’s attention.
“That’s not good.”
Suspended on two stilt-like metal struts, a Jumbotron and scoreboard overlooked the outfield and the fans who had sought shelter there. The large screen tilted forward as one of the struts buckled.
“Run! Get off the field!” Sam yelled, waving them toward the third base line fence.
Many stared at Sam as if he had lost his mind, but a few looked up and saw the massive screen leaning over them. The sound of screaming people joined the screeches of the metal. Explosive pops, like gunshots, rang out, as the bolts supporting the structure snapped one after another. One side of the Jumbotron swung like a trapdoor, seconds from dropping to the field below.
A man in a chambray shirt and jeans ran to his young son, who was sitting on the field, pulling up blades of grass and blowing them off his open palm. The man scooped up the kid and ran toward the infield. A police officer ran to intercept him.
“Look out!” Sam shouted, pointing frantically overhead.
The screen broke free and dropped, narrow end down. Its long shadow fell across the cop’s path. Stunned, he looked up, too late to move. The massive screen crushed his skull and shattered his spine. The running man covered his son’s eyes and veered toward the hole in the fence.
Dean turned back to the collapsing row of upper box seats.
The nearest section pressed against the backs of the aluminum bleachers. Some of the people climbed over the railing and dropped down on to them. Dean waved to the people in the far section to follow the walkway down to the upper tier bleachers. They needed to get everyone down before the next suite section collapsed.
“Anybody trapped up there?” Dean asked every third person who passed him. Most shook their heads, watching where they placed their feet. Whole sections of the bleachers had become treacherous as well. The concrete on which they were mounted continued to crumble. Once survivors had climbed over the upper box walkway railing, Sam directed them to the picnic patio area where the concrete steps leading to the field hadn’t begun to erode yet.
As the last few people reached the railing, another tremendous shudder shook the stadium. “Run!” Dean shouted. “To the field!”
Something about the stadium felt malevolent to Dean, like it was making the most of its last chance to take more lives. But he dismissed the notion as nonsense. The malevolence he sensed surely came from the oni, infecting the building with its mojo, or whatever the hell it called its destructive power.
The Winchesters were the last to reach the field. As they hurried toward the hole in the fence, Dean glanced at the redbrick ticket office and administration building. The rolling tremors were tearing it apart. Brick by brick it crumbled. By this time, Dean hoped fervently, the place should be empty. From the parking lot, he heard new waves of emergency vehicle sirens and the harsh blare of fire truck horns. Sam slipped through the fence before him. As Dean ducked throu
gh, the ground shook beneath him and he almost fell flat on his face.
The parking lot was crowded with cars bunching up near the exits and people wandering around looking for lost family members, trying to remember where they had parked, or seeking medical attention from one of the half-dozen ambulances with overworked paramedics. Another tremor hit and one of the cars seemed to tilt at a crazy angle. Dozens of people stumbled and fell, and twice that number screamed in terror. Car alarms joined the chorus of emergency sirens and human misery.
“What the hell?” Dean said.
Sam saw it too. “The ground’s opening up.”
Fractures and cracks snaked across the asphalt parking lot, expanding into crevices wide enough to capture car tires and human legs. What worried Dean was the logjam of cars whose drivers inched impatiently toward the exits.
“Dude, I’ve got a bad feeling,” Dean said grimly. “All those cars.”
Sam nodded. “Oni bombs.”
As Sam spoke, a car’s rear end dropped a foot. Metal screeched as the axle broke, spraying sparks.
Dean raced across the parking lot, yelling, “Leave your cars! Get out! Run!”
Sam ran in the other direction, shouting similar instructions.
A cop caught Dean by the arm. “Hey, buddy!”
Dean whirled to face him. “Get everyone out of this lot now!”
“Yes, in an orderly—”
“No time for that!” Dean said. “These cars are gonna blow!”
“We’re trying to avoid a riot here, pal.”
“Use your loudspeaker,” Dean insisted. “Get them out now!”
“Listen here—”
With the sound of tortured metal, another car fell into a new crevice. Someone yelled, “Fire!”
An instant later, a gas tank explosion lifted the car in the air with a roaring fireball.
The cop released Dean and raced for his cruiser. A moment later he was instructing everyone over the loudspeaker to abandon their vehicles and run from the lot.
About friggin’ time, Dean thought.
He flinched as another explosion roared thirty feet away. A burning piece of car shrapnel whistled past his face. “Son of a bitch!” he exclaimed, ducking instinctively.
That was lucky, he thought. Another inch or two and …
Dean scanned the surging crowd intently.
“Where the hell are you?” he whispered. “Come out, come out, wherever …”
Everyone was running and stumbling toward the exits, a sea of panic and raw fright. Against that wave of frantic motion, one tall, calm figure stuck out like a sore thumb. The oni stood on the far side of the gated parking lot, near a blue van with a broad white stripe, the handle of a cane held under his overlapping hands. He no longer wore a bowler hat. Dean could clearly see a wave of bright red hair with two bone-white horns angled backward over a lumpy forehead. And in the middle of his forehead—
“Okay, that’s new.”
Dean’s cell phone was ringing. With all the other human and mechanical sounds washing over him, he almost missed it. After checking the number on the display, he pressed the connect button.
“Bobby!” he exclaimed. “Where the hell are you?”
Static warped the voice on the other end.
“… with McClary at stadium … see the sumbitch … the fence …”
“Yeah, he’s hard to miss,” Dean said. “Two horns and three eyes.”
“… meet … stop …”
The call dropped before Dean could answer.
He cupped his hands over his mouth and called Sam, pointing when he had his brother’s attention. They sprinted toward the fence.
Dean saw an abandoned cherry-red Ford F-150 pickup truck with the driver’s door wide open and had an idea.
Twenty-Six
Bobby rode with McClary in his cruiser, buckled up and hanging on in the cramped front seat as McClary raced through red lights with his siren blaring and took turns so sharply the car’s suspension was pushed to the limit. With the oni’s power at work, Bobby worried a catastrophic accident was inevitable. At the speeds McClary was attaining, a fatal head-on collision or multiple rollovers were distinct possibilities.
Once the extent of the stadium collapse had become evident, based upon the progressively dire string of emergency calls coming into the station, McClary abandoned the traffic and security cam feed monitors, placing greater importance on his presence at the disaster scene. For him, the decision was a no-brainer. Why examine camera feeds looking for the oni when it had basically announced where it was? Bobby agreed, but wanted to arrive in one unbroken piece. Though McClary had accepted the supernatural nature of this particular perp, Bobby doubted he fully appreciated the consequences of dealing with a creature that could tilt the odds so drastically in its favor.
When McClary swerved into oncoming traffic to get around a line of cars blocking the passing lane and nearly slammed into a Chevy Silverado before darting back, Bobby spoke up. “We’re playing with rigged dice here, Sergeant.”
McClary frowned. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“This oni specializes in bad accidents,” Bobby reminded him, “and you’re dealing him face cards.”
McClary eased up on the accelerator a bit and nodded nervously. “Right. Right. The crazy stuff. I keep forgetting.”
His NASCAR tryout would have been interrupted in a couple of blocks anyway, as panicked drivers exiting the stadium snarled up traffic in all directions, maneuvering through the congestion as if blindfolded. The harsh crunch of metal on metal sounded repeatedly as erratic driving led to a string of fender benders. Nobody stopped to exchange insurance information. By some unspoken mutual agreement, their only concern was fleeing the disaster area as quickly as possible.
If McClary hadn’t been forced to slow down, Bobby might have missed the oni, standing calmly outside the parking lot fence on Ellisburg Pike near a blue van with a white stripe. He still wore the dark suit and held his ironbound cane in a two-handed grip, but the bowler hat was gone, revealing the twin bone-like horns, which Bobby judged had grown longer since their last encounter.
“We got him,” Bobby said, pointing.
He called Dean’s cell, but the connection crackled with static and became fainter the closer McClary’s cruiser came to the oni. Bobby caught the sergeant’s arm and nodded toward the tall figure.
“Look how focused he is.”
“Like he’s in a trance,” McClary observed.
“Let’s not spook him.”
McClary nodded, turning on his lightbar without sounding his siren as he edged across three lanes of traffic and parked at the curb a hundred feet from the oni.
Bobby followed McClary to the trunk of the cruiser.
“Let’s change this up,” McClary said, switching out the magazine in his automatic. “Armor-piercing rounds,” he explained. “These might cut through that impenetrable hide of his.” He handed Bobby the shotgun. “Try this on him.”
“Well, I won’t miss,” Bobby said as he hefted the shotgun, “that’s for damn sure.”
They hurried along the curb, McClary giving Bobby a wide berth.
Inside the parking lot, another car exploded in a prodigious ball of flame, the roar rising briefly over the sound of emergency sirens and car alarms. People screamed and staggered toward the exit, squeezing between and climbing over abandoned cars. Beneath them, the ground vibrated with fluctuating intensity, like waves breaking on the shore, retreating, and surging again. Bobby wondered if the oni could create destructive harmonic patterns in the earth.
When they were within twenty feet of the oni, McClary stopped and raised the automatic in his right hand, braced with his left palm. Conscious of the real possibility of friendly fire in this situation with this particular opponent, Bobby stepped several paces to the side.
The crumbling stadium held the oni’s attention, seemingly to the exclusion of all else.
Now or never, Bobby thought.
&nb
sp; “Die, you motherless bastard,” McClary said an instant before he squeezed the trigger. Bobby followed a split-second later with a blast from the shotgun.
As Dean had guessed, the driver of the red pickup had abandoned the truck in such a rush that they had left the keys in the ignition. Dean unlocked the passenger door for Sam—who jumped in a moment later—before trying to start the engine. His first attempt failed. On his second attempt, the engine turned over briefly, then stalled.
“No, no, no,” Dean said bitterly. “This is small potatoes.”
“Dean?”
“It’s a theory.”
“I’m all ears.”
“A disaster this size, I’m betting the oni is redlined,” Dean said, “maxed out. He might be vulnerable now, if we hit him fast.”
“You know this how?”
“A piece of shrapnel whizzed by my ear.”
“And … ?”
“It didn’t hit me,” Dean said. “An inch to the left and I’d have a skull skylight. I was lucky.”
Sam nodded, understanding. “You think he’s spinning too many plates.”
“In his case, juggling too many hatchets.”
“Dean!”
Dean saw it. Bobby and McClary were on the other side of the fence, sneaking up on the oni as he focused on orchestrating the stadium collapse and exacerbating the ensuing mayhem. McClary aimed high and took a head shot. From where the brothers sat, it looked like he hit the oni, whose head twitched to the side, but inflicted no apparent damage, before Bobby hit him with a shotgun.
They finally had the oni’s attention.
The oni turned toward its attackers and McClary proceeded to empty his magazine, aiming high with no evident effect. One of the bullets ricocheted, gouging a furrow in the side panel of the van. Another ricochet sprayed sparks off the ground.
The oni walked toward the two men, raising his cane. Bobby worked the pump-action shotgun and sprayed him from head to toe as he advanced.
Dean tried the ignition once more and this time the engine turned over, running roughly for a few moments then roaring to life as he gave it gas.
“Buckle up!”
He glanced up and saw the oni catch McClary by the wrist of his gun hand and squeeze. As McClary grimaced in pain, Bobby pressed the shotgun muzzle under the oni’s chin and fired his last shell. The oni released McClary, who dropped to his knees, and swung his cane in a backhanded blow, dislodging the shotgun from Bobby’s hands. With his free hand, the oni grabbed the front of Bobby’s suit, lifted him bodily off the ground and hurled him into the highway. Bobby slammed lengthwise against the windshield of a gray Subaru Outback, fracturing the safety glass, and rolled down the hood of the car.
Supernatural 10 - Rite of Passage Page 22