“This is Federal jurisdiction now,” the man behind the wheel called back. “We’ve got a plane waiting at Malcolm County Airport. Are you the only two riding along?”
“Looks that way,” Sam said.
“Where’s everybody else?”
Dean glanced out of the back window, where various members of state and local law enforcement had joined with the re-enactors in responding to the stampede.
“Rounding up horses. Looks like they stuck us with thegg stiff.” He shrugged. “What are you gonna do?”
SEVENTEEN
The mobile crime scene truck rolled away from the battlefield and out of the parking lot, trundling down the country highway away from the town. It was bumpier than the road that led into town, and through the windows Sam saw the country landscape whipping past in a steady stream of green hills and blue sky.
“If those demons were taking the time to tear the whole field apart with cannon fire,” Sam said, “they must have been pretty convinced that the noose was in Beauchamp’s casket.”
“So let’s take a look.”
Sam eyed the coffin.
“Now?” he said doubtfully. “You sure?”
“No problem. Find me a screwdriver.”
“No, I mean, you really want to open this up?”
“That’s why we’re here, isn’t it?”
“We don’t even know what’s going to happen.”
Dean let out a breath.
“The coffin’s pretty obviously not stopping the noose’s power. So we need to get it out and destroy it.”
“Just let me try Bobby first.” Sam dug out his cell phone and dialed, waiting while it rang and finally went to voicemail. “He’s not answering.”
“That’s it, then.” Dean looked around. The back of the morgue vehicle was lined with steel cabinets and swing-bins of carefully stored instruments, chemical compounds, and medical tools. “Here.” He picked up a shovel, and crouching beside the coffin wedged it underneath the lid. “This’ll do.”
The driver angled the rearview mirror, glowering back at them.
“Hey!” he shouted. “You know we aren’t supposed to tamper with evidence.”
“It’s okay,” Dean said. “We’ve got prior authorization.”
“From who?”
“Uh, Colonel... Sanders.”
“What?”
Sam shot his brother a glaring WTF stare. Dean just shrugged and twisted the shovel handle as hard as he could. Something inside the casket cracked wide open, and the hinges let out a low, creaking sound as the lid scraped upward.
“You guys aren’t doing anything to that coffin, are you?”
Ignoring him, Dean levered the shovel down harder. Sam squatted next to him, hooking his fingers under the lid, flinching and catching his breath as he pried it upward.
“Whoa,” Dean recoiled. “More stinky smell? Really?”
Sam shrugged and covered his nose. The back tires of the truck bumped upward, seeming to agitate the smell even more. It wasn’t quite as rancid as the reek from the mass grave—but it was more intense, more preserved somehow, and spicy, like canned jerky that had been sequestered away somewhere for a century and a half.
Peering down, Sam looked into the casket’s interior. It contained bones, most of them shifted to one side, where they looked smaller and somehow random. One of the ribs was tangled in what looked like an old suspender, complete with a metal buckle. There was a rusty old revolver that had long ago started reverting into its component parts.
“Oh, man. What happened?” Dean poked through the rest of their stained and brittle remains, looking like a kid whose Christmas toy had arrived broken before he’d gotten a chance to play with it. He picked up the toppled-loose skull and set it aside.
Shards of human pottery and a pair of broken-down hobnailed boots were all that remained of Jubal Beauchamp. There were tattered gray rags of his uniform and a few brass buttons rattling around the bottom like loose teeth, and that was all.
“Talk about no prize in the Crackerjacks,” Dean said. “Where’s the noose?”
“It’s not here.”
“Hey!” the driver was looking back at them. “Hey!”
“Well, where is it then?”
“I don’t know, Dean.”
“Why don’t we ask Johnny Reb here.” Dean picked up Beauchamp’s skull again and turned it around to face him, Hamlet-style. “Hey, Jubal. Where’s the noose, huh, buddy?” He turned to Sam. “What do you know, he ain’t talking either.”
“Dean—”
But Dean wasn’t looking at him anymore. He was staring directly at the skull, still in his hand, at the thin dark tendrils of smoky-colored substance that had begun to drift out of its empty sockets.
“Uh, Dean...?”
The black substance began to float upward, still sluggish, as if awakened from a long sleep. There was something swirling in its depths, Sam realized, something alive and hideously aware.
Moa’ah.
The stuff floating in front of him swirled around Sam’s head with slow, exploratory curiosity, forming a ring that, under the circumstances, reminded him of a noose. It reminded him of the way squid-ink moved through water... except that it was drifting through the air, hanging suspended in the back of the truck.
For a second it appeared to hook around in the shape of a question mark. Then it tightened.
Sam’s head began to throb, as if they’d just gone through an abrupt change in barometric pressure. He felt dizzy, sick to his stomach, like a man who’s just realized he’s coming down with a particularly nasty strain of the flu.
“Don’t look at it,” Dean said.
“Don’t...?” Sam arched an eyebrow. “Is this a Raiders of the Lost Ark thing?”
“Damn it, Sam—”
“Okay, all right, I’m not looking.”
“And no sudden moves,” Dean said. “I think it’s still waking up. It’s been locked in the dark for a long time.” His eyes darted, following the motion of the thing in the air. “But pretty soon it’s going to realize it’s been messed with and get pissed.
“I’m going to put the skull down,” he added.
“Good idea.”
As gently as possible, he set it back into the coffin. The Moa’ah that had emerged from the eye-sockets began slithering back down, pouring itself inside. It was as if, given the choice of attacking a stranger or staying with the human remains that had been its companion for the last hundred and sixty years, it had chosen the familiar option.
At least for now.
“What in God’s name...?” the driver bawled from up in front. He turned around to peer angrily into the back. “The whole truck stinks to high heaven!”
“Sorry.” Dean’s voice was a shaky attempt at normalcy. “Army beans for breakfast.”
“You can’t—”
“Look out!” Sam shouted.
The driver looked back around, but it was too late. The station wagon that was parked up ahead of them, directly across the double-yellow line, was less than twenty feet away when he hit the brakes. The forensics van was still going sixty miles an hour when it slammed into it broadside, T-boning it with the full impact of its one and a half tons of steel.
For an instant the whole world went red. Then, one by one, Sam’s senses began returning.
He heard glass shattering, and he and Dean were pitched forward with the force of impact, bouncing off the metal cabinets and canisters of supplies.
A jar of foul-smelling fluid burst open underneath him, filling the air with the acrid spirits of formaldehyde. The coffin full of bones flew forward too, a prisoner of its own velocity. Thrown by the momentum, the open iron box shot straight ahead as if fired by some invisible slingshot, smashing straight up into the driver’s seat, and there was a third burst of glass as the van’s windshield gave way.
Up in the cab, the driver started to scream. Vaguely, like images glimpsed through a foggy windowpane, Sam saw the black substance envelopin
g the man’s head. It did something to his face. He thrashed violently in his seatbelt, arms hooking the air, fighting to get loose.
Then the screaming stopped.
In the silence that followed, Sam became aware of a squelching, sucking sound coming from the front of the van, from where the driver was sitting. The Moa’ah was still up there, he realized, still wrapped around the driver’s face. Absurdly, his mind gibbered with an immortal line from ‘A Visit from Saint Nicholas.’
It encircled his head like a wreath.
There was a tinkling of broken glass and spilled tools behind him as Dean lifted himself up from the floor of the van with a groan.
“Sammy? You all right?”
“Yeah.” Except he wasn’t. His shoulder ached, and his right hip felt as if someone had gone to work on it with a sledgehammer. Nevertheless, he picked himself up out of the rubble. “I’m going to go up and check on the driver.”
Limping a little, he ducked down and crept his way forward toward the front seat. For a moment his attention was completely arrested by the view through the smashed-in windshield. The van had knocked the station wagon completely off the highway, throwing it sideways into a ditch on the far right side of the road where it lay, half-accordioned, the hood hissing steam. The entire wood-paneled side had been punched in, but Sam could see that it was empty. Whoever had parked it lengthwise across the double yellow line had simply abandoned it there.
He shifted his attention. Directly in front of the van, not far from the grille, Beauchamp’s coffin lay in the middle of the road where the impact of the collision had flung it. The coffin had landed sideways and Sam saw Beauchamp’s bones strewn out across the asphalt. Only a cluster of them remained in the coffin.
He couldn’t see the skull, but it had to be out there somewhere. The other bones looked like pieces from some extravagantly complex dice game whose results determined the cosmic fate of all parties involved.
Finally, he glanced sideways at the driver’s seat. He could see the back of the driver’s head, angled slightly to the left as if the man were checking his side-view mirror.
“Hey, buddy.” He didn’t really expect an answer.
Taking one last step forward—so that he was in line with the driver and passenger seats—Sam tapped the man’s shoulder, then shook it. The head lolled around to reveal a gaping red hole where his face should have been. The driver’s eyes, nose and mouth had been scooped out, all the way back to the occipital region of his skull. The front of his shirt was a bib of gore, gray brain matter and windshield glass.
Sam’s mind flashed to the man’s screams, and the sucking sounds that followed.
The Moa’ah did this to him. But why ?
Then he saw it.
Beauchamp’s skull had fallen out of the coffin during its brief, violent trip forward.
And it had landed on the driver’s lap.
He looked closer. Hovering just inside the eye sockets, on the brink of visibility, was the pulsating black substance.
It might not have been fully awake before, Sam thought, but it’s awake now. And Dean was right: it is pissed.
“Sam?” Dean’s voice called from the back. “How bad is it up there?”
Sam didn’t answer. He scarcely breathed.
Gingerly, like a man picking up a nest of swarming hornets, he made himself lift Beauchamp’s skull, gripping it from the back. He could feel the Moa’ah humming around inside, filling its hollow bony hemisphere, like a cell phone set on vibrate. He held the skull briefly in his fingertips, then turned and hurled it as hard as fast as he could through the hole in the blown-out windshield out onto the road in front of them. It clattered once and rolled across the pavement, coming to rest next to a black boot.
“Thank you, Sam. How considerate of you to do our work for us.”
Sam looked up at the source of the sardonic voice.
Perhaps twenty yards ahead, a group of five re-enactors in Union and Confederate uniforms and hats were standing shoulder to shoulder in the middle of the road. They smiled, and their eyes flicked jet-black.
“Dean,” Sam felt a surge of exhaustion, “demons.”
“I’ll alert the media,” Dean muttered.
“Sam and Dean Winchester,” the Confederate soldier next to the skull said, “again we prove that there’s nothing you can possess we cannot take away.”
Dean groaned.
“Is he quoting Raiders?”
“It seemed appropriate,” the demon said. “Nice hazmat suits, by the way. Got tired of the FBI outfits, did you?”
Without waiting for a response, the demon bent down and picked up Beauchamp’s skull, holding it at arm’s length to better investigate the Moa’ah pulsating inside it.
“Where’s the noose, boys?” he asked.
“It’s not there,” Dean said.
“What?”
“You heard me, ugly.” Dean had squeezed past Sam now and into the passenger seat, opening the door and climbing out. “Looks like you fellas got hold of some false intel.”
“Don’t bother lying to us.”
“We’re not,” Sam said. “The noose wasn’t in the coffin. See for yourself.”
Still holding Beauchamp’s skull in one hand, the soldier demon moved forward toward the casket, the others following behind. Two of them squatted down, searching through the bones and debris.
“He’s right,” one of them confirmed. “It’s not here.”
“Looks like you just bit the bag and stepped out the door, sunshine,” Dean said. “Don’t say we didn’t—”
The Confederate soldier roared a snarl of furious rage. Then he threw the skull down as hard as he could. It cracked, but didn’t shatter.
“I wouldn’t do that,” Sam said, climbing out next to his brother.
Ignoring him, the demon brought a boot down on the skull—hard.
Two things happened at once.
The skull broke open under his heel with a brisk ceramic crack, and the Moa’ah—in its full awakened and angry state—came spurting up and outward, rounding in midair and plunging back toward the demon with a violent spearlike thrust.
Sam had never heard a demon scream quite like it. The Moa’ah eviscerated its meat-suit in less than a second, ripping directly through the Confederate soldier’s chest cavity and almost splitting it in two.
The demon shrieked and flashed out, but before its parts even hit the asphalt, the Moa’ah had changed course again, arcing back on the other demons gathered around Beauchamp’s bones. It tore through demons two and three with a speed and fury that was almost too fast to see, and flashed around to wipe out the last two with a single slashing downward stroke.
Then it swirled back around, settling among dissolute bones in the coffin that had been its home for the past century and a half. The lid swung shut with a clank.
“Whoa,” Dean said. “Should we run now?”
“Yeah. Running’s good.”
“So,” Dean said. “How far do you think it is back to town?”
“Couple miles.”
“Great.”
Sam glanced at him.
“What?”
“‘Cuz, you know,” Dean patted his flat stomach, “I could really use the exercise.”
They both spun around and broke into a sprint.
They hadn’t gone twenty feet when they saw the police lights careening straight up the road at them from the direction of town, coming too fast to dodge.
EIGHTEEN
The cruiser’s tires scraped to a halt in front of them and Sheriff Daniels sprang out of the car, handcuffs already in hand. The ferocity of her expression alone would have smelted steel.
“You two have no idea how much trouble you’re in,” she said. “You’re both—”
“Under arrest,” Dean finished. “Yeah, we get it.”
“Up against the car.” Jamming Sam forward, Daniels jerked his hands back and clapped the metal bracelets on his wrists, frisking him thoroughly. “Spread you
r legs.”
“Hey,” Dean said, “don’t forget me.”
Daniels stuffed Sam into the back seat of the cruiser. From the passenger seat, her big swag-bellied deputy—Jerry was the name that Dean fished out of his memory—stepped out, ready with the sap should things turn ugly. At first Dean thought the guy was going to be the one to frisk him, proving yet again that his bad luck was coming in streaks. But then the deputy saw the wreckage of the truck in the road ahead and kept walking.
“Hey, sheriff,” he shouted back. “You’re gonna want to check this out.”
“Hold on.” Daniels quickly cuffed Dean, and he felt her hands go over his body, patting him down roughly.
“Whoa,” Dean said. “Try a little tenderness, huh?”
“What’s this?” She yanked out Ruby’s demon-killing knife and examined it.
“I’m going to need that back.”
“I don’t think so.” She opened the back of the cruiser and shoved him in next to Sam, slamming the door behind them. It was cramped and smelled like some generic bleach-based disinfectant. With his hands cuffed behind him, Dean had to lean forward, bent over his knees. There were two door handles on the inside back doors, and the wire mesh separating them from the front was caged steel.
“Well, this sucks,” he observed.
Sam nodded and watched Sheriff Daniels walking up the road to join the deputy. Suddenly he heard Jerry’s voice.
“Holy crap!”
“Sounds like they found the meat-suits,” Dean said.
“Yup.”
“They’ll pin it all on us, y’know.”
“No doubt.”
They watched as Sheriff Daniels spun and headed back toward the cruiser, walking fast, almost running. She slid into the front seat and picked up her radio, keying the mic.
“This is Sheriff Daniels requesting immediate backup at a single-vehicle MVA on Highway 17, mile-marker 83. Multiple confirmed casualties, red-blanket, notify emergency services.”
The radio crackled and an ambulance dispatcher confirmed the request, echoing it back.
“I hope you two have good lawyers,” Daniels said, glaring at them in the rearview mirror. “You’re going to need them.”
Supernatural The Unholy Cause Page 11