Supernatural The Unholy Cause

by Joe Schreiber

  Daniels slammed on the brakes, skidding to a halt. Dean finished the first portion of the exorcism. He could see inside the shed now. The demons were gone, reduced to a scrum of foul-smelling murk that was eddying lazily out of the holes in the roof.

  Dean jumped out of the car, wincing but not stopping. Through the thick clouds of the demon-smog, he saw Sam slouched over on the floor in what looked like a lake of blood. There was a girl slumped next to him—Sarah Rafferty, he realized. They seemed to be holding each other up. All around them, re-enactors lay bleeding in the dirt, pale and motionless like heaps of gore-stained operating room laundry. It was impossible to say which—if any—were still alive.

  Or, for that matter, which ones had died fighting off the demons, and which were evacuated meat-suits that the demons had left behind.

  “Sammy!” Dean made his way over. “Oh, dude...”

  “It’s okay,” Sam said. “Not as bad as it looks.”

  “That good, ‘cause it looks pretty freakin’ bad.”

  Sam shook his head.

  “What about you? McClane shot you.”

  “Misfire. Flesh wound.”

  “Lucky break.” He stiffened a little, looked around. “Where is McClane anyway?”

  “I must have smoked his ass with the Rituale,” Dean said. “Figured you heard that part.”

  “No.” Sam’s expression was bleak. “McClane got out of earshot before the exorcism took hold. With a bunch of his soldiers.”

  Dean’s eyes widened. “What?”

  They both looked over at Sheriff Daniels. The expression on her face was a combination of disappointment and alarm.

  “They’re out there, and they—” she began, then her voice broke off. “You found it?” She said, peering past Sam.

  She reached past him to the floor of the shed, grabbed a loose stretch of bandage and picked up the last uncut coil of noose from the ground. She held it at arm’s length, as if afraid to get too close to it, yet unable to put it down.

  “The last loop. It’s still intact.”

  Sam nodded.

  “One of the men found it out there. Put it on a wounded soldier as a tourniquet.”

  “Not a good choice.”

  “Tell me about it,” Sam grunted.

  “But...” Daniels was turning the noose over in her fingers, examining it for flaws., “it’s good for us.”

  “What? Why?”

  “The seventh coil is the most powerful one in the noose. If we can get it back to its reliquary intact, lock it down in the basement of the church, we can stop the effects of the noose.”

  “How do you know all this?” Sam asked.

  “She’s the chosen descendant of the original guardian of the noose,” Dean parroted. “Sworn to keep it locked up in a demon-proof room.” And, off Sam’s perplexed reaction: “I talked to Cass.”

  “Tommy McClane and I share a common ancestor,” Daniels said, “that much, you probably figured out. But power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. As much as I want to keep the noose locked away, McClane wanted to get it out—even before he was possessed. He coveted its magic, and it made him an appealing vessel for the lesser demons that took him over.

  “I’ve returned it to the reliquary before, after finding it on Dave Wolverton’s corpse.” She fell silent a moment. “But what’s their endgame?”

  “They want me to be Lucifer’s vessel,” Sam said bluntly. He let the words lie there.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “It’s a long story,” Dean interjected, “and a pretty ugly one.”

  He drew in a breath, bolstered by what Daniels had told them. “So all we have to do is put the last coil back in the reliquary? How easy is that?”

  “Not easy at all.” The sheriff gazed out of the open side of the wrecked railway shed, across the smoking battlefield and eastward toward town. “There’s still an army of demons between us and the church, ready to do whatever it takes to stop us.”

  “What about our army?” Sarah Rafferty asked. “Those soldiers out there. Can’t they help?”

  “You’ve seen what those things can do,” Dean said. “What do you think?”

  Real hopelessness flashed through her expression, making her look even more pale and exhausted.

  “Then what...?” she began.

  Sam bent down and picked up a musket.

  “We bring the fight to them.”

  “With what,” Dean asked, “replica guns?”

  “Demon weapons kill demons, too,” Sam said. “I saw it happen, out on the battlefield, when I turned that siege cannon around on one of them.” He looked his brother squarely in the face. “And they run on blood. Demon blood.”

  Dean gaped at him, unable to articulate or even identify the bolt of harsh, vivid emotion that he experienced just hearing those words from his brother.

  Anger?

  Distrust?

  Neither of those words came close. Glancing at his brother, he saw that Sam was experiencing an even more gut-level reaction. He looked paralyzed with fear.

  “That’s what Rufus told us at the beginning of all this—that the weapons ran on blood,” Dean said finally. “He didn’t say it was demon blood, though. I hate that stuff.”

  “You’ve never tasted it,” Sam said evenly.

  “So we find a demon,” Daniels cut in, “and we make it bleed. Where’s the problem in that?”

  “You know how it is—there’s never one around when you need it,” Dean muttered.

  Then Sam looked over at the pile of bloody bandages that had been held in place by the last coil of the noose—the remains of the re-enactor’s field dressing.

  “I think I’ve got us covered,” he said.

  THIRTY-SIX

  The vision was coming back into McClane’s left eye.

  It was different, however.

  He now saw two different worlds from two different sides of his head. His right eye was normal—as “normal” as a demon’s view of the world could be, a subterranean crawlspace of predatory opportunities and constant craven impulses—but his left one had changed dramatically.

  Closing his right eye and opening his left, he was greeted by an entirely new landscape, cut out in shades of reddish-orange like scalding bronze from the sculptor’s forge. He saw emotions personified in pulsing shades of blue and gray and black.

  Riding into town on the back of a horse, pursued by Jeeps and military trucks, the demon that called itself Tommy McClane discovered that he liked looking at things this way—especially human beings. He had escaped the Rituale, and he’d begun to relax and regroup.

  However, at the moment he was under attack from both sides. Soldiers in half-tracks and Humvees were firing on him and the remains of his demonic retinue, their bullets powerless, and McClane amused himself by squinting through his left eye, watching the auras of the humans, the actual fear in their hearts made manifest in all its glory. He wondered idly what it might taste like.

  Opening both eyes now, he watched the world unfold in both directions at once. Spectral figures of his own demonic army, U.S. military personnel, and civilians all swirled together in a miasma of motion and intention. It was a peculiar kind of magic, more illusion than actual power, but a pleasant diversion, and he wished he had the luxury of enjoying it more fully.

  But he a town to occupy, and to sack.

  He knew, of course, that Daniels and the Winchesters would try to return the noose to the reliquary.

  All he had to do was stop them.

  It was almost eight a.m. when McClane’s hundred-strong demon army rode down the eight-block stretch of storefronts and buildings that constituted Main Street of Mission’s Ridge. They rode past the Dixie Buggy Wash and the Twin Kiss and the Ben Franklin Five and Dime. Some of them, like McClane, came on horseback, others on motorcycles or in stolen police cars or military vehicles still stuffed full of dead soldiers. Demons in Confederate and Union uniforms steered while others rode shotgun, firing out of t
he windows at the last townspeople scurrying for cover on either side of the street.

  It was a turkey-shoot, pure and simple, and the demons treated it as such.

  “Hey, Captain!” a soldier yelled from McClane’s left flank. “Watch this!” Drawing his saber, he flicked his wrist, sending the blade across the street where it hit a man standing in front of a Blockbuster Video, impaling him against a poster for a forthcoming Sandra Bullock romantic comedy. The man twitched and squirmed like an insect on a collector’s pin, and then fell still. Closing his right eye, McClane watched the man’s aura curdling from bright red to a listless, uninteresting charcoal gray.

  McClane giggled, then snorted, then found himself braying with laughter. Setback or no setback, exorcism or no exorcism, there was absolutely no part of this that he wasn’t loving with every fiber of his being. He was a demon, and he lived for this. It was Superbowl 666, and he was the starting quarterback.

  Straightening in the saddle, he slowed his horse. The First Pentecostal Church of Mission’s Ridge lay straight ahead, three blocks down. Seeing it brought new gravity to the moment. It was time for strategy.

  “You men take the right side of the street.” Then McClane swung his arm toward the other flank. “You all take the opposite side. Get up in those windows. Pick your positions carefully. Minimal exposure, clear line of sight—”

  “What’s the plan, Captain?”

  “I’m turning this place into Dealey Plaza,” McClane said. “When those boys come through with the noose, we’re gonna go Lee Harvey Oswald on their asses.”

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  Sarah Rafferty grabbed hold of the flatcar and pulled herself up until she was standing next to the Gatling gun mounted there on a turret. Sheriff Daniels was already positioned behind it, inspecting the gun’s hand-crank. She grabbed the lever in both hands and struggled to turn it, pushing down with all her weight, but the mechanism was frozen in place.

  “You think this is going to work?” Sarah said.

  “Do I think...” Leaning out of the locomotive’s cab, Dean glanced down at Sam. “Tell ‘em, Sammy.”

  “Tell me what?”

  “Dean loves Clint Eastwood movies,” Sam said.

  Sarah stared at the Winchester brothers.

  “What am I missing?”

  “Ever see The Gauntlet?” Dean asked.

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  Dean rolled his eyes. “No appreciation for the classics. Okay, Eastwood plays a washed-up cop bringing back an ex-hooker who’s testifying against this corrupt big-city police commissioner. All he has to do is get the witness back alive. Except the commish has every cop on the force out waiting for Eastwood and they’re armed to the teeth, turning the streets of downtown Phoenix into the world’s biggest shooting gallery. So Clint shows up on the outskirts of town in a clanking old Greyhound bus that he’s tricked out with sheet metal over the windshield, and he and his witness have to run the gauntlet.”

  He looked at the women expectantly. Sarah and Sheriff Daniels were both staring at him blankly.

  Sarah spoke first.

  “And this is supposed to make me feel better how?”

  Dean started to answer with something witty and sarcastic, when he turned to take his first good look around the steam engine’s cab.

  Suddenly he wasn’t so sure either.

  The massive iron boiler in front of him looked as big as a house. Gauges, levers, valves and pipes sprouted out from it in every direction. A chunky thing that looked like an aluminum teapot with a brass handle stuck out by his legs. Down below, the ancient firebox hung open, cold and dead like the mouth of a giant, exhaling the long-lost coal vapors from fuel that had burned up a century before.

  Come on. Get ahold of yourself, he said silently. It’s just internal combustion, right? How different can it be from the Impala?

  He grabbed the big lever that ran horizontally across the cab from left to right. It had to be the throttle. Gripping in both hands, he jerked on it as hard as he could.

  It didn’t budge.

  “Uh, Sam?”

  Sam climbed through the empty coal car into the cab with the bloody wads of bundled up bandages in his arms.

  “You better hang on.”

  “What? Why—”

  Without bothering to answer, Sam shoved half the demon-blood stained rags through the fire door into the empty box, slammed the metal grate, and stepped back.

  Nothing happened.

  He and Dean stood momentarily silent, looking at it.

  “I think when Doug Henning did this trick,” Dean said, “it worked out better.”

  “Hang on.” Sam bent down and peered through the slots in the grate. He could see the rags piled up in there. They didn’t appear to have changed.

  Pulling the fire door open again, he picked up a long iron poker that was leaning against the boiler and stuck it inside, extending it slowly toward the pile of fabric. He nudged it gently, like a kid poking a sleeping snake with a stick.

  “I don’t get it.” He pushed harder, the tip of the poker scraping across the metal floor, throwing up sparks. “Maybe it needs more bl—”

  The rags exploded.

  It was like a rocket going off inside a tinderbox. Flame shot out of the fire door in a thick jet of blue headed right toward Sam’s face. At the last instant he jolted sideways, the poker flying from his hand, clattering across the floor, and for a dizzying second his equilibrium was gone and he almost fell out of the cab.

  Dean’s hand swung down and grabbed his collar, pulling him back.

  “Shut the door!” Sam shouted. “Get it closed!”

  Dean grabbed the poker and rammed it forward, aiming at the grate again and clapping it shut. Blue flames spewed and flickered eagerly out of the slots, writhing like serpents’ tongues.

  All around them, the railway cab gave a massive shudder and a sharp clank. Dean could hear the sound of old iron as the air around him filled with churning smoke, steam creaking through the engine’s pipes, its valves straining under long forgotten pressure. The needles sprang to life on the gauges in front of him, twitching and arrowing upward in great optimistic leaps.

  He could see tiny puffs of vapor hissing from the boiler’s seams.

  Dean clung onto a pipe, felt it growing hotter in his hand until he couldn’t hold on any longer. He leaned out of the doorway. One of the women—Dean thought it was the sheriff—was shouting up at him from the flatcar.

  “What’s going on? Is it working?”

  Before he could answer, the locomotive jerked forward. In July 1938, the locomotive Mallard set the land speed record for steam on a run from London’s King’s Cross station, England, on the East Coast Main Line. Officials clocked her at a hundred and twenty-six miles per hour before the engine’s bearings started to overheat and the engineer had to slow it down. “Any more speed, lads,” he’d supposedly told his fireman, “and we’d be sitting down for a kip with the Almighty Himself.”

  When the Winchesters saw the outskirts of Mission’s Ridge coming up in front of them, they weren’t traveling quite that fast—probably only eighty, although it felt like a hundred up in the cab, where Dean had the throttle all the way open. The whistle screamed steadily overhead. The other valve-control was a hand-release lever called the Johnson bar. A half-mile from downtown, Dean had his Johnson running full-tilt, as well.

  Within minutes, they’d be there.

  The train rocketed hard down the tracks, pistons pounding, chuffing smoke. It was impossible not to think of it as a living thing. Dean held the regulator steady at maximum as the last of the woods blurred past them, giving way to houses and farms.

  “Dean!”

  Standing up in the cab, his eyes tearing up from the wind and velocity, Sam had to shout to be heard.

  “We have to stop!”

  “What?”

  “Stop!”

  “That’s crazy! It—”

  Then Dean saw why.

  Up ahead
in the distance, where the first storefronts and shops marked the beginning of Mission’s Ridge proper, the tracks were covered with bodies.

  And some of them appeared to be still alive.

  McClane had gotten the idea at the last moment, looking at the poor bastard impaled in front of Blockbuster. He’d heard the locomotive’s whistle shrieking off in the distance and understood immediately how the Winchesters were bringing the noose back to the church.

  Kneeling down in the middle of Main Street, resting his hands on the rails, he could already feel them humming.

  “Quick!” he said. “Somebody get me some kids!”

  They were tied to the tracks.

  Dean could see the faces from a hundred yards away, though for a moment his mind refused to accept it. A little blonde girl in a blue dress and white tights, her face a pale porcelain sculpture of pure terror.

  Behind her, arms and legs tied, were maybe a dozen other children from town, all looking up and screaming—some silently, others not. His heart froze. A single thought pulsed through his mind—Where are their parents?—but the answer was already there, pounding like the wheels underneath them.

  Possessed. Or worse.

  Dead. Dead. Dead.

  Dean grabbed the air brake and yanked it back as hard as he could. Tortured metal howled. The engine lurched hard, its couplings slamming together between the cars, pistons fuming, wheels grinding, dumping off showers of sparks in every direction, but still ramming forward, ensnared in its own momentum.

  “There’s not enough time!” Sam shouted.

  The train scraped on, brake shoes hissing as the locomotive slithered inexorably down Main Street on insufficient friction. They were slowing down—twenty, now fifteen miles per hour—but the process was taking too long. Dean stood at the brake, his mouth pinched into an expression of absolute concentration, as if he could somehow stop their progress through sheer force of will.

  Sam jumped.

  Dean didn’t even realize Sam had done it until he saw his brother, not just running, but flat-out sprinting, ahead. He saw something flash in Sam’s hand, it looked like a pair of pliers, and then he was actually moving along the rails in front of the locomotive.