by Tim Waggoner
They were only a block away from the Foxhole, walking through an alley between a coin-operated laundry and pizza joint when Joe had the feeling they were being followed. Before he’d become homeless, he might’ve ignored the sensation, figuring it was just his imagination. Who didn’t walk through an alley with their guard up? But during his relatively short time on the street, Joe’s survival instincts had been sharpened, and he knew better than to dismiss any feeling, no matter how trivial it seemed. He gripped Billy’s upper arm to stop him, and then glanced back over his shoulder. He honestly didn’t expect to see anything, so it was a shock when he saw the figure standing behind them. It was even more of a shock to see the large, cruel-looking knife clutched in the man’s hand. Was the blade black? It sure looked that way to Joe.
“Good evening, gentleman,” the man said. “My apologies, but you both have something I need, and I’m afraid I’m going to have to take it from you. I assure you, this is nothing personal, and if it’s any consolation, know that your sacrifice will not only help further the cause of science, it will also help bring about a most glorious change unlike any the world has ever seen.”
Joe turned to Billy. “Do you have any idea what the hell he’s—”
That was as far as he got before the man with the knife sprang at them.
* * *
Dispatching the men was accomplished easily enough. A pair of quick, deep slices to the throat, and all Conrad had to do was step back as the men fell to the ground and wait for them to bleed out. He had no aversion to cutting into still-living bodies, but he preferred not to get any more blood on him than necessary. It didn’t take long for their blood flow to diminish, and then Conrad went to work. He selected the clean-shaven man first, judging him to be younger than his bearded companion and likely in better condition. He raised his obsidian blade over his head, and the runes engraved upon it glowed with silver-blue light.
“In your name, my lady.”
Then he crouched next to the body and went to work.
FIVE
Blood was everywhere—on the walls, the floor, the furniture, even the ceiling. It looked as if someone had carried in large buckets of the red stuff and splashed it all over the living room, taking pains to make sure that no surface was left untouched. There was so much blood that at first Sam couldn’t see anything but crimson. Then a second later, his eyes registered the two forms on the floor in front of the couch, one lying prone, the other straddling it. Both were covered with so much gore that he didn’t recognize them right away. The one on the floor was larger, taller, and beefier than the other. Sam thought it might be a man, but given the state of the figure’s face—or rather what little was left of it—he couldn’t tell for sure. The flannel shirt and jeans didn’t help much, but the large boots were a giveaway. They were Earl’s, which made sense, considering the cabin was his as well. His left hand was clenched around a small black object which Sam immediately recognized as a statuette of Anubis, the Egyptian god of the dead.
The figure straddling Earl’s chest was thinner, shorter, and dressed in a blood-soaked T-shirt and a pair of cut-off shorts. The long hair was so matted with blood, it was impossible to determine its true color by sight, but Sam knew it was a light chestnut brown. He also knew that the hair normally smelled of strawberry kiwi shampoo. He didn’t want to think about how it smelled right now.
Trish.
He hadn’t spoken her name aloud—at least, he didn’t think he had—but her gaze snapped in his direction. Her blue eyes were as empty and cold as the bottom of an arctic sea, and there was nothing remotely human in them. She had something wet and ragged clamped between her blood-slick teeth, and Sam’s stomach did a flip when he realized it was part of her father’s tongue. She tossed her head back and swallowed the grisly morsel in a single gulp, and then locked gazes with him once again. Her lips drew back from her teeth in a gesture that was more rictus than smile. She rose to her feet and stepped away from her father’s body. She moved toward Sam with the feral grace of a jungle cat, and a low keening sound came from deep in her throat. It was the sound of need, of desire, of hunger.
This isn’t right, Sam thought. It didn’t happen like this!
It was the last thought he had before Trish sank her teeth into his throat.
* * *
“Sam? Sam!”
He sat up and opened his eyes, surprised by how much effort it took. Dean’s hands were on his shoulders, and Sam realized his brother had been shaking him.
He pushed Dean’s hands away and then yawned. “What’s wrong?”
Dean had been sitting on the edge of the bed, but now he stood. “You were moaning and thrashing in your sleep, big time. You must’ve been having one hell of a serious dream, and not the good kind, if you know what I mean.”
Sam rubbed his eyes. He didn’t remember falling asleep. “What time is it?” He glanced toward the nightstand and checked the read-out on the digital clock there: 9:13. “Wow, I must’ve been wiped out. I napped for... what, three hours or so?”
Dean walked over to the window and drew back the curtains. Light spilled into the room and stabbed Sam’s eyes. His head pounded as if he had a hangover, and he lifted a hand to block the glare as he averted his gaze.
“You slept a little longer than that, Rip Van Winkle. It’s nine in the morning.”
He’d slept for fifteen hours. Most of the time, Dean and he were lucky to get four hours a night, but every once in a while the lack of rest caught up with them and they crashed for the better part of a day. “Guess I needed to get caught up on my sleep. Sorry.”
He sat up the rest of the way and swung his feet over the side of the bed. He winced as his right foot touched the carpet, and he remembered his wound. That memory brought the rest along with it—Brennan, the mummified corpses, Frankenmutt—and he was jolted fully awake.
He looked around the room, trying to appear casual as he checked to make sure that everything was the way it should be. He had a hard time telling what was real and what wasn’t these days, especially when he’d just awakened, or was tired or stressed. But he didn’t see any hallucinations—none that were obvious, at any rate—and when after a few moments the room, the furniture, and Dean remained the same, he allowed himself to relax.
“Any coffee?” he asked.
Dean walked over to the table where a couple coffee cups from a fast-food joint sat. He brought one to Sam, then went back and took a seat. The brothers sipped their go-juice for a few moments in silence before Dean asked, “So what were you dreaming about? And if it was the good kind of dream, make sure you don’t leave out any naughty details.”
At first Sam couldn’t remember what he’d been dreaming about, but then the details came flooding back, and he wished they hadn’t.
“Trish.”
Dean arced an eyebrow in surprise. “Trish Hansen?”
Sam nodded and took another sip of coffee. It seemed sharp and acidic as it went down his throat, and his stomach roiled in response.
“That was a while ago,” Dean said softly. “We were teenagers.”
“Barely.”
They were silent for a few moments after that, both continuing to work on their coffee.
After a bit, Dean asked, “Why do you suppose you dreamed about her?” He didn’t look at Sam as he spoke, but there was a clear edge of tension in his voice.
“I don’t know. I guess I’ve just been thinking about death lately.”
Dean turned to him, a hard expression on his face that verged on anger. “Lately? In case you haven’t noticed, Death could be both of our middle names. If we aren’t ganking some monster, we’re watching someone we love go belly up.”
Someone like Bobby, Sam thought, although he didn’t say it aloud. “That’s kind of what I mean. Death is so much a part of our lives that sometimes we take it for granted...” He hurried on before Dean could protest. “Until something happens to remind us. In a lot of ways, what happened to Trish was the first time I r
ealized just how close death really is to all of us. Not just hunters, but everybody. It’s always there, just a heartbeat away, waiting for the right time, you know?”
Dean nodded gravely. “Yes. Yes, I do.”
Of course you do, Sam thought. For a short time, Dean had actually served as a stand-in for Death with a capital D.
Sam went on. “Besides, we were talking about Frankenstein yesterday, so that’s another probable reason I was thinking about death—at least subconsciously—as I conked out.”
“Yeah. Probably.” Dean’s tone was distant, distracted, and Sam knew that he was remembering Trish. Remembering how she died... and remembering the horrible thing she had become in death.
Sam wanted to take Dean’s mind—and his own—off Trish Hansen, so he put his almost-empty coffee cup on the nightstand and stood, trying not to grimace as he put weight on his injured ankle. It hurt, but not as bad as it had yesterday. “So, any new developments regarding Frankenmutt while I was zonked?” he asked.
“Not so fast there, pilgrim,” Dean said.
“Pilgrim?”
“Caught a cowboy flick on TV last night while you were off in dreamland,” Dean said, sounding a bit apologetic. “Anyway, before we get back to work, I want to take a look at that ankle of yours.”
“What for?”
“We don’t know exactly what the hell Frankenmutt is, and after the way you passed out last night, I want to make sure that you didn’t pick up something nasty when he bit you.”
“I didn’t pass out,” Sam muttered. “I fell asleep.”
Dean had eased up on the overprotective big brother bit over the last couple years, but he still got on Sam’s nerves whenever he fell back into his old role. Still, Sam couldn’t fault his brother’s reasoning, and besides, he knew Dean wouldn’t let up until he was satisfied.
“Whatever. Let’s take a look at that ankle and make sure you didn’t catch Frankenrabies.”
“Fine.”
Sam sat on the foot of his bed and crossed his right leg onto his left. He’d fallen asleep in his clothes, and by longstanding agreement between the brothers, Dean had left him that way. He’d taken his shoes off before bandaging his ankle the night before, though, so all he needed to do was pull up the pant leg a little and begin unwrapping the bandage. Dean rose from the table and walked over to the bed to get a closer look at the wound.
“You’re hovering,” Sam said.
“Deal with it,” Dean replied.
Sam finished removing the bandage and was gratified to see the wound looked greatly improved since yesterday. It wasn’t bleeding anymore and scabs had already started to form. The tissue around the wound wasn’t swollen, nor was it red, but he probed it with his fingertips to be sure. The flesh was tender, but it felt cool: no infection.
“I gotta admit, it looks pretty good,” Dean said.
“So no more worries about Frankenrabies?” Sam asked.
“We’ll see.”
Sam started to rewrap the wound, but then decided to let it breathe for a while.
“As I was saying, anything new?”
“Not really. No mysterious wasting deaths were reported, so it looks like Frankenmutt didn’t drain anyone’s battery last night. I researched black dogs some more on the net, but didn’t find anything we don’t already know. I also looked into Brennan’s history, but near as I can tell, until recently nothing even remotely supernatural has ever happened here. When it comes to the wide world of weird, this may be the least interesting town in the whole damn country. Hell, I’m thinking about retiring here some day.”
Sam smiled. “Assuming we get rid of Frankenmutt first.”
“And the Double-Header.”
Sam frowned. “Excuse me?”
Dean grinned, then went back to the table and turned on the laptop. Sam hobbled over, and since there was only one chair, Dean made him take it. Dean looked over his shoulder as the screen came to life and displayed the webpage for the Broadsider. The headline read Local Unemployment Reaches All-Time High.
“Scroll down,” Dean said.
Sam did so, and toward the bottom of the page, he found a smaller headline: Man Reports Encounter with Two-Headed Monster. The headline was only a link, so Sam clicked it and an instant later, the entire article was displayed on the screen.
MAN REPORTS ENCOUNTER WITH TWO-HEADED MONSTER
Late last evening, Brennan resident Lyle Swanson called 911 to report that what he referred to as a “monster” was raiding the trash containers behind his house. When Brennan police arrived at the Swanson residence, they discovered several trash containers had been overturned and their contents scattered, but they found no evidence of who or what was responsible. When the police spoke with Mr. Swanson, he described hearing noises outside, and when he looked through his back door window to investigate, he saw a creature that resembled a “large naked man with two heads and four arms” going through his trash and “eating all the good stuff.” Police took Mr. Swanson’s statement and suggested he purchase trash containers with locking mechanisms to prevent a recurrence of the incident.
Dean chuckled. “Man, I don’t know what Lyle was drinking last night, but I’ll have a double.”
Sam looked over his shoulder at his brother. “You don’t think what he saw was real?”
Dean frowned. “C’mon, Sammy. I only wanted you to see this so you’d get a laugh out of it. I didn’t think you’d take it seriously.” His eyes narrowed as if he was suddenly suspicious of something, and Sam knew he was worried that his little brother’s crazy was starting to show again.
“Think about it,” Sam said. “Frankenmutt looked like he was a combination of different dog parts, right? So maybe this Double-Header is the same kind of thing, only he’s a combination of different people.”
Dean regarded the computer screen for a moment then turned his attention back to Sam. He sighed.
“You grab a shower. I’ll track down Lyle’s address.”
Sam nodded, rose from the chair, and started toward the bathroom, almost shuffling as he went. He wondered when the coffee he’d had would finally kick in. Despite all the sleep he’d gotten, he felt so damn tired...
* * *
Dean listened to the sound of the shower while he worked on digging up Lyle Swanson’s address. Sometimes living in close quarters with Sam got on his nerves, and he knew Sam felt the same way about him. What two brothers could spend almost every moment together and not irritate each other? It was normal human behavior, no harm, no foul. But he’d never told Sam that he often found the sounds of someone else close by—say, for instance, a running shower—comforting, even soothing. Footsteps across a floor, the scrape of a chair being pulled away from a table, the tapping of computer keys, the creak of bedsprings, the soft breathing of someone else sleeping. As Sam had pointed out, they spent so much of their time dealing with death. Being surrounded by simple day-to-day sounds, human sounds, helped remind Dean that there was life in the world, too, and that he wasn’t alone, not as long as he had family.
Dean found his thoughts drifting toward Trish Hansen. He hadn’t thought of her in years, but now that Sam had brought her up, Dean was having a hard time thinking about anything else. One year in their early teens, their dad had gotten a lead on a possible location of Yellow-Eyes, the demon that had killed their mother. Supposedly, the demon had been spotted by a hunter in Alaska, and John Winchester was hell-bent on running the bastard to ground and making him pay for what he’d done. But his desire for vengeance didn’t cloud his judgment, at least not where his sons were concerned. John wasn’t about to take Sam and Dean along on such a potentially dangerous hunt, so he’d arranged for them to stay with a friend in Washington State. Walter Hansen wasn’t a hunter himself, but a master forger who provided false documents and ID for hunters to use. He also ran something of an unofficial trading post, as some of his clients paid him in barter. Weapons were the most common alternate currency, but sometimes they paid with other, more
... esoteric items that they acquired during the course of their work. Dean hadn’t cared much about any of that, however. At his age, the most important thing about Walter Hansen was that he had a teenage daughter named Trish.
He remembered the first time he saw her. Dad hadn’t told them that his friend had a daughter, so when Walter let them into his cabin one early spring evening, both Dean and Sam had been surprised to see a girl sitting cross-legged in front of the fireplace. She looked to be around his age, maybe a year older. Her complexion was light, her features delicate, and the brown hair that flowed over her shoulders seemed almost bronze in the firelight. Her gray sweater was big and baggy on her, but her faded jeans hugged her slender legs, giving Dean a tantalizing idea of what the rest of her body might look like. She wore no shoes, and she held her bare feet in her hands, as if the fire wasn’t enough to warm them. Later, he would take note of the playful intelligence that danced in her eyes, would feel a strange thrill in his chest whenever she let out one of her too-loud laughs. But what struck him most at that moment was the way she turned her head to look at them and smiled, big and bright, as if welcoming old friends instead of greeting a trio of strangers. It may well have been the best smile he’d ever seen on a woman.
“We good to go?”
Startled, Dean looked up from the laptop screen to see Sam standing by the table, hair a tousled wet mess, motel towel wrapped around his waist.
“Dude, I thought we had a rule about running around naked in front of each other.”
“I’m not naked.”
“Close enough. Get dressed, Towel Boy. I got Lyle’s addy. Found it in an online phone registry.” Dean closed the laptop.
“Good. When I was in the shower—”