“After it disappeared,” Otis said. “That’s when I saw what it had been eating.”
“Don’t know what to make of it,” Marcus said. “Thought it ate the lower half. Then saw the guy stuck in the ground, like he was... planted there.”
Dean thanked them for their help, gave them his business card in case they remembered any other details. The men then piled into the wrecker and drove deeper into the series of linked parking lots to retrieve Otis’s pickup.
The Winchesters joined Jeffries and the paramedics near the impacted body.
“Thanks,” Dean said. “Got what we need.”
“We want to talk to Lucy Quinn,” Sam said. “Apparently she witnessed the Lacosta hit and run.”
“Spoke to the chief. Said he was on his way there when he spotted you two at that sinkhole,” Jeffries said. He removed his cap and ran a hand through his hair, staring down at Dufford’s remains. “Nothing in the manuals or academy training about this sort of thing. We’re waiting on the county medical examiner, but...”
“We can’t move the body without construction equipment,” the woman paramedic said. “Jackhammer minimum.” She took a deep breath. “Christ!”
The other EMT scratched his jaw. “Maybe we should cover the body.”
“Better not,” Jeffries said. “Might contaminate evidence. Some of that flesh is liquid.” He looked toward Dean and Sam. “A word?”
The three of them took a few paces away from the paramedics. Jeffries turned down the volume on the radio clipped to his belt, reducing the police chatter to white noise.
“Listen,” Jeffries said and cleared his throat. “When I heard about Shelly’s giant lizard before, well, I assumed he’d had a bit too much joy juice, you know?” He took a deep breath and sighed. When he spoke again, his voice was hushed. “Chief told us you Fibbies—sorry, Feds—think this might be terrorist-related. Some cell testing a kind of hallucinogen weapon, right?”
Sam glanced at Dean before he spoke. “We had some information along those lines.”
“Right, so, a hallucinogen makes you see weird stuff. Giant lizard, headless horseman, okay, that fits.”
“Giant tarantula,” Dean said.
Jeffries snapped his fingers. “Exactly what I thought when this call came in! Another weird one. But—” he looked back at the mostly dissolved body embedded three feet deep in asphalt—“that is not you or me seeing something. That is something.”
“And you want to know what that something is,” Sam said.
“Exactly.”
“We don’t know yet,” Dean said. More or less the truth.
“There’s more here than we thought,” Sam added.
“Goes double for me,” Jeffries said as he turned to walk back toward the paramedics. “Hell, triple!”
The Winchesters headed back toward the Impala. Behind them, Dean heard Jeffries turn up the volume on his belt radio. A lot of squawking and excited chatter. With the sinkhole and subsequent explosions, the car crash and Velociraptor attack, the brewing lightning storm, and who knew what else, the police were on high alert and apparently unprepared for the chaos befalling their sleepy little town. But two words stood out in the stream of reports and assignments.
Dean stopped, turned toward Jeffries.
“She did not just say Nazi zombies?” he called.
Jeffries looked over at him. “So you heard it too?”
“On Main Street?”
Jeffries threw up his hands in surrender.
“Why the hell not?”
TWELVE
Ignoring posted speed limits, Dean raced the Impala east along Bell Street, reluctantly tapping the brake pedal as he rolled through each red traffic light. No guarantee the Velociraptors hadn’t returned to hunt another car and driver. He shook his head in disbelief.
“This is what I meant,” Sam said. “This is all wrong.”
“You mean the Harvey Dufford smoothie back there? Or the Dead Snow sequel on Main Street?”
“Everything.”
“I’m not arguing.”
“Those Velociraptors don’t match current fossil records,” Sam said. “Real Velociraptors were smaller.”
“So are tarantulas and Gila monsters.”
“They had feathers.”
“Tarantulas?”
“Velociraptors,” Sam said. “More birdlike than reptilian.” Dean nodded. “So we rule out wormholes and time travel.”
“Along with the return of the Third Reich.”
“You got a theory?”
“These... manifestations are real,” Sam said. “But inaccurate.”
“I’m listening.”
“They’re more like perceptions,” Sam continued. “Or misconceptions.”
“Put it that way,” Dean said. “Sounds like a tulpa.”
“Dozens of tulpas?” Sam suggested and dismissed the idea with a shake of his head. “No, I don’t see how—”
“FBI? You there?” said a familiar voice punctuated by an electronic squawk.
Sam pulled the two-way radio from his pocket. “Shelly?”
“Couple of cars drag-racing west on Welker,” Shelly said. “Thought you should know. Least I think they’re drag racing.”
Sam frowned.
Dean shook his head. “Don’t look at me. He’s your deputy.”
“Thanks, Shelly.”
“Actually, they might be driving under the influence, weaving all over the road like that.”
Sam leaned forward, intent now. “Where are you?”
“Near the restaurant district, of course!”
“Did I hear screaming in the background?” Dean asked.
“Restaurants... He’s a block or two from Main.”
“Shelly, listen to me,” Sam said urgently. “Get away from there.”
“Whoa, lady,” Shelly said as the sound of a screaming woman passed by his mic. “What the hell are they supposed...”
“Shelly, get out of there!”
“Some kind of invasion. Soldiers. Nazis? They ain’t right.” Shelly’s breathing was ragged; they heard the rustling sounds of him running. “FBI, I’m sorry. I’m sorry! This ain’t for me. I quit!”
Sam tried the transmit button several times, rewarded with only silence.
“Don’t worry, man,” Dean said. “He got away. Probably tossed your radio down a sewer—”
The Impala pulled to the side, buffeted by a savage gust of wind. Lightning flashed repeatedly, revealing a thick mass of thunderheads. Then a jagged lightning bolt struck a corner lot, hammering a cottonwood with an explosive crack. A large branch, split from the trunk, toppled sideways, crashing through the windows of a two-door garage.
A couple blocks farther east, a curtain of heavy rain slashed across the Impala’s hood and pounded the windshield. Though Dean turned the wipers to their highest setting, he felt as if he were driving underwater. Smears of lights streaked across the safety glass and the world seemed to melt around them. Poor visibility forced him to decelerate to a crawl. For all he could tell, another sinkhole loomed a hundred feet ahead. Maybe a cliff. At this point, anything was possible.
Dean gripped the wheel and ploughed on.
Just when the downpour eased a little, another lightning bolt struck one block ahead of the Impala and skittered across all four lanes of Bell Street, finally blasting a freestanding mailbox. A shower of sparks erupted from the scorched box, which had been dislodged from its cement mooring. Flames flared through a twisted gap in the side of the box as letters and packages burned until doused by the unrelenting rain.
Dean loosened his white-knuckled hold on the steering wheel.
“That was close,” he said. The close encounters seemed to be stacking up.
Ahead, on their right, a searing white flash preceded a fiery explosion.
“Transformer hit,” Sam said.
Dean tried to blink away the afterimage of the lightning bolt from his retinas. The damaged wooden utility pole teetered toward the
road. Engulfed in flame, the polemounted transformer at the top showered sparks like the world’s largest welder’s torch.
“Dean, it’s coming down!”
Burning at the top, severed near the base, the utility pole swung down toward the street, trailing snapped live wires. Dean floored the accelerator and swung the Impala into the oncoming lanes, which were, fortunately, empty. Glancing in the rearview mirror, he saw the pole come to rest in the middle of the road, still burning and spitting sparks in every direction.
“That was closer,” Sam said.
“This storm have a personal grudge?”
They passed a street sign for Arcadia Boulevard on the right, one block before Main Street. Dean looked ahead into the rainy night, made more difficult by a dead row of streetlights. Sam turned in his seat, looking back down Arcadia.
“Hold up,” Sam said. “They’ve reached the row of restaurants back there.”
“You saw them? Actual Nazi zombies?”
Sam nodded. “At least a half-dozen hungry zombies looking to dine on the diners.”
The repeated booms and ongoing rumble of the thunderstorm woke Roman Messerly. He experienced a few moments of disorientation as he took in his surroundings. His head rested on the pillow, but his bedcovers were relatively undisturbed. And he still wore his EMT uniform. Last thing he remembered was going off duty, driving home. After that, his memory was a blur.
Pressing his forearm across his forehead, he closed his eyes.
Not quite a blur. He remembered exhaustion sweeping over him as he entered his townhome. He’d skipped preparing a small meal for himself, instead heading for the bedroom. For some reason, he thought he’d take a nap and then eat something... before going to sleep? Made no sense to him. Usually he had trouble sleeping, which he attributed to drinking coffee nonstop during his waking hours. Occupational hazard. His job entailed long periods of boredom punctuated by short periods of action, the aftermath of mayhem visited upon others. His actions could mean life or death for somebody, so he tried to remain alert at all times. Accidents were caused by carelessness, and he could not afford a moment of distraction.
Some nights he tossed and turned for hours—probably sweating out the last dregs of caffeine—before he fell asleep. And he was not a heavy sleeper. He kept his pager and cell phone close to the bed. Never knew when they might need him. Sometimes he dreamed the pager was buzzing. He’d wake up and grab it only to find it quiet and still in his hands. Rare was the night he slept more than three hours in a row or five hours total.
Lethargic, he forced himself to climb out of bed and walk to the window. To the west, he saw the lights of downtown. And stretches of darkness marking a power outage. Flashes of lightning opened the black sky, revealing masses of angry clouds. As he stood there, he thought about how comfortable the bed had been. It pulled him like a gravity well. At that moment, he wanted nothing more than to sleep for ten hours straight. He had almost convinced himself to give in to the unnatural exhaustion when he saw the lightning strike and heard the boom. From experience, he thought a polemounted transformer had been hit. Above the trees, a flare of fire illuminated the night. Looked to him like Bell Street.
Hurrying to his bed, he reached for his pager and cell phone and experienced a moment of dizziness. Again the urge to climb into bed and sleep it off hit him. He teetered on the moment of indecision, weighing duty against personal weakness. Lightning flashes bathed his bedroom in stark, shifting shadows. For a moment, the shadows over his bed seemed to slide and race across the wall, as if with a mind of their own. Then the room plunged into darkness and he attributed the strange motion to tricks of the weird lighting.
His pager vibrated, shimmying across the tabletop.
When he checked the display, he saw he had five queued messages.
Strange that he hadn’t heard it once.
The cell phone display lit up. A quick check revealed he had received several calls and a half-dozen text messages. As he walked out of his bedroom, he shook his head in disbelief. Nothing like this had ever happened to him before.
Must have slept like the dead to miss all those alerts, he thought.
Unfortunately, it hadn’t helped. He was exhausted.
“Hold on.”
Dean checked the oncoming lanes and his side view mirror before spinning the steering wheel hard left, while accelerating, making a sweeping three-sixty turn to loop back to Arcadia Boulevard and dart down the wide street until he had a visual on the World War II-era zombies. He parked in a loading zone in front of Mama Ferracci, an Italian restaurant.
While Dean parked illegally, Sam released the partially spent magazine from his automatic and replaced it with a full one.
The rain had eased to a light shower.
Arcadia Boulevard sought a measure of old-world appeal with a row of ornamental horse-head hitching posts that alternated with faux-gas street lamps along the length of the sidewalk. Each storefront and restaurant had a different colored vinyl awning, and some businesses announced daily specials or sales on chalkboard sidewalk signs. Unfortunately, the proliferation of LCD parking meters conspired to spoil the turn of the twentieth-century illusion. Then again, add a dozen shambling Nazi zombies to any setting and you have more than enough anachronistic confusion.
As they exited the Impala, Dean looked over the roof of the car at Sam.
“What do you think? Silver stake through the heart?”
“No,” Sam said. “Perception is reality.”
“Ah,” Dean said. “Romero school. Headshots.”
Dean took a quick count of the zombies. No less than nine soldiers in green helmets and uniforms with black jackboots. An SS officer stood out in the black uniform, peaked cap with the SS eagle and a red armband with the black-andwhite swastika prominent. A graying field marshal also wore a peaked cap but with a full-length leather trench coat, while a younger officer wore a white summer tunic, stained with blood, due in large part to a gaping abdominal wound exposing a loop of intestines. All of them had blood caked around their mouths and on their hands. Impossible to know if they had appeared bloodied out of thin air, or if they had already begun snacking on the citizens of Clayton Falls.
Red and blue light pulsed from the light bars of two police cruisers parked at hurried angles farther down the street. Both cops—a burly man with dark hair and a pale face, and a trim blond woman in her mid-twenties—were slowly approaching the zombies with their guns drawn and braced with both hands, held down at a forty-five degree angle. Thankfully, the immediate area was clear of civilians. But Dean spotted frightened faces behind the glass doors and windows of several restaurants.
“Freeze!” the male cop yelled at the nearest undead soldier.
Ignoring his command, the soldier rammed his helmeted head into the glass door of a coffee shop decorated with a blue-and-white striped awning. The glass shattered and Dean heard startled screams coming from inside the building.
The cop fired a round into the back of the soldier, who immediately turned around and staggered toward him. One of the soldier’s eyes looked as if it had been clawed from the socket. As he lumbered toward the cop, the other police officer fired, hitting the zombie in the side, to little effect.
“Headshots!” Dean yelled.
Both cops immediately swiveled, turning their raised guns toward the Winchester brothers.
THIRTEEN
“FBI!” Sam shouted, producing his laminate in one smooth motion while keeping his gun hand down at his side. “Agents Shaw and DeYoung.”
“Right,” the female officer said. She glanced at her fellow cop. “It’s okay, Cerasi. Chief mentioned them.”
“Affirmative,” Cerasi said, taking two steps back from the advancing zombie soldier. “You two know about this?”
“Headshots,” Dean said again. “Nothing else will stop them.”
“You’re serious?”
“And don’t let them bite you,” Sam warned.
Dean turned to him, e
yebrow raised. “You think?”
Sam nodded. “Perception is reality.”
During the back-and-forth conversation between the living, the young Nazi officer in the blood-stained white summer tunic with exposed intestines had worked his way behind the female cop. About two strides away from her, he stared hungrily at her exposed neck.
“Wild! Check your six!” Cerasi said.
Dean had closed the distance to the cops and had a bead on Summertime Nazi. He squeezed off a shot and watched as the zombie took the round through his right temple, his head whipping to the side. As he dropped to his knees and pitched forward, Officer Wild jumped back.
Beside Dean, Sam fired two rounds in quick succession. Two zombie soldiers teetered and fell—one with a neat hole in his forehead just above the bridge of his nose, the other losing rotted bits of brain matter after the back of his skull was blown away, along with the shattered remains of his helmet.
Cerasi sighted along his automatic and fired a shot at the first soldier, almost point blank. The zombie’s nose seemed to vaporize and the back of his neck exploded. As the zombie swayed on unreliable legs, Cerasi raised his foot and kicked him in the abdomen, knocking him to the ground, his helmet rattling around on the ground behind him. The zombie’s head twitched back and forth for a few seconds, until Cerasi stepped forward and put a bullet through his forehead.
The gray-haired Nazi field marshal in the full-length leather trench coat targeted Wild. With his mouth gaping and his chin resting on his chest, his red-rimmed eyes stayed as fixated on her as his outstretched arms and twitching fingers.
She took a step back, almost tripping over the dead zombie in the white tunic, then sidestepped and raised her firearm. “Stop!”
“Too damn civilized,” Dean scoffed. He raised his automatic.
Wild let the zombie take one more step before she pulled the trigger. Twice. One shot burst through the field marshal’s left eye, the other blew off his peaked cap and the top of his skull. His legs crumpled and he fell to the side.
The rest of the zombies shambled around the broken window of the coffee shop, trying to gain entrance. Somebody inside was shoving them back with a coat rack, but there were too many zombies to keep at bay. The soldier bearing the brunt of the coat hooks wrapped his arm around it and staggered sideways, dislodging the pole from the coffee shop patron’s hands.
Supernatural 9 - Night Terror Page 11