“He’s infected,” Sam cautioned. “Something nasty. Ebola. Hemorrhagic fever. Marburg virus.”
“You have to help ME!” the man cried, hysterical.
Turning back to Sam, the man lumbered toward him, arms outstretched.
FOURTEEN
Blood coursed down the infected man’s face, spilling from his ears, eyes, nose, and mouth. When he was within ten feet of Sam, his body became wracked with a coughing spasm and blood sprayed from his mouth. Stiff-legged, he continued to stumble toward the brothers.
“Stop!” Sam warned him, his jaw bunching as he tightened his grip on the trigger.
“Hell with that,” Dean said and fired.
The bullet struck the man above the left eye, whipping his head back. His body collapsed in a tangle of legs—and winked out of existence before reaching the pavement. All the spilled blood vanished as well.
Sam turned to Dean. “How did you know he wasn’t real?”
“I didn’t,” Dean said. “Your rules. Perception and reality.”
Wild joined them. “That could have been one of my people!”
“Either way,” Sam said with a nod to Dean. “He was infected and lethal. Ninety percent mortality rate.”
“Ten percent chance he could have lived,” Wild countered.
“You willing to turn your town into a hot zone?” Dean asked.
“Not my call.”
“Whatever this is,” Sam interrupted before the argument could escalate. “Whatever creates these manifestations, I doubt it plays the percentages. You get infected, you die.”
“So what are we supposed to do?”
“Shoot on sight,” Dean said. “Lethal force.”
As he slept at the end of the sofa, mired in a troubling dream, Phil Meyerson’s hand slipped and he jabbed his thigh with his mechanical pencil. The sudden movement, more than the injury to his leg, woke him from what had started out as a break to rest his burning eyes and had turned into sound sleep. His eyes opened to darkness and he experienced a moment of disorientation. A few seconds later, the lamp flickered and winked on, followed by the television set. He assumed the house had experienced a short power loss while he’d been asleep.
Glancing down at the half-finished New York Times crossword, he sighed in self-disgust and slapped it down on the end table and placed the mechanical pencil on top of it. “Damn old age,” he muttered.
He leaned over the coffee table and pressed the remote button to turn off the television set. Then, with another sigh, he pushed himself from the comfortable embrace of the sofa. Six months ago, he would have battled on with the crossword. Hell, one month ago, he’d have been game to keep plugging along. But not now.
“Not tonight,” he whispered in quiet surrender.
For some reason, his physical exhaustion would not be denied. Maybe he was coming down with something. A bug incubating, draining his stamina, what little he had at his age. Nothing like the exotic diseases he had studied his whole life. Just some common, garden variety virus staking its claim, challenging his immune system to a duel.
In a way, the conjecture made him feel better. Anybody could become sick, need more rest than usual. Not necessarily a sign of advanced age or deteriorating faculties. If he had to rest, he would. But was it asking too much for some dreamless sleep? As much as he missed his youth, he wouldn’t mind a night’s sleep without dreaming about deadly viral outbreaks.
Switching off the table lamp, he made his slow way up the stairs, hearing his joints creak and pop like rusty hinges, pressing down on the banister rail with his palm because he needed the support to make the simple trip to his bedroom and his sleeping wife.
In the dark room he left behind, a deeper darkness detached from the wall and drifted across the open space, spilling out through a keyhole and then through a small gap between the edge of the storm door and the doorjamb. Once out in the night, it floated above the rooftops in a familiar direction and paused above another house before drifting down, ready to feed again before the night was over.
* * *
Alden Webb, sitting in bed in his pajamas, yawned as he flipped through assorted internal prison documents. He turned the television to a nighttime talk show host whose monologue patter became like white noise filling the unnatural silence of the house. Thunderstorms had passed and the sirens he’d heard earlier had faded. Car accidents, downed power lines, the usual heartbeat of town emergencies in severe weather, he presumed. Nothing to concern him. But even with all those distracting sounds outside the house, he could never acclimate to the silence inside the house.
Ever since his wife divorced him and moved to San Francisco to work for her niece—who founded a company that helped corporations develop social networking strategies—he swore he could hear the clocks in the house ticking. And the sound was enough to drive him to distraction—or a psych ward. He found himself turning on the stereo or the television as soon as he returned home. Background noise. Because the silence was too loud.
What the talk show host joked about was of little interest to him, but it trumped the hollowness of ticking clocks and humming electronics. Instead, Webb flipped through the file folders filled with routine paperwork and incident reports from his deputy wardens, the food service supervisor, his corrections center manager, the director of security operations, and the building manager. The reports dealt with everything under his purview, including food preparation, counseling, treatment, health care, security issues, purchase orders, human resources matters involving prison employees, and building maintenance. Most of the reports were standard administrative matters. He looked for irregularities in the routine reports. And he paid special attention to matters involving prisoner treatment by the guards and violence or insubordination among the prisoners.
His early conversation with the young FBI agents had not been unexpected. Defending the safety of the prison had become something of a knee-jerk reaction for him. Nevertheless, he took his responsibilities as warden of a federal prison seriously. While he assured the mayor and the citizens of Clayton Falls that Falls Federal presented no threat to their welfare, any prison was a potential powder keg. One large-scale riot and all his careful assurances would be undone.
The addition of the supermax wing had been a sore point for the town, a rallying cry for all the protestors who decried the housing of the “worst of the worst” criminals minutes away from the families and children of Clayton Falls. In reality, the supermax cons were the least of Webb’s concerns. They were locked down in solitary cells twenty-three hours a day. And their one free hour out of their cells was spent alone. Not much trouble for them to get into with that one hour of exercise time.
Truth be told, he had a visceral loathing of the supermax felons. In his opinion, they were beyond redemption or rehabilitation. They were marking time, lifers or awaiting lethal injection. Webb had a hard time looking them in the eye, because what he saw there struck him as inhuman. Maybe it was the total lack of compassion or conscience. Something was just... missing. The latest addition had been particularly heinous: Ragnar Bartch, a confessed cannibal with seventeen known victims and whose weapon of choice was a cleaver. Before he arrived, the worst con in supermax was Kurt Machalek, who kept a collection of human hearts in mason jars after cutting them from the chests of his victims with a serrated bowie knife. Profilers called the hearts souvenirs. Machalek called them totems and believed they gave him mystical powers. But Bartch and Machalek and their ilk weren’t going anywhere.
All the other prisoners under his watch had much more potential to cause trouble. They had far less direct supervision and oversight. They mingled. They divided themselves along racial lines, us versus them. One spark, one real or imagined slight and they could cause serious injury to their fellow cons and damage to the prison. Yet even the worst-case scenario presented no threat to the town. Even a full-blown riot could be locked down. Yes, there most likely would be casualties in the prison—but the town would remain safe. Guards an
d prison employees would be the only civilians at risk.
Webb shuddered with a sudden draft in his bedroom. He was not poetic enough to consider the sensation a presentiment of doom. He read nothing in the reports that hinted at anything more than the expected amount of conflict within the walls of his prison. Everything was, well, routine.
Acquiescing to the frequency of his yawns, he filed the reports in their folders and stacked them on the bedside table to take to work in the morning. He picked up the television remote, trying to decide if he should turn the volume up or turn the set off. While he weighed the pros and cons, he fell asleep.
Coils of darkness unspooled from the curtains and settled above his headboard, taking shape to feed...
By the time Dean and Sam arrived at the scene of Tony Lacosta’s hit and vanish, the young man’s body had been taken away, and the front yard and wrecked porch had been encircled with crime scene tape. His parents stood in the driveway in their night clothes, arms wrapped around each other. While his mother sobbed, his father looked as if he’d been kicked in the gut. They had already told Chief Quinn what they’d witnessed after the initial attack twice and refused to go over it again. The Winchesters eavesdropped on the conversation as a detective that Quinn assigned to the case promised to talk to them in the morning, after they’d had a chance to process what had happened. Dean doubted their “processing” would adhere to a convenient timetable.
At the curb in front of the house, Lucy Quinn argued quietly with her father. The police chief ’s concern for his daughter was evident in his eyes and body language, but clearly he found her account of the attack unconvincing. In deference to the grieving parents standing less than twenty feet away, Chief Quinn and Lucy spoke in hushed but urgent tones.
“Why would I make this up?” Lucy demanded.
“You wouldn’t,” Chief Quinn said. “Not intentionally. I’m suggesting you didn’t see what you think you saw. A car might roll down a hill unattended, but they simply don’t drive themselves.”
“This one did,” Lucy said. “Saw it with my own eyes.”
“Eyewitnesses are notoriously inaccurate,” the police chief countered. “Three people witness the same crime. Later, they’ll each give completely different descriptions of the perp. And they’re all positive about what they saw.”
“So, you’re saying you don’t believe it was Teddy’s car?”
“Teddy’s car was totaled, Lucy. You know that.”
“Then it was an exact copy.”
“Now we’re getting somewhere. Somebody—a real person, not a ghost or an invisible driver—got hold of a similar car. Maybe even painted on the white stripe.”
“What?”
“An old friend, maybe,” Chief Quinn suggested. “Out for revenge.”
Lucy placed her hands on her hips and stared at him. “You know how crazy that sounds?”
Chief Quinn scoffed in frustration. “Any crazier than a car driving itself around town, running down civilians?”
“You’re impossible.”
Dean stepped up during the awkward silence.
“Mind telling us what you saw. Or didn’t see,” he asked Lucy, with a quick glance at her father.
“Why bother?” Chief Quinn said. “There’s a simple explanation. A tinted windshield hid the driver from view.”
“The windshield was not tinted!” Lucy glanced at Tony’s parents as she spoke, trying to keep her voice under control.
Chief Quinn threw his hands up in the air.
Lucy turned to Dean. “He’s right. What’s the point? I already told him what I saw. He refuses to listen.”
“We—Agent Shaw and I—might be open to different possibilities.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Chief Quinn asked indignantly, as if Dean had called his judgment and entire law enforcement background into question.
“Have you been listening to your police reports, Chief?” Dean asked. “Giant spiders, Nazi zombies in the restaurant district, packs of hunting dinosaurs. You saw the sinkhole deep enough to hold a gymnasium.”
Quinn shook his head. “Crazy talk. If I hadn’t been tied up here with this terrible accident... Well, let’s just say I’m now willing to believe your information about a hallucinogen was credible. Clearly, some people in Clayton Falls have been dosed. It’s the only explanation for all the irrational radio chatter. As far as the sinkhole, that’s all it was. Bigger than most, I’ll grant, but they happen.”
“Mind if we have a word with your daughter?” Sam asked in a reasonable tone. Dean always figured Sam had the better chance of making it in the world of politics.
“No, go right ahead,” he said. “I love her, but her fantasy story is not helping the situation.”
Chief Quinn walked brusquely to his police cruiser, climbed in and slammed the door. He brought the police radio to his mouth and spoke rapidly into it. Dean watched as the chief began to listen to more reports from his officers. Within seconds he was shaking his head in disbelief.
“Lucy, tell us what happened,” Sam said gently. “Were you here when the car hit Tony?”
“No,” she said. “It started before that. I had already left his house. I was walking home when the car... saw me.”
“Saw you?” Sam asked.
The possessed car talk made Dean nervous. He glanced at the Impala parked at the curb, willing it to stay silent and dark. He took a breath and refocused on the conversation.
“That’s what it felt like. I believe it was coming for Tony,” she said. “But it saw me and decided to take a swipe at me. So, maybe it was thinking, two-for-one, right? First Lucy, then Tony.”
“How so?”
“About the same time I saw the car, it drove to my side of the street, jumped the curb and tried to run me down. I froze for a moment. Kept thinking, this can’t be happening. But I remembered that it had happened, that it got Steve.”
“What did you do?”
“I snapped out of it. I was standing next to a white picket fence. Fortunately, it wasn’t too high. I dove over it to get out of the way. The car hit the fence, pretty much wrecked the whole thing. I can show you if you don’t believe me.”
“I believe you.”
Lucy smiled in relief.
Probably the first she’s heard those words all night, Dean thought. “So, the car kept driving. Back the way I had come. Toward Tony’s house. Since it had already got Steve, and tried for me, I thought maybe it’s going after Tony next. When I left his house, he was out on the porch. I wanted to warn him. Thought he’d be safe as long as he didn’t come down to the sidewalk or try to cross the street. I had no idea it would drive up on the lawn and... and ram the porch.”
Dean scanned the ruined front lawn, scored with deep tire ruts, the sagging midsection of the porch and the overturned Adirondack chairs. It had been easier to imagine the car hitting someone standing in the middle of the road. Aside from the last-second acceleration to hit Steve Bullinger, the hit and run fit the profile of an accident. This attack was... premeditated. The car had known where Tony Lacosta lived, had sought him out and used every means at its vehicular disposal to kill him.
“The car jumped the curb and struck the porch?” Dean asked.
“Yes,” she said. “First it turned to face the house. Then it went right over the curb and slammed into the porch. Over and over until the porch collapsed. Tony fell onto the lawn. Once he was at ground level, the car... it crushed him.” She pressed her wrist against her mouth and started to cry quietly.
Sam placed his hands gently on her shoulders and looked her in the eyes.
“Lucy, I’m sorry about your friend. I know this is hard.”
She nodded quickly and a tear slipped down her cheek.
“Why is this happening?”
At the risk of losing her trust, Dean said, “Lucy, can you think of anyone who might want to hurt you and your friends? Because of Teddy’s death?”
“Revenge? Like my father said?”
<
br /> “I’m not saying what you saw isn’t real,” Dean said quickly. “But maybe somebody caused it to happen.”
“We were Teddy’s closest friends,” Lucy said, genuinely puzzled. “His only friends in school.”
“What about family?” Dean recalled Sam’s reading newspaper articles about the accident. “Lived with his grandmother, right?”
Sam nodded. “Olga Kucharski.”
Lucy shook her head. “Mrs. Kucharski is an old woman. Other than grocery shopping, she never leaves her house.”
“You on good terms with her?”
“Not really,” Lucy said. “I mean, she never really approved of us hanging around with her grandson. And she dismissed my relationship with Teddy as a crush. Thought it would pass. But she knew we were his only friends.
“After the accident, I visited her a couple times, but it was just... too much, you know. I couldn’t handle her grief and my grief. Because, after Teddy died, I couldn’t breathe in that house. Felt like it was crushing me. I’ll never forget what happened, but it’s... easier without the constant reminders. Last few months, I haven’t really seen her. Or made an effort. Guess that makes me a bad person.”
“Everybody handles grief in their own way,” Sam said.
“I know,” she said. “But I still feel guilty.”
“You should go home,” Sam said pointedly.
“No, I’m okay,” Lucy said. She glanced toward the Lacostas, still huddled together in their driveway, whispering to each other. “Maybe I should stay with them...”
“It’s not safe here,” Dean said. “You’re not safe here.”
She looked up at Sam and then at Dean. “You think it will come back?”
Sam cleared his throat. “Definite possibility.”
“We could drive you home,” Dean said.
“Thanks, but—” she glanced over at her father’s police cruiser—“I should go with my father.”
“You’re okay with that?” Sam asked.
“If I’m not safe with the chief of police, I’m not safe with anyone.”
Dean frowned but said nothing. He’d feel better about her safety with her dad if the man actually believed in what was trying to kill her and had already killed her friends. The car might be a blind spot for him. Until it was too late.
Supernatural 9 - Night Terror Page 13