Dean headed toward the café.
“I’ll join you,” Julia said.
“Why don’t you freshen up first, sweetheart.” Dean suggested with a hint of spite.
Julia nodded and headed toward the motel office.
Dean and Sam stood in the gravel parking lot watching Walter and Julia.
“Ditching them went well.” Dean looked at his brother. “Now what?”
Sam shrugged. “Let’s sleep on it. Next thing we need to do is get the hell back home.”
“Any suggestions? Because I’m getting sort of tired of Pleasantville.”
“Let’s go back to Waubay, South Dakota, and hope Don has enough wherewithal to pick us up from there. I’ll go check us in.”
Dean noticed Julia standing in the doorway of her cottage. Moments later, Sam reappeared with two keys and threw one to Dean. He ducked inside his cabin.
Half an hour later, Dean lay on his bed. Sam had decided to grab some food after all. Dean was bored. There wasn’t a TV in the room, the only entertainment offered was a selection of black and white pamphlets explaining the local tourist attractions.
“Oh good, a milking museum,” Dean said to himself.
There was a soft knock on the door.
“It’s open, Sam.”
Julia appeared in the doorway. She had changed into a sweater and jeans and a pair of hiking boots. Dean wondered where she’d managed to find clean clothes.
“May I come in?”
Dean sat up. “Sure, yeah.”
Julia shut the door, and leaned against it.
“Need some company?” She smiled.
“Not usually.”
“That was some fight back there,” she said, and sat down beside him on the bed.
Dean shrugged. “I have a feeling you’ve seen it all before. So tell me, what do you and your father really specialize in? It has to be something scholarly. I know—lying and stealing, maybe even some money laundering thrown in for good measure. Anything to survive—right?”
“I have a feeling you and your brother do the same.”
“Maybe, but you’re as fake as silicone, baby. And I hate silicone. Ruins the moment, you know.”
Julia let out a small laugh.
“Sometimes I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
She crept her hand closer to his. Dean looked down.
“Sweetheart, I’m tired. Anyway we can put this off until... say never?” Dean looked her in the eyes.
Julia didn’t seem to be putting on a front now. It had been a long time since Dean had spent this much time with a woman. The Apocalypse, Sam, Lucifer, it had all worn him down. He was on autopilot. Dean wondered whether he would wake up some day and his entire life would have been one bad dream.
“Maybe you like me so much because you know we are both always pretending to be someone else. I see myself in you.” Julia breathed shallowly. “Maybe you see yourself in me.”
“Wow, there are so many different ways I could take that.” Dean smiled. “But sorry, I don’t get close to people. Not in my line of work.”
“Me neither.”
“I doubt that very much.”
“Why can’t you be nice to me?”
“Not my nature. I’m a hunter, I don’t get close. It becomes your weakness. It’s bad enough to hunt with family.”
Julia nodded. “I know how you feel. My mother died at the hands of something evil. My father swore to avenge her death. And he did. He was born into this life. He never knew anything different. My mother, however, she didn’t pick this. She had no idea. I was only a baby when she died. So my father took me with him. I studied with him. I grew up knowing about demons, monsters—”
“Everything that goes bump in the night.”
“Yeah. I guess. There are a lot of people like us. A whole group of people we work with. We meet up every month and pool our resources. You would be amazed what you can get done in groups. Demons sure, but vampires, easy to wipe out with a group of a hundred hunters.”
“Wait a minute, you know a hundred hunters?” Dean stopped caressing her thigh for a moment.
“Yup. So if you’re hunters and we’re hunters, why haven’t we heard of you?” Julia asked.
Dean shrugged. “My father taught us to be on our own. He always said other hunters are fine for some jobs. But in order to keep moving, best to be by yourselves.”
“I guess so. Still strange though. We have an entire network of people and you’ve never come up.” Julia cocked her head to the side, looking at Dean.
“Like I said, best to be on your own.”
Dean’s cheeks flushed. He grabbed Julia by the wrist and pulled her on top of him. He held her head in his hands. She stared into his eyes.
“Why do you need the scrolls?”
“I can’t tell you that.”
“My father knew that he was destined to do something good for people. Then, when they started finding the Dead Sea Scrolls, he knew that he had to find the one scroll his mother always told him about. The ultimate battle plan for the war between good and evil. Hundreds of people have been waiting thousands of years for that scroll to appear. And your brother has it in his bag in a flour can.”
“Could be worse, I guess.” Dean shrugged.
“You really piss me off, you know that?”
“Yup.”
Dean gave her a long kiss. Her lithe body relaxed on top of his. He pulled her sweater up over her head, and ran his hands over her sinewy back. She quickly undid his belt buckle with one hand. Dean raised an eyebrow, impressed. He kissed her again.
TWENTY-FIVE
When Dean woke the next day, Sam was standing in the doorway. Silent. He made a face. Dean shrugged. Sam soundlessly closed the door behind him.
Dean looked at Julia still asleep beside him, then levered himself carefully out of bed. He grabbed his jeans and leather jacket, then struggled to get his boots on. He left the room and walked across the gravel parking lot. Sam was nowhere to be seen. Dean muttered curses under his breath. He needed coffee and Sam had wandered off like a kid at Disneyland.
Then Sam swung into the parking lot. Dean gulped as he saw his brother was driving a brand-new green-and-white 1953 Oldsmobile Fiesta. It had a large chrome grill like a duck bill on the front, white wall tires, 170 horsepower and two-tone seats. Only four were made in 1953.
“Do you know how much one of these is worth?” Dean said excitedly.
“Keep your voice down. The sticker price is $5,700. I found it in the glove compartment.”
“One of these sold at auction for 150 K, just last year. Well, you know, in fifty-five years. Man, I wish I could bring this back with me!”
“Speaking of which. Let’s get on the road. I have an idea that Don will know to look for us in Waubay.”
“Sure.”
Dean got into the passenger seat.
“You don’t want to drive?” Sam asked.
“Didn’t get much sleep.” Dean smirked. “By the way, they have a network of like a hundred hunters.”
Sam looked at his brother in surprise.
“You’re kidding me. We’ve never come across that big an organised group before. What do you think happened to them?”
Dean shrugged. “And supposedly, they all know about the scroll. Specifically the War Scroll.”
Sam looked stunned. He pulled the car out onto the two-lane highway and headed north.
“How do they know about it?”
“I don’t know. A whole group of hunters all believing the scroll has a meaning. Sounds sort of like a cult. But they know about it, that’s for sure.”
“Do you think Julia and Walter told them?”
Dean looked out of the window. “Whether they did or not, we’ll be long gone into the future by the time they find out.”
For the first time since they were flung back to 1954, Dean felt a squeeze of regret. Sure he had spent loads of time with plenty of women. But it was true that very few of them meant
anything to him. Somehow Julia seemed different. Not only did she know the life that Dean had grown up in, but she was similar to him. Dean never had trouble being himself around people—that insecurity type thing wasn’t his bag, there were too many other more important things to deal with—but Julia made Dean want to be better. Just being around her made him want to not be such a jerk. He’d been fighting it since they met. But somehow Julia had an affect on Dean. Oh my god, am I turning into Jack Nicholson in that Helen Hunt movie?
Dean swallowed and noticed there was a lump in his throat. He looked down at his sweaty hands leaving imprints on his jeans.
Sam glanced over at his brother.
“What’s your problem?” Sam raised a curious eyebrow.
“Nothing. Shut up.”
For about a hundred miles Dean stared out of the window. He kept going over and over in his mind the first time they had met. He didn’t feel guilty about leaving her. He had a job to do. He’d left plenty of women while they were sleeping.
So why was he feeling guilty now?
Seven hours later they pulled into Waubay. The town didn’t look much different in the 1950s, everything just looked fresher, the paint wasn’t peeling and the roads were newly paved. The bar where they would meet Don was basically the same, except the building didn’t have as many cracks in it.
They took a booth in the back and ordered two beers.
Sam brought out the flour can with the scroll stuffed inside.
“Put that away,” Dean hissed, scowling. “If Don zaps us back to 2010, we don’t want to accidentally leave the scroll behind.”
“So, I have a thought. If in the future only the last pages of the scroll are missing, what do you think happens to the rest of it? We know it eventually ends up back in Israel. How do you think it gets there?”
Dean shrugged. “Maybe Eli the garden gnome shows up again and takes it there. Who knows? I don’t care. We have the scroll, we’ve got what we came for.”
The Winchester brothers finished three more beers apiece. Still no Don. Dean was getting agitated. Local patrons had come and gone. The bartender had already given them complimentary fish sticks. But still Don was nowhere to be seen.
“You think we should use the sigil?” Sam asked.
“No, that will invite every angel that’s on Earth right now. We’ve flown under the radar up until now, let’s not draw attention to ourselves.”
“Good point.”
The bar closed at twelve. The brothers thanked the bartender, a large gruff guy in a plaid shirt, and told him that if anyone showed up looking for them, they’d be at the motel down the road. The bartender nodded.
The next day, the boys resumed their vigil in the bar, still waiting for Don to zap them back to 2010.
“What the hell is taking him so long?” Dean growled.
“I don’t know. There really isn’t anything else to do but wait.”
“Great. Waiting around for another angel, exactly what I wanted to spend my life doing. At this rate we’ll be seventy by the time he shows up.” A cloud passed over Dean’s face. “You don’t think he’ll leave us here that long, do you?”
“I don’t know. But think about it this way—you could spend the rest of your life with Julia. Happily ever after.”
Dean knuckle punched Sam’s arm. “Shut up.”
He tried to change the subject. “Why don’t you just study up and translate the scroll? Maybe we can get out of here that way.”
“I’ve been trying. It’s beyond what I can translate, Dean. It’s ancient Aramaic, written in Aramaic script. It’s half language, half symbols. I have no idea what it says. Without Don we have no chance of finding out the final battle plan for Lucifer.”
“Well, can’t you learn?”
“I could, but we would need to go to a large university, like Chicago or Berkeley. The texts that would teach me ancient Aramaic aren’t just lying around the Waubay Library. And then I would need to study for months to be able to understand even the most elementary of symbols. I mean, look at it.”
Sam made sure no one in the bar was taking notice. Then carefully pulled out the scroll and smoothed it onto the table top.
“Look at how complicated this is. It’s not like learning an alphabet. There is a symbol for every word. And a sound that goes with every symbol.”
That was the end of the discussion.
On their third day of waiting around in Waubay, Dean got out of bed and looked out of the window at the foggy summer morning. They had to do something. This was ridiculous.
“Sam.”
No answer.
“Sam, wake up.”
Sam rubbed the sleep from his eyes. “I’m up. What?”
“We’ve got to call Julia and Walter. We need Walter to translate the scroll. It doesn’t matter anymore if he knows what the scroll says. Someone else will have to know what the last pages say besides us, right? We have to call them.”
“Dean, we have no way of getting in touch with them. They don’t have cell phones. I can try Walter’s office back at the Biblical Society in New York, but I doubt they went back there. What do you suggest? Besides, are you sure this isn’t because you just want to see Julia?”
“No, Sam, it’s not. We have nowhere else to turn. If you have a better idea, I’m all ears.”
Dean did in fact want to see Julia. Every fiber of his body wanted to, but his mind kept telling him, “No.”
In truth though, Julia and Walter were the only people they knew in 1954 that could help them. If they translated the page, they would have an idea how to defeat Lucifer. At least with that information they could call the angels to help them.
Sam and Dean had—very reluctantly on Dean’s part— ditched the Oldsmobile Fiesta and hotwired an old Chevy instead. It didn’t go very fast, but they didn’t want to draw attention to themselves anyway.
They rolled into a local electronics store. It was filled with black-and-white TVs. In the center of the store, on a raised platform covered in a green shag rug, was a color television. Mesmerized kids sat in a cluster in front of it. Even the adults couldn’t look away.
A guy in a brown suit approached Sam and Dean.
“Looking to buy a new television set, gentlemen? Look at this beauty, a hundred dollars, top of the line. Technicolor they call it. Look at that picture. It’s like you’re really there.”
“Thanks Crazy Eddie. Do you have CB radios?” Dean asked.
“Of course, all brand new. Biggest craze yet, huh? Right over here.”
Crazy Eddie led them to the back of the shop, where a series of CBs and ham radios were set up. None of them were plugged in.
Dean looked at Sam. Sam looked at Dean. Eddie went back to the customers crowded around the color TV. Sam and Dean grabbed some equipment and hid it in their leather jackets.
As they walked out, Dean patted Crazy Eddie on the back.
“Thanks, think we’ll pass.”
“Anytime,” the man said genially.
Back at the motel, Sam and Dean set up the ham radio and CB.
“How do you know they’ll even be on a CB or ham radio?” Sam said as he plugged one of the units into the wall socket.
“Guess we’ll just have to chance it. How else is this group of hunters communicating?”
Sam and Dean spent the next couple of hours putting out feelers on the radio units.
“Breaker, breaker. Looking for Papa Bear and Baby Bear. Ten, thirty-five. We’re up in the land of the Walleye. Anyone read?”
Sam and Dean had no idea what Julia and Walter’s handle would be. But they had an idea that they would be monitoring the airwaves.
About six hours later, Julia’s voice crackled over the CB radio.
“This is Baby Bear.” Dean could tell from Julia’s tone that she wasn’t happy with his moniker for her.
“Is this Dopey? Come in Dopey?”
“Yeah Baby Bear, this is Dopey. You and Papa Bear want to meet up?”
There
was silence on the other end of the radio.
Eventually, “What’s your twenty?” Julia asked.
“Two Pines Motel,” Dean said.
“Be there in twelve hours,” Julia responded. “Over and out.”
The radio was taken over by static. Dean looked at Sam.
“Aren’t you the least bit pissed that we didn’t know they were hunters?” Sam asked.
“What else can we do? Besides, does it matter? Let’s just get out of here as soon as we can.”
TWENTY-SIX
Exactly twelve hours later, there was a knock on the motel room door. Julia and Walter stood in the doorway, wearing what looked like fishing gear.
“Were you fishing?” Dean asked.
“Trying not to draw attention to ourselves,” Julia said tersely as she pulled a large shotgun out of one leg of the rubber waders she had on. “Plus, it’s a good way to carry around firepower.”
Dean nodded.
Walter walked into the room and sat on the bed.
“So, you ditch us and now you need our help?” He stared pointedly at Dean.
Dean gulped. Had Julia told her father they slept together? Dean met Julia’s eyes. She looked away. That was an affirmative. Crap.
“So you can’t translate the scroll on your own. Just like you couldn’t have gotten it on your own. And now you need our assistance. Again,” Walter said.
“Yes,” Sam said. “It would take months. Can you help?”
“You’ve ditched us twice now. There is a hoard of demons looking for us because of you. I’m not quite sure what’s in it for Julia and me.”
“I don’t think that’s because of us—” Dean interrupted.
Walter held out his hand to stop him.
“Regardless, now you come begging for our help.”
“I wouldn’t exactly say begging,” Dean said.
“Boy, let me finish.”
Dean was about to tell Walter he reminded him a lot of their friend Bobby, but he decided to keep his mouth shut.
“Let’s get started,” Walter said.
Walter laid a large suitcase out on the bed. It was filled with loads of dusty texts—most looked even older than the ones he’d had in his office in New York.
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