“Did you see or hear anything unusual before you lost consciousness?”
One eyebrow arched, Pete asked, “Other than a whiff of my own flesh cooking?”
“Yes,” Dean said. “Other than that.”
He thought it over. “Not really. Craving a cigarette. I could almost smell it, taste it. Other than that, nothing unusual. Of course, if I hadn’t fallen on the floor…” He glanced down at his bandaged forearms. “But, hey, could have been worse, right?”
“Yeah. Sure,” Sam said.
“Lots of people got hurt. Bumps and bruises mostly.” Pete looked toward Marie. “I heard Nellie Quick lost a few teeth when she fell! Right in front!”
“Oh, no!” Marie said. “I recall some blood on her mouth. Thought she bit her lip.”
“Heard she looks like a hockey player,” Pete said, chuckling. “Could play for the Blues.”
Marie laughed, then caught herself, mortified. “Sorry. That’s awful, Pete.” She looked around to make sure nobody was in earshot. “But that woman is very particular about her appearance.”
Pete turned back to the Winchesters. “So, got any theories? Terrorists? UFOs?”
“We’re investigating possibilities,” Sam said noncommittally.
As the Winchesters walked toward the Impala, Dean overheard Marie chatting with Pete.
“At breakfast this morning, Clyde Barksdale told me his bomb shelter is stocked for any emergency. Convinced it’s the end times.”
“If it is,” Pete said, “what good is a damn bomb shelter?”
Marie laughed. “You try talking sense to that man.”
Dean drove off the lot. A glance in the rearview mirror showed Marie heading back inside the diner while Pete fired up his battered pickup, a puff of smoke belching from the rusted exhaust pipe. Dean wondered if those two kept the Moyer grapevine thriving. Pete had come to the diner hours before his scheduled shift time to tell what little he knew about the midnight incident in what was more likely a fishing expedition. Harmless small-town gossip, maybe, but they were no closer to the cause of the mass blackout or the weird behavior.
“Possibilities?” Dean asked. “Got anything in mind?”
“Assuming terrorists, UFOs and carbon monoxide are far down the list,” Sam said, “could be any number of things. Demonic possession. Angel possession. Psychics. Witches.”
“Hex bags,” Dean said, latching onto the last suggestion. “What if it’s not random? What if somebody in Moyer has a hit list?”
“Wouldn’t explain the midnight incident.”
“No,” Dean agreed. “If they’re related. Maybe they’re not.”
“I don’t know, Dean,” Sam said. “Gruber had a good point.”
“Could be coincidence.”
“What are you suggesting?”
“Let’s rule out demons,” Dean said. “Because we know demons. And some of these incidents, pranks or whatever, well, not their style.”
“I checked the diner for sulfur.”
“And?”
“Not a whiff,” Sam admitted.
“There you go,” Dean said. “And this oddball stuff doesn’t fit angel possession either.”
“But that’s also why a hit list doesn’t makes any sense,” Sam said. “It’s a mixed bag. Juvenile pranks. Things that might tarnish a reputation? Sure. But then you have extreme violence and attempted suicides.”
“So, what kind of list would cover that range of targets?” Dean asked.
Sam took a moment to consider possibilities. “Maybe it’s not one person with a list.”
“Multiple lists?”
“Or a coven, maybe a group of psychics working together,” Sam speculated. “Everyone brings their own list.”
“Meaning, what, a revenge club?”
“Or,” Sam continued, “a smokescreen.”
“Thought we ruled out a toxic gas emission.”
“Funny,” Sam said. “But we’re not talking about the blackouts.”
“We’re not?”
“Let’s ignore them right now,” Sam said. “Focus on the pranks and violence. What if the person with the hit list had a short list of real targets, but sticking to that list would point the finger right back at them?”
“So, all the rest are random?”
“More or less.”
Dean considered this for a minute or so. “That’s a big smokescreen.”
“If it’s needed to hide the real victims,” Sam said, “then, yeah.”
“Like a sniper shooting up a crowd to disguise his main target.”
“General idea,” Sam said, nodding, “but our sniper isn’t using bullets.”
“So, we start looking for hex bags.”
“Or we start talking to the victims,” Sam said. “Figure out who’d put them on a hit list.”
“Which victims?”
“Said it yourself,” Sam replied. “Ignore the smokescreen and talk to the serious victims.”
“Is Kelly Burke on that list?” Dean asked.
“Maybe,” Sam said. “But I never asked her about enemies since she was eating lunch with her attacker. Think bigger.”
“You mean—?”
Sam nodded. “County hospital,” he said. “But we’ll need a name.”
* * *
Her name was Nancy Vickers, a twenty-four-year-old graphic designer at Thornbury Printing, a company founded by her great uncle almost fifty years ago but struggling to compete in the Internet age with multiple online DIY options. “But there’s no craftsmanship and everything starts to have a sameness about it. Know what I mean? A blandness.” She shrugged and winced in pain. “That’s what happens when you start with a cookie-cutter foundation.”
She sighed, adjusted her casted left arm, grimacing as she bumped her damaged ribs. “So, yeah, business is slow, but that’s not news. And it’s no reason to try to kill myself. I would never do that!”
“Okay,” Sam said in a soothing tone. “Why don’t you start at the beginning?”
When Dean and Sam had arrived on her floor, introduced themselves and asked to see Nancy, the charge nurse—Beth, per her name tag—seemed startled to see them. She stood within the C-shaped nursing station, telephone receiver in her left hand, the fingers of her right poised over the keypad. “How did you know?” she asked. “I haven’t even finished dialing Officer Gruber yet.”
“Know what?” Sam asked.
“That Miss Vickers is awake.”
“We didn’t,” Dean said. “Okay if we talk to her?”
“She woke up less than thirty minutes ago.”
“We won’t be long,” Sam said. “Promise.”
“And she’ll need to go under psychiatric evaluation before she’s released.”
“Understood,” Sam said.
“But I’m calling Gruber!”
“Good,” Dean said. “He knows we’re here.”
Inside Nancy’s private room, she took a few calming breaths before speaking again. “Okay, I’m ready,” she said, “but there’s not much to tell.”
“Because you don’t remember?” Sam guessed.
She looked between them. “How—How did you know?”
“Lot of that going around,” Dean said.
“I don’t understand.”
“Tell us what you do remember,” Sam said.
“Right, okay, well, I was driving to work, my morning commute,” she said. “It’s not far, but I live across town. Sometimes I’ll stop for a coffee at the Gas-N-Sip. I prefer Bigelow’s Bistro, but it’s a bit out of my way and the wait’s longer. Mostly it’s the same routine. Know it like the back of my hand. And you know how you kind of zone out when you drive the same route all the time. Your brain goes on auto-pilot.”
Dean nodded. While he had no regular commute, he’d done enough driving to know what she meant by auto-pilot. Same thing happened on long, open roads.
Nancy reached for the control to raise her bed higher than the current forty-five-degree elevation, mana
ged a steeper incline, then attempted to adjust her position and yelped in pain as she strained her ribs. She bit down on a knuckle while she rode a wave of pain.
“You okay?” Sam asked.
“It’s hard to move at all without pain,” she said. “Even breathing hurts, but I’ll be fine… eventually. Besides, the pain helps me focus.”
“It does?”
“Yes. No. Not really,” she said. “But at least I’m alive.”
“So, you were zoning out on your morning commute,” Dean prompted.
“Right,” she said. “The drive was mostly a blur and then nothing until I was falling…” She furrowed her brow and shook her head. “No, that’s not right.”
“What is it?” Sam asked.
“I remember—I remember what happened next!”
SEVEN
“That’s great,” Sam said. “What can you tell us?”
“At some point during the drive, I remember looking through the windshield and having no idea where I was. Nothing looked familiar. When I took my foot off the accelerator, I tried to get my bearings, to see a landmark…”
She stared across the room, focused on the surfacing memory rather than anything in front of her. “But it was random curiosity, like I didn’t really care one way or the other. And then I…”
“What?” Sam asked. “What happened?”
“I… I pulled over to the shoulder, parked and got out of my car…”
“Why?”
She shook her head. “I have no idea.”
“Where were you?”
“Halfway up the overpass incline,” she said, almost trancelike as she relived the memory. “Jefferson Avenue. Must have been somewhere between Second and Fourth.”
“What happened after you left your car?”
“I walked up to the overpass,” she said, almost in disbelief as the words came out of her mouth. “There’s a chain-link safety fence there and the top is slanted inward. Sometimes people attach flags to the fence and you can see them when you drive by below. Political signs too. And never one. Always in bunches. So annoying.”
Knuckles rapped on the doorjamb.
Startled, Dean looked to his right and saw Nurse Beth standing there, a question on her face. “Everything okay in here?”
“We’re fine,” Sam said. “She’s fine.”
“My legs itch,” Nancy said, back in the moment, free of the reverie. “And my arm. These casts are driving me nuts.”
“I’ll see what we can do,” Beth said in a soothing tone.
As the nurse withdrew, Nancy called after her. “I’m really not suicidal!” She listened for a moment. Silence. “Damn it,” she said to the Winchesters. “They think I’m crazy, don’t they? Or terminally depressed?” She sighed. “This is nuts. Not me! The situation is nuts. All of it.” She looked from Sam to Dean and back again. “You believe me, don’t you?”
“We want to understand what happened on the overpass,” Sam said, his calm and measured voice almost parroting the charge nurse’s.
A safe approach, if they were assuming Nancy had attempted suicide of her own volition, but Dean had his doubts about that. If some external supernatural force was responsible for the odd, violent and suicidal behavior in Moyer, whether it was hex bags or something else, the victims would be as baffled as the police and the Winchesters at this point.
“You and me both,” Nancy said. “So, where was I? Oh, right, walking up the overpass. There were no flags or signs. Just the fence. And the traffic rushing below. Everyone drives too fast on Jefferson. Act like it’s the interstate or something.”
“You climbed the fence,” Dean said, attempting to get her back on track.
“I guess I did,” she said softly.
“You don’t remember?” Sam asked, disappointed.
“I… It’s hard to explain,” she said, her gaze beginning to lose its focus again. “I watched myself park the car and walk up to the overpass. Kicked off my heels and climbed the fence in my stockinged feet. And I struggled around that slanted top section of the fence, like a kid on a jungle gym. But I was watching myself from the inside.”
“Help me understand.”
“I had no thought, no control over my—what do the doctors call it—motor functions? I felt… removed. Like a passenger in my own body. I witnessed it happening. Yes”—she nodded—“that’s the right word. I witnessed it—but I had no say in what I was doing in each individual moment or what happened next. I could see the details, but I couldn’t feel—I couldn’t feel anything.”
“No sense of touch?”
“Emotions,” she said. “I had no control over my actions, but I had no emotional response to them either. When I witnessed my body climbing over the safety fence, I guessed what was coming—I was about to fall or jump into oncoming traffic—but I had no sense of fear or dread.”
“Could someone have drugged you?” Sam asked.
“Spiked your coffee?” Dean suggested.
“No,” she said. “I was running late. Skipped the coffee pit stop. Figured I’d gulp down the bitter metallic crap Stewart brews in the office. But…”
“What?” Sam asked.
“Now that I think about it, you’re right.”
“Which part?”
“The sense of touch thing,” she said. “The memory I have… it’s visual only. I can’t remember the feel of the chain-link fence or the smell of car exhaust or the sounds of traffic. And even my vision, the visual memory, it’s like I was looking…”
“Through the wrong end of a telescope?” Dean asked.
She nodded. “Yes! I was numb. And everything seemed distant, even though it was happening to my body.” Absently, the fingers of her right hand scratched beneath the edge of the cast that rose to her left elbow. “I clung to the other side of the fence for a moment. The drivers had only a few moments to notice me up there before they passed beneath. I could see some of them waving frantically, pounding on their horns, but I couldn’t hear anything. Some swerved out of the lane right beneath me, others braked, some sped up to get by before I could—I jumped. No hesitation. Almost flung myself away from the fence. The fall lasted a split-second. I saw the cars rushing toward me in complete silence, the startled, horrified faces of the drivers convinced they were about to run over—kill me and then… darkness…”
“You blacked out,” Sam said, nodding. “That’s understandable—”
“No, the darkness rippled and flashed away, and everything rushed back into me, the suffocating smell of exhaust, the hiss and screech of tires, blaring horns, voices yelling and”—she closed her eyes for a moment and her body shuddered as if an electric charge blasted every nerve in her body simultaneously—“the pain! Oh, my God, I had been so numb to everything and in that one moment I felt my legs break, the sound and the give inside.” Sweat began to bead on her brow. “A motorcyclist swerved away, narrowly missing me but the car behind him, squealing tires, the metal grill rushing toward—I flung out my forearm, in front of my face, squeezed my eyes shut, gritted my teeth—a blast of pain in my elbow, shooting up to my shoulder and collarbone and I could feel myself spinning, almost flipping aside and then… that’s all I remember until I woke up briefly as paramedics strapped me to the ambulance gurney, hysterical, completely confused. I couldn’t remember any of it. The last thing I recalled was leaving my home that morning, driving to work. I thought I’d been in a car accident, that it must have been bad and then everything faded away. I think I woke up a couple times here, but not for very long until about a half-hour ago.”
“Wow,” Sam said.
“Crazy, huh,” she said with a lopsided grin. “The story, not me. I’m checking the ‘Not Crazy’ box on any forms they have me sign.”
“No,” Sam said. “When you started, you said there wasn’t much to tell.”
She smiled. “When I started, there wasn’t… I mean, I couldn’t remember anything but driving to work and the few moments after I fell.”
�
��You strained your ribs,” Dean said. “When you started talking to us.”
“You’re right,” Nancy said. “That pain, I guess it triggered the memories I couldn’t recall. Maybe I was blocking it out, or didn’t want to believe I could do something like that.”
“Maybe,” Sam said, thoughtful.
“But it’s not like I’m secretly depressed or anything,” she said. “I’ve applied for some design jobs in Jefferson City and Columbia. I have a few interviews scheduled…” She frowned, looked down at her arm and leg casts. “Interviews I’ll never make it to now. If I’m not careful, I’ll talk myself into a state of depression!”
“They’re tech companies, right?” Sam asked.
“Yeah, why?”
“Maybe you can interview with video chat,” he suggested. “Telecommute if you get a job.”
“Maybe,” she said, looking down at her broken and casted body doubtfully. “Eventually.”
“This is gonna sound weird,” Sam said before she could spiral into actual depression. “But, do you have any enemies?”
“Enemies?”
“Someone who might be glad you got hurt,” Dean said. “Almost died.”
“Someone who wanted one of those jobs,” Sam suggested.
“God, no,” she said. “The job market’s bad but not that cutthroat.”
“So, no enemies?”
“I design signs, marketing campaigns for businesses,” she said. “I show them comps and they approve or ask for revisions. Even if the campaigns failed, I doubt they’d be coming after me.”
“Relationship problems?” Dean asked. “Jealous exes?”
“First, that’s kind of personal,” she said. “And second, no, nothing like that. Wait, is this because you think someone drugged me?”
“We’re investigating all possibilities,” Sam said. “Someone with a personal grudge, business deal gone wrong, that sort of thing.”
“Even if any of that happened, if I had a mortal enemy, how could that person make me jump off an overpass?”
Dean looked at Sam. Neither of them had an answer.
* * *
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