Supernatural--Joyride

by John Passarella

  “Morrissey! What the hell?”

  “Wait,” Gruber said, stopping. He swung the flashlight beam toward the side of the house and could just make out the two young cops facing each other. Morrissey stood frozen, his automatic pointed at Bowman’s head, while Bowman stood with both hands up, his right holding the taser.

  “Bowman! Taser him! Now!”

  “What—?”

  “Do it! Now!” Gruber yelled, moving toward them.

  “What the hell—?” Hardigan said.

  Bowman pointed his taser but, before he pulled the trigger, blackness rippled over his face. The taser fell to the grass and Bowman unholstered his own automatic, pointing it at Morrissey’s head.

  “On three,” Morrissey said, grinning. Bowman nodded, returning the amused smile. “One, two—”

  “No!” Gruber screamed, running the rest of the way, taser outstretched in his right hand. Still too far…

  “Three!” Bowman and Morrissey said together and pulled their triggers.

  The twin gunshots overlapped, sounding like one loud pop. The backs of both their skulls blew apart, spewing blood and brain matter in opposite directions.

  “Jesus!” Gruber whispered, falling to his knees.

  A shadow emerged from each supine corpse and swirled away, toward the backyard.

  They don’t die when we die.

  He returned to a visibly shaken Hardigan, who said, “What have we done?”

  “We’re here to save two kids,” Gruber said grimly. “That’s all that matters right now. Lead the way, Chief.”

  Hardigan stared at him for a moment, but finally gave a curt nod, removed his taser and hurried to the front door. He shoved it open while shouting, “Police!”

  Gruber hung back, letting Hardigan take the lead so he could keep his eyes on the older man—and any shadow that attempted to possess him. If Blair’s information was right, only those who succumbed to the blackout were vulnerable to possession. Gruber had been on vacation during the first blackout, and in Bakersburg during the second one. But Hardigan had never left Moyer. Even if he’d been home in bed both nights, he was compromised. For all Gruber knew, the entire force could turn on each other at any moment. Only those who had been out of town during the blackouts would be immune.

  First, they checked the foyer and living room. In the dining room, they found overturned chairs and bloodstains on the right wall—fresh drywall—along with bloody handprints on the hardwood floor. Glass shattered in the kitchen, startling them.

  They rushed to the kitchen doorway. Gruber peeked around the doorjamb, saw a woman hunched over the kitchen counter. A trail of blood drops marked her path to the counter. Gruber waved Hardigan forward, then followed him into the kitchen.

  “Susan Yates?” Gruber asked.

  “I—I…”

  Gripping the counter with one hand, she turned toward them, revealing a blood-soaked blouse. She’d been stabbed below the clavicle. “Help… Addie and Ethan,” she said, grimacing in pain and exhaustion. “He’s trying to… kill them.”

  Her knees buckled—

  Hardigan tossed his taser on the table as he rushed to help her.

  He caught her from behind, her weak body trembling. “Got you!”

  She shuddered and turned her face toward him, a grateful smile on her lips.

  Gruber saw a flare and fade of red in her eyes. “Chief!”

  “What now—?”

  She twisted in his arms and shoved a butcher knife deep into his gut. Hardigan staggered back and crashed into the kitchen table, falling to the floor. Gruber aimed his taser, but the shadow inhabiting Susan Yates rose out of her neck like a cape caught in an updraft and vanished in the darkness. Susan collapsed, unconscious and probably minutes away from death by blood loss.

  Grunting in pain, Hardigan pulled the knife free and stared at it for a moment before tossing it across the floor. After rifling through several kitchen drawers, Gruber found the dish towels and had Hardigan press one to the wound in his gut.

  “Prolonging… the inevitable,” Hardigan said, his voice strained.

  Gruber radioed for help, told the dispatcher the chief was wounded. “Send only officers from Bakersburg! Nobody from the Moyer police force!”

  “But—?”

  “Bakersburg only!” Gruber repeated emphatically. He needed men he could trust. As far as he knew, anyone in a Moyer uniform was a ticking bomb.

  The original call said the boy and his sister were hiding from their homicidal father underground. But not in the basement. In the backyard. In one of the cult’s underground chambers…

  A child screamed.

  Gruber looked toward the back door. The scream had come from outside. The father must have found the kids! He turned back toward the chief. “I have to help—”

  His eyes registered Hardigan holding his taser in a trembling hand, aiming it at Gruber—

  Must have fallen off the table when he—

  —and firing!

  CRACKLE-CRACKLE-CRACKLE!

  Gruber lost control of his motor functions, a terrifying paralysis gripping him as he toppled over—

  THIRTY-FIVE

  The two possessed patrol officers entered the demolished interior of the deserted library and paused. In front of them, they saw a wooden table on its side, the top facing them. Amid the destruction and chaos throughout the building, it garnered no special attention. They walked forward, their shoes crunching broken plastic, guns ready.

  When they were within a few feet of the table, Sam popped up from behind it, a taser in each hand, and fired both weapons simultaneously. Both cops stood rigid for a second, before colliding with each other and falling over. Dean rose a moment after Sam, shotgun aimed above the men, waiting a beat for the shadows to eject from their hosts. Then, it was like skeet shooting, shattering the shadow on the left, working the action to pump another salt round in the chamber, tracking to the right and firing at the second shadow.

  “All clear!” Sam called.

  Townspeople emerged from the utility room and Bonnie’s office, the walking wounded. Of them all, Bonnie alone had survived the ordeal unscathed.

  The business woman looked around at the complete mess of a library and all the wounded, confused people and spread her arms. “Can somebody please tell me what’s going on?”

  “You’re all alive,” Dean said. “Take the win.”

  The formerly possessed townspeople approached the two formerly possessed cops, helped them to their feet, then proceeded to question them. One said, “We were responding to a call—render aid at the Moyer Public Library and…” The other cop looked at him and shrugged. “I remember pulling into the lot… then nothing…”

  “Lot of wounded here,” Dean said to them. “Might want to call for ambulances. Plural.”

  Sam turned to Bonnie, who appeared shell-shocked by the state of her library. She walked out of her office, her legs wooden. “Sorry about the mess,” Sam said.

  She reached out to hand him the stun gun she hadn’t needed.

  “Keep it,” he said. “Just in case.”

  Placing it on the counter, she stood beside him, too numb to speak. Sam waited as Dean flipped the table right side up and approached them. “Need to lock and reload for the cult house,” Dean said. “Even if Gruber believes half of what we told him, he’s punching above his weight.”

  “True,” Sam said, turning to grab the duffel bag and gather the anti-shadow armory they’d brought into the library.

  “Never got to use this,” Dean said, pulling the battery-powered strobe light out of his jacket pocket and looking up. “Bonnie—?”

  With a fierce look in her eyes, she pivoted toward Sam. A silver object slipped down from her sleeve into her hand. She raised her arm over him, a letter opener held like a knife ready to plunge into Sam’s back.

  Dean flicked on the strobe light, praying it worked in the pale light. “Hey! Parasite!”

  Sam turned away from the duffel.
r />   Bonnie glared at Dean—and froze facing him, red embers wavering in her eyes.

  “Sam!” Dean called. “She’s got a rider!”

  Startled, Sam stepped back, putting some distance between himself and the possessed librarian. Of course, the office door had hardly been proof against something that could slip under it or pour itself through a keyhole.

  “Stun her,” Dean said, raising the shotgun he held in his right hand. “I got this.”

  Sam crossed in front of Bonnie to grab the stun she’d left on the counter. Momentarily released from the strobe effect, the shadow inside her decided against waiting for the inevitable electrical charge and subsequent disorientation and burst free of her body, flowing out of her eyes, ears and nostrils.

  Belatedly, Dean realized he’d turned off the mounted black light after they’d subdued the cops. In his hurry to flick it back on, he dropped the strobe light, but never took his gaze off the fleeing shadow. With the substance addled by the black light, the shadow moved sluggishly, gliding toward the front door and freedom. Dean fired—and the shadow burst apart.

  THIRTY-SIX

  Dean parked the Impala next to the two police cruisers.

  Against the evening sky and the wide-open space behind it, the cult house stood almost in silhouette, no interior lights glowing. Almost, because the inkblot shapes of the shadow people presented as unforgiving darkness that blotted out reality wherever they passed. Some of the shadow people came from blocks away, returning to the house where they had once lived.

  “They need this place, Dean,” Sam said. “Something about it brings them back.”

  “Maybe they come back to recharge.”

  He opened the trunk, unzipped the duffel bag. They each took a shotgun with a mounted black light, stun gun, taser with extra cartridges, and a portable strobe light. Lastly, they each grabbed a leather pouch filled with extra shotgun salt rounds and slipped the shoulder strap over their heads.

  Cautiously, they approached the front door of the wooden house. The white paint had faded and chipped away, exposing bare and rotted wood. The gingerbread accents on the archways and sagging wraparound porch were broken and crumbling. The slanted roof had shed brittle green shingles like dandruff, pieces littering the front and sides of the house. Dean wondered if Daniel Yates had purchased a money pit rather than a fixer-upper. Even without a haunting by dozens of malevolent shadow people, the farmhouse had been a candidate for a bulldozer rather than a renovator.

  “Dean!” Sam said, pointing to the left side of the house.

  Dean saw a glint of metal, from a police badge. A few steps later, they found two corpses. “Recognize this one,” Dean said. “Bowman, from the station.”

  “Shot each other at close range,” Sam said. “Simultaneously.”

  “Both possessed,” Dean said bitterly. “Mutual destruction.”

  “Let’s end this,” Sam said, the words a snarl of anger.

  They strode to the front door, which hung partially open. A shadow swooped down from the second story and entered before them. Then a second shadow—or maybe the same one, it was hard to tell them apart—flowed across the floor, rose up to full height and eased away from them. Sam flicked on his mounted black light, and Dean followed suit, with a shudder. With so many shadows circling, entering and exiting the house, he felt particularly vulnerable to possession. As if the two dead cops hadn’t been reminder enough.

  “Tase me, if you have to, bro,” Dean said, trying to lighten the dark mood.

  “I will,” Sam said immediately.

  Dean caught his shoulder. “Dude, you don’t have to enjoy it.”

  “No,” Sam said, straight-faced. “Strictly business.”

  He waved his loaded taser in front of Dean. Even in the darkness, Dean thought he saw a fleeting smile on his brother’s face. Or, maybe a grimace. Hard to be sure in the darkness.

  Black lights crisscrossing in front of them, they cleared the foyer, living room and dining room. In the kitchen they found Susan Yates on the floor, pale and unconscious, her breathing labored. Dean knelt beside Hardigan who, in addition to a stab wound in his gut, had a broken nose and smashed lips. Alive… barely.

  In the distance, Dean heard sirens. He listened for a few moments, but they seemed no closer. No help coming. It’s on us.

  “Dean!”

  Dean looked up from Hardigan and saw them, shadows circling the kitchen, along the countertops and ceiling, through chair legs and under the kitchen table. Some alien quality about them reminded him of sharks.

  With his black light sweeping the kitchen and his taser in his other hand, arm outstretched, Sam attempted to track them. Each time one approached Dean, Sam zeroed in on the threat and it veered away, sensing danger.

  They know we can take them out.

  Slowly, Dean removed the strobe light from his jacket pocket, placed it on the floor and angled it toward the back of the kitchen. “Sam…” he said, nodding toward the light on the floor. The shadows continued to make slow circuits of the kitchen, waiting for a moment of inattentiveness. Sam glanced at the floor and nodded. Laying his taser on the countertop, he reached into his own pocket and withdrew his strobe light. Eyes up, he reached down and let Dean take it from his grasp. Dean positioned the second light to face the front of the kitchen and the archway that led to the dining room. He positioned one hand on each light’s power switch.

  “Showtime!”

  Instantly, strobe lights bathed the entire kitchen with stuttering light.

  With only a split-second separating each period of darkness from light, every exposed shadow person froze in place, incapacitated. The effect could be permanent or only temporary. Would they adapt to the pattern? Best not to test the theory.

  Standing back to back, the Winchesters aimed their black lights at one shadow after another—increasing their density or substance or simply their foothold in the world of the living—and dispatched each one with a salt round.

  As he reloaded his shotgun, Dean exclaimed with grim satisfaction, “Like shooting fish in a barrel.”

  “That all of them?”

  “Every damn one,” Dean said, kneeling to switch off the strobe lights.

  He froze. Under the table, shielded from both strobe light arcs, a single shadow person slid from side to side, trapped.

  “Sorry, pal,” Dean said, bringing the barrel of the shotgun to bear. “You picked the wrong guy to possess.”

  Blam!

  “That was the last one,” Dean said. Even so, he decided to leave one strobe light in place, the one facing the kitchen entrance, to prevent anyone possessed from following them out of the house.

  “Dean,” Sam called. “Blood.”

  They followed the trail of blood drops out the back door, which creaked with the protest of rusty hinges, Dean leading the way. Crossing the sagging, weather-beaten deck down to the backyard, Dean’s skin began to itch again at the potential for a hostile takeover. He gripped the stun gun in his damp left palm, pressed awkwardly against the forestock of the shotgun, ready to zap himself at the first sign of mental invasion. Though, with Sam’s black light shining behind him, any attempted possession might result in a brutal—possibly fatal—cut, depending on the attempted point of entry.

  Dean dreaded the idea of losing control of himself. Even without the potential for murderous consequences, he shuddered at the prospect of becoming something’s human sock puppet.

  Beyond the backyard, encircled by a split-rail fence a few decades past its prime, the commune’s former farmland stretched to the distant tree line. They walked through a gap where the rotted rails had fallen.

  “Somewhere out there,” Sam said. “Two terrified kids are hiding from their possessed father in a small underground room.”

  “Homicidal hide and seek,” Dean said. “Hope we’re not too late.”

  “Where the hell is Gruber?”

  Dean had no answer, feared the worst.

  They loped across the overgrown fi
elds, their mounted black lights a poor substitute for flashlights. Here and there, they spotted the trapdoors, some flipped open to expose small underground rooms lined with plywood. Whoever had left them open had created an inadvertent minefield, though the doors themselves might have been too rotted and brittle to support the weight of a full-grown man.

  Dean leaped over an open doorway—floorway?—as Sam said, “There!”

  Near the trees, almost hidden among their crowded silhouettes, stood a dark figure, seemingly wracked by seizures as darker shapes plunged into his flesh, only to be expelled seconds later. No sooner had one lost the battle for control when another took its place.

  Behind them, Dean heard the tell-tale squeal of the rusty back-door hinges. They stopped, turned. Whoever it was, they’d gotten through the strobe-lit kitchen, so hadn’t been possessed. Of course, as Dean knew, that could change in an instant.

  A figure ran toward them, favoring a knee—Bonnie. She’d followed them rather than remain behind at the library. They waited while she caught up to them, breathless. “I haven’t been back since…” she began. “Barry brought me.”

  “Where is he?” Dean asked.

  She waved an arm above her head, causing Dean to look up as a dark shape swooped down from the roof of the house and merged with her. For a moment her eyes glowed red. Then she said, “Right here. But hurry! They can’t hold Caleb for long.”

  “Who?” Sam asked.

  “Team Rebel!”

  A young girl screamed.

  All three of them sprinted for the tree line. Possessed by a man who died young, Bonnie’s spirit was certainly willing but her body, at more than sixty years of age, struggled to keep up with the Winchesters.

  As she began to flag, Barry spoke to them—and her—through her breathless voice. “We dreamed of the chains breaking… dreamed of Ethan’s father… reclaiming the land. Then the explosion that ended us… echoed again, taking us to the moment all was lost… and somehow, we awoke… as if the dreaming had preserved our lost moment in time… giving us a second chance… A strange new life—but free! We wanted to live again… the promised afterlife… we yearned for it.”