"How are you going to do that?"
Sam cleared his throat. "That's the other thing we don't know yet. Depends on what it is. We'll get there, though. We really are good at this sort of thing."
Beckett shook his head slowly. "I can hardly believe what I'm going to say. You think you can do something about all this? We're supposed to have a shopping center opening at noon today. It's—" He consulted his wristwatch. "It's seven-ten now. You were there when Mayor Milner said that nothing would delay the opening."
"But that many people all gathered together in one place might be an irresistible target for whatever's behind all this," Sam said.
"Exactly. If they can get here." He inclined his head toward the SUV. "Apparently, we can't get out. That's what Trace was trying to do, trying to get to Flagstaff to fetch us some reinforcements. We can't call or even e-mail outside of town. But if people can come in, then once they're here they'll be trapped too, and like you say, piled up in the mall, they'll be easy pickings. So if you think you can do something to stop it, you have till eleven. When noon comes around, I'll be at that mall. If I see you and you haven't put a stop to all this, I'm holding you both as material witnesses. You have any outstanding warrants?"
Sam and Dean caught each other's glances, then looked away.
"I thought maybe," Beckett continued. "Look, that's five hours away. You're the experts you claim to be, that should be plenty of time."
"We'll do what we can, Sheriff," Sam said. "You have our word on that."
"I hate to admit it, boys, but I'm counting on you."
Beckett was turning around to go back to his car when police radios crackled. After a moment's conversation, one of the deputies called out to him. "Sheriff! Jodi Riggins has spotted that old man, she thinks, heading east down Second!"
"On my way!" Beckett replied.
Sam caught him by the arm. "Let us go first," he said. "You said you'd trust us, so give us five minutes. It's just a sighting, right, no one's been killed? We think that old man might be the key to it, and if you go in with lights and siren, he's going to vanish again."
Beckett looked constipated, like he'd eaten his own words and they disagreed with his gut. "Three minutes," he said. "You get on out of here, and I'm three minutes behind you. You better move your asses."
They moved. Sam reached the Impala first, so he got in behind the wheel. Dean slid in beside him without comment, and before his door was closed Sam was peeling out.
On the way, Dean slid his nickel-plated .45 from the glove and checked the magazine.
"What are you doing?" Sam asked.
"Making sure I'm loaded." He reached into the backseat, brought up a pump-action Remington from the floorboards. "For anything."
"We probably just want to talk to this guy," Sam said. "Not kill him."
"We don't know that. All we know, he might be the soldier. Or the Indian. Or both."
"Yeah, and we'll know that if we see him."
"When."
"When we see him. But if he's none of those things, he might be a witness. He might know something. He might even be a hunter."
"He doesn't sound like a hunter," Dean said.
"Only because so few of them live to be old. But showing up around the scenes of these incidents? That sounds like a hunter to me, and a better one than we are, so far."
"Okay, you could be right, Sam. We won't shoot on sight."
The car cornered well considering the roads had frozen over during the night and were just beginning to thaw, and within Sheriff Beckett's three-minute window they were cruising down Second Street. A mailbox on the right had RIGGINS painted on the side.
"Okay, along here somewhere," Dean said.
Sam slowed. He watched the houses and yards on the left while Dean took the right.
They had covered two blocks when Dean shouted, "There!"
Sam screeched to a stop. "Where?"
Dean pointed to a gap between a single-story bungalow and a larger, shingled A-frame that looked like it had been built during the seventies. "I saw him right in there, going behind that wannabe ski lodge. Old guy, carrying a rifle he must have had since birth. I think there was a knife or hatchet or something tucked in his belt, too, but I couldn't get a very good look."
"You go up behind him," Sam said. "I'll go around the other side. We'll try to pinch him in the middle. And don't let him get us caught in each other's crossfire if we need to shoot."
"I thought you didn't want to shoot him."
"I don't. I'm just saying... if we have to."
"No crossfire," Dean repeated. He got out of the car and started jogging toward the A-frame. Sam sprinted past it, then hooked around toward the back.
Behind the A-frame the woods grew thick again. At first Sam didn't see anyone except Dean in the yard. Lost him again, he thought, disappointment welling up in him. But then Dean gave a shout and pointed, and Sam saw the old man trying to sneak off through the trees.
Both Winchesters started running, relying on long legs to propel them over short, prickly underbrush, dodging low-hanging branches as they went. The old man broke into a run too, but his legs weren't as steady as theirs, and the length of his rifle slowed him because he kept catching it in fir branches.
Within a minute they had caught up to him, one on either side. He leveled the rifle at Dean's belly. In the distance, Sam could hear approaching sirens.
"You take one more step, either of you jaspers, and I'll open you up like a can of tuna," the old man said.
From the glint in his narrow-slitted eyes, Sam believed he meant it.
Wanda Sheffield was disappointed to see that the snow had stopped during the night. She'd curled up under her down comforter the night before, hoping that when she opened her eyes again a blanket of white would cover the land, flocking all the trees and creating the winter wonderland effect that would help put her in the Christmas spirit.
Christmas was Wanda's favorite time of year. She loved the music, the decorations, the general good cheer. She even liked shopping in crowded malls, as long as the stores were dressed for the holidays. She wore bright clothes, heavy on the reds and greens, and she seemed, on those occasions, to have a perpetual grin on her face, like some kind of happy idiot.
This year the mood hadn't quite caught her up yet. It would, she had no doubt of that. And it was early in the month yet.
Still, a good heavy snowfall would have set her nicely down the Christmas road.
She would survive the disappointment, she figured, one way or another. To that end, she brewed a small pot of fair trade organic French roast and put a couple of croissants she had picked up the day before in the oven to warm. She got some boysenberry jam from the refrigerator, along with a container of heavy cream. If one intended to pamper oneself, she had long believed, half measures weren't worth the trouble. From a cabinet, she took a real china cup, the kind that came with a saucer and seemed so out of vogue these days, and she put a spoonful of sugar into the bottom of it.
Wanda didn't like a lot of clutter around, so although she would decorate for the holidays, she hadn't done so yet. She kept her home, a 1970s A-frame, neat and clean, and as she worked in the kitchen, she put used utensils and dishes into the sink and ran a little water over them. After sitting at a pine dining table and consuming her breakfast, she carried those dishes back to the sink, rinsed them, and put the whole lot in the dishwasher.
While she was straightening up after bending over the dishwasher, she thought a shadow passed across her back window.
She closed the dishwasher's stainless steel door and walked over to the window. It looked out onto a quarter acre of flat yard, then a thick expanse of trees. A few birds—the kind she called LGBs, for "little gray birds," because she didn't know their real names—jumped and flitted about on yesterday's snow, pecking through it for bugs or seeds or whatever it was they ate off the ground. Grass poked through the snow in tufts here and there, and one scraggly bush, its reed-like branches bent toward the ground by
late fall's snow and ice, offered shelter to a couple of the tiny birds.
None of those looked big enough to have cast such a shadow on the window. Wanda pressed her face against the cool glass, leaving an oval of steam there as she scanned this way and that for some larger creature, a hawk or maybe even a rare visitor like one of the black bears seen once in a great while in town—although surely they'd be in hibernation by now?
Seeing nothing, she gave the tiniest of shrugs. Just a cloud across the sun, maybe—or the sun breaking through the cloud cover, more likely, for a second, and her mind misinterpreting it.
She gave the room a quick once-over. Nothing out of place, no missed croissant crumbs on the table, no splashes of water on the tiled kitchen counter. Satisfied that all was as it should be, she headed upstairs for a bubble bath. She was off work today—she was a checkout clerk at Swanson's, which wasn't exotic but paid the bills—and except for the mall opening in the afternoon, she had nothing on the agenda except relaxation.
At the top of the stairs, a sitting area overlooked the kitchen and living room. She had a couple of cushy, comfy chairs and a reading lamp there, along with a low bookshelf containing her to-be-read books. After the bubble bath, maybe she would tear into that new Laura Lippman thriller. Beyond the sitting area was her bedroom—on a corner with dormer windows on both sides, the lightest room in the house during the day—and her bathroom.
She went into the bathroom first and started the water, shaking in some scented moisturizing bubble bath flakes. She took a thick white towel from the antique cabinet at the end of the tub, where they were rolled and tucked into cubbies, and set it out, folded neatly, on top of the cabinet. While the water splashed in the nearly empty tub, she thought she heard a noise downstairs. Just a thump or a bump, hardly worth notice, except that she didn't have any pets or visitors and she hadn't left a radio or TV on down there. Maybe a bird had flown into a window. She went to the bathroom door and listened. The sound wasn't repeated.
But now there was something else strange. At the doorway, the air felt cooler than it had a few moments ago. She remained there long enough to be sure.
Yes, there was moving air wafting up the stairs, and the scent of the pine forest outside had intensified, battling with the floral smell of her bath flakes.
Someone had entered through the back door.
She had a phone in her bedroom. Barefoot, walking as quietly as she could, she hurried in there.
But she hadn't made it yet when she heard a tread on the steps...
TWENTY-TWO
"Lower your weapon, Grampa," Dean said. "We just want to talk to you." He wasn't sure if that was true, but it seemed like the right thing to say. He was tired of civilians pointing guns at him.
"And those sirens I'm hearin', boy, they're just the wind in the trees? Do you think I'm some kind of an idiot? I still got all of my senses, including hearin' and common sense."
"I'm sure you do," Sam put in. "Believe us, we don't want to be here when the sheriff gets here, either. We'd rather be long gone, but with you along for the ride."
"Why? What've you got to say to me, stripling?"
"You're not behind these attacks, are you?" Dean said. The more he watched the old guy, the more convinced he was that the man was nothing but human. He wasn't flickering or vanishing from sight, and although he was dressed oddly—a little like Elmer Fudd on a wabbit-hunting expedition, in fact—he wasn't the soldier they had seen at the mall. "You're trying to stop them. So are we. I think we'll all do better if we can compare notes."
"And why should I believe that? Answer me that one if you can."
"Do we look like Indians, or bears, or soldiers, or whatever to you?" Desperate, Dean zipped his leather jacket up and then unzipped it again. "Have you ever seen one of those creatures wearing a modern leather jacket with a zipper?"
The old man narrowed his eyes even more than they already were—just tiny black balls behind fleshy folds—and peered at Dean's jacket. He came a few steps closer, pushing through the underbrush, his rifle held out before him. What Dean thought he had seen at first glance now proved correct—the guy's coat was belted shut, and jammed under the belt was a small hatchet. A smell like old cheese wafted off him in waves. His breathing was ragged and wet, as if he had fluid built up in his lungs. Guy's got to be at least ninety, Dean thought. Unless he's thirty-five and lives really hard. Still, for such an old coot, he got around well. He had, after all, managed to elude him, Sam, and every cop in town until now.
"Sir, all we want is to talk to you, compare notes,"
Sam said. "But if we're not out of here by the time those sirens arrive, we won't have the chance."
The old guy looked confused, or maybe uncertain—Dean didn't know how to read his ancient, creased face. His mouth was open a little, with a wedge of pink tongue flitting out and running across his lips. Those BB eyes twitched back and forth. His chin quivered a little, but that might have been because all of him was locked in a state of continual tremor.
Dean hadn't minded landing on the kid before. It had been kind of a shame to dent the hood of that old wagon, but at least he hadn't dented the Impala—that would have required a more punitive beating.
Laying into an old geezer like this, though... it just seemed wrong. He'd do it if he had to, particularly if the guy looked like he was going to pull the trigger on his blunderbuss, or like his hand might spasm on it. Things would be much easier if they could, for a change, talk the man into lowering his weapon.
Meanwhile, the sirens closed in. Beckett had prolonged the head start beyond the promised three minutes, but not by much.
"Sir..." Sam said. Always polite. They must have taught him that at Stanford, because manners hadn't been high on John Winchester's lesson plan. "We've got to hurry."
Finally, the man lowered the barrel of his weapon. He flashed a quick, unconvincing smile—showing teeth as small and yellow as baby corn—and then his face seemed to collapse, cheeks sinking, forehead drooping, as if he had held out hope until just this instant that he and he alone would somehow save the day. "All right," he said, his voice as creaky as a rusted gate hinge. "Let's go."
"We have a car," Dean said. Although I don't know if there's enough air freshener in the world to get the stink out of it after I give you a ride. "Let's go."
Hustling toward the Impala, the word "spry" came to mind. The old guy stepped lively, and by the time the sheriff's department vehicles appeared in Dean's rear view, he was already turning the corner.
"I'm Sam, and this is my brother Dean," Sam said, twisting in the front passenger seat to talk to the old man. "We're here to try to put a stop to this murder cycle once and for all."
"Murder cycle," the old guy said, chuckling wetly. "That sounds like a kind of motorcycle."
"The usual response is to tell a person your name," Dean pointed out.
"Oh. I'm..." He paused, as if he had to think about it. Dean knew the feeling.... "I'm Harmon Baird."
"Pleased to meet you, Mr. Baird," Sam said.
"You've been spotted around a lot of the murder scenes. That's why the cops are looking for you. Us, too, at first, but we just wanted to make sure you weren't another guy, this old soldier we saw once."
"Oh, right," Baird said. "We should go back there."
"Go back?"
"The reason I was there in the first place. They come out of the woods, you know. If you're quiet and you watch the woods you can see 'em coming, like wraiths or the dire wolf."
"Is there going to be an attack?" Dean asked. "Is that what you're saying?"
"It came as a raven," Baird said. Dean hated people who answered questions with riddles. "Then it became a snake. Now it's a man, or the shell of one, without a soul. His heart is twisted and black as coal."
"Dude!" Dean snapped. "Is he gonna kill someone?"
"Oh, yes," Baird said. "Unless he's stopped, most certainly. He'll kill 'em dead as they can be."
Dean hit the brakes and spun
the wheel, pulling the Impala around in a screeching power 180. Fortunately the streets were still mostly empty at this hour.
"How can they be stopped?" Sam asked.
"Shoot 'em," Baird said. "Simple as that."
"You can just shoot them?"
"Can shoot anything. Some it don't stop, some it does. Them it does."
"Shoot 'em," Dean said under his breath. "Like we couldn't've thought of that."
"So they're not spirits," Sam said. "What are they? The reanimated dead?"
"Reanimated dead shapeshifters," Dean added. "Just to make it that much better."
"'Course, not with just any bullets."
"What kind of bullets do you use, Baird?" Dean asked.
"I carve crosses into mine. Let the power of the Lord work through 'em."
"Crosses?" Sam asked.
Dean slapped the wheel. "He's making them into homemade dumdums, dummy! Cut an X into the lead and the slug explodes on impact. It's the oldest trick in the book."
"But if they're spirits, or reanimated dead, or whatever, why would exploding bullets work any better than regular ones?" Sam asked. "Maybe it's the crosses themselves, the symbolism of those, that's stopping them."
"All I know is it works," Baird said.
"I'd still feel more comfortable with rock salt," Sam said. "But whatever they are, Dean, if we can shoot them, we can beat them."
"If we can believe Grandpa Munster here," Dean said. "Where are we going, Baird?"
"That house with the pointy roof," Baird said. "He was heading in there last I saw him, so that's where he's looking for his victim."
"Right where the sheriff's people will be," Dean said.
"Unless they've already moved on," Sam said. "They're looking for Mr. Baird, not whoever it is he saw. Even if they see the killer they won't know what he is."
"Unless he's doing that whole flicker in and out of sight thing," Dean replied. "That's pretty much a dead giveaway."
"He was flickering like a Christmas tree," Baird said. "One of them blinky kinds."
Dean slowed as he reached Second Street again. There was one sheriff's department SUV parked about halfway down the block, in front of the house with the name Riggins on the mailbox, but the others had come and gone. Dean couldn't see any officers; presumably they were inside interviewing the woman who had placed the call.
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