“Are the Sox up?” Dean asked the kid, who hadn’t even glanced up as they walked in.
“Bottom of the eighth. Two runners on. Ortiz is up.”
“Great. Can you tell me what apartment Perry—” Dean looked at Lisa. “What’s her last name?”
Lisa shook her head.
“I don’t know.”
“Can you just look up Perry, then?” Dean said to the kid.
The kid had finally peeled his eyes away from the screen. He was regarding Dean doubtfully. “No can do, bro. I can’t give out residents’ apartment numbers.”
Dean took a twenty from his wallet.
“How about now?”
The kid eyed the money.
“Yeah, I mean, I’d have to get some sort of—”
Another twenty joined the first.
The kid smiled, clearly he was going to try to milk this for all it was worth.
“It really puts my job on the line, man.”
Unfortunately for the kid, he had overplayed his hand. With one arm Dean pushed the kid away from the desk, with the other he spun the computer screen around.
“Hey, you can’t do that. That’s private property,” the kid whined.
“Well, now it’s public,” Dean said, typing a search for Perry’s name into the computer. He drummed his fingers impatiently as the computer creaked into action. Finally it produced an answer: “Kirkbride Building, apartment twelve,” he read.
Dean swiped back his twenties and Lisa and he left. Dean swung the car back around and they parked in front of the large brick building.
“Well, at least this is nice,” Lisa said.
“Yeah, about that...” Dean pulled a pair of sawed-offs out from under his seat.
“What the hell are those for?” Lisa squealed.
“Relax, mine has real bullets, yours has salt. You might have the advantage here,” he said.
“I thought you said there was nothing to worry about?”
Dean nodded. “There isn’t. Prophylactic measure. No pun intended.”
Lisa rolled her eyes. They walked up to the entrance and rang the buzzer to Perry’s apartment. After about thirty seconds with no response, Dean began to methodically ring each of the apartment buzzers in turn. Eventually someone carelessly buzzed them in.
Apartment twelve was on the first floor. Noise filtered from each of the doors as they passed. At apartment twelve Dean knocked on the door and gestured for Lisa to talk.
“Ben? Ben Braeden? You come out here this instant,” Lisa called.
“Could you sound like more of a mom?” Dean asked.
“You try it, smart ass,” she countered.
“Fine. Give me your phone.” Dean took the phone from her and called Ben’s number. From inside the apartment they heard his phone ring. “Okay, so we know he’s in there or was there and someone hit ‘ignore’ when you called before.”
“He knows not to do that,” Lisa said.
“Maybe it wasn’t him. Hold on,” Dean said. He took his lock pick from his jacket pocket and fiddled with the lock. Seconds later, it clicked open. He turned to Lisa with a serious look in his eye. “Okay, so no matter what we find in here you’re going to stay calm, right?”
“I don’t like the sound of that. What aren’t you telling me?”
“Probably no need to worry, but this building was an insane asylum up until 1992, and in my experience, not always, but usually there are some very angry, delusional ghosts in places like these.”
“That’s crazy, Dean. It’s an apartment building now.”
“Just follow my lead,” Dean said, opening the door and walking into the apartment with his sawed-off at the ready. “Perry? Ben? Time to go home.” They moved through the apartment, checking each room in turn but the place was clearly empty. Lisa retrieved Ben’s phone from the living room sofa.
“Is that definitely his?” Dean asked.
Lisa nodded.
Dean peaked around a corner into what looked like a young girl’s bedroom. A feeling of relief washed over him when he saw that the bed was neatly made.
When he opened the doors of the built-in closet the uneasy feeling returned. Set into the plaster wall at the back was an old oak door.
“Wasn’t quite the walk-in closet I was expecting,” Dean said.
Lisa looked over his shoulder.
“That’s strange.”
“Okay, so here’s the deal: I go first. You don’t shoot unless I tell you to. Clear?”
“Who are we shooting at? Is Ben in there?” Lisa sounded panicky.
Dean pulled open the door. A musty blast of cool air hit them as they descended a steep spiral staircase.
“Somehow I don’t think this is on the rental brochure,” Dean said.
At the bottom of the staircase was a vaulted hallway which disappeared into gloom in both directions.
“These must have been used by the doctors and nurses to go between the buildings in the winter,” Dean explained.
“They couldn’t have made it a little more cozy?” Lisa said, shivering in her T-shirt.
Dean walked first into the pitch black of the tunnel. A cold chill ran through him. He took out the EMF again—the needle pinged to the max.
“That’s not good,” he said.
“What? What isn’t good?’ Lisa rushed forward to Dean, but something stopped her. “Ah, Dean?”
Dean glanced in her direction, then quickly pulled her behind him. He lifted the salt-filled shotgun out of her hands and pointed it into the darkness behind them.
BLAMMM! The gunshot echoed through the tunnels.
Out of the gloom a figure appeared. It was the ghost of an old woman in a stained robe. She continued to advance on them.
“Time for your treatment,” she wailed.
Dean shot at her again. But the specter quickly flicked to standing six inches away from Dean’s face. He backed against the wall with Lisa still behind him.
“No exceptions! Every day!” The ghost howled and held her head.
“Move,” Dean hissed urgently.
But it was too late. The ghost shot her hand out, hitting Dean square in the chest. Both guns fell from his hands and he clutched at the collar of his T-shirt, dropping to his knees.
“Can’t... can’t breathe,” he choked. His heart was quickly becoming solid, freezing over.
“Shoot her!” Dean gasped.
Lisa reached for the salt-filled sawed-off and fumbled as she tried to aim it at the ghost.
“Now, please,” Dean croaked as his lips quickly turned blue.
Lisa pulled off a shot. The bullet hit the ghost, dissipating her in an instant.
“I got her!” she said proudly.
“Only for a second,” Dean said getting off his knees and rubbing his chest. He took a canister of salt from his jacket and poured a line across the tunnel. “Let’s go.” Dean grabbed Lisa’s hand and pulled her down the tunnel.
“Ben! Ben! Where are you?” Lisa called.
Two more disgruntled ghosts of mental patients swarmed at them. Dean quickly let off a couple of shots, then poured another salt barrier.
“Mom!” Ben’s small voice echoed faintly through the tunnel.
“Ben?” Lisa called, running forward into the darkness.
Dean yanked free an iron rod that was serving as a railing on the wall. He used it to obliterate each ghost they encountered as they moved quickly forward. Further down the tunnel the low ceilings opened up into a kind of catacomb. Light seeped out from underneath an iron door. Ben called from the other side.
“Hold on, Ben. We’re here,” Dean responded.
“I’m so glad you’ve come to join us,” a voice said.
Lisa and Dean turned. A decidedly older-looking Perry stood behind them. Far from fifteen, she now looked like she was in her early twenties.
“What concerned parents you are,” she mused. “I find it touching. Really, I do. You don’t see that much these days, what with all the divorce. But yo
u two seem to really make it work.” Perry sauntered up to Dean. She was inches away from his face. “Oh, but wait, Ben isn’t your child, is he Dean? But yet, here you are. Still attached. That’s okay though. I don’t mind. I was hoping I could be your baby mama, as they say these days.” Perry laughed.
“In this light you look a little older, Perry. So what are you pushing,” Dean spat at her, “one hundred? Two hundred?”
She eyed him. “If we’re going to have a child together, I might as well be honest. Let’s say somewhere around three hundred-eighteen. But age doesn’t matter when you have a lust like ours. Right, Dean?” Perry pawed at Dean’s chest.
“Lay off, you old slut,” Lisa growled.
“Oh look, mama grizzly made an appearance. Let me tell you something,” Perry turned toward Lisa, “a boy like Ben... Well, you really should be more careful. You wouldn’t want him ending up on Dateline.”
Lisa pulled back and punched Perry in the mouth. A line of blood trickled from her nose. Perry eyed her with shock.
“You have more spunk than I thought.”
“And you have a little mark,” Lisa said indicating Perry’s nose.
“Bitch!” Perry flung her arm aside and Lisa flew across the hallway. She collapsed to the ground, out cold.
Dean faced down Perry.
“So what’s the endgame here, Perry? You part of the killings?”
“You think I have to answer to you? You have no idea how long we’ve waited for this exact moment in time. It’s all happening, and let me tell you, none of us are going to let you stand in our way.” Perry advanced on Dean.
Dean swung the iron rod. Perry stopped it easily with one hand. Dean swung his gun around and aimed it at her, but she knocked the gun away with merely a finger. Dean was empty handed.
Perry shot out her arm and caught Dean by the collar, and then spun around and threw him against the wall. Dean crumpled to the floor, trying to catch his breath.
“You should know that being this old has a lot of advantages. If you’re really nice, I’ll let you in on the little magic secret. Forget all those animals that you hunt—vampires and all. Disgusting. Witchcraft is the real power. Who knew that a little spell and fifty human sacrifices could bring you immortality? But here I am. Living proof.”
“I wouldn’t call what you are ‘living’,” Dean said.
“Of course you would. And it’s something that’s bothered you from the get-go. Dean, you know you have a code of ethics. Are you really going to kill me? After all, I’m human. You don’t want to kill a human. I’m not a monster, after all.”
“We’ll see about that,” Dean said, as he leapt for the iron rod on the floor and swung it at her.
“Tsk. This is grounds for some serious relationship counseling.” Perry grabbed Dean by the throat and pushed him into a corner. “I think we should start this romance on the right foot, don’t you, honey?” Perry swiped the iron rod from Dean and bashed it down on his left foot.
Dean howled in pain.
“There we go. Now I know you can’t run. Just stay here for a little while. I want to get to know my new stepson better.”
Perry flicked her hand and Dean’s wrists magically bound together. She then disappeared into the room beyond the oak door. For an instant Dean caught a glimpse of Ben tied to an old electrical shock chair, then the door slammed shut. Dean struggled against his invisible bonds.
TWENTY-EIGHT
Lisa stirred. She slowly opened her eyes and saw Dean on the opposite side of the hallway near the door. Her head ached
“Dean? Dean, where’s Ben?” she said.
Dean shushed her. She watched him squirm on the floor. He was trying to empty out his pockets with his hands bound behind his back by an invisible force. A couple of packets of herbs fell out of his jacket. He kicked off a boot and with his big toe drew a series of sigils on the dirt-covered floor. He chanted a couple of words in Latin, then awkwardly flung his lit Zippo into the center of the circle. The herbs caught fire. Dean pulled his hands apart.
“Nothing like a little white magic to counteract the black,” he murmured.
He got up and gently pulled Lisa to her feet.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
She nodded and rubbed her head where she had hit the wall.
“I think so.”
Dean handed her the gun with the bullets.
“You’re going to need this,” he said.
“I’m not sure if I can shoot her,” Lisa said nervously.
“You’re going to feel differently in a second,” Dean replied ominously.
He swiftly loaded the other gun with real shotgun shells, then kicked open the oak door.
Inside, Ben was strapped to an electroshock chair in a dark, tiled room that must have been used for electroshock therapy. He looked scared but otherwise unharmed.
Perry sat nearby on a Victorian-era stretcher.
“Mummy and Daddy come to take their little boy home? I don’t think so,” she said.
She jumped off the stretcher and with a flick of her wrist the gurney flew across the room. Dean pulled Lisa to the ground, the speeding bed narrowly missing their heads. It struck the door blocking their exit.
Dean and Lisa peeled themselves off the floor.
Dean cocked his gun at Perry.
“Let him go and maybe I’ll let you live to see your three-hundred and nineteenth birthday,” he growled.
“Oh Dean, you and I are going to have such fun together. Imagine wiling away the years, just you and me,” Perry said. “But not yet. Still have a lot of business to do here.”
Perry walked toward Ben and took out a sharp blade.
“This is what you don’t understand Dean: All my powerful friends passed away a long, long time ago, so now we are just trying to get the old gang back together. We have a big gig coming up. But to do that, we need nice innocent young things like Ben here. You’d be sacrificing him to a good cause.”
Dean pointed his gun at Perry.
“Get away from him, bitch.”
“Dean, that’s no way to speak to your betrothed,” Perry said. She put the knife to Ben’s throat and ran it up and down the muscles of his neck. “You’re not in control of this situation. I am. And it would behoove you to learn some old-fashioned manners!”
Perry sliced the knife across Ben’s cheek for emphasis.
Lisa screamed and pulled the trigger on the gun she was holding. The bullet zinged toward Perry. She stepped out of the way, and the bullet grazed her shoulder. The wound cauterized immediately, like she wasn’t made of human flesh at all. Perry looked down at where the bullet had touched her. There was a rip in her shirt.
“This is my favorite shirt. Now look what you did to it!” She clenched her hand and Ben started choking. “This will be cleaner anyway.”
Ben’s eyes rolled back into his head as his face turned blue. His hands clenched and unclenched, straining at the wrist straps.
Dean stepped forward and leveled his gun at Perry.
“You’re way too old for him.” He pulled the trigger.
The bullet blasted through her right wrist, detaching it so that the five-finger stump of her hand hung loosely from a couple of tendons attached to her arm.
Seizing the moment, Dean sped across the room and knocked the witch to the floor. Recovering quickly, Perry scissor-kicked Dean. He ducked and landed on top of Perry, grabbed her round the neck with both hands and squeezed. She struggled against him but Dean’s whole body weight was pinning her down. He held on until she looked as though she had passed out. He then released her throat and pulled her up so he could hold her arms tight behind her back.
“Let’s tie her up,” he said.
Lisa walked over to Perry and kicked her with a well-placed sandal heel under the ribs. She used the rope that Perry had used to secure Ben to tie Perry firmly to the base of the electric chair, while Dean kept hold of her, just in case.
Dean then picked Ben up off the chair
and heaved him onto his shoulder.
Ben’s eyes slowly fluttered open.
“What happened? Where am I?’
“All I can say is no more dates for you, buddy,” Dean said gently.
Perry quickly came round and struggled against her bonds.
“You can’t take him!” she cried and shut her eyes, mustering her powers once again.
Lisa, and Dean with Ben over his shoulder, didn’t wait to see what would happen next. They exited the room, Dean indicating to Lisa that she should grab the discarded iron bar, then ran back down the hallway. As they crossed over the salt lines more asylum ghosts swarmed around them. Dean remembered he had taken the salt shells out of the sawed-off.
“Ben, grab those shells in my pocket and load them into this gun,” Dean said, holding the sawed-off over his shoulder.
Ben grabbed it, and refilled it while still being carried over Dean’s shoulder. Lisa swung at the ghosts with the iron bar as best she could, clearing a path for Dean and Ben. Ben handed the gun back to Dean and then took the other and filled it in turn with salt shells. Dean then set him down and started shooting, protecting their sides and rear as they leapt forward down the dark tunnel.
“Almost there,” Lisa called from ahead. They reached the spiral staircase and raced upward. Once in the bedroom, Dean pulled the heavy dresser in front of the doorway.
“That’s not going to hold her for long,” Dean said as they left the apartment and ran down the hallway.
Outside, they piled into the car. Dean started the engine and they squealed out around the long oval loop surrounding the planned community. The car jumped off the curb and peeled into traffic.
Two miles down the highway Dean spotted a used-car dealership. He pulled the CRV around back.
“What are we doing?” Lisa asked.
“We need a new car—Perry knows this one,” Dean said, hopping out of the vehicle and approaching a grubby salesman.
Minutes later Dean came back. “Okay, everyone out.”
“Dean, I love this car. I’m still making payments on it,” Lisa protested.
“You aren’t now. Now you’re making payments on this.” He gestured to an old Ford 100 truck which looked as if it had been through a war. “Actually, I’m kidding. No payments.” Dean handed Lisa a stack of one hundred dollar bills. “We can buy a newer model when we get back.”
Supernatural: One Year Gone Page 16
