“I know,” Sam said. “And it’s only getting worse.”
Mortar shells from the cannons had torn the battlefield to shreds, uprooting trees and opening dozens of holes across the acreage. Through huge clouds of dirt and dust, he saw emergency personnel and state police—and probably the sheriff too, he thought glumly—gathered around one of the craters, peering down into it.
Long shafts of sunlight poked down from the clouds above in almost palpable pillars, as if God himself was taking an interest in what had been unearthed there. Although it was hard to say from this distance, Dean thought he saw debris down inside the hole, mixed in with the rocks and roots of trees. And from the reactions of those standing around it, they seemed to be seeing it too.
He noticed something else, as well.
“Didn’t that train used to be inside the shed?”
Sam looked down on the other side of the creek, to the steel rails that ran across the battleground. Far off to the left, an 1850s steam locomotive sat in front of a railway shed. Its engine, coal car, and caboose were in full view, as well as the artillery field piece, a Gatling gun mounted to the flatcar.
“Part of the re-enactment?” Dean asked hopefully.
“Then how come we didn’t notice it before?” Sam countered. “Kind of hard to miss.
“That demon said he was serving a bigger purpose,” he added. “I don’t think they were trying to kill anybody. I think they were making holes. Trying to get down to what’s in that hole in particular.” He shrugged. “If they got those cannons working, who’s to say they couldn’t stoke up an old steam engine, as well?”
Dean was looking back out along the hillside, fixating on something in the middle distance.
“I want a closer look.”
“The sheriff’s down there,” Sam said.
“So?”
“We’re not FBI anymore, remember?”
“I’ve got a plan.”
“Why doesn’t that surprise me?”
“Hey.” Dean clapped his shoulder. “Where’s the trust?”
Sam was about to answer when he felt his phone vibrate in his back pocket.
“Hold on.” He checked the screen. “It’s Bobby.”
“Not now.”
“This could be important.” Sam watched his brother rubbing his neck where the demon had tried to strangle him. “And are you really gonna tell me you couldn’t use a breather?”
“Fine. Five minutes—tops.” Sighing, Dean found a relatively secluded spot behind a pile of rocks and squatted down to watch the action below while Sam answered the call.
“Hey, Bobby.”
“Sam?” Bobby didn’t bother hiding his concern. “You sound winded, kid. Everything all right?”
“Dean and I just took out a demon kill-squad.”
“Yeah, well, I got news about that.”
“Go ahead.”
“That coin you sent me a picture of,” Bobby said, “is a shekel of Tyre—an ancient Phoenician coin. It’s one of the thirty silver pieces that Judas got for betraying Christ. Where’d you get it?”
“Inside one of the victim’s bodies,” Sam said.
“Were you the one that found it?”
“I got it from the sheriff’s office, but—”
“Sam, this is important. Did the sheriff know you took it?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so. Why?”
“Did she ever try to stop you?”
Sam frowned.
“I’m not following you.”
“It’s blood money, Sam. There’s only thirty coins like it in human history. It’s payment for services rendered.”
“What kind of services?”
Bobby’s voice grew into an even more urgent growl.
“The lore says there’s only way you earn that kind of silver. Same way Judas did. By betraying the people you love.”
“So should I get rid of it?”
“You’re not hearing me, Sam. It’s a done deal. Wouldn’t make a difference now if you did.”
“Bobby...”
“I’ll call you when I find out more,” Bobby said. “In the meantime, you better let Dean know what he’s up against.”
“I will,” Sam said. But when he looked back behind the rocks where his brother had been sitting, Dean was gone.
Sam made his way back down the hill. He found Dean squatting down behind the stands of cypress and live oak clustered along the creek, watching a Georgia State Police mobile crime lab that had pulled into the lot, finding its way between the clutter of other vehicles.
“What happened to you?” Sam asked, crouching down beside him.
“Just came down for a closer look.” Dean glanced back at him, his expression unreadable. “What’d Bobby have to say?”
“The coin’s two thousand years old.” As he said these words, Sam realized he’d started to reach up and touch his collar, where his FBI agent’s tie still hung loose around his neck. He consciously lowered his hand. “It confirms the Judas hypothesis that Cass was talking about.”
“That’s it?”
Sam let out a long sigh. “No. No, it isn’t.”
Dean looked back at his brother and narrowed his eyes.
“What going on, Sammy?”
“This is blood money.” Sam reached into his pocket and pulled out the shekel. “Bobby says the only way anybody gets their hands on this...” The rest of the sentence was getting stuck somewhere in his chest, and he made himself finish it, “is by betraying someone you love.”
Dean stared at him.
“I haven’t done anything, Dean!”
“So maybe it’s a down payment.”
“What do you want me to say? You think I’m happy about this?”
“I think you’re in over your head.”
“So what, you want me to sit this one out? Handcuff myself to a tree till it’s over?”
Dean turned away and shook his head, looking more exasperated than anything else.
“Is this part of that nightmare you had?”
“It might be,” Sam said. “I still don’t remember most of it.” He stared down at the silver piece, then closed his fist around it and threw it as hard as he could into the creek, where it sparkled once and disappeared into the brown, slow-moving water.
For a silent moment they just sat there behind the trees, looking across the battleground and the parking lot, neither knowing what to say. The police forensics van reached the proximal end of the parking lot and was angling for a place to park. There was a tow-truck behind it, and Sheriff Daniels was directing it backward between the patrol cars, pickups, and civilian vehicles still filling the lot.
Watching all of this, and observing his brother out of the corner of his eye, it seemed to Sam that Dean was just waiting for an opportunity to move forward again and put this conversation behind them. If he had any more that he needed to say, now was the time.
“Dean...”
“Look,” Dean broke in. “Don’t get too hung up on it, okay? It doesn’t necessarily mean anything.” He stood up and brushed off his jeans. “Whatever happens between us, we’ll deal with it then. Besides, you’ve still got a whole bag of those coins back in...” He stopped abruptly, galvanized by what he was staring at. “The car!”
“Dean, what—?”
“That bitch.” Dean pointed at the parking lot where the tow-truck was hoisting the Impala up on its winch. Seconds later he was fighting his way through the trees. “She’s towing my baby!”
“Dean, wait.” Sam caught up and grabbed his brother’s arm, holding him back. “Let’s stay focused.”
“Oh, I’m so focused,” Dean said, straining against the grip.
“If you go running out there now, we’ll both be in a holding cell in twenty minutes. You know that.” Sam took hold of Dean’s shoulders, holding his stare. “We’ll get her back, okay? I promise.”
“If there’s so much as one scratch on her fender, I swear—”
“Okay, okay, got it.” Sam nodd
ed. “Now, you said you had a plan?”
Dean drew back and nodded across the river at the mobile crime unit. The technicians who climbed out of the back were garbed in heavy protective gear—suits, respirators and isolation masks that draped over their heads and shoulders like arc-welders’ hoods.
“Those guys,” he said. “That’s where we start.”
SIXTEEN
The disorganized crowd of police, civilians and re-enactors in the parking lot was still thick enough that Sam and Dean were able to approach the mobile crime lab undetected.
The lab technicians were already moving through the battlefield, and the state troopers and local police were busy evacuating the re-enactors and civilians. In all of the activity, nobody appeared to notice as Sam and Dean climbed into the back of the lab vehicle and procured two extra isolation suits and masks.
Sam grabbed two laminated ID badges by the lanyard and tossed one to Dean.
Dean looked at the name.
“How do you pronounce this—Cerasi?”
“Doesn’t matter. They can’t see our faces through here.”
Lowering the biohazard hoods and eye-shields down over their eyes, Dean and Sam hopped down off the back of the truck. Dean looked behind, not entirely comfortable with the way the hood eclipsed his peripheral vision. He did a full three-sixty, still walking as he did so, and got a better view.
Along the western edge of the battlefield, a haphazard melange of media personalities, firemen, cops, and Civil War re-enactors were all clustered together watching the action. Surprisingly, and despite the overhead announcement by the state police, many of the soldiers didn’t appear to have left after all.
With a jolt he backed into someone.
“Hey,” a woman snapped, “watch where you’re going, pal.”
Dean looked up and saw that he’d walked right into the sheriff. The mask had hidden his face, and she hadn’t recognized him.
“Sorry.”
He and Sam kept walking until they reached the edge of the pit. Taking a deep breath through the air-purifier, Dean turned and looked down. More than one round must have struck the same spot, so the pit was deep.
It was a mass grave.
Forty feet below, ancient skeletons and bone-shards littered the inner walls of the pit everywhere they looked, along with chunks of shrapnel and rusty wartime ordnance. Here, a cannon barrel, there, a twisted mass that might have been a wagon. In the middle, a welter of ribs and spine segments and yellowish shafts that once had been a man. Dozens of men. Or more. The roots of trees were coiled among the last remains of the dead, knotting them in gnarled fists.
Squinting down into the hole, Dean Winchester’s first reaction was pure relief, a sweeping sense of, Oh. Is that all. Not that any self-actualized aspect of him had honestly expected to find some depthless hellhole, a channel into the underworld, puking up brimstone and capering demonic atrocities lunging forward... or whatever... and yet—
And yet he had.
He did.
Because that was what he did after spending years down there, doing what he’d done.
He wondered.
He worried.
He feared.
Through sheer force of will, Dean shoved those notions aside—all of them—as far and as hard as he possibly could. Now more than ever he didn’t want that experience contaminating the way he looked at the world... not that he had a choice.
Hell had been his Vietnam. It had stamped its mark on him for all eternity, and no amount of denial or self-imposed ignorance was going to change it.
Ever.
“Except this isn’t Hell,” he mumbled under his breath. “It’s just a bunch of dead soldiers.”
Suddenly that phrase, dead soldiers, struck him as improbably funny. He found himself imagining a pit littered with empty beer bottles, Pabst Blue Ribbon and Coors and perhaps the worst beer in America, Meister Brau. The tension cracked and he felt a welcome numbness spread over him in its place, stopping him where he stood.
A nearby police lab tech, mistaking his reaction for despair, gripped him by the shoulder.
“Steady on, man. First time’s tough on all of us.”
“Yeah,” Dean managed, more grateful than ever that the mask hid his face. “It’s tough all right.”
“We’re just here to do a job, right?”
“You got it, buddy.”
“Hey, Dean.” It was Sam, tapping him on the other shoulder. “Are you seeing this?”
“What part?”
“Over there.”
Dean looked. The impromptu investigation team was lowering a sling and pulley contraption over the edge. Down below one of the workers was attaching it to an oblong box sticking halfway out of the dirt at the bottom of the crater. The box appeared to be made of iron. Unlike the other relics and debris in the pit, the passing century and a half didn’t seem to have affected it much at all.
If anything, the metal appeared to be even shinier—more luminous—than it had any right to be. Seeing the thing gleaming, Dean imagined what it must have been like, buried under tons of dirt for decade after decade, shining all by itself deep in the ground with a stark unwholesome intensity that radiated from within its depths.
As the winch hauled the thing upward out of the hole, dragging it by a handle at one end, more of it came into sight. He began to notice a series of inscriptions glinting along its edges. The coffin rotated slowly, catching the light, then settled into place as the makeshift crane set it down on the opposite side of the crater.
“Come on,” Sam said.
Dean jogged behind him around the crater’s outer rim. Several members of the Sheriff Daniels’ investigation team had already gathered around the casket and were looking at it curiously. More were on their way over, along with one of the TV camera crews and a detachment of re-enactors who seemed to have become bolder about ‘contaminating the crime scene.’
Hunching down in the middle of the group where he wouldn’t be so conspicuous, Dean slipped his isolation hood off, letting the breeze cool the layer of sweat that had formed over his forehead and upper lip. He took in a deep breath and let it out. Either he’d actually started getting used to the smell of the pit, or it had begun to dissipate.
“Can you read any of this, Sam?” he asked.
Glancing around nervously, Sam took off his own mask for a better look and reached down to brush a remaining clod of dirt from the lid. The thing’s surface shone out brightly, almost winking at them.
“It’s familiar,” he started. “These markings—” He stopped. “I think they match the symbols in Beauchamp’s journal.”
“This is Beauchamp’s coffin, then.”
“Yeah.”
* * *
Before Sam could get a closer look, the group of workers that had brought out the coffin lifted it up and began carrying it back toward the waiting forensics vehicle. Following it into the open parking lot, Sam realized, would only leave him more exposed to the possibility of being recognized.
And then it was too late.
“Sam!”
He glanced up and saw what Dean had already noticed. On the other side of the pit, perhaps forty feet away, Sheriff Daniels was staring straight at him with a resolute expression that somehow combined recognition, determination, and anger. He supposed he’d known this would happen when he took off the hood... but some part of him hadn’t expected that it would happen so fast.
“We’re made,” he said.
“Hang tight.” Dean was backing up, glancing right and left. More than anything he resembled a quarterback taking stock of his options, even the utterly crazy ones. But they were out of time.
Daniels and her deputies were already moving toward them. There was no way out.
Damn it, Sam thought, we’re gonna spend the night in jail. Maybe more. And we don’t have that kind of time.
Suddenly Dean saw something that seemed to change the game for him. With a shout, he flung one hand up in the air.
Sam turned around and saw several state troopers escorting a group of re-enactors that he identified as members of Dave Wolverton’s division—the Fighting 32nd—past the still-panicked horses of the Confederate armed cavalry division. The soldier up in front was particularly familiar, and it took Sam less than five seconds to recognize Sarah Rafferty.
From where he stood, it looked like she was trying to get the horses out.
She looked up as Sheriff Daniels approached the Winchesters.
“Private Will Tanner!” Dean shouted. “Little help here?”
For an instant, Sarah didn’t seem to understand what was being asked of her. Then she did.
The entire equation—the look on the sheriff’s face, directed at Sam and Dean—unfolded in her expression, and she reached forward and grabbed the bolt on the horse paddock, opening the gate.
All the horses came spilling out in a great galloping wave. It was as if all the pent-up fear from the explosions had finally been given free rein. The animals cut across the open battleground in front of Sam and Dean, hooves thundering hard across the earth between the cops and emergency workers, forcing everyone backward with the atavistic dread that sends people scurrying out of the path of stampeding animals.
“Now!” Sam felt Dean’s hand on his wrist. “Go!”
Using the stampede as cover, they yanked their masks back down and ran along behind the group of lab technicians carrying the casket toward the mobile crime lab. They helped load it into the back of the vehicle, then quickly climbed up after it. When they looked back down, the rest of the police forensics team—four of them, plus the driver—were climbing up into the back of the vehicle with them.
“Stay here,” Dean said. “Me and my partner will handle this one.”
“By yourselves?” The man in front took off his mask, his eyes flicking down to the badge around Dean’s neck. “On whose orders?”
Before Dean could answer, there was a crash and a shout somewhere behind them. The horses were in the parking lot now, running between the cars and creating even more confusion.
The man in front whipped around to see what had happened.
“Let’s move,” Dean bellowed. He pulled the door shut and shouted back up to driver. “Where are we headed?”
Supernatural The Unholy Cause Page 10
