Supernatural The Unholy Cause

by Joe Schreiber

  Sam took a breath.

  “Yes,” he said, “I do.”

  “Just give me a chance.”

  It’s a trap. And if you fall for it, you’re an even bigger idiot than I thought.

  Still...

  Sam hesitated. The shotgun felt very heavy in his grip now. He lowered the gun a fraction...

  And the Nate-demon lunged for him.

  Sam had the shotgun back up instantly.

  He pulled the trigger.

  The barrel roared, a storm of rock salt blasting from its muzzle, tearing the demon down. A child-sized raft of living smoke came shrieking out of Nate’s skin, and somewhere off to the left, Sam heard Tommy McClane start to scream. Obscenities spilled from his lips, curses in a dozen different languages. Sam didn’t wait around to hear the translation.

  Squirming through the broken back window into the pickup’s cab, he dropped into the driver’s seat. The keys were still in the ignition. He cranked them, dropped the truck into reverse, spun the wheel and floored the gas, flinging the pickup back around.

  Up ahead in the headlights, he saw Tommy McClane staring straight at him.

  But Dean was gone.

  Pinned by the headlights of the oncoming truck, the thing that called itself Tommy McClane stood his ground.

  He’d lost the last coil of the noose somewhere.

  This wasn’t the plan, gunning the Winchesters down in the middle of the battle before the endgame was achieved. But the plan hadn’t included the sight of his son being shredded by a shotgun full of rock salt either. When the demon had seen that...

  Oh, when he had seen that...

  McClane’s jaw tightened. Rage lay heavy against his heart like the flat surface of a branding iron. He wasn’t thinking straight. He cast around quickly for something to throw and came up with a short timber post that had been dislodged from somewhere. He hurled it with all his strength at the truck. The glass crazed on impact, and Sam Winchester ducked reflexively, but then quickly sat back up behind the wheel.

  McClane could see Sam’s face through the windshield, and it was a mirror of his own anger.

  At the last second, he dove out of the way, letting the pickup squeal past him.

  Sam swerved across the parking lot and spun the pickup around. He couldn’t see Dean anywhere, and he was running out of time.

  Up on the hill, the siege howitzers were blasting to pieces whatever remained of the night. The onslaught was so unrelenting that it was impossible to discern the gunfire from the echoes. In the east, the glow of dawn shuddered along the rim of the Earth, low and red and trickling through the treetops, as if the sky itself was bleeding from the attack.

  Sam steered the pickup around again, heading for the battlefield, the tents and the trees. Somewhere off to his left he could make out the Civil War steam locomotive by the old railway shed. Between the explosions, over the pickup truck’s engine, he heard screaming.

  He looked over at the figures in uniform, storming down the hill. Some wore blue, others gray. They were running down the incline side-by-side regardless of sides, like the fulfillment of some ancient prophecy.

  And behold, the Yankee shall campaign with the Rebel.

  All carried authentic-looking Civil War weapons. And although Sam Winchester couldn’t know for sure at this distance, in this misty, smoke shrouded pre-dawn light, he had the sick feeling that every single one of them had the same onyx-black eyes.

  He thought of what McClane had said.

  “My kin.”

  Dean, he thought miserably, where are you?

  Up ahead of him, men had already come out of the tents. Re-enactors—the ones whose bodies the demons hadn’t possessed—were standing in their skivvies and long underwear and gaping up at the wave of figures storming down the hillside. The pickup’s headlights strafed their faces, revealing the slack disbelief of sleepers who’d awakened from a nightmare only to find that the nightmare had followed them into reality.

  There was another artillery flash from above, the boom following instantly afterward, the long shadows of the attackers flickering forward over the grass and down like the fingers of some unthinkably vast and clutching claw.

  “Look out!” Sam palmed the pickup’s horn and held it down. Its nasal beep was absurdly small against the roar of battle. “Get out of here! Run!”

  The pickup hit a bump and slammed violently upward, coming down hard on its shocks with a suspension-busting crack. Sam saw the tents and the men, the trees and creek and the hillside beyond it, all of it closer now, but his brother wasn’t there, wasn’t anywhere, and if he didn’t find him soon—

  A figure burst out of the trees in front of him, darting through his headlights, fifteen feet away. Sam had just enough time to recognize her, the name kiting briefly across his conscious mind—

  Sarah Rafferty.

  —when the biggest howitzer shell yet hit the pickup head-on, blasting it sideways and up into the air, pinwheeling Sam Winchester with it, out of the blue and into the black.

  The truck hit the ground, torn open and bleeding flame.

  It was exactly five a.m.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Get up.

  It was his father’s voice. Dean would have recognized it anywhere. Even if the old man hadn’t been standing directly in front of him, gazing down, looking supremely unimpressed with the string of events that had led up to this.

  I can’t, Dad. A jumble of impressions and responses floundered ineffectively in Dean’s mind. I’m shot. Son of a bitch shot me. You saw it.

  What I saw was a man get blindsided by his own stupidity, John Winchester responded unsympathetically. I saw a man who—given his circumstances and the sheer latitude of his folly—is lucky he’s not dead.

  Dad, how come you’re talking like Abraham Lincoln? Dean thought, and that was when he realized that his father was actually dressed like Lincoln, right down to the beard and stovetop hat. Despite the searing, white-hot pain in his chest and right shoulder, the idea struck him as absurdly funny. Here he was, balled up in the edge of the parking lot, trying to staunch the flow of blood from the grapeshot that had come flying out of a vintage Civil War musket. With no less than the Great Emancipator himself, as real as he’d appeared in Phil Wagner’s wax museum, towering over him.

  Dad...?

  Dean reached up.

  Fought to stand upright.

  And touched cold metal.

  Lincoln, his father, was a statue.

  Not a man at all. A bronze likeness. Craggy and hard. It stood on a concrete base overlooking the battlefield, one hand extended permanently northward, as if pointing out to Mission’s Ridge the cause of its inevitable loss.

  Dean felt the world pivoting away from him on greasy hinges, and all equilibrium fled.

  Then he was actually clinging to the statue, gripping Honest Abe’s arm to hold himself upright.

  How much blood have I lost anyway?

  Sirens howled in the distance, approaching at speed. Above them, Dean heard the screaming—the Rebel Yell coming down the hillside, although all it reminded him of was whiskey and Billy Idol.

  His brain struggled to take it all in.

  Tommy McClane had grabbed the knife and he’d unleashed... this.

  Dean narrowed his eyes and saw the pickup truck—Tommy McClane’s truck, the traitorous bastard—swerving madly across the grass of the battlefield, between explosions. Whoever was behind the wheel looked like they were driving with their feet.

  But where’s Sam?

  The question blazed a new line of clarity across his thoughts, temporarily anyway, long enough to realize that what he was dealing with was essentially a flesh wound, and wasn’t that a nice deceptive turn of phrase? Only a flesh wound.

  And just like that, here came Harvey Keitel in Reservoir Dogs: Aside from the knee cap, the gut’s the worst place you can get shot. It hurts like hell, but you ain’t dying. And good God, would the pop culture stuff ever stop coming, even in moments of p
rofound physical agony?

  Now red and blue bubble lights were flashing across the parking lot. Sheriff’s vehicles.

  Cops.

  “Great,” Dean muttered. “Perfect. It’s gotta—”

  THOOM!

  Off to his right, maybe less than a hundred yards away, an artillery shell hit the Ford’s backbed, blasting it sky-high, spinning it up into the air like a Matchbox car whose youthful owner had lost interest in it.

  In the startled hush that followed, he heard tires screeching, spraying gravel. Doors opening. Voices. Cop voices.

  “It’s you,” a voice said.

  Dean let go of the statue’s arm and staggered around to find himself face-to-face with McClane. The bastard was no longer armed, but in all honesty, Dean didn’t suppose he would even need a weapon now. McClane could poke him with a sharp stick and get the job done.

  Bull. I ain’t dying.

  “We just killed your brother, by the way,” McClane was saying. “He was in that pickup when it went blooey.” A grin, utterly inhuman, spread over his face. “Payback for what he did to my partner.”

  “Sent him back to Hell?” Dean said. “Good. But you’re lying about Sam being dead.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “You worked too hard for this. And Sam’s too important to you.”

  The demon paused, as if for reflection, and did an odd thing—he nodded.

  “You’re right,” McClane said. “He is.”

  “So what’s this all about? With you and your ‘kin?’”

  McClane waved the question away as if it didn’t concern him.

  “Wheels within wheels. It’s all too sophisticated for the likes of you.”

  “You know,” Dean said, “I think I liked you better when you were just a redneck.”

  “Ah,” the demon beamed—but was there a flicker of impatience behind that placidity, a flame of anger buried deep in the demon’s enamel of bemused calm? Dean thought so. Seeing it there gave him a dose of vicious satisfaction.

  “In any case, we’re past all that now aren’t we?” McClane tilted his whiskered chin toward the shredded skin of Dean’s right chest wall. “How’s the shoulder, by the way?”

  “Hurts like hell.”

  “Good.”

  Dean ignored him. He was looking beyond the demon now, at the police cars with their strobes flickering over the parking lot, where no less than Sheriff Jackie Daniels herself was striding toward the battlefield, radio in hand, leading a phalanx of State Troopers. There was another crashing BOOM as the sky exploded again, and they all stopped in their tracks.

  Fixing his eyes back on McClane, Dean stood up straight.

  “So what’s the plan?”

  McClane cocked an eyebrow.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “You kill me and my brother, then your demon army takes over the town and throws a big party. Fly the Confederate flag, play war heroes. Am I missing anything?”

  “No,” McClane said. “I think you’ve unfolded it all very nicely.”

  “What happens when Judas catches up with you?”

  “It’ll be too late.”

  “Yeah,” Dean said. “You’re right about that.”

  McClane cocked his head.

  “You agree with me?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Why?”

  Dean shook his head.

  “Because me and Honest Abe here are gonna kick your Rebel ass.”

  Something snapped in the demon’s composure. He charged Dean in a single blurring step, flying at him, knocking him flat again. Dean tasted the familiar now sulfuric tang of asphalt.

  Hello, asphalt.

  McClane stepped over him and swung back his foot, kicking him in the shoulder.

  Right in the gunshot wound.

  The pain was unholy. Nerve bundles shrieked inside him. Dean screamed. He couldn’t help it. McClane kicked him again.

  The demon was talking between kicks. Spitting out words in bursts, between swings of his boot.

  “When I tortured Winston to death—”

  Kick.

  “I thought it couldn’t get any more fun than that.”

  Kick.

  “But this—”

  Kick.

  “Makes that—”

  Kick.

  “Feel like a dryhump in the backseat of old granddad’s Studebaker.”

  Dean squirmed at McClane’s feet. The tips of the demon’s Red Wing boots were dripping with his blood. A glob of it dangled from one of the half-tied laces. He tried to scream again but couldn’t. His entire right side had gone numb, and that included his face. Being numb, however, somehow didn’t stop it from feeling as if it were on fire.

  McClane towered over him, triumphant. Dean could see him drawing back his leg, preparing one last kick, the blow that would either knock him unconscious or snap his spinal cord.

  “Goodbye, Dean.”

  The boot arced forward again. This time, somehow, Dean managed to reach up with his good arm and seize hold of it, clutching onto it for dear life. The move was so sudden, so unexpected, that it actually caught McClane off-balance, and when Dean jerked him forward, the demon went sprawling with a half-audible grunt of surprise.

  Straddling him, Dean grabbed McClane by the hair and rammed his face down into the pavement. Something splintered; something popped. Facial bones. Cartilage. Teeth.

  Remember, an inner voice cut in, this is just a meat-suit, there once was a person in there—

  At the moment Dean didn’t care. He struck the McClane-demon again, hard and fast, while he still had the momentum. Capsules of adrenaline were erupting in his motor cortex, bursting open like strings of firecrackers, popping hot wires of energy through the muscles of his good arm.

  Beneath him, McClane let out a muffled howl and spat a mouthful of pebbles and debris, and it was like music to Dean’s ears. All at once he felt as if he could do this all night if he had to.

  “You worthless piece of trash,” McClane said. “Look what you did to my face.”

  The demon pitched over to one side, throwing Dean down, and locked both hands around his throat. Dean looked up at McClane. His face was a cratered, oozing ruin. McClane’s grip pinched off Dean’s trachea, and he couldn’t breathe.

  Blackness started sliding down on top of him in a massive avalanche.

  Then, screaming.

  But this time it wasn’t him.

  McClane was screaming.

  The hands around Dean’s throat loosened and fell slack. The bloody oval of the demon’s mouth was wide open and he was howling bloody murder. Behind him, Sheriff Jackie Daniels was standing over his shoulder, reaching down, doing something to the back of his neck. From this angle, Dean couldn’t quite see what it was... and when he did see, it didn’t make sense.

  The sheriff was holding the inside of her wrist against McClane’s neck. Not hitting him, not even grabbing him, barely even touching him. But it was enough to make McClane collapse, cringing, onto his belly, where he cowered and whimpered and tried to pull away but couldn’t. Daniels hunkered down next to him, pressing her wrist directly against his flesh.

  She wasn’t looking at Dean. Didn’t even seem to notice he was there. Every ounce of her attention was focused on Tommy McClane.

  “Struggle all you want,” she said. “As long as this tattoo’s on you, you’re not leaving this meat-suit. So tell me what I want to know.” She leaned further down, until her face was right next to his head. And although her voice wasn’t loud, Dean could hear, very clearly, the words she spoke in McClane’s ear.

  “Where’s the noose?”

  TWENTY-NINE

  When Sam came to, he was being dragged backward by his arms across the burning battleground. One of his boots had come off and his ankle was swollen to the size of a grapefruit. Migraine-sized throbs of pain rocked his vision, sloshing his thoughts from side to side.

  Groaning silently, Sam looked behind him. The two men pulling
him were also re-enactors, one Union, one Confederate. The Rebel was shouting into a cell phone. The Yankee had a first aid kit.

  All around him, the world blazed. Men in Civil War uniforms were running wildly, erratically, in every direction. More uniformed figures—McClane’s demonic kin—were screaming down the hillside, weapons held up and ready. It was impossible to say how many of them were out there, although he thought there might be a hundred, maybe more. They seemed to be spilling out of a wound in time, boiling out of some dusty epoch whose daily life was as remote as the pages of history itself. Yet they were real enough.

  As Sam watched, one of the demons ran up to a re-enactor in a blue Union uniform and plunged his bayonet into the man’s throat, then yanked it out with a howl of triumph and thrust the blade, still dripping, high into the air. The first rays of morning sunlight kissed the gleaming tip and shot back a sunburst of scarlet brilliance.

  Sam’s head reeled.

  Then he remembered the pickup truck.

  And Sarah Rafferty.

  The truck he could see from here, fifty yards away, a burning heap of twisted metal that had crashed at the edge of the creek. Flames from the cab had spread to engulf the stand of cypress trees, and although it was probably just the reflection of the flames, it looked like the creek itself had caught fire.

  But what about Sarah?

  And Dean?

  Sam had fallen out of the driver’s seat when the mortar round had launched it into the air. Thinking back, he recalled how much it had hurt when he’d hit the dirt, with just enough consciousness left to look up and see Tommy McClane’s Ranger spinning in the air over his head, its twisted front-end grinning down from the peak of its arc, just before gravity snagged it and flung it back down.

  He had glanced over, seen Sarah’s face as she’d stuck her head up and realized what was falling toward her —

  After that: blackout.

  Yanking Sam’s arms, the two re-enactors dragged him into a tent and dropped him unceremoniously next to several other men who were already sprawled on the ground, motionless, bleeding through their uniforms.

  “Can you hear me, buddy?”