Reaching the blonde girl tied to the tracks, Sam pushed the pliers down and started snapping ropes, chopping through them as fast as he could. Once freed, the girl sprang up tearfully, and he turned to the next child, a five-year-old boy in a ripped t-shirt and grubby red shorts.
He got the boy’s arms free, but his legs were slick with sweat and grease from the tracks, and he wouldn’t hold still. Then Sam got it, and the boy scrabbled away.
He moved on to the next one, but behind him now, he could feel the bulk of the train roaring closer, not just shaking the rails but pounding them, shocking them to life with a steady, awful vibration of unthinkable force and power.
He looked up at the rest of the children. So many of them—too many of them—ten more at least, each tied tightly and separately into place.
They were all staring straight at him.
The shadow of the train swept down. And Sam Winchester understood he wouldn’t be able to save them all.
He turned around and looked.
The train was still coming.
Fifty feet away.
Thirty.
Twenty.
He stood paralyzed, riveted to the spot. Fate seemed to be pointing its skeletal finger directly at him. For one illogical moment he considered throwing himself down on the tracks in the hope of providing the last necessary bit of obstruction. Maybe it would save the last kid in line. Maybe it would—
He shut his eyes.
With a final scraping squeal, the engine halted.
He looked up again. It was less than three feet in front of him. He could have reached out and touched the cowcatcher.
“Sam!” Dean shouted, from up in the cab. “Cut those kids loose! We’re sitting—”
Then, from the upper windows of Main Street, the first gunshots rang out.
The adrenaline was on him now, and Sam worked fast, his trembling hands moving with almost superhuman speed. But he wasn’t fast enough. Two of the kids were injured, one cut by his pliers, the other hit in the leg by a stray bullet.
When he glanced around, Dean was next to him with Ruby’s knife, and they hunched together slashing the ropes in quick deliberate swipes, getting the kids loose and pushing them hard toward the nearest open doors on the far side of the street.
They could feel bits of sidewalk and asphalt spitting up at them as the muskets fired.
Sam didn’t need to look up to know what was happening.
Demons were shooting down from both sides, spanking the concrete with a hail of grapeshot.
They’re shooting around me, he thought. They still don’t want to harm the vessel.
When he flicked his gaze up again, he saw the last of the children ducking into the shelter of a restaurant called Whotta Lotta Pizza. Ten seconds later, the pizza parlour window burst apart under heavy gunfire. He hoped—prayed—that the kids were smart enough to stay down.
Hemmed in by bullets and utterly exposed, Sam looked at Dean. He could see the soldiers now and realized that the first fusillade of shots had been playful, meant to instill fear. But playtime was over. They were crouching in windows and standing on top of buildings, and the comparison to The Gauntlet wasn’t just some rallying cry anymore. It was happening, and they were in the middle of it.
We’re dead meat, he thought. Or at least Dean is.
Suddenly, from the flatcar at the back of the train, he heard a new sound, a mechanical clanking noise. A steady stream of blasts accompanied it, as if someone back there had just opened up with a machine gun.
What the—
Before Sam understood what was happening, the demons started falling. From above, along the rooftops, they dropped their weapons and were pitching backward in every direction, flung aside in twitching ballistic dances. Sagging, they went limp and then fell forward, plummeting to earth as if they themselves were no more than Hell’s own re-enactors, playing out their own Light-bringer’s famous descent from grace.
He glanced back at the flatcar.
Sheriff Daniels was standing behind the Civil War Gatling gun, turning the crank with a fierce concentration. The smoking barrels rotated steadily, spitting out a firestorm upward and around. The iron shafts were gleaming with a pale scarlet color where they’d been wiped down with the bloody rags.
Daniels worked the crank faster. Behind her, Sarah Rafferty held the turret of the gun, rotating the sheriff around to spray the upper rooftops.
The sheriff saw Sam watching her, and took one hand off the gun, pawing violently at the air.
“Get moving,” she shouted. “Run!”
THIRTY-EIGHT
Lunging back up into the cab, Dean didn’t wait for further orders.
He disengaged the airbrake, only peripherally aware of Sam jumping in behind him as he grabbed the throttle with both hands and swung it wide. The train lurched forward on the rails. Bullets rattled and caroomed off the iron locomotive car in a steady clatter of lead.
Straight ahead and four blocks away, he saw the church. Its white steeple rose up into the blue morning sky like an annunciation from on high.
“Go!” Sam shouted.
A metal fragment whined and ricocheted past Dean’s ear, close enough that he felt the breeze, and he ducked belatedly, grim-faced. The next one could just as easily take his head off, he knew.
The engine was still picking up speed. It would’ve been faster to run.
We never would’ve made it.
In front of the engine, a phalanx of demons stood on the tracks, firing directly at the train as it rammed toward them. Sheriff Daniels brought the Gatling around and mowed them down. A second later the engine roared over their bodies, spitting out gobbets of flesh and shredded uniforms beneath the wheels.
Dean didn’t even see them. His eyes were nailed to the church, its front steps and its front door.
Two blocks now.
Closing in.
Get ready.
“Sam!” he shouted.
When Dean hit the brakes again, his brother was positioned halfway back in the coal car, clutching the sides, headed for the flatcar.
“Take the sheriff with you,” Sam called up. “I’ll stay here and try to hold them off as long as—”
His toe struck something soft. The words broke off in his throat, and he stared down at the body in the coal car. Something opened up in the pit of his stomach, hollow and quavering, as if he’d gone plunging downward.
The body of Sarah Rafferty lay motionless at his feet, her upturned eyes half-open, glassy. A bullet had struck her chest, creating a small red splotch that stained her blouse between her breasts, no bigger than a silver dollar. Beneath her, the stain was much bigger, and Sam realized that he was standing in a pool of her blood.
“Oh no...” Dean was shaking his head. “Is she...?”
Sam looked at his brother. He opened his mouth and closed it. When he spoke finally, his voice didn’t sound as if it belonged to him.
“Go.” Stepping over Sarah’s body, he got to the Gatling gun and touched Sheriff Daniels’ arm. “You have the last coil of the noose?”
She held it up.
“Right here.”
“Go with Dean.”
Daniels stepped out and Sam took her place, grabbing the gun’s blood-slick handle and cranking it hard. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Dean and Daniels jumping off the train and running between the pillars and up the front steps of the church. Two demons jumped out from behind one of the pillars, and Sam took aim and tore them to pieces.
Dean and the sheriff disappeared inside.
Sam dropped the Gatling’s crank and knelt down next to Sarah’s body, dragging her as far as he could into the relative cover of the coal car. Bullets spanged and rattled everywhere.
He put his hand to her throat to feel for a pulse. She was still warm—it had only been moments.
Nothing.
“He’s in here somewhere,” Daniels whispered. “I can feel it.”
They crossed the sanctuary, the hardwoo
d floor creaking faintly beneath their feet. Daniels’ voice sounded small amid the cavernous emptiness. Light coming from the variegated stained-glass windows fell across her face like a succession of ever-changing moods. Dean followed after her, padding in silence between rows of empty pews leading up to the dais. The only things he felt was hurt and tired.
And oddly cold. It was unnaturally frigid beneath the high arched ceiling, as if some lost vestige of winter had stayed canned up inside, waiting for them.
“Through here,” the sheriff said in a low voice.
She stopped in front of the pulpit. There was a high oak platform rising fifteen feet above them. Running her fingers along the outer edge, Daniels found what she was looking for and pressed on it. There was a click of some mechanism uncoupling, and the pulpit’s front panel dropped open to reveal a dark rectangle of dusty space directly in front of them.
Crouching, she ducked through it, vanishing inside. Dean heard her and wished for a flashlight.
Then blackness swallowed him whole.
They were in a narrow passage, the walls tight enough that he could feel them on both sides, brushing against his shoulders. Off in the void, the shuffling sounds of Daniels’ footfalls led him forward an inch at a time. Dean stretched his hands out in front of him, groping for something of substance and touching only air.
He crept forward.
Reaching...
And feeling something cold and tight grab him from behind. A hand.
“There you are,” McClane’s voice spoke brightly in his ear, laughing. “You made it after all.”
Hunched down in the coal car, Sam bent over Sarah, doing chest compressions, alternating with rescue breaths. When he pushed down on her chest, blood bubbled up from underneath her blouse.
She’s dead. You can’t save her.
He ignored the voice.
Kept working.
“Come on,” he said, unaware that he was speaking aloud. “Come on, Sarah.”
Her mouth dropped open slightly, as if she’d just remembered something she’d wanted to say. Instead, a shiny blood-bubble formed at her lips and burst, painting her lower lip with a bright smear of kabuki makeup.
Her head rolled to one side.
Footsteps rang out in the coal car behind him, and when Sam lifted his head, he saw five demons in blue and gray uniforms grinning down at him. The barrels of their muskets looked huge in his face.
“You should never have left the gun,” one of them said. It drew closer.
It’s up to you now, child.
Jackie Daniels came off the ladder and stepped down into the square, lead-lined room.
It was absolutely dark in here, drained of every germ of light, but that didn’t matter. She knew this space by heart. The walls, floors and ceiling, and the square of dirt in the middle where the reliquary waited—these intricacies were as familiar to her as her own body. She’d been made to learn all of it when she was young, instructed by her grandfather when he’d told her of the enormous responsibility that lay before her as the next guardian of the noose.
It’s up to you.
In the darkness, something clinked, dragging closer.
Daniels froze. Her scalp prickled, the sensation spreading down between her shoulder blades. Her heart sped up, pounding so hard that she could feel it in her throat. She smelled old animal skins, ancient fabric and dust.
The jingling, clinking sound grew closer.
“I brought it back,” she said into the darkness, and she forced herself to take another step. She almost expected to collide with the jingling shape—that was how close it felt. “The last coil. It’s here.”
The jingling shape moved again. It must have heard her, but it didn’t speak.
Kneeling down, she felt the damp crumbs of dirt and the cold edge of the reliquary. It was already in place—open and waiting.
She dropped the last coil inside, and snapped it shut.
For an instant nothing happened.
Then everything did.
* * *
In the darkness, McClane’s laughter was very close, the sound of it horribly familiar. It smelled like sweat and burning rubber and brimstone.
“You know something?” Dean said, doing everything he could to keep his voice steady. “You know the difference between you and me? I never bent down to kiss the devil’s ass.”
The laughter stopped.
Dean felt the other hand land on his throat.
Not a hand.
A claw.
Squeezing.
The vice-grip shut his airway down instantly, and there was an almost inaudible popping sound as the cartilage began to crush inside him.
Dean’s hand went to his belt, where he’d tucked the demon-killing knife, and he drew it out.
Hope you got it where it needs to go, Sheriff, he thought, and as the darkness began to spin, he plunged the blade into McClane’s chest.
Even on his knees inside the coal car, Sam could see the light erupting out of the church windows, flooding the stained-glass Bible scenes from the inside and spraying the colors into the morning air. A pillar of pure white light shattered its way through the steeple and into the sky, cutting a wide bright shaft of radiance straight up into the cloudless expanse. The old planks creaked, knocking together, rattling hard. Energy shuddered and throbbed from inside, a pulsing storm of megawatt intensity, as if some silent, benevolent detonation had just occurred.
At that point Sam stopped watching.
He was more preoccupied by the demons smoking out in front of him, their muskets falling to the bottom of the coal car. The last of them collapsed with a yowling cry of anger and dismay, its black substance swirling out through its nose and mouth.
The host-bodies lay where they fell.
Some groaned and awoke, injured, confused, bleeding from the injuries to which the demons had subjected them.
Others, like the body of Sarah Rafferty, remained still.
Dean didn’t just hear Tommy McClane scream—he felt it. He’d been prepared for the demon to flash out, but the simultaneous return of the coil to its proper resting place must have somehow amplified what happened. The demonic essence didn’t just flee, it exploded.
There was a loud, moist pop, accompanied by a spraying sensation against the bare skin of his cheek and forehead, and the crushing pressure on his throat was gone.
Just like that.
Dean cringed. His skin was freckled with something cold and sticky, as if a balloon covered in cold syrup had burst open in front of him. The stink was familiar, rotten and nauseating—halitosis from Hell.
Then the darkness itself exploded.
Dean’s hair stood up on the back of his neck, stiffening across his forearms. The numbing crackle of ozone filled the air. His first gut-reaction was that he’d been hit by lightning, and he began to back up as quickly as he could.
The lightstorm opened up around him in every direction. It was flashing through the sanctuary in vast, booming pavilions of pure luminescence as he charged out of the open passageway, down the center aisle, and through the front door.
Sam saw his brother racing for the front steps, leaping down them all at once and landing on the sidewalk, then whirling around to watch the last of the light ebbing away inside the First Pentecostal Church of Mission’s Ridge.
When it finished, he turned and looked up and down Main Street. Columns of smoke rose over the buildings, no doubt from a handful of fires that burned in various parts of town.
The demons’ host-bodies lay everywhere, dangling from windows and sprawled across rooftops. Sam watched them stirring, starting to stand up, wincing and clutching their injuries. Debris littered the sidewalks, broken glass and collapsed awnings, and a layer of airborne murk that was already dissolving in the atmosphere.
Car alarms hooted and shrilled, the modern day birdsong of early morning catastrophe.
“Sammy?”
Sam climbed down, carrying Sarah’s body.
“I’m sorry,” Dean said.
“Where’s the sheriff?”
Dean nodded back at the church. Sirens were rising up now underneath the cacophony of car alarms. Sam imagined federal investigators, government officials and television reporters, state police, more suits and uniforms than he could imagine. They would descend upon Mission’s Ridge and turn it into a buzzing hornet’s nest of questions and accusations and delays.
“We don’t want to be here for this,” he said.
“Yeah, well,” Dean said, “I’m not leaving Sheriff Daniels.”
“Impala’s in the impound lot. Two blocks from here.”
Dean brightened at the prospect of getting his car back and somehow found the strength to smile.
“I’ll bring it around.”
“I’ll go in and look for the sheriff.” Sam set Sarah’s body down next to him, turned, and started toward the church.
As he did so, the front door squeaked open, and he saw Sheriff Daniels emerge from the church and into the light. Her face was glowing, almost sunburned, her eyes bright, utterly vibrant.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
She looked down at him, at first not seeming to recognize him, then out at the ruined streets of her town, the bodies of the citizens, and those who were regaining their bearings, coming out of hiding.
“Yes.” Her voice was far away. “Are they gone...?”
Sam nodded. He could already hear the familiar growl of the Impala’s engine making its way closer. A moment later it appeared around the corner and pulled up to the curb. Dean opened the door and climbed out. Sheriff Daniels stood looking at them.
“I guess none of us was straight with the other,” Dean said.
“I suppose not,” she agreed.
“My brother and I...” Sam began, and paused, unsure how to proceed. “We came because we knew there was demonic activity here. We’re hunters.”
The sheriff nodded.
“I’m glad you came. My job—my real job, protecting the noose—isn’t easy. My family has given their lives to it. Sometimes literally.” She shrugged. “I’m not used to having any help.”
Supernatural The Unholy Cause Page 20
