In the distance, Dean heard the wail of police sirens.
By the time he reached the edge of the sidewalk, Sam was standing with his back pressed against the glass storefront, hauling on the thin clothesline but monitoring the disintegrating walkway. Sam caught Dean’s arm and pulled him up and out. At that moment, several sections of sidewalk tilted forward, pitching them toward the sinkhole.
The door securing the line had been pulled open by Dean’s weight.
“Go!” Dean said. “I got the line.”
Sam threw himself backward, through the open door and into the Qwik Mart. Dean’s feet started to slip out from beneath him, but he continued to support his weight with the clothesline until Sam caught his arm and tugged him inside. A glance back showed black smoke curling up from the pit, but the flames were beneath his line of sight.
An explosion blasted up from the sinkhole, followed by another, and a third—a chain reaction of automobiles exploding. The noise was deafening and debris sprayed everywhere. Chief Quinn took cover behind his cruiser.
Bystanders were shouting and screaming, racing to the far side of the highway. No doubt they’d witnessed the Firebird owner get himself killed. If nothing else, the man had helped by serving as a cautionary tale for others.
“That was close,” Dean said.
“Too close.”
Another explosion roared outside, this one rocking the convenience store. Overhead, the fluorescent lights flickered. Snack bags and aluminum cans crashed to the linoleum floor.
“Not good,” Dean said.
The vibration was only the beginning. The store itself was shifting, creaking, groaning. Dean recalled the utility lines running under the sidewalk out front. Natural gas. Maybe a propane tank out back. Crap.
“We’re not out of the woods yet, Sammy,” he observed.
They sprinted to the back of the store, kicking the fallen shop goods out of the way, past metal racks of chips and bread and boxes of doughnuts and assorted candy, and ducked through a door marked “Employees Only” into a cluttered stock room, and out through the rear exit.
Another explosion sounded, seeming even closer and with a bigger wallop. The back wall of the store shook and the ground beneath their feet shuddered. They couldn’t underestimate the instability caused by the sinkhole. For all Dean knew, the whole convenience store might drop onto the crushed cars at any moment.
“There,” Sam said, pointing to an eight-foot ladder propped against the cinderblock wall behind the store.
A few moments later, they had climbed over the wall and dropped down to the grass on the other side. They were shielded from the blast zone, but how far the sinkhole would spread was an open question. Anson, the store clerk, stood there awkwardly with his hands stuffed in his pockets, but Hunter and his mom were nowhere to be seen.
“Kid and his mom?” Dean asked.
“Gone,” Anson said, a clear tremor in his voice. “She wanted to hang around to thank you again, but after the first explosion...”
“Good parenting,” Sam said. “No place for a kid.”
“You okay?” Dean asked Anson.
“Yeah, fine,” the clerk said, nodding a bit frantically. “Called my manager. Told him I’d wait for him. Don’t think he believes me, how bad it is.”
“Picture’s worth a thousand words, right?” Dean said.
“If I were you, Anson, I’d wait a block or two away,” Sam said.
Then his cell phone rang. He glanced at the display and showed it to Dean. It said: “Clayton Falls Police.”
Sam answered and listened. He mouthed the name “Jeffries” to Dean.
“Yes. Yes, we did. Yes, I would classify that as weird. That too.” He listened for a few moments. “I’ll need addresses.” After a few moments, he said, “We found something weird as well.” Sam described the sinkhole, the subsequent explosions and one death. “Your chief ’s here. Got his hands full with crowd control.” A short time later, he pulled the phone away from his ear.
“Well?” Dean asked.
“Walk with me,” Sam said, with a discreet nod in Anson’s direction.
They cut through someone’s backyard and circled around to the street, heading towards the Impala.
“Short version?”
Dean nodded.
“Giant tarantula. Killer trees. And the phantom Charger returned. Killed Tony Lacosta. And other reports are coming in, attempted home invasions, masked gunmen.”
“Busy night,” Dean said grimly.
“I’ll say. Police are spread thin,” Sam said. “But some of these... apparitions disappear in front of the witnesses or are gone by the time patrols arrive at the scene.”
“Fits the MO of whatever the hell this thing is.”
Lightning flashed across the sky, followed by a prolonged rumble of thunder. A gust of wind whipped around them, shaking nearby treetops. Behind them, another explosion rocked the night.
“Sam,” Dean said. “Don’t think this night’s done yet.”
ELEVEN
“What’s closest?” Dean asked as soon as they were back in the Impala.
“Stay on Bell Street,” Sam said. “This takes us to the office buildings on the left, where the giant tarantula attacked.”
Dean shook his head and had to smile.
“What?”
“Just the fact that you said what you just said. With a straight face.”
Sam smiled. “Yeah. See what you mean.”
“Next stop, eight-legged freak.”
Ahead, a traffic light blinked to yellow, then red. Dean slowed, ready to run the light as soon as he checked the cross street. He craned his neck over the dashboard for a quick look and hit the brake hard.
A dark blue Honda Civic raced into the intersection going in excess of seventy miles per hour. The driver, apparently unaccustomed to high speeds on city streets, took the turn too wide, tires screeching in protest, and slammed broadside into a parked Dodge Ram pickup truck. The left side of the Civic rose off the ground, and would have rolled over a lower barrier.
“What the hell?” Dean said for what seemed like the tenth time that night.
The driver looked stunned, but uninjured. Fortunately, he was alone, because the passenger side had taken the brunt of the impact.
“Dean,” Sam said, pointing down the length of the cross street. “Look!”
“Is that—? No, that’s not what it is. Is it?”
“A pack of Velociraptors.”
“Velociraptors? As in Jurassic Park Velociraptors?”
“Actually, they’re from the Cretaceous per...” Sam cleared his throat. “Yes.”
Four Velociraptors bounded along the street on powerful hind legs in apparent pursuit of the Civic. Their reptilian heads—predominantly jaws lined with sharp teeth—darted side to side as they neared their prey, eyes that reminded Dean of alligators scanning for other predators.
The white-faced driver stared through his side window, watching slack-jawed while the hunting pack sprinted across the intersection and surrounded his wrecked car. Not that he had many options. Safest place at the moment was inside the car. But the Civic’s engine was still running, if roughly, so the driver floored the accelerator. The car tried to move, but the wreckage of the passenger side appeared to be entangled with the Dodge Ram. He shifted into reverse and the vehicle shuddered, immobile.
Ignoring his failed attempts to flee, the first Raptor scrambled onto the roof of the small car, the large sickleshaped claw on each rear foot tapping the metal, perhaps probing for weakness. Another Raptor shoved its head at the side window, fracturing the glass. One more strike and it would break through, giving its fearsome jaws access to the interior of the car.
Dean swung the Impala onto the shoulder of Bell Street. He jumped out with Sam right behind him. In their FBI guises, they both carried handguns, but Dean thought they might need something more powerful from the arsenal they stored in the trunk.
“Time travel, Sam?” Dean said
incredulously. “These things come through a friggin’ wormhole? Even Cass is gonna have trouble sending them back to the... Crustacean period.”
Sam shrugged. “So we put them down.”
Dean nodded emphatically. “Simple. I like it.”
He unlocked the trunk and raised the lid, peering inside.
“Dude—” Sam said.
Dean glanced to the left, assessing. “Where’s the fourth Raptor?”
“Vanished. It just... winked out.”
One of the remaining three Velociraptors jumped on the hood of the Civic, leaned toward the windshield—and vanished.
Two remained. The one prowling on the roof, and the other attempting to poke its head into the car.
With a screeching roar, the second Raptor struck at the window, shattering the glass and darting his head inside with one quick motion. The driver huddled against the passenger door, as far from the driver’s side as possible. With the passenger side pinned against the Dodge Ram, he was, for the moment, safe.
“Something’s not right,” Sam said thoughtfully.
Dean stared at his brother. “When has this not been wrong?”
They armed themselves swiftly.
The Raptor on the Civic’s roof leapt down to the windshield and its weight crunched through the safety glass, detaching the whole window from the frame. Spinning around, the Raptor ducked forward, trying to shove its large snout into the interior of the car.
Sam was already walking across the street, his automatic raised in both hands as he drifted to the left for a better angle. He took two quick shots. Blood blossomed on the head of the Raptor crouched on the car’s hood. As it toppled sideways, it disappeared. The last raptor swung its head around to track Sam with its alligator eyes.
Screeching, it bounded toward Sam, picking up speed at an alarming rate.
Sam took two more shots. The first missed. The second clipped the outside of its left foreleg. Neither slowed it down.
Dean had his own automatic out, but Sam blocked a clear shot.
“Sam! Down!”
Sam dropped, just as the Raptor leapt, covering the remaining distance between them. As Dean sighted along the barrel and applied pressure on the trigger, the creature was gone.
Sam climbed to his feet, brushed himself off and gave Dean a look.
Dean shrugged, holstered his gun. “I had the shot.”
“Look on the bright side,” Sam said. “You saved a bullet.”
The Civic’s driver tried his door, found it jammed, so proceeded to climb out through the windshield frame. Sam helped him down.
“You okay, man?”
“Yes, I’m fine. I mean, considering what the hell just happened,” the driver said, his voice shaky. “You guys cops?
“FBI.”
“My name is Paul Hanes. Swear I wasn’t drinking,” the man said. “Although I could use a drink right now. It’s just— those things came after me and—what were they?”
“Velociraptors.”
“Dinosaurs? But they’re extinct...”
“Maybe,” Dean said. “Starting to have my doubts.”
“Any idea where they came from?” Sam asked.
“No. I mean, I had a fight with my girlfriend—Cathryn Rowsell at 142 Allen Drive if you need to verify this—and I noticed something coming out of the shadows when I unlocked the car door. I thought mugger, or carjacker, you know? Jumped in the car, locked the doors, and drove away fast as I could.” He spoke rapidly, propelled by nervous energy he couldn’t contain. “When I glanced in the rearview, I saw them—those four... lizards racing after me. I was so startled, I actually slowed down. One of them caught up to me and jumped on the trunk of the car. That was enough for me. I floored it and that one fell off. I didn’t slow down until I, well, until I crashed into the pickup.”
“Notice anything unusual before you got in your car?”
Hanes pursed his lips. “May have heard rustling in the bushes before I saw the shadows against the wall. But not on—fog. There was mist or fog along the grass and walkway on my way out. Didn’t remember seeing it when I got to her place after work.”
“Thanks,” Sam said.
The wind gusted again. Lightning arced across the sky, like a pulsing vein in the darkness, followed by a rolling crash of thunder. For a moment the streetlights went dark as far as they could see. Then they flickered fitfully back on.
“Oh, man...” Hanes said, staring at his car and the Dodge pickup. “How do I explain this to my insurance company?”
“Worry about that tomorrow,” Sam said. “Find shelter before they come back.”
“Jeez!” said the guy. “You think?”
Dean steered the Impala into the professional building complex. Once he neared the entrance, he had only to follow the flashing red and blue lights. A patrol car, an ambulance, and a wrecker were parked in a rough half-circle around the crime scene—although an attack by a giant tarantula could hardly be called a crime. Make that an incident scene.
A pair of confused EMTs—a woman and a man— stood on either side of Officer Jeffries, as if awaiting instructions Two men stood near the wrecker, their fidgety body language betraying impatience or discomfort with the situation. The taller of the two wore a baseball cap with an embroidered company logo over an apparently bald head; the other man had a shaggy mane of greasy hair.
“Trying to find a pattern here,” Sam said pensively. He seemed preoccupied with the Velociraptors’ attack rather than focusing on their present situation.
“Besides the white mist?” Dean asked. “And the nighttime? And giant lizards in general?”
“A tarantula isn’t a lizard,” Sam said, glancing up at Jeffries and the paramedics. “And the Velociraptors were big, but not gigantic.”
“Count your blessings.”
Dean swung around the emergency vehicles, and parked the Impala in the island of light under a lamppost. Finally, he saw what the paramedics and Jeffries had obstructed from view when he pulled into the lot.
“You see that?” he asked Sam.
“Human remains.”
“It’s... sticking out of the ground.”
Jeffries walked toward the Impala as they climbed out.
“Hey, guys,” he said. “Hope you got strong stomachs.”
He waved them toward the victim.
“What have we got?” Sam asked Jeffries.
“Victim was an adult male,” Jeffries said. He grabbed an evidence bag from the hood of his patrol car. “Harvey Dufford, according to the metal plate on what’s left of this emergency alert wristband we found beside the body, which no longer has any wrists to speak of.”
The upper torso—what remained of it, at least—looked as if it had been doused with highly corrosive acid. The head was little more than a crushed skull with a few strips of inflamed flesh around the neck. Most of the flesh on the arms and torso was gone, the internal organs missing or partially dissolved into a loose jellylike substance. With no ligaments to connect them, some of the bones had fallen in a loose circle around the torso. The man’s body seemed to end at his waist, but closer inspection revealed flesh and organs embedded in the asphalt of the parking lot.
“Where’s the giant tarantula?” Dean asked.
“Vanished.”
“Was my first guess. And we know it was a giant tarantula because...?”
“Marcus Epps, owner of the wrecker over there, brought his brother-in-law, Otis, here to retrieve his pickup truck, which is a few lots down from here. Soon as they turned into this lot, they saw the giant spider hunched over the victim. I told them to stick around. Figured you’d want a word.”
“Appreciate the cooperation, Jeffries... Hold on,” Dean said. He stepped back, crouched down and ran his hand along the surrounding blacktop. He felt ripples in the surface leading away from the remnants of the corpse. Even further away he found misshapen lumps merged with the asphalt. After a few moments, he identified the objects. “Running shoes.”
&
nbsp; “You’re right,” Sam said. He walked from the embedded shoes toward the corpse. “From the ID and what’s left of his clothes, looks like he was jogging. Sees the giant tarantula, starts to run away, but then... sinks into the ground.”
“What? Giant tarantulas can melt asphalt?” Dean stared up at Sam. They knew weird, the brothers lived and breathed weird but this case was getting way beyond weird.
“Maybe Marcus and his brother-in-law know how this happened,” Sam suggested.
They walked over to the wrecker and the two men waiting there. The bald man’s cap advertised “Epps Service Center” in red script letters on a white field. That settled which one was Marcus.
Dean flashed his FBI laminate.
“Agent DeYoung. This is Agent Shaw. You saw a giant spider?”
Otis responded. “It was a red-kneed tarantula.”
“That sounds specific,” Sam said.
“Growing up, buddy of mine had one,” Otis said. “Fed it live crickets from the pet store. Let me watch.”
“And, as far as red-kneed tarantulas go, this one was big?”
“Hell, yeah!” Marcus said. “Thought it was a bear at first. Hunched over. My headlights swept over it, and I saw those red-striped legs.”
“Damn near had a heart attack,” Otis continued. “Doc keeps telling me my cholesterol is too high.”
“What happened?” Sam asked. “Exactly.”
“I could tell it was feeding,” Otis said. “Saw enough crickets eaten by my buddy’s tarantula. This thing had something wrapped up in its feelers while it went to work on it. Couldn’t tell what it was at first. You know, spiders can’t eat solid food. They digest it outside of their body then suck up the fluids.”
“Helluva way to check out,” Marcus said, shuddering.
“What happened next?” Dean asked.
“Not much,” Marcus said. “Couple seconds after my headlights hit it, damn thing vanished. Poof! Like a magician’s trick. Thought maybe I’d imagined the whole damn thing. But, obviously, Otis saw it too.”
Supernatural 9 - Night Terror Page 10
