“Dean, I’m sorry. Really, I am. But you’re not the one that’s facing an angel firing squad no matter what he does.” Sam tried to hold eye contact with Dean, but the older Winchester looked away. He stared instead at Don, who was still wearing that damn Hawaiian shirt.
“What did you say to him?” Dean asked the angel harshly.
“I told him the truth. That you’ll understand it all in time.” Don’s words were the last thing Dean heard before the sudden, precipitous drop.
Sam awoke to the sound of screaming, terrifyingly close. It was accompanied by the thrashing wails of some sort of otherworldly creature. The noise rattled the air around him, and then gave way to a man’s shouting. And was that... music? What the hell happened? He was totally alone in a dark, curving hallway, both ends of which were obscured by turns. Coming from one direction was the sound of screaming. From the other, silence. This is how a hunter’s instincts can get you in trouble, Sam thought as he slowly stood, his legs faltering, and walked carefully toward the maelstrom. Most people would run away from screaming. Thanks for the death wish, Dad.
As he rounded the corner, he started at the sight before him. His brother, clearly in a similar state of shock, stood in the flickering light of an old-fashioned movie theater. On the silver screen, a massive squid attacked a submarine while sailors threw harpoons at its colossal eye. Sam reached way back into his childhood memories. The Nautilus? Is that 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea? Sam was stupefied. What did Don do to us?
He saw an exit sign and pushed his stupefied older brother toward it. They stumbled outside and squinted as the afternoon sun temporarily blinded them. Blinking, Sam looked up at the impossibly bright sky and saw the silhouette of a massive building. The Empire State Building, he thought. A classic cherry-colored car motored past them, in pristine condition. Happy families strode down the sidewalk, wearing outfits straight out of Back to the Future. Sam stared at them. Something’s gone really wrong.
He looked over at Dean, who looked back at him, an I-told-you-so look on his face.
“Dude. I think that dick sent us back to 1954.”
FOUR
The time-travelers stood on the sidewalk, completely stunned. A crowd of women in full skirts, hats and gloves, and men in sharp suits and derbies flowed around them. In their Levi’s and leather jackets, Dean realized the Winchester boys looked out of place in the smart corporate landscape, to say the least.
That winged chimp really has sent us back to what looks like New York in 1954, he thought, his brain struggling to process. It seemed Don had dropped them smack dab in the middle of Times Square, but there wasn’t a camera-wielding tourist anywhere in sight. The place was also suspiciously clean and quiet, no crumpled piles of paper or garbage, and no blaring rap music emanating from any of the stores nearby.
“First, we get our bearings, then I beat your ass,” Dean announced.
“I didn’t—” Sam began.
“Don’t, Sam. Nothing you can possibly say will make up for you throwing us under the bus, again.”
“You’re not the only one with a stake in this, Dean. That means, sometimes, you follow my plan.”
Dean scanned the bustling crowd, wary of continuing this discussion in public.
“Alright, smarty-pants. You wanted to do the time warp again, so what’s the next move?”
“We get off the street.”
On that point, Dean had to agree with his brother. Trying their best to blend into the crowd, they quickly turned and headed north toward Central Park.
Dean deftly grabbed a New York Herald Tribune from a green newsstand that squatted on the corner of 47th and Broadway. Some things don’t change, no matter what era you are in; sleight of hand is still sleight of hand. Dean peered at the date: June 26th, 1954. He shook his head. That asshole had shot them back almost half a century without even an explanation of where or how to find the War Scroll.
Despite their predicament, Sam was smiling.
“This is amazing,” he said.
“What are you, Buddy the Elf, fresh from the North Pole?” Dean chided. “We’ve been to New York a dozen times.”
“Yeah, but how many times have we been to the fifties?” Sam retorted.
“The real fun starts in the sixties.”
As they crossed a busy intersection, a man in a trench coat clipped Dean’s shoulder.
“Hey, watch it buddy,” Dean said with automatic vitriol, but when he looked at the guy, for a half-second he thought he saw the face of Castiel. The man looked up in alarm, and Dean realized his mistake. It wasn’t Cass, and they didn’t know anyone in 1954. There wasn’t a friendly face for miles, or decades for that matter.
The boys were no strangers to angelic time jumps—they had been through this before, when Anna tried to kill John and Mary Winchester in 1978, and when Cass took Dean back to 1973. The past wasn’t something Dean liked to visit or even remember, and now he was back. Plus, he was super hungry—another drawback to time travel.
Sam looked over his shoulder at the man in the trench coat, and then back at Dean.
“Dude, this isn’t the New York we’re familiar with. Try to be a little less conspicuous.”
As they left Times Square, Sam took one last look. Rather than the giant three-story-high video screens back in the present day, the streets were lined with theaters and coffee shops. The iconic signs that had made the square famous were mazes of neon. A two-story-high Pepsi Cola bottle-cap sign mooned over the square, which was filled not with mid-western tourists in fanny packs, but a vital post-war workforce eager to create the American dream. The fifties saw the beginning of the consumer society that perpetuated after World War II; buying things created a wealthy America, and the indications were all around them. A Chevrolet sign topped a building, under which was a Canadian Club Scotch Whiskey sign, and below that was the large-toothed smiling face of Ed Sullivan, hanging off the side of the building in front of them.
Sam grabbed Dean’s arm.
“We could go see The Ed Sullivan Show!”
Dean looked at his brother scornfully.
“Sam, I’m not hanging around here playing Mad Men with you. We get the page from those scrolls, and somehow have Don get us back to 2010. Nothing else.”
“I just thought we could take in this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see living legends... living.”
Dean made his way up Broadway, and Sam followed a few steps behind. Dean took a right at 55th Street, and he seemed to know exactly where he was headed as he crossed the street, dodging in between cars. Good thing there are no jaywalking tickets in the 1950s, Sam mused.
Dean pushed in the door to the Carnegie Deli and Sam dutifully followed him inside, knowing there was no point in resisting his brother’s appetite.
They slid into a booth looking out onto 7th Avenue. Dean didn’t need to look at a menu; this was the only place in the whole wide world where Dean’s favorite thing diverged from his usual bacon cheeseburger. A waitress appeared at their table in a full pink skirt edged with white bric-a-brac.
“What can I get you gentlemen?” she asked with a heavy New York accent.
Dean smiled for the first time that day.
“I’ll have a pastrami on rye, extra mustard, potato salad, and a root beer, please.”
Sam shook his head. Nothing makes Dean happier than a meal. He looked up from his menu.
“I’ll have the turkey Reuben, light on the Russian dressing, and a side of coleslaw,” he said. The waitress nodded and scribbled on her pad.
“Comin’ right up,” she said and smiled as she left to place the order.
Once she was out of earshot, Dean looked expectantly at his brother.
“Alright, captain. What’s the plan?”
Sam had been pondering their next move, but hadn’t come up with any bright ideas yet. They knew very little about the location of the War Scroll, only what was publicly available on the internet in 2010. What they did know was that a private sale happen
ed at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel on July 1st —in just five days. But how would they even get close to infiltrating that transaction?
“Well, we could try to get jobs at the Waldorf,” he said. “We wouldn’t call any attention to ourselves if we actually worked there.”
Dean shrugged. Getting a real job wasn’t their usual process, mostly they just pretended to be FBI agents, or priests, or CDC inspectors. Doing actual work wasn’t part of Dean’s modus operandi. But, considering the circumstances, they didn’t have a choice. They didn’t know nearly enough about the time period to successfully pass as government officials.
Their sandwiches arrived, five inches of beautiful meat piled onto freshly baked bread. Dean was beside himself with joy.
Minutes later, Dean was finishing up his pickle and the last bite of his sandwich. As they got up to leave, Dean looked at the check and pulled a ten spot out of his pocket. They walked past the young waitress on their way out.
“Thanks,” Dean said, giving her a big smile.
She coyly lilted back. “No, thank you.”
Dean pulled open the door of the deli and looked back to smile smugly at Sam.
“Looks like Betty Draper has a thing for me.”
“You’re gonna wanna run, Dean,” Sam said with an equally smug look.
Dean looked at him questioningly. Then they heard a woman’s voice yelling after them.
“Stop those men!”
They looked back at the waitress, who was holding the very modern ten dollar bill Dean had just put down.
Without a second thought, Sam bolted down the street with Dean a step behind him. They dodged through stalled traffic at the intersection, nearly causing a pile-up when the light turned green.
Moments later they were casually sauntering east on 54th Street.
“To the Waldorf?” Dean asked.
“Guess so,” Sam replied. He took out his BlackBerry, intending to Google the hotel’s location. Instead, he stared at the mess of jumbled pixels on the phone’s LCD. Not only would it have no signal in the fifties, the phone’s hardware had been damaged. Either time travel does a job on electronics, or it broke in the fall, he sumised. He quickly put it back in his pocket, not wanting to draw any more attention to them with his anachronistic device.
“Hey, what time is it?” Dean asked.
“I don’t know, my phone’s useless,” Sam answered.
“Yeah, mine too. Won’t turn on.”
Sam shielded his eyes and looked up at the sun.
“Maybe an hour till sunset,” he said. “On second thought, let’s find a place to crash first. I don’t know if it was the time travel or the dine-and-dash, but—”
“But little Sammy could use a nap?” Dean quipped.
“Take a look in the mirror,” Sam replied. “The bags under your eyes have bags under their eyes.”
“And whose fault is that? You think maybe all of your shenanigans are finally taking their toll on me?”
The brothers continued to bicker until they passed a block of pre-war apartments called the Villard Houses. A sign in front advertised a ‘vacency,’ which Sam figured was close enough, and they strolled into the building and up to apartment 3E.
An old woman answered the door, and directed them to take a look at the apartment across the hall. It had clearly once been part of a larger penthouse, but had been walled off into a smaller dwelling with a half kitchen, bedroom and adjoining living room. After years of living in dilapidated motels and the backseat of the Impala, the boys weren’t picky. With literally no money to their names—at least any they could actually use—Dean asked the landlady if he could give her the rent at the end of the week. She agreed; she just needed their names. They offered up two aliases. Sam was so tired that he couldn’t even place which band they said they came from.
Unfortunately for the Winchesters, the one thing the apartment didn’t have was a bed.
“Couldn’t we have just stayed at the Waldorf?” Dean said grumpily.
“You think they’d let us pay at the end of the week, genius?” Sam replied. Before Dean could respond, Sam went to the bathroom. He climbed into the claw-footed bathtub and rolled his coat underneath his head. It wasn’t nearly big enough for him, but he didn’t care.
Within a minute, he was asleep.
FIVE
Barney Doyle’s back was killing him. Most boys his age were learning to drive, dating girls, and having fun, but that wasn’t a possibility for Barney. His mother had been taken ill, forcing the fifteen year-old to find a job and take responsibility for her care.
There weren’t any grown men left in the Doyle’s Breezy Point, Queens house—just Barney and his mother. His father had passed away three years before, so when his uncle James had said that there was an opening for another security guard at the Waldorf Astoria, Barney’s mother believed it was a sign from Heaven. She was Catholic, of course, and she took her brother’s news as an answer to her prayers.
Although he normally hated his job, Barney had been looking forward to today. He and his uncle had taken one of the hotel’s trucks and were on their way over to Red Hook to pick up a box that had been shipped over from Israel, or someplace equally exotic.
Barney hadn’t paid much attention while he was still in school, so he wasn’t quite sure where Israel even was. He knew that it was a new country, and was somehow controversial, especially with his mother. Barney wished he had been better about his studies, not that it mattered now. He was stuck in this job and as far as he could see you didn’t need much learning to be a security guard.
When James and Barney arrived at the Red Hook Docks, a worker signaled for them to park at dock thirty-six. The truck bumped its way over the pier. They waited. The diesel engine was spewing exhaust almost directly into the cab, but Barney didn’t mind. This was a nice change from the boredom of the hotel.
A large burly guy in a white T-shirt banged his fist on the front of the truck.
“You guys from the Waldorf?”
James pulled his heft out of the truck to answer the guy face-to-face.
“Sure are.”
“Sign here,” the burly guy said as he shoved a clipboard at James. He signed without reading the form.
Handing it back, he asked, “Where is it?”
The burly guy motioned behind him.
“Carton five. Says it’s extremely fragile.” he replied, then walked away.
Barney leapt out of the truck to help his uncle with the carton. It was about four feet by two feet wide, made of fresh pine. The pungent tar smell tickled Barney’s nose as he bent down to inspect the roughly hewn container.
“Stop dicking around and help me get it into the truck,” James growled as he attempted to get his short arms around the base. Barney complied, hastily grabbing hold of his end. “Lift up your side more,” his uncle said.
“I am lifting,” Barney replied, watching as his uncle struggled to negotiate the carton over his stomach. His side was already much higher than James’s on account of his height, plus he wasn’t nearly as tubby.
Holding the container awkwardly between them, they managed to crab walk around to the back of the truck and the closed back doors.
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. Why didn’t you open the doors beforehand?” James demanded, breathing heavily.
“’Cause you didn’t tell me to,” Barney said, staring at his uncle.
“Well, put your side down first and open the door.”
Barney squatted, holding his side of the carton. As he got it to knee height, his uncle’s grip faltered. The shift in weight distribution caused Barney to lose his hold, and the corner of the wooden crate hit the ground with a heavy thud.
Barney looked up in shock as his uncle swore at the top of his lungs. As he made the sign of the cross over his chest, James simultaneously cursed Barney to Hell.
Barney blushed a deep scarlet. “It’s fine, Uncle James. Let’s check it. I’m sure it’s fine.”
They pried a corne
r of the carton up, and Barney saw that the contents were packed densely with hay. James pushed Barney out of the way and with one hand pulled the rest of the top off. Stuffing his pudgy hand into the hay, he revealed a clay pot. It was tall, burnt orange in color, with a good bit of dirt on it. James wiped away more of the hay, and revealed three more jars.
As James inspected the first jar, its cover slid off the top and onto the ground, landing with a heavy crack. A strange, putrid smell emanated from the urn, which reminded Barney of the stench when the pilot light on their gas oven went out.
When his uncle opened his mouth, Barney readied himself, sure that his uncle was going to berate him, despite the accident being his fault. However, before James could start yelling, the oddest thing happened—he choked. It was as if he was vomiting in reverse, with oily bursts of black smoke flying into his mouth and down his throat.
Barney gaped as his uncle reached out toward him, and then everything went dark.
Sam and Dean sat on a hard fake leather couch outside the Waldorf’s general manager’s office. The rickety side table next to Dean was piled with magazines. He slid one off the top and showed it to Sam.
“Yum. Eva Marie Saint.” Dean leered at the picture of the young starlet with her blonde hair swept back, very nicely filling out a blue sweater. “From TV stardom to the movie Waterfront,” Dean said, reading off the cover.
“She’s an old woman.” Sam said, rolling his eyes at his brother’s incredible capacity for horniness.
“Not now she isn’t.” Dean almost jumped in excitement. “Marilyn, I want to meet Marilyn, do you think she stays here?”
“We didn’t travel over five decades back in time so you could sleep with a couple of starlets,” Sam replied.
Dean furrowed his brow. “It wasn’t my idea to travel here, period. Besides, these women are icons, Sam. Completely different. If we have any free time after we nick the War Scroll, I’m going to find Marilyn.”
“Okay, Dean.” Sam shook his head.
Supernatural: War of the Sons Page 4
