The Anti-Christ Grandfather
Damn goats had been in a frenzy since the middle of the night. Bleating like the whole world was coming to an end, banging their stubborn heads against the stalls...
It had happened before, more than once ever since that wolf started prowling the woods outside his lands. He'd stopped paying attention to it ever since he'd gotten that spiffy looking lock at Pee's store. There was no way that wolf was coming inside his barn with that thing bolting the place. Not unless it knew how to pick a lock.
Looking at the opened door of his barn, brand new lock hanging from its hinges like a pathetic monkey hanging from a tree branch with just one arm, Joe had to wonder at just how smart wolves were these days.
"Anybody there?" he called out, really, really hoping that no one but the goats answered him.
Couple of years ago, when May was still around, God bless her soul, someone had broken into the barn. Killed three of his goats, got away with two more. Nearly burned the whole place to the ground on their way out.
Damn vandals. They had been more interested in destroying than stealing. Probably wouldn't even remember it in the morning, if the number of beer bottles that had been found inside was anything to go by.
"I've got a gun!" Joe called out again. He didn't. Have a gun, that is. But his arthritic fingers closed around the handle of the pitchfork resting against the side of barn and, God helped him, he would use it if he found any of those punks messing with his animals again.
Joe took a deep breath and walked inside his barn. It wasn't all that big of a barn, really. Half of it was taken by the goats' pen, the other by a few stacks of hay and his tools.
The sun was coming in from the high windows on the far wall to his right. Slits of light that cut paths of dust through the empty air. It always reminded Joe of them big cathedrals in the city, the ones with the pretty stained glass windows. May loved to visit those.
The windows of his barn didn't have stained glass, or any kind of glass on them. And the smell was of manure, not of melted wax and incense. Other than the goats, it didn't seemed like there was anybody else inside the place.
Joe relaxed a bit in his stance, willing his old ticker to stop beating like a maniac inside his chest. He wasn't twenty anymore and, though he had loved May more than life itself, he also knew that she would kick his ass if he showed his face up in Heaven this soon.
Now, Joe had been a farmer for a very long time, and he had seen wheat of just about any color wheat comes in. Yellow wheat; whitish wheat; light brown wheat; dark brown wheat; even green wheat, when the timing was right. Bright red wheat, however, was something unheard of.
The haystack closer to the wall was turning red, apparently. The color started up close to the ground and just climbed up from there, like a piece of bread soaking up on a good stew.
More curious than scared at that point, Joe grabbed his pitchfork tighter and rounded the corner of the stack. It wasn't even a big stack, just about waist high.
Maybe one of the goats had tried to get out of the pen again; maybe it'd gotten hurt. Damn animals were always trying to escape, like they sensed Joe's farm wasn't going no where and it was time for them to make a living for themselves someplace else.
Well, whoever the curled figure was, it was no goat, that was for sure.
In the gloom, all that Joe's tired eyes could see was a large, dark coat and a pair of denim-clad long legs. The stranger's head was almost hidden by the lapel of the jacket, like a turtle in its shell, but Joe could easily make out light spiky hair and a pair of green, wide eyes.
"What the hell you think you doing here, boy?"
Because, really, he didn't look one day past eighteen, possibly even less if the dust of freckles over his cheeks were anything to go by. Joe's little girl was nearly thirty and still she was Joe's little girl.
The stranger didn't answer Joe, just tried to curl his legs further up, like he was going for the record of the tiniest space ever occupied by a grown-up.
"I'm calling the cops!" Joe menaced, trying to see if panic, at least, squeezed an answer out of the kid. It was an empty threat, as it was. Phone had been broken for a year now and whenever Joe felt like talking to someone, he just grabbed his pick-up truck and drove into town. It wasn't that far away.
Well, it was far enough away for Joe to know that no cops would be coming unless they started answering smoke signals.
"Please, mister... I... I just wanted to rest for a bit," the kid finally said, husky voice sounding older than what he looked. A lot older.
Damn kids... started smoking way too soon these days.
"Think I'm running an Inn here, boy? Get off my property before I add four more holes to your sorry ass," Joe told him in no uncertain terms, waving the pitchfork in his hand for effect.
The kid nodded, even though his head seemed to be more content with the 'going down' part of the gesture than the reverse.
The hands that sneaked out from the long sleeves of the jacket were stained as red as Joe's mysteriously colored haystack and, fortunately, empty of any sort of weapon.
The kid did get to his feet, but he was moving slower than Joe in the cold mornings when temperature made all of his joints feel glued together and covered in molten iron.
"Sorry about that mister," the kid whispered, out of breath, eyes staring at the floor. "Won't happen again."
And then he promptly fell face down, right on Joe's shoes.
"Damn it, kid!" Joe let out, pitchfork dropping to the floor and bouncing off once until it settled, forgotten.
Joe knew May would chew his ear off is she saw him now, naïve old fool, she would call him. But it wasn't like Joe could just ignore the passed out stranger at his feet, even if it was one he'd found trespassing and had given fits to his goats.
Oddly enough, the damn goats had quieted down the minute Joe had set eyes on the kid. Maybe the dumb animals had wanted nothing more than to get Joe there, to help the stranger.
His goats had the kindest of hearts, it seemed. The least Joe could do was make sure all their trouble hadn't been for nothing.
Rolling the kid over and pulling the heavy, leather coat aside, it was easy to see from where all the mystery red had been coming from.
Three long, horizontal slashes raced alongside the kid's belly and, even if they weren't deep enough for the boy's guts to spill out, they were still plenty nasty enough to make him bleed like a stuck pig. Kid needed a doctor, because guts or no guts, there was no way Joe was messing with a wound like that.
Problem was physics. There was no way a man of Joe's age could ever carry a boy that size to his car. He'd seen how tall the kid was and even though he looked like a scrawny oversized colt, it was still more weight than Joe's back could handle these days.
Joe had a rusty steel cart, left over from some construction work that had been done back in the day when the farm was still up and doing business. It wobbled a bit, but it's wheels still turned and the handles could still carry some load in them.
It was hard work managing to push, pull, shove, drag and haul the unconscious body from the floor to the cart and by the time he was done, Joe was wheezing and the kid was moaning like he was being tortured. Which Joe kind of was, prodding and jolting the kid like that.
Joe wiped the sweat off his brow and silently apologized to the kid for all the painful moving around.
Not that it would've mattered much if Joe had chosen to voice his apologies. No, after passing out at his shoes, the stranger had done nothing more than mumble incomprehensible words about monsters, the moon and werewolves. He didn't even seem to be in the same planet as Joe.
Damn TV, rotting kids brains like that...
It was a lot easier to move the kid from the cart to the bed of the truck than it had been at the barn, but still Joe's back protested like a bitch. He was too old for this shit and no one would think wrong of him if he'd just turned his head the other way and dumped the kid on the side of the road.
He couldn't though. Kid that young... he was someone's son and Joe liked to believe that, wherever she was, if his little Julia ever needed the help of a stranger, there would be someone there for her, like Joe was being here now, for this boy.
After a moment's hesitation, Joe went back to the house and grabbed a couple of blankets and his winter coat. The kid didn't say a word, but the single sigh of contentment that escaped his bloodless lips was enough to let Joe know that the gesture was appreciated.
"Damn it, May... what the hell am I doing here?" Joe mumbled out loud, looking at the unconscious stranger that God had dropped in his lap.
Joe drove into town under heavy rain. It seemed like it was always raining when something bad happened. It had been raining buckets the day Joe's daughter had disappeared. It had been snowing when he lost May. Guess snow counts too.
The town wasn't all that big and Joe could name everyone he passed by in the street. It was still early, but most of the local business places were already open for the day. Joe made a straight line for the doc's office, at the end of Main Street.
He tried to remember what day of the week it was. It was easy to confuse them all and lose track when living alone and with no real demands on your time or schedules to keep. Whatever the day was, fortunately for the kid bleeding out in Joe's truck, the doc's office was open.
And with customers already in, if the shiny black car parked outside was anything to go by. Nice car too, a classic, just like Joe liked them.
There were people arguing inside.
"Look, I told you," a man's voice, not doc Grams, blared out. "I'm not trying to abandon him here. I just really need to go!"
From the sound of that booming voice, Joe was already picturing a giant.
"And I've told you before, a minor with those sort of wounds needs a parent around. Your son should be waking soon... and you're doing him no good by being away when he does," Grams said in turn.
"I need to go find my son!" the man said. It seemed like, the lower his voice got, the more dangerous he managed to sound. "Sam's safe here... I need to go find my oldest."
Joe was quick to realize that it wasn't just the man's voice that sounded menacing. His appearance wasn't that reassuring either.
The heavy coat made him look like a grizzly bear, toppled by dark hair and a thick beard to match. Tall and imposing as he stood looming over the doc who was, at least, a head shorter than him, the stranger just deflated when the word 'son' passed his lips.
"Please... he might be hurt," the man pleaded. "I need to go find Dean."
Grams, who was not for nothing the doc with the best bedside manners in the county, had placed a reassuring hand over the other man's shoulder. "You need to trust the Sheriff's men. They'll find your son," the doc said. "In the mean time, I need you to— Oh, hi, there Mr. Wright."
Joe nodded in return for the greeting from the doc, but his eyes were still on the tall stranger. It had to be one darned coincidence that he just happen to have a hurt and lost kid in the back of his truck at the same time that this man was looking for his.
"Anything I can do for you, Joe?" the doc asked him.
Joe nodded, coming to a quick decision. "I need you to come with me outside," he said, looking from the doc's face to the tall stranger. "In fact, I think it's best you two come outside with me. Now."
The stranger looked at him sideways and, for some odd reason, Joe felt weighed and judged. With one last look at the long corridor that ended in the doc's treatments room, where Joe was certain his other kid was, the stranger nodded and followed them outside.
The reaction the tall man had when he circled Joe's truck and looked at the kid curled up in the wet blankets was exactly what Joe had figured it would be.
He tried to imagine what he would do if his daughter was ever found again, if whatever took her away ever decided to give her back.
Yeah, Joe figured he would bawl his eyes out too. Probably more than that guy, whose brown eyes shimmered with unshed tears that he stubbornly refused to release.
"Where... how-?" the man tried to ask everything at the same time, but his attention seemed to start and end at the boy's every breath.
"Bring him inside," the good ol' doc ordered, more concerned about the blood he could clearly see in the bed of Joe's truck, contrasting viciously with the light gray of the paint job, than he was about the whats and whos.
The stranger wasted no time in picking up the kid, grabbing him under his arms and knees and raising him like he weighed nothing at all. With such care and strength as only a father could.
Joe was slightly envious of him. He'd nearly had a coronary dragging the kid, and this guy didn't even break a sweat. But most of all, Joe envied him because he could hold his kid. Joe had lost that chance.
Joe made his exit unnoticed. The doc was too busy trying to keep the rest of the kid's blood inside him and the dad had eyes only for his hurt children.
The rain kept on falling, washing away the remains of blood from his truck, something that Joe was grateful for.
He never got to know how the kid had gotten hurt in the first place, how both of that man's kids had ended up needed the doc to glue them together.
But it didn't really matter. On his way home, Joe thought about making a stop at Pee's store. He needed a new lock to replace the one the kid had broken.
Or maybe Joe would just leave the barn unlocked. As far as he could tell, that wolf had been quiet the previous night, maybe it had decided to move on to some other pastures. Joe's goats would be safe enough.
And you can never really know when some stranger will need your barn to spend a safe night.
The end
AN: Julia Wright, the daughter Joe refers to, is Jesse's mother, the little anti-Christ kid that Sam and Dean will come to meet later on, in 'I believe the children are our future'.
My big thank you to Jackfan2 for her, as always, awesome beta-work. Any remaining mistakes are mine.