Setting: 2013-ish. Early Season 8 for Supernatural. At least eight or ten years post Army of Darkness for Ash.
Warnings for cursing, gore, explosions, stupidity, codependency, man pain, angst, and Lovecraft references. This work is complete.
"You been on the web two days. Watcha got?"
"Nothing to get excited over."
"But something. Hit me."
"Yuppies disappearing in the woods."
"Location?"
"Adirondack Park. Tahawus mine."
"So saddle up, Geek Boy, let's move."
"Dean—you hate this kind of case."
"I do? Thought that was you, with no excuse to spend a wild night in a library."
"You do. You hate hiking. You hate wildlife. You hate camping."
"Maybe it's grown on me."
Silence.
"People change, Sam."
"Survivor's in the Alleghenny mental hospital. Should be a riot."
The nuthouse was brilliant with light, immaculate with whitewash and bleach, secure as a bank vault. Every corner was bright. Linus had asked the staff to clear out the furniture and leave the lights on at all times, and with the head psychiatrist's permission, they had grudgingly complied.
Linus spent his days turning random numbers over on an abacus, and his nights, near as he could tell that it was night, with one finger on his pulse and one ear to the crack under the door. He ate when he was hungry, slept when he dropped, and refused to see visitors. When the staff came in to check on him, he would back himself into a corner and shake until they left.
When two tall men in orderly's uniform entered his room, he was not alarmed that they were unfamiliar. He was alarmed that they were in his room.
"Some publicist," scoffed the man in front. His hair was cropped, and he had a bright sharp gaze like a guard dog and the swaggering authority of a cop. Which he obviously was not, hence the pretense. The one in the back was taller and milder-looking, better for an orderly, but his hair was far too long, cut well past his chin. Long enough to grab. Strong enough to throw Linus against the opposite wall.
But in the right circumstances, anyone could be strong enough to throw Linus against the opposite wall.
"Linus Evans?" the bruiser in front asked as his larger companion softly shut the heavy white door. "I'm Pete, this is my buddy Simon. We're new to the floor, and to get to know you nuts—" His companion kicked him in the ankle. "—inpatients, whatever—we were requested to meet with you guys individually and hear your story in your own words."
Linus bristled. He knew rules. This was against a lot of them. "I'm not accepting visitors," he murmured.
'Pete' was not deterred. "Just a couple minutes, and you can back to doing . . . whatever it is you do."
"Not minutes," Linus insisted from his sanctum in the corner of the room opposite the door. "Not seconds. No visitors. No visits. No chats. Meals twice a day, through the slot in the door, like I asked. Bathroom access three times daily through the shared door. Physical checks once a day. And since there is no way on God's earth you two are orderlies, I'm still due a physical check at four o'clock."
'Pete' knelt in front of him, and 'Simon' left the door to loom over them both. "You seem pretty with it to be sticking around so long in the cuckoo's nest," he quipped.
"I'm a danger to myself and others," Linus growled. "I can't be released. I can't be taken out."
"About that," said Simon. His voice was less deep, more cutting. "Word is, you haven't shown signs of violent behavior since your arrival."
Linus jerked back against the wall. His hands would be shaking if they weren't wrapped around his knees. "I can prove it," he gasped.
Pete waved dismissively. "Nah. Dude, you want to spend the rest of your life in a hermetically sealed box of cotton balls, that's your business. Nobody's gonna pry you outta here."
"What we want to know," Simon added, "is what put you here."
Linus glared at them. "I'm crazy. I know what I remember wasn't real, but it's all I remember, so don't get mad when the crazy guy you picked to interview tells you a pile of crazy."
Pete grinned. "We had to con our way into your room, we got no room to get pissy about anything."
"All right then." Linus steeled himself. "Could you sit over by that wall."
His visitors obligingly sat.
"Say, what are you going to do about the surveillance cameras?" Linus asked.
"Spliced in a loop sequence," Simon explained. "We have a couple hours."
Linus shivered. "I suppose it wouldn't do much good to call an orderly, either."
Pete showed his teeth in something that was not quite a smile. "Catches on quick, doesn't he?"
Simon kicked him again. "Don't scare him," he hissed.
"Somehow I doubt I rate very high on his personal terror alerts," Pete remarked. "Go on, kid. The truth in your own words."
The story itched in him, like a canker sore begging to be chewed. "Me and some friends from trail-running—weekend thing, trail-running—we wanted to try a hike-to-camp, try some trails deeper in the mountains. Adventure, see the stars, you know. There were five of us. You can get the obits out of the papers last week, I'm not reciting 'em to you.
"It got dark early and it was way too cold. But we came over a ridge as the sun was setting and we found this old church . . .
"I wish we'd died out there in the woods. The trees were . . . I can't even say anymore, but the things in the church . . .
"It got into every one of us."
"Zombies." Dean grinned as he plied the huge old black sedan along the tortuous pre-FDR byways of Upstate New York.
Sam groaned. "Zombies are shades of the living. They're not grotesque. You gotta die first for a necromancer to turn you into a zombie. And they don't fly!"
"Crouching Hunter, Hidden Zombie!"
"They're not zombies! There's no such thing as—"
"Are you seriously gonna try to say that with a straight face?"
Sam sighed and scowled out the window.
"Real, undead, juicy, flying Romero-style zombies, Sam. How can you not be pumped about this case?"
"You know what the problem with Romero zombies is, Dean?" Sam demanded. "Splatter."
Dean grimaced.
"Brains. Bone. Blood. Eyeballs. On everything."
Dean felt his zombie-killing buzz begin to wilt.
"Rotten zombie juice in your mouth."
"I get it! Shut up!"
Sam sulked. Dean thought about cold blue skies.
"You know what this means," Sam said after a silence of several minutes. "Unidentified fugly, good witness description, inaccessible area."
Dean grumbled.
"We need Bobby's books. I'll call Garth."
The lathe screamed. The circular saw howled. The forge roared. The hydraulic hammer clanged. Steel ingots of varying alloys and carbon content bowed to the vision of their master and flowed into shape.
A phone on the wall shrilled feebly, flashing a tiny light. The man at the power hammer pulled his half-shaped bar of steel out, shut down the motor, and crossed the workshop in a few strides to snatch the handset off the cradle.
"Yello."
"Asharoonie, how's it hangin'?" came an overly cheerful voice, male and vaguely adolescent.
"New guy," Ash replied. "How many times I gotta tell ya—I'm not a pasta, and I'm sure as hell not your errand boy. I got one job. It's covered."
"I read you, man," said the de facto Hunter dispatcher, Garth Fitzgerald IV. "Necronomicon ex Mortis, Deadites, you and the Evil Book of Evil and your special bond—"
"Don't get smart, kid—"
"I'm not calling in Spiderman to take on the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, here. This is totally your bag."
"Looks pretty quiet from where I'm standing," Ash said warily.
"Upstate New York?"
Ash slammed his right hand on the nearest workbench, bouncing and scattering tools. "What—they—What's it doing in New York? The book's locked down—There's nothing—Who'd you hear this from?"
"The Winchesters."
"No way, they're still alive?"
"For a given value of 'still'—yeah, they got a witness. Putrefaction, levitation, grabby trees, the works. Some desecrated chapel up in the hills."
"And the Brothers Grimm found the site, so they'll want a piece of the action," Ash grumbled.
"Aw, you'll like them."
"They're a menace."
"Don't take this the wrong way, Ashster, but—"
"I get it, I get it. What's the number?"
"You're the best there is at what you do, man. Knew I could count on you."
"Don't make me regret it."
Two black cars pulled in to a fallow field among a dense hardwood forest outside Saratoga Springs: one, a meticulously maintained 1967 Chevrolet Impala, the other, a heavily armored 1991 Dodge full-size van. Dust plumed in their tracks as they stopped.
Three men got out and sized each-other up: from the van, Ash Williams, tall and dark and going gray at the edges, with a steel prosthetic right hand and bloodlust burned into his bones; from the sedan, Sam and Dean Winchester, thirties and fighting fit, cynical after having faced down the brightest angels and foulest demons and found them all incompetent, self-serving dicks.
"The disaster duo," Ash called out over the ten feet of dust and gravel that separated their respective war machines. "How's the gypsy life treating you?"
"FBI got us our fifteen minutes of fame, but the limelight's moved on and it's all booze, babes, grifting, and the open road," Dean rumbled. Across the roof of the car, Sam rolled his eyes. "How's retail?"
"Hell. I don't know how I'd get up in the morning if it weren't for the royalties pouring in from my six patents."
Sam straightened from a strategic slouch to his full imposing height. "I'm sorry, is this a hunt or a dick-measuring contest?"
Ash showed his teeth. "No contest, bucko."
Sam snorted. "Garth says you're the expert on these revenants. How do we play this?"
Ash turned and slid open the van's cargo door, revealing a mattress, bars lining the windows, Sumerian and Akkadian protection symbols on every flat surface in silver paint, a rack of five shotguns, and a Punisher poster. "The name of the game is total bodily dismemberment."
"Decapitation doesn't do the trick?" Dean clarified.
"Barely slows 'em down. I've had 'em pitch the heads at me. Decent aim. And they bite."
"Like rattlesnakes," Sam mused.
"Chattier. And it's no picnic afterwards—somebody gets bit, you gotta lop a limb off or blow their head off. I hear most Hunters do the deed with handguns—silver, blessed iron—but if you're after Deadites, you gotta be handy with short-range buckshot and blades." Ash snatched up one of the lightweight chainsaws from the back of the van. "Really big blades."
Dean's eyes widened. "I knew these were my kind of zombies."
Sam skirted to the driver's side of their sedan and popped the trunk, shoved some heavy duffel bags toward the back, and lifted a false bottom, revealing a smorgasbord of firearms, knives, mystical herbs and talismans, moldy books, and a gift-store dream-catcher. He pulled out a pair of machetes and handed the smaller one to his brother.
Dean waved the blade away, reached deep into the weapons locker, and withdrew something that was not a machete, and definitely not of modern make: a war axe made from a humanoid femur bound close to a two-foot blade of rippling dark stone. Ash clenched his teeth at the sight, and Sam eyed the weapon almost hungrily.
Ash pointed out a sapling, about four inches thick, standing off a stride's length from the rest of the trees. "Let's see you muscle through that without horsepower," he challenged.
Sam and Dean shrugged at each-other, and Dean waved Sam at the tree. With a fluid swing that twisted from the toes to the shoulders of his six-four frame, Sam lopped off the top of the tree in a single powerful blow, then caught the crown and shoved it away as it fell. Dean pushed up beside him and swung his savage, fragile-looking bone weapon. A perfect inch-thick slice of alder popped into the air, and the glittering stone blade was impossibly unharmed.
Ash lifted his saw, then shrugged and lowered it, still cold. "Okay, tough guys, but in ten years, don't come crying to me about your tennis elbow."
Finished with the dick-measuring contest—Sam was pleased, in a grade-school way, that he and his brother had won that one—they adjourned to the nearest sports bar. Ash had found the one screen with hockey on and parked them in front of it, ordered a pitcher of Bud Light, and asked the waitress to "keep the hot stuff coming, sweetheart." By which he meant the Atomic Fire Wings. Sam was relieved there hadn't been a Hooters in the area, or he'd be suffocating under the combined tackiness of his brother and their temporary partner.
Sam crunched on a celery stick and picked breading off his wings. His I-Pad shared the table with his plate, and the touch-screen was a hopeless greasy mess, no matter how high the pile of used napkins at his elbow grew.
"So I drank the juice, said the words, and here I am," Ash concluded, spreading his mis-matched hands over the growing boneyard of wing-joints and grease-paper that had overtaken the table.
"So your car's a history mystery," Dean mused. "I don't know if that's awesome or tragic."
"Tragic," Ash growled. "I land fifteen years too late, presumed dead, in England, and without a dime to my name—'my own time,' my ass. That woulda been a solid five grand in plane ticket and bread money."
Dean's face fell. He'd managed to get loose after five beers, which was an improvement over his Charles Bukowski impression two years ago, but cars were one of his weird tender spots that Sam didn't think he'd want to leave exposed. "Hey, you ever hear about the time Dean stabbed an angel in the face?" Sam interrupted.
Ash cocked his head. "No kidding. What makes you call it an angel?"
Dean took a pull of his beer and clonked it down. "Smug entitled cosmic fart torturing my family to get me to let their brat of a leader wear me like a custom tux so he could start the Apocalypse—yeah, I'd call that an angel. He just—" Dean's eyes went distant. "Lit up with white fire—left the poor sucker of a vessel dead on the floor—"
Ash looked oddly crestfallen, like a kid just finding out that Santa Claus was actually a European fertility god who wasn't into filling stockings so much as eating civilians. Sam knew the feeling.
"Hey, you hear about the time Sam ganked a vamp with a roll of razor wire?"
"No kidding," Ash said again, brighter. "How'd that go?"
Sam flushed. Dean grinned beside him and elbowed him in the ribs. "Garroted 'im," Dean said proudly. "Popped the head clean off." Sam spread his hands, revealing faint scars on his palms.
Ash shook his head and cleaned off a buffalo wing in one bite. "You guys need some actual tools," he remarked through a mouthful of chicken skin.
"You use what you've got," Sam replied. He coughed and sipped his lager. "Speaking of—you ever try an exorcism on these things? Even if they're not standard black-eye demons, there should be something that'll shift 'em."
"Kid," Ash snapped, pounding his right fist on the table hard enough to rattle every plate. The gears whirred. "I read. I been fighting these things since I got back. There's two things that'll shift a Deadite, same as when I started, and that's direct sunlight and the power of love. And you got no leg to stand on if we're talking about saving hosts."
"Right," Sam said, spreading his hands peaceably even as he glared down his nose at the older man, "Just offering a suggestion."
"Yeah, 'offer,'" Ash growled. "You survive that hell, you can talk, but—"
"Hey," Dean cut in, a commanding John Winchester 'knock it off' rumble. "We here to gank demon-zombies or play 'my hell was worse than your hell'? 'Cause living it once was bad enough, trust me."
Sam started to smirk until Dean kicked him in the ankle. "We should think about packing it in," Sam announced. "It's a long drive and it sounds like we'll want daylight on our side."
Ash nodded and reached for another wing, then froze and stared at the plasma screen on the wall. A fight had broken out; Sam watched as the two squads of men flocked tight around two furiously scuffling figures. "Go for him, go for him, go for him!" Ash muttered, then, "Yes! That's how we do it in Detroit, punk-ass!" The referee penetrated the knot of players and separated the fighters. Both retreated to the bench, one bleeding, the other fouled.
Sam huffed.
"Whatsa matter, can't stand a little blood?" Ash demanded with a feral smirk.
"Not that," Sam said. "It's a game. The whole point of a game is that people don't get hurt. And now the guy who started it is off the ice."
"Sacrifice play," Ash countered. "The Hurricanes draft good, but rough 'em up a little and they shake easy. Wings'll tear 'em to pieces."
Dean rose heavily and bent over the back of his chair. "Gotta piss," he grunted.
Sam ate another celery stick. "Hiking in the woods tomorrow. Fun times."