2 – You Walk Alone
Although Sam did wonder about Dean driving so soon after being thrown through several walls and items of furniture, not even counting the beer, he figured Dean had driven while in worse condition. Besides, he'd never risk damaging the Impala.
Jo sat in the back, loaded for bear and tense, while Sam rode shotgun and flipped through the succubus file. Luckily succubuses (succubi?) were rare, because they were so sneaky and so deadly. They could also blend into shadows, making them all but invisible at night. Your best bet was to catch them during the day, but even then they preferred staying in dark places where they were almost impossible to see: sewer tunnels, fresh graves, abandoned warehouses, root cellars and basements. Darkness was their friend.
So what circumstances would lead to an experienced hunter and Ellen – who wasn't exactly a newbie – being caught by one of these things? It was hard to imagine. Sam tried to imagine scenarios where this might occur, but as far as he could tell, catching one unaware was totally doable, especially if it was a smart succubus. But two? How would that occur? Again, their victims had to be asleep, and both Carlos and Ellen would know better than to sleep anywhere in their territory. Knocked out? But who would knock them out? Was the succubus working with a creature more mobile in the daytime? They weren't known to work with anyone. Succubus were solitary creatures, keeping to their own territories, not unlike tigers.
"Any ideas?" Dean asked, guessing that Sam was trying to make sense of this.
"Not yet." Sam glanced in the rearview mirror, and saw Jo looking at them both. Her expression was inscrutable, but he could see lines at the corner of her eyes, in the tension of her jaw. She was more concerned about Ellen than she was letting on. "Ash have any ideas on where the succubus might be staying?"
"Go to the last page. He circled some possible locations."
He did, and she was right. But there were a lot of possible locations circled – a sewer tunnel, an abandoned lumber mill, an entire block labeled "Basement Alley" – and Ash had written in the margins 'there might be other places, this is a succubus playground'. It also looked like he spilled a little beer on it. "I don't suppose you know which locations Carlos had already checked out, or where Ellen was going?"
"No."
"I'm kinda surprised she went," Dean said, speaking for the both of them. "I didn't think she was an active hunter."
Jo shifted in her seat. "She's not really. It's pretty rare. But Carlos is a special friend of hers."
"Special, as in ..?" Dean made a gesture with his fist that Sam considered, at best, completely tacky.
Jo gave him a dirty look, but Dean either didn't know or didn't care. "Yes. No. I mean, they used to be, but … Mom gave up on ever dating hunters. He's just a friend now."
"Well, hard to blame her for that," Dean said. For some reason, Sam was surprised by that response.
"Yeah. But Carlos was really nice. I hope he's okay."
"Maybe we'll get lucky and find out they killed the succubus and just ran off to Vegas for the weekend," Dean said, with forced confidence. Even he didn't believe it, but clearly he was hoping Jo would. From the look on her face, she didn't.
Sam went through the files again, hoping something would jump out at him. A missed clue, an obviously wrong assumption, something … but Ash knew his stuff, and Sam couldn't poke holes in it. These did seem like succubus attacks. There was no obvious commonality among the victims, save for living in the same town. The victims varied across ages, races, genders, and socioeconomic status, although there was only one woman among the victims, and the other four were men. None seemed connected in any way. "I hate to admit it, but I'm not sure where we should start."
Dean glanced at him out of the corner of his eye. "The motels should be stop one, right?"
"What alias was he using?" Sam looked over his shoulder at Jo.
Jo shrugged. "Don't ask me. I'm not even sure of his middle name."
"What about your Mom?" Dean asked. "Would she use one?"
"Why would she check in? But if she did, she'd use Ellen Ripley or Kara Thrace."
"Nice," Dean replied, smiling. "I'd use those myself. If I was a woman."
Jo was staring at the back of Dean's head like he just pulled off his face and revealed he was a large lizard.
"Should it bother me that you've thought about this?" Sam asked.
"Shut up. They're awesome."
Sam actually couldn't argue with that, so he didn't. But why did he feel like they were all missing something? It was infuriating, because on paper, there was nothing wrong. All bases covered, all boxes ticked. So the only thing telling him something was wrong was in his gut. Dean might believe him, and might worry it was more of Sam's "freak thing" coming out, but he'd believe him all the same. He didn't know if Jo would, or if he wanted to tell her.
He noticed her in the rearview, still looking at Dean, although her expression had softened considerably. She still had a thing for him, didn't she? It was kind of unfair how so many women who really should have known better went for Dean. Sam honestly thought he would have gotten more accustomed to that over the years, but nope, he hadn't. The only saving grace – although it was also kind of a heartbreaker – was Dean saw Jo as a kid, and therefore had no romantic interest in her. That, and he was afraid Ellen would beat his ass if he laid a hand on her daughter, and Sam bet that was one hundred percent accurate. You got on Ellen's bad side at your own peril.
Cedar River was a kind of unremarkable place, a town like the hundreds of towns that he and Dean had seen over their lifetimes. There was a slow homogenization that Sam had witnessed growing up, where towns that used to be distinct started losing their edges, becoming something like everything else. It had good points, in that you always knew where you could pick up a semi-decent burger or an emergency chainsaw, but the loss of identity was a big price to pay. He sometimes thought if he ever retired – if he lived long enough to even think about such a thing – he could probably write a book about the subject. Not that anyone would be interested in reading it.
Dean pulled in at the first motel they came to, and Sam let him and Jo check the front office to see if either Ripley or Starbuck was on the registry, while Sam tried to figure out what was bothering him, and how he could put it into words.
And that was when the vision hit.
It was like a lightning bolt of a migraine, and he got little to no warning. Sometimes he'd get this pinprick pain in his head a couple seconds before it came on, but never in enough time to prepare himself for it. Was there any preparing for what felt like a baseball bat full of nails slamming into your exposed, raw frontal lobes?
And while the pain sizzled through his nerves, making him slump against the car door, he saw images in him mind –
- blood in a sink, dribbling red on white porcelain, and the sound of screaming in another room, gunshots, and then he was suddenly in the aisle of a store, where he saw people laying prone and bleeding on the bright waxed floor. He saw at the head of the aisle a kid, maybe twenty at the oldest, waving around a pistol, and shouting something that Sam couldn't quite make out, but his eyes … holy shit, what was wrong with his eyes … -
- and the visions stopped and released him, with a new surge of pain. It was different from the initial pain of the vision, but in a truly odd way. Whereas the vision occurring came with a sharp pain, it exited with a dull one, that thudded like an overly loud bass somewhere behind his forehead. Sam slumped forward, and felt something warm pattering on his hand. He wasn't surprised to find he was bleeding from the nose.
He tilted his head back, pinching his nostrils off to keep the blood in, as Dean and Jo came back from the manager's office. Dean opened the door and got in, saying, "At least we know Ellen's not here, but – holy shit, are you okay?"
Sam stared at him, judging from the horror on his brother's face he must not have looked great. Jo looked on from the back, and gasped. "Are you all right?" she asked. "What happened?"
"He gets these nosebleeds sometimes," Dean lied. He knew what it meant, and he wasn't cluing in Jo. Sam was grateful for that. He could hardly explain this shit to himself. How he'd explain it to someone else – and a would be hunter on top of that – was beyond him.
"We need to go to the Home Stop right now," Sam said.
Dean nodded, and started the car. "Why do we need to go a hardware store in a hurry?" Jo asked.
"Trust us," Dean said, gunning the Impala out of the parking lot. "We have our reasons."
She looked between them suspiciously, and handed Sam some fast food napkins she found in the back seat, which he put over his nose. The red sunk in, turning the white paper to a slow, bright crimson. "What is going on? There's something you're not telling me." She gasped, signaling she'd figured it out for herself. "This is your psychic thing, isn't it?"
Dean gave him a look that signaled he was throwing this in Sam's court. Confirming it or not was all up to him. Sam decided he might as well be truthful, as it would make things easier. "Yeah, it was."
"Do they always give you nosebleeds?"
"No. Just sometimes."
"So what did you see?" Dean asked.
"There's a guy flipping out at the hardware store, shooting people, but he's bleeding from the eyes, and they're covered with this semi-opaque white film. You could just about see the dark circles of pupils and irises beneath them, but just barely. There's no way he can see, but he's hitting all his targets."
"What the fuck ..?" Jo said, encapsulating Sam's feelings pretty well.
"Is that something succubuses do?" Dean asked.
Sam and Jo both shook there heads. "I've never heard of it." Sam added.
"So what could do something like that?"
Sam and Jo exchanged glances in the rearview, and they just confirmed that they both didn't know. At least they were on the same page. "No idea," Sam said. He was pretty sure his nose had finally stopped bleeding, but a dull residual ache lingered in his head. "We're gonna hafta ask him, aren't we?"
Dean gave him a look that screamed 'how do we fucking do that, genius', but he didn't say it, because he didn't have to. They had had years to work out their non-verbal shorthand.
Home Stop was a big box hardware store, and the lot was a madhouse when they got there. People were flooding out of the store, and all trying to leave at the same time. Another delayed vision? Goddamn it, why? He used to get ones with more warning.
Dean parked the car hastily, and told Jo," Stay here."
"Fuck that," she replied, kicking open the back door and getting out, rifle held high.
There was no time to argue, so they didn't. Dean broke through the crowd running from the store, clearing a path for them, and before they were even in the doors, Sam could hear gunshots and yelling. Someone – the shooter, he bet – was screaming about zombies. Was that what he thought he saw?
Since the store was huge, you'd think it would be hard to find the guy, but all they had to do was follow the shouting to the source, and eventually the bodies. Sam checked on all the injure people he found as he ran through the aisles, and confirmed one dead. Two others were bleeding badly, but might make it. He had a bad feeling about the third.
They'd split up, Sam and Jo going one way, while Dean went another, and he sincerely hoped Dean got his message about taking the guy alive. It would be easy to take him out, but they had questions and needed answers. Assuming they could break through whatever had happened to him, he was their best bet right now.
The guy was currently at an aisle junction, which was a huge open space. Great for shooting at him, not good for anything else. A couple of people were laying face down, in pools of their own blood. Sam couldn't tell if they were breathing or not. "What do we do?" Jo asked. "Should I shoot him in the leg?"
Sam shook his head, and decided to go for broke. He stood up, and shouted, "There are no zombies! You're shooting people! You need to stop."
The man turned towards him, and his unseeing eyes seemed to settle on him, bloody tears running in thick rivulets down his face. "I won't become you!" he shouted, raising his gun.
In retrospect, there were probably better moves Sam could have made.
