OOPS! I forgot to say in the first installment that: The television show "Supernatural," including the characters John Winchester, Mary Campbell, Samuel Campbell, and Deana Campbell, is copyrighted by Warner Brothers Entertainment Inc.
Samuel tossed one of the guns to Mary and sat on the ground, leaning back against the truck's front bumper. She did the same in front the ranch owner's car she'd driven down here, adjusting the sheath that carried her hunting knife so it didn't dig into her leg. The car and the truck sat yards apart, facing each other, the bait squarely in between.
"The world's expert on this particular specimen." He'd given her several compliments like that lately, and she couldn't tell if he genuinely thought her work was getting better or if he was starting to sense how much she disliked it.
Actually, she had enjoyed the research aspects. When the hunter in Amarillo had tried to kill the chupacabra and came away with a clawing so severe he'd needed three units of blood, he started calling other hunters all over the Midwest from his hospital bed. Samuel and Deana Campbell had been busy ridding a house of an especially nasty poltergeist, so they'd suggested that their daughter create a map tracking the creature's movements. They really didn't think it would move this far north before turning around, so this was essentially an academic exercise for Mary.
She'd looked for reports of cattle deaths and unexplained livestock illness in newspapers at the library downtown, but made minimal progress. The small farm and ranch communities most likely to be victimized wouldn't have newspapers noteworthy enough to be in a library hundreds of miles away. She made phone calls to hunters all the way from Mexico to Missouri for leads, fumbling through her high-school Spanish, leaving messages on answering machines and hearing back several days later, following up the leads she got with calls to local papers or university extensions. A pattern began to emerge, a slow, zig-zag spiral across the map.
By her reckoning, the creature should have struck somewhere near Dodge City, and it annoyed her that there was a completely dead space on her map in that area. Now pretending to be from a university extension herself, she started calling small towns in the area.
After a talk with law enforcement in Hanston, Kansas, she sat up until two in the morning waiting for her parents to come home.
No, the Hanston sergeant had told her, they hadn't had any unexplained cattle deaths lately. The only mysterious animal death at all had been his six-year-old nephew's dog, and the only reason that had attracted notice was because of what happened the same night that the dog died. His nephew had wakened his parents complaining that a big porcupine was trying to get into the slightly ajar window of his room. Discounting the "porcupine" as a child's confusion of dream and reality, it seemed clear that some dangerous nut had killed the child's dog and tried to get into the child's room; they'd sent out alerts to every newspaper, radio station, TV station and law enforcement body in the area.
So this thing was starting to get interested in human beings, and this was no longer an academic exercise. Samuel researched killing chupacabras while Mary continued her map, and now here they were, in a deserted field hours west of Lawrence, sitting on either side of bait that the creature could smell fifteen miles away.
The quiet and darkness were profound; they were five miles from the nearest small town, a mile from the ranch owner's house. She couldn't see her father yards away, but she could see at least three times as many stars as she could see at night in Lawrence. Cold wind swept in an unbroken wave across the plain, biting her face and hands. She was wearing thermal long underwear, jeans, boots, a flannel shirt and a denim jacket, so the rest of her wasn't too uncomfortable. What she did hate was having to pull a roll of toilet paper out of the glove box of the truck and squatting to relieve herself. At least she only had to do that once in the hours they waited.
"Talk to me," Samuel said eventually, which was his way of saying "Don't fall asleep."
Actually, she had been nodding. She forced herself back to full consciousness. "Why do you think a chupacabra is a kind of demon? It could just be its own species of creature."
"Its being a demon would explain a lot. Killing livestock needed by humans instead of wild animals. How fast they decompose after death, so you don't have anything left to analyze. Fear without understanding, it's what Hell thrives on. Plus the way it moves. By all the laws of physics, nothing that size and shape should be able to move like that. Just about has to be demonic."
She let her amusement show in her voice, since he wouldn't be able to see her smile. "By all the laws of physics?"
"Hey, I went to school."
She giggled, then broke off in the middle.
"You hear that?" Samuel asked at the same moment.
It was hard to describe – a toy remote control car possessed by a demon? A gigantic mosquito? An angry zzzzz that was clearly closer the second time they heard it than the first.
The third time they heard it there was also a thud as something heavy landed on their bait.
God, that thing could move. Mary and Samuel were both still getting to their feet when it landed. She ran to the car holding the shotgun in her left hand, reached into its open window and slammed the lights on.
The brights showed Samuel yanking at the untethered side of the net, which was now over by the stakes. He'd managed to throw it over the creature and was wrestling to tie down the untethered end before the chupacabra understood what was happening. It was already thrashing, and the light was supposed to stun it, but unfortunately it was facing away from the car when Mary hit the lights. It focused on Mary's father and gave a grating hiss, half rising on its back legs, ready to spring.
She knew there was no point in shooting a chupacabra in the back, but she had no choice. Even enmeshed, it could leap a yard or two and Samuel was just now finishing tying off the net. She emptied one barrel and in the light could see some of the pellets flying, ricocheting off the creature's back.
It gave a terrifying cry, like a small horse screaming combined with a huge cat hissing, as Samuel leaped away from the stake and rolled to avoid attack. The creature turned its focus on Mary as she ran to turn on the truck's lights, and she knew it was about to spring at her. She sensed a chance to shoot the thing in the belly but didn't have time to aim well as it sprang. She saw blood spray from its back leg when she shot and she shook the beast off the barrel of her gun, its fangs bared and missing her hand by inches as it fell.
Samuel, behind the chupacabra, spun the shotgun in his hand to use it like a club, slamming the stock down onto the creature's spined back. It gave that cry again, turning toward Samuel, and now Mary had the lights of the truck on, truly seeming to stun it. Before Samuel could shoot, it balled up on the ground, three of its legs pulled in and its neck weirdly doubled, the head tucked underneath the torso. Only the leg Mary had injured, apparently useless, stuck out from the ball of black quills covering armor plating with a row of reddish spines down the middle.
Samuel clubbed it again so hard that the thing bounced from the sheer force of the blow, but it remained as it was.
"Well, great," Samuel said, breathing heavily. "I suppose we could take turns standing around hitting it all night."
Mary crouched to look at it. "Can we flip it over?"
"Not without getting closer to it than a sane person would."
"Try hitting the injured leg. See if that makes it move," Mary suggested.
He did, and it did. With that hideous braying hiss, the creature snapped its head up and rose facing Mary, whose gun was empty. Without time to jump up, she fell on her back and pulled her knees up to cover her gut as the creature leaped. She brought the barrel of her gun up like a spear as it landed on her, forcing its face and front claws away from her. For a horrible moment it hung like that, its one good back claw digging into her shin as she screamed, its flat bat-like face inches from hers, the open mouth revealing protruding fangs, the eyes black from rim to rim like a shark's. Or a demon's.
Samuel brought his gun up between Mary's knees and her gun and the thing went flying, the claw ripping out of Mary's leg as it went. It landed on its back and before it could roll Samuel gave it both barrels in the belly.
The chupacabra thrashed spasmodically, unable to get upright, a well of blood burbling from its gut that shone in the lights. Yet still it bared its fangs and slashed its claws through the air, too dangerous to take with them, too dangerous to leave.
Mary let the pain in her leg give her rage enough to pull her hunting knife and plunge it into the creature's throat. Samuel struck aside the claw that moved toward her hand. Mary twisted the knife and yanked it out sharply. Blood sprayed over both of them, and finally, finally, the chupacabra lay still and silent.
"Are you all right?" Samuel asked immediately.
Mary held her hand to her leg. "I'm bleeding pretty bad."
"Stay still. Press your hand on it."
Samuel ran to the truck, where two big tackle boxes held enough medical supplies for a small hospital. He dropped to the ground in front of her, opening a box. "Let me see."
She removed her hand; he took a look and slapped a gauze pad on it. "That's not too bad. You'll be all right. Hold on." He wrapped bandaging around it quickly, going more for pressure at high speed than technique. "We'll wash it and take a look when we get back to the ranch house. Come on, get in the truck."
"His car," Mary said.
"He's a rancher. If he can't hike a mile across his own field to get his car he needs to change jobs."
He helped her to the truck, turned off the car's headlights, cut the net free from the stakes in the ground and used the net to drag the chupacabra's corpse to the back of the truck. Mary took the chance to lower her head and cry from the pain. She hated to do that in front of him.
There was a thud in the bed of the truck. Mary raised her head, wiped her face. Samuel sprang into the driver's seat and took off for the house.
The ranch owner opened the door, listened to Samuel, showed them to the kitchen. He had an odd look on his face that it took Mary a moment to interpret, and then she realized: He thought he was being taken. He must have changed his mind about the research they'd shown him earlier that day; he was thinking that the dirt on their sweaty faces, the blood splattering their clothes, the soaked red gauze pad on her shin and her limp, were all just a setup to make a fool out of him.
Well, that would change. At her insistence, they left her alone in the kitchen with the first aid kit while Samuel took the rancher out to show him the thing in the truck. Mary found a towel, ran water on it as cold as she could get, sat on the floor. She pulled off the bloody dressing and her boots and jeans, pulled up the leg of her long underwear, and applied the towel to the wound, grunting in pain. But of the three lacerations on her shin, only the middle one was still bleeding. She curled up, pressed the towel to her leg, rested her forehead on her knees and indulged in one of her favorite daydreams:
Her friends meet her in the middle of the sun-washed quad, one of them moaning, "This is bad. This is so bad."
"She thinks she blew her math exam," the other friend explains.
"Don't be silly! You always get great grades!" Mary says comfortingly. "And anyway, TGIF!"
"Yeah, true." The math student perks up. "What do you want to do this weekend?"
"I was thinking," her other friend says. "Why don't we drive down to Santa Monica tonight and spend all day Saturday. We could split the cost of gas and a hotel room. It's only two or three hours
The front door slammed and the rancher's voice said, "God."
Mary raised her head, hearing Samuel say, "Have you got any bandages?"
"In the bathroom. Medicine chest."
Mary pulled the towel away from her leg. A surly trickle of blood leaked from the middle cut. She medicated and dressed the wound and pulled her clothes back on. As she was doing so, she could hear her father coming back into the front room and saying, "You know, I told you not to touch those spines."
"I just – I was looking to see if – "
"You were wondering if we stuck them onto a dead wolverine with Elmer's Glue," her father said dryly. "After we pushed its face in and cut its tail off."
"Are they – is it poisonous?"
Samuel knocked on the kitchen door. "You OK, honey?"
"I'm fine. I'll be out in a minute."
"No, they're not poisonous," she heard her dad telling the rancher. "And they don't carry diseases from the natural world, so you won't get tetanus or rabies. They just kill your cattle. And like we told you, this one was getting interested in human children."
"God," the rancher said again with a new shiver of horror in his voice.
Mary opened the door and limped into the front room. The ranch owner, sitting in an easy chair bandaging the palm of his hand, looked up at her in disbelief. "You – do you do this all the time?"
Samuel laughed. "Girls can be great hunters if they have the guts for it. You should see her mother go after a zombie."
Mary smiled.
"So if we could get a check, we'll be on our way," Samuel said.
"Oh! Yeah, right. Here." Still looking a little dazed, the rancher walked over to a leather coat hanging on a rack, pulled out a checkbook, sat down and began writing.
"Like you saw, that thing's already starting to decompose," Samuel said (sneaking a quick glance over the rancher's shoulder at the check). "In a couple of days there won't be anything left but what looks like the skeleton of a deformed dog."
"What about the spines?"
"Tendon, not bone. They'll go too. What I'm saying is, if you want to keep it and show it to anyone, better do it tomorrow."
"Show it to anyone?" The rancher looked up at Samuel as if he were crazy. Then he took the check out of the folder and handed it to him.
"Take that thing away," the rancher said. "My wife's on the county commission. My kids are in school. I don't need to be known as the local nut."
Samuel slammed the driver's side door of the truck and gave a little cackle of laughter as he tucked the check into his shirt pocket. "My whole damn life, this is only the third time I've made money for doing a hunting job. This is even more than your mom made for that camping-with-kids article in Woman's Day."
"We'll be millionaires before you know it."
"You know, half of this is yours, honey."
"Really?"
"Really. So what do you think – do we go look at some cars?"
"Mm," Mary said as if she were thinking it over, "just write me a check. I'll decide later."
Samuel grinned as he started the truck. "OK, Miss Moneybags."
"Could we stop at a motel?"
"You don't want to go straight home?"
She did. But she was shaky from blood loss and exhaustion, her leg hurt, and she didn't want to try to sleep sitting up in a cold jouncing truck. "I'd like to get some sleep."
He looked over at her. "Yeah, probably not a bad idea."
He threw the chupacabra corpse, net and all, into a ditch by a roadcut on an utterly dark stretch of highway and found a motel with a room to spare in Minneapolis, Kansas. Mary went to the bathroom and collapsed on the bed. Her father put his bedroll on the floor, disappeared into the bathroom himself. When he came back out and sat at the little table to make a call he kept his voice low, but he still wakened Mary, who didn't stir and didn't open her eyes.
"Hi, Deana. Yeah, we're both fine. We're gonna get a few hours sleep in Minneapolis and head home. Evil little sumbitch turned up just like Mary thought it would, gave us some exercise. She's fine. She gave it the death blow. No kidding. Born hunter. I'm bringing you home that dishwasher, well, something to pay for it anyway. I'm going to give Mary half, she earned at least that. Well, she's asleep right now, can you talk to her tomorrow? Right, I mean later this morning. We'll be in about eleven. You too." The phone clicked into its cradle.
Half of that check would put her weeks ahead in her planning. She insisted on paying her parents part of her paycheck for room and board, although her mother protested, but that did make her savings account grow slowly. It had grown, though, and with this windfall she had a decision to make.
She'd always thought she'd get a car first, which she'd need whether she was a hunter or not. Then, if she decided to run, she'd save enough money to drive across the country and get settled. But with half of the rancher's payment, she'd have enough to take a bus across the country and get settled, and, even without a car, sometimes she felt like she couldn't wait to make her escape.
"Make her escape" – she felt like a bad daughter, thinking like that. She loved her parents, and she knew their work saved lives. Still, when she was little, she'd hated it. When she'd been in her teens she'd started getting more of a kick out of being part of a secret group of warriors. But the charm of that was wearing very thin, and sometimes she couldn't wait to get away from hunting, even though she knew she was good at it. For all she knew, it was all that she was good at. What if she abandoned her parents and insulted their life's work, only to discover that she wasn't suited for anything but hunting?
One thing she knew: She had to embrace it completely or break completely away. She couldn't simply move out of the house, keep in touch, and try to set up a normal life nearby. As long as she was anywhere close to her mom and dad, she'd feel like she was betraying or endangering them if she refused when they called her for help on a hunting job. If she was going to quit hunting, she had to go without announcement, and so far away that they couldn't expect her to be with them on a moment's notice.
So. Either she was going to buy a car, stock the trunk with weaponry, and devote herself full-time to hunting. Or she was going to tell them that she was taking a weekend trip, go west, call them from the road to tell them what she was really doing, withstand her mother's tears and her father's outrage. And then –
"I'm sorry I'm late," she gasps, dropping into her seat in the front row of the classroom. "I just got off work."
"Well," the professor says, handing her a few sheets of paper, "I'd be angrier if it weren't for this essay. It's one of the best I've ever seen from a student."
"Excuse me," another student says, "Do you mind if I sit here?"
Like all the people in her daydreams, he isn't visually that clear, more a feeling than a specific face. And the feeling she gets from him is wonderful. She knows he has a sweet, genuine smile. She would feel happy and safe and normal with him next to her. And for some reason, she knows he has black hair.
"No, please have a seat," she says, gesturing at the seat next to her, and a red drop from the blood dripping off her right hand hits the chair.
She tries to clean the blood droplet off with her left hand, but it's as gruesome as her right hand, and she's just smearing blood all over the chair. "Sorry," she says with a little laugh. "I'm a born hunter."
She sucked in a breath and her eyes popped open. It took her some time to get back to sleep, but she didn't let herself daydream during that time.
Sitting several yards from the counter, Mary was typing a letter when Mrs. Smith, her perpetual disapproving look accented by concern, stood in front of her desk. "Mary, there's a young man asking for you. He was here the other day. Do you know him?" She gave a slight backward jerk of her head.
Mary looked over her shoulder and saw, sure enough, a young man standing at the counter. He had black hair and was wearing what looked like a brand-new denim jacket, and he was looking at the back of Mrs. Smith's head as if willing himself to see straight through her.
"No. But I answer a lot of questions on the phone, you know," she said, standing. "He probably thinks that he needs to stay in contact with the same person."
Mrs. Smith looked dubious, but let Mary pass without further comment.
She tried to disguise her slight limp as she went to the counter. She was wearing a maxi-skirt that hid the bandaging on her leg. She could see why Mrs. Smith had seemed a little concerned: The young man had a look that was intense to the point of unnerving and was standing statue-still. She smiled at him. "Hi, can I help you?"
"You're – Are you Mary Campbell?"
She had the feeling that he knew darn well she was. "Yes. Did you need help with something?"
Suddenly he smiled. It was as though he had received some inner command to do it: The corners of his mouth clicked back and his eyes widened in an instant. "Yes. Well, no. I mean, I work for Curt Bailey."
He had a nice face, really, but that forced smile was just weird. And what was he babbling about? "Yes?"
"Curt Bailey. Uh, Lawrence Used Auto?"
"Oh, yes! The calendar! Is it out yet?"
The smile dropped off his face. "Oh. I should've brought you one. Damn. Excuse me. Sorry."
"Well, no. That's OK. Did they come out all right?"
"Yes. Your picture looks great. They all do." Here came that smile again. "You know, I was talking to Curt. And he said, he thought, we might like each other."
OK, now she was starting to catch on. She just wasn't sure how happy she was about it. Vamp for time. "He did? Curt's nice. At least, I only met him a couple of times, but he seems nice."
"He's a good guy." There was a sudden genuine warmth to his smile. "Probably too soft-hearted to be a used car dealer."
She smiled back at him. "What's your name?"
