I don't own Supernatural. Darn. I do own Asher Michaels and this story, excluding the bits from the show. My friend Shauna owns Amelia Shaw, and I am using her in my story with her permission. This fic is rated for violence, blood, language, drinking, sexual situations and, hopefully, some scary shit. I don't know how good I will be at writing scary stuff since I've never actually tried before. Enjoy the stories.
Monster Hospital, Book One: Zombies.
Chapter Nine: Skills.
Asher and Amelia hung back as Sam and Dean approached the tent, everyone's guns pointed at the opening of the flimsy shelter. The Winchesters snuck as silently as they could until one was standing on either side of the door. As Sam reached for the zipper, the man inside rolled over, causing Amelia to start, her hands flexing on the grip of her gun. Asher shot her a dangerous glare, telling her to be careful. Dean unzipped the tent, a stray breeze catching the flap and blowing it open, and Sam had a second to see where the guy was lying before he grabbed him around the ankles and hauled him into the open, Dean grabbing the flailing arms as soon as they were in view. Stanley Hammermill screamed wordlessly as the boys pinned him to the ground the best they could. Asher and Amelia stepped forward, fingers on triggers and guns pointed at head and heart respectively.
"There are iron bullets in these guns, Stanley!" Asher barked. "Do you know what iron will do to you?" He kept screaming, but his watery grey eyes found Asher and she saw intelligence and awareness behind them. She kicked him hard in the ribs. "Shut the fuck up!"
"Asher," Amelia hissed.
Asher frowned at her sister—the only evidence of obedience—as she kicked Stanley again. "Start questioning him then," she snapped when the frightened man finally stopped wearing out his lungs.
Sam stared at her for a moment and then looked at Stanley, his face set and projecting his best authoritative expression. "Have you been raising zombies and ordering them to kill people?" he asked. Stanley's eyes remained on Asher, and she saw fear there; he was afraid of the werewolf hunter, and that would either be very good or very bad for the interrogation. "Stop looking at her!" Sam shook the man roughly, drawing those grey eyes to him. "Answer me! Have you been raising zombies and ordering them to kill people?"
The muscles of Stanley's jaw bunched as he pressed his teeth together and then his mouth opened and he started screaming again. Dean slammed his hands harder into the ground at the same moment Sam put more weight on his legs. Asher went to one knee, pressing the mouth of her gun into his temple. Amelia pulled the hammer back on her own handgun, the motion unnecessary with the model of the weapon but the noise was frightening. Stanley's eyes shot towards that noise. Even though she wasn't looking at her sister, Asher knew Amelia's eyes would have narrowed into a glare and her face would have taken on a tight quality, showing that she was ready to snap; when she was provoked, Amelia could be just as angry and vicious as her older sister.
"Stanley, I'm going to ask you one more time," Sam said, his voice calm and measured. "And if you don't answer, I'm going to let them"—he gestured with his head at Asher and Amelia—"have some fun." He fixed his normally friendly eyes on the struggling man and let him see he wasn't kidding. Asher knew he probably wouldn't have done that, but hey, the target of their investigation didn't have to know that. "Have you been raising zombies and ordering them to kill people?"
"NO!" Stanley bellowed.
"Then what are you doing camped out by a cemetery?" Dean asked, his voice harsh.
"If I'm not here or anywhere close to dead people, dead things, then I'll go crazy because I can hear them, hear them talking to me, telling me to set them free, to let them out, and if I don't they latch onto my powers and do it anyway! Like they did when I was little, when the zombies came and killed my father because I was mad… I was mad and they answered my anger… I can't control them! I can't bear it anymore! Voices, voices, voices…" Even though he was held down by Sam and Dean, Stanley tried to curl into a ball and tears started to pour down his cheeks. "Make it stop, please. I don't want o hear their voices anymore…"
Amelia lowered her gun and frowned at her companions in turn. "What is wrong with him?"
Before anyone could answer her however, the ground started to shake. Asher dropped to a crouch to prevent herself from falling over or stumbling, her blue eyes scanning the immediate area for any sign of threat and her heightened hearing looking for noises beyond what her human eyes could see. There was nothing. Nothing, nothing, until a hand broke out of the ground a few metres away. Then another hand. Then a foot.
"Zombies!" Asher yelled, informing anyone who maybe hadn't seen the decaying parts surfacing as she pulled two of the collapsible silver stakes out of the back of her belt.
The first shambling corpse broke through the surface and before anyone could react, Asher leapt forward from her crouch and stabbed the stake through the leathery chest and, using her momentum, pushed the zombie backwards until she could drive the silver into the ground, pinning it to the ground. It wasn't the grave it had risen from, but she had driven the stake in far enough to keep the zombie from getting to its feet again. Her first target taken care of, Asher spun around and, extending the stake in her other hand as she moved, and smacking the side of it into the face of another of the living dead.
"Ash, look out!"
Her eyes went first to Dean, who had yelled the warning in the midst of his own grappling, and then behind her to the large zombie raising a tree branch over his head, ready to attack. Asher dropped and aimed a kick at the thing's knee, her booted foot connecting and sending the rotted joint flying backward. The massive zombie howled in rage as it started to tumble forward, makeshift club raised. Asher dove out of the way, rolling through the underbrush to avoid being crushed, and when she made it back to her feet, she lunged forward and drove the stake through the zombie's shoulder and into the ground, pinning it in place. In her moment of peace, Asher looked towards her fellow hunters.
Amelia was on her knees beside Stanley, trying to get him to send the zombies back, while Sam was standing behind her, grappling with three zombies at once, keeping them from getting to Asher's sister. Dean, who was halfway between Sam and Asher, tackled a zombie as Asher watched, stabbing the female zombie through the stomach before he moved onto his next target.
She absorbed it all in less than a minute, and satisfied that no one needed her help, she leapt from her spot beside the massive, twitching, zombie, and tackled another fiend to the ground before it reached Dean.
"Amelia, get that guy to stop them!" she barked as soon as she was within range of her sister's ears.
"I'm trying! He's just getting more worked up!"
"Well do something! More zombies are coming!" Asher looked out into the trees behind the tent. Thankfully, there was nothing coming at them from that way. The other direction was another story. There were several more of the decaying zombies moving towards them from the cemetery, some moving faster than others, a few even running. "Hurry up Amelia!"
"Nothing is working!"
Asher growled and ran at one of the faster zombies, intercepting it before it could reach Dean. She actually launched herself into the air, wrapped her arms around its shoulders and brought it to the ground, driving her knee into its back, her joint coming through the flesh. She felt something dry and heavy—probably a shrivelled internal organ—slap against her leg, but she ignored it and attempted to tear the monster apart with her hands. Dean staked the thing through its lower half before grabbing Asher's upper arm and pulling her free of the zombie. She pulled another stake from the back of her belt and slammed it through the thing's face.
"How many of those did you bring?" he asked as she straightened.
She flashed him a small grin and turned to face the small hoard still approaching them, allowing him to see the row of small silver bars stuck through the back of her belt. There were at least ten, meaning she had brought close to fifteen with her from the truck.
"A little over-prepared?"
"Always." Asher pulled two more stakes out of her belt and extended them. "Amelia?"
"He won't listen!" she shrieked. "He just keeps screaming!"
As she fended off more members of the living dead, Asher listened. Above the sounds of fighting, there was a high, keening noise that hurt her hyper sensitive ears, and the only reason she hadn't heard it before was her focus on keeping the zombies back. It was a terrible noise, one a dying animal might make. Asher shoved a zombie towards Dean, who staked it to the ground, and then turned and started running to where her sister was still trying vainly to calm the screaming man. When she was a few feet from Sam's position, a zombie wrapped its arms around her legs and dragged her to the ground. Sam jumped to the rescue and Asher scrambled the last few feet and crouched on the other side of Stanley.
"Does he know how to stop them?" she growled.
"All he's saying is 'no, no, no' over and over again!" Amelia shook Stanley again, but he just kept screaming and rocking back and forth in the foetal position he had achieved once the Winchesters had let him go.
"Guys, look out!"
Asher looked up at Sam's voice and climbed over Stanley and her sister to intercept the zombie that had gotten by Sam. It was missing half its head and there was a fist-sized hole through its chest, but it was still moving as fast as it could. The werewolf growled and grabbed the thing by its chest-hole, pulling her hands outward and succeeding—because of the small size of the beast and her slightly enhanced strength in human form—in tearing the top part of the monster off the lower. Bits of rotted flesh smacked against her face, but Asher ignored them, intent on tearing the zombie to shreds. When it was just twitching body parts, she turned back to Stanley and Amelia.
"Is he going to make it stop?" she snarled.
"I think he's pretty much lost it."
"Well whatever you're going to do," Sam said. "Do it fast."
Something in the tone of his voice made Asher turn around and once again look in the direction of the graveyard. There were more zombies coming. A lot more. In addition to the five or six the Winchester brothers were still wrestling with, there were twenty or more zombies making their way through the trees, a wave of snarling and growling and howling drifting through the air before them. Asher only looked at them for a moment. It only took her a second to decide what she was going to do.
Her mind made up, she tossed one of her stakes into the air, catching it again, in a position for stabbing. She took the few steps back to the necromancer and then drove the stake down through his chest, moving with the weapon and putting as much strength behind the blow as she could. There was a sickening crunch as the weapon broke his sternum followed by a wet, squelching noise as it pierced his heart.
"ASHER!" Amelia shrieked.
She didn't acknowledge her sister. She just stared down at his body. Watched him twitch. Watched the life drain away. As she straightened, she wiped the blood off her face. As the necromancer gave his last breath and the zombies started dropping, she turned to face the other hunters.
They just stared back at her, not wanting to believe what they had just seen.
It was Dean who spoke first, as he closed the distance between him and Asher. "What the hell was that?" he asked, voice calm and measured. It only got that way when he was angry or didn't understand something. "What did you just do?"
"I killed him."
His eyes narrowed as he stepped closer. There was barely a foot of space between them. "Why?"
"He couldn't stop the zombies," she hissed. "He was too freaked out and he wasn't calming down. If we had waited any longer, we would have been overwhelmed. Did you not see the horde of zombies coming towards us?" Asher had stepped even closer to Dean as she'd spoken, her eyes narrowed and her lips pulled back over her teeth as she growled. "I did what I had to do," she said, her voice more growl than anything else.
"You don't know that he couldn't stop them! Maybe he was just freaked out!"
"We didn't have time to wait for him to calm down, Dean! We would have been dead!" Asher turned from him, took a few steps away and then rounded on him again, her blue eyes flashing with her anger. "And if by some miracle we had survived and Stanley had managed to stop the zombies, we can't afford to have any more civilians die as he learned to control his powers! Where's your common sense, Dean?"
Amelia stepped in front of her sister before she could reach Dean again. "Maybe if you could show a little remorse at killing the guy, Ash. You just look like you enjoyed it too damn much."
Asher huffed and stared down at the shorter woman. "Is that what you are so pissed about?" she asked, looking at Dean. He gave no response, so she turned her attention back to Amelia. "Do you want me to weep and mope around because I had to kill someone I didn't know to save our lives? To save the lives of God knows how many people? Well, you're not going to get that. Yeah, I wish I hadn't had to kill him to save our asses, but that's what we do! How many people have we killed that we didn't really have to?" She looked up at Dean again and then to Sam, who's jaw muscles were bunching repeatedly as he chewed over his thoughts. "You three are in no place to get mad at me for this," she hissed, pointing at Stanley's body with the stake she still had in hand. "No right. I'm not going to apologize." Wrapped her hand around the stake in Stanley's chest and pulled it out with another nasty noise. Asher collapsed the weapon and stuck it back into her belt. "And yeah, I did enjoy it. But what did you expect? I'm just a monster," she whispered as she passed Dean.
The other three hunters watched in silence as she began moving around the small battlefield, gathering up her stakes. After she was finished, Asher headed back to where the truck and Impala were parked and climbed into the cab of her truck, running her hands over the worn leather of the steering wheel for comfort. She could see her companions cleaning up their weapons and shoving Stanley back into his tent. Still fuming, she watched them drag the tent into a more open area and light it on fire.
Asher would stand by her decision. It wouldn't matter how much they bitched at her. She was right to have killed the necromancer, to save their lives and the rest of the people in the town who would otherwise have died. Unbidden, the image of the little girl in the morgue came back and Asher had to close her eyes to get rid of it. Stanley Hammermill wouldn't kill anyone else. Not on purpose and not by accident. She really did feel bad that it had come down to killing the young man, but he had asked them to make the voices stop, and since necromancy was a heredity art and his father was dead, there was no one they knew of to teach him.
She had made the right choice.
As the sun was sinking beneath the trees, Amelia, Sam and Dean made their way back to the cars. Sam and Dean didn't look at her as they headed for the Impala and Amelia just tossed her the keys as she climbed into the passenger seat. Asher started the truck and, without any direction, headed back to the motel. The journey was made in silence, and neither sister felt the temptation to break it. Back at the motel, Asher parked in front of their room and killed the engine, Amelia getting out and grabbing her duffel bag before the noise of the vehicle had quieted. Asher closed her eyes once she was alone and leaned back in the seat.
The passenger door opened and closed. She opened one blue eye and peered sideways at Dean. "What do you want?" she asked.
"I wanted to apologize. You were right."
She opened both eyes and sat forward so she could turn and look at him. "What changed your mind?"
He shrugged absently, not meeting her gaze. Clearly, he didn't like admitting that he was wrong. "Thinking about what you said, I guess. We couldn't let more people die. And we might not have survived waiting."
"I really didn't enjoy killing him."
Dean turned to look at her then, his face blank. "I know."
She levelled the full weight of her gaze on him, and something in her chest tightened. Her eyes burned with unshed tears for a reason she wasn't sure of. The emotion must have showed in her eyes, because Dean gingerly moved closer so he could squeeze her upper arm reassuringly.
"And you're not a monster."
That made Asher smile. "Oh come on. I can believe you admitting you were wrong about Stanley, but admitting you were wrong about me being a monster? Yeah right."
"Well, maybe you're still a monster. Just not the kind I thought you were."
"I guess I can take that."
Author's Note.
So Supernatural is back…
(insert spaz here)!!!!!^$!
Needless to say, I'm a little excited. Supernatural is my favourite television show that's still on television, and not only is it awesome, but it inspires me to write. And not just write Supernatural. Write everything.
Anyways, enjoy. I'm off to write more Star Trek.
Next Chapter: Goodbye… For Now.
