10 - Midnight Cowboy
The next time Dean took a quick peak inside the cabin, he saw movement in the archway beyond the living room, and knew Cecelia had joined them. Neither Clay or his pal had noticed, and Dean made sure they didn't by firing off a couple of shots in their direction.
Another shot rang out, this time from the kitchen, and Clay's pal slumped to the floor. Clay turned, gun raised, only to see Cecelia already had him dead to rights, gun aimed at him, and her eyes were bright with fury. Dean advanced inside the cabin, clearing his throat, so Clay remembered he was fucked. He could shoot one of them - he would never get them both.
"You bastard," Cecelia said, spitting out each word like a bullet. Dean had never heard it said with such fury and weight.
Clay understood then how deeply fucked he was. He dropped his gun and held his hands up, showing he was now unarmed. "Cecelia, I -"
"Don't you fucking say my name," she said. She was in the archway now, the separation point between the kitchen and the living room, and even from here, Dean could tell her gun sight had never wavered from his head. "You motherfucker. You come into my house. You murder my husband, you try to murder me, and you tried to murder children. Did you know you could get this low? When did you lose your soul exactly?"
"I didn't want -"
"You didn't want what, Clay? You didn't want to hurt anyone?" She laughed mirthlessly. Tears streamed down her face, but her upper lip was curled in a snarl. Dean knew tears of rage when he saw them. "But you did. For a man who didn't want to hurt anyone, you certainly have a shit ton of blood on your hands."
Clay had the unmitigated gall to look to Dean for what exactly? Support? Pity? Dean glared back at him, trying to channel murder through his eyes. Did he think he would give him a break? Everything was Cecelia's call, but if it had been Dean's decision, Clay's brains would already be smeared on the living room wall.
"I'm sorry-" Clay began, and he was cut short by a bullet Cecelia fired, which hit the chair maybe half an inch from his ear? It was a good shot, precise, and Dean couldn't help but admire it. Clay cringed, as he should have.
"Keep your meaningless apology. It changes nothing. You're a cold blooded murderer, Clay. I want you to look me in the eye, and tell me why you did it."
He sighed, and his shoulders seemed to shrink as he came to grips with the fact that he was probably not leaving here alive. "We only wanted the Star. We would have cut you in."
"No fucking means no, you worthless sack of shit."
"The world is going to hell no matter what we do. We might as well -"
"Fuck you and your excuses. No one had to die for this," she said. She had stopped advancing, but she had never moved the gun, not even a single centimeter. As soon as she squeezed the trigger, it was a good center of the head shot. A cleaner kill than he probably deserved.
Dean thought he heard the creak of a floorboard, but Cecelia knew what and where it came from since this was her home, and she quickly stepped back into the archway as a gunshot cracked the plaster, coming from down the main hall. Cecelia fired back at them, and Dean kept his eyes on Clay, which was why, when he saw him grab his gun off the carpet, Dean instinctively fired. He didn't even think; he simply reacted. His Dad would have been proud. Well, in theory.
Because Clay was still partially behind the overturned chair, Dean saw blood splatter and heard his body collapse to the floor like he was made of stone, but he didn't know how bad the shot was. Until he heard a thud of something else down the hall, and an unfamiliar male voice say, "Okay, okay, I surrender. Please don't kill me." The other man. Dean had almost forgotten about him. That was sloppy on his part.
Cecelia looked down at Clay, and up at Dean. He expected horror, but didn't get it. There simply seemed to be a question in her eyes. "He grabbed his gun," he explained.
She nodded, and looked down the hallway. "Face down on the floor. Keep your hands where I can see them," she ordered, as sternly as any cop.
Dean stepped forward, to make sure Clay didn't rouse enough to try anything again, when she shot him a concerned glance. "Dean, stop, you don't wanna see this."
But he'd already gotten close enough to spy the pooling blood on the floor, and it took him a second to figure out what he was looking at. That was Clay's body all right, but not all of it.
Dean wasn't sure whether to vomit or be impressed with himself. He took the top of Clay's skull completely off. His brains weren't on the walls, but kind of oozing all over the carpet. He wasn't going to be a threat to anyone ever again.
Oh hell, why couldn't he barf and be proud of his marksmanship at the same time?
It wasn't only the male werewolf's chopped off head. The decapitated female was also still chomping away. Bobby wanted to call it an unconscious response maybe, except the eyes were obviously moving too. Somehow, they were still alive in an undead sense, despite being without the rest of their body.
On a terrible hunch, Bobby kicked over the man's body, and it groped blindly for his leg. The bodies were animate too, for what good it did them. How could they live as a body without a head, or vice versa? Jesus Christ, wasn't this a plot in one of those trashy horror movies Dean watched? Maybe the wolves watched the same movie, and got an idea.
"Are we all on drugs?" Rosie asked. "'Cause that would explain everything."
"What kind of spell were they casting that it went this wrong?" John asked. The werewolf's head had managed to bite the carpet closer to him, and he kicked it across the room. It still showed no signs of staying dead.
"Well, at a guess, immortality, or maybe invincibility."
"But they ended up extras in the Reanimator sequel?" Rosie replied. Oh, yeah, that was the title of that movie, wasn't it? Sounded kind of familiar.
"Who'd wanna live like this?" John asked, gesturing vaguely to the room. Or the two bodies and the two heads, which were all in separate corners.
"I think that's where the "went wrong part kicks in," Bobby said, scratching his head. "Now what the fuck are we gonna do about this?"
They all considered it, as they looked around the grimy living room. It had been thoroughly trashed, in that there were several holes in the walls, all the furniture was broken, and part of the carpet was burnt. And that was all done long before they entered the house.
"Crush the bodies?" John suggested. "Or maybe pulp them in a wood chipper."
Rosie stared at him. She was a short, zaftig woman with striking hazel eyes, and a delicate voice, all of which left you a little unprepared for learning she was a long haul truck driver who cursed like a sailor, and had a specialty in constructing improvised explosive devices. People who just assumed she was a dainty flower usually got a nasty left hook, and she wore a silver spiked ring that would put a neat hole in your face no matter how hard she hit you. She was something. If only she were ten years older, Bobby felt they might have made a decent pair. "Messy, Winchester. We could save ourselves the clean up by encasing them in concrete."
John raised an eyebrow, almost like he took that as a challenge. "You got a cement mixer?"
"No, but I know where to steal one."
"Before we go that far, we could try the usual, and burn them," Bobby suggested. "Although let's keep the cement idea as plan B." Bobby was in no mood to dismember werewolves and wood chip them. This was supposed to be a simple werewolf hunt, and it had already gotten needlessly complicated and messy.
Rosie smiled smugly, like she won the argument, and more gunshots rang out deeper within the house. Rosie headed back down the hall, shouting, "Take the heads off! And watch out, 'cause they can still bite!"
John shook his head, but at what Bobby wasn't sure. The female werewolf head was now half way across the room, and at this rate, if they never moved from where they were right now, she'd get to them in an hour or two. Although he didn't really, Bobby did kind of feel bad for it. Who wanted to live as just a head? Okay, technically it wasn't alive, and it showed no genuine signs of awareness, but still.
"Could we find a counter spell?" John suggested. Bobby had to swallow a laugh at the "we", because when did he crack a book with him?
"I'm not a witch. It'd take ages to even narrow one down that might apply here. I don't suppose you know of any?"
"Not off hand, no." John walked over to the male werewolf's body, and nudged it with his boot. It reacted, kind of, and he wondered aloud, "If we dismembered them, would all the parts be animate?"
Oh holy hell, Bobby hadn't thought of that. Would they have hands crawling around and legs hopping? A comedy of horrors. "Let's not find out."
"But what happens if we light the place up, and they still walk? We'd have created the weirdest fire hazard ever. And when does the movement stop? When they're bone fragments? Before?"
"I'm assuming once we burn the muscles away, the bones, animate or not, aren't going anywhere." It wasn't like bones had any ability to perambulate on their own. Of course, skulls shouldn't have that ability either, but the female head was still pulling itself on the carpet by its teeth. The first time he saw it happening, it was the most bizarre thing Bobby had ever seen. It still was, but now amusement and pity were warring it out in him for supremacy. It was funny in a very dark, sick way. God, he was so glad the kids weren't here.
"I hope you're right. Because I don't even want to attempt to explain this to anyone else."
Neither did Bobby. How and where did he even start? And what did he call these things? Werewolf zombies? Undead werewolves? It certainly gave a new meaning to the term restless leg syndrome. That was it - he'd say they came down with restless corpse syndrome.
Okay, yeah, he was getting giddy. They needed to get this wrapped up and soon, or he was going to lose the few marbles he had left.