The biker bar was loud, even from out here, the music pouring from inside was loud enough to sing along had I wanted to. Dean was inside, hustling pool. Sam and I were sat on the bonnet of the car, leaning back against the windscreen with a few newspapers. One article in particular had caught our attention, "Local Death a Medical Mystery".
Dean's laughter made me look up; he was coming down the steps of the bar, waving a wad of cash. I grinned at him; there were so many memories in that image. Sammy and me waiting outside, Dean returning triumphant and slightly drunk, Dad's jacket just a little too big on him, but the cash meaning that we'd hold out another week until Dad came home; Dean and I would get to eat that night as well as Sammy. They were fond memories despite the struggles, somehow eveything had seemed simpler back then.
"You know, we could get day jobs once in a while." Sam's voice rang out beside me, making me roll my eyes. Our baby brother always was so law abiding.
"Hunting's our day job. And the pay is crap." Dean reminded him.
"Yeah, but hustling pool? Credit card scams? It's not the most honest thing in the world, Dean."
"Well, let's see honest. Fun and easy." He held out his hands as if to weigh the options, leaning obviously towards the "fun and easy" side, I laughed slightly, Sam was less impressed. "It's no contest. Besides, we're good at it. It's what we were raised to do."
"Yeah, well, how we were raised was jack."
"Well, why don't you go get a day job then, Sammy? Dean hustles pool, I work with Uncle Bobby, what do you do?"
Sam scowled at me but didn't reply.
Dean snorted slightly before changing the subject. "We got a new gig or what?"
"Maybe. Oasis Plains, Oklahoma - not far from here. A gas company employee, Dustin Burwash, supposedly died from Creutzfeldt-Jakob." Sam explained, handing Dean the paper as he and I slid off the bonnet.
"Huh?"
"Human mad cow disease." I explained.
"Mad cow. Wasn't that on Oprah?"
We both turned to look at Dean. "You watch Oprah?"
Dean stumbled over something to say, clearly recognising his mistake and swiftly changed the topic. "So this guy eats a bad burger. Why is it our kind of thing?"
"Mad cow disease causes massive brain degeneration. It takes months, even years, for the damage to appear. But this guy, Dustin? Sounds like his brain disintegrated in about an hour. Maybe less." Sam summarised what it was about the article that had caught our attention.
"Okay, that's weird."
"Yeah. Now, it could be a disease. Or it could be somethin' much nastier."
"All right. Oklahoma." We got in the car, Dean complaining as we went. "Man. Work, work, work. No time to spend my money."
The next morning was overcast and raining as we pulled up outside Oklahoma Gas and Power. We got out of the car, and I took hold of Dean's hand, playing up the small and sad card; I'd braided my hair into pigtails and made sure to wear a knee length skirt, big boots making my feet appear disproportionate to my body, a pink fluffy jumper and I'd exchanged my leather satchel for a school rucksack. It all gave the impression that I was much younger than I am. In this get up I could probably pass for a tall ten year old, 5'1" isn't outrageous for a ten year old, is it? I walked with my head ducked and shoulders curled in, just in case.
We approached a construction worker standing by his truck on the other side of the lot, and Sam called out to him, "Travis Weaver?"
The man turned, "Yeah, that's right."
"Are you the Travis who worked with Uncle Dusty?" Dean questioned.
Travis looked questioningly at the boys, he gave me a gentle smile, "You must be Sophie," I smiled back and buried my face further into Dean's arm. Dustin Burwash had a niece? We hadn't known that. "But Dustin never mentioned any nephews."
"Really? Well, he sure mentioned you. He said you were the greatest."
"Yeah." Sam and I agreed with Dean's statement.
"Oh, he did? Huh." Travis smiled sadly.
"Listen, we wanted to ask you... what exactly happened out there?"
"I'm not sure. He fell in a sinkhole, I went to the truck to get some rope, and, uh... by the time I got back..." Travis trailed off.
"What did you see?" Dean asked.
"Nothin'. Just Dustin."
"No wounds or anything?"
"Well, he was bleeding... from his eyes and his ears, his nose. But that's it."
"So you think it could be this whole mad cow thing?"
"I don't know. That's what the doctors are sayin'."
"But if it was," Sam pressed, "he would've acted strange beforehand, like dementia, loss of motor control. You ever notice anything like that?"
Travis shook his head. "No. No way. But then again, if it wasn't some disease, what the hell was it?"
"That's a good question."
"You know, can you tell us where this happened?"
"Yeah."
It didn't take us long to get to the scene of Dustin Burwash's death. A tree, gnarled and twisted from growing alone in a windy place, stood at the corner of a house that was in the final stages of construction. Police tape, wrapped around the tree and several metal stakes pushed into the dry earth, surrounded a sinkhole, a couple of feet in diameter, at the foot of the tree.
"Huh. What do you think?" Dean asked as we pulled up and got out of the car.
"I don't know. But if that guy, Travis, was right, it happened pretty damn fast."
"So, what? Some sort of creature chewed on his brain?"
"No, there'd be an entry wound. Sounds like this thing worked from the inside." We ducked under the tape and approached the edge of the hole, using a torch to illuminate its depths. From where I stood behind the boys, I couldn't see much, just a tangle of roots and what might have been the bottom, a few meters down.
"Huh. Looks like there's only room for one." Commented Dean. "You wanna flip a coin?"
"Dean, we have no idea what's down there." Sam pointed out.
Dean grabbed a nearby coil of rope and turned back to tease Sammy. "All right, I'll go if you're scared. You sca- Alison! What the hell are you doing?"
I pulled my head back out of the hole from where I'd been crouched; leaning forwards with my arms braced on the ground at the edge of the hole. "I'm the best choice to go down, and I want to see what I'm heading into."
My brothers stared at me speechlessly until Sam turned to Dean, "Flip the damn coin."
Dean pulled a coin from his pocket, "All right, call it in the air... chicken."
The coin flicked off Dean's thumb, rose, spinning, and then began to fall before Sam snatched it out of the air. "I'm going."
"I said I'd go."
"I'm going."
"All right."
I let them bicker without interruption, and watched as Sam picked up the rope, starting to tie it around his waist. "Don't drop me."
I rolled my eyes at their antics before allowing myself to tumble forwards into the hole, catching myself with my hands against the edges to control my descent. Superior strength, superior night vision, superior sense of hearing, as well as being lighter and therefore easier to haul back out if need be, all made me better suited to this task than either of my brothers.
The roots scratched at my face, catching in my hair as my pigtails fell over my shoulders to dangle in front of my face. For a moment the surrounding earth dampened sounds, the darkness was peaceful and the chill of the air below the earth made me feel like this was… a special place, a steady and constant place, and slightly forbidding; it was calm, and still and didn't like to be interrupted by something as fast paced as a human.
Then my observations were shattered as Sam grabbed my ankles, which were still at ground level. "Ali! What the hell? You can't just dive into holes in the ground! Anything could be down there! And you don't even have a rope; how are we meant to get you out again?"
I glanced back up at my brothers through the tangled net of roots. "Chuck us a rope then." I said softly.
Dean frowned at me, somewhat more used to me taking a more active role in hunting than Sam was, he didn't comment. He tied a loop in the rope and lowered it down. I flexed my ankle against Sam's hand and used the support to allow me to remove a hand from the wall, passing the rope over my head and free arm before replacing my hand on the wall, feeling the grit and slight moisture in the soil at this depth. I pointed my toes, indicating to Sam that I didn't need his support any longer and continued my descent into the darkness.
As my eyes adjusted I was able to confirm that there were no tunnels leading in or out of the sinkhole. There were barely any roots down this low, and the atmosphere of cold dislike didn't change. There was nothing overly aggressive in the feeling, more that something was watching that wanted me gone; I felt unwelcome. I pressed my hands against the walls, looking for looseness in the soil that would suggest that it had recently been disturbed, but there was nothing.
In fact, all I could see that wasn't soil was a few dead beetles. Actually, there were a surprising number of dead beetles, considering that there was nothing else here; no marks in the dirt except for the outline of where Dustin Burwash had lain, and some blood soaked into the dirt from his head injuries and on the other side of the hole, presumably some injury associated with the fall. There were some boot prints, left by whoever got him out, but only one set; all evidence suggested that I was the third person to have come down this hole.
There was pain, and panic in the echo, plus the much milder distress of the person who recovered the body. Everything was exactly as you'd expect for someone who'd died in the fall, except for ten dead beetles.
I removed my feet from where they were braced against the walls of the tunnel and wrapped them around the rope. "Alright, pull me up!" I called, and delicately pinched a beetle between finger and thumb as I rose steadily out of the cold, dark little pit and out into the reassuring daylight and the welcome presence of my brothers.
"So you found some beetles. In a hole, in the ground. That's shocking, Ali."
Dean was driving, Sam was examining the beetle I'd retrieved, apparently less squeamish about bugs than I am, and I was reclining in the back seat; still a little dizzy from the head rush of being turned the right way up again.
"There were no tunnels, no tracks. No evidence of any other kind of creature down there." I told them, again.
"You know," Sam added, bizarre enthusiasm in his voice, "some beetles do eat meat. Now, it's usually dead meat, but-"
"How many did you find down there?"
"Ten." I answered flatly.
"It'd take a whole lot more than that to eat out some dude's brain." Dean pointed out.
"Well, maybe there were more." Sam defended me.
"Of the many that ate his brain, ten died and remained in the hole for me to find. Unless the dude's brain was poisonous, most of them will have left."
"I don't know, it sounds like a stretch to me." Dean replied, dubiously.
"Well, we need more information on the area, the neighbourhood. Whether something like this has ever happened before." Sam pointed out.
There was a pause as we drove; the neighbourhood was very new; I doubted there'd be much in the way of local ghost stories yet.
"I know a good place to start." Dean announced, nodding out the window to a sign with red balloons tied to it, I wasn't quick enough to read what it said. "I'm kinda hungry for a little barbeque, how 'bout you?" He glanced across at Sam, "What, we can't talk to the locals?"
"And the free food's got nothing' to do with it?"
"Of course not. I'm a professional."
"I'm in it for the food." I announced, Sammy just sighed and shook his head slightly as we pulled over.
"Growing' up in a place like this would freak me out." Dean commented as we strolled down the street towards the house with more balloons out front.
"Why?"
"Well, manicured lawns, "How was your day, honey?" I'd blow my brains out."
"There's nothing wrong with "normal"." Sam protested.
"I'd take our family over normal any day."
"Me too." I added quietly. ""Normal" with its manicured lawns and kids playing in the street was nice, until my mother died and my father started beating me. After that we moved around, always places like this, and no one even knew I existed until Dad saved me." I stood at the bottom of the drive, arms crossed and looked around. "In places like these, everyone is superficial, isolated within their own little house and garden. They're aware of their neighbours, but they don't know their neighbours and they don't care to look. If they look, they might see something out of place, and it would disrupt their perfect little world. The world where no one suffers, where the only thing going bump in the night is the cat flap." In that world, of course that nice man next door isn't beating his daughter and hiding her in a closet.
Dean stepped close to my side, putting his arm across my shoulders and tugging me into a one armed hug.
"Our family might not be "normal", Sam, but it's a thousand times better in so many ways." I pulled away from Dean, and led the way up the driveway to knock on the door. My brothers joining me and Sam taking my hand in a silent apology and comfort as the door opened to reveal a middle aged man with grey hair and a pleasant smile.
"Welcome."
"This the barbeque?" Dean asked.
"Yeah, not the best weather, but... I'm Larry Pike, the developer here. And you are...?"
"Dean. This is Sam and Alison."
Handshakes and smiles were exchanged, before I was excluded from the "grown-up talk".
"So, you two are interested in Oasis Plains? Let me just say - we accept homeowners of any race, religion, colour, or... sexual orientation."
I started giggling quietly as I realised what the developer was implying and Dean hastened to correct the assumption. "We're brothers."
The man seemed slightly embarrassed, probably not helped by my laughter, but I'd really needed the lift after being reminded of my early years.
"Our father is getting on in years, and we're just looking' for a place for him."
"Great, great. Well, seniors are welcome, too. Come on in."
Larry led us through the house to the back garden, where a few tables were set up with food and lots of people were milling about. Most were dressed casually, like us, but scattered about were people all in matching suits, sales representatives presumably.
"You said you were the developer?"
"Eighteen months ago, I was walking this valley with my survey team. There was nothing here but scrub brush and squirrels. And you know what?" I drifted off at this point, I was pretending to be a kid, and no one would be offended by a kid more interested in free food than buying a house.
I milled about, eating miniature burgers and debating how many times I could get away with going up for seconds. Twice worked, but the lady giving out the food did give me a funny look, so I settled for getting some ice cream and returning to my brothers who were near the middle of the garden, arguing about something.
"Well, Dad never treated you like that. You were perfect." Sam was saying as I approached. "He was all over my case. You don't remember?"
"Well, maybe he had to raise his voice, but sometimes, you were out of line." Dean replied.
"Right." Sam scoffed. "Right, like when I said I'd rather play soccer than learn bow hunting."
"Bow hunting's an important skill."
"Not to mention one of the more fun things we had to learn." Dad had started training me about a week after I'd told him I was a prangeni. I was about 25 years old at the time, and delighted that he was teaching me how to protect the boys, instead of throwing me out. The novelty soon wore off, and the responsibility and the shear physical challenge of it all became onerous very quickly.
"Whatever. You're about to drip." Sam pointed at the cone in my hand and I turned it, not quite catching the strawberry flavoured cream in time to stop my fingers getting sticky. Sam rolled his eyes and turned to Dean. "How was your tour?"
"Oh, it was excellent. I'm ready to buy." He got a short laugh out of Sam, "So you might be onto somethin'. Looks like Dustin Burwash wasn't the first strange death around here."
"What happened?"
"About a year ago, before they broke ground, one of Larry's surveyors dropped dead while on the job. Get this; severe allergic reaction to bee stings."
"More bugs." Sam said grimly.
Dean nodded in agreement. "More Bugs."
We'd been driving around Oasis Plains for a while, just trying to make sense of what was happening here. Sam was driving while Dean leafed through Dad's journal and I leant forward in the back seat, reading over Dean's shoulder.
"You know," contemplated Dean, "I've heard of killer bees, but killer beetles? What is it that could make different bugs attack?"
"Well, hauntings sometimes include bug manifestations."
"Yeah, but I didn't see any evidence of ghost activity."
"Yeah, me neither." Sam agreed, as did I; there'd been no ozone smell in that hole, only the smell of fresh soil.
"Maybe they're being controlled somehow. You know, by something or someone." Dean asked.
"You mean, like Willard?"
"Yeah, bugs instead of rats."
"There are cases of psychic connections between people and animals - elementals, telepaths."
"Pied Piper of Hamlin."
"Yeah, or that whole Timmy-Lassie thing." Dean agreed, then seemed to realise something. "Larry's kid - he's got bugs for pets."
"Matt?" Sam asked; I'd seen him talking to a boy not much older than I appeared to be, must have been this Matt. "He did try to scare the realtor with a tarantula."
"You think he's our Willard?"
"I don't know." Sam answered, "Anything's possible, I guess."
"Ooh, hey. Pull over here." Dean was pointing to one of the finished houses; there were no cars on the drive and no lights on. It looked like this one hadn't sold yet.
Sam pulled into the driveway. "What are we doing here?"
"It's too late to talk to anybody else." Dean answered, getting out of the car and opening the garage door.
Sam leant out the car window. "We're gonna squat in an empty house?"
"I wanna try the steam shower. Come on." Dean waved us into the garage, glancing up and down the street. "Come on!"
Sam pulled the car into the garage, smacking Dean through the window as he drove passed. I cuffed him across the back of the head. "Don't hit your brother."
"I could say the same to you!"
"Don't hit your brother without reason."
We got out of the car, and Sam and I grinned at each other, we hugged, Sam lifting and dropping me before Dean joined us in the darkness, having shut the garage door behind the car.
"He hit me first; do I have reason enough to hit him back?"
"Sorry, De, I got there first."
We grabbed blankets from the car and headed into the house, fully expecting that it wouldn't be furnished. We bedded down for the night in a carpeted room upstairs that had some sort of crazy soft underlay under the carpet. One of the best nights of sleep I've had in a lwhile.
We'd gotten lucky; the house had power and water. I was able to cook porridge and coffee for the boys in the morning. All from packets of course, we hadn't got any fresh ingredients, but powdered milk isn't bad in porridge, and Dean takes his coffee black; Sam might not like powdered milk in his coffee, but he wouldn't complain about it, he's not quite the princess Dean is. Speaking of which, Dean had taken the shower after I'd finished that morning, and we hadn't seen him since; we could still hear the water running.
"We should eat his porridge, he clearly isn't that hungry, and he wouldn't want it cold anyway." I rationalised. Not that Dean was ever very fond of porridge, too healthy for his tastes.
Sam was about to reply when the police scanner crackled to life. I used the distraction to pilfer the last of the porridge, while Sam listened with a frown on his face.
"Another one, we need to check this out. I'll fetch Dean." And he disappeared from the kitchen. I started packing things away, in between mouthfuls of sticky and increasingly cold porridge.
We pulled up to a house with police and medics all over the front lawn. Dean parked behind a couple of police cars and we got out, Sam and I sharing an umbrella and Dean having one to himself. A black body bag was being wheeled out of the house as we approached Larry, the developer from the day before.
"Hello. You're, uh, back early" Larry greeted us.
"Yeah, we just drove in, wanted to take another look at the neighbourhood." Replied Dean
"What's going' on?" Sam asked.
"You guys met, uh... Lynda Bloome at the barbeque?"
"The realtor." Sam confirmed.
"Well, she, uh... passed away last night." Larry glanced over his shoulder, where the coroners were loading the body bag into the back of a car.
While this didn't really come as much of a shock to us, given that we'd heard on the police scanner that a body had been discovered, we did our best to look surprised and concerned. "What happened?"
"I'm still trying' to find out. Identified the body for the police. Look, I-I'm sorry, this isn't a good time now."
Larry excused himself to go and talk to a police officer and we turned inward, forming a small huddle under the two umbrellas.
"You know what we have to do, right?"
"Yeah. Get in that house."
"See if we got a bug problem."
We hung about until the police left, staying out of sight. Then, from a side street beside the house, the boys climbed a fence, balancing precariously on the top of it while Dean got the window open and they disappeared inside, leaving me outside to keep watch.
They didn't spend long inside, and they came back out the same way they went in, wiping down for prints as they left. They filled me in on what they'd found once we were all safely back inside the warm and dry Impala.
Spiders. Big, dead spiders.
I'm so glad I was the lookout.
Our next step was to speak to our suspect; Matt, Larry's son, who had a pet tarantula. We pulled up by the bus stop just as the school bus was dropping him off. We watched as he disappeared into the woods at the side of the road.
"Isn't his house that way?" Dean asked pointing in the direction opposite to the one in which Matt had disappeared.
"Yup."
"So where's he goin'?"
"I'm gonna go find out."
"Wait! Ali? How about you stay here and we'll go find out where he's going." Sam protested.
I waved him off as I got out of the car. "He's a teenage boy, Sam. A kinda nerdy looking teenage boy with a thing for bugs, a teenage girl bats her eyes at him and tells him "he's so smart", he'll be falling over himself to tell me anything I ask."
My brothers got out of the car anyway. Dean folded his arms and gave me the 'you really want to have this argument?' look.
"Ugh, fine. Just stay out of sight."
I checked my reflection in the car window, pulling my top down a little to better show off my assets (yes, I have assets; they're new, kinda small but I'm quite pleased with them) and fluffing my hair a little. I bit my lips for colour and gave my reflection a bright smile. Thankful that I was dressed my age today; jeans that hugged my curves (also new), a low cut tank top and a plaid shirt open over the top, my hair in a single braid and carrying my normal worn leather satchel. Other than the jeans, which were a bit too tight to allow for movement that I'd want when hunting, it was pretty much the same as the boys wear most days.
I headed into the woods, the same way Matt had gone, following a well-worn trail that quickly dispersed once inside the woods, going every which way. I followed the sound of footsteps from up ahead and tried to ignore the footsteps following me.
I found Matt enthralled with a long-limbed bug of some kind, as I watched it crawled onto his hand and he turned, fetching a clear plastic box from his school bag.
"Hi!" I called as I approached, and he looked up in confusion.
"What are you doin' out here?"
"I'm exploring. My brothers are looking around the neighbourhood again. They haven't even finished building it; I don't see what exactly is so interesting about it."
"Well, I guess they're sort of exploring too." He held his hand up to the box, but the insect wandered the other way, headed down his wrist.
I giggled slightly. "Looks like he doesn't want to go in the box."
He held the box in front of the insect again, only to have it change direction once more. "He'll go, eventually. I'm Matt by the way."
"I'm Alison. So, Matt; you sure know a lot about insects."
"I'm, uh…" he blushed slightly, looking at the insect on the back of his hand rather than at me. "I'm studying them for an AP science class."
"AP science? Wow, you must be pretty smart." The blush darkened a shade or two. "Did you hear what happened to Lynda, the realtor?"
"I heard she died this morning."
"Yeah, the police said it was spider bites. Are there a lot of poisonous spiders around here? I'll be honest; spiders kind of give me the heebie-jeebies."
He laughed slightly, "Yeah, spiders do that to a lot of people. But there's nothing deadly poisonous around here. She must have been allergic, or been bitten by a lot of spiders, a nest or something."
"Hmm, weird for a spider nest to be in a brand new house like that, but I bet you see a lot of weird insect activities?" I ducked my head, looking up at him through my lashes with a small smile.
"There is somethin' going on here." He leant a little closer, as if telling me a secret. "I don't know what... but something's happening with the insects. Let me show you something."
He grabbed his backpack and gestured for me to follow. "Last year, one of the surveyors died of bee stings, and this year, we lost a guy who was working for the Gas Company, and now Lynda."
"What do you think happened to the Gas Company guy?"
"I don't know, but it sure is weird. I can't find a rational explanation for what's happening and there's no record of insects behaving like this."
"Like what?" We emerged at that moment into a clearing; the sound of insect's wings buzzing in the trees, the grass, and the sky filled the air.
"From bees to earthworms, beetles... you name it. It's like they're congregating here."
"Why?"
"I don't know."
There were echoes here; old ones, very old. It wasn't something you could 'hear' or 'smell' it was more a sense that there was once something there. So much of something that the place had become saturated, and you could still feel it there today. The Somme was like that, except that when it rains, you can still smell the blood soaked into the earth, and walking through the fields you can still find bullets and pieces of frag and even bone.
I shuddered, walking further into the clearing, feeling the long ago echoes of pain, suffering, death; there were lots of Deathcries here, old enough not to make me sick, but it was still… unpleasant.
"What's that?" Sam asked, coming up behind me and pointing to a darkened mound of grass a few yards away.
I sighed, "Matt, meet my slightly overprotective brothers, Sam and Dean. They must have been following me."
Matt looked a little afraid as he gave a small wave. Somehow I don't think that my flirting will have any lasting effects on the boy now; probably for the best.
We headed over to the mound that Sam had gestured at, and I shrunk back once I got close enough to see it clearly. The ground was literally crawling with worms, hundreds of them! Dean tapped with his foot at one patch, where there didn't even seem to be any grass left beneath the worms, and they fell away, creating a hole in the ground. He crouched down and used a stick to poke around in the hole.
"There's somethin' down there." He announced as the stick made a tapping noise against something solid. He put the stick down and reached into the hole with his hand. His face showed the same disgust I felt as he felt around for a moment before withdrawing his hand. There in his grip, covered in dirt and worms, was a human skull.
"Alas, poor Yorick!"
Matt and Sam snickered slightly, but Dean didn't seem to appreciate my humour.
We pulled up outside the local university and got out of the car into the brilliant sunshine. Sam fetched the box of skeletons from the back seat and draped his jacket over it, to keep from alarming any of the students. "So," he started, "a bunch of skeletons in an unmarked grave."
"Yeah. Maybe this is a haunting. Pissed off spirits? Some unfinished business?" Dean suggested.
"Yeah, maybe." Sam agreed, "Question is, why bugs? And why now?"
"That's two questions."
We made our way into the building, asking for directions to the lecture theater that the Anthropology Professor had agreed to meet us in.
We handed over the bones, and he departed with them to his office, or lab, or something. Telling us to come back in an hour. We found a café on campus that had some computers for students to use and Sam found a pretty college girl willing to allow him to use her log-on, but she was far more interested in chatting to him to allow him to actually use the computer we'd gained access to. He took her off and bought her a coffee, a pained 'take one for the team' look on his face as he went, and I commandeered the computer. Searching for anything that could make bugs congregate and attack. I didn't find anything in the hour and we returned to the lecture theater hoping that the bones could shed some light on the mystery.
"So, you three are students?" The professor asked, returning with our box and placing it on the desk.
"Yeah. Yeah, uh, we're in your class - Anthro 101?" Sam blagged.
"Oh, yeah." Though he didn't seem completely convinced.
"So, what about the bones, Professor?" Dean was quick to refocus on what we needed to know, rather than who we are.
"This is quite an interesting find you've made. I'd say they're 170 years old, give or take. The time-frame and the geography heavily suggest Native American."
"Were there any tribes or reservations on that land?" Sam asked.
The professor looked uncomfortable, "Not according to the historical record. But the, uh, relocation of native peoples was quite common at that time."
"Right. Well, are there any local legends? Oral histories about the area?"
"Well... you know, there's a Euchee tribe in Sapulpa. It's about sixty miles from here. Someone out there might know the truth."
The diner on the reservation was small and ramshackle, but welcoming, and smelt of grease and chips. A man fitting the description we'd been given when we asked around town for someone who could tell us the oral histories of the area was sat playing cards at a table to the right of the door.
"Joe White Tree?" Sam asked, and the man nodded in confirmation. "We'd like to ask you a few questions, if that's all right."
"We're students from the university." Dean explained, only to have the old man cut him off.
"No, you're not. You're lying."
Dean, somewhat taken aback, tried again. "Well, truth is-"
"You know who starts sentence with "truth is"? Liars."
Sam and Dean exchanged a look, while I muffled a laugh behind my hand; I liked this old man.
"Have you heard of Oasis Plains? It's a housing development near the Atoka Valley." Sam asked.
Joe White Tree addressed Dean, "I like him. He's not a liar." I laughed again, and Joe tossed me a smile and a wink before turning back to Sam. "I know the area."
"What can you tell us about the history there?" Sam asked.
"Why do you wanna know?" Joe asked, examining us each in turn
"Something... something bad is happening in Oasis Plains." Sam explained truthfully, "We think it might have something to do with some old bones we found down there - Native American bones."
Joe, frowned slightly, as if this news was not unexpected, but was still troubling, then he sighed and began his story. "I'll tell you what my grandfather told me, what his grandfather told him. Two hundred years ago, a band of my ancestors lived in that valley. One day, the American cavalry came to relocate them. They were resistant, the cavalry impatient. As my grandfather put it, on the night the moon and the sun share the sky as equals, the cavalry first raided our village. They murdered, raped. The next day, the cavalry came again, and the next, and the next. And on the sixth night, the cavalry came one last time. And by the time the sun rose, every man, woman, and child still in the village was dead. They say on the sixth night, as the chief of the village lay dying, he whispered to the heavens that no white man would ever tarnish this land again. Nature would rise up and protect the valley. And it would bring as many days of misery and death to the white man as the cavalry had brought upon his people."
"Insects. Sounds like nature to me." Dean observed. "Six days."
"And on the night of the sixth day, none would survive." Joe finished his tale, ominously.
We thanked Joe and left, hurrying back to the car to return to Oasis Plains now that we knew what we were dealing with.
"When did the gas company man die?" Sam asked, starting to do the maths.
"Uh, let's see, we got here Tuesday, so, Friday the twentieth."
"March twentieth? That's the spring equinox." Sam informed us.
"The night the sun and the moon share the sky as equals." Dean made the connection to the Native American story.
"So, every year about this time, anybody in Oasis Plains is in danger. Larry built this neighbourhood on cursed land."
"And on the sixth night - that's tonight." Dean pointed out.
"If we don't do something, Larry's family will be dead by sunrise. So how do we break the curse?" Sam asked.
"You don't break a curse." Dean told him, "You get out of its way. We've gotta get those people out now."
We raced back to Oasis Plains, the daylight was fading fast and we were running out of time.
Dean was on the phone with Larry, trying ineffectually to get him to take his family and leave for the night.
Sam took over, phoning Matt in another attempt to get the family, the only people left in the valley, out before it was too late.
Having done all they could at that end, Dean pressed further down on the accelerator, speeding us onwards in the gathering darkness. I strained my eyes in the back seat to decipher the handwriting in Dad's journal, desperately trying to find anything on how to break a curse.
Despite our best efforts, the family was still in their house when we pulled up outside, a brief argument was interrupted at midnight by the sound of angry buzzing rising over the trees. We all fell silent to listen, then the fluorescent bug light on the porch started killing flies, at a much higher rate than you'd expect.
"All right, it's time to go. Larry, get your wife." Dean
"Guys." Matt was staring up into the sky were thousands of bugs could be seen swarming towards the house, blocking out the moon.
"Everybody in the house. Everybody in the house, go!" Dean's words prompted us into action and we all rushed for the door, locking it behind us. I grabbed the doormat, a sort of woven thing, and rolled it up, cramming it against the bottom of the door like a draft excluder. Behind me Larry's wife Joanie was asking what was going on and being told to call 911. Dean and Larry went to fetch towels to help block spaces around the doors and windows and Sam and Matt hurried up the stairs to lock down the upstairs.
"Phones are dead." Joanie informed us.
"They must have chewed through the phone lines." Dean replaced the rolled up doormat with a thick towel and I turned to ask Larry for duct tape when the lights went out. "And the power lines." Dean finished, looking around apprehensively.
"I need my cell." Larry grabbed the device off the side and checked the screen. "No signal."
A tapping sound, like heavy rain on a car roof began to become more noticeable as Sam and Matt joined us from upstairs.
"They're blanketing the house." Dean exclaimed, we stared at the windows, the room becoming darker as the light was blocked out by the hundreds of thousands of bugs gathering against the outside.
The tense silence was broken only by the pattering of more bugs hitting the house and eventually Larry's nervous question, "So what do we do now?"
"We try to outlast it." Answered Sam, "Hopefully, the curse will end at sunrise."
On the sixth night, none would survive. It certainly sounded like the curse would end at sunrise, possibly even be broken if we could survive. Like a high stakes gamble, we survive, the curse is broken; the curse prevails, we die. Not that I'd be hanging around for next spring to test my theory, even assuming that we did survive the night.
Dean returned from wherever he'd gone while Sam was talking with a can of bug spray in his hand.
"Bug spray?" Joanie screeched, presumably thinking that we'd need a lot more than just one can for the number of bugs we were dealing with.
"Trust me."
A creaking noise drew our attention to the fireplace, and I shrunk into Dean's side. How do we fight this? Millions of tiny assailants, all trying to sting and bite us, how could we possibly defend ourselves? I'd rarely been so scared, and we'd never been so outnumbered. All these years hadn't prepared us to fight something like this; how could you fight something like this? I trembled slightly as the enormity of what we were facing hit me, curling my fingers into the sleeve of Dean's leather jacket and whimpering his name.
"What is that?" Matt asked, as Sam took a step or two towards the creaking fireplace.
"The flue."
"All right, I think everybody needs to get upstairs." Dean said, giving me a nudge towards the staircase. A sudden crack froze everyone in place, and the bees were swarming from the fireplace and Joanie was screaming. Everyone waved their arms over their heads, trying to protect themselves and I raced up the stairs as the sudden light of a flame lit up the hallway from downstairs and Dean's voice raised above the chaos. "All right, everybody upstairs! Now! Go, go, go!"
I threw myself through a door, slamming it behind me and turning to grab a sheet from the bed, jamming it against the crack at the bottom of the door. I heard panicked voices from the hallway and the rattle of the loft ladder being pulled down. Idjits! Lofts are usually well ventilated to prevent damp! Bugs can easily get in under the eaves!
I opened the door, fighting against the sheet at its base just in time to see the loft hatch slam closed and a swarm of bees bounce off the wooden panel. I quickly closed myself back into the bedroom, replacing the shield at the bottom of the door and swatting at the bugs that had gotten in when I opened the door.
I stared about the room, my mind racing. Dawn was hours away, and while this room looked to be fairly secure, there was no way that my brothers and the Pike family in the attic would last that long. I had to do something to help them! But what? What could I possibly do while I was trapped in this room and they were stuck in the attic, sitting ducks, just waiting for bees, or spiders, or beetles, or lord knew what else to kill them?
I up-ended my satchel over the bed, scrambling through the contents; some emergency rations, a torch, spare batteries, dad's journal, my purse and a few pieces of litter fell to the bed amidst other, less innocent items. An assortment of knives, throwing stars and other weapons were concealed within the lining and the bag was heavy when it hit the floor. Finally I snatched up what I'd been searching for; a sage smudge stick and a lighter.
Sage is used for cleansing and I lit the end, flicking it to put out the flame and leave the smoke coiling upwards. I had little hope that this would be enough to break the curse, but doing something made me feel better, calmed my mind and let me think.
The curse was powerful, uttered with a man's dying breath it would have used the power of the Deathcry. Little could be done against it, my little smudge stick certainly wouldn't do the trick, but perhaps surviving until dawn would be enough. If only dawn were a little closer at hand; it was still hours away!
That's it!
If I can somehow make dawn come quicker, we'll all be safe! But how? Messing with time is dangerous, and takes far more power than I have at my disposal. So I can't make time go faster, but maybe I can make it appear to go quicker? Long car journeys always go so quickly when I'm asleep for most of the way, but if everyone is asleep that won't save them, they just won't be awake when the bugs kill them. Really not much of a solution, unless the bugs are asleep as well.
Some sort of sleeping curse that will break automatically at sunrise, something to make every living thing fall into a deep sleep. Kind of like the fairies placed on the palace in Sleeping Beauty.
I grabbed dad's journal, flicking through the pages and swatting at the occasional bug that braved the smoke around me to land on my skin. Another advantage to the smudge stick, I thought idly while another part of my mind raced, trying to remember everything I'd ever learned of magick.
I've never cursed anything before, never really needed to, what with being one of the good guys. Eventually I dropped the book, knowing I wouldn't find anything in its pages, and sat cross legged in the middle of the bed, closed my eyes and took a few deep breaths. I had to be calm if I was going to think, and casting spells took concentration.
What is a curse? A spell cast with malicious intent, without the permission of the person the curse would affect. How do you place a curse? Much the same way as any spell; focus. Chanting and objects can be used as ways of focusing power, or directing it, like hex bags for example. Maybe I could create a hex bag that would affect the whole building, something that would continue to work even after I was asleep, since I was in the house too.
I would need things to go in the bag though, and the usual witchy things, bones etc. wouldn't be easily obtained. I took my smudge stick with me and ran to the en-suite bathroom, rummaging through the medicine cabinet. Yahtzee! Sleeping pills! I grabbed the whole bottle and returned to my seat on the bed, stripping the pillow case off one of the pillows and grabbing a pen from my bag I started hurriedly marking symbols on it. Once I was done it was a simple case of tipping the pills into the middle of the circle, tying it up into a bag, placing it in a fireproof bowl I'd tipped the pot pouri out of and focusing.
I reached down inside myself, to a place of calm and quiet, the place I usually go when I need to add some healing power to my ability to relieve people of pain, and pulled up all the power I could muster. I opened my eyes, watched as the symbols I'd scribbled on the pillowcase seemed to glow slightly and began to speak.
"Omnes in domo hoc, cadet in sopor, excitate vos e somno cum lumine de solis"
The pills and the pillowcase burst into flames as the power burst out of me, and I fell back to lie on the bed.
I was still laying there what seemed like only a moment later, when sunlight poured through the east facing bedroom window. A few bugs picked themselves up and started flying into the glass, bouncing off it in the way bugs do. None showed any interest in me.
I got up and, pulling the sheet away from the bottom of the door, I went to investigate the situation in the rest of the house. The hallway was crawling with insects, but they ignored me as I stepped through them to get to the loft hatch. Ignoring the marks where termites had been eating away at the wood, I pulled the hatch open, catching the ladder as it descended and placing it steady on the ground at my feet.
"Ali? That you?" Dean's voice came from above, followed by the faces of both my brothers appearing in the opening above me, and I grinned up at them.
It worked. It really worked and my brothers were alive and well. It worked!
Some times I am a damn genius.
