Disclaimer, Summary & Rating: see Chapter 1
LIVING LA VIDA LOCA
Chapter 8
Impacting with the concrete hard winded Sam and he could only lay there gasping for the air expelled forcefully from his lungs, his ears ringing in a cacophony of white noise from the concussion of the gun. He lay there an eternity of a few seconds, but forced himself to roll over and to his knees even as he sucked in air. A low inarticulate sound was coming from his left. Dylan Cameron was lying curled up, almost in foetal position, on the parking lot concrete, moaning softly as he clutched his gun hand to his chest. It was clearly badly sprained, if not broken, and it looked like he'd suffered at least one dislocated finger. Nearby was why - a .40 Smith & Wesson lay against the rear wheel of a nearby car, destroyed by the bullet that had hit it just above the trigger where the stock met the barrel and wrenched it from Cameron's grasp.
And Dean stood over him, his own gun pointed unerringly at Dylan's forehead.
Dean…Sam was still too winded for it to be more than an inaudible mouthing. Forcing himself to his feet and shutting off the pain in his ears, Sam put himself between his brother and his brother, in a moment of clarity realising what Dean had had to endure for most of his life as the buffer and bridge between Sam and John…who was frozen with indecision, clearly completely shocked by what had just happened and unable to respond.
Sam could relate, but somebody here seriously had to get a grip. He licked suddenly dry lips as he looked at Dean, not even for a microsecond foolishly thinking that Dean had been aiming his shot at the impossibly small target of Dylan's gun when Sam's life was in danger. Dean was well-experienced and expert in the use of firearms, but even at such close range he couldn't have deliberately made such a shot with only an instant's reaction time available even if he'd sat there and practised the move for a millennium. Nor would he have tried – fancy 'impossible' shots were the sole purview of gun-sports shows and Hollywood/TV networks; in the real world, cops and soldiers faced with some crazy trying to hurt their partner or friend or comrade shot to put the guy down immediately without getting their friend hurt.
"Dean…" he appealed softly but Dean's expression didn't even flicker; his face was a sculpted mask, as perfect as Michelangelo's David…and just as lacking humanity.
Okay... "Guys!" Sam barked the word in his best imitation of how dad used to be during his and Sam's many loud arguments in the run up to Sam 'running away' to college. "We need to leave, now!" He pointed towards the diner, the back wall of which was mercifully all brick with no windows, just the metal door leading from the kitchen, "Miraculously nobody heard that shot, but right about now any fire for justice the sheriff may have lost is being refuelled with a vengeance by Julie Hanson and her video tape. We cannot afford to be here if or when the sheriff decides he wants to interview the Hansons' three eccentric houseguests!"
"Sure, Sammy," Dean shrugged casually and smoothly the gun vanished back into his waistband at his lower back, completely hidden beneath his leather coat. "Don't have a cow, bro'."
Dylan Cameron had shakily got to his feet; in the distance came the faintly heard wail of what could have been a police siren. John Winchester turned and headed for his car, and Dylan did the same towards a small, dented old blue Toyota in the corner, defiantly scooping up the ruined gun into his jacket pocket en route; quite how he would manage to drive one-handed was a problem all his own – Sam had no intention of dealing with that as he instead turned and followed Dean back to the Impala.
No observer would have realised it was a bizarre convoy as three vehicles left the town limits of Wakefield at slightly more than the legal speed-limit in the knowledge that the local law was currently otherwise occupied. An old battered sedan was in front like a point man, followed by a compact blue Toyota and a black Impala was a growling rearguard like a hungry panther.
In the front passenger seat Sam felt his stomach begin to roil and churn and the warmth in his extremities leach away as shock set in. He flicked a glance at Dean.
"You didn't know about him." It was a statement, not a question; although almost five years older than Sam, Dean would still have been too young to realise the implications of seeing his dad with a woman.
"I know he saw a clerk at the local bank for a while…" Dean shrugged "…but after we left I never thought about Clarksville."
Which was classic Dean; how had he once put it? Infiltrate, operate and expirate – go in, do the job and get out. Never look back, never dwell on 'what ifs?' and 'could-have-beens'. While I spent the rest of my childhood turning Clarksville into a lost Utopia, Sam acknowledged.
He'd loved Clarksville, and when he hit five had started to let himself believe that Daddy would stay and he could start first grade and go home to the same house every night like a normal kid – he even vaguely remembered seeing dad smiling at a woman – her memory was nothing more than a outline feminine shape – and his fantasy that maybe she would become his new mommy in place of the one he knew only from the photographs that Daddy and Dean cried over. Sam glanced again at his brother. Over the years John Winchester had dated a few women, but always the romance had fizzled out – because of Dean. Sam had always been friendly and gregarious but above all accepting, each time secretly hoping this woman would be the one to break his father's obsession with avenging the murder of a woman Sam had no memory of.
Dean, however, was not. He had in no way been naughty, malicious, disobedient or even slightly hostile. But he had been quiet and watchful, reserved and wary, always on alert and placing himself between his brother and the woman. John and Sam were perfect, but eventually the woman inevitably decided she couldn't deal with the 'odd kid', the 'other one'. Sam suddenly recalled back when he was ten and he'd overheard his dad's last – to date – girlfriend on the phone to her sister complaining that she couldn't deal with '…the weird kid. It's such a shame 'cause, Sammy, he's adorable, but the older boy, Dean? He's just not firing on all cylinders if you ask me. I'm telling you, twenty years from now that kid is going be the lead-in on 'America's Most Wanted' under the latest serial killer banner, you mark my words. A year from now he'll be in Juvie Hall, I bet.'
For the first time, Sam got where she was coming from. "What the hell was that, shooting at Dylan?"
Dean didn't even look at him, just kept his eyes on the Toyota in front of them that was directly behind John Winchester's car. "The psycho had a gun to my brother's head. What would you suggest I should have done?"
"He's our brother!"
"I've got a brother," Dean shrugged, "and I don't have time to deal with any more."
"Well I suggest you rethink that policy, Dean," Sam turned his head and looked directly at his brother's cold face, "because back there – for the first time in my life, I was afraid of you instead of for you."
He watched the barb strike home in the spasmodic clenching of the jaw and the whitening of knuckles on the steering wheel, but Dean continued to obstinately glare straight ahead.
Sam turned his attention back to the vehicles in front again, closing his mouth and breathing rhythmically through his nostrils to control his shock-induced sensation of nausea. The fear that Dylan Cameron was well on his way to being another Max Miller was an almost visible spectre in the car and now he had Dean to worry about too. How much worse could the Winchester family psyche get? His new-found baby brother was a psychotic Freudian nightmare with a Bates-esque mother fixation and his older brother was suddenly channelling Charles Manson.
For a moment Sam shivered not with reaction but the fear of what would have happened if he'd let Meg talk him into sticking with her to California. Assuming Dean had come up with some foolproof plan to destroy the Vanir there would still have been nobody to get him out of that shack and to the hospital when he accidentally electrocuted himself if Sam hadn't been around. But Sam knew the world, and events had a way of twisting back on themselves. What had some guy once said…? Destiny struggles to reassert the pattern that was meant to be; sometimes, happily, it fails, and sometimes, happily, it succeeds. Somehow if Dean had been gotten to a hospital, he could have still have ended up with the faith-healing Reverend Roy Le Strange pinging on his radar.
What had shocked and angered Sam the most was not Dean's decision to kill Roy, but the dangerously close to casual way in which he'd made it. What would have happened if Sam hadn't been around to stop Dean? The road to hell is paved with good intentions…what would Dean have done, what would it have done to Dean, to find out that he had killed an entirely innocent, honest-hearted man that genuinely believed he been given a second chance and a purpose to help deserving people?
Before they'd left, Sam insisted that they made sure that all the crap from Sue-Ann's altar in the basement was incinerated so Roy never realised his wife had been an evil nut-job; it would have devastated the man to know that he had not been 'healing' but instead killing one person in saving another thanks to his psychotic wife setting herself up in the place of God as judge, jury and executioner of the human heart. Roy had predictability decided that his loss of power to heal at the moment of his wife's death from 'stroke' had meant that she was the source of his gift. Roy believed the gift of healing of had been taken away from him to make a point in the same way he believed he had been given it in the first place to make a point and his love of god and faith was as undiminished as ever.
Dean had told Sam what Layla had told him, that having genuine faith meant you had to have it when the miracles didn't happen – or stopped happening. Then he'd quietly thanked Sam for insisting that they destroy the unclean altar and all traces of Sue-Ann's perfidy before going out to 'get some food'. Worried, Sam had discreetly tracked him to a little church and listened as Dean started to have a nervous but sincere conversation with God on the subject of Layla. Then he'd resolutely turned and slipped away before Dean had finished the first sentence, since to stay would have been an unconscionable invasion of Dean's privacy.
That was the brother he wanted in the car right now, not this Ted Bundy clone – and nor did Sam forget that Dean had all too readily considered killing poor Max Miller to be a 'viable solution' as well.
John Winchester slowed and turned into the parking lot of the first motel as they reached Springfield – a large and therefore safely anonymous town. It was a fleapit of a place that was – just barely – a step above charging by the hour, but the prominent: CASH ONLY sign accounted for its popularity amongst a certain demographic of customer, implying with it what the clientele viewed as a reassuring uninterest in them and widespread poor memories amongst the staff.
Hostility rolling off him in waves, Dylan Cameron awkwardly scrabbled out of his Toyota and marched up to the front desk, laying out dead presidents for a single room, a procedure John Winchester copied – cesspit as the place was a middle-aged man trying to persuade teenage boy to share a room with him was still pushing the boundaries. As it was the guy at the front desk – manager was far too grandiloquent a term for the dumpy, unshaven man wearing a sweat-stained vest and braces straining to contain his beer gut – gave Dean and Sam a blatant once-over of mingled disgust and salacious interest as they, as usual, took a twin room. Neither bothered to correct his misconception or attempted persuade their dad to bunk in with them. Dean had reached the stage where he could, if not exactly sleep through, at least settle down rapidly after one of Sam's nightmare/vision episodes; anyone else attempting to sleep in close proximity had had it.
The twin room was dingy and dark by virtue of stiff semi-closed curtains heavy with dust, dirt, nicotine and a whole smörgåsbord of other narcotic substances, featuring peeling wallpaper last fashionable during the Presidency of Abraham Lincoln and two sagging, queen-sized beds separated by a rickety bedside cabinet that looked as if they'd been there just as long. God only knew what was living in them. The 'bathroom' was barely more than a closet in which an architectural genius had managed to cram a john, a miniscule sink and a 'shower' useless for anyone above a size 8. Someone had apparently decided that the shower could be classed as having cleaned itself whenever it was used; the showerhead was a paradise for Legionella and the plughole was a black crusted homage to lime-scale that itself could well have been a rotted memory, sort of like a fossil was the imprint of something long decayed.
Having expected nothing else and been prepared for much worse, Sam and Dean simply tossed their holdalls on the beds – which they would sleep on top of to minimise contamination – ignoring the metal slots at each of the heads that enabled you to make them vibrate if you put in a quarter. They also ignored the miniscule closet, since they never unpacked more than the bare minimum of necessities from their gear – they never stayed in any one place longer than four or five days and it was an extremely useful practice in case of needing to make a rapid departure from the locale.
Sam ignored his holdall altogether and went past his brother to the door.
"Where are you going?" Dean demanded.
"To take care of Dylan's hand," Sam retorted, "someone has to and I think it's safe to say he won't let you or dad anywhere near him."
Continued in Chapter 9…
© 2006, C D Stewart