Punxsutawney Sucks – Chapter 3

Disclaimer: Ownership is such a loaded concept, don't you think? Punxsutawney is still a great place, with no evil marmots (as far as I know), but does possess a whole dang lot of really nasty fiberglass groundhogs and some fairly weird mythology. As for the boys? Well, I can complain till I'm hoarse, but they still belong to the Acronym.

--

Friday night and every table was full. It was the kind of place with checkered tablecloths and faux brick, but the pizza was great. They didn't have a pretty waitress, however, which always dampened Dean's dining pleasure, but he supposed that Kris might give him a run for his money when it came to getting phone numbers from waitresses, anyway. This kid is fearless, he thought, engaging in a little hand dance with Sam as to who was going to get the last slice of meat lover's. Sam had the advantage of reach, though, and he scooped it first, a feline smile touching his lips as he met Dean's scowl. The waiter-owner-cook picked up the empty pizza tin with efficient speed, and whisked it away before Dean could grab a lingering crust. It had cheese on it, too. Damn.

When she'd taken off the baseball cap, turned out Kris had platinum blonde hair, cut close to her head, a small tattoo on the back of her neck, #45. Her jersey number, she'd said, when Sam had asked. The baseball cap had not seemed up for the weather, though Kris had a huge warm scarf that she'd pulled up to her nose when she'd taken them round to see the sights earlier that afternoon. The sights being where the burnings had taken place.

The latest one, Austin Boorsma's, was halfway up to Gobbler's Knob, where Phil did the prognosticating every February 2nd. They'd followed Kris in her beaten-up truck, the Impala fishtailing on the icy road. Dean had been having fun, when he'd had it under control. Once, though, the wheels had slewed without warning, and the car had gone sideways across the road before he'd been able to right it. You're enjoying this, aren't you? Sam had asked, peeved, at the only and exact moment when he hadn't been enjoying it. Trust Sam to ask the wrong question at the wrong time.

It wasn't difficult to miss the spot: the ice melted away in a radius the size of a big family's dinner table, a circle of black asphalt amidst ice three inches thick. When Dean had bent down to take a closer look, the pavement was warm to his touch. Three days and it was still hot as a summer sidewalk. He'd peered up at Kris then, but she was looking out across the fields at something Dean couldn't see, and didn't seem as though she wanted to talk about it.

Because they'd been halfway there and sundown was still an hour away, they had continued the climb up to the Knob, passing by the local rec center and a clutch of billboards advertising all manner of groundhog-related festivities: a pancake breakfast, a bonfire, a game of touch football with the Chucks. Lyndon, Kris's friend, had a weekend job cleaning the Knob, Kris had said. Since he'd died two weeks ago, not much had been done to tidy up the clearing on the hill: the garbage can had been overflowing, and the snow was deep enough that Dean had parked the Impala right on the road, didn't even try to pull off to the side. They'd walked in the last little bit, snow up to their knees.

The Knob itself hadn't been much to look at: a clearing of ridged snow on top of beaten ice, a fenced enclosure with a stage and an artificial stump in the middle of it. The stump had a latched flap, secured with a dinky-looking padlock. Kris had said that they literally stuffed Phil in there pre-dawn on February 2nd, and would haul him out an hour or so later, whether he wanted to be displayed in front of tens of thousands of screaming fans or not. Surprised he'd be paying any attention to his freakin' shadow, given the distractions. Look at all those TV cameras, and those wacky guys in the top hats, and the girls decked out as the Groundhogettes – wait a minute, is that my shadow?

"What's so funny?" Sam asked, enjoying the last piece of pizza way too much.

Not only was his pizza gone, but so was his beer, so Dean crumpled his napkin onto his plate and shoved it to the middle of the table. Kris finished her coke, and both of them stared at Sam like he was the last cookie in the box at a slumber party. "What?" Sam's face screwed up with the question. "Order more, if you want more."

"I got plans," Kris demurred, making to get up. "Thanks for the pizza. Hope that was helpful, this afternoon."

"You know where we could talk to this Rebecca Shadlee? The one who was with Austin when he died?" Dean knew that she'd probably not be able to tell them much, but maybe there was something they'd kept out of the papers. If they could do it without her parents around, that would be best. The newspaper reports had said that her dad was a cop, which didn't exactly have Dean beating a path to her front door.

"Friday night?" Kris grinned, pulling on the baseball cap. "Lace up, guys. Everyone'll be at the rink."

--

Kris wasn't kidding. The place was lousy with teenagers. Not many were hanging outside, braving the cold for a smoke, or a pull on someone's mickey of rye, but enough were that Sam felt conspicuous when they pulled into the parking lot. The kids made way for them at the double doors of the rec center, whether due to Dean's imposing swagger, or Kris's immediate prickly presence.

A few of the boys – disguised by heavy coats and industrial-grade deerstalker caps that wouldn't have looked out of place on the Shackleton Expedition – grunted hello to Kris. Sam sensed a wary respect, doubtlessly earned. They didn't hang around to make conversation, however: even the short walk from the car to the doors froze Sam to his bones. It was cold enough that he didn't care about the groundhog toque or the mittens; the temperature made all notion of fashion completely ludicrous.

Rebecca Shadlee was startlingly pretty, long gangly legs, freckles, curly blonde hair, figure skates making her almost as tall as Dean when she stood up to Kris's low greeting. She eyed Kris, her friends seated around the benches, getting their skates on, conversation falling into silence. "This is Dean," Kris said. "Works for Tar Zine," and from the way she said it, Sam knew she didn't believe a word of their cover. "Writing a piece on the freeze, and what happened to the guys."

"You're a writer?" Rebecca asked, slightly disbelievingly. Sam bit back a laugh, but left Dean to it. He'd be better at this. Kris grabbed Sam's arm, steered him around as Dean led Rebecca to the concession stand. Sam heard the words 'hot chocolate' and shook his head. Big time operator, my brother, likethis with the Swiss Miss.

"Your friends are here," Kris said with a wickedly amused grin, gesturing with her nose to a gaggle of slightly younger teen girls, skates hung around their necks, just entering the lace up area. Floating Heart smiled and waved. "I leave you to it, Big Guy," Kris clapped his shoulder, unhooking her own black Bauers from her shoulders and finding a spare spot on a nearby bench.

--

It took all of five seconds to determine that Rebecca was a sweetheart, not one of those girls that traded her good looks for superiority or favour. She was decent, and truthful, and felt things deeply. She teared up when she told Dean what had happened, and she'd been raised by a father who obviously instilled in her a healthy respect for her own person. But she was also young and wanted so badly for Austin's death to mean something. She was the one who suggested that they go to where Austin had gotten spooked three nights ago, to where he'd said, 'Something's out there,' which in Dean's experience, were three of the most alarming words in the English language.

--

Sam was trying to explain that he couldn't skate to save his life. California, he offered as an excuse, which was as true as anything. Lots of skaters come from Cali, Floating Heart replied. Cali, she called it, which made Sam stutter ineptly, and search the rink for some sort of relief. Across the ice, back by the double entrance doors, he saw Dean and Rebecca. And they were leaving.

Now was the time to panic, clearly. Floating Heart, whose name might have been Amber, or Tamara, Sam hadn't quite caught it, was absolutely reveling in the fact that the tall college boy had come to see her, no matter how much he denied it. He was here, wasn't he? He stood at the edge of the rink trying desperately to ignore her, leaning one arm on the boards, skaters zooming on and off the ice, that particular smell of cold and wet and the inside of skates permeating the entire sorry night.

Heart pounding unnecessarily hard, Sam was further surprised when a hand grabbed his shoulder. Kris, coming off the ice, a quick blur easily the best and fastest skater on the rink, hauled Sam toward the penalty box, a ridiculously tall presence in the skates, which added an additional three inches to her height.

"Get worried," she said, dropping her voice and giving the Floating Heart crowd a laser beam stare.

"Why?" Sam asked, walking a few steps with Kris to the edge of the rubber mats. He followed Kris's concerned stare. A group of five or six guys – big guys, solid as Scottish oatmeal – were huddled by the double doors across the rink. One of them looked pretty agitated.

"Heard them talking about Rebecca, how she's not showing proper respect for Austin," and Kris's voice was so dry she might start growing cacti on her tongue. "Their fellow Chuck."

"He's pissed off the football team, hasn't he?" Sam asked, after a minute of watching the boys. They moved as a group, a gang. Sam didn't like the looks of it either. Still, it was Dean they were talking about, the guy who regularly gunned down zombies, demons and werewolves. Though he actually did the gunning down with a gun.

"So, I'm guessing a twelve," and Floating Heart was by his elbow again, holding up a pair of rental skates for him. Glancing at Kris, Sam realized who needed Dean, when he had this fresh humiliation to endure?

--

What had been missing, up to this point anyway, was a commonality. And Dean had just found it.

He parked the Impala a few hundred yards from the clearing at the top of Gobbler's Knob and told Rebecca to wait in the car while he took a look. Though he wasn't too sure what to expect, he didn't take a gun, didn't want a cop's daughter to suddenly blurt that out at the dinner table. Every single boy that had burned up, both this winter and in winters past, had been under eighteen. Whatever was going on, it liked kids, not grownups, which was technically what he was, like it or not. According to his birth certificate anyway. It did not seem to attack girls, either, so he was fairly confident that Rebecca would be fine in the car.

But it was night and the piece of the puzzle that had just dropped into his lap, thanks to Rebecca rattling on about Punxsy teens and their stupid mating habits, was that every single boy who had been killed had been to Gobbler's Knob in the half hour before their death, including Lyndon, who had only been doing his fucking job. So something was here, if he could find it.

He was really not scared, not by this, not by something that wasn't going to hurt him. He was, however, fucking freezing because that stupid toque was a piece of shit, wouldn't have kept Angelina Jolie hot. So he was cold, not afraid. His guard was down, then, though it was nighttime, and the moon full, and he heard it before he saw it, which ought to have given him some kind of advantage.

--

When she'd suggested it, Rebecca didn't think that leaving the rink with a complete stranger might be a problem. After all, this Dean guy seemed sincere, and she'd never known Kris to have a bad bone in her body, and Rebecca considered herself a pretty good judge of character. And Dean was so interested in the strangeness of it all, which no adult around her seemed willing to admit.

But when Brent Fallowfield's Camaro came gunning up the rise to Gobber's Knob, she had presence of mind enough to duck under the seat as they slowed and beamed a flashlight in. And she thought, as the car slowly passed by to go up to the Knob's parking circle in the deeper snow, how it might look to Brent and his friends, who were grieving in their own Neanderthal way.

--

It moved from behind the tree, in the darkest part of the night, and Dean found himself more irritated than scared. Would you just fucking come out? Don't make me come back there. Thought of their father, of the arm raised above the bench seats, ready to swipe whichever one of them was howling in the backseat. This hand is coming back and it doesn't care who it hits.

There.

Black against black. Too fucking big to be a groundhog, he thought with a wide grin. Felt it move again, cautious, maybe scared. Maybe waiting for him to come in. A little, tiny insignificant warning bell tinkled away in the back of his head with all the urgency of wind chimes. You don't have any weapon except your knife, the bells converged enough to tell him.

Then, behind him, headlights swept across the clearing, and he was caught in them. Dean turned immediately back to the forest, but all he saw were trees.

--

She huddled down in the space between the seat and the glove compartment, and waited there for a long time, until her legs began to cramp. Shit, she thought. This is stupid, and I'm cold. When the hell is he coming back? She peeked over the dash, could see the glow of the Camaro's headlights through the trees at the top, stationary. Hope Dean's okay. Those guys probably just want to scare him.

But she knew in her heart of hearts that this Dean wouldn't scare easily, and she hoped that the Chucks were just going to talk.

Like an incendiary bomb, something she'd seen on CNN's Iraq coverage, a huge white light overcame the puny headlights. She'd seen this before, knew what it was, and oh, shitshitshitshit. Rebecca climbed into the driver's seat, turned the key in the Impala's ignition, and headed hell bent for leather to the rink, where some kind of help would surely be found.

--

What he knew about fighting was enough to fill a thick book. A whole lot of thick books. With weapons, without. Bare hands, pool cues, broken bottles, knives. Even cans of Spaghetti-Os in a pillowcase made an effective weapon when used correctly. Tonight, with six guys, big guys, his best weapon was going to be his mouth.

"Hey," he started, as they got out of the car. Silly car, he thought, dismissing the pinstriping and the fuzzy dice as excessive. He held his hands away from his sides. These are boys, he reminded himself magnanimously.

They were in no mood to talk. And even though they were boys, in the same technical sense that Dean was an adult, they were also large, and they were angry. Angry at him, angry at losing their friends in an inexplicable and irrational way, angry that they couldn't stop it.

"What the fuck you doing with Rebecca?" The tall one in front, neck as thick as Dean's thigh, came forward, his words turned to mist by the devastating cold, difficult to tell anything about him other than his size, silhouetted against the headlights as he was. The lights shone into Dean's eyes and he circled a little to the side, hoping to draw them off, get into a better position.

"Wanted to know more about how your friend Austin died," he said, truthfully. He kept moving, but it was hard not to be obvious about it, the snow was so deep.

"Don't fucking talk about Austin," one of the others slurred and Dean smelled alcohol over the metallic tang of snow. "He was a fucking Punxsy Chuck. What the fuck are you?"

A thin sense of self-preservation kept Dean from rolling his eyes at that. "Listen, I'm..."

"You know who you're dealing with, man? Do you? Fucking Punxsy Chucks, that's who. I'm through talking," he heard one of them say, and the first tendril of dread crept up Dean's spine, gave him a little shake. Wake up, boy.

"I'm sorry, I didn't hear you," Dean replied, feeling around in his parka's pocket for his knife before realizing it was in his jeans. He was repeating these are just boys, over and over again, though it was so definitely not helping. "Who are you guys again? Dixie Chicks?"

As he suspected, that brought it on, but at least he was the one who rang the dinner bell.

For the first maybe five seconds it went quite well. He was stone cold sober, and had a vast, stupid amount of experience in this sort of thing. Enough to know that after the first five seconds, experience would count for exactly shit, and combined body weight would take precedence. So he enjoyed the three connective shots he got in: one to the biggest guy's head, one to the solar plexus of the slow drunk guy, and a neat kick to the balls of the little mouthy guy who was likely to give him the most trouble.

After that, it was a matter of endurance, hoping he could outlast their fury until they stumbled into shame. Two quick blows to his head were not promising, and when one of the bigger boys grabbed his arms from behind, Dean turned neatly to elbow him in the jaw, but that just allowed one of the others to connect a hell of a right hook across his face, a blow that probably broke the guy's knuckles. Dean hoped it did, anyway. As the brightly lit snow rushed up to meet his falling body, he watched, as though in bizarre slow motion, his own blood spray across the white, contrasting and strangely beautiful. None of it hurt.

Yet.

Once he was down – which was such a very bad place to be in a fight like this, was the point when it turned from a fight into a beating – they began to kick him. He rolled an arm around his head to protect it, but one of them had big bad-ass construction boots, and those mothers inflicted damage. Dean felt something break inside him, a harsh cough and hiccup of organ and bone, and the sound that hissed from his suddenly liquid lungs felt as though it might be the last one he would ever make.

His world exploded in a flash of white light, everything bleached, sand-blasted to oblivion. The curl his body had protected itself with tightened further, and he felt a hot hand on him, and it burned like a sonofabitch. With that, he heard screaming, and he had no idea who was making such a god-awful sound, but he had his suspicions.

--

One look at her face and a scrambled fear clutched Sam's heart. Rebecca had no colour to her whatsoever, and she searched the cavernous rink for a particular face. His. No, Kris's, who was sitting by his knees, undoing the laces of her skates, getting ready to go. Dean hadn't come back, had been gone for at least forty-five minutes and that was enough for Sam. Kris said they could use her truck to look around but, no she was not going to hand over the keys to a virtual stranger.

As Kris straightened to a stand, weirdly shorter, but not precisely short, Rebecca rushed up to them, grabbed both of Kris's shoulders.

"Shit, Kris," and Sam thought he might dissolve like a sandcastle in surf as she said what he knew she was going to say, "Up on the Knob. It's happened again. Your friend," she turned to Sam. "They..."

Sam was already moving, had grabbed the keys from Kris's slack fingers and was going. "Phone the police," he shouted over his shoulder, and Kris was running up behind him, her bulky big sneakers untied, holding her hand out for her keys with a stern expression on her face.

In the parking lot, they were almost run over by a Camaro, which veered off the road and into the lot as though it was participating in a high-speed chase minus the cop car. It slid to a stop, and the driver climbed out, his face bloody, his nose most certainly broken, shouted, "Get an ambulance! We need an ambulance on the Knob!"

And though he scanned the Camaro, Sam did not see his brother. But before he could shove Kris towards her truck, Sam spotted the Impala parked sideways in front of the snow pile, and he felt almost faint. "C'mon, Kris," he murmured, realizing his breath was too shallow and too fast, "C'mon."

TBC

a/n: Wow, totally sorry that wasn't quite as funny as Dean in the library. And further apologies that I'm probably not going to get to post again until after the long weekend (going away and all). Weigh in, if you like – not enough funny? Right balance of drama/humour? Let me know. Happy egg hunting. In a purely non-denominational way, of course.