Punxsutawney Sucks -- Chapter 5
a/n: You know that part of the episode when you check the clock to see how much story is left? It's 9:42.
Disclaim away! God, this is tiresome... Here's the deal: In my world, the boys talk the way I do, so they cuss, especially that Dean. He's earned the right. Also, there might be some fairly violent stuff, but nothing too graphic, because I'm just way too concerned about screwing up the kids beyond a therapist's ability to fix. I own nothing, no one's based on anyone. Okay? Good to go? All right, where were we? Oh yes...
--
Anyone watching would probably acknowledge that the kid had guts. Not much else, especially in the way of common sense: traipsing around a death scene when the perpetrator was still at large was an idea beyond stupid. Kris would be the first to admit it, really, if she'd been thinking at all. Enough was enough, though. Five kids dead, her friends, some of them. Even if they weren't her friends, even if some of them had actually made sly comments about her when they thought she couldn't hear, none of them deserved to die. Kris Wieland was pissed off, and nobody wanted to mess with her when she got going.
She had a theory and was going to put it to the test tonight, this the sixth week of brutal winter weather, no end in sight. A theory, she reminded herself, that could get her killed. She never shied away from things that could hurt her: a crosscheck into the boards, homophobic assholes, eggs swallowed raw for breakfast. The Gobbler. Thought about that as she engaged the emergency brake of the truck and peered through the windshield at the Knob.
The radio didn't work anymore, so she sat in the cab, listening to the wind in the bare branched trees, fingering the cell phone in her hand. The night was clear and silent and bright. Her heart sounded the same as when she received a breakaway pass with a profoundly inept goalie in front of her: kettledrums reverberating over ice. Careful, she cautioned herself. This guy hasn't been hanging around for a gazillion years because he's dense. He'll fucking kill you, given half a chance. She set the text message to go to her dad's cell: M/D Knob NOW DANGER. Dont 4get truck pls. Her finger hovered over the send button.
Keeping the phone in her hand, she gingerly picked up the box on the seat beside her. Her dad had brought the cat home in it the last time it had swallowed tinsel off the tree and cost them five hundred dollars in vet's bills. The animal inside was heavier than Bobo, and Kris hoped it wouldn't break through the bottom of the box. Actually, she was feeling a little sorry for the groundhog.
The snow had frozen solid and Kris wished she'd brought snowshoes: it was hard going, smashing through the chunks of ice to sink knee-deep into snow so hard it cut. Her boots were felt-lined and she wore long johns under her jeans, a pair of ski pants over them. She didn't care how goofy the outfit looked: she was moderately warm. She had a balaclava pulled over her head, and could feel her breath hardening into ice on the outside as she huffed her way up the hill through the treacherous snow. She'd pulled her bare hand with the phone inside the sleeve of her down parka for protection. Against what, she didn't like to suppose.
At the top, she waited, put down the box, which lurched a little as the groundhog inside bashed itself against the walls. Kris stopped feeling sorry for its stupid ass. In her experience, groundhogs were dumb as stumps and easy enough to catch – her uncle always kept a couple in the old chicken coop alongside the guinea pigs and the rabbits, ran the town petting zoo in the summer. She was thankful for that: she thought that the Gobbler might not accept a guinea pig in place of a groundhog, if her theory was right.
A movement in the bush startled her badly. Shit, she had time to think before the blackness rushed up to her all at once, breathing like it had lung disease, rattling worse than space shuttle tiles on re-entry. Funny, thinking that. A fiery re-entry. She jammed her finger into the send button. Almost funny.
Almost painless.
--
Sam decided that if the blue light didn't actually go off, he couldn't count it as blue. Which brought his count down to sixteen, unless something untoward happened to Dean. He appeared pretty stable, though, if the drug-induced sleep of the happy dead was any indication. The doctor was optimistic about a complete recovery; Sam had been mildly surprised the medic was so worried, probably because he hadn't witnessed Dean bounce back from crap like this a million times before. Sam had nodded gravely to the doctor, had taken a prescription for painkillers that Dean would never fill.
He tapped his fingers against the tabletop, wishing that Dean was awake. Because if he was, then Sam would have an excuse for backing out of the idiot plan he'd come up with. He wanted Dean with him when they hunted; he sometimes wondered what it was like, doing this sort of thing on your own, like Dad did. Like Dean had, up until a few months ago. Well, tonight he would find out. He twirled the Impala's keys on his forefinger, then poked Dean gently on the arm.
Too gently. Man, if you want him to wake up, wake him up. Dangled the car keys, shaking them a little so they made a percussive metal jangle. If that didn't snap him out of it, nothing would. Like bloody Pavlov's dog with the car. Likely, Dean would chew him a new hole when he returned, but it would be in the knowledge that Sam had actually done something. And even if Dean had been awake, you know what? He wouldn't be doing any Gobbler-torching anytime soon – he was that banged up.
Sam had a can of gas and an idea. The idea was this: that he was just old enough to avoid the Gobbler's lethal attention, but young enough to get him out of hiding. Which would be the moment that Sam would set him on fire. It might unleash a snowstorm, or even sandflies, come to think of it, but it had to be better than allowing a town to bury its sons in frozen turf.
He turned to go, then remembered he had something for Dean, something that was his chicken's way out. He set the new cell phone beside another untouched plate of mashed something-or-others, and wrote on the napkin: Call if you need anything. That would placate him, wouldn't it?
Noticing that the old guy in the other bed was also asleep, Sam dimmed the lights as he left, but kept the door open: it was a rule that the hospital staff adhered to with demonic tenacity. As he turned, he almost bumped into a nurse, hurrying in the opposite direction, towards the emergency entrance.
"Oh," she said. "I'm glad you're still here. They're just bringing in your friend now."
"My friend?" Sam asked, realizing he sounded like the village idiot on a particularly difficult day. What friend did he have in Punxsutawney?
"Kris Wieland," the nurse snapped back at him, but she was already down the hall, too far away to notice his confusion turn to acid resolve. "Got a bad scare up on the Knob, maybe an electrical shock."
That settled it. Sam was going to end this sucker, right now, tonight.
--
As the lights dimmed, Archie opened both eyes, peered at the shadow of the tall boy in the doorway. From the way he'd looked at his brother, the way he'd touched him with one tentative finger, fear and longing in his eyes, Archie had known what he was going to do. Archie might be old, might even be venerable, as one glowing retirement toast had put it, but he wasn't deaf. That nurse had a loud voice, one of the harridans that kept him awake half the night with her inane chatter. He'd heard all right. Little Kristine Wieland. This was wrong, wrong, wrong.
He'd said many oaths over his years. A marriage. A couple of christenings. One was stronger than those, and it was wrong. He lay in the bed for a long time, deciding what to do.
--
The blue light went off. Just a blinking at first, lighting the dim room with an intermittent glow, not anything that would alarm anyone.
The nurses and the ward doctors rushing in with a crash cart, flipping on the lights, yelling at each other, well, that was enough to wake Augustus Gloop from a sugar-induced coma. They broke open vials of adrenaline, and charged up the paddles, observed the clock. Charge. Clear. Did it all over again, the floor soon littered with syringe casings, paper and plastic wrappers of sterilized equipment, and the crossword puzzle book that had been dropped to the floor by a man in full cardiac arrest.
Dean awoke with a start and a curse. Fuck, that hurt, that deep breath thing. Blinked his eyes, tried desperately to figure out where he was. Right. Hospital. Groundhogs. Dead kids. Batshit freaky aboriginal sorcerer. Sounded about right.
He touched his eye socket with his left hand, the one that wasn't splinted up. Around his eye was numb, actually. They'd pulled the curtain around Archie's bed, and Dean knew that was never a good sign, was either the opening act for a sponge bath or a full-on myocardial infarction. Given the presence of the crash cart, he was assuming it was the latter. A classic recognizable sound, the noise of someone dying on a hospital bed. Beeeeeeeeeeep. Aural equivalent of a straight line.
Well, that blew his chance at finding out about the Inner Circle. Would have been nice, knowing what was in that groundhog punch. Hadn't kept Archie alive, though, had it?
Oh, he could imagine what Sam would have said to that observation. Jesus, when did you stop having a sense of decency, Dean? And then he would have shut up fast, because Sam was smart, and he'd have thought about what he'd just said.
They took an awful long time to wind things down, during which time Dean discovered the phone Sam had left him. Phone him if I need anything. Fuck you, Sam. Get me a BLT with a side of fries. Made him sick just thinking about it, but Sam would be expecting that kind of request. He wasn't going to give Sam the satisfaction, though, and they probably had rules about cell phone use when the guy next to you coded.
"You want this?" A nurse had come from behind the curtain, her face a little pinched, eyes dog tired. She held up the crossword book, pointed to the corner of one page. It was too far away and Dean couldn't make it out. He almost said no, but she brought it closer. For Matthew Evans, it said. Dean was suddenly, inexplicably, visited by his missing sense of decency. Sammy, you'd be proud of me, I actually feel...guilty.
He took it, and spent a few minutes trying to get comfortable, which was impossible. Every time he adjusted his position, he had to clench his teeth with the effort not to gasp or yelp. A nurse came in, offered to top up his pain medication, which he refused, much to her apparent surprise.
The crossword book was almost done. What a crappy present, Dean thought, about to toss it aside. Had the old coot thought he liked these things? Jeez. Then one page, with red ink instead of pencil, circling one clue: To make replete (4). Huh. He rested his pounding head against the pillow, tried not to think about his aching ribs. Little baby breaths, Dean.
Fuck. He picked up the phone and tried to remember Sam's number. Bastard hadn't programmed the phone. Damn. Tried one set of numbers, brow furrowing in frustration as he got hold of the California Chicken Shack. Tried again. Rang, rang, rang. Where is he? A panicky flush of fear dizzied him.
"Dean? You up?"
In relief, Dean snapped, "Where the hell are you?"
A laugh. "Miss me?"
"Okay, answer me this," ignoring Sam's jab completely. "What does 'replete' mean?"
"Seriously," Dean had the impression that Sam was not actually listening to him, because his comeback was so lame, "this is what you want to know? Maybe you should ask the tree frogs."
And in the silence that followed, Dean heard the unmistakable rumble of the Impala. "Where are you?"
"That's twice now. Third time lucky. Full."
"What?" It was like Sam was deliberately trying to confuse him. "Sammy..." The desperation in his own voice made him wince.
"It means full. Why do you want to know?"
"Uh, crossword puzzle," if he'd been less medicated, he'd have found a way to avoid answering that, he was sure.
A long laugh followed that admission, but Dean caught the edge of it, understood that it was Sam's slightly nervous, hysterical laugh, the one he made when he was saying, 'look over there!' while putting salt in Dean's coffee.
"Does it fit?"
"What?" That was the second time he'd asked his brother for clarification; he was feeling so dopey. Fucking drugs. "Yeah, it fits. But it doesn't help."
"Oka-a-ay," Sam answered slowly. "Has Archie given up on the crosswords?"
"Yeah, considering he's dead." Not that he was usually the epitome of tact, but Dean was setting a new low. "I inherited the book."
"Oh," Sam paused -- stalling. "Kris was just brought into the hospital from the Knob. Why don't you find out if she's okay?"
"And how am I supposed to do that?" Wait a minute...Dean thought, then it was gone again, a scent of suspicion that disappeared in a hazy moment. Look over there, he remembered, then that too faded away.
"You'll figure out something. Ask a nurse," like he was explaining jump to a bunny. Man, he must sound out of it, for Sam to be so openly school-marmish. Next, Sam would be spelling out 'bye-bye'.
Which was close.
"Gotta go, Dean. I'll see you in the morning." And before Dean could respond, Sam hung up. Dean lay in the bed, trying to put it all together. Hiding something, the bastard's hiding something...and punched the little off button, not nearly as satisfying as slamming a heavy telephone receiver back onto the cradle of a land line.
Kris, up on the Knob. Sam had said that she'd been at the historical society, had wanted to know the Knob's history. What had she been doing? Might as well find out. He glanced at the IV before finding the corner of the tape attaching the tube to the inside of his elbow. He ripped it off in one motion and didn't stop to think through pulling out the tube itself before doing it. He'd done it before, knew that it would hurt. Not as much as his ribs, though, when he tried to sit up. Concentrate on something. Anything, get your mind off the...To make replete. To make replete. Stare at the four spaces, imagine the letters F-U-L-L there. Fuck, it didn't fit after all, or the down clue was wrong, one of the two. The F and the two Ls fit, all right, but if the U was right, then the down word would be FLUCK, which even he knew wasn't a real word.
Little baby breaths. His lungs felt like wet cardboard, ached as though a hand was squeezing them.
Damn. It's a verb, not an adjective. To make full.
A cold wave of dread passed over him, his heart suddenly pumping ice water. The word wasn't 'fluck', it was 'flick', which meant that 'full' wasn't right. Archie was shouting from the grave, and the word he was shouting was 'fill'.
--
She was shivering, and the burn on her forehead hurt so much she wished that the nurse would just bring some more drugs damnit. Now would be okay, more than okay. Thank god her dad had finally gone home, even if it was just to spell off her mom, who was minding her sleeping baby brother. Her dad was always more of a freak about Kris getting hurt anyway, like when she'd broken her jaw during that game against...who the fuck was that?
Her heart jolted high in her chest, in a place that it hurt to just think about, but came down almost immediately. Dean, who might be Matthew Evans as well, but she'd come to think of him as Dean, and that's what his brother called him, so might as well stick with...and he looked worse than she felt, which was some kind of statement about hospital discharge rules.
"Hey," she said, surprised at how weak her voice sounded. "You okay?" She could see immediately that he wasn't the kind of guy who responded well to that question, but she had to beat him to the punch.
He nodded. Somehow, he'd gotten hold of his charred up parka. Kris wondered if her own coat looked half as bad. She'd liked that coat, damnit. Actually, he looked as though he might fall down, so she gestured with her nose to the chair beside her bed. Her dad had sat in it when they'd bandaged her burn, had held her hand. Big pussy.
Instead, Dean stood at the side of her bed, but there was something not quite right about him – freaky bloody eye and bandage on his cheekbone notwithstanding – he seemed ill at ease, ready to bolt. Worried, not quite afraid. She didn't like to think about what might make him afraid.
Thing on the Knob, maybe, because asking about what she'd seen was the first thing out of his mouth. She told what she remembered, which wasn't much. He asked about her visit to the historical society, what she thought was going on, his voice a little mechanical, tired – fighting against pain, she thought. I've broken ribs before; he shouldn't be up and walking around. The groundhog in the box, though, that made him look up with interest.
"Why'd you do that?" he asked, the second set of words he'd put together.
How to explain this without sounding like a drooling escapee from the big house? She shrugged, wishing that he'd sit down. That slight sway was making her nervous. "I think that's what's supposed to happen. Every seven years, when it's a six-weeks of winter prediction. They say they're giving him the 'groundhog punch'; they're supposed to give the groundhog to the Gobbler. But some years..."
"They don't," Dean finished, his voice and his gaze very far away. His fingers, the ones on his unbandaged left hand, were playing with the blackened fabric of his coat, picking out stray feathers. "The Inner Circle, right? One of them thinks, 'We can't kill the golden goose.'" Okay, she was really glad he was saying it, because it sounded way more demented that she'd imagined. There were some things you were better off not saying out loud and this was one of them. "The Gobbler wants his groundhog, Wojek. The ancestor of the people he terrorized in life. And so, when it's not offered, the Gobbler gets the town's attention by freezing the joint? And if that doesn't work, by killing off boys? Why only young men?"
"Legend? The Delaware chief that killed him was young." It was a guess, but it was a good one.
Finally, a little bit of that gleam came back into his eyes. It made her feel suddenly so much better, as though she'd been holding something heavy that he'd taken from her. "I'm too old to be a chief?"
She wiped her eyes, realized that they were tearing up, but from some kind of weird stressy laughter. "Yeah, the chief was still alive when the first Europeans arrived, so if you do the math," and he didn't look like the type that would usually do the math, so she spelled it out, "he would have been about twenty-three or twenty-four years old. And definitely male. I think the Gobbler thought I was a boy at first. Tried to burn me, but realized – somehow, didn't exactly lift my skirt – that I didn't have the right parts. I was counting on that. But I brought a fucking groundhog, thought he would take it. It just wasn't the right one."
"Nope, not the right one. Archie was trying to tell me, ratted out his Inner Circle friends after all. Wait till Sam hears what job I've got in store for us." And he pulled out a phone, wrestled with the numbers, listened, and the gleam in his eyes changed to something else. "Oh, Sam," he groaned, just a little exhalation, but enough to make him grimace in pain. "Don't be doing what I think you're..." He looked right at her as he yelled into the phone. "Sammy," he warned, voice sharp. "Sammy, don't you dare be going up there. You're too young. Fucking idiot."
Nice message, Kris thought.
"Might be in bed," Dean murmured, putting the phone away in his inside pocket, but it sounded as though he was calming himself, like some mental patients rocked back and forth or laid things out in neat rows. "Might be in bed."
And stared at her again, so certain, so true, that she thought she could see his cogs and wheels whirring away. Obvious, in some essential and worthy sense of the word. Difficult to refuse him anything when he was like this. He must be so lucky with the ladies; I should be taking notes. "Give me your car keys. And don't tell me you don't know how to disable the alarm at the Groundhog Zoo."
TBC
a/n ('What? Another one?' you're thinking): Shout out to my dad, who phones me every weekend to bombard me with crossword puzzle questions. Oh, and by the way? It's now 9:47.
