Vacancy - Ch2
"You ok, Dean?" Sam asked.
Dean shook his head, and Sam looked down at his brother's chest. To his utter shock, Dean's undershirt was covered in blood.
"What the hell?" Sam gasped. The axe had seemed ethereal. How had it hurt Dean? "Did the axe cut you?" There was no answer. Dean's eyes had closed. Sam pulled off his brother's shirt and saw that Dean's heavily muscled chest was clean. No blood. No wound.
"What the hell?" Sam repeated. "How..."
"Is he dead?" asked the girl from behind Sam.
The younger Winchester leaned down and listened for signs of life from his brother. Mercifully, he heard a small wheezing breath from Dean's lips. "No," Sam said. "He's alive."
"Who are you?" asked the teenage boy. Now that the apparition was gone, he was pretending he hadn't been so scared.
"My name is Sam," Sam said, slapping Dean's cheek. His brother's eyes fluttered open, and for a moment they were unfocused. Then they fixed on Sam's concerned face, and his hand came up and connected with Sam's face.
"Dean!" Sam gasped, holding a hand to his cheek. "What-"
"Idiot," Dean said. "It's cold in here. Why'd you have to go and take off my shirt?"
"I thought the thing got you with its axe," Sam said. "Your shirt was bloody."
Dean rubbed his hands over his chest. "It feels like... I don't know. This emptiness in my chest. Like the axe did hurt me, but someone pulled it out and then took away all the pain. It's... Very unpleasant."
A loud moan came from the television, and the teen flipped it off quickly. His cheeks reddened as the Winchester brothers turned to look.
"What the hell was that thing?" the kid asked.
"I don't know," Sam said. "It wasn't a spirit, that's for sure." Dean stood up and shuddered.
"It sure looked like a ghost to me," the girl said, clutching the sheet around her small frame.
"No, the gun was filled with rock salt," Dean said. "It would have repelled a ghost. That was something else, my friends."
The boy looked at Dean incredulously. "How do you know that? What are you?"
Dean laughed, then clutched his chest. "That hurts," he said. "That's not good. It hurts."
Sam put his arm on Dean's shoulder. "Dean?"
"Sammy, I don't know what happened to me, but it's not good. Why don't you get these kids all situated and I'll go lie down in the room," Dean said. Sam nodded, looking concerned. Dean took the bloody shirt from the ground and walked outside, shivering from the night breeze.
"So," Sam said, looking at the two teenagers. They stared back at him, waiting for him to say something else. "Um, what are your names?"
"Why?" the boy asked suspiciously.
The girl slapped his arm and said, "I'm Kathy, and this is Jason. Uh... thank you."
"Yeah, thanks," Jason said, after the girl gave him a hard look. "If you and your brother didn't show up, I'd be going through what your brother is right now. So... thanks."
"No problem," Sam said. "That's what we do."
"What DO you do?" the girl, Karen, asked. "How do you know that rock salt repels ghosts?"
"Well, we're... hunters," Sam said, unsure of how much he should tell these two. Then he realized, they had experienced something supernatural and had a right to know they weren't crazy.
"Hunters?" Jason said. "Me too. I hunt turkey with my father every year."
"Not that kind of hunter," Sam said, thinking that if Dean had been there he would have found the misunderstanding humorous. "We hunt... things. Things like whatever that was with the axe, or... spirits, or demons, or witches. Those things exist. My brother and me, we take it upon ourselves to kill them whenever we come across them." Sam noticed the boy had a trickle of blood running down his forehead. "Hey, are you OK?"
Jason touched his hand to his forehead and took it away. He looked for a long while at the blood there before his eyes lit up with understanding. "Oh. Yeah. That's nothing. I got up to change the... uh... the channel, and I fell and hit my head. That's when AxeMan showed up."
Sam nodded. "Do you two have somewhere else you can go? You really don't want to be here if that thing shows up again."
Jason and Kathy looked at each other. They seemed to be communicating without speaking, and then Jason said, "Yeah, I guess we can go back to my place. Thanks again, man, you saved my life."
"Yeah," Sam said, stepping forward to shake the boy's hand. Jason took Sam's hand and pumped up and down once. The boy had a strong handshake.
Kathy said, "Can I get dressed?"
Sam's eyes opened wider and he whirled around. "Oh, god, I'm sorry." He walked out of the room and started to close the door behind him, but Jason followed him out. The door swung shut and they could hear Kathy moving around.
"So, are you and your brother going to stay here and try to kill that thing?" Jason asked, his breath rising from his mouth in the cool night air. He stared out at the road, where an eighteen-wheeler roared past.
"Yeah, probably," Sam said, hands in his pockets. He wanted to see how Dean was making out, but the kid obviously wanted to talk.
"Do you want help?"
Sam was taken aback. "I couldn't ask you to-"
"I'd be glad to," Jason said, turning to Sam. "My mother died when I was only six months old, in a fire in my nursery. Dad said she was pinned to the ceiling somehow and that caught on fire. I sort of always figured she was killed by some kind of supernatural thing, so I've always been interested in hunting paranormal stuff."
Sam's eyes opened wide. He inhaled sharply and asked, "Are you serious?"
The boy nodded. "Yeah. Sucks. It really does. I never got to know her real well. Hell, I never got to know her at all."
"Dude, my mom was killed the same way. Dean and I, we've been hunting the demon that did it for a while. Jason, how old are you?"
"Seventeen," the teenager replied, surprised. "You know what killed my mom?"
Sam nodded. "There's this demon that can possess people, among other things. We've faced it a few times, but it keeps getting away. Oh my god, I can't believe it... so far we've only found other kids my age. Twenty three. I thought the demon only killed mothers in 1983."
"I guess you were wrong," Jason said, smiling a thin-lipped grin.
"Do you have any kind of psychic ability?" Sam asked. Jason shook his head, unsure of what Sam meant. "Like, premonitions."
"No," Jason said. "Why?"
"I do... and some of the children like me do."
"Jason!" came a call from inside the room. Jason opened the door immediately, afraid the being with the axe had come back for Kathy. Instead, she stood there with his pants, which he'd forgotten he wasn't wearing. "Can we leave?" she asked.
"I'll be back tomorrow, if that's OK," Jason said. He walked to his girlfriend, kissed her on the cheek, and pulled on his pants. They walked, hand in hand, past Sam to the office to turn in their key. Sam stood in front of their room until they came out of the office and got into their car, and he gave a curt wave to Jason as he pulled out of the parking lot.
Sam opened the door to Room 7 and walked in. It was warmer inside, although not much. The heat in their room wasn't working right.
'Pizza's probably cold,' he thought.
Dean was on the phone. "Just fifty cents an hour?" he said. "That right? Ok, well then, I'll take four hour."
"What?" Sam exclaimed. Dean hung up the phone and grinned at his brother.
"Just kidding man, calm down!" Dean had put on another white shirt, and Sam saw the bloody one in the bathroom sink in the reflection of the large mirror near the bathroom. "I didn't order porn. No need to worry."
"Dean, you're not going to believe this. Jason... the boy... His mother was killed the same way Mom was. And he's only seventeen!" Sam said without taking a breath. "Do you think it's the same demon that killed Mom?"
"Slow down, Sammy," Dean said, all playfulness gone from his voice. "You said this kid's mom died in his nursery, on the ceiling, in a fire?" He rubbed the place where the spectre's axe had wounded him thoughtfully.
"Yeah. He said he wants to help us track down whatever this thing here at the motel is... before I could tell him we didn't want to put him in danger, he left."
Dean was silent for a moment. "Good," he said after a while.
"Good?" Sam said.
"Yeah. With me out of commission, you need someone to help you kill the bastard," Dean said, grimacing.
"Dean, what's wrong with you?" Sam asked. "Do you think that axe actually hurt... you know... your soul? You know, like the Lord of the Rings... where Frodo was hurt by the Nazgul's blade."
"Never saw the movie," Dean said.
"Ever read the book?" Sam asked almost without thinking. Dean gave him a look, and Sam sighed. "Sorry. Never mind. Anyway, let me see Dad's journal."
"Want a piece of cold pizza to go with that?" Dean asked.
"Sure," Sam said, and his brother handed him the book and the food.
"Here we go," Sam said. Ten minutes had passed. They had each eaten two slices of pizza, and Dean had found a wrestling match on TV. "Dean."
His brother held up a hand and kept watching as the large men onscreen kept slamming into each other.
"Dean!" Sam shouted. Dean flicked off the TV with a sigh.
"You wouldn't let me watch women, so I had to watch that. And now I can't even watch wrestling. What is it?" Dean said with a smirk.
"I think I found something. Dad wrote about these beings that are born out of pure rage. They usually stick with a certain building where something bad happened to them, and... get this. They're immune to rock salt," Sam said. He flipped a page in the journal and said, "Says here they can also bring objects with them over into the spirit world, if the object was important enough to them in life."
"Where's Sarah Michelle Gellar when you need her?" Dean grinned.
"What?" Sam asked.
"Nothing," Dean said. "Didn't you see The Grudge?" Sam shook his head, and Dean smiled. "Didja read the book?"
"Dean, can you be serious for a minute? You were hurt by this thing's axe and we need to figure out how to reverse the effects. Where's your laptop?"
"Out in the car," Dean said. "You think this place is a hot spot?" To Sam's quizzical look he replied, "Wireless Internet access. You really think so?"
Sam finished splicing the cord into the phone jack and pressed the laptop's power button. It whirred to life and he clicked on the Internet Explorer logo. He smiled when the Internet opened.
After five minutes of searching on the Internet, he said, "OK, it says on a couple of these websites that burning the bones of the being will release the hold it has on the Earth and set it free. So, we have to find this guy's grave and burn it."
There was a knock on the door. Sam went over and opened it, gasping in surprise at the person he saw there.