Part 4
A week after the Jenny fiasco, Dean couldn't tell anyone where he was. He was utterly lost and unfortunately he did know the state he was in. There were cowboy hats and green pastures and big belt buckles. Yeah, he was in Texas. Where in Texas? Who the hell knew? He could probably go town to town, hunting and never run out of places to hunt or towns to visit in Texas. There were scores of bars and who could beat a state full of drive-thru liquor stores, broken down asylums and haunted penitentiaries. Of course, there were several parties in his immediate vicinity who were armed and could arrest him or kill him depending on their mood. He actually hoped he dealt with the cops than the citizens in this state.
The bar wasn't bustling but seeing good business when he wandered in. He slapped down the twenty and waited for the talk to start up again. Which it did.
"So, they're saying those kids just went off camping so it's no big deal." One man at the end of the bar was saying to the bartender.
"What about the geek? You telling me that kid went camping?"
"Maybe he's hiding in shame. Anyway, the cops told the parents to wait out the weekend and they'll be back in classes by Monday."
"What the fuck does Hugo know? I heard he failed his test but he's a legacy so they promoted him anyway."
"I'm just saying. It fits. College kids from out of town, they go off partying every so often and no one really turns up missing, you know?"
"They're probably holed up somewhere having hippy flashbacks." Dean tossed out. "My daughter's in college, thinks she's Stevie Nicks."
"See." The guy told the bartender.
"Where's your kid go?"
"I dunno anymore. A&M?" Dean pulled the college's name out of his ass but the two men snorted. "What?"
"Fuckin' Aggies." They chorused and shook their heads, conversation moving on to other topics.
Dean had looked into less. Taking in another couple of beers, he headed back to the motel. 12 missed calls. No voice messages. If she really wanted to talk, she would have left a message. Dean flipped through a stack of newspapers to pick out potential stake out locations. Then he sat down to write a letter, he was due and he liked to think that she actually expected them. He knew she read them because she yelled at him about them.
Dear Alice,
I nearly became a father again last week and this time… in a real sense. She was 11 years old. I met her outside the apartment I was crashing in for a while. She told me that a monster visited her at night. I looked into it but she just seemed like one of those kids that loved to tell boogeyman stories.
It was simple enough, it's what I thought anyway. Then I talked to my ladyfriend and she informed me that everyone knew about the monster but no one had any proof. Her monster wasn't what I thought it was. He wasn't the kind I'm used to fighting. He was a man, just a sick fuck of a man. Creatures of the night, I get. People are just crazy.
I didn't even think and I don't remember roughing her father up. I laid out his options for him and I cut him loose. They wanted me to stay. I wanted to but… it wouldn't be fair to them to build something resembling a happy home and then run out on them later. That's the only guarantee in my life. That I'll leave and disappoint someone.
I would have killed that son of a bitch except that I get squeamish about dispatching humans. Murder is not that high on the list of bad things I do. If your stepdad ever did those things to you… I would have no choice but to kill him. He looks like an okay guy, though… what I've seen of him.
I'm glad that he was good to you. I'm a bad role model.
Dean Winchester.
His phone rang but he ignored it in favor of heading out to find one of the potentially haunted houses in the rural area. His phone kept ringing and he kept on ignoring it. There were four condemned houses that were scheduled for demolition in the next month according to the papers and two of them had shady histories according to the internet and the progeny of the Hell Hounds' Lair. Hopefully it wasn't still the same two idiots running the site. He really hoped those two had moved out of the tin can and not back into their mom's basement. Maybe he should head out to Richardson and get them a hooker for a night.
Dean's plan was to check out the houses and the neighborhoods and go back to the motel to make Sam make some long distance phone calls for him. That's not the plan he got to put into action. The second house had broken windows, which wasn't uncommon in condemned houses but the tape on the front door was broken. Then his phone rang again. Tossing it into the backseat, he got out of the car to pop the trunk. The block was virtually empty… except for three cars parked haphazardly in an empty lot across the street. It all screamed Late Night Friday Movie to him.
He selected his tools carefully. Shotgun. Rock salt shells. Holy water. Pistol. Consecrated iron rounds. Lighter. Matches. He looked up at the house. It was dark. Flashlight. Fully armed, he marched up to the front door, which gave easily when he pushed it, confirming that it had been messed with recently. It was quiet but the kind of dead still that drove him nuts.
He found the first body in the kitchen. He hadn't got a chance to do the research on the house but he'd lay down money that the odd way the body was laid out was an exact match to a crime scene photo somewhere. The next body was at the bottom of the basement stairs. Then it struck him that the bodies were no more than a day dead. No bloat. Rigor… He canvassed the rest of the first floor but came up with nothing. Slowly, he approached the stair case. He moved quickly and easily. His knee only cracked once. There at the top of the stairs was a third body. This one was impaled on a banister rod, eyes open. He hated it when their eyes were open.
Then came the first noise. Whispering. Then he heard beeping. Cell Phone. He approached the hallway slowly, keeping his beam low. The first room was empty. The one across the way was empty. The next room had two bodies in it, jackets over their faces. Someone had been alive after these two had died. Breathing evenly, he made it to the last room. The whispering was getting louder, frantic. The beeping getting faster. Easing open the door, he found the source.
A girl, in a skirt and boots, rocking herself, blindly dialing on a cell phone, whispering to herself and sitting inside a salt circle. Well that explained why she was alive and the others were dead. The salt circle though… wouldn't she have warned the others if she had known about the salt? He cleared his throat, about to speak, when the spirit appeared behind her. He didn't even blink, he shot off the gun and the ghost vanished in a spray of rock salt.
The girl shrieked and covered her head with her hands, cell phone tangling in her long blond hair. Dean didn't have time for this. Whoever this ghost was, he was a very bad person and he needed to get this girl out of the crossfire. He gripped her under her arm and hauled her to her feet. He couldn't see her face for all the hair everywhere. "I need you to shut the fuck up, right now. Do you hear me?" He had to shake her to make his point. She stopped screaming, which allowed him time to reload his gun. "You stay in my shadow, you got it? Two steps behind me, both hands on my back until we get out of here. Can you do that?"
"Ye-yes." She stammered out, her head bobbing. Her sudden gasp, made him turn around just as two figures appeared out of thin air. He'd only just gotten the shells out of his pocket. It would take too long to shoot them. Biting the wadding out of a shell, he flicked the remainder of the contents out the door and through the figures. They vanished.
"Bam." He whispered as he finished loading the gun. He stepped into the doorway and peered into the hallway. "Girl! Hands on me. Two steps behind."
He could feel her shivers as they shuffled down the hall. She was tripping over herself and nearly took him down with her once. He was about to yell at her when the ghosts came out of the stairwell. He leaned back to get the gun out of the way of the banister, which also trapped the girl between himself and the wall. He pumped the gun and shot at the nearest of the two and managed to get them both with one shell. Still, he reloaded while he had the moment.
"Listen to me carefully." He whispered as he inched down the stairs. "When we hit the first floor, you're going to stay on me for ten steps and then when I turn around, you make a break for the door. Don't you dare trip. You stay on your feet and you keep up if you want to live another day. If I turn back, you keep going. There's a car out front. If I don't come out, you get the phone in the backseat and you call Sam, he's speed dial one. You don't get out of the car until he gets here and that could take a while."
He felt her nod against his back. He reached back and gave her the flashlight. He grasped her shirt and hurried down the last steps. He could hear her counting out the steps. Then the ghosts reappeared. "Go!"
Spinning, he shot but the ghost moved and he missed. Swinging the gun around, he kept an eye out for the other one. He heard her skid on the porch and drop the flashlight but then he heard her feet on the grass. "Good girl, don't need the flashlight outside."
Inching toward the open door, Dean kept his eyes on the darkness. He was almost there when the ghosts came at him from both sides. Shooting one, he dove for the door and let himself tumble out onto the grass. He ran for the car where she was not. Stupid girl was staring at the house with one hand on the door handle. Quickly, he reloaded his gun and aimed it for the doorway where the other ghost was raging. He shot the thing on principle. "Get in. Let's go."
"My friends are in there." She pointed to the house.
"They're all dead."
"What?" She turned to face him, hair out of her face and all the blood rushed out of her cheeks just a moment before she fainted.
Rushing to catch her, Dean frowned. She looked familiar but he couldn't place her. Cursing, he hefted her into the car and turned it to his motel. He would get his answers when she woke up.
TBC