Hold Off the Earth Awhile
Summary: Post WIAWSNB. Sam and Dean tangle with an artist whose work is a deadly gift that keeps on giving.
For those not reading the new Meyer book…
Chapter Two
Sam opened the motel room door and walked in. It was well into the afternoon , but Dean was still in bed. He didn't know if his brother was asleep or not, but Sam entered quietly just the same.
Normally, Dean would have awakened no matter how quietly Sam came into the room, but right now things weren't normal. The quiet, pensive Dean that Sam had been living with since the djinn happened was a different brother and Sam was walking on eggshells. Loud Dean, angry Dean, drunk Dean, reckless Dean, any other normal incarnation of his brother, Sam could deal with, had spent his life dealing with. But this silence… it was wearing on him. It wasn't like the silence after their dad's death either. That silence had been bristling with tension. It had been an angry, seething silence. This… Losing their mom all over again was different for him.
Sam sat down at the little table and opened the laptop. He could work a little and then he would force Dean to go to dinner with him. Sam glanced toward his brother's unmoving form. Dean wasn't asleep. He could tell now. The depression, the sadness, the cloud surrounding him was almost visible.
Sam's working theory was that the djinn had basically kept Dean high to induce the dream. To make the dream that vivid and concrete feeling, it must have been a massive buzz. Dean was crashing now, supernaturally speaking, a fierce depression replacing the high. Then again, Dean's depression might be a natural reaction to having their mom and a monster-free life ripped away from him again. Whatever the case, when Sam managed to get him out of bed, Dean still moved like he was underwater, exhausted by the effort, and Sam was at a loss as to how to help.
"Dude, quit staring at me," Dean suddenly growled.
"Who says I'm staring?" Sam asked, staring at Dean whose back was still to him.
"One, I've got that creepy feeling of being watched. Two, you're thinking so loud it's giving me a headache."
"You know what time it is?" Sam asked, and could have kicked himself for how accusatory it sounded.
"About two minutes 'til I kick your ass if you don't back it down," Dean said, although he had yet to move a muscle.
Sam snorted. "You'll have to get out of bed to do it."
"Tired, Sammy," Dean said, sounding exhausted despite how long he'd been asleep.
Sam bit his lip, freshly troubled at Dean's failure to play along in their game of words. "Wanna know what I found at the morgue?" he tried.
"I'm guessing dead people."
"Finally got hold of the police reports too."
"Fascinating reading, I'm sure," Dean muttered.
"Tattoo place has a website," Sam continued. "The guy wasn't kidding about memorial tattoos being his specialty. He's been doing them for years."
Dean just grunted.
"The Impala was making a funny noise when I came back from the morgue. Guess I should go take a look at it if you're gonna sleep a little longer." Sam just kept his eyes on his brother. If his threatening to work on the car didn't get Dean moving, it just might be the third sign of the apocalypse.
Dean sighed heavily and shoved the covers back. After several seconds' hesitation, he sat up throwing his legs over the side of the bed. He leaned forward, setting his elbows on his knees, rubbing a hand across his face. Finally, he stood and padded around the bed, dropping into the chair across from Sam at the little table.
"Morgue?"
"Definite EMF," Sam reported, "but not necessarily from the tattoos. Which is weird. More like what you get when someone's attacked by a ghost. Matching readings from each of the bodies as well, like one ghost did all the damage."
"Police reports?" Dean asked.
Sam chose not to comment that after the strenuous trip from the bed to the chair, Dean didn't seem to have the energy to say more than a word or two. He'd been paying attention at least. "Just like the paper said. Over the last month several bodies have turned up, each one on or near a relative's grave. Not all of the tattoos were fresh, but they were all memorial tattoos. The victims all died from exposure, which is impressive since some of them had been seen only hours before the bodies were discovered. One thing…"
Dean looked up slightly, but didn't say anything.
"There was a sixth body that didn't make the papers. It wasn't on a relative's grave. It was left outside the cemetery all together."
"How come?"
"The police don't have a clue, but I have a theory." Sam waited, trying to force Dean to respond before telling him more.
"What?"
"There are actually two separate cemeteries. They just happen to be right next to each other. The body was dumped outside the Jewish part of the graveyard. There were scuff marks pulling the body out."
That got Dean's attention and he pursed his lips in thought. "Nobody with tattoos allowed in a Jewish cemetery. Old school anyway… Tattoos are unclean."
Sam nodded in agreement. "That's my guess, too." Just like Jewish dietary laws of animals that were considered clean and unclean, there were lots of other rules, tattoos being just one. Sam wasn't surprised that Dean knew that rule either. When it came to burials, Winchesters had to be experts on the subject or they could get their asses handed to them by a ghost who knew more than they did.
"So we've got a dead rabbi sucking the life out of tattooed people?" Dean asked, his face twisted, not liking the idea. "Dumped the one guy's body outside his territory?"
Sam grimaced, not liking it either. It just didn't feel right. "Dunno. Maybe."
"I dated this chick once… She tried to talk me into getting matching tattoos," Dean said, seemingly out of the blue.
Since Dean didn't have any tattoos, Sam could only assume he'd refused. "What happened?"
"Told her I didn't believe in them on religious grounds."
Sam laughed. "Cause you look like such a good church-going boy."
Dean grinned, his more normal rakish smile and Sam was happy to see it. "I've got wholesome written all over me, Sammy."
"Or not written, as the case may be."
Dean nodded. Tattoos had never really appealed to either of them. They'd seen them used too often for more than just decorative reasons. Symbols, sigils, anything like that permanently on a person's skin could mean a lot of things in their business, rarely anything good. A tattoo that reminded you of a loved one was one thing. A tattoo that said you belonged to a loved one, be that family or a witch or a demon, was another. Tattoos could carry a lot of weight in the supernatural realm. The djinn had been their most recent reminder. Not to mention that the police had a nasty habit of cataloguing tattoos to identify a person.
"She woulda picked something wussy anyway," Dean continued. "Try explaining cupids or whatever to a bunch of guys at the Roadhouse."
Sam shuddered appropriately. "What happened to the girl?"
Dean shrugged. "Ditched me one night for a dude with 'Budweiser 4ever' on his arm." He drew the four in the air with his finger. "Thought it was kinda tacky myself, but hey…" He shrugged again.
"Whatever makes a person happy, huh?" Sam said.
Dean looked at him, staring, gone somewhere else for just a second. Then he blinked and abruptly sat back in the chair, leaning heavily against the back rest. "Yeah." Dean ran a hand through his sleep-tousled hair. "Sure."
Sam coughed, shifting uncomfortably in his chair. He just couldn't seem to keep his foot out of his mouth. Dean had given up a life that must have felt like paradise on earth compared to what he was living now and he'd done it for the sake of the job, for what was real, for Sam.
"So the tattoo guy."
"Right." Sam pulled up the site and flipped the laptop around so Dean could see it. "His name is Bud Mortimer. He's been specializing in memorial tattoos for fifteen years or so. He was a portrait artist before he got into tattooing. He does other things, but portraits are what he does best."
"Anything look fishy about him?" Dean asked, not really concentrating on the screen. "Other than the freaky-ass tattoos that are about to eat his face?"
Sam gave him a half-grin. "Looks clean to me. His process actually takes some work, especially if he's using grave dirt. He's got an autoclave for the tattoo equipment, uses that to sterilize it, but like he said, I don't think he does more than wave the stuff near the tattoo ink anyway. It's basically for effect. People feel better, or whatever, and he makes a ton of money."
Dean sighed. "Except a bunch of people are dead and we don't know why."
"Yeah. And he's been doing this for years and this is the first time anybody's ever turned up dead."
"That we know of."
"Huh?"
"He said people come from all over the country. We don't know if people have died once they got home."
Sam shook his head. "The EMF wasn't centered on the tattoos. I think this is somebody here in town taking people out. It's related to the tattoos, but…" Sam frowned in frustration. "I don't know." He looked across the table to see that Dean was staring down at his hands.
"Can you imagine what Dad would have done if we'd tried something like that with his ashes?"
The thought was so ludicrous that Sam laughed and Dean's lips quirked up slightly on one side. "I'm having a terrible image of my tattoo coming to life to boss me around."
Dean snorted. "That's my job. You don't need a tattoo for that."
For once, Sam wished that his brother would boss him around. "So what do you want to do?" he asked.
"Dad would've already burned down the tattoo place," Dean observed.
Sam just raised an eyebrow. "I was hoping for something a little more subtle."
Dean sighed resignedly and shifted forward again, moving like an old man. "So we figure out what changed a month ago. What do we have?"
Sam sat back, rubbing a hand over his face in frustration. "A whole lot of nothing." He pulled a sheaf of papers out of his bag and spread it out in front of them on the table. "We have victims that have nothing in common, but that they went to the same tattoo place. No one is related, the graves they were visiting don't have anything in common. Some were old graves, some new. Some were elderly people, some younger, one child. Men, women, ages, jobs, families… there's nothing except the tattoos, which are old and new as well."
"So something that happened a month ago set all this off," Dean surmised. "Something that stirred up a ghost that's been dormant, or maybe someone new." He pulled the laptop closer to him and began typing.
"What are you looking for?"
"Obits," Dean answered. "Might be a new resident in the cemetery doesn't like visitors…"
Sam just nodded and remained silent while Dean worked, in truth glad to see some initiative. As was often the case, giving his brother something to do was the best way to help him through whatever was troubling him. Finally, Dean sat back. "Anything?"
Dean shook his head. "A few other deaths. Nothing standing out."
"So now what?"
"Guess we go back to the tattoo place." Dean smiled innocently. "Only this time we're a little less Health Department and a little more kick-ass hunters of every evil thing that stalks the night."
Sam snorted. "And if that doesn't work? We what? Burn it to the ground?"
"Thought you wanted subtle." Dean's smile transformed into a wolfish grin. "We'll just break his fingers so he can never tattoo again."
The sun was just setting as Dean pulled the Impala to a halt in front of the tattoo shop. He shut the car off and he and Sam both looked up just in time to see the plate glass store front explode outward as the tattoo artist crashed through it. The man fell onto the sidewalk in a limp pile and didn't move again.
More soon…