GUNSLINGER (Chapter Two)

"You are a hard man to hunt, Samuel Bevins," Conrad said. His jaw creaked and his death corroded fingers stroked the barrel of the rifle in his hands.

Sam knelt with his hands clasped behind his head and stared mutely at a smear of blood on the floor. It was probably his own. Dean lay further over, closer to the door, sprawled ungainly, his breath raising dust. Sedated by a rifle butt to the temple.

Whatever role Brad had played in bringing them here, his relationship with the dead men was no longer in doubt. Actually, the whole unreal nightmare had become clear. The two spirits believed Sam had murdered their loved ones. Conrad's entire family to be precise, though Tom, the older one, was some form of relative, brother maybe, Sam wasn't really sure.

"You deaf, boy?"

Sam ignored that, because really, what was the point? His throat hurt from trying to explain himself. How the two spirits failed to see his modern dress, his mannerisms… that he couldn't possibly resemble a man from over a hundred years earlier, was inconsequential. The dead see what they want to see. Plain and simple. No reasoning with that.

Brad Jennings pressed the muzzle of his gun to Dean's head. Right at the temple, in that little hollow between eye and hairline. If the weapon fired, it'd blow Dean's brains out. Sam refused to acknowledge the threat – refused to show any reaction at all.

"How 'bout we blow a hole in your friend here," Conrad said.

Brad's gun moved and sank, muzzle point shallow, into Dean's left side. Sam noted it impassively, his lungs burning, his expression poker-flat.

Conrad sauntered across the floor, his boots making a harsh clunking sound against the timber boards. "He'd bleed out nice and slow. Painful-like."

Gut-shot, Sam thought. Greater survivability than a headshot, but out here, with desert as the only witness and sixty miles from the nearest town, it meant jack-shit. Dean would bleed out before Sam had made it ten miles, that's if he didn't roll the Impala first.

Conrad kept pacing, clunking his boots. Sam stared at the fixed spot on the floor. He breathed shallowly. His head ached and blood ran warm down his neck, seeped beneath the collar of his shirt.

If they shot Dean, Sam wouldn't be able to save him. See, he became reckless when it came to his brother's life. His focus narrowed, he blocked things out, blocked out threats. He lacked the calm, homicidal fury that kept Dean grounded and peripherally cognizant. He figured it was because his father and Dean had sheltered and protected him, but it didn't really matter, because their plan had failed spectacularly.

Great plan it had been too. Take out the dead guys in hand to hand combat. Fantastic!

If Brad hadn't knocked the shotgun from Dean's hands after feigning distress, things might have gone a whole different way. Though, maybe not – dead men feel no pain, but living ones sure as hell do.

Now his only chance was to buy time: allow Dean to be alone with Brad and maybe, hopefully, Dean could bring the rancher around – or overwhelm him in order to grab a weapon that would work on the ghosts.

Conrad stopped before him, hunkered down, his hideously dilated eyes inches from Sam's own. His breath reeked of rotting death and Sam instinctively turned his face away. Tom fisted a hand in Sam's hair and wrenched his head back.

"You killed my daughter, my son, my wife," Conrad said. His voice had the flat, inflectionless quality of the walking dead.

"And your dog," Sam added with a forced sneer, because what the hell he was probably screwed anyway.

Conrad smirked in a show of yellow rotted teeth and a putrid decaying tongue. "Yes, and the dog."

Sam swallowed convulsively, his leer losing much of its vigor.

"Old Red was the best damned hunting dog I ever had, and you blew his head off. In front of my children. In front of my wife."

Sam needed rock salt, a conscious brother… a damned miracle. He'd get none of those, just vivid accusations and a twisting stake of fear. Buying time no longer seemed a viable option.

"Rose kept herself for only me, and you… you defiled her."

Conrad snarled and back-handed him. The blow bloodied his lips and raised heat to his jaw. The hold on his hair tightened. Sam sought out his brother then jerked his gaze away.

"If we're gonna duel, I'll need a gun," Sam said. He shifted fractionally to ease the pressure on his aching neck. Tom overcompensated and Sam had no choice but to look down the bridge of his nose as pain cramped his upper back.

"No duel. You'll die like a coward."

"Where's the challenge in that?"

"No challenge. It's justice."

"There's no honor in killing a defenseless man."

Conrad studied him, the soulless chasms glittering, reflecting evil and madness and a century of lust and loss. "If we shoot your friend, would that hurt you?"

Sam refused to look away, refused to show how much that prospect tore his heart out. "No."

Conrad accepted that with unnerving ease. "Take him over to the Sherriff's office," he said to Brad. "There's a cell out back. We'll deal with him later."

Brad tucked the gun into a pocket, stood and started dragging Dean feet first across the saloon.

"No!" Sam twisted, wrenching his neck as he lashed out an arm. He sliced it into Tom's midriff, pushing him backwards into a table setting that collapsed beneath his weight. Dust lifted and sound exploded.

Brad continued dragging, as though on automaton, and Dean's head thump-thumped across the timber boards.

Sam wheeled and kicked, slamming Conrad in the side. The impact should have broken ribs, sent him flying – hurt like a vicious bitch. But Conrad bent laterally like a jelly puppet, feet cemented to the floor and head stationery. Before Sam could regain his balance, Conrad raised a two foot length of rusted rebar.

Where the hell had that come from?

Sam ducked and rolled. Scampered across the floor and dodged repeated blows in a frantic, panicked dance around the saloon. His goal, the open space beyond the bat-wing doors. Brad crossed the threshold and disappeared, taking Dean with him. The timbre of the rancher's footfalls gained a deeper resonance then tapered off entirely as he hit the desert sand.

For a moment sunlight lacerated the darkened room as the doors swung, opening a chasm of light – an opportunity. Sam lunged for it, beating tables and chairs out of the way, dodging the two dead men and their frenzied attack. The rebar lanced and parried – wielded like Luke Skywalker's light saber. It caught him across the back, drove him to his knees, his spine cracking. He scrambled blindly, moving even as his mind told him he no longer could.

He backpedaled into a corner, sweat stinging his eyes, his back on fire. Shudders ripped pain through the length of his torso, and his bowels cramped.

Conrad whipped the air with the metal lance while Tom kicked chairs out of the way to make a clear path.

Desperate, exhausted and pain-clumsy, Sam grabbed a chair, raised it legs out before him and charged into the gap. He drove it straight at Tom, who stood closest to the door. The timber prongs lanced the man's torso, drove deep into his innards then popped out the other side. The seat of the chair stopped when it flattened against the man's chest. Sam shoved, expecting Tom to skid backwards, as he had done before. But no, the man grinned with his paper dry skin, death leached lips and hell's own breath.

"Shit." Sam spun, his lungs failing to oxygenate his limbs as he faced Conrad. Tom grabbed his arms, cold, dead fingers pinning him in place. The timber seat pressed against his back.

Sam dug an elbow backwards, forgetting the timber chair, and smashed his humorous nerve with such force that his entire arm went numb. Small mercies, he thought miserably. The hold on his biceps tightened, the cold touch drilling through to the bone. He struggled because it hurt, Jesus it hurt!

"Sam Bevins, justice is served," Conrad said, and the dead man raised the rusted rebar.

Sam twisted away, recognizing the trajectory and the damage it would cause. But he had nowhere to go, and Tom's cement-like hold barred any chance at escape. The rebar whistled through the air. Sam closed his eyes, panting… bracing for the pain.

The rebar smashed into the left side of his face. Metal against flesh and bone. He cried out, his scream cut off as pain ignited. It flashed and seared. So intense that he couldn't think, couldn't breathe, couldn't move. He fell, loose limbed, landing on the floor. He tasted blood, felt the oxygen burn of air into an open wound and convulsed against the pain of it all.

Then… everything… just… faded.

For a blissful while he felt little pain, just a dulled grey nothingness. Not quite unconsciousness, but close enough that he could pretend he was in a motel somewhere, with Dean watching questionable content on cable television.

It didn't last.

When Sam regained his senses, he was outside, face down in the dirt, hacking up blood. Conrad and Tom stood over him, arms folded, faces knitted with morbid pleasure. The desert lay in a 280' vista, the saloon behind him. No sign of Dean or Brad.

Alone. He was alone.

He had wanted this – for them to take him away from his brother, to give Dean a chance.

"Where's my gun?" he asked blearily. "Can't duel without a gun." He pushed, sweaty handed, against the ground. Made it to his knees and swayed. His stomach played flyball with his bowels, and blood dried pasty tight to his face.

He was going to die.

The certainty of it weakened him, left him defenseless and hollow. It seemed unjust, unfair, but maybe it was due penance. As he knelt in the desert sand, two dead men observing his suffering with callous indifference, he accepted his fate – and he knew that through his death, these two men would achieve their peace.

It would mean something. It would matter. Conrad had lost his wife, his children… and his thirst for revenge had stolen his soul. Sam could give it back: he could give the man peace – he could make a difference. It made sense.

Except he didn't want to die.

He struggled to his feet, wavered like a top heavy flagpole as they grinned at him. Maybe he could run, though he doubted it. Sometimes there were four of them, sometimes six and his stomach roiled precariously. He bowed his head, closed his eyes and searched for composure, for a chance.

His mind fractured, and he fell to one knee, gritting his teeth as he opened his eyes. If they pitied him at all, and he knew they didn't, they didn't torture him by delaying the beating.

He tried to fight them, but his balance was off, his body refused to follow commands and ice-fingered Tom soon had him subdued and defenseless, his arms pinned behind his back, his feet locked into a stance that prevented escape.

"You defiled my wife." Conrad threw a gut punch. "Held her down" – another fist of knuckles – "forced your putrid self upon her." Four more blows, each fiercer than the last. "You made my children watch."

Sam tasted blood. His vision blackened and his head tipped forward.

"Never again," Conrad grunted and pile drove a fist into Sam's groin.

If Sam had held any breath, he would have screamed. But pain and shock had stolen that, instead he twisted, released by Tom, and staggered two steps before crumpling. They were on him faster than vultures on a newly dead carcass. The beating continued: fists, boots and words – evil, ugly images of depravity and suffering. Conrad's family had endured grave torment before their deaths. The dog – its head splattered from its body in one gory shower – had gotten off easily.

Sam sought unconsciousness, an escape from the gruesome images and the pain. Curled into a ball, he endured the beating with hazy stoicism. Consciousness ebbed and waned – but he kept an ounce of pride by making little sound. But when Conrad wrenched his right arm behind his back, forced him face down into the sand with such force that he choked, and twisted and twisted and twisted his arm, Sam screamed.

They gave him a reprieve after that, left him sobbing in the sand, bleeding and crying. His right arm still behind his back because he couldn't muster the courage to move it.

At some point he threw up, started choking on his own vomit and failed to make any effort to save himself. One of them, he wasn't sure which, hefted him up and held him until his airway cleared and his stomach had purged.

"That was for my son and daughter," Conrad said, his grave-deep breath burning tears to Sam's eyes. "And this is a taste of things to come."

Sam heard the clinking of chain. Dazed, he tried to make sense of the sound, of the movement of air around him. His arm spiked fiercely, and something slipped around his neck. Cold. Close. Intimate. His pulse notched up, his eyes widening, blinking in horrified understanding.

He reached for the metal links, swallowing convulsively as they tightened, cinching the soft skin of his neck, drawing tighter and tighter.

The chain squeezed, constricting his windpipe, cutting off his air. Sam struggled to his knees. Felt the biting closeness of Conrad standing behind him, fisted hands in the chains – drawing the links tighter. Sam's mind pitched black and red, flashes of pain interspersed with specks of nothingness. Lungs, desperate for air, billowed uselessly.

The chain cinched, link over link, biting deeper.

Death bore down, rupturing cells in a cataclysmic frenzy of cauterizing pain. Hot and cold. Sound and silence. So fast, so brutal, so final that Sam fell beneath it, helpless to offer any form of defense. Weak and hurting, he offered himself to it – splayed his soul with the knowledge that Dean wouldn't see, wouldn't know… wouldn't have to carry out his promise.

Twenty four years too late, and not a moment too soon.

In the moment of acceptance, the dark gift tore away. The chain released, rusted metal tearing into his neck as he fell. He felt the bite, registered the traumatic insult, and hit the ground face first. Consciousness splintered with the first ragged intake of heated desert air. The tattered gasps that followed leveled awareness to an abstract void.

"You will get a little rest now," Conrad whispered in his ear, the dead man's voice cutting like glass. "Then you will pay for killing my wife."