Lazarus Came Forth, Chapter Two
Jul. 15th, 2008 09:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
oselleTitle: Lazarus Came Forth
Pairings: None (gen)
Rating: R (for language)
Warnings: Serious angst, some gore, heavily Dean-centric
Spoilers: Through end of Season Three
Word Count: 7,000 for Chapter Two
Disclaimer: I don't own nothin and I ain't makin a penny off it.
Go back to Chapter One here.
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baylorsr beta'd the first half of this chapter but the rest is unbeta'd so any mistakes are my fault. Feel free to send me a message if any glaring error slaps you in the face. Comments are disabled to protect my agoraphobic muse.
Lazarus Came Forth
2. Signs and Wonders
Three members of the Mississippi Patriots Militia were the first responders to the fire near Rena Lara, although by the time they arrived there was little left to respond to. The house had burned to its foundation, leaving behind nothing but a chimney and gaping cellarhole and the surrounding fields had been high-summer dry and had kindled like straw. The fire had spread into the woods and probably would have taken out half of Coahoma County if the rain hadn't come. When the militia arrived the charred ruin was still smoldering and the sludge of wet ash on the ground was as thick and hot as tar. Judging from the size of the foundation, the house had been a big one but there was not even one doorknob left for the taking and Corporal Frank DiRita was not happy. This was a backwoods shitshow and it sure wasn't what he'd signed on for.
In the field they found three bodies burnt to black.
"This don't make no sense," DiRita said. "The house is on fire, how'd they burn up out here?"
"Maybe they was on fire when they run out," Private Larry Eula said. "Run out, fall down on the grass tryin to put theyselves out, grass is dry, they goes up like firewood."
"Hey, Harlan," DiRita called. "What're you thinking?"
Corporal Roy Harlan was standing over the third body, the one they'd found farthest from the house and DiRita didn't really expect him to answer. Harlan wasn't much on conversation. He'd joined up with the outfit in Clarksdale just a few days ago and the whole time he'd been giving DiRita a serious fucking case of the creeps. Most of the guys who joined the militia did it for pay, plunder and pussy and then you had spooky fuckers like Harlan who let all the fake military shit go to their heads. Nobody even knew where the hell he'd come from, one day he was just there.
"The owner of this house was a woman named Catherine Parsons," Harlan said without turning around. "This house was built in 1905 when the Parsons family moved here after the fire in Yazoo City. They said that fire was set by a witch, did you know that?"
DiRita and Eula looked at each other.
"Well, no Harlan, I didn't know that."
Harlan looked over his shoulder. "You don't know much about the great state of Mississippi, do you?"
"I'm from Florida," DiRita said. "I just go where the company tells me to go, Harlan. Same as you."
"This is Catherine Parsons' body," Harlan said.
"She a witch?" Eula said grinning. "That how come she burned the house down?"
DiRita smirked. "Yeah, Harlan, was she a witch?"
Harlan turned back to the body. He looked at it and then he lifted his foot and stomped down on Catherine Parsons' charred skull. It pulverized beneath his field boot and what was left of Catherine Parsons' skin flaked off like parchment. DiRita and Eula jumped in surprise and Harlan did it two more times and was fixing for a third when DiRita called out to him.
"Hey, Harlan man, what the fuck?"
Harlan turned around. He was red in the face and breathing hard as if that sorry pile of black bones had enraged him.
"What's your fuckin problem?"
"Yeah, Harlan," Eula said. "Why're you kickin the ol gal?"
Harlan stared at them. They stared back. The fire must have driven away all the birds and bugs because it was deathly quiet.
"We need to search these woods for survivors."
"Survivors?" DiRita said. "Hell, we found three bodies already. How many people were shacking up in that house?"
"Catherine Parsons was harboring a fugitive."
"Well, you got two more bodies over there. One of those crispy critters is probably your fugitive."
"Those men gave their lives in service to their country."
"We didn't have militia boys out here last night. I'd've known about it."
"I didn't say they were militia."
"Well what in the hell were they?"
"Private contractors."
"How come you know about this?" DiRita said. "We never heard nothin about it."
"They don't tell you everything."
"And they tell you?"
"More than you."
DiRita stared at Harlan. "You're fuckin crazy and this is a fuckin shitshow. I'm callin HQ in Clarksdale. Ask them about these fugitives before I go runnin through the woods with your crazy ass."
DiRita turned and started loping through the boot-sucking tar towards the Hummer. There was a sharp crack and DiRita was on the ground with a big hole in the back of his head. Eula took two stumbling steps back and was shot before he could say a word. He lay in the black muck with his arms outstretched. Harlan holstered his firearm.
"Fucking useless crackers," he said.
* * *
After Dean told them his name he asked them where he was and Buddy told him. Then July asked him if there was anyone they could call for him and he didn't answer for such a long time they thought he was asleep until he said he had a brother. That was the last thing he said that made any sense and by noon Buddy thought they were going to lose him. They had him on Tylenol and Buddy's old antibiotics and they put wet sheets over him and Buddy gave him ice chips like they'd given his wife in the hospice where she'd died but the fever wasn't coming down and Buddy thought maybe the boy had just been in too bad of a shape to begin with. All those stitched-up wounds and getting shot and losing so much blood and walking barefoot from God knows where until he was raw up to his ankles. It was enough to stir pity in the heart of the devil himself.
"There's that public hospital in Memphis," July said. "Think the truck'd make it up there?"
"She probably would but public ain't free."
July shrugged. "I got a little saved up."
"You hold onto your penny jar," Buddy said. "There's no point in goin up there just to get turned away. I heard they got quite a wait."
"And we'd have to drive all the way back here with that boy burnin up like he is."
"Yep, and there's still the matter of who shot him and why. There'd be a whole lotta questions to answer before anyone'd even take a look at him."
Buddy looked out the kitchen window. The yellow curtains hanging there were the ones his wife had picked out many years before. Outside the sun was baking the dirt lot behind the house. The chrome bumper of his truck winked out from the barn's darkness.
"I got a strange feelin about this," July said quietly.
"Strange how?"
"Well...I can't really say. Like, how come he was so quiet yesterday? He hardly even made a sound when you was pullin that bullet outta him, it was like...like he was used to that sorta thing. And all those stitches, I never saw anyone tore up like that. And then this mornin while you was in here makin coffee and I was settin back there with him he just starts rattlin off in some foreign language. I'm not sure but I think it was Latin. Church Latin, like them Robicheaux kids used to know."
"There's no accountin for what people say when they're that sick."
"Maybe so but it seems to me like this could be a sign of sorts. Like in the Bible there's always prophets or angels showin up at someone's door only no one knows that's what they are and it's only the person who's chosen for it that takes em in. You see what I'm sayin?"
"July, I don't have clue one what you're sayin."
"I'm sayin maybe we was chosen to make sure that boy doesn't die."
Buddy looked across at July. On the table between them was the gun he'd taken from Dean. Buddy picked it up and waved it at July.
"Your prophets and angels? They're usually packin one a these?"
"Well, angels ain't all harp-pickin. There's warrior angels too. He's got one right around his neck, St. Michael, he who trod Satan under his foot. We're livin in strange times, Buddy. There's bound to be signs and wonders."
Buddy thought about the awful smile Dean had given him when he'd said he was going to die and about all those terrible wounds on him and the way he'd looked at July's cross, the way he'd listened to July saying the psalm. There was something about him that didn't sit right. Maybe not prophets or angels, but something.
"If that boy gets up and starts tap dancin I'll believe in wonders," Buddy said. "Till then maybe you oughta wear a wider-brimmed hat when you do your devotions. Sun's baked your brain."
* * *
It wasn't tap dancing to be sure but the fever did break that evening. Buddy had no thermometer but the back of his hand on Dean's forehead revealed the closest thing to a normal temperature since they'd found him. He was deeply asleep and Buddy put a fresh blanket over him and let him rest. He felt weak with relief. The thought of burying the boy had filled him with an old man's horror of death and July's words had been weighing heavily on his mind though he'd never admit it. If July ever thought Buddy had come over to his side of the Jordan he'd hear about it for the rest of his days.
* * *
Harlan's job would have been easier if it hadn't rained the day after the fire. There would have been a scent to follow, even better there probably would have been blood. It would have led him right to the fugitive wherever he was holed up. Days of the world's time had gone by since they knew that he'd escaped, something that was not supposed to have happened, was not allowed under any rule. He had made his deal and they had called it in, simple and fair as that. These things were immutable.
Harlan didn't know the two who had gotten to Parsons' house first but they had clearly met with more than they had expected. He knew that the fugitive had gotten away and was living. His body was not in the woods or anywhere else because if he had been back among the dead, Harlan would have known. All of them would have known.
* * *
Dean opened his eyes onto a room pale with early morning light. Above him was a ceiling darkly waterstained in places and a milky light fixture with dead insects collected in its glass bowl. He turned his head to the left and saw a window with a yellowed pull shade. A sound of birds. The window propped open with a ruler. To the right was an open door and more daylight beyond.
He sat halfway up and was checked by the pain in his back. He put his hand over the bandaged wound as if that would keep the pain down and eased himself all the way up. He moved his legs off the bed and winced when he set his feet on the floor.
The whole procedure took him a good ten minutes. There was a full glass of water on the nightstand and he was ragingly thirsty but he drank it slowly to make sure it would stay down. He put the glass back on the nightstand and sat there with his head bowed and took long, slow breaths to manage the pain.
He remembered being told he was in Mississippi. He remembered a long, harrowing walk in the dark and he remembered the fire and the woman telling him to run before she died and remembered her taking care of him for some indeterminate time before that. And before that he knew that he'd been Dean Winchester and that his brother had watched him die. Everything between dying and waking up in the woman's house was very, very dark and while he knew where he had been and could have said so, his living self had no words with which to describe it because such language had never been invented and so his living mind was already blacking it out.
He rubbed the back of his neck and his fingers caught on the chain there. He followed it around to the front and looked at the saint's medal on his fingertips. He had no idea where it had come from but he knew he hadn't had it before he died.
He stood up and walked to the door. He was wearing a clean but very worn t-shirt and pajama bottoms in a similar state. His feet hurt almost as badly as his back and he took small steps and paused in the doorway to catch his breath. It was morning-cool in the house but he was sweating.
There was no one in the kitchen and he seemed to be the only person awake. The kitchen was of a size typical of old houses in the country and furnished with a cracking vinyl dinette and ancient appliances that reminded him of Bobby Singer's kitchen. His entire afterlife was becoming a black hole in his memory but he could remember the trucklike chug of Bobby's shitty refrigerator and that was fine with him.
Through the kitchen was a short hallway with a bathroom at the end of it. He went in and shut the door. He switched on the light and a fluorescent bar buzzed into life above the medicine cabinet and he turned and looked at himself in the mirror.
It was his own face and yet it wasn't, not anymore. He wondered if anyone who'd known him would be able to see that. Maybe Sam. Definitely Sam. There was no one physical change that he could identify and yet it was all changed, all different. His eyes dropped down to the open neck of his t-shirt and he could see the scars there and he pushed the shirt off his shoulder and looked at the wounds that had killed him. He wondered who had stitched him back together after he'd died. Probably Sam. Definitely Sam. He looked back at his altered face in the mirror. He had died. He had gone to hell. He'd been brought back. Everything seemed to shift beneath him and he sat down hard and painfully on the toilet lid and put his forehead on the cool porcelain edge of the sink. He thought he was going to pass out but something tore up out of him instead and then he was crying, real living tears though whether they were of grief or gratitude he couldn't tell.
* * *
Buddy made Dean a soft-boiled egg and two pieces of toast for breakfast but refused to make him any coffee, giving him glass after glass of watery grape drink-mix instead. Buddy and July sat there and watched him eat like two kids feeding a stray cat.
They asked him if he wanted to try and get in touch with the brother he'd mentioned and he answered honestly that he didn't know where his brother was. It pressed on Dean that Sam wasn't there and that Sam was nowhere in his recent memories. Sam hadn't been at the woman's house either and yet someone had gotten him out of hell and if not Sam then who?
For the first time Dean looked at the calendar on the refrigerator. He'd seen it before but hadn't paid attention to it and he set down his glass and stood up and went over to it. He looked at it for a long time before turning back to the old men.
"It's 2012?" he said and they nodded and looked at each other.
"2012?" he asked again.
"All year," Buddy said.
Four years? Dean thought. Four years?
He must have turned some sick color because Buddy came over and put a hand on his arm.
"You maybe shouldn't be up. Yesterday at this time we didn't think you were gonna make it."
"Four years?" he said to no one in particular.
"Why don't you go have a lie-down?"
"Do you have a computer?" Dean asked. He glanced around the kitchen. "Scratch that. Do you have a television?"
"It don't work. I never got that digital thing they was peddlin a few years ago."
Oh God, Dean thought. I've crash-landed with Pa and Pa Kettle.
"What...look, this is going to sound crazy but...have things been...different?"
"Different like how?"
"Like, strange. Have strange things been happening in the past four years? Like things no one can explain?"
"Just bad times," Buddy said soothingly. "Same as always."
"As in they closed the plant bad times, or as in plague of locusts bad times?"
Buddy didn't say anything. It was July, still at the kitchen table, who spoke.
"Sorta like that last bit," he said.
Dean stared at July. It was quiet enough to hear a fly buzzing in the windowscreen.
"I have to go," Dean said. He pulled away from Buddy. "I have to go."
"Go where?"
"I don't know. I need to find my brother. Do you have..."
He wanted to ask them if they had any clothes he could wear or a car he could borrow and then realized he might as well ask them for a goddamn time machine because he'd lost four years and what in God's name had happened during that time and where the hell was Sam?
"Dean?" Buddy asked. He sounded very far away.
Dean wiped a hand over his face. He took a step back.
"I'm fine," he said though he wasn't. "I'm..."
He was falling and he heard Buddy say his name again and heard July's chair scraping over the linoleum floor and that was that.
* * *
Dean was half-awake by the time they got him back into bed but he was deathly pale and wordless and when Buddy told him that he needed to take it slow he only nodded and closed his eyes.
"Where's he been," July asked in the kitchen, "That he don't know what year it is?"
Buddy had nothing to say.
* * *
Buddy woke in the night from some troubling dream and he sat up in bed and felt the dream clinging to him and couldn't shake it off. He was thirsty and he wanted some of that purple drink in the icebox and when he went downstairs he saw someone silhouetted in the pale square of backdoor window.
"July?" he said.
"Shhh," Dean said. "Don't turn on the light."
"What're you doin up? You need to stay in bed."
"There's something outside the house."
"There's all kind of critters outside at night."
Buddy wondered if Dean was feverish again. He came and stood beside him and looked out into the yard. He saw nothing except moonlight on the dirt and glinting off the Chevy's bumper in the barn.
Then he saw some black shape detach itself from the darkness of the barn as if the shadows themselves had taken on form. It slunk around the front of the truck with a creeping purposefulness and was absorbed back into the blackness.
"What was that, a dog?"
"I don't think so," Dean said.
July's shotgun was standing up by the door where he'd left it. Dean took it and held it up to the faint light and breeched it open and took out a shell and turned it over in his hand. He put it back into the shotgun and breeched it shut and handed it to Buddy.
"You hold onto that. Where's the gun I had on me?"
Buddy felt a faint flush creep onto his face. He hadn't told Dean about the gun. He'd put it up on the wardrobe in his bedroom and had hoped Dean didn't remember it. He'd be happy to give it back to him when he was sure that Dean was all right in the head and today hadn't made him too confident of it.
"I know you found me with a gun, Buddy, I need to see it."
"Dean, it's just some old dog."
"Well then no harm no foul, right? Can I see the gun?"
Buddy went upstairs. July was standing in the hallway and asked him what was going on.
"I don't know," Buddy said. "There's somethin in the barn."
"Somethin like what?"
"I don't know that either."
"Why're you carryin my shotgun?"
"You ask too many goddamn questions, July."
He got the gun down from the top of the wardrobe without turning on the light and went downstairs with July trailing after him. Dean held out his hand and Buddy gave him the gun and Dean released the magazine and popped one of the rounds out into his hand where it gleamed silvery in the moonlight. He loaded it back into the magazine and slid that back into the gun.
"You got a flashlight or something?"
"Are you goin out in the barn?"
"Yeah. You guys stay here."
"The hell I am. It's my barn."
"I mean it," Dean said. "You stay here."
Dean had gotten halfway across the yard before Buddy swore under his breath and went after him. It was hot and very still. There was not a breath of air and Buddy could not hear any sound of insect or night creature. As if his ears had been packed with cotton. Dean was walking lightly on his bandaged feet. He hardly made a sound but he must have heard Buddy behind him because he turned around and motioned at Buddy to go back and then something was charging at him out of the barn.
Buddy had lived in Mississippi all his life and figured he knew everything in it that flew or swam or crept about but he'd never seen anything like this. It was like a dog but much bigger than a dog and blacker than hell's cellar with eyes as red and fiery as a coal stove and its mouth full of dripping teeth. Buddy would grasp these things later because what he saw in the moonlight was nothing but a black shape, hideously fast, and then Dean was on the ground and it was on top of him. It had been years since Buddy had been hunting but he sighted the shotgun and unloaded both barrels into the thing and nothing seemed to happen and then Buddy heard two more shots and a howl like nothing he'd ever heard on this earth.
Dean was up on one knee with his hand pressed to the wound in his back and when Buddy and July got to him he was saying, "Shit, shit," to himself as if the pain was a bigger shock than whatever he'd just killed. Buddy thought about all those stitched wounds that Dean had and he spared a glance at the thing while they were helping him up and saw it had long yellow claws curved like boar tusks.
"We need to burn that," Dean said.
"Sure, sure," Buddy said, because burning something like that sounded like the best idea anyone had ever had. By then they'd made it to the back porch steps and Buddy realized he could hear night sounds again as if a shadow had passed over the place and was gone.
* * *
Dean had bled through the bandage on his back and Buddy offered him two pain pills but he turned them down and sat at the kitchen table with his head pressed into his forearm while Buddy pulled sodden gauze out of the hole in his back and cleaned it out and packed it and rebandaged it. Dean felt like puking by the end of it and must have looked it because Buddy brought him a glass of water and put the orange pillbottle next to it.
Dean shook his head. "I have to go. Do you have any clothes I can wear?"
"Dean, you can't hardly walk. Where're you gonna go?"
"I can't explain."
"Well, I sure wish you would because this is all makin less and less sense to me."
"My momma used to tell stories about things like that," July said suddenly. "She'd say not to go near crossroads at night and stay away from bridges and the like because that was where you'd find em. Black shucks, that was what she called em. Never thought I'd see one with my own eyes. Was either that or a damn hellhound."
"It wasn't a hellhound," Dean said but held back from adding that one of those wouldn't have been taken out by a couple of silver bullets. He drank the water and saw Buddy and July glance at each other.
"There was some folks breedin pitbulls for dog-fightin here a few years ago and I'll bet that thing is just one of the ones that got away. Don't make it any less hair-raisin but hell..."
"Buddy," Dean said. "I have to go."
Buddy looked at him and opened his mouth to say something and then there was a sound of a vehicle pulling up in front of the house, something with a deep, heavy engine. The engine cut off but the sound of it seemed still to vibrate in the house. It was just past four in the morning.
"Who in the hell could that be?" Buddy said and Dean wondered if he knew that he was whispering.
The fluorescent circle in the ceiling flickered once, then again. Dean looked up at it. He could hear someone climbing the front porch steps. The light flickered and buzzed. The doorbell rang and the old-fashioned bell key rattled the house as if chains were being drawn around it.
Buddy stood up and Dean grabbed his arm.
"Do you have any salt?"
"Salt? There's salt right on the table there..."
"No no no, lots of it. Like road salt, bags of it?"
The doorbell shrieked again and Dean tightened his grip on Buddy's arm.
"Dean, what's the matter with you?"
"Doors and windows. You've got to salt the doors and windows or they're gonna get in."
"No one's gettin in this house without my say-so. You stay right here." He hefted July's shotgun and nodded at July. "You come with me. Two old men're better'n one."
Buddy and July left Dean in the kitchen. He got up and turned off the light. He got the gun off the kitchen table though if he was right about what was at the door silver bullets wouldn't do much more than the little birdshot shells in July's shotgun. He stepped out of the kitchen and into the hallway. The hallway opened off into the front room. Buddy switched on the porchlight and opened the door and Dean could see what was at the door and knew that Buddy and July could not. He spun around and pressed his back to the wall before it could see him and stood there with his heart hammering and sweat running down his neck and tracking along the silver chain he wore.
"Boyd Lennox?"
"Sir?"
"Corporal Harlan of the Mississippi Patriots Militia, Clarksdale Brigade. I need to search your house."
"It's awful late, sir."
"Will you put down your firearm and step aside, Mr. Lennox?"
"I know you don't need a warrant no more but maybe you could do the courtesy of tellin me what this is about?"
"There's an escaped prisoner in the area. He murdered five people in Rena Lara including two other members of the MPM."
"There ain't nobody here but the two of us," July said.
"I need to see that for myself."
"At four in the mornin?" Buddy asked.
"This is official militia business. You'll step aside now, Mr. Lennox."
"I ain't lettin some rented cop in my house."
"Let him in," Dean said. "Before he shoots you."
Buddy and July turned and stared at him. Harlan smiled, the face beneath his human skin running and changing and Dean pushed Buddy out of the way and threw a pitcher of water in Harlan's face, a pitcher of water with the St. Michael's medal in it and Harlan howled and bent double with his hands over his smoking face.
Dean grabbed the shotgun out of Buddy's hands and brought the stock down hard on the back of Harlan's head.
"What are you doin?" Buddy said. "He's militia!"
"No he isn't," Dean said. Harlan was getting up and Dean hit him with the shotgun again and the wooden stock shivered and split from the blow and Harlan snarled and Dean grabbed him by the back of the collar and dragged him into the house.
"Get his gun!" Dean said and thought it was July who reached down and pulled it from its holster and then Harlan lunged at Dean's legs and brought him down hard to the floor.
The pain that erupted in Dean's gunshot wound knocked all the air out of him but he turned on his hip and kicked Harlan in the face and then got up and ran and Harlan scrabbled after him as Dean had known he would. He made it into the kitchen with Harlan right on his heels and then Dean turned and Harlan stopped and looked down and looked up at Dean.
"Fuck," he said.
Dean leaned against the kitchen sink and caught his breath and smiled because he hadn't forgotten how to draw a Devil's Trap and there was a crude but effective one on Buddy's linoleum floor, done in black marker and Harlan was right in the middle of it. Behind him Buddy and July stood in the kitchen doorway and July was holding Harlan's big militia-issue firearm and staring at the markings on the floor and Buddy was staring at Dean. Dean's smile faded and he shook his head and looked away and then Harlan opened his mouth and howled enough to shake the house and the fluorescent halo in the ceiling flared white-hot and burst into glassine dust.
* * *
Buddy had seen some things in his day. He'd been to war. He'd seen young men get blown into bloody rags and try to get up and run. He'd watched his wife die slow, eaten up by cancer. He'd seen people executed right in the streets of his own country by militia. He'd never seen anything like this.
The soldier who'd called himself Harlan was stuck in the middle of a circle of symbols drawn in the marker Buddy'd had hanging from a string on the refrigerator door. His face was burnt though it didn't seem that Dean had thrown anything stronger than water at him. Some of it had splashed on Buddy and that's all it had been, water. Dean drew up a chair and sat down facing Harlan and Buddy could see fresh blood slicking the back of his shirt.
"Don't go near him," Dean said. "Don't get anywhere inside that circle."
Buddy lit a match. His hands were shaking. There was an oil lamp on top of the refrigerator and he lit that and put it on the kitchen table. Harlan looked at him and for a second Buddy thought the man's eyes had gone black as a rat's but that must have been a trick of the light.
"You look like shit," Harlan said to Dean.
"Looked in the mirror lately?"
"You can see me?"
"Yeah, I can see you. The real you."
"You're fresh out. Veil's still thin, isn't it?"
Dean stared at him and said nothing. His gun was on the kitchen table and he picked it up and shot Harlan through the right knee. Buddy jumped. He saw July against the refrigerator put his hand over his heart. Harlan fell down. Dean stood up.
"That won't kill you but it's silver and it's gotta hurt like hell."
"You would know."
"How did you find me?"
"We can smell you."
"How did I get out?"
"Satan shat you out of his asshole."
"Where's my brother?"
"He's dead," Harlan said and Dean froze.
"You're lying."
"Why would I lie? Nothing's ever worse than the truth. Didn't you learn that's what hell is?"
"Where is my brother?"
"He's in heaven, fucking your mother while your father fucks him."
"Dean?" Buddy said quietly.
"Oh, you're on first-name basis with this thing?" Harlan said and Buddy looked at him. "That road to hell really is paved with good intentions, isn't it? You have any idea what you were playing good Samaritan to?"
Buddy looked at Dean. Even in the dim light Buddy could see how white he'd gone. There was sweat running into his eyes and he blinked it away.
"Why don't you tell him, Dean? Tell him where you've been the last four years."
"Dean, do you know him?"
"Oh, he knows me. Don't you sweetheart?" Harlan swung his head back to Buddy. "I fucked him for an eternity. I made him suck my dick until he choked. I fucked him on all fours and he'd beg me to stop, he'd fucking beg..."
Something black came whirling at Harlan and hit him in the back of the head and he bellowed and fell over on his knees.
"Hold your forked tongue, devil," July said.
Dean bent down and picked up what July had thrown and handed it to Buddy. It was the leather-bound King James Bible that his wife's sister had given him when she died.
Buddy stared at July. Wasn't that just like him to find the right word?
* * *
The Robicheaux kids who had lived down the road apiece had been Catholics and altar boys and they'd known that Church Latin backwards and forwards. Buddy hadn't heard it in more than sixty years but he knew what it was when Dean started saying it, just like July had said he'd done while he was feverish. It didn't make one word of sense to Buddy but it sure was having an effect on Harlan. He was spitting and hissing in the middle of the circle and his eyes had gone a flat, dead black.
Dean circled around Harlan saying things that Buddy didn't understand and by now he was limping so badly on his left side that he could hardly stay upright but he didn't seem to notice, just like he didn't seem to notice that Buddy and July were still in the room. He didn't even look up at Buddy when he stumbled and Buddy caught him.
"Where's my brother?"
"Dead."
Dean went back to that Church talk and Harlan started screaming. Dean stopped.
"Is he with her? Does she have him?"
"Lean in real close and I'll tell you."
Dean leaned towards the circle and Harlan grinned up at him. Buddy saw a silver ribbon of drool unspool from his mouth to the floor.
"He's dead. She tore his fucking head off. I saw her do it." He licked his lips.
Dean stood upright and closed his eyes and took a deep breath.
"They're all dead, Dean, everyone you knew is dead. There's no place for you here."
Dean opened his eyes and looked at Harlan.
"We're coming for you."
Dean shook his head. "Not you."
He threw more Latin at Harlan and the eyes of the man who was no man rolled up in his head and his head snapped around and Buddy heard his neck give. And then something black came up and out of his mouth and shot up to the ceiling and it was gone though it left a stink behind like shit and sulfur and the house fell very, very quiet.
Dean sat down and put his head in his hands. Buddy stood by the wall holding the bible. July was across the room with his hand over his mouth. The man on the floor was dead. It was six-thirty in the morning and the windows were lightening.
Finally Dean said, "How far will that truck get you?"
Buddy didn't understand the question. "What?"
"How far will that truck get you? How far from here?"
"Well I...I don't know. Where am I goin?"
"Both of you, you're leaving. Go somewhere, anywhere, just put a lot of miles between yourself and this place." He sat up and looked at Buddy. "A woman is dead because of me and you will be too if you don't leave."
"Did he kill her?"
"I don't know but he isn't the last one."
"Last one of what? I don't even know what in the hell just happened here except I got a dead militia on my kitchen floor."
Dean looked at July. "What do you think happened?"
July hitched in a breath and held it and looked at Buddy and looked back at Dean.
"I think an imp of Satan crawled up outta hell and found its way here, that's what I think."
"Well..." Buddy said. "If that don't..." He looked at Dean. "What does that make you?"
"Really bad luck. You have more shells for that shotgun?"
"At my house," July said.
"Good. Get them. And keep that piece you took off him."
Dean got off the chair and got down on the floor next to Harlan and started taking off his clothes.
"You're bleeding again," Buddy said.
Dean paused and put his hand on his back and looked at the blood on his fingers.
"Shit."
"Let me take care of it."
"I'll take the stuff with me and do it myself."
"Where are you going?"
"I don't know. But wherever I go, you go in the opposite direction, understand?" He had taken off Harlan's black t-shirt and was looking at his dog tags. "What's this militia? Some bunch of survivalist nutjobs?"
"No. They're the law. Martial law. Here in Mississippi and in most states."
"Since when?"
"Year or so."
Dean shook his head put the dog tag chain around his neck. He stripped off his bloody shirt and put on Harlan's shirt. He stood up and shucked off the pajama bottoms and put on the soldier's camouflage trousers and looked at the hole in the knee where the bullet had passed through.
"We're not gonna get very far, none of us," Buddy said. "The gas alone..."
"Don't worry about that," July said. "I got plenty of money back at the house."
"I don't think your penny jar'll do the trick," Buddy said.
"I got a couple hunnerd thousand. In a hole in the wall. Shoot, I never had no vacation in my entire life. Maybe it's time for one."
Dean paused in pulling on Harlan's boots. He looked at Buddy. "This guy's full of surprises."
"Sure is," said Buddy in amazement. "He's a regular jack-in-the-box."
* * *
July took the Chevy to his house and Buddy helped Dean wrap Harlan's body in a sheet and take it out to the black Hummer H3. They put it in the back and closed the door and Dean stopped and put his arm on the H3's roof and laid his forehead against it.
"You're not doin too good," Buddy said.
"I'll be okay," he said. He raised his head and wiped his face and looked at Buddy. "I'm sorry about this."
"I don't get the feelin this was your fault, bad luck or no. Times are hard. Bad things're happenin. It comes to everyone sooner or later."
"I wish I could help you."
"Seems like you need to look out for yourself right now, whatever you done. Are you gonna try and find your brother?"
"Yeah."
"Well, I sure hope you do."
"I hope so too."
Dean smiled. It was the first real smile Buddy had seen on him and it made him look very young but very tired. There were a couple dozen questions Buddy wanted to ask him but couldn't bring himself to do it. This boy has a hell of a long row to hoe, Buddy thought. I wouldn't want to be in his shoes.
* * *
July came back and they packed a few things in the truck and July made Dean take some money.
"The Lord helps those that helps themselves, so you just...you help yourself," July said. "I got somethin else for you too."
He held out his hand and dropped the silver chain and St. Michael's medal into Dean's palm. Dean looked at it.
"I don't even know where this came from," he said.
"You know who that is I take it?"
"St. Michael," Dean said. "The archangel."
"Who trod Satan under his foot," July said and Dean looked up at him. "Maybe you don't know where it came from but you sure deserve to wear it. You take care now, son."
"I'll try." He looked from July to Buddy and then at the Chevy. "Just keep driving. Get as far as you can. Wherever you stay, do that thing with the salt that I told you about."
"Do you know where you're goin?" Buddy asked.
"I'm still working on it. West, I think."
"Well good luck to you, wherever you go."
"God bless you," July added.
Dean smiled and fastened the medal around his neck. He climbed in the H3 and looked at both of them.
"Thank you," he said and keyed the ignition and pulled out.
They'd been driving for about half an hour when Buddy glanced over at July.
"I know what you're thinkin," he said.
"What would that be?"
"You're thinkin next time I wanna go and fish someone up outta the river I can do it myself."
"I wasn't thinkin no such thing."
"Well what then?"
"For some have entertained angels unawares," July said. "That's what I was thinkin."
Buddy thought he had something to say but he didn't. He reached out and patted his old friend on the arm and turned back to the road.
To be continued.
Go ahead to Chapter Three.
Pairings: None (gen)
Rating: R (for language)
Warnings: Serious angst, some gore, heavily Dean-centric
Spoilers: Through end of Season Three
Word Count: 7,000 for Chapter Two
Disclaimer: I don't own nothin and I ain't makin a penny off it.
Go back to Chapter One here.
baylorsr beta'd the first half of this chapter but the rest is unbeta'd so any mistakes are my fault. Feel free to send me a message if any glaring error slaps you in the face. Comments are disabled to protect my agoraphobic muse.Lazarus Came Forth
2. Signs and Wonders
Three members of the Mississippi Patriots Militia were the first responders to the fire near Rena Lara, although by the time they arrived there was little left to respond to. The house had burned to its foundation, leaving behind nothing but a chimney and gaping cellarhole and the surrounding fields had been high-summer dry and had kindled like straw. The fire had spread into the woods and probably would have taken out half of Coahoma County if the rain hadn't come. When the militia arrived the charred ruin was still smoldering and the sludge of wet ash on the ground was as thick and hot as tar. Judging from the size of the foundation, the house had been a big one but there was not even one doorknob left for the taking and Corporal Frank DiRita was not happy. This was a backwoods shitshow and it sure wasn't what he'd signed on for.
In the field they found three bodies burnt to black.
"This don't make no sense," DiRita said. "The house is on fire, how'd they burn up out here?"
"Maybe they was on fire when they run out," Private Larry Eula said. "Run out, fall down on the grass tryin to put theyselves out, grass is dry, they goes up like firewood."
"Hey, Harlan," DiRita called. "What're you thinking?"
Corporal Roy Harlan was standing over the third body, the one they'd found farthest from the house and DiRita didn't really expect him to answer. Harlan wasn't much on conversation. He'd joined up with the outfit in Clarksdale just a few days ago and the whole time he'd been giving DiRita a serious fucking case of the creeps. Most of the guys who joined the militia did it for pay, plunder and pussy and then you had spooky fuckers like Harlan who let all the fake military shit go to their heads. Nobody even knew where the hell he'd come from, one day he was just there.
"The owner of this house was a woman named Catherine Parsons," Harlan said without turning around. "This house was built in 1905 when the Parsons family moved here after the fire in Yazoo City. They said that fire was set by a witch, did you know that?"
DiRita and Eula looked at each other.
"Well, no Harlan, I didn't know that."
Harlan looked over his shoulder. "You don't know much about the great state of Mississippi, do you?"
"I'm from Florida," DiRita said. "I just go where the company tells me to go, Harlan. Same as you."
"This is Catherine Parsons' body," Harlan said.
"She a witch?" Eula said grinning. "That how come she burned the house down?"
DiRita smirked. "Yeah, Harlan, was she a witch?"
Harlan turned back to the body. He looked at it and then he lifted his foot and stomped down on Catherine Parsons' charred skull. It pulverized beneath his field boot and what was left of Catherine Parsons' skin flaked off like parchment. DiRita and Eula jumped in surprise and Harlan did it two more times and was fixing for a third when DiRita called out to him.
"Hey, Harlan man, what the fuck?"
Harlan turned around. He was red in the face and breathing hard as if that sorry pile of black bones had enraged him.
"What's your fuckin problem?"
"Yeah, Harlan," Eula said. "Why're you kickin the ol gal?"
Harlan stared at them. They stared back. The fire must have driven away all the birds and bugs because it was deathly quiet.
"We need to search these woods for survivors."
"Survivors?" DiRita said. "Hell, we found three bodies already. How many people were shacking up in that house?"
"Catherine Parsons was harboring a fugitive."
"Well, you got two more bodies over there. One of those crispy critters is probably your fugitive."
"Those men gave their lives in service to their country."
"We didn't have militia boys out here last night. I'd've known about it."
"I didn't say they were militia."
"Well what in the hell were they?"
"Private contractors."
"How come you know about this?" DiRita said. "We never heard nothin about it."
"They don't tell you everything."
"And they tell you?"
"More than you."
DiRita stared at Harlan. "You're fuckin crazy and this is a fuckin shitshow. I'm callin HQ in Clarksdale. Ask them about these fugitives before I go runnin through the woods with your crazy ass."
DiRita turned and started loping through the boot-sucking tar towards the Hummer. There was a sharp crack and DiRita was on the ground with a big hole in the back of his head. Eula took two stumbling steps back and was shot before he could say a word. He lay in the black muck with his arms outstretched. Harlan holstered his firearm.
"Fucking useless crackers," he said.
* * *
After Dean told them his name he asked them where he was and Buddy told him. Then July asked him if there was anyone they could call for him and he didn't answer for such a long time they thought he was asleep until he said he had a brother. That was the last thing he said that made any sense and by noon Buddy thought they were going to lose him. They had him on Tylenol and Buddy's old antibiotics and they put wet sheets over him and Buddy gave him ice chips like they'd given his wife in the hospice where she'd died but the fever wasn't coming down and Buddy thought maybe the boy had just been in too bad of a shape to begin with. All those stitched-up wounds and getting shot and losing so much blood and walking barefoot from God knows where until he was raw up to his ankles. It was enough to stir pity in the heart of the devil himself.
"There's that public hospital in Memphis," July said. "Think the truck'd make it up there?"
"She probably would but public ain't free."
July shrugged. "I got a little saved up."
"You hold onto your penny jar," Buddy said. "There's no point in goin up there just to get turned away. I heard they got quite a wait."
"And we'd have to drive all the way back here with that boy burnin up like he is."
"Yep, and there's still the matter of who shot him and why. There'd be a whole lotta questions to answer before anyone'd even take a look at him."
Buddy looked out the kitchen window. The yellow curtains hanging there were the ones his wife had picked out many years before. Outside the sun was baking the dirt lot behind the house. The chrome bumper of his truck winked out from the barn's darkness.
"I got a strange feelin about this," July said quietly.
"Strange how?"
"Well...I can't really say. Like, how come he was so quiet yesterday? He hardly even made a sound when you was pullin that bullet outta him, it was like...like he was used to that sorta thing. And all those stitches, I never saw anyone tore up like that. And then this mornin while you was in here makin coffee and I was settin back there with him he just starts rattlin off in some foreign language. I'm not sure but I think it was Latin. Church Latin, like them Robicheaux kids used to know."
"There's no accountin for what people say when they're that sick."
"Maybe so but it seems to me like this could be a sign of sorts. Like in the Bible there's always prophets or angels showin up at someone's door only no one knows that's what they are and it's only the person who's chosen for it that takes em in. You see what I'm sayin?"
"July, I don't have clue one what you're sayin."
"I'm sayin maybe we was chosen to make sure that boy doesn't die."
Buddy looked across at July. On the table between them was the gun he'd taken from Dean. Buddy picked it up and waved it at July.
"Your prophets and angels? They're usually packin one a these?"
"Well, angels ain't all harp-pickin. There's warrior angels too. He's got one right around his neck, St. Michael, he who trod Satan under his foot. We're livin in strange times, Buddy. There's bound to be signs and wonders."
Buddy thought about the awful smile Dean had given him when he'd said he was going to die and about all those terrible wounds on him and the way he'd looked at July's cross, the way he'd listened to July saying the psalm. There was something about him that didn't sit right. Maybe not prophets or angels, but something.
"If that boy gets up and starts tap dancin I'll believe in wonders," Buddy said. "Till then maybe you oughta wear a wider-brimmed hat when you do your devotions. Sun's baked your brain."
* * *
It wasn't tap dancing to be sure but the fever did break that evening. Buddy had no thermometer but the back of his hand on Dean's forehead revealed the closest thing to a normal temperature since they'd found him. He was deeply asleep and Buddy put a fresh blanket over him and let him rest. He felt weak with relief. The thought of burying the boy had filled him with an old man's horror of death and July's words had been weighing heavily on his mind though he'd never admit it. If July ever thought Buddy had come over to his side of the Jordan he'd hear about it for the rest of his days.
* * *
Harlan's job would have been easier if it hadn't rained the day after the fire. There would have been a scent to follow, even better there probably would have been blood. It would have led him right to the fugitive wherever he was holed up. Days of the world's time had gone by since they knew that he'd escaped, something that was not supposed to have happened, was not allowed under any rule. He had made his deal and they had called it in, simple and fair as that. These things were immutable.
Harlan didn't know the two who had gotten to Parsons' house first but they had clearly met with more than they had expected. He knew that the fugitive had gotten away and was living. His body was not in the woods or anywhere else because if he had been back among the dead, Harlan would have known. All of them would have known.
* * *
Dean opened his eyes onto a room pale with early morning light. Above him was a ceiling darkly waterstained in places and a milky light fixture with dead insects collected in its glass bowl. He turned his head to the left and saw a window with a yellowed pull shade. A sound of birds. The window propped open with a ruler. To the right was an open door and more daylight beyond.
He sat halfway up and was checked by the pain in his back. He put his hand over the bandaged wound as if that would keep the pain down and eased himself all the way up. He moved his legs off the bed and winced when he set his feet on the floor.
The whole procedure took him a good ten minutes. There was a full glass of water on the nightstand and he was ragingly thirsty but he drank it slowly to make sure it would stay down. He put the glass back on the nightstand and sat there with his head bowed and took long, slow breaths to manage the pain.
He remembered being told he was in Mississippi. He remembered a long, harrowing walk in the dark and he remembered the fire and the woman telling him to run before she died and remembered her taking care of him for some indeterminate time before that. And before that he knew that he'd been Dean Winchester and that his brother had watched him die. Everything between dying and waking up in the woman's house was very, very dark and while he knew where he had been and could have said so, his living self had no words with which to describe it because such language had never been invented and so his living mind was already blacking it out.
He rubbed the back of his neck and his fingers caught on the chain there. He followed it around to the front and looked at the saint's medal on his fingertips. He had no idea where it had come from but he knew he hadn't had it before he died.
He stood up and walked to the door. He was wearing a clean but very worn t-shirt and pajama bottoms in a similar state. His feet hurt almost as badly as his back and he took small steps and paused in the doorway to catch his breath. It was morning-cool in the house but he was sweating.
There was no one in the kitchen and he seemed to be the only person awake. The kitchen was of a size typical of old houses in the country and furnished with a cracking vinyl dinette and ancient appliances that reminded him of Bobby Singer's kitchen. His entire afterlife was becoming a black hole in his memory but he could remember the trucklike chug of Bobby's shitty refrigerator and that was fine with him.
Through the kitchen was a short hallway with a bathroom at the end of it. He went in and shut the door. He switched on the light and a fluorescent bar buzzed into life above the medicine cabinet and he turned and looked at himself in the mirror.
It was his own face and yet it wasn't, not anymore. He wondered if anyone who'd known him would be able to see that. Maybe Sam. Definitely Sam. There was no one physical change that he could identify and yet it was all changed, all different. His eyes dropped down to the open neck of his t-shirt and he could see the scars there and he pushed the shirt off his shoulder and looked at the wounds that had killed him. He wondered who had stitched him back together after he'd died. Probably Sam. Definitely Sam. He looked back at his altered face in the mirror. He had died. He had gone to hell. He'd been brought back. Everything seemed to shift beneath him and he sat down hard and painfully on the toilet lid and put his forehead on the cool porcelain edge of the sink. He thought he was going to pass out but something tore up out of him instead and then he was crying, real living tears though whether they were of grief or gratitude he couldn't tell.
* * *
Buddy made Dean a soft-boiled egg and two pieces of toast for breakfast but refused to make him any coffee, giving him glass after glass of watery grape drink-mix instead. Buddy and July sat there and watched him eat like two kids feeding a stray cat.
They asked him if he wanted to try and get in touch with the brother he'd mentioned and he answered honestly that he didn't know where his brother was. It pressed on Dean that Sam wasn't there and that Sam was nowhere in his recent memories. Sam hadn't been at the woman's house either and yet someone had gotten him out of hell and if not Sam then who?
For the first time Dean looked at the calendar on the refrigerator. He'd seen it before but hadn't paid attention to it and he set down his glass and stood up and went over to it. He looked at it for a long time before turning back to the old men.
"It's 2012?" he said and they nodded and looked at each other.
"2012?" he asked again.
"All year," Buddy said.
Four years? Dean thought. Four years?
He must have turned some sick color because Buddy came over and put a hand on his arm.
"You maybe shouldn't be up. Yesterday at this time we didn't think you were gonna make it."
"Four years?" he said to no one in particular.
"Why don't you go have a lie-down?"
"Do you have a computer?" Dean asked. He glanced around the kitchen. "Scratch that. Do you have a television?"
"It don't work. I never got that digital thing they was peddlin a few years ago."
Oh God, Dean thought. I've crash-landed with Pa and Pa Kettle.
"What...look, this is going to sound crazy but...have things been...different?"
"Different like how?"
"Like, strange. Have strange things been happening in the past four years? Like things no one can explain?"
"Just bad times," Buddy said soothingly. "Same as always."
"As in they closed the plant bad times, or as in plague of locusts bad times?"
Buddy didn't say anything. It was July, still at the kitchen table, who spoke.
"Sorta like that last bit," he said.
Dean stared at July. It was quiet enough to hear a fly buzzing in the windowscreen.
"I have to go," Dean said. He pulled away from Buddy. "I have to go."
"Go where?"
"I don't know. I need to find my brother. Do you have..."
He wanted to ask them if they had any clothes he could wear or a car he could borrow and then realized he might as well ask them for a goddamn time machine because he'd lost four years and what in God's name had happened during that time and where the hell was Sam?
"Dean?" Buddy asked. He sounded very far away.
Dean wiped a hand over his face. He took a step back.
"I'm fine," he said though he wasn't. "I'm..."
He was falling and he heard Buddy say his name again and heard July's chair scraping over the linoleum floor and that was that.
* * *
Dean was half-awake by the time they got him back into bed but he was deathly pale and wordless and when Buddy told him that he needed to take it slow he only nodded and closed his eyes.
"Where's he been," July asked in the kitchen, "That he don't know what year it is?"
Buddy had nothing to say.
* * *
Buddy woke in the night from some troubling dream and he sat up in bed and felt the dream clinging to him and couldn't shake it off. He was thirsty and he wanted some of that purple drink in the icebox and when he went downstairs he saw someone silhouetted in the pale square of backdoor window.
"July?" he said.
"Shhh," Dean said. "Don't turn on the light."
"What're you doin up? You need to stay in bed."
"There's something outside the house."
"There's all kind of critters outside at night."
Buddy wondered if Dean was feverish again. He came and stood beside him and looked out into the yard. He saw nothing except moonlight on the dirt and glinting off the Chevy's bumper in the barn.
Then he saw some black shape detach itself from the darkness of the barn as if the shadows themselves had taken on form. It slunk around the front of the truck with a creeping purposefulness and was absorbed back into the blackness.
"What was that, a dog?"
"I don't think so," Dean said.
July's shotgun was standing up by the door where he'd left it. Dean took it and held it up to the faint light and breeched it open and took out a shell and turned it over in his hand. He put it back into the shotgun and breeched it shut and handed it to Buddy.
"You hold onto that. Where's the gun I had on me?"
Buddy felt a faint flush creep onto his face. He hadn't told Dean about the gun. He'd put it up on the wardrobe in his bedroom and had hoped Dean didn't remember it. He'd be happy to give it back to him when he was sure that Dean was all right in the head and today hadn't made him too confident of it.
"I know you found me with a gun, Buddy, I need to see it."
"Dean, it's just some old dog."
"Well then no harm no foul, right? Can I see the gun?"
Buddy went upstairs. July was standing in the hallway and asked him what was going on.
"I don't know," Buddy said. "There's somethin in the barn."
"Somethin like what?"
"I don't know that either."
"Why're you carryin my shotgun?"
"You ask too many goddamn questions, July."
He got the gun down from the top of the wardrobe without turning on the light and went downstairs with July trailing after him. Dean held out his hand and Buddy gave him the gun and Dean released the magazine and popped one of the rounds out into his hand where it gleamed silvery in the moonlight. He loaded it back into the magazine and slid that back into the gun.
"You got a flashlight or something?"
"Are you goin out in the barn?"
"Yeah. You guys stay here."
"The hell I am. It's my barn."
"I mean it," Dean said. "You stay here."
Dean had gotten halfway across the yard before Buddy swore under his breath and went after him. It was hot and very still. There was not a breath of air and Buddy could not hear any sound of insect or night creature. As if his ears had been packed with cotton. Dean was walking lightly on his bandaged feet. He hardly made a sound but he must have heard Buddy behind him because he turned around and motioned at Buddy to go back and then something was charging at him out of the barn.
Buddy had lived in Mississippi all his life and figured he knew everything in it that flew or swam or crept about but he'd never seen anything like this. It was like a dog but much bigger than a dog and blacker than hell's cellar with eyes as red and fiery as a coal stove and its mouth full of dripping teeth. Buddy would grasp these things later because what he saw in the moonlight was nothing but a black shape, hideously fast, and then Dean was on the ground and it was on top of him. It had been years since Buddy had been hunting but he sighted the shotgun and unloaded both barrels into the thing and nothing seemed to happen and then Buddy heard two more shots and a howl like nothing he'd ever heard on this earth.
Dean was up on one knee with his hand pressed to the wound in his back and when Buddy and July got to him he was saying, "Shit, shit," to himself as if the pain was a bigger shock than whatever he'd just killed. Buddy thought about all those stitched wounds that Dean had and he spared a glance at the thing while they were helping him up and saw it had long yellow claws curved like boar tusks.
"We need to burn that," Dean said.
"Sure, sure," Buddy said, because burning something like that sounded like the best idea anyone had ever had. By then they'd made it to the back porch steps and Buddy realized he could hear night sounds again as if a shadow had passed over the place and was gone.
* * *
Dean had bled through the bandage on his back and Buddy offered him two pain pills but he turned them down and sat at the kitchen table with his head pressed into his forearm while Buddy pulled sodden gauze out of the hole in his back and cleaned it out and packed it and rebandaged it. Dean felt like puking by the end of it and must have looked it because Buddy brought him a glass of water and put the orange pillbottle next to it.
Dean shook his head. "I have to go. Do you have any clothes I can wear?"
"Dean, you can't hardly walk. Where're you gonna go?"
"I can't explain."
"Well, I sure wish you would because this is all makin less and less sense to me."
"My momma used to tell stories about things like that," July said suddenly. "She'd say not to go near crossroads at night and stay away from bridges and the like because that was where you'd find em. Black shucks, that was what she called em. Never thought I'd see one with my own eyes. Was either that or a damn hellhound."
"It wasn't a hellhound," Dean said but held back from adding that one of those wouldn't have been taken out by a couple of silver bullets. He drank the water and saw Buddy and July glance at each other.
"There was some folks breedin pitbulls for dog-fightin here a few years ago and I'll bet that thing is just one of the ones that got away. Don't make it any less hair-raisin but hell..."
"Buddy," Dean said. "I have to go."
Buddy looked at him and opened his mouth to say something and then there was a sound of a vehicle pulling up in front of the house, something with a deep, heavy engine. The engine cut off but the sound of it seemed still to vibrate in the house. It was just past four in the morning.
"Who in the hell could that be?" Buddy said and Dean wondered if he knew that he was whispering.
The fluorescent circle in the ceiling flickered once, then again. Dean looked up at it. He could hear someone climbing the front porch steps. The light flickered and buzzed. The doorbell rang and the old-fashioned bell key rattled the house as if chains were being drawn around it.
Buddy stood up and Dean grabbed his arm.
"Do you have any salt?"
"Salt? There's salt right on the table there..."
"No no no, lots of it. Like road salt, bags of it?"
The doorbell shrieked again and Dean tightened his grip on Buddy's arm.
"Dean, what's the matter with you?"
"Doors and windows. You've got to salt the doors and windows or they're gonna get in."
"No one's gettin in this house without my say-so. You stay right here." He hefted July's shotgun and nodded at July. "You come with me. Two old men're better'n one."
Buddy and July left Dean in the kitchen. He got up and turned off the light. He got the gun off the kitchen table though if he was right about what was at the door silver bullets wouldn't do much more than the little birdshot shells in July's shotgun. He stepped out of the kitchen and into the hallway. The hallway opened off into the front room. Buddy switched on the porchlight and opened the door and Dean could see what was at the door and knew that Buddy and July could not. He spun around and pressed his back to the wall before it could see him and stood there with his heart hammering and sweat running down his neck and tracking along the silver chain he wore.
"Boyd Lennox?"
"Sir?"
"Corporal Harlan of the Mississippi Patriots Militia, Clarksdale Brigade. I need to search your house."
"It's awful late, sir."
"Will you put down your firearm and step aside, Mr. Lennox?"
"I know you don't need a warrant no more but maybe you could do the courtesy of tellin me what this is about?"
"There's an escaped prisoner in the area. He murdered five people in Rena Lara including two other members of the MPM."
"There ain't nobody here but the two of us," July said.
"I need to see that for myself."
"At four in the mornin?" Buddy asked.
"This is official militia business. You'll step aside now, Mr. Lennox."
"I ain't lettin some rented cop in my house."
"Let him in," Dean said. "Before he shoots you."
Buddy and July turned and stared at him. Harlan smiled, the face beneath his human skin running and changing and Dean pushed Buddy out of the way and threw a pitcher of water in Harlan's face, a pitcher of water with the St. Michael's medal in it and Harlan howled and bent double with his hands over his smoking face.
Dean grabbed the shotgun out of Buddy's hands and brought the stock down hard on the back of Harlan's head.
"What are you doin?" Buddy said. "He's militia!"
"No he isn't," Dean said. Harlan was getting up and Dean hit him with the shotgun again and the wooden stock shivered and split from the blow and Harlan snarled and Dean grabbed him by the back of the collar and dragged him into the house.
"Get his gun!" Dean said and thought it was July who reached down and pulled it from its holster and then Harlan lunged at Dean's legs and brought him down hard to the floor.
The pain that erupted in Dean's gunshot wound knocked all the air out of him but he turned on his hip and kicked Harlan in the face and then got up and ran and Harlan scrabbled after him as Dean had known he would. He made it into the kitchen with Harlan right on his heels and then Dean turned and Harlan stopped and looked down and looked up at Dean.
"Fuck," he said.
Dean leaned against the kitchen sink and caught his breath and smiled because he hadn't forgotten how to draw a Devil's Trap and there was a crude but effective one on Buddy's linoleum floor, done in black marker and Harlan was right in the middle of it. Behind him Buddy and July stood in the kitchen doorway and July was holding Harlan's big militia-issue firearm and staring at the markings on the floor and Buddy was staring at Dean. Dean's smile faded and he shook his head and looked away and then Harlan opened his mouth and howled enough to shake the house and the fluorescent halo in the ceiling flared white-hot and burst into glassine dust.
* * *
Buddy had seen some things in his day. He'd been to war. He'd seen young men get blown into bloody rags and try to get up and run. He'd watched his wife die slow, eaten up by cancer. He'd seen people executed right in the streets of his own country by militia. He'd never seen anything like this.
The soldier who'd called himself Harlan was stuck in the middle of a circle of symbols drawn in the marker Buddy'd had hanging from a string on the refrigerator door. His face was burnt though it didn't seem that Dean had thrown anything stronger than water at him. Some of it had splashed on Buddy and that's all it had been, water. Dean drew up a chair and sat down facing Harlan and Buddy could see fresh blood slicking the back of his shirt.
"Don't go near him," Dean said. "Don't get anywhere inside that circle."
Buddy lit a match. His hands were shaking. There was an oil lamp on top of the refrigerator and he lit that and put it on the kitchen table. Harlan looked at him and for a second Buddy thought the man's eyes had gone black as a rat's but that must have been a trick of the light.
"You look like shit," Harlan said to Dean.
"Looked in the mirror lately?"
"You can see me?"
"Yeah, I can see you. The real you."
"You're fresh out. Veil's still thin, isn't it?"
Dean stared at him and said nothing. His gun was on the kitchen table and he picked it up and shot Harlan through the right knee. Buddy jumped. He saw July against the refrigerator put his hand over his heart. Harlan fell down. Dean stood up.
"That won't kill you but it's silver and it's gotta hurt like hell."
"You would know."
"How did you find me?"
"We can smell you."
"How did I get out?"
"Satan shat you out of his asshole."
"Where's my brother?"
"He's dead," Harlan said and Dean froze.
"You're lying."
"Why would I lie? Nothing's ever worse than the truth. Didn't you learn that's what hell is?"
"Where is my brother?"
"He's in heaven, fucking your mother while your father fucks him."
"Dean?" Buddy said quietly.
"Oh, you're on first-name basis with this thing?" Harlan said and Buddy looked at him. "That road to hell really is paved with good intentions, isn't it? You have any idea what you were playing good Samaritan to?"
Buddy looked at Dean. Even in the dim light Buddy could see how white he'd gone. There was sweat running into his eyes and he blinked it away.
"Why don't you tell him, Dean? Tell him where you've been the last four years."
"Dean, do you know him?"
"Oh, he knows me. Don't you sweetheart?" Harlan swung his head back to Buddy. "I fucked him for an eternity. I made him suck my dick until he choked. I fucked him on all fours and he'd beg me to stop, he'd fucking beg..."
Something black came whirling at Harlan and hit him in the back of the head and he bellowed and fell over on his knees.
"Hold your forked tongue, devil," July said.
Dean bent down and picked up what July had thrown and handed it to Buddy. It was the leather-bound King James Bible that his wife's sister had given him when she died.
Buddy stared at July. Wasn't that just like him to find the right word?
* * *
The Robicheaux kids who had lived down the road apiece had been Catholics and altar boys and they'd known that Church Latin backwards and forwards. Buddy hadn't heard it in more than sixty years but he knew what it was when Dean started saying it, just like July had said he'd done while he was feverish. It didn't make one word of sense to Buddy but it sure was having an effect on Harlan. He was spitting and hissing in the middle of the circle and his eyes had gone a flat, dead black.
Dean circled around Harlan saying things that Buddy didn't understand and by now he was limping so badly on his left side that he could hardly stay upright but he didn't seem to notice, just like he didn't seem to notice that Buddy and July were still in the room. He didn't even look up at Buddy when he stumbled and Buddy caught him.
"Where's my brother?"
"Dead."
Dean went back to that Church talk and Harlan started screaming. Dean stopped.
"Is he with her? Does she have him?"
"Lean in real close and I'll tell you."
Dean leaned towards the circle and Harlan grinned up at him. Buddy saw a silver ribbon of drool unspool from his mouth to the floor.
"He's dead. She tore his fucking head off. I saw her do it." He licked his lips.
Dean stood upright and closed his eyes and took a deep breath.
"They're all dead, Dean, everyone you knew is dead. There's no place for you here."
Dean opened his eyes and looked at Harlan.
"We're coming for you."
Dean shook his head. "Not you."
He threw more Latin at Harlan and the eyes of the man who was no man rolled up in his head and his head snapped around and Buddy heard his neck give. And then something black came up and out of his mouth and shot up to the ceiling and it was gone though it left a stink behind like shit and sulfur and the house fell very, very quiet.
Dean sat down and put his head in his hands. Buddy stood by the wall holding the bible. July was across the room with his hand over his mouth. The man on the floor was dead. It was six-thirty in the morning and the windows were lightening.
Finally Dean said, "How far will that truck get you?"
Buddy didn't understand the question. "What?"
"How far will that truck get you? How far from here?"
"Well I...I don't know. Where am I goin?"
"Both of you, you're leaving. Go somewhere, anywhere, just put a lot of miles between yourself and this place." He sat up and looked at Buddy. "A woman is dead because of me and you will be too if you don't leave."
"Did he kill her?"
"I don't know but he isn't the last one."
"Last one of what? I don't even know what in the hell just happened here except I got a dead militia on my kitchen floor."
Dean looked at July. "What do you think happened?"
July hitched in a breath and held it and looked at Buddy and looked back at Dean.
"I think an imp of Satan crawled up outta hell and found its way here, that's what I think."
"Well..." Buddy said. "If that don't..." He looked at Dean. "What does that make you?"
"Really bad luck. You have more shells for that shotgun?"
"At my house," July said.
"Good. Get them. And keep that piece you took off him."
Dean got off the chair and got down on the floor next to Harlan and started taking off his clothes.
"You're bleeding again," Buddy said.
Dean paused and put his hand on his back and looked at the blood on his fingers.
"Shit."
"Let me take care of it."
"I'll take the stuff with me and do it myself."
"Where are you going?"
"I don't know. But wherever I go, you go in the opposite direction, understand?" He had taken off Harlan's black t-shirt and was looking at his dog tags. "What's this militia? Some bunch of survivalist nutjobs?"
"No. They're the law. Martial law. Here in Mississippi and in most states."
"Since when?"
"Year or so."
Dean shook his head put the dog tag chain around his neck. He stripped off his bloody shirt and put on Harlan's shirt. He stood up and shucked off the pajama bottoms and put on the soldier's camouflage trousers and looked at the hole in the knee where the bullet had passed through.
"We're not gonna get very far, none of us," Buddy said. "The gas alone..."
"Don't worry about that," July said. "I got plenty of money back at the house."
"I don't think your penny jar'll do the trick," Buddy said.
"I got a couple hunnerd thousand. In a hole in the wall. Shoot, I never had no vacation in my entire life. Maybe it's time for one."
Dean paused in pulling on Harlan's boots. He looked at Buddy. "This guy's full of surprises."
"Sure is," said Buddy in amazement. "He's a regular jack-in-the-box."
* * *
July took the Chevy to his house and Buddy helped Dean wrap Harlan's body in a sheet and take it out to the black Hummer H3. They put it in the back and closed the door and Dean stopped and put his arm on the H3's roof and laid his forehead against it.
"You're not doin too good," Buddy said.
"I'll be okay," he said. He raised his head and wiped his face and looked at Buddy. "I'm sorry about this."
"I don't get the feelin this was your fault, bad luck or no. Times are hard. Bad things're happenin. It comes to everyone sooner or later."
"I wish I could help you."
"Seems like you need to look out for yourself right now, whatever you done. Are you gonna try and find your brother?"
"Yeah."
"Well, I sure hope you do."
"I hope so too."
Dean smiled. It was the first real smile Buddy had seen on him and it made him look very young but very tired. There were a couple dozen questions Buddy wanted to ask him but couldn't bring himself to do it. This boy has a hell of a long row to hoe, Buddy thought. I wouldn't want to be in his shoes.
* * *
July came back and they packed a few things in the truck and July made Dean take some money.
"The Lord helps those that helps themselves, so you just...you help yourself," July said. "I got somethin else for you too."
He held out his hand and dropped the silver chain and St. Michael's medal into Dean's palm. Dean looked at it.
"I don't even know where this came from," he said.
"You know who that is I take it?"
"St. Michael," Dean said. "The archangel."
"Who trod Satan under his foot," July said and Dean looked up at him. "Maybe you don't know where it came from but you sure deserve to wear it. You take care now, son."
"I'll try." He looked from July to Buddy and then at the Chevy. "Just keep driving. Get as far as you can. Wherever you stay, do that thing with the salt that I told you about."
"Do you know where you're goin?" Buddy asked.
"I'm still working on it. West, I think."
"Well good luck to you, wherever you go."
"God bless you," July added.
Dean smiled and fastened the medal around his neck. He climbed in the H3 and looked at both of them.
"Thank you," he said and keyed the ignition and pulled out.
They'd been driving for about half an hour when Buddy glanced over at July.
"I know what you're thinkin," he said.
"What would that be?"
"You're thinkin next time I wanna go and fish someone up outta the river I can do it myself."
"I wasn't thinkin no such thing."
"Well what then?"
"For some have entertained angels unawares," July said. "That's what I was thinkin."
Buddy thought he had something to say but he didn't. He reached out and patted his old friend on the arm and turned back to the road.
To be continued.
Go ahead to Chapter Three.