Supernatural: Carved in Flesh (2 page)

Then the smell hit her, a thick miasma of musk and rot that made her gorge rise.

Sweet Jesus, what
was
that thing?

“It’s okay,” Ted said. His voice was shaky, but he didn’t hesitate as he let go of Joyce’s hand and stepped between her and the approaching whatever-it-was. Normally, she would have hated having a man—any man—treat her as if she were some delicate thing that needed protecting, but something about this... this
creature
triggered a deep atavistic fear in her, and she was grateful for Ted’s gesture. She thought, too, that perhaps his actions were as much for his benefit as hers. As a former principal, he was used to being in charge and dealing with problems head on. It was his default setting, a comfortable role that he could fall back on in a time of crisis.

Still, as much as she appreciated what he was trying to do, her instincts told her it was a bad idea.
Very
bad.

She put her hand on his shoulder. “Please, don’t.”

Ted gave no sign that he heard her. Instead, he took a step toward the creature and drew himself up to his full height, arms held away from his sides, hands balled into fists.

He’s trying to make himself look larger,
Joyce realized.
More threatening.
She wondered if he’d done something similar in high school when dealing with potentially violent teenage boys. But hadn’t she read somewhere that directly facing a canine and making eye contact was a form of challenge to them? In that case—

The creature rushed forward, mismatched limbs moving with surprising speed, growl so loud it was nearly a roar. It moved so swiftly that in the dimming light of dusk Joyce could only make out the most basic details of its grotesque form: different-sized legs, a single ragged ear, bare skin alternating with patches of fur, and worst of all, a crooked muzzle filled with sharp teeth, far more than the mouth of a simple dog should have been able to hold.

When it was within a yard of Ted, the beast leaped into the air, discolored tongue lolling from the side of its misshapen mouth. Its front paws hit Ted on the chest, its weight driving him backward, slamming him against the ground. The impact drove the air from his lungs, and she heard a crack that she guessed was the sound of one or more ribs breaking.

Joyce had managed to sidestep in time to avoid being knocked down, and she now stood less than a foot away from Ted as he struggled with the freakish dog, which was roughly the size and bulk of a St. Bernard, although it didn’t resemble the breed otherwise. It snarled and snapped, intent on fastening its teeth around Ted’s throat, and Ted wrapped his hands around its neck in an attempt to hold it at bay. The dog-beast’s rear legs—one larger than the other—scrabbled at the ground as it fought to get close enough to sink its teeth into its prey. Ted grimaced, his arms trembling with the effort of trying to hold off the animal. Considering the massive size of the thing, it would have been too strong for most men to handle, and whatever physical strength Ted had possessed in his youth was long gone. He was relying on adrenaline and sheer force of will right now, but Joyce knew they wouldn’t be enough in the end. She feared he had only moments, if not seconds, before the monster dog overwhelmed him, fastened its jaws around his throat, and crushed his windpipe in a spray of blood.

Part of her—the primitive animal part that was only interested in self-preservation at all costs—wanted nothing more than to turn and run away as fast as her less-than-svelte legs were capable of carrying her. In fact, without fully being aware of it, she had already half-turned and taken a step away from the pond. But she forced herself to turn back. She would never forgive herself if she ran off and left Ted to die. She had to do something to help him, but what? She wasn’t about to try and grapple with the damned beast, and the closest thing to a weapon she had was her sometimes too-sharp tongue, which had filleted many a lazy student over the years. So, without anything else in her arsenal to rely on, she drew in a deep breath and, using what one of her fellow teachers had once referred to as “The Voice of Irresistible Authority,” she shouted a single word.

“Stop!”

The word sounded harsh as a whip crack on the chill autumn air, and it echoed across the pond. The dog-thing stopped snarling and turned to look at her, confusion and perhaps a touch of fear in its eyes. Joyce had the feeling that with that one word she had reached something deep inside the beast, an inner core which recognized that humans occupied a higher rung on the evolutionary ladder, and thus were its masters. The creature lowered its gaze and its tail—a hairless appendage that looked like it should have been attached to a giant rat—drooped between its legs. It let out a soft whine.

Ted, who’d been just as surprised as the dog by Joyce’s command, loosened his grip on the animal’s neck. Instantly, the grotesque canine’s upper lip curled away from its teeth, and the confusion in its eyes was replaced by blazing fury. The creature tore free from Ted’s grasp and lunged forward with a snarl.

Joyce screamed as the monster-dog sank its teeth into Ted’s throat and began shaking him back and forth, as if he were nothing but a toy. Ted’s eyes widened with fear and pain, but although his mouth gaped wide, no sound emerged. An instant later Joyce understood why, as thick blood geysered upward. It ran down the sides of Ted’s mouth and turned his white hair crimson before soaking into the ground beneath.

She opened her mouth to scream again, but the sound died in her throat. Something strange was happening. She thought at first that it was a trick of the waning light, but Ted’s pale pink skin was losing its color, becoming a dull slate gray. More than that, his skin was drawing in on itself, tightening against his bones, muscle and fat shrinking as he transformed into an unwrapped mummy before her eyes. Crazily, Joyce was reminded of one of the last trips she’d taken with her husband before the cancer spread to the point where he was unable to travel. They’d gone camping in Hocking Hills, and instead of sleeping bags, they’d taken a king-sized inflatable mattress with a battery-powered fan that inflated it within moments. The fan had a reverse switch on it that also deflated the mattress, so that when it was finished, it was completely flat, curled slightly at the edges and crisscrossed with wrinkly lines. That’s what Ted looked like now: a deflated gray air mattress with a skeleton inside.

The monster-dog held its grip on Ted’s throat a moment longer, and Joyce watched as the blood smeared on Ted’s face and the creature’s muzzle dried and flaked away. Like the monster had absorbed Ted’s life energy, drawn it into itself, and was determined not to let go of him until it had gotten every last bit. When it was finally finished, it withdrew its teeth from Ted’s desiccated flesh and turned its attention to her.

She heard someone whisper, “Run,” and it took her a moment to realize she was the whisperer. Hearing her own voice broke her paralysis, and she turned and ran.

The hill that led back up to the apartment complex wasn’t steep, but she was hardly in the best of shape. When she’d been younger, her idea of exercise had been a leisurely stroll in the park, and now most of her physical activity involved walking around antiques stores. Adrenaline could only do so much to compensate for a mostly sedentary lifestyle, and her heart pounded an uneven rhythm in her ears, and her lungs burned as if they were aflame. Her legs felt heavy and shaky, and they became more so with each step she took. Finally, something gave way in her right knee, her leg buckled, and she went down. She landed on her side and slid several feet down the hill before coming to a stop. She lay there, pulse thrumming, lungs heaving, knowing there was no way she could hope to escape the monster-dog now—if she’d ever had a chance in the first place. She closed her eyes and waited to feel the creature’s teeth sink into her throat.

But she felt nothing.

She opened her eyes and pushed herself to a sitting position. She turned to look back toward the pond, wondering what had happened. Had something scared the dog-thing off? Or had it simply been too full for another meal? For an instant she allowed herself to hope that she might survive this, but then she saw the creature. It sat next to Ted’s corpse, looking at her, head cocked to the side in a very doglike fashion. She understood at once what had happened, and the realization filled her with despair. The monster-dog hadn’t chased her because it hadn’t needed to. She was too slow, old, and overweight to get away. The creature had only needed to wait for her to bring herself down, and she had done so.

As she watched, the great misshapen beast came lurching toward her on its mismatched limbs, crooked mouth open, discolored tongue hanging out, eyes burning with horrible, inhuman hunger.

She screamed, but not for long.

“I hate this damn car,” Dean said.

“You hate every car that’s not the Impala,” Sam countered.

“Yeah, well, this one’s especially sucktastic. And it smells like feet.”

They’d picked up the brown “crapmobile”—just one of Dean’s nicknames for it—behind a bar in Canton, Ohio. Dean would have preferred “borrowing” something with a bit more class, or at least something that didn’t drive like a turd with tires, but ever since they’d gone off the grid in order to avoid registering on the Leviathan’s radar, they’d been forced to keep a low profile, which meant no Impala. It also meant starting a sideline as reluctant car thieves—all for the greater good, of course. If the brothers failed to kill Dick Roman and ended up as human happy meals for him and his fellow monsters, the rest of the planet would be next on the menu. They were careful to take cars that no one would miss much, junkers that would be easy for their owners to replace and which the cops wouldn’t work too hard to find. Dean had his hands full keeping the rust heaps they stole running, but there was only so much he could do. He constantly kept his fingers crossed that they wouldn’t find themselves in a high-speed pursuit. As rough as the crapmobile was running, if he tromped on the gas, the rods would probably shoot out of the engine like friggin’ missiles.

“Here we are,” Sam said, pointing to a wooden sign on the side of the road. “Brennan, Ohio, which, according to the sign, is home to the Battling Brennan Brahman.”

Dean frowned as they drove across the town line. “Brahman? Aren’t they a kind of water buffalo or something?”

“Sort of. They’re a type of cattle named after the sacred cow of Hinduism.”

“Lousy choice for a school mascot, if you ask me. Alliteration only goes so far, you know?”

After they’d dropped in to the local sheriff’s department as a “courtesy” to let them know that two FBI agents were in town and to glean any additional information they could about the deaths, they drove through Brennan to get a feel for the place. Not that they really needed to. They might have gone from Northeast Ohio to Southwest, but for all the miles they’d driven, they might as well have stayed in the same place. After all the years he’d spent on the road, most Midwestern towns looked alike to Dean, and Brennan was no exception. A downtown consisting of small local businesses housed in old buildings, suburbs dotted with mini malls and chain restaurants, and a decaying industrial section, which in Brennan’s case was a closed bicycle factory on the south edge of town.

“You need a whole factory to make bikes?” Dean said. Sam just shrugged.

They found a cheap no-tell motel not far from the factory called the Wickline Inn, although Dean had no idea who or what a wickline was. They parked in front of the main office, and Sam went inside alone to register them. They always asked for a room as far from the main office as they could get, preferably one with empty rooms on either side. They’d been attacked in hotels more than once over the years, and the last thing they wanted to do was endanger any innocent lives.

Once Sam came out of the office with their room key, they pulled around to the back of the motel, parked, removed their stuff from the car—a couple backpacks with clothes and toiletries, Sam’s computer, and a couple duffle bags containing weapons—and entered the room.

Once they were inside, Dean wrinkled his nose. “Man, this place smells like mothballs and ass.”

“No argument there,” Sam said.

They put their stuff on the beds and gave the room a quick once over, checking the bathroom, looking under the beds, and testing the window locks. Only when they were satisfied the room was clear did they lock the door. Every hunter worth his or her rock salt-filled shotgun knew better than to cut off a possible exit until they were sure they didn’t need it. The brothers didn’t bother unpacking in case they needed to grab their gear and get the hell out of there in a hurry. Not for the first time, Dean thought how much his life resembled that of a criminal on the run. He’d never told Sam, but for a while now, whenever they settled into a hotel room, he thought of his time with Lisa and Ben, and how damned nice it had been to go to sleep and wake up in the same place day after day.

The room had a small desk by the window, and Sam set his laptop on it, raised the lid, and booted up the machine. When the screen came to life, he said, “Once again the Winchesters are open for business.” He sat down in front of the computer and started typing.