Supernatural Fresh Meat (5 page)

“This thing’s too fast for Molotovs. We’d have to get lucky. Another flamethrower wouldn’t hurt,” Bobby said. “If we could figure out where its main lair is, we could surprise it there and kill it. Might be our only chance.”

Dean nodded. “I’m in.”

They turned and headed out of the forest, the cold seeping into Dean’s bones. He only hoped they could find that lair before more people disappeared.

SIX

While Sam and Dean checked out the newspaper morgue of the
Truckee Herald,
Bobby visited the Truckee library. Bobby’s bruised ribs were already on the mend, and Sam was feeling more hopeful about the hunt. He pored over newspaper indices while his brother retrieved the microfiche and looked up the articles.

“Here’s one,” Sam said, writing the catalog number down on a piece of paper. “A pair of hikers disappeared in this same area about fifteen years ago.” Dean took the paper and moved to the metal file cabinets that held the microfiche. The overworked clerk at the desk told them to look at whatever they wanted, just be sure to refile it all in the right place.

Sam scanned further back in time. There had been another set of disappearances a few years before, and still another a few years before that.

The newspaper files stopped in 1879, when the newspaper was founded. But that year a team of miners had vanished from a silver mine near Lake Spaulding. “Check this out. Ten miners vanished from the Panfil Silver Mine, which is only five miles from Emigrant Gap.”

Dean looked up from his screen. “I got one here, too. A group of surveyors vanished while planning the route of Highway 80 through Emigrant Gap.”

“This thing’s been busy.”

“I’ll say.”

“Disappearances going back at least through 1879. And those are just the reported ones. A lot of emigrants came westward then. A lot of anonymous faces and plenty of people to disappear.”

Dean jotted down notes from the surveyors. “I wonder what Bobby found.”

The Truckee library was a nice one, with large, open windows looking out onto pine trees. There weren’t many people milling around the shelves when the Winchesters entered. They walked past an older man perusing the magazines and a young girl in the science-fiction section.

Bobby sat at a table in a back corner, books piled high around him. He’d been trawling through the local history section. Tomes on the Emigrant Trail, mining, and California pioneers took up every available inch of the table. Sam felt a tinge of sadness when he saw Bobby nose deep in an old book with yellowed pages and a faded spine. Bobby’s house in South Dakota had held a repository of books on all manner of arcane and supernatural knowledge; ancient books and new books, journals, diagrams, parchment folios, illuminated manuscripts. Bobby had lost it all when his house burned. Now he stayed at his friend Rufus’s cabin in Whitefish, Montana. Sam knew it was torture for him to have lost all those books. Bobby was one hell of a researcher.

Bobby looked up as they entered the room. “Glad you could make it. Take a seat.”

Sam sat opposite Bobby and leaned in to talk quietly.

“What’d you find at the newspaper morgue?” Bobby asked.

Sam spoke in a low voice. “A series of disappearances dating back to 1879.”

“What happened then?”

“Newspaper was founded,” Dean told him.

Bobby closed the book he was looking at and pulled his notes closer. “Well, you know all those emigrants coming through in the mid-eighteen hundreds?”

They nodded.

“Seems a lot of people have been getting lost around Donner Lake.”

Dean leaned forward. “As in the Donner Party?”

“None other.” Bobby nodded. “In 1845, a group of emigrants decided to take a cutoff advertised by one Lansford Hastings. It was supposed to allow them to traverse the Great Salt Desert in two days and a night. But it took much longer, taking them extra weeks and costing lives. The upshot was they got delayed and hit the Sierra Nevadas in late October, just as winter was setting in. They tried to make it out, but deep snowdrifts held them back. They retreated to what is now Donner Lake. Another group in the party had a wagon axle break at Alder Creek and holed up there. They weren’t a cohesive bunch. No team spirit like the Uruguayan rugby players. They fought and squabbled and some of them were killed even before the group got snowed in. Once that happened, it was every man for himself. More than one person was suspected of murdering his fellow man to fill his stomach.”

Bobby pulled out the items they’d retrieved at the shack, including the pocket watch and photos, and placed them on the table. He clicked open the watch to reveal the initials W. F. “This could be William Foster’s.”

Sam raised his eyebrows. “Who’s that?”

“William Foster was with the emigrants trapped near Donner Lake. He was a member of the Forlorn Hope, a group of fifteen snowshoers who left the snowbound emigrants to try to breach the mountains and reach help at Sutter’s Fort near Sacramento. They had two Miwok guides, and Foster, half-crazed with starvation, hunted them down in cold blood and ate them. He reasoned that their being Miwoks made them less human and that they should sacrifice themselves to the white emigrants.”

“Nice guy,” Dean said drily.

“Yeah, a real prince,” Bobby agreed. “After the Forlorn Hope reached help, Foster returned with one of the rescue parties for his kid. Only by then the kid had died and been eaten. By that time, Foster himself had eaten at least six different individuals.”

“You think he’s our wendigo?” Sam asked. Wendigos didn’t start out as crazed, inhumanly strong killers. They’d been regular people, pushed to the limit of endurance and driven to cannibalism to survive. Those who relished in it could lose themselves, the sickness spreading through them until they craved human meat and nothing else would satisfy them.

“At the very least, I think it was his things at that shack. This daguerreotype of the little town and the other of the child and wife are definitely linked to him. Couldn’t find any known photos of the kid, but here’s one of his wife.”

Bobby slid a book over to them. A black and white photograph showed a much-aged version of the woman in the daguerreotype.

“Also found this.” Bobby slid over another book, showing a clearer photograph of the general store and post office with the name Foster’s Bar. “It was a little settlement near the Yuba River that was inundated when they made Bullards Bar Reservoir.”

“What happened to Foster?” Dean asked.

“Records say he sickened and died in 1879.”

“But he could have just disappeared and the family could have thought he was dead.”

“Especially if he’d started to transform. He would have looked seriously ill at first.”

Sam leaned forward. “Any guess as to where his lair might be?”

Bobby turned back to the books, pulled one off the stack. “Far as I can tell, there was a place called the ‘Camp of Death.’ It’s where the Forlorn Hope was hit by a nasty blizzard and resorted to cannibalism. Could be he’s revisiting the site of his old crimes.”

“So we go out there and we kill him,” Dean said.

“Unfortunately, it’s not that simple. None of these sources say exactly where the Camp of Death was, only that it was near what is now Emigrant Gap. I looked at a USGS topo., and that area is riddled with mines. Could be anywhere in that area. We need some more info.”

“So where to?” Sam asked.

“Virginia City,” Bobby said, closing his notebook.

“What’s in Virginia City?”

Bobby stood up. “The Aces and Eights Saloon.” The chair legs screeched on the library floor in that unique way reserved for library chairs. Bobby winced at the sound. “It’s a hunters’ hangout. I figure we’re not the first to hunt this thing. Someone’s gotta know something.”

Dean and Sam stood up, too. “Sounds good to me,” Dean said. “Let’s go.”

SEVEN

A cold wind blew over Virginia City. The main street of the town stood before them, apparently unchanged since 1879. The city had been built on the side of a steep mountain, with forested slopes above and the high desert stretching away beneath. Wooden sidewalks ran the length of the street. Old saloons, hotels, and casinos rose on both sides, some of their wooden structures leaning. The sidewalk creaked beneath Dean’s feet as he walked toward the Aces and Eights Saloon. A motorcycle roared by, pulling over in front of the Delta Saloon, whose windows advertised the “World Famous Suicide Table.” Up one of the steep streets stood Piper’s Opera House and Millionaires’ Row, home to huge mansions built with the riches from the famous Comstock lode of silver.

A few people milled around the streets, and he could hear the bluegrass music of a live band filtering out from one of the bars.

It was a strange, exotic place, like stepping back in time to the Old West. They passed the newspaper office where Mark Twain had worked, and a place that offered ghost tours on the weekends. Just looking around at the old buildings, the leaning balconies, hearing the lonely whispering of wind through the streets made Dean think you wouldn’t have to look very hard to find ghosts in this place.

The Aces and Eights Saloon appeared on their right, a large, white wooden building. A weather-worn sign swung and creaked in the wind, depicting hands holding a set of playing cards.

“This is it,” Bobby said. A few tough characters hung out in front smoking, and Dean nodded to them as he passed through the saloon doors.

Inside music played on a jukebox, a country western tune Dean didn’t recognize. It was an old place, nineteenth century, with a large wooden bar with brass railings along the bottom to rest your boots on. A haze of smoke filled the room, drifting around the ceiling by Victorian shaded lamps. A scuffed-up piano stood in one corner, the keys yellowed and the ivory missing altogether in places. Old paintings hung on the walls, desert landscapes and one of a saloon girl fanning her face. Three leather-faced cowboys played cards at a beat-up wooden table in one corner. The only thing missing was brass spittoons next to the bar stools.

At the bar, a line of beer drinkers looked over their shoulders with disinterest at the three men who entered.

“What’ll it be, boys?” asked the bartender, a tall woman with so many tattoos on her arms that Dean couldn’t see any bare skin.

“Beers all around,” Bobby said, “and a whisky.” He looked at the shelf above the bar, its bottles glowing in the fading sun. “Make that two.”

They took three empty stools at the far end of the bar. Through the floor-to-ceiling window, Dean watched the sun paint the desert mountains gold. It was a beautiful spot.

The bartender slung a towel over her left shoulder and poured the drinks, eyeing Dean and the others surreptitiously. Dean caught the guy next to him sneaking a glance, too. He wondered how many people in there were hunters, and how many tourists. The bartender slid a lager to him and he took a sip, spinning on his stool to check the place out.

Apart from the poker players in one corner, two other tables were filled. Two leather-clad, tattooed men sat with a woman wearing a black leather vest and fringed chaps over her blue jeans. Their tanned and reddened faces were wrinkled and leathery from years of riding motorcycles in the hot sun. Their long hair was braided tight against their heads, and one of the men wore a black bandana with skulls. Dean wondered if they were out for a weekend motorcycle ride or if they were hunters.

The other table held two men who talked in hushed tones. A blond man in green fatigues and a black T-shirt leaned closer to his wiry companion, whispering something. The wiry man’s face formed an expression of disgust. He cringed, showing brilliant white teeth against the dark cocoa of his skin, and held up a placating hand to get the other man to stop talking. The blond slapped his own leg hard, and busted out with an outlandish laugh that filled the whole bar. The poker players looked up, annoyed, then went back to their game.

“That can’t be true!” the dark man protested.

“Swear to God, Jason.” Fatigues held up his hand as if he were a Boy Scout. “Swear to God!”

Jason leaned forward. “I swear you make up the craziest b.s., Gerald. I’ve been out to their trailer. There’s no way they’re keeping something like that there.”