Supernatural: The Unholy Cause (14 page)

“Doesn’t matter. They can’t see our faces through here.”

Lowering the biohazard hoods and eye-shields down over their eyes, Dean and Sam hopped down off the back of the truck. Dean looked behind, not entirely comfortable with the way the hood eclipsed his peripheral vision. He did a full three-sixty, still walking as he did so, and got a better view.

Along the western edge of the battlefield, a haphazard melange of media personalities, firemen, cops, and Civil War re-enactors were all clustered together watching the action. Surprisingly, and despite the overhead announcement by the state police, many of the soldiers didn’t appear to have left after all.

With a jolt he backed into someone.

“Hey,” a woman snapped, “watch where you’re going, pal.”

Dean looked up and saw that he’d walked right into the sheriff. The mask had hidden his face, and she hadn’t recognized him.

“Sorry.”

He and Sam kept walking until they reached the edge of the pit. Taking a deep breath through the air-purifier, Dean turned and looked down. More than one round must have struck the same spot, so the pit was deep.

It was a mass grave.

Forty feet below, ancient skeletons and bone-shards littered the inner walls of the pit everywhere they looked, along with chunks of shrapnel and rusty wartime ordnance. Here, a cannon barrel, there, a twisted mass that might have been a wagon. In the middle, a welter of ribs and spine segments and yellowish shafts that once had been a man. Dozens of men. Or more. The roots of trees were coiled among the last remains of the dead, knotting them in gnarled fists.

Squinting down into the hole, Dean Winchester’s first reaction was pure relief, a sweeping sense of,
Oh. Is
that
all
. Not that any self-actualized aspect of him had honestly expected to find some depthless hellhole, a channel into the underworld, puking up brimstone and capering demonic atrocities lunging forward... or whatever... and yet—

And yet he had.

He
did
.

Because that was what he did after spending years down there, doing what he’d done.

He wondered.

He worried.

He feared.

Through sheer force of will, Dean shoved those notions aside—all of them—as far and as hard as he possibly could. Now more than ever he didn’t want that experience contaminating the way he looked at the world... not that he had a choice.

Hell had been his Vietnam. It had stamped its mark on him for all eternity, and no amount of denial or self-imposed ignorance was going to change it.

Ever.

“Except this isn’t Hell,” he mumbled under his breath. “It’s just a bunch of dead soldiers.”

Suddenly that phrase,
dead soldiers
, struck him as improbably funny. He found himself imagining a pit littered with empty beer bottles, Pabst Blue Ribbon and Coors and perhaps the worst beer in America, Meister Brau. The tension cracked and he felt a welcome numbness spread over him in its place, stopping him where he stood.

A nearby police lab tech, mistaking his reaction for despair, gripped him by the shoulder.

“Steady on, man. First time’s tough on all of us.”

“Yeah,” Dean managed, more grateful than ever that the mask hid his face. “It’s tough all right.”

“We’re just here to do a job, right?”

“You got it, buddy.”

“Hey, Dean.” It was Sam, tapping him on the other shoulder. “Are you seeing this?”

“What part?”

“Over there.”

Dean looked. The impromptu investigation team was lowering a sling and pulley contraption over the edge. Down below one of the workers was attaching it to an oblong box sticking halfway out of the dirt at the bottom of the crater. The box appeared to be made of iron. Unlike the other relics and debris in the pit, the passing century and a half didn’t seem to have affected it much at all.

If anything, the metal appeared to be even shinier—more
luminous
—than it had any right to be. Seeing the thing gleaming, Dean imagined what it must have been like, buried under tons of dirt for decade after decade, shining all by itself deep in the ground with a stark unwholesome intensity that radiated from within its depths.

As the winch hauled the thing upward out of the hole, dragging it by a handle at one end, more of it came into sight. He began to notice a series of inscriptions glinting along its edges. The coffin rotated slowly, catching the light, then settled into place as the makeshift crane set it down on the opposite side of the crater.

“Come on,” Sam said.

Dean jogged behind him around the crater’s outer rim. Several members of the Sheriff Daniels’ investigation team had already gathered around the casket and were looking at it curiously. More were on their way over, along with one of the TV camera crews and a detachment of re-enactors who seemed to have become bolder about ‘contaminating the crime scene.’

Hunching down in the middle of the group where he wouldn’t be so conspicuous, Dean slipped his isolation hood off, letting the breeze cool the layer of sweat that had formed over his forehead and upper lip. He took in a deep breath and let it out. Either he’d actually started getting used to the smell of the pit, or it had begun to dissipate.

“Can you read any of this, Sam?” he asked.

Glancing around nervously, Sam took off his own mask for a better look and reached down to brush a remaining clod of dirt from the lid. The thing’s surface shone out brightly, almost winking at them.

“It’s familiar,” he started. “These markings—” He stopped. “I think they match the symbols in Beauchamp’s journal.”

“This is Beauchamp’s coffin, then.”

“Yeah.”

* * *

Before Sam could get a closer look, the group of workers that had brought out the coffin lifted it up and began carrying it back toward the waiting forensics vehicle. Following it into the open parking lot, Sam realized, would only leave him more exposed to the possibility of being recognized.

And then it was too late.

“Sam!”

He glanced up and saw what Dean had already noticed. On the other side of the pit, perhaps forty feet away, Sheriff Daniels was staring straight at him with a resolute expression that somehow combined recognition, determination, and anger. He supposed he’d known this would happen when he took off the hood... but some part of him hadn’t expected that it would happen so fast.

“We’re made,” he said.

“Hang tight.” Dean was backing up, glancing right and left. More than anything he resembled a quarterback taking stock of his options, even the utterly crazy ones. But they were out of time.

Daniels and her deputies were already moving toward them. There was no way out.

Damn it
, Sam thought,
we’re gonna spend the night in jail. Maybe more. And we don’t have that kind of time.

Suddenly Dean saw something that seemed to change the game for him. With a shout, he flung one hand up in the air.

“Yo, Commanches!”

Sam turned around and saw several state troopers escorting a group of re-enactors that he identified as members of Dave Wolverton’s division—the Fighting 32
^nd
—past the still-panicked horses of the Confederate armed cavalry division. The soldier up in front was particularly familiar, and it took Sam less than five seconds to recognize Sarah Rafferty.

From where he stood, it looked like she was trying to get the horses out.

She looked up as Sheriff Daniels approached the Winchesters.

“Private Will Tanner!” Dean shouted. “Little help here?”

For an instant, Sarah didn’t seem to understand what was being asked of her. Then she did.

The entire equation—the look on the sheriff’s face, directed at Sam and Dean—unfolded in her expression, and she reached forward and grabbed the bolt on the horse paddock, opening the gate.

All the horses came spilling out in a great galloping wave. It was as if all the pent-up fear from the explosions had finally been given free rein. The animals cut across the open battleground in front of Sam and Dean, hooves thundering hard across the earth between the cops and emergency workers, forcing everyone backward with the atavistic dread that sends people scurrying out of the path of stampeding animals.

“Now!” Sam felt Dean’s hand on his wrist. “Go!”

Using the stampede as cover, they yanked their masks back down and ran along behind the group of lab technicians carrying the casket toward the mobile crime lab. They helped load it into the back of the vehicle, then quickly climbed up after it. When they looked back down, the rest of the police forensics team—four of them, plus the driver—were climbing up into the back of the vehicle with them.

“Stay here,” Dean said. “Me and my partner will handle this one.”

“By yourselves?” The man in front took off his mask, his eyes flicking down to the badge around Dean’s neck. “On whose orders?”

Before Dean could answer, there was a crash and a shout somewhere behind them. The horses were in the parking lot now, running between the cars and creating even more confusion.

The man in front whipped around to see what had happened.

“Let’s move,” Dean bellowed. He pulled the door shut and shouted back up to driver. “Where are we headed?”

“This is Federal jurisdiction now,” the man behind the wheel called back. “We’ve got a plane waiting at Malcolm County Airport. Are you the only two riding along?”

“Looks that way,” Sam said.

“Where’s everybody else?”

Dean glanced out of the back window, where various members of state and local law enforcement had joined with the re-enactors in responding to the stampede.

“Rounding up horses. Looks like they stuck us with thegg stiff.” He shrugged. “What are you gonna do?”

The mobile crime scene truck rolled away from the battlefield and out of the parking lot, trundling down the country highway away from the town. It was bumpier than the road that led into town, and through the windows Sam saw the country landscape whipping past in a steady stream of green hills and blue sky.

“If those demons were taking the time to tear the whole field apart with cannon fire,” Sam said, “they must have been pretty convinced that the noose was in Beauchamp’s casket.”

“So let’s take a look.”

Sam eyed the coffin.

“Now?” he said doubtfully. “You sure?”

“No problem. Find me a screwdriver.”

“No, I mean, you really want to open this up?”

“That’s why we’re here, isn’t it?”

“We don’t even know what’s going to happen.”

Dean let out a breath.

“The coffin’s pretty obviously not stopping the noose’s power. So we need to get it out and destroy it.”

“Just let me try Bobby first.” Sam dug out his cell phone and dialed, waiting while it rang and finally went to voicemail. “He’s not answering.”

“That’s it, then.” Dean looked around. The back of the morgue vehicle was lined with steel cabinets and swing-bins of carefully stored instruments, chemical compounds, and medical tools. “Here.” He picked up a shovel, and crouching beside the coffin wedged it underneath the lid. “This’ll do.”

The driver angled the rearview mirror, glowering back at them.

“Hey!” he shouted. “You know we aren’t supposed to tamper with evidence.”

“It’s okay,” Dean said. “We’ve got prior authorization.”

“From who?”

“Uh, Colonel... Sanders.”

“
What
?”

Sam shot his brother a glaring
WTF
stare. Dean just shrugged and twisted the shovel handle as hard as he could. Something inside the casket cracked wide open, and the hinges let out a low, creaking sound as the lid scraped upward.

“You guys aren’t doing anything to that coffin, are you?”

Ignoring him, Dean levered the shovel down harder. Sam squatted next to him, hooking his fingers under the lid, flinching and catching his breath as he pried it upward.

“Whoa,” Dean recoiled. “
More
stinky smell? Really?”

Sam shrugged and covered his nose. The back tires of the truck bumped upward, seeming to agitate the smell even more. It wasn’t quite as rancid as the reek from the mass grave—but it was more intense, more preserved somehow, and spicy, like canned jerky that had been sequestered away somewhere for a century and a half.

Peering down, Sam looked into the casket’s interior. It contained bones, most of them shifted to one side, where they looked smaller and somehow random. One of the ribs was tangled in what looked like an old suspender, complete with a metal buckle. There was a rusty old revolver that had long ago started reverting into its component parts.

“Oh, man. What happened?” Dean poked through the rest of their stained and brittle remains, looking like a kid whose Christmas toy had arrived broken before he’d gotten a chance to play with it. He picked up the toppled-loose skull and set it aside.

Shards of human pottery and a pair of broken-down hobnailed boots were all that remained of Jubal Beauchamp. There were tattered gray rags of his uniform and a few brass buttons rattling around the bottom like loose teeth, and that was all.