Supernatural: The Unholy Cause (21 page)

Raising the knife, McClane stuck its tip into the first of the noose’s coils, shoving it upward. Sam heard a ripping noise as the blade tore through the weave of the hemp.

Black ooze spurted from the rope like drainage from an infected loop of bowel, trickling down McClane’s hands and up to his elbows.

Seeing it, Sam remembered how heavy the rope had felt, and realized that was because it was alive and pulsating, nearly sloshing in Tommy’s hands. He stared as the black substance rose up, shimmering in the night air, moving the way they’d seen it move in the back of the morgue van.

The Moa’ah.

It swirled over their heads and flung itself outward, across the battlefield and up the hill, a streak of greater blackness against the gloom that preceded sunrise.

A sudden eruption of thunder shook the world, lights flashing and shivering over the hillside, illuminating the full curvature of the landscape in a series of silent-movie flickers.

No
, Sam realized,
not thunder.

Guns.

Up on top of the hill, figures began to appear, manning the siege howitzers that the state police had not been able to bring down. More of them rose up every second.

They seemed to be rising up out of the ground itself.

But they weren’t—the meat-suits they wore were the bodies of the re-enactors who had refused to abandon the battlefield.

* * *

“Ah.” Reaching the final loop, McClane changed the angle of the blade, as if anticipating greater resistance. “The seventh coil. Now you’re going to see why Judas wants to keep the noose so closely protected.”

Dean swung at him.

It should have worked. McClane wasn’t even looking at him—he was still apparently absorbed by the task at hand. But when Dean’s fist came at him, McClane switched hands with the noose, then reached up almost casually and gripped Dean by the wrist, swinging him around sideways and applying pressure to his radial nerve.

A thin lancet of icy-hot pain sprang up Dean’s arm and his knees went out from under him, dropping him to the ground.

“Nate?” McClane called out. From inside the cab of the truck, Nate stepped out holding what Sam Winchester recognized as a Civil War musket from the gun rack. Wielding the gun with ease, the boy aimed and pulled the trigger. There was a flat, eardrum-rending report as the muzzle-flash ignited the air in front of him. Dean flailed backward, twisted and was landed face-first in the dirt.

“Dean!” Sam shouted.

McClane turned and eyed him speculatively.

“I hope you’re gonna be a little tougher to crack,” he said, drawing the demon-blade, tipping it back and throwing it at Sam at point-blank range.

Jacqueline Daniels’ head continued to throb mercilessly.

It was four in the morning and she was still in her office. She had called her deputy, Jerry, in from the stakeout at the Winchesters’ motel. He had arrived along with Sergeant Earl Ray Harris and a handful of State Troopers, plus an FBI agent.

She couldn’t tell them about the noose, or the thirty silver pieces that she’d removed from the battlefield, or her recent excavations in the basement of the First Pentecostal Church of Mission’s Ridge.

She definitely couldn’t reveal the recent visit from the self-proclaimed angel in a trench coat who had called himself Castiel. And besides, even if she told them the truth, none of them would believe her.

“Let’s go over what happened out on the highway again,” said the FBI officer, a slicked-back thirty-something careerist named Andrew Tremont. In the last hour or so, Sheriff Daniels had silently upgraded Agent Tremont’s status from localized pain-in-the-ass to world-class hemorrhoid as his questions had become less random and more focused on how and when her particular investigation had fallen apart.

Also, he was drinking her coffee—the good stuff, the French Roast that she normally kept hidden under the microwave.

“You said someone stepped out in the middle of the road, in front of your cruiser, and forced you to stop. You have reason to believe this person was working with the two men?”

“I already told you that—we’re just wasting time,” Daniels said. “Besides, I’m not the one under investigation here.”

Tremont lifted his mug to his lips and sipped noisily.

“May I remind you, Sheriff, that you called us.”

“To help me catch a couple of men who were impersonating Federal Agents, not to pick my investigation to pieces.”

“I submit that our goals might not be mutually exclusive.” Another two ounces of premium coffee disappeared into Tremont’s mouth. “Now, two of our DMORT workers claim they saw you taking something from the corpse of Phil Oiler and placing it in a bag,” Tremont said. “One of them said that it jingled.”

“Jingled?”

“Like coins. Can you tell me anything about that?”

“That’s right. I stole a bag of quarters from a corpse.” Daniels knuckled her eyes and waited for one of the State Troopers—or even her own deputy, for that matter—to stick up for her. Jerry hadn’t even had the consideration to stay awake.

When none of them spoke, she glared back up at the Fed.

“Look, Agent Tremont...”

“That’s a very interesting tattoo on your wrist, Sheriff. Might I ask after its provenance?”

“Its what—?”

BOOM!

Everybody jumped up and scraped back their chairs.

“Not again,” Jerry moaned, sitting up in the seat where he’d been drowsing.

Tremont stiffened, then stood, wiped the spilled coffee from his shirt cuff and put the cup aside, heading toward the front window to look out onto the street.

“Who do you have stationed out at the battlefield?” Daniels asked Sergeant Harris.

“Two details,” Harris said. “At midnight they were still trying to get those re-enactors to leave.”

Nobody else spoke.

They headed out.

Sam ducked the blade.

It hissed past his head like a low-flying comet, and when he came up again, both Tommy and Nate McClane were barreling toward him. Nate had discarded the gun and was circling about looking for the demon-killing knife.

BOOM!

The skyline erupted with the biggest explosion yet, heaving up vast ripples of convulsed air that blew back Sam’s hair and made the pickup jounce sideways on its shocks. He sprang up into the back of the truck, kicked out the window above the gun rack, and yanked down the shotgun and the canister of salt.

He broke the weapon open, dumped in salt and worked the action.

He pointed it down at Nate.

The boy froze.

“Please, mister.” All at once the young face went smooth and innocent, becoming that of an average kid—one who’d stumbled in far over his head. His eyes had changed from black to a pale blue, and they were filling with frightened tears. “You don’t know what it’s like.”

Sam took a breath.

“Yes,” he said, “I do.”

“Just give me a chance.”

It’s a trap. And if you fall for it, you’re an even bigger idiot than I thought.

Still
...

Sam hesitated. The shotgun felt very heavy in his grip now. He lowered the gun a fraction...

And the Nate-demon lunged for him.

Sam had the shotgun back up instantly.

He pulled the trigger.

The barrel roared, a storm of rock salt blasting from its muzzle, tearing the demon down. A child-sized raft of living smoke came shrieking out of Nate’s skin, and somewhere off to the left, Sam heard Tommy McClane start to scream. Obscenities spilled from his lips, curses in a dozen different languages. Sam didn’t wait around to hear the translation.

Squirming through the broken back window into the pickup’s cab, he dropped into the driver’s seat. The keys were still in the ignition. He cranked them, dropped the truck into reverse, spun the wheel and floored the gas, flinging the pickup back around.

Up ahead in the headlights, he saw Tommy McClane staring straight at him.

But Dean was gone.

Pinned by the headlights of the oncoming truck, the thing that called itself Tommy McClane stood his ground.

He’d lost the last coil of the noose somewhere.

This wasn’t the plan, gunning the Winchesters down in the middle of the battle before the endgame was achieved. But the plan hadn’t included the sight of his son being shredded by a shotgun full of rock salt either. When the demon had seen that...

Oh, when he had seen that...

McClane’s jaw tightened. Rage lay heavy against his heart like the flat surface of a branding iron. He wasn’t thinking straight. He cast around quickly for something to throw and came up with a short timber post that had been dislodged from somewhere. He hurled it with all his strength at the truck. The glass crazed on impact, and Sam Winchester ducked reflexively, but then quickly sat back up behind the wheel.

McClane could see Sam’s face through the windshield, and it was a mirror of his own anger.

At the last second, he dove out of the way, letting the pickup squeal past him.

Sam swerved across the parking lot and spun the pickup around. He couldn’t see Dean anywhere, and he was running out of time.

Up on the hill, the siege howitzers were blasting to pieces whatever remained of the night. The onslaught was so unrelenting that it was impossible to discern the gunfire from the echoes. In the east, the glow of dawn shuddered along the rim of the Earth, low and red and trickling through the treetops, as if the sky itself was bleeding from the attack.

Sam steered the pickup around again, heading for the battlefield, the tents and the trees. Somewhere off to his left he could make out the Civil War steam locomotive by the old railway shed. Between the explosions, over the pickup truck’s engine, he heard screaming.

He looked over at the figures in uniform, storming down the hill. Some wore blue, others gray. They were running down the incline side-by-side regardless of sides, like the fulfillment of some ancient prophecy.

And behold, the Yankee shall campaign with the Rebel.

All carried authentic-looking Civil War weapons. And although Sam Winchester couldn’t know for sure at this distance, in this misty, smoke shrouded pre-dawn light, he had the sick feeling that every single one of them had the same onyx-black eyes.

He thought of what McClane had said.

“My kin.”

Dean
, he thought miserably,
where are you?

Up ahead of him, men had already come out of the tents. Re-enactors—the ones whose bodies the demons hadn’t possessed—were standing in their skivvies and long underwear and gaping up at the wave of figures storming down the hillside. The pickup’s headlights strafed their faces, revealing the slack disbelief of sleepers who’d awakened from a nightmare only to find that the nightmare had followed them into reality.

There was another artillery flash from above, the boom following instantly afterward, the long shadows of the attackers flickering forward over the grass and down like the fingers of some unthinkably vast and clutching claw.

“Look out!” Sam palmed the pickup’s horn and held it down. Its nasal beep was absurdly small against the roar of battle. “Get out of here! Run!”

The pickup hit a bump and slammed violently upward, coming down hard on its shocks with a suspension-busting crack. Sam saw the tents and the men, the trees and creek and the hillside beyond it, all of it closer now, but his brother wasn’t there, wasn’t anywhere, and if he didn’t find him soon—

A figure burst out of the trees in front of him, darting through his headlights, fifteen feet away. Sam had just enough time to recognize her, the name kiting briefly across his conscious mind—

Sarah Rafferty.

—when the biggest howitzer shell yet hit the pickup head-on, blasting it sideways and up into the air, pinwheeling Sam Winchester with it, out of the blue and into the black.

The truck hit the ground, torn open and bleeding flame.

It was exactly five a.m.