Supernatural: War of the Sons (5 page)

“And?” Dean asked, annoyed.

“And what?”

“And what is it?” Dean spat out, the words almost falling on top of each other.

“A manual. A book of strategy, if you like, a... a war guide... A cheat sheet for the Apocalypse.”

“Written by?” Dean demanded.

Don grabbed a beer from the bartender’s outstretched hand.

“God,” he answered.

“And you walked away?! I knew y’all were idjits, I just didn’t know the extent.” Dean was always relieved to hear Bobby Singer’s voice, no matter how annoyed he sounded. He may not be blood, but he was the only family the boys had left.

“Told him we needed some time to think it over,” Dean said, shifting his cell phone away from his ear to protect his hearing from the auditory onslaught. Dean was alone in the fish-scented motel room while Sam had gone out for food. Dean found it hard to think on an empty stomach, and there was no way he was gonna share a meal with Don the d-bag angel.

“I bet you did. Did you also tell him to come and bring me some new damn legs?” Bobby responded with his usual rancor. Dean had forgotten momentarily about Bobby’s disability. Bobby had been stabbed by Ruby’s knife a few months back and become paralyzed, left to live out the Apocalypse in a wheelchair. It was the worst possible fate for a man who prided himself on being self-sufficient.

“I kept you out of it. The less the angels know about you, the better. For all of us,” Dean said.

“What, because I’m a slow-moving target now? I can take care of my damned self, Dean.” Bobby’s voice cracked slightly, betraying the hardship his impairment had caused.

“I know you can, Bobby,” Dean said, and then tried to reroute the conversation back into productive territory. “Do you know anything about this book? It’s called
The War of the Sons of Light Against the Sons of Darkness
.”

“Everybody’s heard of it,” Bobby replied, sounding more like his usual self. “It’s a segment of the Dead Sea Scrolls, and one of the most widely read apocryphal texts in Christendom. Trouble is, nobody’s read the ending.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because it don’t exist. When the scrolls went up for sale in ’54 there was a big to-do. Somebody broke into the Waldorf Astoria, where they were being auctioned, and the next day they couldn’t find the last page, what they called the ‘War Scroll.’ Lore says it was destroyed... That the Devil didn’t like what it had to say.”

So much for an easy answer
, Dean thought.
But at least Don’s story checks out
.

“And the bit he said about it being a field guide to the End Times?”

“More like a field guide to gutting the Devil,” Bobby said grimly. “It gets pretty specific. Battle formations, a timeline, you name it. But that last page... how to defeat Satan himself? That could change everything.”

“Thanks for keeping expectations low, Bobby. So if it’s been destroyed, how does Don the angel lead us to it?”

“Should of asked him instead of storming off, dimwit.” There was a pause on the other end of the line. “Could be it wasn’t destroyed, just hidden. Put someplace safe where Lucifer knew no one would find it.”

“So all we have to do is find something hidden by the Devil himself. Easy peasy.”

Dean heard the door open behind him, letting a gust of cold air rush in, rustling the drapes and sending a chill down his spine. He turned to see Sam enter the room, a guilty look on his face.

“Bobby, I’ve gotta go...”

And then Dean saw him. Don the angel, striding in right after Sam.

“Sam, what the hell’s going on?” Dean dropped the cell phone to his side, but could still hear Bobby’s tinny voice calling out from the speaker.

“Dean, I’m sorry. Really, I am. But you’re not the one that’s facing an angel firing squad no matter what he does.” Sam tried to hold eye contact with Dean, but the older Winchester looked away. He stared instead at Don, who was still wearing that damn Hawaiian shirt.

“What did you say to him?” Dean asked the angel harshly.

“I told him the truth. That you’ll understand it all in time.” Don’s words were the last thing Dean heard before the sudden, precipitous drop.

Sam awoke to the sound of screaming, terrifyingly close. It was accompanied by the thrashing wails of some sort of otherworldly creature. The noise rattled the air around him, and then gave way to a man’s shouting. And was that... music?
What the hell happened
? He was totally alone in a dark, curving hallway, both ends of which were obscured by turns. Coming from one direction was the sound of screaming. From the other, silence.
This is how a hunter’s instincts can get you in trouble
, Sam thought as he slowly stood, his legs faltering, and walked carefully toward the maelstrom.
Most people would run
away
from screaming. Thanks for the death wish, Dad.

As he rounded the corner, he started at the sight before him. His brother, clearly in a similar state of shock, stood in the flickering light of an old-fashioned movie theater. On the silver screen, a massive squid attacked a submarine while sailors threw harpoons at its colossal eye. Sam reached way back into his childhood memories.
The
Nautilus
? Is that
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
?
Sam was stupefied.
What did Don do to us?

He saw an exit sign and pushed his stupefied older brother toward it. They stumbled outside and squinted as the afternoon sun temporarily blinded them. Blinking, Sam looked up at the impossibly bright sky and saw the silhouette of a massive building.
The Empire State Building
, he thought. A classic cherry-colored car motored past them, in pristine condition. Happy families strode down the sidewalk, wearing outfits straight out of
Back to the Future
. Sam stared at them.
Something’s gone really wrong
.

He looked over at Dean, who looked back at him, an I-told-you-so look on his face.

“Dude. I think that dick sent us back to 1954.”

The time-travelers stood on the sidewalk, completely stunned. A crowd of women in full skirts, hats and gloves, and men in sharp suits and derbies flowed around them. In their Levi’s and leather jackets, Dean realized the Winchester boys looked out of place in the smart corporate landscape, to say the least.

That winged chimp really has sent us back to what looks like New York in 1954,
he thought, his brain struggling to process. It seemed Don had dropped them smack dab in the middle of Times Square, but there wasn’t a camera-wielding tourist anywhere in sight. The place was also suspiciously clean and quiet, no crumpled piles of paper or garbage, and no blaring rap music emanating from any of the stores nearby.

“First, we get our bearings, then I beat your ass,” Dean announced.

“I didn’t—” Sam began.

“Don’t, Sam. Nothing you can possibly say will make up for you throwing us under the bus,
again
.”

“You’re not the only one with a stake in this, Dean. That means, sometimes, you follow
my
plan.”

Dean scanned the bustling crowd, wary of continuing this discussion in public.

“Alright, smarty-pants. You wanted to do the time warp again, so what’s the next move?”

“We get off the street.”

On that point, Dean had to agree with his brother. Trying their best to blend into the crowd, they quickly turned and headed north toward Central Park.

Dean deftly grabbed a
New York Herald Tribune
from a green newsstand that squatted on the corner of 47
^th
and Broadway. Some things don’t change, no matter what era you are in; sleight of hand is still sleight of hand. Dean peered at the date: June 26
^th
, 1954. He shook his head. That asshole had shot them back almost half a century without even an explanation of where or how to find the War Scroll.

Despite their predicament, Sam was smiling.

“This is amazing,” he said.

“What are you, Buddy the Elf, fresh from the North Pole?” Dean chided. “We’ve been to New York a dozen times.”

“Yeah, but how many times have we been to the
fifties
?” Sam retorted.

“The real fun starts in the sixties.”

As they crossed a busy intersection, a man in a trench coat clipped Dean’s shoulder.

“Hey, watch it buddy,” Dean said with automatic vitriol, but when he looked at the guy, for a half-second he thought he saw the face of Castiel. The man looked up in alarm, and Dean realized his mistake. It wasn’t Cass, and they didn’t know anyone in 1954. There wasn’t a friendly face for miles, or decades for that matter.

The boys were no strangers to angelic time jumps—they had been through this before, when Anna tried to kill John and Mary Winchester in 1978, and when Cass took Dean back to 1973. The past wasn’t something Dean liked to visit or even remember, and now he was back. Plus, he was super hungry—another drawback to time travel.

Sam looked over his shoulder at the man in the trench coat, and then back at Dean.

“Dude, this isn’t the New York we’re familiar with. Try to be a little less conspicuous.”

As they left Times Square, Sam took one last look. Rather than the giant three-story-high video screens back in the present day, the streets were lined with theaters and coffee shops. The iconic signs that had made the square famous were mazes of neon. A two-story-high Pepsi Cola bottle-cap sign mooned over the square, which was filled not with mid-western tourists in fanny packs, but a vital post-war workforce eager to create the American dream. The fifties saw the beginning of the consumer society that perpetuated after World War II; buying things created a wealthy America, and the indications were all around them. A Chevrolet sign topped a building, under which was a Canadian Club Scotch Whiskey sign, and below that was the large-toothed smiling face of Ed Sullivan, hanging off the side of the building in front of them.

Sam grabbed Dean’s arm.

“We could go see
The Ed Sullivan Show
!”

Dean looked at his brother scornfully.

“Sam, I’m not hanging around here playing
Mad Men
with you. We get the page from those scrolls, and somehow have Don get us back to 2010. Nothing else.”

“I just thought we could take in this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see living legends... living.”

Dean made his way up Broadway, and Sam followed a few steps behind. Dean took a right at 55
^th
Street, and he seemed to know exactly where he was headed as he crossed the street, dodging in between cars.
Good thing there are no jaywalking tickets in the 1950s
, Sam mused.

Dean pushed in the door to the Carnegie Deli and Sam dutifully followed him inside, knowing there was no point in resisting his brother’s appetite.

They slid into a booth looking out onto 7
^th
Avenue. Dean didn’t need to look at a menu; this was the only place in the whole wide world where Dean’s favorite thing diverged from his usual bacon cheeseburger. A waitress appeared at their table in a full pink skirt edged with white bric-a-brac.

“What can I get you gentlemen?” she asked with a heavy New York accent.

Dean smiled for the first time that day.

“I’ll have a pastrami on rye, extra mustard, potato salad, and a root beer, please.”

Sam shook his head.
Nothing makes Dean happier than a meal
. He looked up from his menu.

“I’ll have the turkey Reuben, light on the Russian dressing, and a side of coleslaw,” he said. The waitress nodded and scribbled on her pad.

“Comin’ right up,” she said and smiled as she left to place the order.

Once she was out of earshot, Dean looked expectantly at his brother.

“Alright, captain. What’s the plan?”

Sam had been pondering their next move, but hadn’t come up with any bright ideas yet. They knew very little about the location of the War Scroll, only what was publicly available on the internet in 2010. What they did know was that a private sale happened at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel on July 1
^st
—in just five days. But how would they even get close to infiltrating that transaction?

“Well, we could try to get jobs at the Waldorf,” he said. “We wouldn’t call any attention to ourselves if we actually worked there.”

Dean shrugged. Getting a real job wasn’t their usual process, mostly they just pretended to be FBI agents, or priests, or CDC inspectors. Doing actual work wasn’t part of Dean’s
modus operandi
. But, considering the circumstances, they didn’t have a choice. They didn’t know nearly enough about the time period to successfully pass as government officials.

Their sandwiches arrived, five inches of beautiful meat piled onto freshly baked bread. Dean was beside himself with joy.

Minutes later, Dean was finishing up his pickle and the last bite of his sandwich. As they got up to leave, Dean looked at the check and pulled a ten spot out of his pocket. They walked past the young waitress on their way out.

“Thanks,” Dean said, giving her a big smile.