Supernatural: Bobby Singer's Guide to Hunting (18 page)

Oblivion

UH. HI.

I’m not Bobby.

My name is Dean Winchester, and I’m not quite sure how to explain what’s happened the last few days. Guess with these things you start at the beginning. I’m no writer, so bear with me.

My brother Sam and I were in northern Wisconsin, chasing down a lead on something that’d disappeared a few dudes. My money was on a succubus or siren, but Sammy bet crocotta. That’s when we got the call about an Eve sighting in Port Washington, a few hours south. Eve was a big fish (not, you know, literally), so we had to jump off the Ashland case and called in Bobby to take over for us. Shocking nobody, he was a grumperpuss about it, but got in that beat up old Chevelle of his and drove up.

When we came back from Port Washington (the Eve thing was a false alarm), Bobby’d done most of the legwork for us. It turned out to be a banshee we were after, so Sammy and I were both wrong. In his infinite wisdom, Bobby’d gotten the banshee hooked on
him
, so we were looking at a countdown situation. Sooner or later, Bobby would fly the belfry and disappear on us, so we had to stay with him wherever he went. And boy, Bobby’s a regular Chatty Cathy when you’re with him all day.

He started getting antsy, wanted to go to the bog real bad, so the banshee’s call had definitely kicked in. Before we drove to the swamp, Bobby had to sing this terrible song into Sam’s phone, said it was the only way to off the banshee, and hey, he was the expert. Felt like we were the ones getting punished, though.

Bobby already told you how things went with the banshee. She wasn’t the problem. This other—pardon my French—
total bitch
came out of nowhere and beat the living crap out of us and we all woke up back in our hotel, the Starry Nite Inn on Highway 13.

The woman was standing over Bobby, working some bad-touch mojo on him. His face was all twisted up in pain, like he’d eaten some bad shellfish or something. She was talking to him, whispering, too low for me to hear.

Sam and I were tied to chairs, which happens to us so often that we oughta hide knives in our sleeves. Being absolute geniuses, though, we don’t do that. Maybe we’ll start, right after we put our weapons on a bungee. I could tell Sam was already working on his bindings, and so was I, but it’d take us a minute.

The woman touched her finger to Bobby’s temple, did some kinda Vulcan mind meld on him, and when she took her finger away, a trail of white light followed, like she was tugging out a string of pure energy. Whatever she was doing, Bobby did not seem jazzed about it. She took her finger, dragging the white light with it, and touched her own temple. Like she was making a psychic connection between them.

There wasn’t anything we could do except watch and make angry faces at the lady. Bobby started mumbling, babbling nonsense, like he didn’t know where he was. The bitch was messing with his mind, putting a tap into his brain and letting all the juice drip out.

Sam, being Sam, got out of his binds first. Those huge biceps aren’t just for impressing other dudes at the gym. The woman raised her hand, clenched her fist, and he was sent flying ass-over-elbows, knocked right into me. My chair tipped backwards, which actually helped me out, since it put me in a better position to get at the knot in my rope. I was up a few seconds later and saw Sam get his ass handed to him a second time. Guy is always getting beat up by girls.

When I went at her, I won’t say it went great, but I didn’t get flung into a wall. She might have punched me a little, but I got in a few blows, too. Sam came in behind her and got a hand around her neck, while I went for the pillow on the bed, where I’d stashed a knife and a gun.

That’s when things got weird.

Bobby stood up, started going crazy. And I mean
cuh-ray-zee
. Taking swings at all of us, demanding we take him to the bus stop, crap like that. She must have really scrambled his eggs, because a second later he ran out of the room and didn’t look back. Last I saw him, his Chevelle was fish-tailing out of the Starry Nite’s parking lot.

And then the lady
really
got pissed off.

. . . . .

I don’t like getting my ass kicked any more than the next guy, but it’s a little more embarrassing when your job is to kick other people’s asses. Anyway, the next few days weren’t exactly the champagne room at the Spearmint Rhino. Sam and I were kept in that hotel room and got our noodles twirled, just like Bobby did.

Parts of my memory are fuzzy (because of the noodle twirling . . . , but it felt like she was scanning my brain. Sampling what she found inside, and psychically ripping out the parts that she liked. Every now and then, she’d laugh, cry, or start talking to herself, reliving the memories she was taking from us. As she took the memories, they’d flash in our heads. Little pieces of them, like echoes.

She was still taking memories from Bobby, too. Once she put that tap in his brain, she was able to siphon off his memories wherever he went. Pretty good racket, I guess, if stealing other people’s lives is your thing. What she was doing with the memories and why she picked the ones she picked, she kept that to herself.

While I was tied up, having my grapefruit juiced, I got to thinking. That after what she’d done to him, maybe I’d never see Bobby again. He didn’t seem to be in any shape to come rescue us, and the guy was the only person who knew we were here.

I shouldn’t have doubted him.

It took him a few days, but Bobby showed. While the lady was forcing me to relive the tenth grade, Bobby smashed through the hotel room door. He blasted her with rock-salt before she’d even turned around. Black blood sprayed on the tacky star wallpaper—kind of an improvement, really. Didn’t drop the shrew, though, she came right back at him. Another shell straight to her gut and she doubled over. Bobby got to Sammy first, untied him, then came for me.

Three on one, it was a pretty even fight. We had her cornered, Bobby pulled a silver knife from his jacket, took a couple swipes, then fell over, having a seizure. Then Sammy fell over, too. When Sam looked up at me, it was like he didn’t even recognize me. A blank stare.

My whole life flashed through my head—every kick, every kiss, every monster, and every bacon cheeseburger. All of them felt totally real, as if I was experiencing every flavor I ever tasted at the same time. And man, they tasted funny together.

I had to fight through it to get back on my feet. The woman was straining, holding out her hands at me and Sammy. Bobby was back on his feet as well, struggling to move towards her. I fell back to the floor, totally useless. Imagine feeling every emotion you’ve ever felt, simultaneously. I didn’t know whether to cry, laugh, or puke, but I came close to doing all three. When I looked back up, Bobby had his knife to her neck. She was talking, but all I could hear were the voices in my head—my dad’s voice, Sam’s voice, my
mom’s
voice, telling me that angels were watching over me. . . .

It stopped fast, like a faucet was turned off. I wiped the tears off my cheeks in the manliest way possible, then saw that she and Bobby were still facing off. His knife and her hand both raised.

“Who are you?” he asked.

She smiled at him, in that totally creepy way that monsters do. “Oblivion. Lethe. The Great River,” she said back, and this is verbatim ’cause I couldn’t make this crap up.

Bobby shook his head. “Not familiar.”

You know what else is chatty, besides Bobby? Monsters. They love to tell you their story and blather on about how terrible their lives are, what a burden they bear, yada yada yada. This one was no different.

See, Oblivion, aka Lethe, aka crazy shrew, was a high-level goddess in Greek mythology. Her job? Wiping people’s memories, which, I know, is a huge shock. She liked her job and was apparently really good at it. She dug the, I don’t know,
taste
of the memories she’d take.

Bobby has a picture of her in one of his books, but it don’t do her justice:

Oblivion got her orders from the men upstairs, and it’d worked that way since Adam and Eve were playing “hide the kielbasa” in the Garden of Eden. People see things they’re not supposed to see every day, and she was the one who would swoop in and remove those memories. Like a celestial housekeeper. Except a recession had hit in heaven, and she was laid off. We’d averted the Apocalypse, and the great heavenly plan had been tossed out. Just like the Fates, Oblivion’s services were no longer needed. Team Free Will, baby.

But Oblivion, she enjoyed her job too much to give it up. Like one of those accountants who retires but still does people’s taxes for fun. There was no order from heaven for her to take our memories. No plan. She said if angels like Balthazar could run around doing whatever the hell they wanted, then she was gonna do the same thing.

Bobby asked her what she wanted from us, and she told him the honest truth. One memory, that’s all. One of
Bobby’s
memories. She could smell it from across the state, and used the banshee as a way to lure us in. Sammy and me, we were just collateral damage.

I asked what was wrong with my memories. I mean, what am I, chopped liver? What she said will stay with me for the rest of my life. She said she’d sampled all of our goods, and even with everything me and Sam had been through, Bobby’d still had it worse. He’d been forced to kill his own wife, twice, and bury nearly every friend he’d ever had. He’d seen enough terrible things for a hundred lifetimes. And despite all that baggage, deep inside him, he was hiding a single, perfect memory. A moment of . . . bliss, I guess.
That
is what she wanted. That flawless moment.

But it was hidden too well for her to find. She’d been trying to draw it out, but it was under layers of pure suffering that she couldn’t get through. That’s why she needed him to come back to Ashland, and why she’d been using her psychic connection to Bobby to send him clues—images of her, of me, of what went down with the banshee, returning just enough of his memories so that he’d find his way back to her. She wanted to bargain.

That one memory for all of our lives. Knowing Bobby, I thought he’d say yes right away. Never met someone so prone to self-sacrifice. But I hoped he wouldn’t. He had something in there that was rare, like one in a million, she said. If I had that, I’d keep it hidden, too. But if he refused her offer, she’d suck out what she could from our heads and leave us to die as vegetables.

Bobby, bless his surly heart, said no. Told her to eat a bag of dicks. Said he was through making deals with the likes of her. He knew exactly what memory she was talking about, and he’d rather die than give it up. He was being a little cavalier with me and Sam’s lives, but I dug his attitude.

Oblivion knew his blind spot, though. Karen. Apparently, Bobby’d realized he was losing his memories while he was driving home to Sioux Falls. He was so scared of losing his memories of Karen that he carved her name in his car’s windshield at a rest stop along the way. Oblivion watched through her psychic connection as Bobby wrote down the story of her death and saw that set him on his path to being a hunter. If he cared for her so much, how would he feel if she never knew he existed? Oblivion had a pass-card for the pearly gates of heaven. Some of the people she wiped were
already dead
—in Greek mythology, the river Lethe was where souls went to be wiped clean before they were reincarnated—so she could find Karen in heaven and steal all of her memories of Bobby. If they ever got to meet again, Bobby’d still love her, but she wouldn’t even know his name.

“So, what’ll it be?” she said. “Will you give up the memory for Karen?”

To Bobby, it wasn’t even a choice. He said yes.

. . . . .

Oblivion put her hands on Bobby’s face. He was sitting in a chair, she stood over him. Once she had the memory, she’d let us go, she said. I’ve met enough monsters to know that once they’ve tasted the chum in the water, they never let you go. She’d take Bobby’s perfect memory, then the rest of him, then me, then Sam. We had to fight back.

Bobby said he was ready, leaned back in the chair. Closed his eyes, concentrating. It was time to do . . . something.

Sometimes, when I’m in a really stressful situation, I think of this hilarious picture of Sammy from when he was two years old. He’s buck naked and playing air guitar to Zeppelin’s “Kashmir.” That was before he decided to hate good music. I have no idea why it always pops into my head, but it takes the edge off. I was about to watch my friend get lobotomized, and what do you know, there was Sammy, riffing on his air guitar.

The damnedest thing happened. Oblivion
laughed
.

The connection between us was still active. Everything I remembered,
she remembered
. Finally, I had a weapon.

I pictured Alastair, branding me with a scorching hot piece of iron. Rusty hooks, being driven through my skin. Boiling water, being poured down my throat.