Supernatural--Cold Fire (5 page)

Whether she doubted his resolve or could no longer offer even token resistance to the unspoken imperative of the Chimera, she screamed and lunged toward Sam, mouth wide, fangs extended, forcing the issue. The internal debate ceased in an instant. One moment she’d been about to plunge her fangs into his throat, the next she staggered backward and toppled over, headless.

After detaching her snake-scale-covered limbs, it dawned on Sam he might have to skin her to completely reverse the hybridization. But that gruesome task could wait. Stepping around the snake-woman’s remains, he sprinted toward the Chimera.

When he saw Dean, bloody and smiling, behind the bulk of the attacking creature, he couldn’t help but worry about his brother. What if he won the battle with the Chimera at the cost of losing the war to the Mark?

* * *

If there was a fate worse than becoming a hybrid, it had to be becoming part of the monster that created hybrids, nothing more than a fleshy ornament on a living, metric ton of nightmare fuel.
Not happening
, Dean thought.

A third head, probably belonging to one of the hyena-teens, echoed the Chimera’s refrain, “Join me.”

“Like hell.”

The long-handled ax, now broken, lay out of reach. But Dean hadn’t come without backup party favors. From inside his jacket, he took out a metal-handled hatchet and a long hunting knife.

“Way I see it, you’re just one big plate of sushi.”

The Chimera lurched forward—its weight buoyed by powerful dragon wing thrusts, undulating forward on giant squid tentacles and multiple lion legs—attempting to trap Dean against the factory’s cinderblock wall. Diving to the side, Dean drove the point of the hunting knife through a meaty paw as he somersaulted out of range. Multiple arms reached out for him and he managed to hack a hand off at the wrist when it attempted to pin him to the floor. He sprang to his feet in a heartbeat, slashing at one arm, chopping another, stabbing a third. Severed fingers spun through the air, followed by the cheek and nose of an impacted face he caught with a backhanded blow of the hatchet. With every opening in the creature’s defenses, he plunged the knife into the rolling flesh, but despite the flurry of wounds he inflicted, the damage was superficial, with minimal bleeding and no true dismemberments, at least not at species joins.

He caught a blur of motion in the periphery of his vision and narrowly avoided the darting snake heads that sprouted from the creature’s long tail. But a tentacle slammed into his back and knocked him to the ground. When it tried to wrap around his leg, he slammed the hatchet into the slick flesh, only partially severing the appendage. Another tentacle struck his chest, hurled him into the wall again and he lost his grip on the weapon.

The Chimera’s mass leaned forward, its center of gravity close to a tipping point if not for the wide base of the tentacles, and the lion’s head stretched forward with a roar. Dean figured that this was the Chimera’s command center, despite all the talking human heads that riddled its flesh like a scattering of warts. Leaning against the wall to catch his breath, he grabbed the hilt of a throwing knife hidden in his belt and fired it at the lion’s head, grinning when the flat blade sank deep into its left eye.

The resultant roar, accompanied by the indignant screams of all the other Chimera faces, was deafening. Dean doubted the wound was life-threatening, but it struck at the core of the monster, blinding one of its primary eyes and inflicting a substantial amount of trauma to the lion’s brain. The Chimera lurched forward so suddenly, Dean had no time to evade the body slam it delivered. The malleability of the Chimera’s ever-expanding fleshy frame saved him from serious injury, but it smothered him in a suffocating embrace. Turning his head aside, he gasped for the slightest sip of air while the creature’s unrelenting stench burned his eyes. If the military had been involved in the hunt, Dean imagined they’d spare the Chimera’s life in hope of weaponizing its body odor.

Fortunately for Dean, the creature’s rage was too pure to grant him death by suffocation. It backed away, looped Dean’s leg in a tentacle and hoisted him into the air, spinning around on a procession of lion legs. As Dean dangled upside down in the tentacle’s grip, wishing he’d packed more throwing knives or, hell, maybe a flamethrower, he glanced down and his eyes widened in alarm. In about two seconds, the Chimera would have him directly above the roiling flesh pit. He’d be dropped into that infernal soup of miscreation. Before he could be reassembled as part of a hybrid—or grafted onto the Chimera itself—he’d be disassembled: his head, limbs and organs dispersed but still somehow alive, awaiting whatever horrific reassignment the Chimera deemed appropriate.

Lion claws tap-tap-tapped across the broken concrete flooring, spinning the Chimera’s body, the tentacle swooping in an arc like an airplane carnival ride. The pit was six feet away… four feet…

Sam yelled, swinging a section of twisted rebar overhead, striking the tentacle inches away from where it gripped Dean by the ankle. Instantly, the tentacle flinched, flinging Dean two feet from the hellish pit. Skidding forward, his legs flailed wildly over the edge before he could steady himself.

Below, the mass of flesh rolled like a wave. As it crested beneath him, a forlorn face rose to the surface, wide mouth moaning. Then an enlarged scorpion tail rolled toward him, its tip striking the near wall before sliding back into the mass, giving way to a pair of mismatched arms whose fingers strained to reach Dean’s right leg as it hung over the pit.

“Hey!” Dean shouted, yanking his leg clear. “I’m not spare parts!”

“Uh, Dean,” Sam said beside him. “Any suggestions?”

Dean scrambled to his feet. His hatchet was momentarily lost on the other side of the Chimera, but he’d somehow retained his hold on the hunting knife. Sam held the rusty section of rebar in his left hand, spear-like—though Dean doubted the warped metal would fly true—and a bloody cleaver in his right.

The Chimera surged toward them, a chaotic but effective pursuit aided by dragon wings, lion legs and seething tentacles.

“Separate—away from that damned pit!”

They spread out, Dean to the left, Sam to the right, far enough apart that the Chimera had to choose which Winchester to attack. Normally that would leave the attacker vulnerable on the opposite flank, but the Chimera had faces, arms and clawed legs scattered around its bulk.

“Now what?” Sam said. “Where do we start?”

“Anywhere,” Dean said. “Keep whaling on it until it runs out of parts.”

One of the Chimera’s human arms yanked the throwing knife from the lion’s eye and hurled it at Dean. But the arm protruded from the creature’s flesh at an awkward angle and the throw was obviously unpracticed. Dean dodged the blade easily and heard it skitter across the concrete without taking his eyes off the monster, even for a moment.

Sam attacked the same instant the Chimera threw the knife, lunging forward to drive the tip of the rebar deep into the rolls of flesh, barely avoiding the powerful claws of a lion as he jumped backward, abandoning the makeshift weapon.

Dean doubted the attack inflicted much damage on the Chimera. Other than the reflexive swipe with its claws, it hardly reacted to the impalement. Nothing like the roar and screams of the beast when Dean punctured the lion’s head eye with the throwing knife. Almost as if the—

Two tentacles whipped around in opposing arcs, attempting to loop around Dean’s legs as the Chimera surged forward again. As both tentacles swept across the ground Dean leapt straight up, avoiding the trap, but a third struck the point of his shoulder, spinning him away to land awkwardly and stagger into a concrete pillar.

Sensing an advantage, the Chimera rumbled forward with frightening acceleration. Dean spun around to the back of the pillar a second before the Chimera struck the front with the full force of its weight. Wary of the long reach of the tentacles, Dean almost fell to his hands and knees as he stumbled away. Then the tip of a tentacle swatted the heel of his back foot and he went down. He rolled away awkwardly as the Chimera shambled around the obstructing column to continue its pursuit.

Damn thing’s on a mission to destroy me.

“Sam,” Dean called. “Spare parts!”

“What?” Sam asked, tracking the Chimera from behind, his cleaver poised to attack the nearest limb.

“Ignore the spare parts,” Dean said, finally understanding. “They’re like—decoys! Distractions. Sever the original parts.”

They’d both studied the illustrations from mythological texts. Sam would know what and where to attack. From behind the creature, Sam tossed his jacket over the multi-headed snake tail, blunting its attack long enough for his cleaver to slice through its base. One of those snake heads had been part of the original Chimera body and now it was gone. The Chimera reared back, multiple faces shrieking as the lion head roared. Before making a strategic retreat, Sam snatched the embedded rebar from the Chimera’s body.

“That’s more like it,” Dean said, approaching carefully but with renewed purpose, hunting knife clutched at his side.

As the Chimera spun around on its lion legs and mass of tentacles, dragon wings beating furiously, to retaliate against its most recent attacker, Dean caught sight of his hatchet and, a bit farther away, the broken-handled ax. For the moment, Dean held no interest for Chimera-prime. But some of the tortured human and animal faces looking down on him raised quite a vocal protest, in the combined form of howls, screeches, and useless shouts: “No!” “Stop him!” “Kill him!”

Whoever had most recently attacked the original Chimera body became enemy number one. Though its spare parts became distracted, the Chimera’s attack retained laser focus. As Dean retrieved his other weapons, Sam backed away from the creature, evading the vicious swipes of its original forelegs, his rusty rebar and cleaver poor but more lethal substitutes for a lion tamer’s whip and chair.

Nevertheless, they’d stumbled upon an effective strategy of alternating tag-team attacks, ultimately targeting the Chimera’s original heads and limbs, whenever they sensed an opening, blinding and dismembering. Dean’s ax and knife became natural extensions of his arms and he entered a zone where he anticipated the path and strike of each claw and tentacle, meeting them with sharp steel, chopping and slicing to devastating effect. Then Sam lopped off the blinded lion’s head. A moment later Dean countered with the decapitation of the similarly incapacitated goat’s head. And it was basically over.

* * *

Sam noticed the difference immediately.

Without the original Chimera heads to take charge, the monster lost any semblance of focus in its attacks. Any distraction set it on a new course, as if a dozen feuding minds vied for control of the massive body. Given time, one of the voices might establish itself as the new leader—at least until the Chimera could reattach or possibly regrow its original heads—but Sam and Dean were unwilling to give the abomination time to recover from internal anarchy. Taking turns, the Winchesters attacked one side, then the other, completing one dismemberment after another.

When only the legless, armless, headless and tailless husk of the body remained, a bloody mass of quivering flesh and fur, Dean made a quick trip to the Impala and returned with a few containers of lighter fluid. Sam checked on the snake-woman, whose head remained far from her scaled, armless body. She presented no immediate threat. After the Chimera’s body and severed parts burned, her snake-skinned form would succumb to the rapid decaying process, ending any chance of an unnatural resurrection. Spared the gruesome chore of skinning her from head to toe to separate snake from woman, Sam’s relief was palpable. After several intense days and nights of beheadings and dismemberments had turned the Winchesters and the Impala into a mobile slaughterhouse, that was a final mercy.

He couldn’t recall a time he’d been more grateful at the end of a hunt. Which made him turn his attention to Dean, standing beside him as the Chimera’s flesh sizzled and charred to ash. Twice during the final battle, Sam had noticed the intensity with which Dean had torn into the Chimera, first when he’d been backed against the wall and later, when he’d faced an onslaught of tentacles. Though Dean insisted he was in control of himself, Sam couldn’t help but worry that the Mark seized any opportunity for violence to take over.

Dean noticed Sam staring at him. “What?”

“You okay, Dean?”

“Other than bruises,” Dean said, spreading his arms, “I’m fine.”

His tone seemed casual, rather than evasive.

“And the Mark never…?”

“Took control?” Dean finished. “No. Of course not.”

Sam nodded, wanting that to be true. But took in the surfeit of blood smeared across his brother’s face, the torn and bloody clothes, and yet more blood slowly dripping from his shirt cuffs and fingertips. As if he’d bathed in the stuff.

Again, Dean noticed the wordless appraisal, took note of his own appearance, smiled and shook his head.

“What?”

“You’re worried about how
I
look?”

“Well,” Sam began, cleared his throat. “Now that you mention it.”

“Dude, look in the mirror.”

Sam examined his own hands, streaked with tacky red fluid layered over dried, almost black blood, caked into his knuckles. His shredded jacket was sodden and speckled with gore, from finger-sized chunks to confetti-sized bits. Neither his pants nor his shoes had been spared the reeking mess of the slaughtered hybrids and their maker. If Sam and Dean had brought a spare set of clothes, their outfits would have certainly ended up in the Chimera bonfire without a second thought. Nothing worth trying to salvage in a basic spin cycle.

Without a mirror, Sam couldn’t examine his own face, but he imagined it looked no better than his brother’s frightening visage. They looked like a pair of serial killers after a murderous bender, the stuff of nightmares.

“Point taken,” Sam said.

Feeling vindicated, Dean replied with an emphatic nod, “Damn right!”

Nevertheless, Sam couldn’t forget the unbridled glee with which Dean had attacked the Chimera. Though not without satisfaction, hunting was grim work. Sam never considered it a source of entertainment. It was a job. Sometimes the killing felt like a necessary evil. They’d both had to cross some gray lines over the years, often with regrets and sometimes resentments that lingered.