Supernatural--Cold Fire (8 page)

“Angry lawn gnome?” Dean said as he sat down in front of the laptop to read the news report.

Castiel came forward, looked over Dean’s shoulder.

“I know it’s not much,” Sam said. “Just the one incident. And other than the brutality of the—”

“Animal attack,” Dean said, pointing. “According to police.”

“Maybe, but—”

“Gouged out eyeballs,” Dean continued, not really ignoring Sam, just his hard-sell masquerading as a soft-sell. “That a message? Or a delicacy?”

Sam shrugged. “Let’s find out. You in?”

“I’m in.”

“I’ll join you,” Castiel said. “After I follow up on my lead.”

“Great,” Dean said as he picked up the scattered books. “Lot of irons in the cure-the-Mark fire. Unfortunately, these”—he dumped the stack of books back on the table—“aren’t one of them.”

After lying to his parents that he’d finished his homework, Aidan Dufford ducked out for the evening to spend some time with his friends, which basically meant wandering around Braden Heights with no clear destination in mind. Technically, he hadn’t lied. He’d told them he was finished
with
his homework. Which was true. He’d had more than enough of term papers, essays, reading assignments and math problems for one day. Really, teachers should get together and declare a mercy rule, especially for seniors. Even prisoners were granted early release for good behavior. But to his mind, his teachers did put their heads together, like a gathering of psychological torturers, to decide the best way to drive their students crazy before they escaped the drab walls and crowded halls of Braden Heights High. Sadistic bastards, the whole bunch of them. And, really, how much of the crap they tried to stuff into his head would matter one week after graduation? The whole system was designed to keep teens busy during as many waking hours as humanly possible. Idle hands and all that bullshit…

Well, whatever. Just because they played a tune, it didn’t make him a dancing idiot. But dropping out wasn’t an option. Not this close to the finish line. He’d play along just enough to get by. Get the diploma and get the hell out.

Problem was, he’d skipped too many classes and missed too many assignments to give himself any wiggle room. Every day remaining in the school year meant another tightrope walk to avoid expulsion, summer school or failure. Another day of nodding his head as one person after another told him what to do and where to go and how to be, starting and ending with his parents, with his teachers and the vice principal in between, and even Chloe when everyone else was too busy to nag him.

So, really, who could blame him for wanting to blow off some steam? It was so much easier to hang out with Wally and Jay. They got it. They got him. And so what if they got into a little mischief now and then. Wasn’t anything major, really, just kids clowning around. A little loitering, a little smoking, with an occasional side of vandalism, but mostly decompressing. Wasn’t as if anybody their age could find jobs these days. And even if something turned up, some minimum-wage slave job, they had their whole freaking lives to work from dawn to dusk or vice versa. What was the goddamn rush?

Lately, between the home and girlfriend situations, he’d much rather stay out and tune out, walk the streets with his friends, vent about the indignities of his daily life and ignore the uncertain future. If he tried to take it more than one day at a time, he really would go crazy.

“Everybody keeps telling me I’m an adult now,” Aidan said as he walked down the street three abreast with Wally and Jay. He could see the wrought-iron fence ahead at the corner of Second and Hawthorne. That’s where they’d split up, Aidan heading east and the others north. In other words, his freedom walk was nearly over. “As if turning eighteen flipped some magical damn switch in my DNA and changed me somehow. Know what I mean?”

Jay nodded.

Wally said, “Yeah, like, ‘Welcome to the club.’ And you’re like, ‘What club? That’s it? That’s all there is?’”

“And nothing they teach us in school makes any difference,” Aidan continued. “None of it really matters.”

“I have no clue,” Jay said.

“It’s like they want to confuse us,” Aidan said. “Pretend like they’re preparing us for something, but the stuff in the books is all crap.”

“It’s a conspiracy,” Wally said. “Joke’s on us, man.”

“You know what?” Jay said. “I bet they don’t have a clue either.”

“You’re onto something,” Aidan said, laughing. “Making it up as they go along.”

They paused by the wrought-iron fence that marked the perimeter of Halloran’s Life Celebration Studio. Which, once you turned off the bullshit force field, was better known as a funeral home. For a while, their running joke had been to refer to every location as a “celebration studio” of some kind. Braden Heights High became the Education Celebration Studio, Madonado’s Deli was rebranded the Sandwich Celebration Studio, and Grand National Bank’s new moniker was the Fat Stacks Celebration Studio. Not that they had any stacks, fat or otherwise, with which to celebrate. But upcoming graduation gifts kept the hope alive.

Aidan nodded toward the funeral home. “How many dead people are celebrating in there right now?”

“How should I know?” Jay said, taking the question literally.

“Just wondering,” Aidan said. “People are always dying, right?”

“Half dozen, maybe,” Wally said. “Just the ones ready to get burned or buried, right? And it’s not the only stiff shop in town, right?”

“Stiff shop?” Aidan asked, smiling.

“Whatever,” Wally said, shrugging. “Corpse club? Zombie hatchery? Listen, man, we gotta go.”

“Right,” Aidan said. “See you guys tomorrow.”

Once they were a block away, their chatter fading into the night, Aidan crossed the street heading west a couple blocks before circling behind Kirkwood Plaza. He was already late and figured a few more minutes wouldn’t hurt. If his parents held true to form, his mother would already be sound asleep and his father, if he hadn’t passed out from putting a major dent in a case of beer, would be warming a bar stool until closing or until they cut him off. Either way, Aidan’s lateness would go unnoticed.

By ducking behind Kirkwood Plaza, a strip mall with a dozen stores facing Second Avenue, his presence would also go unnoticed by any patrolling cop cars. At the rear of the first store in the strip mall conga line, he reached into his left inner jacket pocket and pulled out a wrist rocket. Basically a slingshot on steroids. In the right inner pocket, he had a hundred-count bag of steel ball ammo, each one about the size of a marble.

Behind the stores after business hours, on the private access driveway with barely enough room for a trash truck to trundle through and empty the row of fetid dumpsters, he risked little chance of discovery. A cop car might pass by every few hours, but Aidan would be long gone in five or ten minutes. At the first glare of headlights, he could duck into the line of bushes on the far side of the driveway, stay low and avoid detection. Until then, he planned to engage in a bit of what he called “sanity preservation.”

At some point, venting to his friends fell short of the mark. On these occasions, some target practice usually improved his mood. He’d practiced on bottles and empty pop cans until he got good enough not to waste too much ammo. This late at night most stores were closed and dark, except for security lights and—in the case of the strip mall—the steel-caged lights over the rear doors. He preferred the caged lights to exposed bulbs. The metal grid protecting them provided a higher degree of difficulty and the extra challenge of a direct hit provided more satisfaction. Hit one of the cage bars instead, and his shot ricocheted into the night—or, worse, right back at him. He’d had the welts and bruises to show for it. But knocking out a caged light required precision, like zipping a puck through a goalie’s five hole.

For each light, he imagined the head of some teacher or administrator or store clerk who had pissed him off recently. But he kept his “hit list” internal, completely memorized, no written record that could ever lead to suspension or expulsion. Besides, he had no actual plans to go after anyone with fists, ball bearings or real bullets. He was blowing off steam, nothing more. So what if he broke a bunch of fifty-cent light bulbs? It was—what did they call it?—the cost of doing business. The shop owners should be grateful he didn’t smash their big display windows or break into their shops and steal stuff.

Taking position behind Flanagan’s Pub, he took careful aim. “This one’s for Mrs. Garrity and the never-ending term paper,” he said with a wicked grin, imagining the mole on the corner of her forehead, and launched a metal ball at the first caged light. Direct hit! The bulb burst with a deep
pop
sound and a slight sizzle of electricity before bits of glass clinked all over the ground, like a miniature orchestra warming up.

His steel ball rattled around the cage for a moment before striking the wall and rolling toward his feet. Plucking it off the ground, he moved to the rear of the next shop, Sal’s Pizza Palace, if he recalled the order of the stores correctly. Again, he took aim. “Ah, for Mr. Uphoff and that D+ on my last exam. Writing ‘Try Harder’ followed by three exclamation marks really helps. How about you try harder to be a better teacher, jackass!”

He released the shot—missed. Though he flinched at the steel-on-steel ping, the ricochet sailed wide, harmless. “Figures,” he muttered. “Guess I need to try harder!”

His next shot scored. Definite sizzle this time.

Moving sideways down the line, he positioned himself behind the rear entrance of the third shop, a dry cleaner or temp agency, he couldn’t remember. He fished a shot out of his plastic bag, deciding whose face would make a perfect target, when his cell phone buzzed. Heaving a sigh, he said, “What now?”

He tugged the phone from his back pocket, checked the caller ID: Chloe.

“C’mon,” he said. “Give it a break already.”

He tapped the ignore button and shoved the phone back in his pocket before proceeding to knock out the third light. Unfortunately, he’d been so upset by yet another call from Chloe that he’d forgotten to pick a target for the light.
Wasted a bulb for nothing!
Not like he could retroactively assign a face to the bulb.

With a sigh he moved on to light number four, but was interrupted by another call. Chloe again. “She can
not
take a hint,” he mumbled. “Save it for tomorrow, Chloe. I’m fried over this crap.”

Maybe she can be the face of light number four
, he thought. She wouldn’t give him a moment’s peace. Worse than his damn parents. Powering off the phone, he put it away and tried to shake off the interruption.

He took aim—

And smelled freshly popped popcorn. Made him think of settling into the darkness of a movie theater to see the latest summer action blockbuster; overhyped more often than not, but a happy diversion for a few hours, away from people making demands of his time, an island of serenity during the projected chaos and one-liners. He pulled back on the rubber tubing and took aim at the fourth light again—

—and the light blew out.

But he hadn’t released the steel ball. It sat in the rubber pad, full of potential energy, as his physics teacher might say. Then, one by one, each caged light in the row of stores popped out. Some merely winked out. Others shattered. But he hadn’t moved.

“What the hell—?”

Something scraped the ground behind him.

For a moment he worried the shopping center had hired a security guard to patrol the place at night. A security guard with a popcorn cart. But as he spun around, an apology or some lame excuse trying to take form in his mind, he caught a whiff of something foul, like an animal carcass left on the side of the road too long. But what he saw was not an animal. He had the fleeting impression of utter darkness mixed with corpse-pale flesh, straggly hair and strangely elongated fingers, somebody in a horror costume maybe, but he sensed she—yes a
she
—was not entirely human. Something that emerged from the nightmares of a fevered mind after gorging on tainted food in a serial killer’s house, something that couldn’t exist but terrified at the level of instinct.

The wrist rocket and ammo slipped from his numb hands.

“What—?”

His gaze tracked toward her partially obscured face, trying to focus despite his revulsion. In that moment, she switched from inhuman stillness to surging forward, inhumanly fast, reaching for his face—his eyes!—with those disturbingly long fingers. Fire ripped through his face, and then lower, the intense pain scorching him until he welcomed—