Supernatural: Night Terror (12 page)

“Anson.”

“There a back exit out of the store?”

“Yes,” Anson said. “But there’s a wall behind the store.”

“Can you get over it?”

“No. Wait, yes, we have a ladder for changing lights.”

“Great,” Dean said. “I want you to take this woman and go out the back.”

“I’m not leaving my son!” the woman cried.

“I’ll get your son,” Dean responded.

“I’m not leaving until I know he’s safe.”

Dean sighed. He looked at the strip of sidewalk they stood on. At the moment, it seemed secure. The blacktop had crumbled away almost to the bollards. Maybe they provided some extra support.

“First sign that sidewalk’s failing, you leave. Okay?”

After a moment, she nodded reluctantly.

Beside him, Sam said, “What do you have in mind?”

Dean noticed a four-foot high chain-link fence ran along both sides of the convenience store parking lot. Easy enough to climb over it to get to the van.

“You take the passenger side. I’ll take driver’s side.”

“Figures.”

Sam started to run along the outside of the fence. Dean was a step behind him when he noticed the conversion van shudder. The blacktop under the left rear tire was crumbling. He veered to the right, but stayed on the inside of the fence, running along a thin strip of sidewalk that abutted the chainlink fence. The ground shook beneath his feet. A quick glance at the van and he saw it drop a few inches and rock side to side.

The front bumper of a late seventies gold Pontiac Firebird was close enough to kiss the fence. Without a moment’s hesitation, Dean jumped on the hood of the car and crossed over it.

Someone across the street yelled, “Hey!”

“You gotta be kidding me,” Dean muttered. Joker’s car was ten seconds from joining the vertical demolition derby and he was worried about a ding on the hood?

Dean bounded across the hoods of two more cars and landed beside the Chevy van as Sam was leaping sideways over the fence. The passenger side doors were locked. This close, he could hear a frightened child crying inside the van. Dean circled around to the driver’s side, which was also locked.

“Here,” the young mother called. “The keys!”

She tossed them underhand to Dean.

The van lurched as more ground gave way.

Dean staggered, but snatched the keys out of the air by the dyed-pink rabbit’s foot keychain. He opened the driver’s door and was about to hit the button to unlock all the doors when he was flung forward against the steering wheel.

The woman screamed. Dean felt the van sliding violently backward. Sam’s startled face flashed by the passenger-side window and was gone a second later.

A moment or two of eerily quiet free fall and then a jarring impact.

First Dean was tossed up against the steering wheel, banging his already bruised ribs. Then he came down hard against the driver’s seat. With one leg hanging outside the van, the door slammed painfully against his knee, but provided enough resistance to prevent him from hurtling through the interior of the van. He kicked the door with his other leg to free himself, and promptly sprawled across the front seats. Twisting around, he peered down.

Fortunately, the three-year-old boy was buckled into a child safety seat strapped to the passenger side captain’s chair in the second row. Terrified, his cheeks streaked with tears, the boy stared at Dean as if he were an alien life form. The sudden drop and impact must have stunned the crying jag right out of him.

“It’s okay, kid,” Dean said trying to sound calm. “I’m gonna get you outta here.”

“Where’s Momma?”

“Your mom’s fine. She’s up—back in the store.”

“I want Momma.”

“I’m gonna take you to her. Okay?”

The boy nodded. “Want Momma.”

“We’ve established that,” Dean said. “But I need you to work with me. Okay?”

Another nod. This time the kid gave him an expectant look.

“What’s your name, kid?”

“Hunter.”

Dean smiled. “No kidding?”

The boy nodded solemnly. “Hunter Riley Fields.”

Gravel and chunks of blacktop pelted the exterior of the van like hailstones with biblical aspirations. One particularly large chunk stuck and starred the windshield. A few more
plinked
and
plunked
against the hood. Dean tried not to think about what might happen if a big enough rock—or even another car—came through the windshield at that moment. Or what would happen if a fuel tank ruptured and something sparked. No, he wouldn’t think about that at all.

“Okay, Hunter,” Dean said with a serious nod of his own. “Let’s do this.”

He reached between the front seats and stretched his arm to the far seat in the second row, pushing the release button on the kid’s safety seat. Accustomed to the seat routine, the boy pulled the V-straps up over his head without any prompting. Dean smiled reassuringly.

“Great job, Hunter. Now, let’s get out of here.”

The boy started to climb out of the seat.

“Whoa!” Dean said. “Careful, now. Give me your hand.”

Dean stretched to meet the kid’s small hand but adjusted his position to get a better grip on his arm.

“One, two...
three
!”

With one quick tug, Dean pulled the boy up to the front— top—row of seats.

Dean backed out of the door, propping it open with his back as he stood in the dirt and gravel slope of the sinkhole. The van rested against the side of the hole at a sixty degree angle. With one arm wrapped around Hunter, he moved away from the van and let the door slam shut. The back end of the van rested against a beige Camry that was almost completely submerged. Even as Dean watched, the van’s tires were sinking into the dirt and crumbled blacktop.

“Dean!” Sam called from above.

Dean spotted his brother braced against the chainlink fence in front of where the van had been parked, his forearms hooked over the fence so he could clutch it while leaning forward for a better view. Sam was almost twentyfive feet above.

“We’re fine,” Dean said.

“Hunter!”

“Momma!” Hunter said, waving at his mother who stood beside the store clerk. The bollard nearest the pair tilted at a forty-five degree angle. The sidewalk wouldn’t last much longer. But they had a more immediate problem.

A banana-yellow Mini Cooper that had been parked one space closer to the store’s entrance was inching backward and leaning at a precarious angle. Clumps of dirt and chunks of blacktop broke away from beneath its back tires. With a scrape of metal on asphalt, the Mini Cooper pitched backward, listing to the left as it hurtled toward Dean and the boy.

Dean whispered, “Oh, crap...”

Ehrich Vogel shuddered in his sleep, rolled to the left and a few moments later rolled to the right, becoming tangled in his sweat-soaked sheets. Mumbling softly, his words unintelligible, the tone of his voice escalated from concern to agitation to fright. His distress culminated with him shouting, “No! No!
NO!
”

With the last protest, his eyes opened wide and he swung his tangled legs over the edge of the bed, breathing harshly. Pressing his good hand to his chest, he felt his heart hammering beneath his ribs. He could imagine himself having a fatal heart attack at that moment. Widowed, retired, alone. Nobody would miss him for days. While he waited for his heart rate to return to normal, he leaned over the bed, forearms resting on his thighs, head hanging.

Because of his huddled posture, he neither saw nor sensed the mass of darkness dispersing above his bed, thinning itself into deep shadow and drifting along the walls and out through a narrow gap in the windowsill.

His thoughts turned inward, to the nightmare. The same one that had visited him on a regular basis for the past twenty years. Only worse. The explosion, the partial cave-in at Croyden Creek began the same, but this time more than his right arm had been crushed. He’d been standing in a new section, next to a support beam and the explosion blew it clear.

Coal dust and methane. Bad combination.

He shook his head.

One moment he’d been standing, the next he was buried under an avalanche of rock and dirt, his ribs crushed. In the nightmare, he couldn’t escape, couldn’t breathe. Felt his life slipping away down in the darkness.

Vogel stood on weak legs and walked to the bathroom, bending over to splash water on his face with his trembling left hand. The fingers of his right hand were mangled. He couldn’t do much with the muscles of that arm and, as a result, it had atrophied. After the cold water cleared the fog of sleep, he stood up straight and took several deep breaths.

The real explosion and cave-in at Croyden Creek Mine had been bad, but the nightmare scenario had been far worse. Nevertheless,
bad
had been bad enough. After the accident, he never set foot in that mine or any other mine ever again. That didn’t stop the nightmares from haunting him through the years.

Outside, the wind howled and his bedroom windows rattled in their frames. A flash of lighting lit the room in stark black and white. The rumble of thunder shook the eaves of his house.

This troubled night, with the cave-in images especially vivid in his head, he decided he’d had enough sleep. Staying awake, whether watching a movie or reading a book, was his only guarantee that another nightmare wouldn’t finish the course of the first, and this time see him buried alive in a deep, dark pit.

If nothing else, his heart would thank him.

As the yellow blur of the Mini Cooper fell toward him, Dean clutched the three-year-old boy against his chest and flattened himself against the driver’s door of the Chevy conversion van.

“Hold on!” he said into Hunter’s ear.

The Mini Cooper slammed into the partially submerged Camry with a booming clash of metal, and a popping crunch of breaking safety glass. The yellow car’s roof missed Dean and Hunter by less than a yard.

Hunter’s mom screamed and the boy started to cry again.

“Everybody calm down!” Dean shouted. “I’ve got this.” He took a deep breath. “Hunter, can you hang onto my neck?” The boy nodded. “Good.”

Dean shifted Hunter to his back, with his small arms wrapped around Dean’s neck. But he didn’t trust the boy’s ability to hang on as he climbed, so Dean kept his left hand clamped over both of the boys’ fists. He scrambled up the steep slope high enough to climb onto the side of the Mini Cooper.

The small car’s undercarriage had sunk into the side of the sinkhole facing the front of the store, so Dean jumped onto the slope, with an awkward three-point landing. His shoes immediately began to sink into the soft earth and his free hand couldn’t find any reliable purchase.

He realized two things at that moment: No way was he climbing out of the sinkhole unassisted; and that strong odor assailing his nostrils was definitely gasoline. Somewhere in the mangled pileup of cars, a fuel line had been compromised or a gas tank ruptured.

He looked to where Sam was inching along the fence to track their movements.

“Sam!”

Their eyes met and Sam nodded grimly. He looked over to the store clerk.

“Anson! You sell rope in there?”

“What? Rope? No, we don’t—wait. What about clothesline?”

“Clothesline is perfect.”

“We have packages. Hundred feet.”

“Good. Get one.”

While Anson ran into the store, Sam made his careful way along the fence and then hurried along the sidewalk to join Hunter’s mother. Anson came out and handed Sam the shrink-wrapped package of white clothesline, which Sam quickly ripped open to play out the coiled line.

“Hey!” Anson yelled. “Bad idea, man!”

Dean looked to the far side of the parking lot and saw one of the bystanders, a balding man in his forties, edging around the back of the gold Firebird.

“The hell’s he doing?” Dean called.

“Sir!” Sam yelled. “Get back!”

The man tossed a dismissive wave in Sam’s direction.

“I’m saving my car!”

Dean shook his head. “You believe that guy?”

“Dude, seriously?” Sam said.

“What?”

“You... and the Impala.”

“Totally different.”

“Right. Because you have all your hair,” Sam said, then shouted at the man. “You can’t move your car! It’s trapped.”

The back wheels of the Firebird were two feet from the edge of the expanding sinkhole. The front bumper was too close to the chain-link fence. No room to turn or maneuver. The car was as good as gone.

Ignoring Sam, the man started and gunned his engine. Then the Firebird edged forward, pressing into the metal fence. It seemed he intended to run over the fence and drive off the side of the lot. But the center of his front bumper pressed against one of the vertical support posts, which was anchored in cement and wouldn’t budge. He floored the accelerator, which caused the back wheels to spin and squeal against the compromised blacktop. What he couldn’t see was that the wheels were accelerating the erosion process. He threw it in reverse and backed up a bit, expecting to ram the fence. But the back wheels hit the lip of the sinkhole before he expected and they dropped over the edge with a loud squeal as the undercarriage slammed into the ground.