Supernatural: Night Terror (34 page)

Old before she first claimed him, he had little more to give her. She left his withered remains and moved to the next victim in her familiar path. This one was young, with enough vital energy to feed her for days before expiring. She slipped into his home, as insubstantial as an errant breeze, and flowed into his room, nudging him toward sleep so she could slip into his fertile subconscious...

Trevor Deetz hunched over the student desk in his bedroom. His mom had warned him not to wait until the last minute again to work on his latest project, a World War II book report due Monday morning. Peeved, he had retreated to his bedroom and slammed his door. Fine. He would finish the damn thing before Sunday morning even if he stayed awake all night to complete it. Then maybe she’d get off his freakin’ case for once.

Unfortunately, the reading assignment was a boring book written by some old geezer with a fondness for dates and statistics that made Trevor roll his eyes. Instead of finishing the book, he sat hunched over his desk reading the end of the
Hitler’s Zombie Force
graphic novel. Now this guy knew how to tell a story. The Allies were winning the war, so a desperate Hitler decided to zombify his entire army. Any soldier unwilling to make the undead sacrifice for the Fatherland was summarily shot.

More Nazi zombies than ever
, he thought.
How cool is that?

Despite the rising excitement in the final pages of the graphic novel, Trevor couldn’t help yawning. He closed his eyes and rested his head on the desk, falling asleep in seconds.

Dean followed Bell Street eastward with a sense of déjà vu, passing the intersection where they’d witnessed a pack of Velociraptors hunt a Honda Civic driven by Paul Hanes. The downed utility pole had been patched to restore the lines but was still a repair in progress. And when Dean turned onto Arcadia Boulevard, he once again saw police cars in the middle of the street and Nazi zombies looking for meals on legs. A full block short of the nearest zombie, Dean swung the Impala onto the shoulder of the road to allow enough time to raid the trunk of the car for extra ammo.

Twisting around to face Sophie in the back seat, Dean said, “Stay in the car. Lock the doors.”

“My ankle has swelled like a balloon,” she said. “Don’t think I’m going anywhere under my own power.”

“Just as well,” Sam said. “This will get messy.”

As Dean and Sam circled to the back of the Impala, Sophie double-checked the locks. Inside the trunk, Dean opened a case with spare magazines for their guns and handed two to Sam, taking two more for himself. In the distance, he heard the staccato pops of gunshots mingled with hysterical screams.

They ran south along Arcadia. Dean tracked left and right for concealed zombies. He didn’t want a repeat of his last close encounter. Behind a chalk-smeared sandwich board, a young Nazi officer in a white summer tunic turned toward them, staggering into their path. A loop of intestines dangled from a nasty abdominal wound. Dean raised his arm, braced his hand and put a round through the zombie’s forehead.

Adding to the chaos, several people slipped out of stores and restaurants, yelling and screaming as they raced away from the undead abominations. A shrieking woman picked up her young, crying daughter and lumbered awkwardly down the street on a broken heel. An overweight man wearing a business suit and gripping a briefcase in both hands tripped and fell, breaking the briefcase and barely managing to escape from a zombie soldier’s clutching fingers. The man scrambled away on hands and knees until he could regain his feet and flee. Papers fluttered in his wake.

In the middle of the street, an older field marshal in a fulllength leather trench coat spotted them and lumbered into their path. Sam drilled a round through his eye.

“Dean,” Sam said. “These aren’t just Nazi zombies...”

Dean nodded. “They’re the same Nazi zombies we already killed.”

“Regenerated,” Sam said. “Like the Charger each night.”

“Night hag’s playing her golden oldies.”

“Until she burns out the dreamer.”

Three soldiers in green helmets and uniforms rose from behind the cover of an open police-cruiser door with blood and gobbets of flesh dripping from their cracked and jagged teeth. Dean shot one under the chin. Sam caught the other two with headshots. As they passed the police cruiser, they stopped. The zombies hadn’t taken cover behind the cruiser. They had been feeding.

The ravaged body of Darren Nash, the portly
Fremont Ledger
reporter who’d been interviewing people in C.J.’s Diner, lay sprawled on the ground, missing half his throat and large portions of his upper arms and thighs. One of his eyes was missing, along with part of his cheek. The other eye stared lifelessly into the night sky. His notebook, now spattered with drops of blood, was clutched in his hand. Several pages flapped in the breeze, flashing the details of a story he hadn’t lived to tell.

“I did not need to see that,” Dean said and turned away from the corpse.

“Wait a minute, Dean,” Sam said, catching his brother’s arm.

Dean looked back. “What—?”

Then he saw.

The fingers of the empty hand twitched. Then the head lolled to the side. The remaining eye moved slowly in its socket until it located them. Moaning, the reporter pushed himself up with his bloody arms and slowly climbed to his feet. His head hung to the side from his ruined throat. Uttering a wet grunt, he staggered one step toward Dean, then another, reaching out with straining fingers.

“Seriously?”

“Perception is—”

“Reality,” Dean said. “Yeah, I know.”

He aimed his gun, the end of the barrel less than a yard from the man’s forehead. Without a second thought, he pulled the trigger, blasting half the reporter’s brain and the back of his skull from his head.

“Hey! They shot Nash!” a voice called.

Dean turned.

A Hispanic Colorado State Patrol officer pointed from him to Sam with the barrel of his gun.

“Drop your weapons!” he commanded.

“They’re FBI, Valdez,” Officer Wild said. “Watch—!”

“Look out!” Sam called.

Valdez turned around and stood face to face with a ravenous SS officer in a black uniform, peaked cap, and swastika armband. They stood too close together for the others to take a clear shot. The state cop shoved his firearm into the gut of the Nazi zombie and fired round after round to no effect. The zombie ignored the abdominal wounds and ripped a chunk out of Valdez’s throat. Blood sprayed from a torn artery but Valdez continued firing until he exhausted his magazine. The zombie clutched Valdez by the shoulders and continued to tear into his flesh, even as his own midsection separated above his hips, his legs falling sideways. The upper torso of the zombie rode the state cop to the ground, continuing to eat long after the light had faded from Valdez’s eyes.

Officer Cerasi, gun drawn, ran up beside Wild and looked down.

“Oh, God...”

Spinning away he bent over and vomited.

Wild walked up to the feeding zombie, aimed her weapon at the back of his head, but averted her gaze from Valdez’s remains as she pulled the trigger.

Dean and Sam joined the cops.

“Now, Valdez,” Dean said. “Or he’ll come back as one of them.”

“I—I can’t...” she said and turned away from them.

Dean looked down at the bloody state cop, lying beneath the truly dead zombie’s torso. His eyes were wide open and unblinking.

“Poor bastard,” Dean said and took the shot.

More screams sounded, coming from a nearby Italian restaurant, one they had already passed, Mama Ferracci’s. Sam cast a grim look at Dean.

“The zombies are inside!” he called, running toward the restaurant.

Two bodies crashed through the plate-glass window, a Clayton Falls man, wrestling with a Nazi soldier whose jaw snapped repeatedly so hard they could hear the teeth striking each other from fifteen feet away. The soldier’s hand had clawed the man’s face, but so far he’d managed to hold the snapping teeth at bay with a firm grip on the soldier’s hair. If the soldier noticed or cared that his scalp was slowly tearing away, he showed no sign of it.

Sam strode forward and swung his booted foot at the soldier’s head, connecting just under the jaw and elevating the zombie’s torso enough to get off a clean shot through his temple. He looked down at the relieved restaurant patron.

“Were you bit?” he demanded.

The man climbed hastily to his feet, ran his hands over his arms, and gingerly touched his face and neck.

“No. No, I don’t think so. Scratched. Not bit.”

“You’re lucky,” Dean said. “Now go home.”

“My wife,” the man said. “She went to the restroom before those... those things appeared out of nowhere. She’s still in the restaurant.”

“We’ll handle it,” Sam said.

When Dean and Sam entered Mama Ferracci’s, they saw the problem. A dozen patrons were trapped in the back corner of the place, surrounded by at least as many zombies. Some civilians cowered against the wall, backs turned, whimpering in fear while another yelled hysterically for somebody to please God do something. But a few diners held chairs up, like lion tamers in a circus, jabbing the chair legs at the zombies each time they tried to grab somebody. Because the zombies were impervious to pain, they took the abuse and continued to edge closer to their intended victims.

Wild and a few other cops entered the restaurant behind the Winchesters and took in the situation.

“More than last time,” Wild observed.

“Head shots,” Dean said for the benefit of the new cops.

“Not as easy as it sounds,” Sam said softly to Dean.

The difficulty was that the restaurant patrons were behind the zombies. One miss or a through-and-through shot and they would kill or maim innocent people.

“Guess we get up close and personal,” Dean said.

He crossed the restaurant with Sam beside him. The cops followed, spreading out to avoid friendly fire, and seemingly reluctant to tangle with zombies.

Dean grabbed the first zombie soldier by the collar and yanked him backward. At his side, Sam had a clean line of fire and took it, splattering zombie brains over a watercolor map of Italy. Then Sam pulled back the zombie closest to him, and Dean took the shot from the opposite direction.

When Dean killed a third soldier, he saw a young officer in a white tunic. Dean spun the man around.

“No!”

Sam saw it too.

The loop of intestine hanging from the abdominal wound.

“Same damn zombie we killed outside!”

Dean shoved the white-clad officer onto a round table draped in a red-and-white checkered tablecloth, and shot him in the brain stem.

“You know what this means,” Sam said.

“Running on a friggin’ treadmill,” Dean responded.

The Winchesters backed away from the zombies. Dean turned to Officer Wild.

“You know what to do?”

She nodded. But instead of grabbing a zombie, she removed the extendible baton from her belt and snapped it open. Stepping forward, she whipped it across the head of the nearest zombie, the graying field marshal with the fulllength leather trench coat. The old man staggered sideways, but she’d commanded his attention. Turning to face her, he bore down on her, arms raised to grab her even as he opened his hungry maw to bite.

Cerasi moved to the side, mirroring the Winchesters’ technique, and blew the field marshal’s brains out. The other cops took out their batons and joined the fight. With the situation basically in hand, the Winchesters retreated to the front of the restaurant.

“They’re regenerating minutes after we kill them,” Dean said.. “She’s playing with us.”

“We waste time attacking the symptoms,” Sam added, “not the cause.”

They heard more screaming outside and ran back into the street. Dean looked south and north for the source of the cry. His eyes locked on a black-clad Nazi SS officer standing hunched over beside the Impala.

“No!” Dean yelled and sprinted to his car.
“No!”

I’m too late
, he realized with horror.
Too late
.

Sophie Bessette had been pulled through the broken side window and was thrashing in the SS officer’s arms, one of which looked broken in several places from punching it through the window. Behind the black-clad Nazi zombie, Sophie’s body was obscured. Dean hesitated, holding his gun extended at eye level, to make sure Sophie wouldn’t be in the line of fire. When he saw her head flop down near the zombie’s elbow, he fired a high shot, catching the undead officer in the back, between his hunched shoulder blades. The zombie straightened, twisted his head around to look back over his shoulder. Seeing the satisfied grin on the zombie’s face, with fresh blood staining his jagged teeth and dripping from his chin, Dean lost it.

Roaring in anger, Dean emptied his magazine, firing round after round into the zombie’s face until his magazine was empty. He ejected the spent magazine, slammed another into the grip, released the slide and continued to fire, so he could blast that evil grin all the way to hell.

With nothing much left above the stump of his neck, the zombie SS officer released his victim and swayed side to side. Lunging forward, Dean kicked the zombie in the chest, knocking him clear of Sophie’s prostrate form.