Supernatural: Night Terror (37 page)

Dean hit the brakes.

“Lisa!” Dean cried as he swung the Impala around. “Here with Ben. They’re in trouble, Sam.”

Sam looked over his shoulder.

“They’re not real, Dean. Can’t be. The real Lisa and Ben are at home. Safe. It’s the night hag. She’s using your fear against you.”

“How? I’m not asleep.”

“When you’re exhausted, your mind wanders. You’re having a waking nightmare. She’s stronger now. Maybe that’s all she needs to find a way into your subconscious.”

“Gotta help them, Sam. If I don’t—”

Sam grabbed his arm. “I saw something too, Dean. Yesterday. Something that wasn’t real. It’s all mind games. Your fears fuel her. If you give in now, she wins.”

“Damn!” Hitting the brakes again, Dean took a deep breath. He’d failed to protect Sophie. And he always worried that his being a hunter would bring danger to Lisa and Ben. With nightmares to prove it. Now the night hag’s psychic influence was jumbling his failure with his fears to mess with his mind. “You’re right. It’s not real. Lisa and Ben wouldn’t be here... Can’t believe I almost fell for it.”

Shaking his head, Dean resumed his original course and dropped Sam off near the warden’s house with his iron short-spear and lock picks. Then he drove to the home of Phil Meyerson, CDC retiree and parked half a block away. He didn’t need Lucy’s report over the radio to tell him when the night hag arrived and began to feed. The house and half the streetlights on the block went dark all at once.

“Going silent,” Dean said into the radio before turning the volume off. Sooner or later the radio would lose power, but he couldn’t know when. One ill-timed squawk from the speaker and he’d lose the element of surprise.

He sprinted up the block and hurried around the house along a bricked backyard patio to the rear door. Kneeling, he worked by sound and feel and had the lock picked within a minute.

Once inside the house, he waited quietly for a couple minutes more, long enough for the nocnitsa to assume solid form and begin feeding. But not too long. For all he knew, Meyerson’s subconscious was already creating an outbreak of bubonic plague in Clayton Falls.

Iron short-spear at the ready, Dean crept through the house.

One moment Jeffries was talking to Baumbach—his temporary state cop partner who was still freaked out about what he’d seen in Clayton Falls—and the next moment he saw them wink into existence at the entrance to the parking lot over a thin bed of white mist. Even though DeYoung and Shaw warned them what type of living nightmare they might see next, Jeffries wasn’t sure he would have fired so readily at seemingly ill people if he hadn’t seen their eerie appearingout- of-thin-air act himself. Baumbach stared in shocked dismay as Jeffries shot two of the hemorrhagic fever victims stumbling toward the diner.

“What the hell?” he whispered.

“They’re not real people, Baumbach,” Jeffries responded. “But their disease
is
contagious.”

Seven more appeared at various points around the diner, lurching forward, begging for help as blood ran from their ears, eyes, noses, and mouths, their voices choking on it as they moaned.

“Help! Help us! Please!”

As they came close enough to shoot, five more appeared behind them. Soon they would be overwhelmed by sheer numbers. Jeffries took aim, but saw out of the corner of his eye that Baumbach was paralyzed by dismay.

“Baumbach! Shoot!” he commanded urgently.

The state cop nodded abruptly. “O—okay.”

They fired together, Baumbach clearing the left side of the entrance, Jeffries taking the right. Jeffries wondered what the people inside the diner thought about them mowing down apparent civilians in distress, but shook it off. A moment later all the approaching bleeders—as he had begun to think of them to disassociate them from real human beings—disappeared. Even the ones on the ground vanished.

He got on the radio.

“DeYoung? Shaw? Is it over?”

After a few moments, DeYoung answered, his voice bitter with disappointment.

“No. Meyerson is dead.”

Wieczorek came on the channel.

“The creature is on the move.”

By the time Dean reached Meyerson, sitting on a sofa by a table lamp with a crossword puzzle in his lap, the man was dead and the night hag was gone. When he examined the body, he discovered that Meyerson hadn’t been reduced to a husk. He was wrinkled and old but not withered to skin and bones.
The strain of the feeding must have killed him
, Dean thought. Either a heart attack or a stroke. He turned on the radio to report his findings and to warn Sam he was up next.

The stairs creaked.

Dean glanced up and saw an old woman in a long nightgown staring at him.

“Who are you? Why are you in—what have you done to my husband,” she demanded as she took in the scene below her.

“FBI,” Dean said quickly, scrambling to produce his ID while keeping his iron short-spear beside his leg out of view before Mrs. Meyerson had a heart attack of her own. “I’m afraid your husband has passed.”

“No... no,” she said, her eyes wet with brimming tears as she brushed by Dean and bent down to grab her husband’s shoulders. “Phil! Phil, my God, no. Philip! Please, no...” She turned to Dean with an accusatory look. “What happened? Why are you here?”

“My partner and I are investigating strange incidents in town,” Dean said. “I—I thought your husband could help. I had questions. But... I think he had a heart attack.”

Dean guessed she heard only about half of what he’d blurted out. She sat beside her deceased husband and rested her head against his chest, crying silent tears.

Good luck, Sam
, Dean thought.
Kill this damn thing already
.

When darkness blanketed the warden’s house and extinguished nearby streetlights, Sam slipped around to the back door and picked the lock, allowing enough time for the night hag to settle in and begin feeding. Webb was younger than Meyerson, so she should have time to feed. If Sam acted too soon and the nocnitsa fled, they would be back to square one, not knowing where she’d strike next, with dawn two hours away.

This was it. All or nothing. Clayton Falls wouldn’t last another night.

On the western outskirts of town, inside the Falls Federal Prison compound, the walls of the supermax wing began to tremble. Fissures appeared in the concrete and raced upward, forking and spreading in all directions. Large chunks of the walls fell away like a calving glacier.

While the walls crumbled, the electrical systems shorted out, rendering motion detectors and closed-circuit cameras blind. Inside the solitary cells of poured concrete, the prison’s most dangerous inmates took notice. Lights flickered and dimmed. Cell doors creaked in their housings. Cracks spread across the walls of cells that were de facto sensory deprivations chambers, with the exception of narrow window slots that revealed only a slice of sky and nothing more. Supermax inmates spent twenty-three hours of every day alone in these cells, known as “special housing units” or “SHU.” They were granted one hour per day to exercise, alone, in what amounted to an empty swimming pool. When the walls began to crack, some of the inmates imagined that the heavy concrete slabs would crush them, unlamented victims of a natural disaster.

But all of them considered the possibility of escape.

Ragnar Bartch jumped up from his bunk and watched in awe as two long cracks rose from opposite sides of the wall across from his cell door and formed an inverted V. Walking forward, he pressed his hands to the block of stone and marveled as the section scraped and slid away, opening a gap in the previously impenetrable wall. A gleam of reflected starlight on his bunk caught his attention. When he saw the familiar rectangular shape lying there, beckoning to him, he smiled for the first time since he’d come to Falls Federal. He grabbed the handle of the shiny new meat cleaver and ran through the breached wall, eager to claim the destiny that had been granted him.

Jasper Dearborn, Deputy Warden in charge of security at Falls Federal ran his hand through his thinning gray hair, convinced he was a cursed man. Alden Webb, his boss, had placed Dearborn in charge after leaving early for the day. Said he felt “wiped out.” Thought he might be coming down with a nasty virus or something. Surely Dearborn could handle things for a day or two. Most days passed without incident. Dealing with administrative red tape was the biggest headache. But routine led to complacency. And Dearborn never accepted complacency in himself or others. The previous night’s false report of an escaped inmate had even provided a bit of a wake-up call for his staff.

Dearborn’s internal alert level went up a notch when he’d received reports of a tornado touching down a few miles from the prison. But that was nothing compared to the report Ray Strawder, his security operations director brought him a few hours ago. Somehow, Kurt Machalek, one of their most notorious supermax cons, had managed to thoroughly and completely disembowel himself while under closedcircuit camera surveillance. Corporal Urbino, the guard monitoring the feeds, noticed static on the monitor. By the time he thought to report it, the image cleared and Machalek was lying in blood-strewn pieces all over his cell.

Dearborn thought it unlikely a man could commit an act of such grievous violence on himself. The logical conclusion was that he’d had help. No prisoners had access to that cell. Only Dearborn’s men. He was determined to find whoever had decided to mete out his own idea of justice—a brutal execution. And if there was a conspiracy in Dearborn’s ranks, he wanted to root it out before he told Webb of his failure. The situation was contained. Urbino had been relieved of duty and awaited interrogation. Dearborn planned to interview anyone who had access to the supermax wing, and anyone who could not account for his time. Even if it took all night.

Lost in thought, Dearborn stared at his desk when it began to vibrate beneath his hands. Picking up the phone, he called Ray Strawder.

“Strawder, what the hell—?”

“The supermax wing, boss,” his security operations director said. “It’s crumbling.”

“What?”

“The walls are literally falling apart!”

“How? Earthquake?”

“Only supermax is affected. All electronic surveillance is down. We’re blind, but I’m getting reports some of the prisoners are outside the walls. I’ve sent men and guard dogs out—hold on a minute.”

Strawder must have cupped the receiver. Dearborn heard rushed and maddeningly muddled conversation before Strawder came back on the line.

“Boss, the prisoners are armed!”

“How the hell is that possible!”

“Don’t know, boss,” Strawder said, his voice piano-wire taut. “We’re taking casualties. Bartch is out, with a damn cleaver. Killed two guards.”

Dearborn almost dropped the phone. His hands were numb.

“Gets worse, boss,” Strawder said. “Stun fences are offline. Tower guards are reporting physical gaps in the fences. Boss, this is some kind of coordinated mass escape.”

“This is a nightmare, Strawder,” Dearborn said. “Have the tower guards shoot them all. Shoot to kill. Nobody escapes!”

Not on my watch
, Dearborn thought.
I won’t let this happen
.

He needed to alert the Clayton Falls police chief, but first he had no choice. Time to notify his boss that everything had gone to hell while the old man caught the sniffles. With a heavy sigh, he picked up the phone and dialed Webb’s number—

—but the call wouldn’t go through.

* * *

Ragnar Bartch sprinted across the prison yard in a state of pure exhilaration. Ignoring the blaring sirens and the blinding watchtower spotlights that swept back and forth, he swung his bloodied cleaver with lethal accuracy at anyone who came within arm’s reach, whether fellow inmate or prison guard. He’d even decapitated one of the German shepherds they’d sent after him without suffering a bite or a single scratch. Handgun bullets whizzed by his ears. Rifle bullets rained down from the watchtowers.

Two cons running on either side of him dropped seconds apart, but he continued unscathed. Once he spotted the gap in the inner fence, he embraced his destiny. Freedom. Through the opening in the first barrier, he hardly had to alter his course to duck through the gap in the second fence. With fresh blood dripping from his cleaver, the night welcomed him and the lights of the town beckoned.

Alden Webb, warden of Falls Federal Prison, thrashed in his sleep, unable to wake up from his worst nightmare. Crouched on his chest, elongated fingers of both hands wrapped around his damp forehead, the solidified darkness of the nocnitsa hissed and sighed with delight as she drained the life energy from his body, mining his nightmare for images of fear and darkness to unleash upon the hapless town. She had grown too strong for the man to free himself from her feeding. She ravaged his subconscious mind with limitless abandon. She would ride out his feeble psychic resistance until his body and his mind succumbed to her will. Only when he had been reduced to a lifeless husk would she move on. No need for half measures now. With total focus, she slowly snuffed him out...