Witch's Canyon (21 page)

He swung into the doorway, bracing his right shoulder against the jamb, shotgun leveled.

Inside the room a slender brunette in her fi fties or so stood up against the far wall with tears running down her face. Between her and Dean was a soldier—not the one they had seen at the mall, but a younger guy, from about the same era if the uniform 192 SUPERNATURAL

was any indicator—holding a wickedly huge knife in his right fist. A genuine bowie knife, Dean thought.

The soldier advanced toward the woman, but the bed blocked his way. He stepped to his left like he would go around it, then raised his leg like he would step up on it. He lowered the leg again, apparently undecided.

“Ma’am,” Dean said softly. “You might want to duck now.” He backed up his words with a hand signal.

At the sound of his voice, the soldier turned around.

He was just a kid, maybe seventeen or so—or that’s how old he had been when he died. His throat had been slit, and the wound still gaped, dry and papery.

Something had been gnawing on him, too—holes in his cheeks and forehead showed bone beneath. As he looked at Dean, he flickered, and for an instant it was like his bones were illuminated from inside by a bright lightbulb made from transparent black glass. Then he looked whole, as he must have in life, and then he flashed back to the slit-throat dead man Dean had fi rst seen.

As indecisive as he had been before, he didn’t seem to have any trouble recognizing that Dean—while not his initial target—represented the greater threat.

He lunged toward Dean with the big blade.

Dean pulled the Remington’s trigger. The rock salt blast obliterated what remained of the young soldier’s head and much of his chest. The woman, hunkered down in her corner, screamed as bits of him pelted her like rain.

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The soldier’s lower part teetered and fell, landing in a seated position on the bed for a few seconds before slumping to the floor. There he blinked in and out, in a pattern that was growing familiar to Dean, and vanished.

All the other parts of him disappeared at the same time. The walls were marked with rock salt, but not with the bits of flesh that Dean had just scattered all over.

“It’s okay now,” Dean said. “He’s gone.” The woman, sobbing almost hysterically, wiped her hands at body parts that had been on her a moment before and were no longer.

“No, I mean completely gone,” Dean said.

“But . . .”

“I know. Don’t try to understand it,” Dean suggested. “It’s a lot easier that way.” The woman tried to smile through her tears. She rose and wiped a sleeve across her eyes. “Thank you.

Whoever you are.”

“No problem,” Dean said. “And, uh, you might want to have someone come out and install a new door in front. I kinda broke yours.”

TWENT Y-THREE

As Dean had directed, Sam waited downstairs. Coming back down, Dean saw that he’d been able to hold Harmon Baird there.

“What happened, Dean?” Sam asked.

“There was another one of those soldiers,” Dean said. “Just a kid. His throat had been cut, and he was trying to do the same to the woman who lives here.

But the old guy’s right—if you shoot them, they go away. Blink a few times and poof, gone, like they got stuck in a transporter beam.”

“If you shoot them with the right load,” Sam said.

“Anyway, we should probably get Mr. Baird out of here before someone comes to investigate the gunfi re.”

“What I was thinking.” Dean called back to the woman upstairs, who still hadn’t left her bedroom.

“Ma’am, we’re taking off. There’s a sheriff’s offi cer down the street at the Riggins place. You might want Witch’s

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to see if they can stick around until you get that door fi xed.”

She didn’t answer, but comprehensible conversation was not yet within her capabilities. Dean thought she’d be okay once she got over the fright of the dead guy—and he had been ugly dead—trying to ice her.

Dean shrugged. He and Sam and Baird exited through the destroyed front door and hurried to their car. The sheriff’s vehicle was still parked in front of the Riggins house. By the time Second Street vanished from the rearview for the second time that morning, no one had come out.

The summer that Dean had been fourteen and Sam ten, their father had taken them on a long hike into the Rocky Mountains. They’d been staying at a cabin in Colorado for a week, and it seemed almost like paradise to Dean. Blue skies, a swift creek running past the place where trout could be caught, a meadow on the other side of the creek, reached by crossing a rustic wooden bridge, that bloomed with thousands of wildfl owers.

The thing that had prevented it from actually being paradise was that Dean was fourteen, and would rather have been meeting girls and playing sports and sleeping in than continuing what seemed like lifelong boot camp. Dad hadn’t offered that option, though, and Dean went where Dad went and did what Dad said.

On this particular day Dean, Dad, and Sam shouldered heavy backpacks containing rations and equip-196 SUPERNATURAL

ment for a three-day stay in the wilderness. Dad had packed them both, and said Dean’s weighed eighty pounds and Sam’s sixty. With their respective burdens, they struck off into the higher elevations. They walked all morning, stopped for a quick lunch of peanut butter sandwiches and raisins from Dad’s pack, then kept going. The meadows thinned and disappeared altogether. Deciduous trees were left behind. Eventually there were only scattered fi rs on hard, rocky slopes. The air was thin and cool.

Most of the way, Dad kept up a running patter, telling his sons lessons he had learned in the Marines or since their mother had died, on his hunting trips.

He told them about the
loup garou
and the Manitou, Assyrian
ekimmu
, Greek
keres
, about mummies, golems, zombies, and much more. He described the tests and traps and traditions they would one day rely on. He had already taken the boys on several hunting trips, of course, but he told them that he was preparing them for the day when they would go without him.

Finally, as the day grew late, the side of the mountain they were on shrouded in shadow, he told them to take off their packs and sit. They obeyed, as they usually did.

Dad didn’t remove his backpack. He remained standing. “The main thing I want you boys to learn from this,” he said, “is never to trust anyone. Even me. Always verify what you’re told. Taking a few minutes to check might save you hours later on. It might even save your life.”

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“What do you mean, Dad?” Dean asked. An awful thought had already risen up in the back of his mind, and he realized that he hadn’t paid much attention to the route they took to get here, counting on Dad to know the way back.

“I mean, neither of you checked your backpacks before we left. You just trusted that I put in the things you’ll need out here.”

“That we’ll need?” Sam asked.

“You boys sit there for one hour,” Dad said. “By then it’ll be almost dark, and you’ll need to make camp. Tomorrow you can head back to the cabin—if you remember the way. I don’t expect I’ll see you until the day after, or maybe the day after that.”

“But . . .” Dean started to protest, then held his tongue. Dad tested them. That was what he did. He taught them and he tested them, and so far they had failed this particular test. He wasn’t going to make it worse by complaining.

“Dad, you can’t—” Sam began.

Dean cut him off. “Zip it, Sammy. We’ll be fi ne.” Sammy zipped it, and Dad headed back down the mountain. Dean figured he’d be able to follow their tracks back—unless Dad took pains to erase them, which was the kind of thing he would do.

When he was gone, both boys opened their backpacks. The top layer looked legitimate—rolled-up tarps that might have passed for tents under a cur-sory examination. Beneath those, though, Dean’s held a box of baseball cards, some cans of pork and beans but no can opener, a couple of bricks, a plas-198 SUPERNATURAL

tic bag full of wadded-up paper, and miscellaneous other objects of absolutely no use in the wilderness.

Sam’s was similarly packed. Neither one of them had a match, a sleeping bag or tent, a compass, or any accessible food. They had water in separate canteens, strapped across their chests and clipped to their belts, so Dean wasn’t worried on that score.

But it was getting dark, and they would soon be starving and sleepy.

“What are we going to do?” Sam asked. He was only ten, so Dean tried to cut him some slack, but if the kid started to blubber, he was going to toss him off the nearest cliff.

“I’m going back down the hill,” Dean said. “Try to get as far down as I can before it’s dark. Inside the tree line it’ll be warmer, and maybe we can fi nd some berries, or a rabbit or something, for dinner.”

“But we’re supposed to stay here for an hour,” Sam protested.

“That’s what Dad said. He also told us our backpacks held supplies for three days. You want to believe everything he says, or you want to eat tonight?”

“Eat, I guess.”

“Then let’s get going.”

They ended up getting back to the cabin just after dark on the next day—hungry, tired, and mad. But, Dean had to admit, having learned a valuable lesson.

He tried to apply that lesson now, listening to Harmon Baird’s story.

The old man had been right about two particulars.

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He had known which house was under attack, and that shooting the attackers put an end to them. Dean had verified both by going into the house and con-fronting the young soldier.

Sitting on Sam’s bed in their room at the Trail’s End, though, he told a story that would be diffi cult to verify. If Dean hadn’t seen what he had—both throughout his life, and specifically since arriving in Cedar Wells—he wouldn’t have believed a word of it.

“I’m ninety-one years old,” Baird began, once they had turned up the heat in the room to a level he found comfortable and brought him a Dr Pepper from the soda machine. He had taken his hat off, and his head was nearly bald, just a few wisps of hair spreading across pink, tissuelike skin. “So I’ve already lived through two of these, what you call murder cycles. I just think of them as the forty-year.”

“Forty-year what?” Sam asked.

“Nothing. Just forty-year. Ain’t like I talk about it to other folks, and I know what I mean when I think it in my own head, right?”

“I guess that’s true.”

“Damn straight it is. So like I say, I’ve lived through two before. This one marks my third time.

First one, I was just a sprout, of course. But I saw it happen. Saw my own father cut down with a tomahawk. My aunt shot in the back. My neighbor—this was the worst—my neighbor tied behind a horse and dragged, facedown, until all the skin was fl ayed off his front side.”

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“Yeesh,” Dean said. “That’s harsh.”

“Harsh it was, young man,” Baird agreed. “But it left an impression, I can tell you that.”

“Bet it did.”

“Forty years later, as I reckon you know, it all started up again. This time I knew what was happening, because I saw the same sorts of attacks I remembered from the first go-round. Attacks by Indians and soldiers dressed in clothing and uniforms that had stopped being worn before the first set of murders. People who were there one second and gone the next, like you were opening and closing your eyes. And animals who changed their forms from one second to the next, who became people, people who became animals. It was all so familiar, and so terrible, seeing it happen a second time.”

“What did you do?” Sam asked.

“Well, I fought back as hard as I could, that’s what I did. The first time, none of them came for me, else I wouldn’t be here now, most likely. But the second time? They came for me, all right. Nine times I was attacked. I used my rifle and my pistol and an ax and even a flaming log, in one case, to fight ’em off. I had seen what they could do and wasn’t about to let ’em do it to me. Some of them I killed, if that’s what you can call it, and others I just chased off. They like to have turned to easier prey, after tanglin’ with me.” The old man rubbed his left eye, hard, as if trying to pry it out of its socket. Then he scratched at the end of his nose, leaving red marks. “I had married by then, and they did get my lovely Betty. I only left Witch’s

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her alone at home for a short while, long enough to run into town for supplies and ammunition. I left a gun with her, too, but somehow they got her anyway, split her open from collarbone to breast. I buried her in the back and went out lookin’ for whichever one had done that, but of course they can’t really be followed.”

“Why not?” Dean asked. “Don’t they leave tracks?”

“Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Sometimes the tracks just trail away into nothing at all. Sometimes they change into other tracks. They don’t really come from anywhere, you see. They . . . what’s the word?” He snapped his fingers with a dry clicking sound.