Supernatural--Cold Fire (2 page)

Leaving the shed, he turned the handle behind him, to secure the door as much as possible without a lock. Now convinced that somebody had abandoned a baby behind the shed, he looked for the widest gap between the bushes and wondered how someone could have gone back there without leaving a path of freshly snapped branches in their wake, coming and going. Then he had a worse thought. What if somebody had approached the yard from the other side, through the overgrown field of grass and weeds to drop the baby over the fence—from a height of six feet?

It made no sense.

Halfway through the tangle of branches and having already accumulated an impressive collection of scratches on his face, neck and forearms, Dave belatedly wished he’d gone back into the shed for trimming shears, if not a damned tree saw.
Too late to turn back now
, he thought. But how would he bring the baby out without causing more harm?

The baby’s wailing softened into quiet sobs and snuffling sounds.

For some reason, this alarmed Dave more than sudden anguished cries would have. Abandoned and injured, the infant could be near death. Dave might literally be hearing the baby’s last gasps. He forged ahead with renewed purpose, barely noticing when a thorny vine raked across his palm, drawing stipples of blood like beads of crimson sweat. “Hold on!” he said softly, then louder. “Hold on, I’m coming!”

The last branch whipped back behind him, rustling its neighbors into a chorus of arboreal admonishments. The scent of pine trees washed over him, briefly reminding him of Christmas, happy childhood memories of giftwrapped surprises and lavish feasts. Which was odd, because there were no pine trees on their property and none that he’d noticed nearby. But that hardly mattered at the moment. He pushed the thought aside and turned the corner into the narrow space between the back of the shed and the fence.

Naturally, he scanned the small patch of ground where he expected to find a baby wrapped in swaddling clothes or a soiled diaper. What he saw instead was sparse grass and decaying plant matter, along with the desiccated carcass of what could have been a squirrel.

And then he was no longer alone…

He caught a brief glance of legs, standing before the rotted fence pickets where no one had been a moment before.

“How—?”

His gaze darted upward, more confused than afraid.

It happened so fast, he had no time to process what he saw. A vague, dark shape, tatters of cloth—but before his eyes could focus on the image before him, something flashed in front of his face; the movements were animalistic, and definitely inhuman in their speed and ferocity. Something sharp and painful struck his face, tugging and tearing—

He cried out at the sudden, unbelievable pain.

—then another impact, much lower, doubling him over in searing agony, ripping the breath from his lungs, and he dropped into numb darkness, welcoming it…

* * *

Sally Holcomb returned from her extended shopping trip a couple hours later than she had anticipated.
Almost time to get dinner started or call in a takeout order.
Dave had backed his pickup into the driveway, angled toward the backyard gate, so she assumed he continued to patch up the fence.

“I’m home!” she called as she passed the gate on the first of several trips from her Camry to the kitchen, emptying the trunk and backseat of numerous shopping bags; first the plastic grocery bags—stowing the perishables in the fridge or freezer—followed by the home decorations; everything from artisanal candles and storage cubbies, to window treatments and bed linens.

By the time she made her last trip, holding a ceramic planter wrapped in both arms, she paused to wonder why Dave hadn’t offered to help her with the bags. Sometimes, in the midst of a complicated home improvement project, he’d enter a trancelike state of concentration and fail to register the details of a conversation she thought they’d been having. More than once, she’d had to remind herself that his mumbles of assent and understanding had no correlation to the actual subject matter at hand. Over the years, she’d learned to recognize the signs of his worker-bee single-mindedness and would postpone any casual discussions until he finished the job or came up for air on his own. When she really needed his attention, her go-to move was offering him a cold beer. But as she stood before the gate, she heard nothing to suggest he was absorbed in the repairs. No rap of a hammer. No clunking of wood.

“Dave?”

Again, no response. Not completely unexpected if he’d entered trance mode. As she walked through the gate into the backyard, she noticed the lack of progress. She scanned the fencing. Nothing new or patched. To her right, she saw the reason why. The cement patio held everything Dave must have bought for the job and unloaded from the pickup, with the sole exception of one new fence panel leaning against the rotten old one. She never considered herself any kind of handyman—handy
woman
? handy
person
?—but her immediate impression was that nothing had been done, that he’d carried the panel across the yard but nothing else.

“Dave!”

No answer.

Empty yard. Utility shed closed. Naturally, she assumed he’d gone into the house and gotten involved in some other project, abandoning the fence, even if that was so unlike her methodical husband, a man who made prioritized checklists for every project no matter how small. Unless an emergency had come up. A busted pipe, maybe, an overflowing toilet. She’d only breezed through the kitchen to unload her bags and the house was much bigger than their old townhouse, plenty of rooms she hadn’t passed. She made a complete sweep of the place with no sign of Dave or the remnants of any household emergency, her anxiety building with each step.

“The shed,” she mumbled. “He must be in the shed.”

She imagined he’d hurt himself with a power tool, her mind miles ahead of rationality, concocting bizarre and gruesome scenarios. Perhaps he was unconscious, lying on the floor of the shed, bleeding…

Why close the door?
She hurried out back, across the patio and overgrown lawn to the shed. She gripped the metal handle, pausing to take a deep, calming breath, preparing herself as much as possible for the worst case scenario.
So why did you leave your cell phone in your purse on the kitchen counter?

She yanked the door open and peered inside, through dust-filled shafts of sunlight. Holding her breath now, she entered the shed, her gaze darting toward every corner until she convinced herself of Dave’s absence. As she backed out of the shed, uncertainty filled her, the names of her neighbors bubbling to the surface of her thoughts. If he’d left home without the pickup, maybe he’d accepted a neighbor’s offer to watch a ballgame or have a beer. But her reasoning crumbled before she could even build a case for either scenario. She’d been gone for hours and Dave hadn’t even begun work on the fence. No distraction would have lasted so long.

As she stood there, seeking an answer that made sense, she noticed broken branches on the bushes pressed against the right side of the shed. The breaks looked fresh…

That was the only place she hadn’t checked, as it was invisible to casual inspection. But it seemed like the only place he could have gone.

“Dave!” she called, rubbing her arm in anticipation of the awkward tangle of branches and prickly leaves that awaited her if he failed to come out on his own. “Dave, are you back there?” A deep breath. “Are you hurt?”

Silence.

She stepped forward, snapped a few branches to allow her as much unmolested passage through the bushes as possible without the benefit of garden shears. That’s when she noticed bright red spots on some of the leaves… drying blood.

With a renewed sense of urgency, she flung herself forward, eyes closed, left forearm shielding her face as she broke through the last of the bushes and thorny vines. Stumbling free, she rounded the corner of the shed and saw more blood splattered across the old fencing, some patches so wet that long crimson drip lines had formed underneath them. Numb, she took a step forward and her foot struck something, throwing her off balance. A frantic windmilling of her arms helped her avoid a fall, but in the process of catching herself, her gaze had dropped to the obstruction at her feet and an involuntary gasp escaped her throat.

Dave. Sprawled face down before her, motionless, right arm tucked under his midsection, left arm above his head, fingers clutching loose weeds, his legs splayed inelegantly to the sides. For a few agonizing seconds, her heart seemed to pause as she strained to see if he was breathing, the slightest rise and fall of his chest.

“Oh, my God! Dave!”

She dropped to her knees beside him, shook him and called his name again and received no response, not even a moan or grunt of pain. If not for the blood all over the fence, she might have thought he’d had a heart attack and simply collapsed, unnoticed back here. She spared no time speculating on the reason why he’d gone behind the shed. Instead, she focused on what she could do now, alone, since she’d left her cell phone in the kitchen. Although she’d never taken a CPR class, she’d seen the procedure performed on television often enough to give it a try. Grabbing his right shoulder and hip, she flipped him over to—

“Oh! Oh—oh, oh, God, please no,” she sputtered as she recoiled, flinging herself backward and slamming painfully into the back wall of the utility shed. “No, no, no, no!”

For a terrifying moment, it seemed as if Dave was staring accusingly at her, but that was impossible. He couldn’t stare. Not without eyes. Only bloody gaping sockets where his ice-blue eyes had been. Dark voids in a blood-smeared face, shockingly pale. And less than an instant must have passed before she noticed another bloody void, a ragged hole in his midsection, extending from beneath his ribcage to his waistline, and framed in the dripping, shredded remains of intestines. Small twigs and bits of dried leaves clung to the gore. And insects were already—

Whipping her head to the side, Sally dropped to all fours and expelled the remains of her food court lunch, gagging interspersed with uncontrollable sobbing until only thin strings of bile remained. She pushed herself to her feet, shaking as she stumbled away from her husband’s body, shrieking once as her foot slipped in blood-matted leaves. Irrational fear surged through her. She imagined some evil presence—a monster born of nightmares—had caught her ankle, determined to pull her back to finish its macabre task.

Screaming as conscious thought abandoned her, she flung herself around the corner of the shed, tearing several fingernails, and charged through the tangle of overlapping bushes as if her very survival depended on it.

Two minutes in, and Dean was gone.

Preferring a more cautious approach, Sam took in their surroundings. The setting sun leached all color from the graffiti decorating the drab and cracked walls of the abandoned three-story factory that dominated this particular city block of urban decay. A poured concrete foundation supported a ground floor of bleached cinderblock beneath two additional stories of faded and crumbling red brick. The hundreds of upper level windowpanes, perhaps intended to provide visual relief from the oppressive monotony of brick, had been transformed into endless daggers of glass, which caught the fading light in a golden glow and seemed to set the condemned structure ablaze. Whatever dark secrets the building held, they were hidden from the street view.

At some point after the factory closure, most likely after the majority of the graffiti artists tagged the then-fresh urban canvas, the building owners had erected a cyclone fence topped with loops of barbed wire around the perimeter, in case the metal No T
RESPASSING
– P
RIVATE
P
ROPERTY
sign—now tagged as well—affixed to the padlocked gate provided insufficient deterrent.

Rather than scale the fence and navigate the barbed wire, Dean had removed a pair of bolt cutters from the trunk of the Impala and made short work of the padlock. Then, exchanging the bolt cutters for a long-handled ax, Dean slipped through the gate, told Sam to take the front, and sprinted toward the rear of the forgotten factory.

“Dean!” Sam whispered, too late for his brother to hear, and shook his head in resignation. Not that they needed a big discussion or an elaborate plan, but he doubted their quarry had any intention of slipping out the back and fleeing. And it might have been wise to stick together for this final assault.

After a week of brutal assaults perpetrated by what several terrified eyewitnesses described as strange, mutated beasts, the Winchesters had determined the abominations had somehow been created by the mythological Chimera, a creature described in lore as a lion with the head of a goat rising from its back and a snake’s head for a tail. While the Chimera itself had remained in the shadows during the attacks, a couple of witnesses caught glimpses of its telltale features, but they also had the impression of a massive, lumbering presence, indicating something larger and more fearsome than the sum of the Chimera’s supposed parts. Unfortunately, as the frequency and ferocity of the assaults escalated, the Chimera had become more elusive. The brothers speculated that it had retreated to some kind of lair, a place secluded enough to avoid chance discovery while orchestrating its expanding reign of terror. In order to find it, the Winchesters needed to wait for one of its minions to “escape” a battle long enough to report back to the lair and secretly follow it to its master.