Supernatural: Night Terror (14 page)

The Raptor on the Civic’s roof leapt down to the windshield and its weight crunched through the safety glass, detaching the whole window from the frame. Spinning around, the Raptor ducked forward, trying to shove its large snout into the interior of the car.

Sam was already walking across the street, his automatic raised in both hands as he drifted to the left for a better angle. He took two quick shots. Blood blossomed on the head of the Raptor crouched on the car’s hood. As it toppled sideways, it disappeared. The last raptor swung its head around to track Sam with its alligator eyes.

Screeching, it bounded toward Sam, picking up speed at an alarming rate.

Sam took two more shots. The first missed. The second clipped the outside of its left foreleg. Neither slowed it down.

Dean had his own automatic out, but Sam blocked a clear shot.

“Sam! Down!”

Sam dropped, just as the Raptor leapt, covering the remaining distance between them. As Dean sighted along the barrel and applied pressure on the trigger, the creature was gone.

Sam climbed to his feet, brushed himself off and gave Dean a look.

Dean shrugged, holstered his gun. “I had the shot.”

“Look on the bright side,” Sam said. “You saved a bullet.”

The Civic’s driver tried his door, found it jammed, so proceeded to climb out through the windshield frame. Sam helped him down.

“You okay, man?”

“Yes, I’m fine. I mean, considering what the hell just happened,” the driver said, his voice shaky. “You guys cops?

“FBI.”

“My name is Paul Hanes. Swear I wasn’t drinking,” the man said. “Although I could use a drink right now. It’s just— those things came after me and—what were they?”

“Velociraptors.”

“Dinosaurs? But they’re extinct...”

“Maybe,” Dean said. “Starting to have my doubts.”

“Any idea where they came from?” Sam asked.

“No. I mean, I had a fight with my girlfriend—Cathryn Rowsell at 142 Allen Drive if you need to verify this—and I noticed something coming out of the shadows when I unlocked the car door. I thought mugger, or carjacker, you know? Jumped in the car, locked the doors, and drove away fast as I could.” He spoke rapidly, propelled by nervous energy he couldn’t contain. “When I glanced in the rearview, I saw them—those four... lizards racing after me. I was so startled, I actually slowed down. One of them caught up to me and jumped on the trunk of the car. That was enough for me. I floored it and that one fell off. I didn’t slow down until I, well, until I crashed into the pickup.”

“Notice anything unusual before you got in your car?”

Hanes pursed his lips. “May have heard rustling in the bushes before I saw the shadows against the wall. But not on—fog. There was mist or fog along the grass and walkway on my way out. Didn’t remember seeing it when I got to her place after work.”

“Thanks,” Sam said.

The wind gusted again. Lightning arced across the sky, like a pulsing vein in the darkness, followed by a rolling crash of thunder. For a moment the streetlights went dark as far as they could see. Then they flickered fitfully back on.

“Oh, man...” Hanes said, staring at his car and the Dodge pickup. “How do I explain this to my insurance company?”

“Worry about that tomorrow,” Sam said. “Find shelter before they come back.”

“Jeez!” said the guy. “You think?”

Dean steered the Impala into the professional building complex. Once he neared the entrance, he had only to follow the flashing red and blue lights. A patrol car, an ambulance, and a wrecker were parked in a rough half-circle around the crime scene—although an attack by a giant tarantula could hardly be called a crime. Make that an incident scene.

A pair of confused EMTs—a woman and a man— stood on either side of Officer Jeffries, as if awaiting instructions Two men stood near the wrecker, their fidgety body language betraying impatience or discomfort with the situation. The taller of the two wore a baseball cap with an embroidered company logo over an apparently bald head; the other man had a shaggy mane of greasy hair.

“Trying to find a pattern here,” Sam said pensively. He seemed preoccupied with the Velociraptors’ attack rather than focusing on their present situation.

“Besides the white mist?” Dean asked. “And the nighttime? And giant lizards in general?”

“A tarantula isn’t a lizard,” Sam said, glancing up at Jeffries and the paramedics. “And the Velociraptors were big, but not gigantic.”

“Count your blessings.”

Dean swung around the emergency vehicles, and parked the Impala in the island of light under a lamppost. Finally, he saw what the paramedics and Jeffries had obstructed from view when he pulled into the lot.

“You see that?” he asked Sam.

“Human remains.”

“It’s... sticking out of the ground.”

Jeffries walked toward the Impala as they climbed out.

“Hey, guys,” he said. “Hope you got strong stomachs.”

He waved them toward the victim.

“What have we got?” Sam asked Jeffries.

“Victim was an adult male,” Jeffries said. He grabbed an evidence bag from the hood of his patrol car. “Harvey Dufford, according to the metal plate on what’s left of this emergency alert wristband we found beside the body, which no longer has any wrists to speak of.”

The upper torso—what remained of it, at least—looked as if it had been doused with highly corrosive acid. The head was little more than a crushed skull with a few strips of inflamed flesh around the neck. Most of the flesh on the arms and torso was gone, the internal organs missing or partially dissolved into a loose jellylike substance. With no ligaments to connect them, some of the bones had fallen in a loose circle around the torso. The man’s body seemed to end at his waist, but closer inspection revealed flesh and organs embedded in the asphalt of the parking lot.

“Where’s the giant tarantula?” Dean asked.

“Vanished.”

“Was my first guess. And we know it was a giant tarantula because...?”

“Marcus Epps, owner of the wrecker over there, brought his brother-in-law, Otis, here to retrieve his pickup truck, which is a few lots down from here. Soon as they turned into this lot, they saw the giant spider hunched over the victim. I told them to stick around. Figured you’d want a word.”

“Appreciate the cooperation, Jeffries... Hold on,” Dean said. He stepped back, crouched down and ran his hand along the surrounding blacktop. He felt ripples in the surface leading away from the remnants of the corpse. Even further away he found misshapen lumps merged with the asphalt. After a few moments, he identified the objects. “Running shoes.”

“You’re right,” Sam said. He walked from the embedded shoes toward the corpse. “From the ID and what’s left of his clothes, looks like he was jogging. Sees the giant tarantula, starts to run away, but then... sinks into the ground.”

“What? Giant tarantulas can melt asphalt?” Dean stared up at Sam. They knew weird, the brothers lived and breathed weird but this case was getting way beyond weird.

“Maybe Marcus and his brother-in-law know how this happened,” Sam suggested.

They walked over to the wrecker and the two men waiting there. The bald man’s cap advertised “Epps Service Center” in red script letters on a white field. That settled which one was Marcus.

Dean flashed his FBI laminate.

“Agent DeYoung. This is Agent Shaw. You saw a giant spider?”

Otis responded. “It was a red-kneed tarantula.”

“That sounds specific,” Sam said.

“Growing up, buddy of mine had one,” Otis said. “Fed it live crickets from the pet store. Let me watch.”

“And, as far as red-kneed tarantulas go, this one was big?”

“Hell, yeah!” Marcus said. “Thought it was a bear at first. Hunched over. My headlights swept over it, and I saw those red-striped legs.”

“Damn near had a heart attack,” Otis continued. “Doc keeps telling me my cholesterol is too high.”

“What happened?” Sam asked. “Exactly.”

“I could tell it was feeding,” Otis said. “Saw enough crickets eaten by my buddy’s tarantula. This thing had something wrapped up in its feelers while it went to work on it. Couldn’t tell what it was at first. You know, spiders can’t eat solid food. They digest it outside of their body then suck up the fluids.”

“Helluva way to check out,” Marcus said, shuddering.

“What happened next?” Dean asked.

“Not much,” Marcus said. “Couple seconds after my headlights hit it, damn thing vanished. Poof! Like a magician’s trick. Thought maybe I’d imagined the whole damn thing. But, obviously, Otis saw it too.”

“After it disappeared,” Otis said. “That’s when I saw what it had been eating.”

“Don’t know what to make of it,” Marcus said. “Thought it ate the lower half. Then saw the guy stuck in the ground, like he was... planted there.”

Dean thanked them for their help, gave them his business card in case they remembered any other details. The men then piled into the wrecker and drove deeper into the series of linked parking lots to retrieve Otis’s pickup.

The Winchesters joined Jeffries and the paramedics near the impacted body.

“Thanks,” Dean said. “Got what we need.”

“We want to talk to Lucy Quinn,” Sam said. “Apparently she witnessed the Lacosta hit and run.”

“Spoke to the chief. Said he was on his way there when he spotted you two at that sinkhole,” Jeffries said. He removed his cap and ran a hand through his hair, staring down at Dufford’s remains. “Nothing in the manuals or academy training about this sort of thing. We’re waiting on the county medical examiner, but...”

“We can’t move the body without construction equipment,” the woman paramedic said. “Jackhammer minimum.” She took a deep breath. “Christ!”

The other EMT scratched his jaw. “Maybe we should cover the body.”

“Better not,” Jeffries said. “Might contaminate evidence. Some of that flesh is liquid.” He looked toward Dean and Sam. “A word?”

The three of them took a few paces away from the paramedics. Jeffries turned down the volume on the radio clipped to his belt, reducing the police chatter to white noise.

“Listen,” Jeffries said and cleared his throat. “When I heard about Shelly’s giant lizard before, well, I assumed he’d had a bit too much joy juice, you know?” He took a deep breath and sighed. When he spoke again, his voice was hushed. “Chief told us you Fibbies—sorry, Feds—think this might be terrorist-related. Some cell testing a kind of hallucinogen weapon, right?”

Sam glanced at Dean before he spoke. “We had some information along those lines.”

“Right, so, a hallucinogen makes you see weird stuff. Giant lizard, headless horseman, okay, that fits.”

“Giant tarantula,” Dean said.

Jeffries snapped his fingers. “Exactly what I thought when this call came in! Another weird one. But—” he looked back at the mostly dissolved body embedded three feet deep in asphalt—“
that
is not you or me
seeing
something. That
is
something.”

“And you want to know what that something is,” Sam said.

“Exactly.”

“We don’t know yet,” Dean said. More or less the truth.

“There’s more here than we thought,” Sam added.

“Goes double for me,” Jeffries said as he turned to walk back toward the paramedics. “Hell, triple!”

The Winchesters headed back toward the Impala. Behind them, Dean heard Jeffries turn up the volume on his belt radio. A lot of squawking and excited chatter. With the sinkhole and subsequent explosions, the car crash and Velociraptor attack, the brewing lightning storm, and who knew what else, the police were on high alert and apparently unprepared for the chaos befalling their sleepy little town. But two words stood out in the stream of reports and assignments.

Dean stopped, turned toward Jeffries.

“She did not just say Nazi zombies?” he called.

Jeffries looked over at him. “So you heard it too?”

“On Main Street?”

Jeffries threw up his hands in surrender.

“Why the hell not?”

Ignoring posted speed limits, Dean raced the Impala east along Bell Street, reluctantly tapping the brake pedal as he rolled through each red traffic light. No guarantee the Velociraptors hadn’t returned to hunt another car and driver. He shook his head in disbelief.

“This is what I meant,” Sam said. “This is all wrong.”

“You mean the Harvey Dufford smoothie back there? Or the
Dead Snow
sequel on Main Street?”

“Everything.”

“I’m not arguing.”

“Those Velociraptors don’t match current fossil records,” Sam said. “Real Velociraptors were smaller.”

“So are tarantulas and Gila monsters.”

“They had feathers.”

“Tarantulas?”

“Velociraptors,” Sam said. “More birdlike than reptilian.” Dean nodded. “So we rule out wormholes and time travel.”

“Along with the return of the Third Reich.”

“You got a theory?”

“These... manifestations are real,” Sam said. “But inaccurate.”

“I’m listening.”

“They’re more like perceptions,” Sam continued. “Or misconceptions.”

“Put it that way,” Dean said. “Sounds like a tulpa.”