Supernatural Fresh Meat

FORTY-NINE




Dean came to slowly. He couldn’t quite remember where he was and tried to move his body, but something pressed down on him, making it impossible. He could barely breathe. As he tried to suck in air, he instantly went into a coughing fit. Dust drifted thickly around him and a strange red haze permeated the air.

Across from him in the gloom, a red ‘exit’ sign glowed above a hopelessly askew doorway. Heavy beams lay in front of it, along with broken ceiling tiles and plaster dust. Wiring hung down in clumps, sparking and swinging.

Dean remembered. There had been another avalanche.

He lay on his stomach, something heavy across his upper back. He tried to crane his neck around to see, but couldn’t. Someone whimpered nearby.

“Hello?” he said, spitting out plaster dust.

A man continued to mutter and plead softly.

He could hear something moving near him, but couldn’t tell if it was shifting debris or someone crawling around.

“We’re dead, we’re dead,” the man muttered.

“No, we’re not,” Dean told him, and started coughing again.

When the fit subsided, he glanced around for anything he could use as a pry bar. A few feet away, a piece of rebar lay against a pile of cement rubble. Dean’s left arm was free, and he reached for the rebar. At first he could barely graze it with the tips of his fingers, but he managed to grip it enough to drag it a little nearer, then grasp it properly. Something above him groaned and shifted, pushing even harder down on him.

The man whimpered softly.

“Hey, buddy,” Dean called out. “You free? Can you give me a hand here?”

But the man just went on crying.

Another groan filled the gloom, and Dean felt the debris on his back shift again. But this time the weight eased. Suddenly, he could take a deep breath. Pushing with his legs, he managed to wriggle out from under the debris. When he scrambled free, he sat up and looked back. Part of the stone wall from above had crashed over the staircase. He’d been pinned under one end of a massive beam. Luckily, as more debris fell on the other end of the beam, it had lifted off him.

He tried to stand and found that he could only crouch. The ceiling had caved in all around him. He followed the sound of the crying man. Dean recognized him as Bill, who he’d helped dig out of the first avalanche. A massive head injury yawned in his forehead. His eyes were unfocused and glassy. Dean shucked off his jacket and folded it tightly, then pressed it against the wound.

“Anyone else down here?” Dean yelled. “Jason!”

He listened, hearing only the sparking of the wires and water dripping from somewhere nearby.

He told Bill to put pressure on the wound and moved away in the darkness. Crawling over debris and walking bent over when the space allowed it, Dean entered the neighboring room. It was the locker room where he’d originally seen the avalanche control team.

One wall had completely caved in, the lockers fallen over against the benches in the center of the room. It left a space big enough to protect someone. Dean bent down and peered in. The red emergency lighting had kicked on, and he could just make out the shapes of two bodies in the confined space.

“Hey,” he said.

A hand reached out for him, and he grasped it. Pulling gently, he dragged the person out. It was Steven, the snow ranger.

“Thanks, man,” he said. “I can get Hank out. He was next to me in there. We’re both okay, I think.”

Dean nodded and continued on, crawling through the wreckage. Beyond the crew locker room lay the equipment room. Dean moved to it at a crouch. He wondered if anyone who’d been on the floor above when the avalanche hit could possibly have survived. He wondered if Don had dashed down here at the last minute, but somehow he doubted he could have made it in time.

As Dean made his way toward the equipment room, Steven and Hank emerged from the locker room and crawled away toward Bill. “Everyone should try to stay together,” Dean told them.

Steven nodded dreamily, showing signs of shock.

Dean could hear Bill’s voice echoing down the hall. “Hey, dude. You seen my car? It was parked out in the lot. We’re probably going to go out later and cruise around.”

Hank responded, his voice strained. “We’ll do that.”

The equipment room lay at the end of a narrow corridor sparking with live wires. Before he went in, Dean searched for additional rooms, but didn’t see any other spaces where people could have survived the building’s collapse.

Finally, he slunk down the hallway, keeping well away from the live wires. The equipment room lay in ruins. Splintered skis and snowboards stuck out from a collapsed ceiling that descended at an angle. Some of it still held, creating a triangular space.

He saw two shapes moving in the gloom and crept closer. A man lay on the floor with a figure bent over him. Suddenly the man cried out in pain, and Dean recognized Jason’s voice. He crept closer and saw Grace stooping over him, her back to Dean. Blood soaked her hands and Jason’s chest. She bent her head low over him, and he screamed.

Dean dug around in his pockets, his hand closing around the spice concoction. “Hey!” he shouted.

Grace turned around, and Dean released a big splash of the mixture, hitting her squarely in the face.