Supernatural Fresh Meat

SEVEN




A cold wind blew over Virginia City. The main street of the town stood before them, apparently unchanged since 1879. The city had been built on the side of a steep mountain, with forested slopes above and the high desert stretching away beneath. Wooden sidewalks ran the length of the street. Old saloons, hotels, and casinos rose on both sides, some of their wooden structures leaning. The sidewalk creaked beneath Dean’s feet as he walked toward the Aces and Eights Saloon. A motorcycle roared by, pulling over in front of the Delta Saloon, whose windows advertised the “World Famous Suicide Table.” Up one of the steep streets stood Piper’s Opera House and Millionaires’ Row, home to huge mansions built with the riches from the famous Comstock lode of silver.

A few people milled around the streets, and he could hear the bluegrass music of a live band filtering out from one of the bars.

It was a strange, exotic place, like stepping back in time to the Old West. They passed the newspaper office where Mark Twain had worked, and a place that offered ghost tours on the weekends. Just looking around at the old buildings, the leaning balconies, hearing the lonely whispering of wind through the streets made Dean think you wouldn’t have to look very hard to find ghosts in this place.

The Aces and Eights Saloon appeared on their right, a large, white wooden building. A weather-worn sign swung and creaked in the wind, depicting hands holding a set of playing cards.

“This is it,” Bobby said. A few tough characters hung out in front smoking, and Dean nodded to them as he passed through the saloon doors.

Inside music played on a jukebox, a country western tune Dean didn’t recognize. It was an old place, nineteenth century, with a large wooden bar with brass railings along the bottom to rest your boots on. A haze of smoke filled the room, drifting around the ceiling by Victorian shaded lamps. A scuffed-up piano stood in one corner, the keys yellowed and the ivory missing altogether in places. Old paintings hung on the walls, desert landscapes and one of a saloon girl fanning her face. Three leather-faced cowboys played cards at a beat-up wooden table in one corner. The only thing missing was brass spittoons next to the bar stools.

At the bar, a line of beer drinkers looked over their shoulders with disinterest at the three men who entered.

“What’ll it be, boys?” asked the bartender, a tall woman with so many tattoos on her arms that Dean couldn’t see any bare skin.

“Beers all around,” Bobby said, “and a whisky.” He looked at the shelf above the bar, its bottles glowing in the fading sun. “Make that two.”

They took three empty stools at the far end of the bar. Through the floor-to-ceiling window, Dean watched the sun paint the desert mountains gold. It was a beautiful spot.

The bartender slung a towel over her left shoulder and poured the drinks, eyeing Dean and the others surreptitiously. Dean caught the guy next to him sneaking a glance, too. He wondered how many people in there were hunters, and how many tourists. The bartender slid a lager to him and he took a sip, spinning on his stool to check the place out.

Apart from the poker players in one corner, two other tables were filled. Two leather-clad, tattooed men sat with a woman wearing a black leather vest and fringed chaps over her blue jeans. Their tanned and reddened faces were wrinkled and leathery from years of riding motorcycles in the hot sun. Their long hair was braided tight against their heads, and one of the men wore a black bandana with skulls. Dean wondered if they were out for a weekend motorcycle ride or if they were hunters.

The other table held two men who talked in hushed tones. A blond man in green fatigues and a black T-shirt leaned closer to his wiry companion, whispering something. The wiry man’s face formed an expression of disgust. He cringed, showing brilliant white teeth against the dark cocoa of his skin, and held up a placating hand to get the other man to stop talking. The blond slapped his own leg hard, and busted out with an outlandish laugh that filled the whole bar. The poker players looked up, annoyed, then went back to their game.

“That can’t be true!” the dark man protested.

“Swear to God, Jason.” Fatigues held up his hand as if he were a Boy Scout. “Swear to God!”

Jason leaned forward. “I swear you make up the craziest b.s., Gerald. I’ve been out to their trailer. There’s no way they’re keeping something like that there.”

Gerald nodded. “And every day they bring it fresh milk.”

“Now I know you’re bullshitting me.”

Gerald laughed again, but Jason nodded in Dean’s direction. He had realized Dean was eavesdropping, and in a not so subtle way. Dean grinned, nodded, and held up his glass at them.

Gerald scowled. “Who are you, Mr. Rogers, my friendly neighbor?”

Dean’s smile vanished and he put the glass down. “Just being friendly. You have a loud laugh. Hard not to notice.”

This earned him an indignant stare from Gerald.

Dean spun back toward the bar.

Bobby eyed him. “Making friends already?”

“Apparently.”

“Just try not to get in a fight before we figure out which of these people are hunters,” Sam urged him.

Elbows planted on the bar, Bobby took a shot of whisky and glanced over his shoulder. “You boys recognize anyone?”

Sam looked around casually, too. “Nope.”

Gerald had returned to talking in a low voice, with Jason looking sicker by the minute. “You are disgusting,” Dean heard the wiry man say. “Now I know you’re full of crap. Ash would no more have done something stupid like that than cut off his hair. Besides, Ellen would have killed him for it.”

Dean and Sam perked up, exchanging glances. Their friend Ellen had owned Harvelle’s Roadhouse in Nebraska, a bar frequented by hunters. Ash had been a brilliant former MIT student who could hack into any computer system and use math and probability to figure out any kind of problem. But the most awe-inspiring thing about Ash had been his astounding mullet, which hung well past his shoulders. Jason was right: whatever Ash had supposedly done, Ellen would have killed him for it if it were dangerous. She’d lost her husband to hunting and wasn’t prepared to lose anyone else. Unfortunately, she had lost more—she and her daughter Jo had perished not long ago in order to save Dean and Sam’s lives.

A skinny, pale guy appeared from a back room. He pulled a bar rag out of the back pocket of his ripped denim overalls and started wiping down tables. As he got close to Gerald’s table, Jason got up. “Drink on your own.” He walked away, revealing a painful-looking limp.

Gerald called after him, “You ain’t any fun, Jason.”

Jason approached the bar and took a seat. After a minute, Bobby said in a quiet tone, “Heard you mention Ellen. You mean the bar owner?”

Jason raised his eyebrows. “You know Harvelle’s Roadhouse?”

“Indeed I do,” Bobby told him.

Jason looked sad, lowering his eyes. “Then you know Jo and Ellen are…” His voice trailed off. The bartender placed a beer in front of him.

After a moment of silence, Sam said, “We were there.”

Dean felt a punch to his gut at the mention of that day. He always did. He’d gone over it a thousand times, wondering what could have been done differently, how they all could have walked out of that town alive. But they hadn’t.

Jason’s eyes narrowed. “You sons of bitches. You’re the ones who left them to die?”

Boom. Punch two to the gut.

Dean shook his head, horrified. “We didn’t call in the Hellhounds.” He remembered the horror of seeing Jo mortally wounded, of the impossible decision to leave her there so she could take out as many Hellhounds as possible, thus buying them time and their lives. Her mother staying by her side. Jo was all she had left.

When Jason continued to look angry and dubious, Bobby added, “You think all three of us wouldn’t have traded places with them if we could have?”

Dean felt an unwelcome constriction in his throat and swigged down another gulp of beer. Bobby was right. He usually was.

Jason frowned, relenting. “I guess so. They were good people, the Harvelles.” He looked up, studying all of them. “You hunters?”

“Born and raised,” Sam told him. He held out his hand. “Sam Winchester.”

Jason shook it, lighting up. “Well, hell! I’ve heard of you! The Winchesters! You must be Dean.” He shook Dean’s hand with exuberance. “I’ll be damned.” He turned to Bobby. “And you?”

Dean watched the skinny bar hand as he wiped tables closer to them. He was clearly eavesdropping.

“Bobby Singer.”

Suddenly, the skinny guy dropped his cloth. “No friggin’ way! I thought I recognized you all! Three regular legends in my bar.” He grabbed Bobby’s hand and shook it so hard Bobby slopped some of his beer on the table. Then he shook Sam and Dean’s hands.

The bartender strolled over. “It ain’t your bar, Jimmy, you lowlife. You can barely scrub the floors right.”

Jimmy grinned good-naturedly. “This here’s Darla,” he said.

She nodded at them in greeting.

Jimmy leaned in conspiratorially. “She killed that vamp nest over in Carson City last month—you know, the ones who were preying on drunk customers leaving the casino over there?”

Dean lifted his beer and nodded it toward her. “Nice.”

“Nasty things.”

Jimmy drew closer, getting uncomfortably in Bobby’s space. “You here huntin’ somethin’?”

“Now Jimmy,” Darla said, “go back to cleaning the tables.”

He looked chagrined and said, barely audibly, “Okay.”

As he turned away, Darla said quietly, “Best to ignore Jimmy. He’s a little excitable.” She glanced around the bar. “Can’t remember that not everyone in here might want to hear what we talk about.”

“He means well, though,” Jason said in his defense.

“So, are you a hunter, too?” Dean asked Jason.

“Jason’s been in the biz for a long time,” Darla said. “Long as I can remember.”

The hunter looked to be in his late thirties or early forties, but his face was so weather-beaten it was hard to tell. Dean wondered if he’d been raised in the life, too.

“My mom,” Jason said.

“Huh?”

“You were wondering if by ‘long time’ she meant my family had been in the business.”

Dean nodded. “Hard life for a kid.”

“That it was.” He took a sip of his beer. “That it was.” He looked at Dean and Sam, appraising them. “I knew your dad, actually.”

Sam turned his attention away from Darla. “You did?”

“Well, in passing, when he’d come into the roadhouse. I was green as hell back then. A teenager. The stories he’d tell used to scare the hell out of me.” He laughed. “He was an intense son of a bitch.”

Bobby lifted his second shot of whisky. “That he was.” He downed it in one gulp.

Dean felt a small pang of jealousy. So this guy had helped his dad out while, what, Dean was on another case? Had his dad sent him on some research errand while this guy was actually hunting with him in person? Not for the first time, Dean felt a pang of regret for how he’d been raised, the hardened lifestyle he and Sam had been plunged into after the death of their mother. Most kids would be jealous that their dad spent time practicing in batting cages with other kids, and here Dean was jealous that this guy got to kill monsters with his dad and probably risk his own neck.

“What brings you to town?” Jason asked, taking a sip of his beer.

“A case,” Sam answered.

Bobby leaned in. “You know anything about the folks disappearing out by Emigrant Gap?”

Jason shook his head in consternation. “Hell, yes, I do. Tried to burn the sucker three weeks back. Thing cracked three of my ribs, tore some cartilage in my shoulder. I’ve barely begun to recover. But I’m going back.” He gestured at them with the bottle. “That why you’re here?”

Dean nodded. “Yep.”

“That thing’ll have you for dinner. I’ve never hunted one of them before, though I remember my parents telling me about one they killed in Oregon before I was born.”

Dean felt some perverse pride rise up in him. “We killed one out by Blackwater Ridge in Colorado a few years ago.”

Jason raised his eyebrows. “Oh, yeah? How bad you get hurt?”

Jason wasn’t wrong to assume. That thing had done a number on them.

Bobby was all business. “You know where its lair is?”

The hunter stared out the window for a minute, then looked back at them. “I can get you close. I couldn’t find the actual nest, but I knew I was near. It’s an old mine near Sawtooth Ridge. Everything pointed to there.” He looked down, frowning. “It got me before I got a chance to take it out.”

Bobby pulled the topographic map out of his pocket. “Can you mark it on here?”

“I’ll do you one better. I’ll take you. Thing got the better of me once. It ain’t gonna happen again. It needs to go down.” He winced as he shifted his weight on the barstool.

Dean wondered if Jason was damaged goods. Maybe no more so than Bobby, with his bruised ribs. But with Bobby’s tracking skills and this guy’s knowledge of the area, they stood a good chance, even if they were all a little banged up.

“What do you say?” Jason asked him.

Outside, a sudden wind kicked up, bringing a cloud of dust past the saloon windows. Dean saw an honest-to-god tumbleweed go by. Sam looked to Bobby and him. “I think we could use him.”

Bobby took a swig of his beer. “Agreed.”

They slapped a twenty down on the bar and got up.

Jimmy rushed over. “You leavin’ already?” Dean noticed that his front teeth were brown and a few were missing entirely.

“Good meeting you, Jimmy,” Dean told him.

Jimmy gazed at him hopefully, clutching his bar rag with both hands. “Maybe I could ride shotgun?”

Behind him, the bartender waved her hand across her throat in the gesture movie directors use to say “Cut” and shook her head.

“Maybe next time,” Dean said, giving him a light, friendly punch on the arm.

“Aw, hell.” Jimmy turned away, defeated.

That night they ate at the Enraged Cow and Sippery, Dean finishing off a steak lathered in BBQ sauce and topped with crispy onion curls. Bobby ate a salad and Sam a turkey pita.

Then, with Jason following them in his beat-up Chevy pickup, they drove back in the darkness toward Emigrant Gap.

They restocked in Reno in a twenty-four-hour outfitter that had everything from warm jammies to guns, crossbows, combat boots, and night-vision goggles. They even got a second flamethrower for Sam. Dean had to love Nevada.

Jason limped up to the cashier, who tried not to stare. Jason was right. The wendigo had messed him up good.

In a low voice, Sam said, “Sure we want to take Jason on this hunt? Look at him.”

Bobby frowned. “Was wondering that myself.”

“Me, too,” Dean added. “But he’ll be helpful. If he can keep up.”

“He has got useful intel,” Bobby conceded.

While Jason finished checking out, Bobby grabbed the Reno Gazette off the stacks. “Uh-oh,” he said.

“What is it?” Sam asked.

“A family of five just went missing out by the Yuba River.”

Jason joined them. “That’s right where Sawtooth Ridge is.”

Bobby read more. “A search by helicopter using FLIR didn’t pick up anything.”

“They’re probably underground where the FLIR won’t be able to see them,” Sam said.

“What the hell’s a flerr?” Dean asked.

Bobby stroked his beard, reading the rest of the article. “Forward-looking infrared,” he said distractedly. “Says here they’ve only been missing for a day.”

Sam paid and picked up the gear. “They could still be alive.”

“Yep,” Bobby agreed.

Jason took the paper from Bobby and read over it. “We have to go now,” he said. “There still might be time.”

They hurried out to the parking lot, loaded up their cars, and hit Highway 80, driving as fast as they could toward the wilderness and the abandoned mine. This time they could not fail.