Supernatural--Cold Fire (30 page)

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When Dean first stared down into the darkness, he had the odd sensation that he gazed into a bottomless pit, an abyss that consumed the souls of all who entered. But the disturbing thought was fleeting, the product of an imagination so often exceeded by the terrifying reality of a hunter’s life. He followed Sam down the steep staircase and almost sighed in relief when he realized the passageway was only fifteen feet underground. The walls and ceiling were made of plywood painted a dull red—though maybe the red had been bright crimson once but faded over time—with loose boards on an earthen floor. A secret passageway carved in the earth and supported with the simplest DIY building materials.

With his shotgun resting against his right shoulder, Sam swung the flashlight in his left hand back and forth to expose any side passageways that might branch off from the main one, which was almost wide enough for two people to walk abreast. Nevertheless, Dean brought up the rear, armed with the machete in case anything came at them from behind while their attention was directed forward.

He took out his cell phone, but not simply for the extra illumination. Before they went any deeper underground, he called Cordero to warn him the new mothers might exhibit violent tendencies. Castiel was headed to the Green house, but he couldn’t be everywhere at once. And if one new mother had flown into a murderous rage, Dean had a feeling the others might follow suit.

Cordero knew about the bouts of temporary rage and was currently dealing with Melissa Barrows, who had attacked and injured her own parents. Moreover, Cordero told him Captain Sands had gone to the Atherton house to stop Denise from trying to kill her husband.

“When will this stop, Agent?”

“Soon,” Dean said. “One way or another, this stops soon.”

Next Dean called Dr. Hartwell, to check on Chloe and Olivia, since he’d directed Castiel away from LMC, and to tell her about the attacks by the new mothers.

“Nothing’s changed here,” she said, clearly worried. “No response from Chloe or Olivia to any stimuli, their labor is arrested, and their heart rates are slowing down. They’re not reacting to any treatment. As I told Agent Collins, I may need to perform C-sections on both women the minute I detect any distress in the babies.”

“Agent Collins had to respond to another emergency,” Dean said. He described what was happening with the other women: bouts of rage, followed by a period of brief unconsciousness and calm, followed by another bout of homicidal rage. “All patients at LMC. Were they given any kind of experimental drug? Anything with side effects? Like the world’s worst case of postpartum depression? That might explain…?”

“No,” she said definitively. “Nothing like that. I don’t experiment on my patients with unknown or dangerous drugs.”

“Didn’t think so,” Dean said, all but convinced the episodes were also linked to the pontianak, which was not something he could explain to a medical doctor.

“It’s curious, the timing of these violent episodes,” Dr. Hartwell said.

“Curious how?”

“Think about it,” she said. “A period of rage, followed by a period of calm, coming in waves, one after another.”

“Labor pains,” Dean said, nodding. “The violence is the contraction, followed by the calm between contractions.”

“But why?” she wondered. “Obviously these women aren’t pregnant anymore.”

“No.”

“Women in labor may curse and scream, but…”

“They don’t become homicidal.”

“Dean,” Sam called. “I’ve got something.”

“Gotta go, Doc,” Dean said.

“Agent Banks,” she said before he could disconnect. “These women are slowly dying. If we can’t discover the cause I won’t let their babies die with them. Time is running out.”

Dean tucked his cell phone back in his pocket and looked ahead to where Sam shone the flashlight beam. Unlike the crude underground passage braced with planks and plywood, the door at the end of the passage could have been found inside a typical home—except that it had been painted black.

Taking a moment, Dean looked up at the boarded passageway ceiling and tried to visualize how far and in which direction they’d walked since descending under the barn. “We’re under the burnt silo.”

Now Sam paused, pointing the flashlight toward the crude stairs and back again, making the mental calculation. “Maybe that fire wasn’t an accident,” he said. “Debris left to conceal the excavation.”

“Of what?” Dean wondered.

“Whatever’s behind this,” Sam said as he redirected the light forward to examine the door. Over time, the doorjamb had warped, pinching the top right and bottom left corners of the door. Sam passed the flashlight back to Dean, turned the knob and pushed to no effect.

“Locked?”

“Stuck,” Sam said. “Back up.”

They both took a step back. Sam raised his right foot and struck the door. It shuddered but held. A second kick and the lock popped free of the dislodged strike plate. With a squeal of protesting hinges the door swung inward, revealing an open space much wider than the passageway. Since Dean held the flashlight, he took the lead, shining the beam back and forth, up and down.

After the makeshift red passageway and the ominous black door, Dean had not expected to find a large room, painted white, approximately twelve feet wide and fifteen feet deep. Though the hallway appeared haphazard and unfinished—a means to an end—this room was relatively complete, though the construction was basic, consisting of sections of plywood nailed to a two-by-four framework, judging by the give in the floor. Utilitarian and quick to assemble once the space was excavated. In its original condition, nothing other than the lack of windows would have hinted that the room was underground, a space carved out of dirt. Since then, somebody had smashed through the bottom of the back wall, while years of moisture, mold and rot had taken their toll on the untreated surfaces of the wood. Here and there, sections of plywood bulged where the rotted wood had popped free of nails, and the lines of the room seemed out of true, though the floor remained level.

In the center of the room, at a skewed angle, stood a narrow, military-style hospital bed with low side rails and two welded IV drip poles rising from the head rail. At the foot of the bed, permanently welded to the frame, were two crude gynecological stirrups. The thin mattress, pillow and bedding were all stained and moldy. Dean suspected the darker stains were blood. The flashlight beam illuminated a metal ring attached to the side rail.

“Sammy,” he said. “Look.”

Sam stepped around him and lifted up the other dangling metal ring attached to the first by a short length of chain, rusty but easily recognizable. “Handcuffs.”

“They don’t leave until they pay the bill,” Dean said, walking around the other side of the creepy hospital bed.

The right side of the room looked as if it had been struck by a whirlwind. A metal stool lay on its side, along with a large bucket, and pieces of a shattered enamel wash basin spread out from an overturned small table. In the near right corner, also on its side, near a severely cracked section of plywood, lay a wheeled baby crib. The metal tubing was mangled, with two wheels missing, the crib split in half.

Against the back wall, a large wooden cabinet had toppled over, leaning away from the wall at an awkward angle, one leg broken, shattered door panels scattered, along with broken jars, an assortment of pills decades past their use-by dates, and medical instruments, including a stethoscope, blood pressure cuff, a half-dozen crushed syringes, a black handheld inhaler that looked like a small gas mask to cover the nose and mouth, and freaky obstetrical forceps. Pinned under the forceps was a torn paper chart depicting Friedman’s curve for estimating cervical dilation over time.

Dean moved on, inspecting the hole in the corner of the back wall. The broken section of plywood had burst into the room, as if something from beyond the wall had crashed inside. And what he found beyond the wall looked like a small addition to the original room, an unfinished storage area with some tattered black cloth in a hole about the size of a…

“Shallow grave,” Dean said. “Somebody was buried here.”

“Dean—I got something,” Sam called. “Under the cabinet.”

Sam laid his shotgun on the hospital bed. He crouched, gripped the front edge of the cabinet and lifted it upright, but not before a drawer fell out and dumped a worn leather-bound journal on the floor. The shattered cabinet balanced precariously on three intact legs, but the Winchesters directed their attention downward, at what—or who—had been under it.

The flashlight beam revealed the desiccated corpse of a tall man in a torn white lab coat, brown trousers and black leather shoes. Most of his dark hair had fallen out and what remained looked like a fright wig. His face was gaunt, stretched into a horrified rictus. The skin around both eyes had been shredded, the bone underneath scored, the sockets dark and empty. Further down, the body’s midsection had been ripped open, ribs shattered, pelvis cracked. Dark stains discolored the white lab coat from the corpse’s sternum all the way down.

“Grave you found over there wasn’t his,” Sam concluded. “Looks like he was thrown against the cabinet, killed right here and left to rot.”

“Pontianak victim zero,” Dean said. “My money’s on Calvin Nodd.” He kneeled beside the body, checked the pockets, and came up with a billfold containing forty-two dollars and a faded Indiana driver’s license. “Bingo! Doctor Nodd never left town.”

Sam glanced toward the shallow grave. “Was the pontianak here all along?”

“She rises from the grave and kills Nodd. But why?”

“Dean, she was returning the favor,” Sam guessed. “He handcuffed patients to that bed. This was his kill room.”

“Why the operating room if he planned to kill them?”

Sam picked up the leather-bound journal, opened the cover and read a name. “This belonged to Nodd,” he said and started flipping through the early pages. “He’s writing about events that happened during the war, when he was in the Philippines… It’s a recitation of atrocities Nodd witnessed directly or after the fact. Dean, I think this journal was his attempt at self-therapy.”

“Lot of good it did.”

Sam shook his head. “Brutal stuff. Whole families and villages—men, women and children—massacred by machine-gun fire… weak and injured prisoners were bayoneted, then beheaded and dumped in mass graves. Others doused in petrol and burned alive.”

“Saw a documentary on the Bataan Death March. Nasty stuff.”

After reading several sections in a hushed whisper, Sam flipped through more pages, skipping ahead, seeking answers about what could have happened fifty years ago to spawn a pontianak terrorizing Braden Heights today.

“Yeah,” Sam said. “It gets worse.”

“Not surprised.”

“Apparently Nodd was captured by the Japanese,” Sam said. “His writing is a mess, almost illegible, like he struggled to put some of this on paper, reliving the horror… says he never told anyone about this stuff, not even Malaya. Nobody in the service ever knew he’d been captured…”

“How is that possible?”

Sam shook his head and kept reading. “He was forced by a Japanese doctor—Kurokawa, but sometimes he calls him Dr. Smiles—to assist in wartime experiments… he’s talking about amputations and vivisections of healthy civilians captured during the occupation… Nodd’s writing… he’s almost incoherent at this point… the victims were alive during these surgeries and Kurokawa refused to use sedation on any of them. When he finished with a subject, assuming they were still alive, he would bob his head and smile broadly, then slice their throats open.”

“A nightmare clown college graduate.”

“Kurokawa removed limbs, eyes, genitalia… he would cut them open and remove organs… all in the name of science, testing endurance, survival times… and nutrition…”

“Do I even want to know?”

“Looks like he fed human flesh and organs to the other prisoners,” Sam said, shaking his head in disgust. “Something about alternative food sources in times of severe rationing. He cut up men, women—and children… to test the quality of the meat. And Kurokawa made Nodd participate in all of this, acted like he was Nodd’s mentor. Nodd finally guessed that Kurokawa was testing his psychological limits, to see how far he could push him on penalty of torture and death before Nodd would refuse.”

“Did he?” Dean asked. “Stop?”

“Nodd didn’t stop,” Sam said. “He snapped. Happened around the time Kurokawa started cutting up children and feeding them to other prisoners. Nodd acted like he was going along with it, very helpful… until he gained Kurokawa’s trust or at least inattention—he was never sure—long enough to conceal a scalpel. He picked his moment, when the two guards who were always present were distracted. Nodd flew into a rage, sliced open Kurokawa’s carotid artery, then jumped the nearest guard, cut his throat and killed the other guard with the first guard’s gun. He escaped in the night with minor physical wounds… told everyone afterward that he’d been injured and pinned down in enemy occupied territory until it was safe to get away… the whole ordeal messed with his head…”