Supernatural: Night Terror (17 page)

He tilted his head back against the sofa cushions and closed his eyes. For a few moments, his burning eyes experienced exquisite relief. The cooling sensation was so welcome, he decided to leave his eyes closed for a few minutes more, then he would continue...

Darkness descended from the ceiling, creeping along the wall to hover near Meyerson’s head. Where the lamplight fell against the thickening shadows, it was absorbed, unable to penetrate the darkness taking shape. Unable to break apart the arm or long fingers that reached for Phil Meyerson’s forehead.

Meyerson slept and the darkness began to feed.

As Dean drove slowly down Main Street, Sam pointed to the lone mourner standing near the curved wall of the garment factory memorial, head bowed.

“Should we ask if he’s seen any zombies?”

“If he saw zombies,” Dean said, “he’d be long gone.”

“Slow down,” Sam said.

“What is it?” Dean asked, but then noticed it himself.

The man was trembling, twitching where he stood. Possibly overcome with emotion, remembering a lost loved one. But Dean’s gut told him something else was at work. He eased the Impala to the curb and switched off the engine.

“Could be he’s infected,” Dean said. “If he is...”

“Perception is reality,” Sam said, nodding. “Worst case scenario. He’s a goner.”

“We do this,” Dean said. “Kill a civilian. We’ve turned a corner.”

“I know,” Sam said grimly and stepped out of the car, gun in hand.

Soulless Sam wouldn’t have a problem pulling the trigger.
Hell, he’d shoot first and ask questions later
, Dean thought. This one might be on Dean. He’d have to be prepared.

Dean followed Sam, gun drawn, and together they approached the man.

“FBI,” Dean said. “We’d like a word.”

“Help me,” the man whispered harshly.

“Excuse me?” Sam said. “Mister, are you okay?”

The man turned toward them with pained precision, as if coordinating his muscles for that simple task required extreme effort. His head rose from his chest and he stared at them with bloodshot eyes, which seemed to lack a pupil. Blood trickled from his ears, nose and mouth. An inflamed red rash covered every square inch of his exposed skin, as if all the blood in his body wanted to vacate the premises as soon as possible.

The Winchesters stopped in their tracks, stared.

The man raised a hand toward them and his fingers dripped blood.

In a voice harsh with pain, he gasped, “Help me!”

When he blinked, tears of blood streamed down his cheeks.

“Buddy, what happened to you?” Sam asked, keeping his distance.

“I need help!”

The man staggered toward them.

Sam and Dean raised their guns.

“That’s far enough,” Dean said.

The man stopped walking toward them, but he continued to twitch.

“He’s not a zombie, Dean.”

“Looks like a friggin’ blood grenade.”

From the opposite direction, a police cruiser approached. The light bar came on, but not the sirens. The cruiser swung across two lanes of traffic and parked on the shoulder on the opposite side of the memorial.

“It’s Officer Blondie,” Dean said.

“Wild,” Sam said. As she approached, Sam called. “We meet again!”

“And you two with your guns on a civilian,” Wild said.

“Is he?” Dean called. “One of yours?”

“Of course, he...” She stopped talking as she walked toward the man in a wide arc with her hand on the butt of her holstered sidearm. “Sir? What’s your name?”

He looked at her and coughed when he tried to speak.

Blood sprayed from his mouth in a fine mist. Wild backed away instinctively.

“What is this?” she asked.

“He’s infected,” Sam cautioned. “Something nasty. Ebola. Hemorrhagic fever. Marburg virus.”

“You have to help ME!” the man cried, hysterical.

Turning back to Sam, the man lumbered toward him, arms outstretched.

Blood coursed down the infected man’s face, spilling from his ears, eyes, nose, and mouth. When he was within ten feet of Sam, his body became wracked with a coughing spasm and blood sprayed from his mouth. Stiff-legged, he continued to stumble toward the brothers.

“Stop!” Sam warned him, his jaw bunching as he tightened his grip on the trigger.

“Hell with that,” Dean said and fired.

The bullet struck the man above the left eye, whipping his head back. His body collapsed in a tangle of legs—and winked out of existence before reaching the pavement. All the spilled blood vanished as well.

Sam turned to Dean. “How did you know he wasn’t real?”

“I didn’t,” Dean said. “Your rules. Perception and reality.”

Wild joined them. “That could have been one of my people!”

“Either way,” Sam said with a nod to Dean. “He was infected and lethal. Ninety percent mortality rate.”

“Ten percent chance he could have lived,” Wild countered.

“You willing to turn your town into a hot zone?” Dean asked.

“Not my call.”

“Whatever this is,” Sam interrupted before the argument could escalate. “Whatever creates these manifestations, I doubt it plays the percentages. You get infected, you die.”

“So what are we supposed to do?”

“Shoot on sight,” Dean said. “Lethal force.”

As he slept at the end of the sofa, mired in a troubling dream, Phil Meyerson’s hand slipped and he jabbed his thigh with his mechanical pencil. The sudden movement, more than the injury to his leg, woke him from what had started out as a break to rest his burning eyes and had turned into sound sleep. His eyes opened to darkness and he experienced a moment of disorientation. A few seconds later, the lamp flickered and winked on, followed by the television set. He assumed the house had experienced a short power loss while he’d been asleep.

Glancing down at the half-finished
New York Times
crossword, he sighed in self-disgust and slapped it down on the end table and placed the mechanical pencil on top of it. “Damn old age,” he muttered.

He leaned over the coffee table and pressed the remote button to turn off the television set. Then, with another sigh, he pushed himself from the comfortable embrace of the sofa. Six months ago, he would have battled on with the crossword. Hell, one month ago, he’d have been game to keep plugging along. But not now.

“Not tonight,” he whispered in quiet surrender.

For some reason, his physical exhaustion would not be denied. Maybe he was coming down with something. A bug incubating, draining his stamina, what little he had at his age. Nothing like the exotic diseases he had studied his whole life. Just some common, garden variety virus staking its claim, challenging his immune system to a duel.

In a way, the conjecture made him feel better. Anybody could become sick, need more rest than usual. Not necessarily a sign of advanced age or deteriorating faculties. If he had to rest, he would. But was it asking too much for some dreamless sleep? As much as he missed his youth, he wouldn’t mind a night’s sleep without dreaming about deadly viral outbreaks.

Switching off the table lamp, he made his slow way up the stairs, hearing his joints creak and pop like rusty hinges, pressing down on the banister rail with his palm because he needed the support to make the simple trip to his bedroom and his sleeping wife.

In the dark room he left behind, a deeper darkness detached from the wall and drifted across the open space, spilling out through a keyhole and then through a small gap between the edge of the storm door and the doorjamb. Once out in the night, it floated above the rooftops in a familiar direction and paused above another house before drifting down, ready to feed again before the night was over.

* * *

Alden Webb, sitting in bed in his pajamas, yawned as he flipped through assorted internal prison documents. He turned the television to a nighttime talk show host whose monologue patter became like white noise filling the unnatural silence of the house. Thunderstorms had passed and the sirens he’d heard earlier had faded. Car accidents, downed power lines, the usual heartbeat of town emergencies in severe weather, he presumed. Nothing to concern him. But even with all those distracting sounds outside the house, he could never acclimate to the silence inside the house.

Ever since his wife divorced him and moved to San Francisco to work for her niece—who founded a company that helped corporations develop social networking strategies—he swore he could hear the clocks in the house ticking. And the sound was enough to drive him to distraction—or a psych ward. He found himself turning on the stereo or the television as soon as he returned home. Background noise. Because the silence was too loud.

What the talk show host joked about was of little interest to him, but it trumped the hollowness of ticking clocks and humming electronics. Instead, Webb flipped through the file folders filled with routine paperwork and incident reports from his deputy wardens, the food service supervisor, his corrections center manager, the director of security operations, and the building manager. The reports dealt with everything under his purview, including food preparation, counseling, treatment, health care, security issues, purchase orders, human resources matters involving prison employees, and building maintenance. Most of the reports were standard administrative matters. He looked for irregularities in the routine reports. And he paid special attention to matters involving prisoner treatment by the guards and violence or insubordination among the prisoners.

His early conversation with the young FBI agents had not been unexpected. Defending the safety of the prison had become something of a knee-jerk reaction for him. Nevertheless, he took his responsibilities as warden of a federal prison seriously. While he assured the mayor and the citizens of Clayton Falls that Falls Federal presented no threat to their welfare, any prison was a potential powder keg. One large-scale riot and all his careful assurances would be undone.

The addition of the supermax wing had been a sore point for the town, a rallying cry for all the protestors who decried the housing of the “worst of the worst” criminals minutes away from the families and children of Clayton Falls. In reality, the supermax cons were the least of Webb’s concerns. They were locked down in solitary cells twenty-three hours a day. And their one free hour out of their cells was spent alone. Not much trouble for them to get into with that one hour of exercise time.

Truth be told, he had a visceral loathing of the supermax felons. In his opinion, they were beyond redemption or rehabilitation. They were marking time, lifers or awaiting lethal injection. Webb had a hard time looking them in the eye, because what he saw there struck him as inhuman. Maybe it was the total lack of compassion or conscience. Something was just... missing. The latest addition had been particularly heinous: Ragnar Bartch, a confessed cannibal with seventeen known victims and whose weapon of choice was a cleaver. Before he arrived, the worst con in supermax was Kurt Machalek, who kept a collection of human hearts in mason jars after cutting them from the chests of his victims with a serrated bowie knife. Profilers called the hearts souvenirs. Machalek called them totems and believed they gave him mystical powers. But Bartch and Machalek and their ilk weren’t going anywhere.

All the other prisoners under his watch had much more potential to cause trouble. They had far less direct supervision and oversight. They mingled. They divided themselves along racial lines, us versus them. One spark, one real or imagined slight and they could cause serious injury to their fellow cons and damage to the prison. Yet even the worst-case scenario presented no threat to the town. Even a full-blown riot could be locked down. Yes, there most likely would be casualties in the prison—but the town would remain safe. Guards and prison employees would be the only civilians at risk.

Webb shuddered with a sudden draft in his bedroom. He was not poetic enough to consider the sensation a presentiment of doom. He read nothing in the reports that hinted at anything more than the expected amount of conflict within the walls of his prison. Everything was, well, routine.

Acquiescing to the frequency of his yawns, he filed the reports in their folders and stacked them on the bedside table to take to work in the morning. He picked up the television remote, trying to decide if he should turn the volume up or turn the set off. While he weighed the pros and cons, he fell asleep.

Coils of darkness unspooled from the curtains and settled above his headboard, taking shape to feed...

By the time Dean and Sam arrived at the scene of Tony Lacosta’s hit and vanish, the young man’s body had been taken away, and the front yard and wrecked porch had been encircled with crime scene tape. His parents stood in the driveway in their night clothes, arms wrapped around each other. While his mother sobbed, his father looked as if he’d been kicked in the gut. They had already told Chief Quinn what they’d witnessed after the initial attack twice and refused to go over it again. The Winchesters eavesdropped on the conversation as a detective that Quinn assigned to the case promised to talk to them in the morning, after they’d had a chance to process what had happened. Dean doubted their “processing” would adhere to a convenient timetable.