Supernatural: The Unholy Cause (25 page)

Staggering across the battlefield, McClane heard a scream.

He was weak, blind in one eye, his meat-suit wracked with pain, but none of that mattered. The chaos he’d unleashed here was reaching its boiling point, and soon the goal would be in sight. The cannons that had been blaring from the hillside had finally fallen silent, perhaps temporarily, maybe for good. It didn’t matter. The objective was now within reach.

Sam Winchester’s true purpose would be fulfilled.

Grinning through cracked lips, McClane heard another scream—this one louder.

It came from the railway shed.

He glanced at the parking lot, saw both flanks of his demonic army riding back around to surround the police cars and military vehicles that now filled the lot.

Soldiers in camouflage were piling out of the newly-arrived personnel carriers, carrying automatic rifles, opening fire on the Confederate and Union-garbed figures. The demons charged them, cutting through their ranks, blasting and slashing with high good humor. Their antique muskets, breechloaders and carbines had become supernaturally powerful, spraying flame that enveloped whole vehicles in great, leaping gulps.

A soldier jumped out of a blazing Humvee and bolted across the parking lot. The man was on fire and screaming. As the recon helicopter blared back overhead, a cavalry demon went charging up behind the burning man and decapitated him with a swift slash of his bayonet. In one fluid movement the demon caught the severed head in midair, its face and hair burning like a Roman candle, spun around in the saddle and flung it upward at the helicopter.

The burning missile smashed into the chopper’s glass canopy, shattering it, and a moment later, the cockpit was filled with orange flame and smoke, the helicopter pitching and yawing erratically in the air. McClane paused to watch as the chopper canted hard to the left and fell out of the sky, exploding on the ground in a fireball that unleashed heat he could feel from where he stood. Good times.

He raised one hand in the air.

It was as if a silent alarm had sounded across the battlefield. The cavalry and infantry demons stopped what they were doing, swinging around to face him.

Hundreds of attentive black-eyed faces looked directly at him, shoulders at attention, awaiting orders.

McClane pointed at the shed.

Sam landed on the demon full-force, with the idea that sheer momentum might be enough. Obligingly, it let go of Sarah’s neck. Only to turn its attention to Sam. Instantly it was on him, and it was out for blood.

He had no plan and no means of self-defense.

The demon pinned Sam to the floor. The sulfurous stink was overwhelming. It grabbed one of the bloody rags that had served as its tourniquet, jerked Sam’s mouth open and tried to cram the rag inside.

Sam choked, his gag-reflex triggering over and over, and managed to get his mouth shut. Even so, he could smell the blood. But not just any blood. It was heavy, almost intoxicatingly potent and somehow rotten at the same time—demon blood. The re-enactor had continued seeping into his bandages long after the noose had turned him.

He tried to turn his head, to keep his mouth shut, but the demon had fastened its hand over his lower jaw and kept trying to pry it open.

In the background, a million miles away, something was happening. Ashgrove and Bendis were scuffling to get the attacker off of him. The demon shrugged them away, batting them off like insects.

Sam couldn’t see much. The room was fading fast around him, sinking away in gradations of gray.

“
Leave him alone
,” a voice said.

The demon jerked upright, his weight rising off Sam’s chest. As his vision cleared, he saw Castiel had yanked his assailant away from him and was holding the demon by the throat, both hands clenching while the demon made gargling sounds.

“Cass,” Sam choaked. “I thought—”

The door of the railroad shed blew off its hinges, flying inward, smashing the demon backward and flinging it across the room like some unwanted toy.

Castiel vanished.

In the middle of it all, Sam felt a random verse from Scripture race through his mind:
And the stone the builder rejected will become the cornerstone.
Where did these thoughts come from, he wondered dazedly, and why did they arrive in his mind when they did?

The door was followed by the rest of the wall, the wood and reinforced steel of the shed itself blasting inward on a geyser of flame as wide as a semi. That gout of fire sucked the oxygen out of the building. The ceiling pulled downward in a crumpling shriek of splintering oak and tortured steel. It was like being trapped inside an enormous tin can as it was being crushed.

The roof’s coming down
, Sam thought,
And it—

The noise stopped. The last row of crossbeams held steady.

Sam stared up at the steel plating, partially caved in five meters above their heads.

Forcing himself up, he spat the bloody rag from his mouth. He jabbed one finger down his throat, felt his stomach tighten and squeeze, and expelled a thick spew of bloody liquid, spitting it out onto the ground.

Did I get it out?

I think so. I hope so. I guess we’ll find out soon enough.

Through the smoke, he saw Tommy McClane walking through the fire. McClane’s face was a mad Expressionist painting of bruises and insults. One black eye flickered with an imprinted sigil that seemed to have been burned directly onto his optic membrane. He was flanked by more demons than Sam could count, all of them armed with sabers, muskets, and bayonets, and when the back wall of the railway shed began to crumple and collapse, Sam saw that they had encircled it on all sides.

“We’ve been waiting a long time for this,” McClane said. “I think you’re ready now.”

“What do you...?”

“Your true nature. I’m aware that it requires a certain amount of carnage and a heightened degree of desperation to bring it forth.” McClane’s one working eye rolled upward, weirdly detached from the other. He nodded over at the demon that had shoved its bandages into Sam’s mouth. “He was trying to do it himself, but he didn’t really know what he was doing. And besides, I had to see it with my own... well, eyes.”

“What?” Sam asked. “What are you talking about?”

“You. You’re his vessel. Say
yes
. Bring him forth.”

“Lucifer?”

McClane nodded.

“That’s what this is all about?”

“You
will
be the Light-bringer, Sam.” Suddenly McClane was standing directly in front of him, bare inches away. Within breathing distance. It had happened so fast, in a parody of motion, that Sam didn’t even see him move.

“Certainly you’re aware of the Gnostic gospel.
If you bring forth what is inside you, what you bring forth will save you. If you don’t bring forth what’s inside of you, what you don’t bring forth will destroy you
.” He smiled, almost gently now. “So I present you with the choice. Manifest your true self for me now, or be destroyed.”

“You make it sound so tempting.”

“Tempting or not,” McClane said, “it’s the best offer you’re going to get, and it’s not going to get that good again.”

Sam shook his head.

“Then I guess you’d better kill me.”

McClane just looked at him, a faint smile still riding the corners of his lips. He didn’t even appear to be upset. If anything, he seemed satisfied.

“First things first.” Gesturing at one of the cavalry demons to his left, he said, “Kill the girl.”

“Wait,” Sam started. “She’s not—”

The demon’s arm snapped forward, grabbing Sarah Rafferty by the hair and jerking her toward him, the edge of his bayonet resting against her throat. Sam could see the throb of her pulse just beneath her skin, reflected in the mirror-brightness of the blade.

“Care to try again?” McClane asked. “No?” Then, to the bayonet-wielding demon. “Go ahead. Take your time.”

The blade bit in to Sarah’s neck. Sam saw her mouth leap open in a startled dark oval of pain.

But the noise he heard this time wasn’t a scream.

It was his brother’s voice.

“
Deus, et Peter Domini nostri Jesu Christi, invoco nomen sanctum
...”

The state police cruiser hit a bump, and through the shooting pain Dean gripped the microphone harder, holding it to his lips. He could hear his own voice broadcast through the loudspeaker on top of the cruiser. The volume was turned up as loud as it could go, crackling out where the whole world could hear it.

“
et clementiam tuam supplex exposco: ut adversus hunc
...”

“Is it working?” Daniels shouted.

Without pausing to answer, Dean pointed out at the partially collapsed railroad shed that lay straight in front of them, sixty yards away. The sheriff gunned the accelerator, tearing up clumps of scorched battlefield dirt, swerving to the right and then bringing them back on course.

The demons surrounding the railroad shed were already recoiling, falling off their horses, collapsing to the ground in waves. They threw back their heads, wafts of thick vapor spewing out of mouths, wrenching their bodies into convulsions as they departed, swirling upward. The atmosphere around the shed was beginning to stain with a thick and sooty patina of airborne grime, like the polluted sky of a Midwestern factory town.

“Keep going,” Daniels said. “Don’t stop.”

Dean didn’t stop.

“et omnem immundum spiritum, qui vexat hoc plasma tuum...”

The
Rituale Romanum
spilled from his lips automatically, without requiring conscious thought. Seeing the bastards go down like this always got him jazzed, triggering each line of Latin so that there was no hesitation, no interruption.

The cruiser swung up in front of the shed, stopping just short of running over the bodies that now lay strewn over the grass in the entryway.

“Over there!” Sheriff Daniels said. “
Look!
”

Dean snapped his head to the side and saw what she was talking about. Some of the demons—whole detachments of them, it looked like—were covering their ears, running and escaping into the woods. So he kept going.

“
mihi auxilium praestare digneris. Per eumdem Dominum”

The
Rituale
overtook some of them before they could get out of hearing distance, but others vanished into the trees.

In the meantime, something else was happening.

Some of the Civil War re-enactors—those that
hadn’t
been possessed and were still trying to fight their way off the battlefield—were coming face-to-face with their demon-possessed brothers-in-arms. The result was eerily similar the confusion and chaos that typified actual battles. Dean saw one of them run up to a demon dressed as a Confederate soldier, approaching the man with both hands outstretched in a “you remember me” gesture. The demon’s response was to stab the man directly in the heart, dropping him and stepping over his bloody corpse.

Daniels slammed on the brakes, skidding to a halt. Dean finished the first portion of the exorcism. He could see inside the shed now. The demons were gone, reduced to a scrum of foul-smelling murk that was eddying lazily out of the holes in the roof.

Dean jumped out of the car, wincing but not stopping. Through the thick clouds of the demon-smog, he saw Sam slouched over on the floor in what looked like a lake of blood. There was a girl slumped next to him—Sarah Rafferty, he realized. They seemed to be holding each other up. All around them, re-enactors lay bleeding in the dirt, pale and motionless like heaps of gore-stained operating room laundry. It was impossible to say which—if any—were still alive.

Or, for that matter, which ones had died fighting off the demons, and which were evacuated meat-suits that the demons had left behind.

“Sammy!” Dean made his way over. “Oh, dude...”

“It’s okay,” Sam said. “Not as bad as it looks.”

“That good, ‘cause it looks pretty freakin’ bad.”

Sam shook his head.

“What about you? McClane shot you.”