Supernatural: The Unholy Cause (27 page)

Dean’s hand swung down and grabbed his collar, pulling him back.

“Shut the door!” Sam shouted. “Get it closed!”

Dean grabbed the poker and rammed it forward, aiming at the grate again and clapping it shut. Blue flames spewed and flickered eagerly out of the slots, writhing like serpents’ tongues.

All around them, the railway cab gave a massive shudder and a sharp clank. Dean could hear the sound of old iron as the air around him filled with churning smoke, steam creaking through the engine’s pipes, its valves straining under long forgotten pressure. The needles sprang to life on the gauges in front of him, twitching and arrowing upward in great optimistic leaps.

He could see tiny puffs of vapor hissing from the boiler’s seams.

Dean clung onto a pipe, felt it growing hotter in his hand until he couldn’t hold on any longer. He leaned out of the doorway. One of the women—Dean thought it was the sheriff—was shouting up at him from the flatcar.

“What’s going on? Is it working?”

Before he could answer, the locomotive jerked forward. In July 1938, the locomotive
Mallard
set the land speed record for steam on a run from London’s King’s Cross station, England, on the East Coast Main Line. Officials clocked her at a hundred and twenty-six miles per hour before the engine’s bearings started to overheat and the engineer had to slow it down. “Any more speed, lads,” he’d supposedly told his fireman, “and we’d be sitting down for a kip with the Almighty Himself.”

When the Winchesters saw the outskirts of Mission’s Ridge coming up in front of them, they weren’t traveling quite that fast—probably only eighty, although it felt like a hundred up in the cab, where Dean had the throttle all the way open. The whistle screamed steadily overhead. The other valve-control was a hand-release lever called the Johnson bar. A half-mile from downtown, Dean had his Johnson running full-tilt, as well.

Within minutes, they’d be there.

The train rocketed hard down the tracks, pistons pounding, chuffing smoke. It was impossible not to think of it as a living thing. Dean held the regulator steady at maximum as the last of the woods blurred past them, giving way to houses and farms.

“Dean!”

Standing up in the cab, his eyes tearing up from the wind and velocity, Sam had to shout to be heard.

“We have to stop!”

“What?”

“
Stop
!”

“That’s crazy! It—”

Then Dean saw why.

Up ahead in the distance, where the first storefronts and shops marked the beginning of Mission’s Ridge proper, the tracks were covered with bodies.

And some of them appeared to be still alive.

McClane had gotten the idea at the last moment, looking at the poor bastard impaled in front of Blockbuster. He’d heard the locomotive’s whistle shrieking off in the distance and understood immediately how the Winchesters were bringing the noose back to the church.

Kneeling down in the middle of Main Street, resting his hands on the rails, he could already feel them humming.

“Quick!” he said. “Somebody get me some kids!”

They were tied to the tracks.

Dean could see the faces from a hundred yards away, though for a moment his mind refused to accept it. A little blonde girl in a blue dress and white tights, her face a pale porcelain sculpture of pure terror.

Behind her, arms and legs tied, were maybe a dozen other children from town, all looking up and screaming—some silently, others not. His heart froze. A single thought pulsed through his mind—
Where are their parents?
—but the answer was already there, pounding like the wheels underneath them.

Possessed. Or worse
.

Dead. Dead. Dead.

Dean grabbed the air brake and yanked it back as hard as he could. Tortured metal howled. The engine lurched hard, its couplings slamming together between the cars, pistons fuming, wheels grinding, dumping off showers of sparks in every direction, but still ramming forward, ensnared in its own momentum.

“There’s not enough time!” Sam shouted.

The train scraped on, brake shoes hissing as the locomotive slithered inexorably down Main Street on insufficient friction. They
were
slowing down—twenty, now fifteen miles per hour—but the process was taking too long. Dean stood at the brake, his mouth pinched into an expression of absolute concentration, as if he could somehow stop their progress through sheer force of will.

Sam jumped.

Dean didn’t even realize Sam had done it until he saw his brother, not just running, but flat-out
sprinting
, ahead. He saw something flash in Sam’s hand, it looked like a pair of pliers, and then he was actually moving along the rails in front of the locomotive.

Reaching the blonde girl tied to the tracks, Sam pushed the pliers down and started snapping ropes, chopping through them as fast as he could. Once freed, the girl sprang up tearfully, and he turned to the next child, a five-year-old boy in a ripped t-shirt and grubby red shorts.

He got the boy’s arms free, but his legs were slick with sweat and grease from the tracks, and he wouldn’t hold still. Then Sam got it, and the boy scrabbled away.

He moved on to the next one, but behind him now, he could feel the bulk of the train roaring closer, not just shaking the rails but pounding them, shocking them to life with a steady, awful vibration of unthinkable force and power.

He looked up at the rest of the children. So many of them—too many of them—ten more at least, each tied tightly and separately into place.

They were all staring straight at him.

The shadow of the train swept down. And Sam Winchester understood he wouldn’t be able to save them all.

He turned around and looked.

The train was still coming.

Fifty feet away.

Thirty.

Twenty.

He stood paralyzed, riveted to the spot. Fate seemed to be pointing its skeletal finger directly at him. For one illogical moment he considered throwing himself down on the tracks in the hope of providing the last necessary bit of obstruction. Maybe it would save the last kid in line. Maybe it would—

He shut his eyes.

With a final scraping squeal, the engine halted.

He looked up again. It was less than three feet in front of him. He could have reached out and touched the cowcatcher.

“Sam!” Dean shouted, from up in the cab. “Cut those kids loose! We’re sitting—”

Then, from the upper windows of Main Street, the first gunshots rang out.

The adrenaline was on him now, and Sam worked fast, his trembling hands moving with almost superhuman speed. But he wasn’t fast enough. Two of the kids were injured, one cut by his pliers, the other hit in the leg by a stray bullet.

When he glanced around, Dean was next to him with Ruby’s knife, and they hunched together slashing the ropes in quick deliberate swipes, getting the kids loose and pushing them hard toward the nearest open doors on the far side of the street.

They could feel bits of sidewalk and asphalt spitting up at them as the muskets fired.

Sam didn’t need to look up to know what was happening.

Demons were shooting down from both sides, spanking the concrete with a hail of grapeshot.

They’re shooting around me
, he thought.
They still don’t want to harm the vessel.

When he flicked his gaze up again, he saw the last of the children ducking into the shelter of a restaurant called Whotta Lotta Pizza. Ten seconds later, the pizza parlour window burst apart under heavy gunfire. He hoped—prayed—that the kids were smart enough to stay down.

Hemmed in by bullets and utterly exposed, Sam looked at Dean. He could see the soldiers now and realized that the first fusillade of shots had been playful, meant to instill fear. But playtime was over. They were crouching in windows and standing on top of buildings, and the comparison to
The Gauntlet
wasn’t just some rallying cry anymore. It was happening, and they were in the middle of it.

We’re dead meat
, he thought.
Or at least Dean is.

Suddenly, from the flatcar at the back of the train, he heard a new sound, a mechanical clanking noise. A steady stream of blasts accompanied it, as if someone back there had just opened up with a machine gun.

What the—

Before Sam understood what was happening, the demons started falling. From above, along the rooftops, they dropped their weapons and were pitching backward in every direction, flung aside in twitching ballistic dances. Sagging, they went limp and then fell forward, plummeting to earth as if they themselves were no more than Hell’s own re-enactors, playing out their own Light-bringer’s famous descent from grace.

He glanced back at the flatcar.

Sheriff Daniels was standing behind the Civil War Gatling gun, turning the crank with a fierce concentration. The smoking barrels rotated steadily, spitting out a firestorm upward and around. The iron shafts were gleaming with a pale scarlet color where they’d been wiped down with the bloody rags.

Daniels worked the crank faster. Behind her, Sarah Rafferty held the turret of the gun, rotating the sheriff around to spray the upper rooftops.

The sheriff saw Sam watching her, and took one hand off the gun, pawing violently at the air.

“Get moving,” she shouted. “Run!”

Lunging back up into the cab, Dean didn’t wait for further orders.

He disengaged the airbrake, only peripherally aware of Sam jumping in behind him as he grabbed the throttle with both hands and swung it wide. The train lurched forward on the rails. Bullets rattled and caroomed off the iron locomotive car in a steady clatter of lead.

Straight ahead and four blocks away, he saw the church. Its white steeple rose up into the blue morning sky like an annunciation from on high.

“Go!” Sam shouted.

A metal fragment whined and ricocheted past Dean’s ear, close enough that he felt the breeze, and he ducked belatedly, grim-faced. The next one could just as easily take his head off, he knew.

The engine was still picking up speed. It would’ve been faster to run.

We never would’ve made it.

In front of the engine, a phalanx of demons stood on the tracks, firing directly at the train as it rammed toward them. Sheriff Daniels brought the Gatling around and mowed them down. A second later the engine roared over their bodies, spitting out gobbets of flesh and shredded uniforms beneath the wheels.

Dean didn’t even see them. His eyes were nailed to the church, its front steps and its front door.

Two blocks now.

Closing in.

Get ready.

“Sam!” he shouted.

When Dean hit the brakes again, his brother was positioned halfway back in the coal car, clutching the sides, headed for the flatcar.

“Take the sheriff with you,” Sam called up. “I’ll stay here and try to hold them off as long as—”

His toe struck something soft. The words broke off in his throat, and he stared down at the body in the coal car. Something opened up in the pit of his stomach, hollow and quavering, as if he’d gone plunging downward.

The body of Sarah Rafferty lay motionless at his feet, her upturned eyes half-open, glassy. A bullet had struck her chest, creating a small red splotch that stained her blouse between her breasts, no bigger than a silver dollar. Beneath her, the stain was much bigger, and Sam realized that he was standing in a pool of her blood.

“Oh no...” Dean was shaking his head. “Is she...?”

Sam looked at his brother. He opened his mouth and closed it. When he spoke finally, his voice didn’t sound as if it belonged to him.

“Go.” Stepping over Sarah’s body, he got to the Gatling gun and touched Sheriff Daniels’ arm. “You have the last coil of the noose?”

She held it up.

“Right here.”

“Go with Dean.”

Daniels stepped out and Sam took her place, grabbing the gun’s blood-slick handle and cranking it hard. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Dean and Daniels jumping off the train and running between the pillars and up the front steps of the church. Two demons jumped out from behind one of the pillars, and Sam took aim and tore them to pieces.

Dean and the sheriff disappeared inside.

Sam dropped the Gatling’s crank and knelt down next to Sarah’s body, dragging her as far as he could into the relative cover of the coal car. Bullets spanged and rattled everywhere.

He put his hand to her throat to feel for a pulse. She was still warm—it had only been moments.

Nothing.

“He’s in here somewhere,” Daniels whispered. “I can feel it.”

They crossed the sanctuary, the hardwood floor creaking faintly beneath their feet. Daniels’ voice sounded small amid the cavernous emptiness. Light coming from the variegated stained-glass windows fell across her face like a succession of ever-changing moods. Dean followed after her, padding in silence between rows of empty pews leading up to the dais. The only things he felt was hurt and tired.

And oddly cold. It was unnaturally frigid beneath the high arched ceiling, as if some lost vestige of winter had stayed canned up inside, waiting for them.