Nevermore (2 page)

“Bite me entirely, dude.”

6 SUPERNATURAL

Another breeze gusted, and John had to push the hair out of his face again. The farther they got from Fordham Road, the quieter it became, as Cambreleng was entirely residential. Most of the block was filled with red brick three- story town houses that were a few feet in from the street, a postage-stamp front area separated from the sidewalk by a waist-high wrought-iron fence. The rest of the block had fi ve-story apartment buildings. Fewer buildings went higher than that, since once you went above fi ve fl oors, city law required you put in an elevator. Many of the windows on the block were

dark, and John and Kevin were the only people on the sidewalk.

“Well,
I’m
still going, since I had the brains to arrange a proper schedule, where my fi rst Monday class is at twelve-thirty. Which means, par-
tay.
” Kevin chuckled. “Dude, Britt’s not gonna dump Jack for you.”

John tensed up. In fact, hitting on Britt was at the top of his list of things to do at Amy’s party, but he saw no reason to share that with his roommate. “Britt’s gonna be there?”

“Don’t
even.
You lie like I snowboard.”

“You don’t snowboard.”

“My
point.
”

John started to say
Whatever,
but he’d already said that, and he hated repeating himself. Kevin may have been fond of that doofy catch phrase “my Never

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point,
” which he used
all
the damn time, but John liked to be verbally diverse. That was the thing he always nailed in the articles he edited for the paper—

repetition. You kept people interested by saying different things, not by using the same tired phrases. It was why he didn’t like most stand- up comics and sketch comedians. They’d get some kind of catch phrase, and then it would become expected and desired, and the routine wouldn’t be about being funny anymore, but about building to the catch phrase.

That wasn’t entertainment, that was conditioning.

“What the hell’s that?”

Kevin was pointing at something, and John followed his finger to the plastic garbage cans in front of one of the town houses. It looked like someone was rummaging through the garbage.

Sadly, that wasn’t so unusual a sight. There were plenty of homeless people around, and they’d often go through recycling bins to find cans and bottles they could redeem at the supermarket.

Then the figure raised its head, and John saw that it wasn’t a homeless guy. They both stopped walking as they realized that it was some sort of simian.

“That’s a baboon!” John said.

“Dude, that’s an orangutan.”

John frowned. “You sure?”

“Pretty sure.”

The baboon or orangutan or whatever it was 8 SUPERNATURAL

looked over at them, opened its mouth, and
hissed.

Both John and Kevin stepped back a pace or two.

John whispered, “Dude, do orangutans hiss?”

“No, but I don’t think baboons do, either. And why’re we whispering?”

Before John could answer that, the—oh, hell, he’d just call it a monkey until he found out for sure—picked up the garbage can and threw it into the street. Unfortunately, the lid was off, so a torn garbage bag came rolling out, spilling rotten food, empty containers, and other stuff onto the pavement.

John said, “You got your cell?”

Kevin nodded.

“Good, ’cause my battery’s dead.”

“Who the hell’m I supposed to call, Lost and Found?”

Not taking his eye off the monkey, John said,

“No, 911, you doof, now
call
’em, before—” Suddenly, the monkey ran toward them, screeching like it was on a meth bender or something.

John wanted to turn and run away, but found that he couldn’t make his legs move.

And it didn’t matter for very long, because this monkey could give Jesse Owens a run for his money. It was on them in a second.

As a general rule, John hated when he screamed.

He always sounded like a girl. Proving that this Never

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was an unjust universe, his screams actually had gotten
higher
in pitch after his voice changed. It was embarrassing, really, so whenever he felt the urge to scream, he tried to keep his mouth shut, so it came out as more of a hum. To his mind, that sounded manlier.

But right now, with a crazed monkey screeching and howling and jumping on top of him and Kevin, and hitting them
really
hard with his big hands, he screamed like a girl.

He hadn’t felt like this since he got into that stupid fight in high school with Harry Markum over who would be going to the prom with Jeannie Waite. The joke being, of course, that she went with that
loser
Morty Johannsen, so he got a black eye and a split lip for nothing. The monkey’s fi sts pounded on him and Kevin both, and the pain was just
everywhere.

Then one smack caught him in the side of the head, and he literally saw stars, something he used to think only happened in cartoons.

Only when he felt the cool pavement on his cheek did John realize that the monkey wasn’t hitting him anymore. But he still heard screams.

Rolling over, which sent a shooting pain through his side, he saw the monkey picking Kevin up and throwing him into the fence in front of one of the town houses.

Then he heard a snap.

10 SUPERNATURAL

He didn’t want to believe it.
Couldn’t
believe it at first. It wasn’t like a twig breaking, it wasn’t like a piece of plastic snapping in two, it wasn’t—

It wasn’t like anything John Soeder had ever heard before. And because of that, he knew that Kevin was dead.

“No. Kevin!”

He barely noticed the orangutan or baboon or gorilla or
whatever
it was lumbering toward him.

Instead, he just stared at Kevin, lying there on the Cambreleng Avenue sidewalk, his head at an impossible angle, and wondered how the
hell
this could possibly have happened. It couldn’t have been real, monkeys didn’t just show up on the street and beat people to death. It couldn’t be!

The monkey leapt on top of him then and started whaling on him, and he didn’t even raise an arm to defend himself, because he simply couldn’t believe it.

The second boy took forever to die.

At least the first one was taken care of quickly. But the other one, the one who kept muttering to himself after the first one died, the orangutan had to keep punching and punching until he finally gave in.

Once the second one breathed his last, he spoke the incantation one final time, then stepped on the burning wormwood to put it out. A few charred bits of wormwood leaf were left on the pavement, but the wind would scatter that in due course. And even Never

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if they found it, no one was likely to connect it to an escaped orangutan beating two people to death.

It wasn’t pleasant, but it was necessary—and it had to be done to night, in the last quarter of the moon, just as the first one had to be done on the full moon on the fifth. True, they discovered the body two days later, which was sooner than he’d expected, but nobody from the constabulary had come to question him, so all his precautions had obviously been successful.

More to the point, it had to be done on this spot.

The second spot of the sigil had been traced with the appropriate ritual.

Once he was sure the small flame was extinguished, he stepped out from the narrow passage-way between one of the town houses and the apartment building—and wasn’t it revolting, the way people just tossed their garbage into the dark places, hoping nobody would notice it?—and un-holstered the tranquilizer gun. Taking careful aim, he shot the orangutan in the neck.

It fell face first into the pavement a second later.

Running onto the sidewalk, he quickly removed the dart with a gloved hand. There would be no trace of his presence here.

Turning, he ran toward his car while pulling out a disposable cell phone he’d bought earlier that afternoon at one of the delis on Arthur Avenue and dialed 911.

12 SUPERNATURAL

“There’s some kinda wild animal! Beatin’ two kids at Cambreleng an’ a hun’ eighty-eighth! Come quick!”

Then he tossed the cell phone into a metal mesh garbage can on the corner of East 188th Street and got into his parked vehicle.

Two down, two to go. Then, at last, the answer
will be mine!

TWO

Bowles Motel and Lodge

South Bend, Indiana

Wednesday 15 November 2006

“That’s the problem with the job, Sammy, sometimes you hit a dead end.”

Sam Winchester silently agreed with his brother Dean as they did their final check of the motel room before hauling their stuff out to the car. Their father had drilled into them from a young age always to scour a room before checking out, as it wouldn’t do to leave personal stuff lying around.

Especially when some of that stuff included exotic weaponry and ancient grimoires.

Generally, they were good about cleaning out the room. There was that one time in Key West when Dean had left the tin of salt next to the bed, and 14 SUPERNATURAL

he’d insisted on turning the car around on Route 1

and heading back to retrieve it. Sam had asked why they couldn’t just go to a supermarket and get another one—it was a pretty common household item, after all—but Dean had insisted that it was the principle of the thing.

Which had been fine right up until the clerk asked why the two brothers had a big tin of salt in their hotel room, and Dean had gotten that wide-eyed look he got when somebody went off the script.

With Sam watching and not even bothering to hide his grin, Dean had stammered for about half an hour before coming up with something about lactose intolerance. (“Dude,” Sam had said as they went back out to the car, retrieved tin in hand, “you
do
know that salt has, basically,
nothing
to do with lactose intolerance, right?” “Thank you, Mr. Wiz-ard,” Dean had replied through clenched teeth.) Today, they were checking out and hitting the road, their latest job not having been a job at all.

Dean was still talking as they headed out to the car. “But at least we got to see beautiful downtown South Bend.”

“Yeah, real hot spot,” Sam muttered as Dean opened the trunk.

“Hey, we go where the jobs take us.”

“Or don’t. It really was a suicide, Dean. A normal, run-of-the-mill suicide.”

Dean shrugged. “It happens.” He tossed his Never

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bag into the rear of the trunk, rolling it over the boxes of weapons and supplies. Sam did likewise, using only his left hand, as his right was still in a cast from when that zombie girl broke it back in Lawrence.

Sam didn’t have the same attachment Dean did to the black 1967 Chevrolet Impala, the family car their father had passed on to Dean. (Then again, Sam sometimes thought he didn’t have the same attachment to his late girlfriend Jessica that Dean had to the Impala.) When the car was wrecked a couple of months back, Dean had rebuilt it pretty much from scratch, a process that took weeks of backbreaking effort.

However, even Sam had to admit that the massive trunk was a great benefit, given that they lived their entire life out of this car. The rear of the vo-luminous trunk was taken up with three bags: Sam’s bag, Dean’s bag, and the laundry bag. That last one was starting to bulge.

“We’re gonna need to do a laundry run soon, man,” Sam said.

“Not here,” Dean said quickly. “I don’t think that cop was too thrilled with ace reporters Anderson and Barre. We’d better split before he decides to run my face through his computer.” Sam nodded in agreement. Dean was still wanted for a series of murders committed by a shapeshifter taking his form in St. Louis earlier that year, and 16 SUPERNATURAL

there was just no way “a mutated freak who looked just like me did it” was going to fly with the U.S.

Attorney’s Offi ce.

Dean closed the trunk and they headed to the main office. Like most of the places the Winchesters stayed, the Bowles Motel and Lodge was dirt-cheap with minimal amenities. All they needed was a roof, a bed, and a working shower—though the latter was hit and miss with some of the places they stayed—

and they weren’t exactly rolling in dough.

Fighting demons and monsters and things that went booga- booga in the night was important, but it didn’t pay. They lived off credit card fraud, and Dean’s pool and poker winnings. That meant the Hyatt was not an option.

They entered the shabby office, which had cracked wood paneling, a badly stained beige car-pet, and a pockmarked front desk. An older woman sat behind that desk, puffing away on a cigarette while sitting under a red no smoking sign and reading a Dan Brown book. Her face was caked with enough makeup to allow her to attend a Hal-loween party as the Joker, and her hair was sprayed within an inch of its life into something that probably wanted to be a beehive. Sam was fairly sure he could have hit that hairdo with any weapon in the Impala’s trunk and not done a lick of damage to it.