Supernatural 10 - Rite of Passage (29 page)

When Bobby called Sam’s burner cell to report that multiple emergency calls had come in from the Gafford Sports Arena at the intersection of Ellisburg Pike and Cuthbert Avenue, Sam checked a cached onscreen map and told Dean they were only four blocks away.

Dean gunned the accelerator. “Sporting event, huh?”

“According to the community calendar, an exhibition soccer match.” Sam read something then looked at Dean, alarmed. “Seating capacity is 5,600. It’s the last event at the stadium. They’re tearing it down in two weeks.”

“Crowded and old,” Dean said. “Low-hanging fruit.”

Sam consulted his map. “Turn right up ahead.”

Once Dean made the turn, he saw the first responders, two police cars and an ambulance, speeding to the parking lot entrance, so he followed them. Even from that distance, they
could hear the yelling and screaming of thousands of people.

As the Monte Carlo roared up the entrance ramp, Dean had to pump the brakes to avoid a rush of people, many of whose faces or arms were streaked with blood and dust, flowing out of the stadium in a mass panic.

“A target this size,” Sam said, “there’s a good chance he’s close.”

Dean hoped that was more than wishful thinking on Sam’s part. Of course, they still had no idea how to gank the bulletproof oni. At least they could try to minimize casualties. Beyond that, Dean had suggested they “give fire a chance.” Since New Jersey’s legislature didn’t trust drivers in the state to pump their own gasoline, Dean had the listless attendant fill a two-gallon container with regular, which they now kept in the Monte Carlo’s trunk alongside their cache of conventional weapons. Of course, if the New Jersey legislature knew Dean planned to douse the oni with two gallons of regular and light him like a tiki torch, they might not trust drivers to buy gasoline either.

Dean double-parked away from the hundreds on foot who had already escaped, jumped out of the car and ran toward the shaking stadium, Sam at his side. A three-story red-brick structure faced the parking lot, stairs on either side leading to upper-level seating. Even from the parking lot, Dean caught glimpses of the stadium’s layout. The outdoor stairs rose to a row of enclosed upper box seats that overhung the second of two staggered tiers of outdoor seating. The first level looked like individual stadium seating, while the second level consisted of long rows of aluminum bleachers. Behind that back row, tucked under the upper box seats, was a promenade with a row of vendor stalls and kiosks.

Dean heard the prolonged creaking of straining metal, a series of explosive pops, and glass shattering. As he neared the ticket window and the ramps leading up to the first level of seating, he saw that the section of upper box seats closest to the parking lot had collapsed, tossing box ticket holders through shattered windows and crushing several people in the back rows of the bleacher section.

Against the mass exodus of the scared and wounded, Dean and Sam fought their way up the ramp. The whole stadium shook, as if in the throes of a powerful earthquake, and the next section of upper box seats collapsed. One middle-aged man in a business suit was thrown through the window, but managed to catch the upper box seat walkway railing long enough to slow his momentum before dropping awkwardly to the aluminum benches below.

Amid the crush of people on the ramp, several reacted to the ominous sounds of destruction behind them by pushing and elbowing their way toward the parking lot. A mother carrying her crying two-year-old daughter and pulling her frightened four-year-old son by the hand, fell down awkwardly. She tried to shield her daughter, but lost her grip on her son, who began to cry.

“Stop!” she screamed. “You’re hurting my babies.”

“Whoa!” Dean said, planting the palm of his hand on the chest of a large man intent on ignoring the woman’s pleas as he strode over her.

The man looked down and shook his head as if the
woman’s plight didn’t matter in his rush to save his own ass. “Outta my way,” the man mumbled, but slid sideways before continuing his descent.

Dean caught the woman’s arm and helped her up, while Sam scooped her son up and lowered him to the ground on the other side of the guide rail.

“Wait for your mom,” Sam told the kid.

Dean steered the woman to the railing, helped her over and handed her daughter down to her. All three of them jogged to the parking lot.

The Winchesters worked their way into the stadium and immediately came to the bottleneck. The collapse of the first upper box section had brought down slabs of concrete and twisted rebar from the ceiling of the promenade, destroying two vendor stalls and almost completely blocking the exit. The air was heavy with concrete dust sifting down from the damage above. Narrow cracks in the floor, walls and ceiling continued to multiply. The stadium was literally crumbling around them.

While some people continued to stream through the cramped exit aisle, the police who had arrived on the scene a couple of minutes ahead of the Winchesters were directing people down to the field and across what would have been the infield—if the grass had been marked for baseball instead of soccer—and back to outfield depth, well clear of the toppling row of box seats. Frightened fans waited with uniformed soccer players from both teams in bright gold and red uniforms. A cyclone fence wrapped around the outfield, decorated every few feet with brightly painted
plywood sponsor signs. Dean’s attention was drawn to a cop who stood outside the fence, all the way down the third base line, with a pair of bolt cutters, improvising a new exit.

Dean scanned what seemed like a sea of bobbing baseball caps looking for a man in black wearing a bowler. “I don’t see him, Sam,” he yelled over the chorus of frightened voices around them. “You?”

“Nothing.”

Dean turned to Sam. “If he’s here, how close—”

A woman with frizzy red hair grabbed Dean’s arm and said urgently, “A man is pinned back there, bleeding and dying!”

The lights in the ceiling of the promenade had burnt out. With the partial collapse of the upper box seats, the promenade looked more like a tunnel. Vibrations continued to shake the walls and the floor under their feet. To Dean, it felt like a ticking bomb. If they weren’t careful, the whole friggin’ shebang would come down on their heads.

The first vendor stall looked like it had gone a couple of rounds with an auto compactor. A white-aproned burger-flipper had the misfortune of leaning over his grill when the first slab of concrete fell, striking his back and pulping the upper half of his torso. Flames burned his clothes in the few patches not soaked with blood. Sam crouched and stepped through the gap that led to the remainder of the promenade. Dean followed, looking nervously over his head a half-dozen times, expecting the next slab of death-dealing concrete to fall the moment he became inattentive.

The next several stalls had suffered damaged from falling
debris. One contained a dead woman whose head had been crushed by a massive chunk of concrete. By another was a lifeless man who had been impaled through the eye by an exposed piece of rebar that still held him upright. Everywhere Dean looked, blood had spattered the walls and floor. Closer to the exits than the fans, the other vendors had probably been the first to flee when the destruction began.

A pronounced shudder shook the stadium. Several chunks of dislodged concrete fell around them. Above them, frightened cries rang out from people in the upper box suites. Belatedly, Dean wondered if the first responders had turned off natural gas lines feeding into the stadium. That should be standard protocol, but with the oni’s powers in the mix, crucial details might have been overlooked.

“We’re courting disaster here, Sammy,” Dean said.

“I know.”

As the promenade opened up, beyond the collapsed upper box sections, they moved down to the upper tier of seats. They found a swarthy man on his knees with his right arm pinned against the back of the last row of bleachers by a slab of concrete wedged against one of the support struts. His eyes squeezed shut in pain, the man moaned softly. Blood ran down his arm and dripped from his fingertips.

Sam pulled Dean aside.

“Arm’s a goner,” Sam whispered.

“So we go
127 Hours
on him, ’cause I left my penknife in the car.”

“No,” Sam said. “But that concrete might be the only thing stopping the next section from coming down.”

“Shove and run?”

Sam nodded. He crouched beside the man. “Buddy, can you hear me?”

The man’s eyes fluttered open and took a moment to focus. “What … ?”

“Can you hear me?”

The man nodded. Dean feared he was slipping into shock.

“Mister—Sir, what’s your name?” Sam asked.

“Ruben,” he said softly, attempting a weak smile. “Ruben Cordova.”

“Ruben, we have a situation here,” Sam said evenly. “Are you with me?”

The man nodded again.

“When we shove this concrete block out of the way, I need you to head down to the field. Got it?”

Again the man nodded, then gave a hesitant thumbs up with his free hand.

Dean stood next to Sam against the concrete slab, closer to the support strut than to the pinned man. They would try to push it away from the strut, releasing the pressure on the man’s pinned arm.

“On three,” Dean said. “One … two … THREE!”

The upper tip of the slab screeched against the strut, shifting a couple of inches, but not enough to fall. Ruben cried out in pain.
“Dios mío!”

“That woke him up,” Dean said grimly.

“Again,” Sam said.

On the next count of three, the slab of concrete scraped away from the strut and fell with a thunderous impact,
breaking in half. The sound of shrieking metal filled the air. Ruben climbed awkwardly to his feet, his ruined arm limp against his body. Sam caught him under his good arm and helped him upright and into the aisle.

The three of them rushed down the rows of bleacher seating, some of which contained the sprawled and bloodied bodies of those struck and killed by flying debris.

Behind them, steel screeched and large chunks of concrete fell like mortar rounds. Glass popped and shattered, pelting them like hail. Alarmed cries rang out from above. Turning back, Dean saw groups of people flailing around inside the box enclosures. Their only exit was the walkway that ran in front of the box seats and it had become a treacherous incline.

A paramedic hurried over to Sam and Ruben and led the Hispanic man across the field to where the others had gathered. The police had begun to lead people, single file, to the cutout in the cyclone fencing.

“Sam, we’ve got people trapped up top!”

A frightening tremor shook the ground beneath them. Cracks raced under their feet and the rows of bleachers started to collapse into the foundations below.

On the far side of the field more metal shrieked, demanding Dean’s attention.

“That’s not good.”

Suspended on two stilt-like metal struts, a Jumbotron and scoreboard overlooked the outfield and the fans who had sought shelter there. The large screen tilted forward as one of the struts buckled.

“Run! Get off the field!” Sam yelled, waving them toward
the third base line fence.

Many stared at Sam as if he had lost his mind, but a few looked up and saw the massive screen leaning over them. The sound of screaming people joined the screeches of the metal. Explosive pops, like gunshots, rang out, as the bolts supporting the structure snapped one after another. One side of the Jumbotron swung like a trapdoor, seconds from dropping to the field below.

A man in a chambray shirt and jeans ran to his young son, who was sitting on the field, pulling up blades of grass and blowing them off his open palm. The man scooped up the kid and ran toward the infield. A police officer ran to intercept him.

“Look out!” Sam shouted, pointing frantically overhead.

The screen broke free and dropped, narrow end down. Its long shadow fell across the cop’s path. Stunned, he looked up, too late to move. The massive screen crushed his skull and shattered his spine. The running man covered his son’s eyes and veered toward the hole in the fence.

Dean turned back to the collapsing row of upper box seats.

The nearest section pressed against the backs of the aluminum bleachers. Some of the people climbed over the railing and dropped down on to them. Dean waved to the people in the far section to follow the walkway down to the upper tier bleachers. They needed to get everyone down before the next suite section collapsed.

“Anybody trapped up there?” Dean asked every third person who passed him. Most shook their heads, watching where they placed their feet. Whole sections of the bleachers
had become treacherous as well. The concrete on which they were mounted continued to crumble. Once survivors had climbed over the upper box walkway railing, Sam directed them to the picnic patio area where the concrete steps leading to the field hadn’t begun to erode yet.

As the last few people reached the railing, another tremendous shudder shook the stadium. “Run!” Dean shouted. “To the field!”

Something about the stadium felt malevolent to Dean, like it was making the most of its last chance to take more lives. But he dismissed the notion as nonsense. The malevolence he sensed surely came from the oni, infecting the building with its mojo, or whatever the hell it called its destructive power.

The Winchesters were the last to reach the field. As they hurried toward the hole in the fence, Dean glanced at the redbrick ticket office and administration building. The rolling tremors were tearing it apart. Brick by brick it crumbled. By this time, Dean hoped fervently, the place should be empty. From the parking lot, he heard new waves of emergency vehicle sirens and the harsh blare of fire truck horns. Sam slipped through the fence before him. As Dean ducked through, the ground shook beneath him and he almost fell flat on his face.

The parking lot was crowded with cars bunching up near the exits and people wandering around looking for lost family members, trying to remember where they had parked, or seeking medical attention from one of the half-dozen ambulances with overworked paramedics. Another tremor hit and one of the cars seemed to tilt at a crazy
angle. Dozens of people stumbled and fell, and twice that number screamed in terror. Car alarms joined the chorus of emergency sirens and human misery.