The Winchester Boys and the Tremors of Doom - Chapter 6
Sam poked around Carl Massina’s farmhouse until he found what he was looking for; Carl’s office. It was small, square and crowded, with an L-shaped cedar desk, a bookshelf, a filing cabinet and a shredder taking up almost all the available space. The desk was so overloaded with papers, manila folders, books, miscellaneous stationery and coffee mugs that there was barely any visible surface, and what little surface Sam could see was a fuzz of thick, grey dust. There was also a clunky 14 inch computer monitor sitting on the desk, and when Sam sat down on the wheeled office chair he could see that the desk had a pull out tray which housed a keyboard. On the floor next to the skirt of the desk was a PC tower and-hallelujah-sitting on top of that was a modem. Sam grinned and fired up the beast, linking his hands together and cracking his knuckles in anticipation of getting stuck into some hardcore research.
Six minutes later, he was still waiting for the damn clunker to finish booting up. Sam glared at it, and then, working on the theory that, much like a watched pot, a watched PC never boots, he wandered back toward the large farmhouse kitchen.
Ronnie was making coffee with a face like chalk, Dean was straddling a kitchen chair backwards and talking animatedly with Angel about minhocão and what, if anything, they had in common with fictional giant worms, and Blake was watching the two of them with a raised brow and a slack mouth, as if he couldn’t quite bring himself to believe what he was hearing. Noah was nowhere to be seen.
“Sammy!” Dean’s face brightened when he saw Sam standing in the kitchen doorway. “You’re a geek,” Blake made a small noise and glanced at Sam in disbelief. “Do you think our Worms are more like graboids or more like the giant sandworms from Dune?”
Sam raised an eyebrow. “I’m a geek? And yet you know both of those sci fi references.”
Dean waved a hand dismissively. “Okay one? Kevin Bacon. He always gets a pass. And two? Hot, naked chicks with blue-on-blue eyes,” he waggled his eyebrows and grinned broadly. “So what d’ya think? Graboids or Sandworms?”
Sam sighed. “I don’t know, Dean. Does it really matter?” He turned to Blake. “Where’s Noah?”
Blake nodded toward the verandah where Sam could see Noah pacing back and forth while talking on a cordless phone.
“He’s talking to one of the staff in the Cultural Department.”
Sam turned back to Dean who was looking pensive. “You reckon we’ll get to blow stuff up?” Dean asked. “Does anyone have any dynamite? Or a cannon?”
The sound of shattering ceramic rang throughout the house and they all turned to Ronnie, standing frozen in the kitchen.
“Listen to yourselves!” he said, his voice tight and high pitched. “This is not a movie! It’s not a game! People have died. Virgil…Virgil got eaten! And Luke got hurt. And Brian is missing-”
“Dead,” Dean interjected.
He somehow managed to miss Sam’s fervent ‘shut up’ gestures and carried on obliviously. “Luke saw him get eaten.”
Angel’s chair clattered to the floor and his fist was through the plaster in the kitchen wall before Sam could get to him.
“Dammit, Dean,” Sam hissed at his brother, pulling the distraught nineteen-year-old into a hug, despite the fact that he was trying to fight him off, “Brian’s his brother!”
Dean’s face fell and his eyes hardened, all signs of the cocky joker he’d been just a few moments earlier completely gone.
“I’m sorry,” he said, “I didn’t know. And I’m sorry for your loss. But I promise you,” his eyes glinted. “We will get these sons-of-bitches and we’ll put them down hard.”
“Doesn’t help Brian none, does it?” Angel snapped.
“I know,” Dean’s voice was hard and his jaw was set, but his eyes were full of compassion and understanding. “But it’s what we’ve got left.”
Sam felt Angel slacken under his grip as the 19-year-old searched Dean’s eyes for any trace of insincerity and, upon finding none, drew himself to his full height and nodded his head. Sam was impressed at the kid’s resolve.
Dean, never one to linger long in emotionally-charged situations, nodded once and then rubbed his hands together “Alright. First things first; where does Massina keep his good whiskey?”
Sam slipped quietly back into the office to see if the computer had managed to boot up yet.
Ten minutes later he was just about pulling his hair out in frustration waiting for the modem to successfully dial up. The clatter of the screen door and the stomp of boots, accompanied by Carl’s holler, announced the arrival of Carl, Dodger, Cahill and the injured boy, Luke. Dean immediately took charge of the patient, dosing him up with painkillers and then ushering the kid into his bedroom to lie down. Sam ventured into the kitchen to let Carl know that he was using his office for research. Carl merely nodded, then patted him on the shoulder and took off after Dean and Luke. Dodger had corralled Angel and the two of them were talking quietly together and the Hualapai were nowhere in sight, so Sam went back to the office, finally managing to get the Hunters’ Blog up and running and his log-in accepted.
There were a number of worm-like cyptids known to hunters, Sam discovered. The most dangerous-sounding of these was the olgoi-khorkhoi, or Mongolian Death Worm. A thick, bright red worm, it was only five feet long, but could kill at a distance using an electric charge, and could also spit out a deadly corrosive acid. They were hard to kill by all accounts and Sam was thankful that they had so far only been found in and around the Gobi Desert. The next worm that was discussed on the Hunters’ Blog was the e-kwa tshko-ya, a giant inchworm that featured in Cherokee legends and was said to take the women of the tribe and eat them. The lore said that the warriors of the tribe dealt with the worm by digging a trap, then luring the worm into it and burning it to death. There was a note on the blog from Caleb saying that he’d faced a pair of e-kwa tshko-ya in Oklahoma and the Cherokee method of dealing with them was right on the money. Sam bookmarked the entry.
The third and final worm that was detailed on the site was the minhocão, the South American worm that Angel had told them about. The minhocão was described as a giant subterranean worm-like cryptid that lived underground in South American forests. Enormous limbless beings, they had scaly black skin, a readily visible mouth and a couple of tentacle-like appendages protruding from their heads. They had a body diameter of up to ten feet and a body length which varied from 75 up to 150 feet. They were reported to prey on large animals, including cattle, and to leave enormous tunnels in their wake. Apparently minhocão tunnels most commonly appeared after periods of continuous rain, indicating that the minhocão was more active during such periods, and might even keep themselves hidden during dry days.
Sam frowned. The physical description of the minhocão matched the creature that had been attacking Dean and Ronnie, but that thing about rain? It was desert country out here; as dry as a bone. According to the lore, the minhocão should be inactive and keeping itself hidden in this climate.
“Knock, knock.”
Sam turned to find Noah standing in the doorway.
“Hey,” Sam minimized the screen. “You get anything good from your Cultural people?”
Noah made a so/so gesture. “You mind if I…?” he gestured at the desk and waited for Sam’s response before going and perching himself on the L side of the desk.
“I spoke to Marietta, one of our cultural anthropologists. She’s been working on a project, collecting oral histories and transcribing them into a database. She’s also part Cherokee. Apparently, the Cherokee have a legend of the e-kwa tshko-ya-”
“I know it,” Sam said. “I just finished reading about it. I don’t think that’s what we’re dealing with here.”
Noah nodded. “No. We’re dealing with a hybrid.”
Sam’s eyebrows shot up. “A hybrid?”
“Marietta took down a…well…I would’ve said it was a legend until today, but maybe it’s more of a historical fact. One of our elders, Hilda Quasula, recounted an incident that her grandmother had told her about. Apparently, when the grandmother was a girl, there were some cattle disappearances and then two women disappeared on their way home from town. Our people held a council and then went out to hunt whatever was responsible for the disappearances. The popular theory was a pack of coyotes. Anyway, it turned out to be a giant worm, with some features in common with the Cherokee worm and some in common with a South American worm known as a-”
“Minhocão ,” said Sam. “Yeah.”
Noah nodded. “The e-kwa tshko-ya is native to Oklahoma, but the larvae form, which can stay dormant underground for a very long time, is quite small. It gets around, in produce and so forth. And apparently some idiot miner around the turn of the last century thought he could harness a minhocão to dig his mine shaft for him, brought a baby one out from Brazil. You can guess how that worked out. So anyway, Baby Minhocão meets Baby E-kwa tshko-ya. End result? We ended up with our own unique species of man-eating worm.”“Did Hilda know how they ganked it?”
“How they what?”
“Ganked. Killed.”
Noah nodded. “They took a leaf out of the Cherokee’s book. Dug a pit and burned them.”
“Them?”
“There were two. A mated pair.”
~~~
When Sam and Noah rejoined the others in the kitchen, Cahill was updating everyone on the conversation he’d just had with Lyn, back at the search base in Chloride.
“We’ve agreed to hold off on calling the Kingman Police Department for now,” his eyes flashed briefly to the Hualapai and to Sam and Dean, as if expecting them to argue in favor of going straight to the police.
“That’s a good move,” Dean said. “The cops ain’t gonna believe us if we try to tell ‘em what we’re dealin’ with. Not until they see the critters in action and if that happens, we’re probably gonna increase the body count. And I think we can all agree that that would be a bad thing.”
Cahill made eye contact with Dodger, then Carl, and then straightened in his chair. “You’re awful calm about this,” he said. “You and your brother.”
“Yeah, well,” Dean swilled his whiskey around in his glass, “ain’t exactly our first rodeo.”
Another significant look passed between the three Chloride men.
“What Dean means,” Sam said, “is that we’ve dealt with…unusual…creatures before,” he pulled up a chair next to Cahill and sat down. “It’s kind of what we do.”
“Right,” Dean tossed back the last of his whiskey and reached for the bottle. “Saving people, hunting things. The family business.”
There was a moment’s silence and then Cahill said, “You’re Hunters, then.”
Dean froze. “What do you know about Hunters?”
Dodger sniffed. “We had a Thunderbird problem a few years back. Guy by the name of Reggie stopped by to help us out. Strange fella. Used to pour salt in doorways and on window sills, but he knew how to deal with Thunderbirds.”
Dean pushed the whiskey bottle away and sat back in his chair. “We know a Reggie,” he acknowledged. “Our Dad knows him better.” He turned to Sam. “How did the research go? Do you know what we’re dealing with?”
Sam filled everyone in on his worm research and then handed over to Noah to talk about the Hualapai and Cherokee legends.
After they’d finished there was a lengthy silence.
“So how come we haven’t seen these…these…hybrid Worms before now?” Angel demanded. “I mean, they’re kinda hard to miss.”
Noah shrugged. “My theory? The larvae have been lying dormant out in the dessert for the last century and when the tailings pond out at the mine leaked, the area got wet enough to wake ‘em up and get ‘em going.”
“Hybrids, huh?” Dean said after a while. “So what do we call ‘em? Cuz graboids is kinda lame and trying to combine the two parent species’ names is just…well it’s not really gonna roll off the tongue, is it? So what do we call ‘em?”
Sam and Noah exchanged a pained look and Blake huffed out a laugh. “I highly doubt there’s an International Code of Cryptozoological Nomenclature, so why don’t you just go ahead, Dean, and pick a name?”
Dean’s delighted grin had Sam rolling his eyes. He watched as his brother tilted his head to one side and pursed his lips. “Limp Bizkits,” he said, with a nod, “because they’re a mix of two different things watered down, they keep coming back, and everyone hates them.”
Angel sniggered.
“Well, now that we’ve got the important things sorted out,” Cahill said dryly, “Maybe we can sort out how to kill them?”
Sam cleared his throat. “About that,” he said, “Carl wouldn’t happen to have a back hoe, would he?”
~~~
Dean raised the binoculars and peered through them at the half-a-football-field sized mess of muddy sand, tunnels and holes. He lowered the glasses with a sigh and turned to Blake.
“So you and Noah collected water samples from here and then followed one of the tunnels?”
Blake nodded. “There are a lot more tunnels now than when we were here earlier. I guess the…the…”
“Limp Bizkits,” Dean supplied helpfully.
Blake glared. “…Worms have been a lot more active in the last few hours.”
Dean figured they were probably on a protein high, thanks to all the cow and Search Team they’d eaten. And they were probably starting to grasp the idea that they were pretty high on the food chain around here too. But he kept those thoughts to himself because he didn’t want the natives getting restless. Natives. Ha! His eyes slid across to Blake who was staring at the muddy slush with a serious Sam-like expression on his face. Dean sighed. He’d already had to put up with one whispered lecture on ‘cultural sensitivity’ from Sam when the group had decided that Dean and the Hualapai Biosystems Engineer would scope out the suspected Limp Bizkit nesting site. Sam’d had reservations…Dean bit back a snort… Reservations? Get it? Because Indians… So anyway, Sam had been worried that Dean would spark some kind of Indian War if he was left alone with Blake for five minutes. Although apparently Blake threw a bitchfit of epic proportions if you called him an Indian, so it probably wouldn’t be an Indian war per se. Dean grinned to himself. Alrighty. Cultural sensitivity, coming right up. He could do that.
“Should we try to get closer?” Blake asked.
“Well that depends. You got a giant pit of fire in that back pack?”
Blake produced a bitchface that would’ve done Sam proud and didn’t deign to answer.
“In that case, I recommend not poking around in the nest of the giant, man-eating, near-impossible to kill Worms. We’re just here to observe from a safe distance.”
~~~
When Sam was thirteen, the Winchesters had spent a summer at an abandoned property outside of Lewistown, Montana and their dad had taught them how to make explosives from common household ingredients. Dean had been beside himself, Sam recalled with a grin, as excited as a fourteen-year-old girl with a back-stage pass at a Backstreet Boys concert. They’d purpose-built a dozen roughly-hewn sheds, just to blow up, and for Dean, the fun had been in watching them burst and shatter, splinters of wood raining down amid clouds of smoke and belching fire. For Sam, the fun had been in finding the necessary ingredients among the various common household bleaches, cleaning fluids, fertilizers and so forth and then constructing an explosive that worked. For him, the explosion was satisfying because it meant his science had worked. Dean just liked to watch things go boom.
As it happened, Noah liked to watch things go boom too. When Sam had asked him if he had any experience with homemade explosives, he’d grinned sheepishly. “Our senior year of High School my cousin and I blew up the sports shed where the hockey team kept their gear.”
“Holy shit,” said Sam. “Did you get expelled?”
Noah shook his head. “The school couldn’t prove who did it,” a rueful smile crossed his face. “Unfortunately for us, our fathers decided they didn’t need the same high standard of proof. Suffice to say we never did anything like that again, but we knew that we could if we wanted to. And so did the jocks.”
Sam shook his head clear of the earlier conversation as Noah shouldered his way into the shed.
“I’ve got drain cleaner and bleach,” Noah hefted a couple of gallon-sized bottles up onto the bench. “What did you find?”
“I found the mother lode- a 130 gallon tank of Diesel that Carl keeps for his tractor. I also found fertilizer. Half a dozen bags.”
Noah grinned. “Awesome! What are we using for detonators?”
“Diesel soaked rags? Molotov Cocktail style?”
Noah nodded. “We’ll need bottles then.”
Cahill looked up from where he was busy making a flame thrower out of a butane torch, a high pressure hose, and a fire extinguisher. “Carl’s got a glass and plastics recycling box out behind the house. You’ll find plenty of bottles there.”
The Worm Ganking Plan was reasonably straight-forward: lure the Worms into a large pit, filled with wooden spikes and gasoline, and then set fire to them. The tricky part would be digging the pit without attracting the attention of the Worms. In order to hold them back if they did come to investigate, Noah had suggested hand held explosives and a flamethrower. Dean was going to be ecstatic.
“You think we should try to take Luke into town?” Cahill asked when Noah had gone to get them some bottles. “Get him in to see the Doc?”
“I could take him,” Ronnie piped up, from where he was carving wooden stakes, along with Angel and Dodger.
Sam shook his head. “Look how they went after Virgil’s Jeep and our ATVs. It’s too risky. Better to stay here until we’ve taken the Worms out.”
“You think we can do it?” Ronnie asked. His eyes were nervy and his hands shook as he drew the knife up and down the wood.
“I do,” Sam said. “My brother and I, we grew up killing monsters. We know what we’re doing.”
Ronnie nodded and chewed on his bottom lip. “Okay,” he said. “I trust you guys.”
Sam was relieved that Noah returned just then, pushing a wheelie bin that rattled with the tell-tale clink of glass on glass. Sam was confident that they could gank the Worms. He just couldn’t guarantee that none of the civilians would get hurt in the process.
~~~
Blake had the binoculars and Dean was watching his back when the tremor hit.
Blake gasped and would’ve dropped the binoculars, if not for the cord keeping them around his neck. Dean spun just in time to see two Limp Bizkits break clear of the mud, their long, segmented bodies lifting clear into the air, undulating grotesquely as they opened their maws and shrieked.
“Fuck,” said Dean.
The Limp Bizkits fell to the ground, writhing and twisting around each other. Blake lifted the binoculars once more. “Oh,” he said. “Not good.”
“Are they fighting?” Dean asked. “Maybe they’re fighting for dominance. That’s good for us, right? If one takes the other out, there’s one less Worm for us to deal with.”
“They’re not fighting. They’re…well, you were on the money with that word you said before.”
Dean frowned and then gaped. “Really? They’re…”
“Copulating,” said Blake. “Yes.”
Dean reached for the binoculars, snatching them from around Blake’s neck. “Give me those,” he brought them up to his eyes. “Wow,” he watched the Worms twist around each other, surging together, rippling and heaving, and smacking each other to the ground. “I’ve known some feisty women in my time, but that…that can’t be comfortable.” He lowered the binoculars and looked at Blake. “Which one’s the chick anyway?”
Blake looked embarrassed and uncomfortable. “Well they’re worms, so I imagine they’re hermaphrodites.”
Dean’s eyes widened and then he grinned. “Riiiiight,” he said. “Dick and tits. Nice. Although,” he brought the binoculars up again, “they don’t exactly seem, uh, properly equipped.”
“Oh my God,” Blake muttered. “Maybe you should try watching Discovery once in a while instead of pay-per-view?”
“I watch Discovery,” Dean protested. “Shark Week is awesome.”
Blake raised his eyebrows. “What they’re doing now is exchanging sperm. Once they’ve done that they’ll separate, then secrete…I guess it’s like an egg sack…and then they’ll inject their own…” Blake trailed off as he caught sight of Dean’s glazed expression. “You know what?” he said, “All you really need to know is that the Worms are doing the nasty. And Giant Killer Worms making more Giant Killer Worms equals bad freaking news for us.”
Dean nodded thoughtfully. “Awesome. So we’re gonna have to gank Mom and Dad and a bunch of babies,” He frowned and then grinned, his face lighting up with impish delight. “The Worm family should definitely be on the Jerry Springer Show. They’d be like, well we’re brothers but his Mom is my Dad, and my Dad is his Mom.”
Blake stared at him.
Dean cleared his throat. “Anyway, looks like we’re gonna have to gank the parents and clean the nest out too,” His face lit up again. “Here’s one way that this is good. The Limp Bizkits are a little busy right now. So let’s get back to the farm and tell the others to step on the gas and get the pit dug asap. If we’re lucky, the Worms’ll be too distracted to notice.”
~~~
Carl Massina’s shed stank; a really pungent aroma of cat pee and gasoline.
Which meant Sammy was making explosives.
“Nice going guys,” Dean nodded at Noah. “How many you got?”
Between them, Sam and Noah had made eighteen Molotov Cocktail-style IEDs out of ammonium nitrate and Diesel.
“Well you need to get a hustle on,” Dean explained about the Worms. “We gotta get that pit dug while they’re busy with their Hentai play date.” He grinned brightly in the face of Sam’s bitchface.
Twenty minutes later Sam, Dean, Noah, Blake, Dodger and Angel were each armed with a gun, a knife and three IEDs. Cahill had a gun, a knife and a flamethrower that could spit fire twenty feet away and Carl was driving the back hoe. Ronnie, much to his chagrin, had been left behind to keep an eye on Luke. At least that’s how Dean had sold it to him, anyway. In reality he’d been left behind because Dean wanted the kid kept out of harm’s way. Granted, he and Angel were the same age, but Angel’s brother had been eaten; he had every right to help hunt down the sons-of-bitches responsible and Dean wasn’t going to deny him his vengeance. Ronnie had a widowed mom and younger siblings relying on him; Dean wasn’t about to let him become worm food; not on his watch.
The group had selected a flat area approximately half way between the Massina farm and the Limp Bizkit nesting site as their battleground. While Dean and the others formed a protective circle around Carl, the man himself set to getting a twenty-foot by twenty-foot pit dug out.
The late afternoon sun beat against their backs and Dean’s forehead and neck were soon beaded with sweat; his tee-shirt damp. The back hoe was sending up clouds of gritty orange dust and they were all soon caked in it. Cahill and Dodger had quickly pulled their bandanas up from around their necks and placed them over their noses and mouths. The rest of the team soon followed suit, pulling the necks of their tee-shirts up to save them from breathing in the dust.
By the time the pit was dug, the heat of the day was giving way to the relative cool of dusk. Sam and Angel made quick work of lining the pit with several big tarpaulins, and then filled it with stakes, all carved with points at each end. Once Sam and Angel had climbed out of the pit, Dean and Dodger poured in the Diesel. The pungent scent of it overwhelmed the smell of sweat and dirt and the fumes hit Dean hard, making his blood sing with euphoria. Or maybe that was just pre-battle adrenalin.
The desert twilight was still and quiet. Not a man moved, not a man spoke.
Eventually, Angel cleared his throat, his feet shuffling restlessly. “So now what?” he said.
“Now?” said Dean. “Now we summon a Worm.”
Master Post / Next
Six minutes later, he was still waiting for the damn clunker to finish booting up. Sam glared at it, and then, working on the theory that, much like a watched pot, a watched PC never boots, he wandered back toward the large farmhouse kitchen.
Ronnie was making coffee with a face like chalk, Dean was straddling a kitchen chair backwards and talking animatedly with Angel about minhocão and what, if anything, they had in common with fictional giant worms, and Blake was watching the two of them with a raised brow and a slack mouth, as if he couldn’t quite bring himself to believe what he was hearing. Noah was nowhere to be seen.
“Sammy!” Dean’s face brightened when he saw Sam standing in the kitchen doorway. “You’re a geek,” Blake made a small noise and glanced at Sam in disbelief. “Do you think our Worms are more like graboids or more like the giant sandworms from Dune?”
Sam raised an eyebrow. “I’m a geek? And yet you know both of those sci fi references.”
Dean waved a hand dismissively. “Okay one? Kevin Bacon. He always gets a pass. And two? Hot, naked chicks with blue-on-blue eyes,” he waggled his eyebrows and grinned broadly. “So what d’ya think? Graboids or Sandworms?”
Sam sighed. “I don’t know, Dean. Does it really matter?” He turned to Blake. “Where’s Noah?”
Blake nodded toward the verandah where Sam could see Noah pacing back and forth while talking on a cordless phone.
“He’s talking to one of the staff in the Cultural Department.”
Sam turned back to Dean who was looking pensive. “You reckon we’ll get to blow stuff up?” Dean asked. “Does anyone have any dynamite? Or a cannon?”
The sound of shattering ceramic rang throughout the house and they all turned to Ronnie, standing frozen in the kitchen.
“Listen to yourselves!” he said, his voice tight and high pitched. “This is not a movie! It’s not a game! People have died. Virgil…Virgil got eaten! And Luke got hurt. And Brian is missing-”
“Dead,” Dean interjected.
He somehow managed to miss Sam’s fervent ‘shut up’ gestures and carried on obliviously. “Luke saw him get eaten.”
Angel’s chair clattered to the floor and his fist was through the plaster in the kitchen wall before Sam could get to him.
“Dammit, Dean,” Sam hissed at his brother, pulling the distraught nineteen-year-old into a hug, despite the fact that he was trying to fight him off, “Brian’s his brother!”
Dean’s face fell and his eyes hardened, all signs of the cocky joker he’d been just a few moments earlier completely gone.
“I’m sorry,” he said, “I didn’t know. And I’m sorry for your loss. But I promise you,” his eyes glinted. “We will get these sons-of-bitches and we’ll put them down hard.”
“Doesn’t help Brian none, does it?” Angel snapped.
“I know,” Dean’s voice was hard and his jaw was set, but his eyes were full of compassion and understanding. “But it’s what we’ve got left.”
Sam felt Angel slacken under his grip as the 19-year-old searched Dean’s eyes for any trace of insincerity and, upon finding none, drew himself to his full height and nodded his head. Sam was impressed at the kid’s resolve.
Dean, never one to linger long in emotionally-charged situations, nodded once and then rubbed his hands together “Alright. First things first; where does Massina keep his good whiskey?”
Sam slipped quietly back into the office to see if the computer had managed to boot up yet.
Ten minutes later he was just about pulling his hair out in frustration waiting for the modem to successfully dial up. The clatter of the screen door and the stomp of boots, accompanied by Carl’s holler, announced the arrival of Carl, Dodger, Cahill and the injured boy, Luke. Dean immediately took charge of the patient, dosing him up with painkillers and then ushering the kid into his bedroom to lie down. Sam ventured into the kitchen to let Carl know that he was using his office for research. Carl merely nodded, then patted him on the shoulder and took off after Dean and Luke. Dodger had corralled Angel and the two of them were talking quietly together and the Hualapai were nowhere in sight, so Sam went back to the office, finally managing to get the Hunters’ Blog up and running and his log-in accepted.
There were a number of worm-like cyptids known to hunters, Sam discovered. The most dangerous-sounding of these was the olgoi-khorkhoi, or Mongolian Death Worm. A thick, bright red worm, it was only five feet long, but could kill at a distance using an electric charge, and could also spit out a deadly corrosive acid. They were hard to kill by all accounts and Sam was thankful that they had so far only been found in and around the Gobi Desert. The next worm that was discussed on the Hunters’ Blog was the e-kwa tshko-ya, a giant inchworm that featured in Cherokee legends and was said to take the women of the tribe and eat them. The lore said that the warriors of the tribe dealt with the worm by digging a trap, then luring the worm into it and burning it to death. There was a note on the blog from Caleb saying that he’d faced a pair of e-kwa tshko-ya in Oklahoma and the Cherokee method of dealing with them was right on the money. Sam bookmarked the entry.
The third and final worm that was detailed on the site was the minhocão, the South American worm that Angel had told them about. The minhocão was described as a giant subterranean worm-like cryptid that lived underground in South American forests. Enormous limbless beings, they had scaly black skin, a readily visible mouth and a couple of tentacle-like appendages protruding from their heads. They had a body diameter of up to ten feet and a body length which varied from 75 up to 150 feet. They were reported to prey on large animals, including cattle, and to leave enormous tunnels in their wake. Apparently minhocão tunnels most commonly appeared after periods of continuous rain, indicating that the minhocão was more active during such periods, and might even keep themselves hidden during dry days.
Sam frowned. The physical description of the minhocão matched the creature that had been attacking Dean and Ronnie, but that thing about rain? It was desert country out here; as dry as a bone. According to the lore, the minhocão should be inactive and keeping itself hidden in this climate.
“Knock, knock.”
Sam turned to find Noah standing in the doorway.
“Hey,” Sam minimized the screen. “You get anything good from your Cultural people?”
Noah made a so/so gesture. “You mind if I…?” he gestured at the desk and waited for Sam’s response before going and perching himself on the L side of the desk.
“I spoke to Marietta, one of our cultural anthropologists. She’s been working on a project, collecting oral histories and transcribing them into a database. She’s also part Cherokee. Apparently, the Cherokee have a legend of the e-kwa tshko-ya-”
“I know it,” Sam said. “I just finished reading about it. I don’t think that’s what we’re dealing with here.”
Noah nodded. “No. We’re dealing with a hybrid.”
Sam’s eyebrows shot up. “A hybrid?”
“Marietta took down a…well…I would’ve said it was a legend until today, but maybe it’s more of a historical fact. One of our elders, Hilda Quasula, recounted an incident that her grandmother had told her about. Apparently, when the grandmother was a girl, there were some cattle disappearances and then two women disappeared on their way home from town. Our people held a council and then went out to hunt whatever was responsible for the disappearances. The popular theory was a pack of coyotes. Anyway, it turned out to be a giant worm, with some features in common with the Cherokee worm and some in common with a South American worm known as a-”
“Minhocão ,” said Sam. “Yeah.”
Noah nodded. “The e-kwa tshko-ya is native to Oklahoma, but the larvae form, which can stay dormant underground for a very long time, is quite small. It gets around, in produce and so forth. And apparently some idiot miner around the turn of the last century thought he could harness a minhocão to dig his mine shaft for him, brought a baby one out from Brazil. You can guess how that worked out. So anyway, Baby Minhocão meets Baby E-kwa tshko-ya. End result? We ended up with our own unique species of man-eating worm.”“Did Hilda know how they ganked it?”
“How they what?”
“Ganked. Killed.”
Noah nodded. “They took a leaf out of the Cherokee’s book. Dug a pit and burned them.”
“Them?”
“There were two. A mated pair.”
~~~
When Sam and Noah rejoined the others in the kitchen, Cahill was updating everyone on the conversation he’d just had with Lyn, back at the search base in Chloride.
“We’ve agreed to hold off on calling the Kingman Police Department for now,” his eyes flashed briefly to the Hualapai and to Sam and Dean, as if expecting them to argue in favor of going straight to the police.
“That’s a good move,” Dean said. “The cops ain’t gonna believe us if we try to tell ‘em what we’re dealin’ with. Not until they see the critters in action and if that happens, we’re probably gonna increase the body count. And I think we can all agree that that would be a bad thing.”
Cahill made eye contact with Dodger, then Carl, and then straightened in his chair. “You’re awful calm about this,” he said. “You and your brother.”
“Yeah, well,” Dean swilled his whiskey around in his glass, “ain’t exactly our first rodeo.”
Another significant look passed between the three Chloride men.
“What Dean means,” Sam said, “is that we’ve dealt with…unusual…creatures before,” he pulled up a chair next to Cahill and sat down. “It’s kind of what we do.”
“Right,” Dean tossed back the last of his whiskey and reached for the bottle. “Saving people, hunting things. The family business.”
There was a moment’s silence and then Cahill said, “You’re Hunters, then.”
Dean froze. “What do you know about Hunters?”
Dodger sniffed. “We had a Thunderbird problem a few years back. Guy by the name of Reggie stopped by to help us out. Strange fella. Used to pour salt in doorways and on window sills, but he knew how to deal with Thunderbirds.”
Dean pushed the whiskey bottle away and sat back in his chair. “We know a Reggie,” he acknowledged. “Our Dad knows him better.” He turned to Sam. “How did the research go? Do you know what we’re dealing with?”
Sam filled everyone in on his worm research and then handed over to Noah to talk about the Hualapai and Cherokee legends.
After they’d finished there was a lengthy silence.
“So how come we haven’t seen these…these…hybrid Worms before now?” Angel demanded. “I mean, they’re kinda hard to miss.”
Noah shrugged. “My theory? The larvae have been lying dormant out in the dessert for the last century and when the tailings pond out at the mine leaked, the area got wet enough to wake ‘em up and get ‘em going.”
“Hybrids, huh?” Dean said after a while. “So what do we call ‘em? Cuz graboids is kinda lame and trying to combine the two parent species’ names is just…well it’s not really gonna roll off the tongue, is it? So what do we call ‘em?”
Sam and Noah exchanged a pained look and Blake huffed out a laugh. “I highly doubt there’s an International Code of Cryptozoological Nomenclature, so why don’t you just go ahead, Dean, and pick a name?”
Dean’s delighted grin had Sam rolling his eyes. He watched as his brother tilted his head to one side and pursed his lips. “Limp Bizkits,” he said, with a nod, “because they’re a mix of two different things watered down, they keep coming back, and everyone hates them.”
Angel sniggered.
“Well, now that we’ve got the important things sorted out,” Cahill said dryly, “Maybe we can sort out how to kill them?”
Sam cleared his throat. “About that,” he said, “Carl wouldn’t happen to have a back hoe, would he?”
~~~
Dean raised the binoculars and peered through them at the half-a-football-field sized mess of muddy sand, tunnels and holes. He lowered the glasses with a sigh and turned to Blake.
“So you and Noah collected water samples from here and then followed one of the tunnels?”
Blake nodded. “There are a lot more tunnels now than when we were here earlier. I guess the…the…”
“Limp Bizkits,” Dean supplied helpfully.
Blake glared. “…Worms have been a lot more active in the last few hours.”
Dean figured they were probably on a protein high, thanks to all the cow and Search Team they’d eaten. And they were probably starting to grasp the idea that they were pretty high on the food chain around here too. But he kept those thoughts to himself because he didn’t want the natives getting restless. Natives. Ha! His eyes slid across to Blake who was staring at the muddy slush with a serious Sam-like expression on his face. Dean sighed. He’d already had to put up with one whispered lecture on ‘cultural sensitivity’ from Sam when the group had decided that Dean and the Hualapai Biosystems Engineer would scope out the suspected Limp Bizkit nesting site. Sam’d had reservations…Dean bit back a snort… Reservations? Get it? Because Indians… So anyway, Sam had been worried that Dean would spark some kind of Indian War if he was left alone with Blake for five minutes. Although apparently Blake threw a bitchfit of epic proportions if you called him an Indian, so it probably wouldn’t be an Indian war per se. Dean grinned to himself. Alrighty. Cultural sensitivity, coming right up. He could do that.
“Should we try to get closer?” Blake asked.
“Well that depends. You got a giant pit of fire in that back pack?”
Blake produced a bitchface that would’ve done Sam proud and didn’t deign to answer.
“In that case, I recommend not poking around in the nest of the giant, man-eating, near-impossible to kill Worms. We’re just here to observe from a safe distance.”
~~~
When Sam was thirteen, the Winchesters had spent a summer at an abandoned property outside of Lewistown, Montana and their dad had taught them how to make explosives from common household ingredients. Dean had been beside himself, Sam recalled with a grin, as excited as a fourteen-year-old girl with a back-stage pass at a Backstreet Boys concert. They’d purpose-built a dozen roughly-hewn sheds, just to blow up, and for Dean, the fun had been in watching them burst and shatter, splinters of wood raining down amid clouds of smoke and belching fire. For Sam, the fun had been in finding the necessary ingredients among the various common household bleaches, cleaning fluids, fertilizers and so forth and then constructing an explosive that worked. For him, the explosion was satisfying because it meant his science had worked. Dean just liked to watch things go boom.
As it happened, Noah liked to watch things go boom too. When Sam had asked him if he had any experience with homemade explosives, he’d grinned sheepishly. “Our senior year of High School my cousin and I blew up the sports shed where the hockey team kept their gear.”
“Holy shit,” said Sam. “Did you get expelled?”
Noah shook his head. “The school couldn’t prove who did it,” a rueful smile crossed his face. “Unfortunately for us, our fathers decided they didn’t need the same high standard of proof. Suffice to say we never did anything like that again, but we knew that we could if we wanted to. And so did the jocks.”
Sam shook his head clear of the earlier conversation as Noah shouldered his way into the shed.
“I’ve got drain cleaner and bleach,” Noah hefted a couple of gallon-sized bottles up onto the bench. “What did you find?”
“I found the mother lode- a 130 gallon tank of Diesel that Carl keeps for his tractor. I also found fertilizer. Half a dozen bags.”
Noah grinned. “Awesome! What are we using for detonators?”
“Diesel soaked rags? Molotov Cocktail style?”
Noah nodded. “We’ll need bottles then.”
Cahill looked up from where he was busy making a flame thrower out of a butane torch, a high pressure hose, and a fire extinguisher. “Carl’s got a glass and plastics recycling box out behind the house. You’ll find plenty of bottles there.”
The Worm Ganking Plan was reasonably straight-forward: lure the Worms into a large pit, filled with wooden spikes and gasoline, and then set fire to them. The tricky part would be digging the pit without attracting the attention of the Worms. In order to hold them back if they did come to investigate, Noah had suggested hand held explosives and a flamethrower. Dean was going to be ecstatic.
“You think we should try to take Luke into town?” Cahill asked when Noah had gone to get them some bottles. “Get him in to see the Doc?”
“I could take him,” Ronnie piped up, from where he was carving wooden stakes, along with Angel and Dodger.
Sam shook his head. “Look how they went after Virgil’s Jeep and our ATVs. It’s too risky. Better to stay here until we’ve taken the Worms out.”
“You think we can do it?” Ronnie asked. His eyes were nervy and his hands shook as he drew the knife up and down the wood.
“I do,” Sam said. “My brother and I, we grew up killing monsters. We know what we’re doing.”
Ronnie nodded and chewed on his bottom lip. “Okay,” he said. “I trust you guys.”
Sam was relieved that Noah returned just then, pushing a wheelie bin that rattled with the tell-tale clink of glass on glass. Sam was confident that they could gank the Worms. He just couldn’t guarantee that none of the civilians would get hurt in the process.
~~~
Blake had the binoculars and Dean was watching his back when the tremor hit.
Blake gasped and would’ve dropped the binoculars, if not for the cord keeping them around his neck. Dean spun just in time to see two Limp Bizkits break clear of the mud, their long, segmented bodies lifting clear into the air, undulating grotesquely as they opened their maws and shrieked.
“Fuck,” said Dean.
The Limp Bizkits fell to the ground, writhing and twisting around each other. Blake lifted the binoculars once more. “Oh,” he said. “Not good.”
“Are they fighting?” Dean asked. “Maybe they’re fighting for dominance. That’s good for us, right? If one takes the other out, there’s one less Worm for us to deal with.”
“They’re not fighting. They’re…well, you were on the money with that word you said before.”
Dean frowned and then gaped. “Really? They’re…”
“Copulating,” said Blake. “Yes.”
Dean reached for the binoculars, snatching them from around Blake’s neck. “Give me those,” he brought them up to his eyes. “Wow,” he watched the Worms twist around each other, surging together, rippling and heaving, and smacking each other to the ground. “I’ve known some feisty women in my time, but that…that can’t be comfortable.” He lowered the binoculars and looked at Blake. “Which one’s the chick anyway?”
Blake looked embarrassed and uncomfortable. “Well they’re worms, so I imagine they’re hermaphrodites.”
Dean’s eyes widened and then he grinned. “Riiiiight,” he said. “Dick and tits. Nice. Although,” he brought the binoculars up again, “they don’t exactly seem, uh, properly equipped.”
“Oh my God,” Blake muttered. “Maybe you should try watching Discovery once in a while instead of pay-per-view?”
“I watch Discovery,” Dean protested. “Shark Week is awesome.”
Blake raised his eyebrows. “What they’re doing now is exchanging sperm. Once they’ve done that they’ll separate, then secrete…I guess it’s like an egg sack…and then they’ll inject their own…” Blake trailed off as he caught sight of Dean’s glazed expression. “You know what?” he said, “All you really need to know is that the Worms are doing the nasty. And Giant Killer Worms making more Giant Killer Worms equals bad freaking news for us.”
Dean nodded thoughtfully. “Awesome. So we’re gonna have to gank Mom and Dad and a bunch of babies,” He frowned and then grinned, his face lighting up with impish delight. “The Worm family should definitely be on the Jerry Springer Show. They’d be like, well we’re brothers but his Mom is my Dad, and my Dad is his Mom.”
Blake stared at him.
Dean cleared his throat. “Anyway, looks like we’re gonna have to gank the parents and clean the nest out too,” His face lit up again. “Here’s one way that this is good. The Limp Bizkits are a little busy right now. So let’s get back to the farm and tell the others to step on the gas and get the pit dug asap. If we’re lucky, the Worms’ll be too distracted to notice.”
~~~
Carl Massina’s shed stank; a really pungent aroma of cat pee and gasoline.
Which meant Sammy was making explosives.
“Nice going guys,” Dean nodded at Noah. “How many you got?”
Between them, Sam and Noah had made eighteen Molotov Cocktail-style IEDs out of ammonium nitrate and Diesel.
“Well you need to get a hustle on,” Dean explained about the Worms. “We gotta get that pit dug while they’re busy with their Hentai play date.” He grinned brightly in the face of Sam’s bitchface.
Twenty minutes later Sam, Dean, Noah, Blake, Dodger and Angel were each armed with a gun, a knife and three IEDs. Cahill had a gun, a knife and a flamethrower that could spit fire twenty feet away and Carl was driving the back hoe. Ronnie, much to his chagrin, had been left behind to keep an eye on Luke. At least that’s how Dean had sold it to him, anyway. In reality he’d been left behind because Dean wanted the kid kept out of harm’s way. Granted, he and Angel were the same age, but Angel’s brother had been eaten; he had every right to help hunt down the sons-of-bitches responsible and Dean wasn’t going to deny him his vengeance. Ronnie had a widowed mom and younger siblings relying on him; Dean wasn’t about to let him become worm food; not on his watch.
The group had selected a flat area approximately half way between the Massina farm and the Limp Bizkit nesting site as their battleground. While Dean and the others formed a protective circle around Carl, the man himself set to getting a twenty-foot by twenty-foot pit dug out.
The late afternoon sun beat against their backs and Dean’s forehead and neck were soon beaded with sweat; his tee-shirt damp. The back hoe was sending up clouds of gritty orange dust and they were all soon caked in it. Cahill and Dodger had quickly pulled their bandanas up from around their necks and placed them over their noses and mouths. The rest of the team soon followed suit, pulling the necks of their tee-shirts up to save them from breathing in the dust.
By the time the pit was dug, the heat of the day was giving way to the relative cool of dusk. Sam and Angel made quick work of lining the pit with several big tarpaulins, and then filled it with stakes, all carved with points at each end. Once Sam and Angel had climbed out of the pit, Dean and Dodger poured in the Diesel. The pungent scent of it overwhelmed the smell of sweat and dirt and the fumes hit Dean hard, making his blood sing with euphoria. Or maybe that was just pre-battle adrenalin.
The desert twilight was still and quiet. Not a man moved, not a man spoke.
Eventually, Angel cleared his throat, his feet shuffling restlessly. “So now what?” he said.
“Now?” said Dean. “Now we summon a Worm.”
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