The Witch Is Dead: Part 2
2.
May I never be complete. May I never be content. May I never be perfect.
(Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club)
Sam was growing like a weed - that’s what Mrs. Westmoreland often said. Growing like a weed. Sam didn’t think he imagined the undertone of longing in her voice, and he didn’t miss the way her eyes would go all misty. Mrs. Westmoreland’s own sons certainly weren’t growing much, at fifteen.
Sam thought about that as he pedaled up the street to where the Westmorelands’ house sat on the hill, in the upper middle class neighborhood that Dean avoided like the plague and Sam rather liked. There was some cheap irony involved here. Sam lived down by the railroad tracks, in a house with a leaking roof and wore his jeans rolled up, to hide how short they were getting for his legs. The Westmoreland twins could afford custom made pants, but no amount of money could buy extra inches for the three legs they had between them. Fifteen. Nobody should stop growing at fifteen. Sam suffered growing pains and strain after strain, and every time he felt that sharp yanking pain down his leg, he told himself to be grateful. At least he was growing.
The Westmoreland family lived in a two-story beige house surrounded by a rose garden. Sam fantasized about owning a house like this someday, though he didn’t particularly like it. It represented the type of life he wanted. Maybe. On a good day, when he wasn’t too paranoid and didn’t picture a survivalist’s outpost in the desert instead. He pushed harder on the pedals and stood up in his seat on the last few feet going up the hill, one final effort before the pavement evened out. Sam jumped off the bike, dropped it on the front lawn next to a yellow rose bush, and ran up the porch, skipping over the middle step. He pressed the buzzer and waited, his heart still beating fast but settling in his chest.
Mrs. Westmoreland answered almost immediately. “Hello, Sam,” she said, stepping aside to let him in. She was dressed in a pants suit and heels, obviously on her way out the door.
“Hi, Mrs. Westmoreland.”
“I have to run,” she said, picking up her purse. “The boys are having lunch. You eat something, too, okay?”
Sam flushed, which she pretended not to notice. She knew what neighborhood he lived in, knew that his family was poor and probably suspected that at fifteen Sam was always hungry. Growing like a weed and hungry. Dad would’ve had a fit if he knew that Mrs. Westmoreland was feeding his son extra lunches, but Dad wasn’t there to have a fit about anything. Dad was hunting something in the woods, and Dean, left in charge, had too much practical sense to complain about free food.
“Thank you.”
She left, and in a minute Sam heard the engine of her car start out front. He toed off his shoes and padded into the large, bright kitchen. Luke and Matt were busy arranging sandwiches on the center island. They looked up when Sam walked in. Matt waived with the butter knife he’d been using to smear mustard on a piece of bread, and Luke grinned. He used to greet Sam with an upside-down nod, but the mannerism had become painful for him since his spine problems started to worsen. Sam dropped his shoulder bag by the door and clasped each of the twins’ hands in turn, performing the secret handshake that they developed.
“Hey, Sam,” said Matt. “Want some sandwiches?”
Sam nodded. “Starving. How are you guys?”
“Ah, you know,” Matt said, rolling his shoulders, and Luke interrupted with, “Suzanne stopped by earlier.”
Matt shot his brother a furtive look and pretended to be absorbed by the task of arranging ham slices on the bread. Suzanne was their mother’s personal assistant, twenty two and extremely attractive. Both boys were secretly in love with her, even though she was engaged and they were, well, underage and joined at the ribcage and pelvis.
“She smelled real good,” Luke added, leaning forward.
Sam grinned. “Yeah?” He’d never actually seen Suzanne, but had formed a clear picture from his friends’ descriptions.
Matt rolled his eyes and shrugged. “Yeah, okay. Here, have some.” He pushed bread and the lunch meats towards Sam.
They ate their first servings in silence, all three too busy sating their hunger to talk. The twins were still hungry like other teenage boys, except that the food was doing nothing for their growth rate, especially not for Luke. He stopped growing about six months before his brother, and the two legs that he controlled were now a good inch shorter than Matt’s one leg. Luke wore shoes on a platform, to compensate for the height difference and ease the strain on their pelvis. It was a mixed blessing when Matt stopped growing as well.
“So,” said Sam, shaking the crumbs off his lap, “you ready for the grammar quiz?”
“Yeah, yeah, piece of cake.” Matt shrugged and started making another sandwich. Sam followed his example. “What should we do after, though? Mom’s not coming back until at least seven.”
“And Dad even later than that,” said Luke. “We’re on our own for the whole day.”
Matt split the sandwich and gave half to his brother. Sam took a bite out of his and thought as he chewed. “You want to play video games? Or, we could toss the ball out back.”
The twins exchanged some encoded look between them. “Have you been down to the park lately?”
Sam stopped chewing. “The park” was an old amusement park, now overgrown and abandoned, a little ways down from where Sam and Dean lived. All of the expensive rides had long been sold, and only some rusted skeletons remained, along with the wooden tracks of a former roller coaster without any cars left. Sam liked to climb those tracks, and to swing upside down three feet over the nettles until his head felt like it was going to explode.
“Sure,” he said. “You guys want to go, or something?”
There was no way in hell the twins with their three mismatched legs were going to climb the roller coaster. There was no way in hell their mother would ever let them to even think about it.
“We’d like to, yes.” Luke nodded gravely. “That’d be very cool.”
Sam must’ve looked worried, because Matt nudged him. “Come on, man. Mom’s out for the day, and we can always do English later.”
Well, Sam thought, we don’t have to climb the roller coaster. And that was how, half an hour later, he ended up rolling his bike down the hill with the Westmoreland twins standing on the back. All three whooped as the bike picked up speed, with the fall wind in their faces. Sam concentrated on keeping the balance with the uneven weight behind him. Down and down the hill they went, down the class ladder as the housing developments grew poorer. The elevation ended in the middle class neighborhood, and the bike almost reached the end of it by inertia alone. Sam pushed down on the pedals, passed the crossroads with the traffic light swinging in the wind above it, and they broke into the working class cluster of streets, which comprised most of the town. Five minutes later, they were down by the railroad tracks. Sam caught a glimpse of the house the Winchesters were staying in, two blocks over, and stretched his neck out to see if Dean was in the yard.
“Sam!” the twins yelled together, and Sam barely managed to swerve around a post.
People started as they went by, just like they always stared at the Westmoreland twins. Sam felt the looks, saw heads turning around and hated it. He breathed easier once the three of them left town and rolled down the quiet road along the tracks. By then, Sam was sweating from having to propel the extra weight forward, but there was something enjoyable about the way his leg muscles strained and burned and carried the three of them along.
Sam took a left turn - Luke stuck out his leg for balance - crossed the tracks and started down the unused lane that once led to the park. The asphalt was cracked, with weeds growing through. A billboard by the entrance read “NO TRESPASSING”.
“Cool,” said Luke when Sam slowed down. “This is the furthest we’ve been without the car.”
Sam took them all the way to the desolate pavilion where electrical cars used to run. “Come on.” He waited for the twins to climb down and dragged the bike into the bushes where it wouldn’t be seen from the path. “Check this place out.”
All the cars were long gone, and the hollow structure was filled with several years’ worth of rotten leaves. Graffiti covered the supporting columns, and there was a distinct smell of old urine, but none of the boys minded. Sam got busy trying to pry a tile off a column while the twins kicked the leaves around, looking for interesting things underneath.
“You don’t go out much, huh?”
The twins stopped messing with the trash and stared at Sam with equally puzzled expressions. Sam shrugged, thinking of a life inside, of being stuck in a single house year after year after year. “Must be annoying,” he said, “people staring at you all the time.”
“We throw rocks if they stare too much,” Matt said.
“Don’t tell Mom,” Luke added.
Sam promised to keep the secret. The twins seemed to like the park, and Sam began to wonder if this wasn’t a good idea after all to bring them here. They finished examining the pavilion and wanted to see the roller coaster. Some of the highest loops were visible from where the three were standing, rising up over the treetops.
“I can never reach that one,” Sam said, pointing out a high section of the rail that, he suspected, offered a great view of the entire park. “A bunch of ties are missing from both ends. But I’ll make it up there before we leave.” He stepped out of the pavilion and into the tall grass, heading for the roller coaster loading platform.
The twins behind him fell quiet. “When are you leaving?” said Luke.
“Could Mom, like, pay you more to tutor us in English, so you could stay?”
I wish. Sam shook his head. “Nah. It’s my Dad. We move a lot for his work.” And he walked a little faster, to end the conversation. The twins followed in silence.
Once they reached the roller coaster’s platform, half-buried in ivy and raspberry bushes, the Westmorelands forgot all about Sam’s impending departure. And it really was a cool place: rusted rails and the splintering ties between them, rusted metal latticework with ancient paint peeling off it, the roof long gone. There were no cars, but this was a nice place to start climbing the tracks, which Sam often did. Today, though, he stood on the platform, hoping to show an example.
It didn’t work. Luke and Matt went over to the rails, and Luke put one tentative foot on the tracks.
Sam shivered. “Hey, don’t.”
Luke looked like he might listen, but Matt just waved him off. “We’re just looking. Chill, Sam.” He pulled his brother forward, and Luke followed easily.
“That thing is rotten through. Guys.” Sam was suddenly sweating in the cold air. The twins were standing firmly on the tracks. Sam reached out for them, but Matt jerked his shoulder out of his reach.
“We’re just gonna look.”
“Get back here.”
A wind rose in the woods and rustled the foliage. It blew old leaves and dust in Sam’s face, tugged on the twins’ clothes. The roller coaster made a sound, so much like a sigh, like an animal turning in its sleep. It didn’t seem like a sound an inanimate object should ever make.
~~~~
Sam made it home by nine, long after dark. A freight train was dragging through town, an endless succession of cars that smelled of machine oil and made a lazy monotone noise. The house - belonging to a relative of a friend of John’s old Marines buddy - was dark, except for the flickering blue light in the living room, a sign that the TV was still on. Theirs was the only inhabited building on the block, and all the others stood unlit. Sam could hear broken glass shuddering in the windows, disturbed by the train’s passage.
At least Dad wasn’t home. Thank god for small mercies.
Aliens was on when Sam walked in, perhaps the last half hour of the movie. Dean’s head popped up from around the back of the couch but dropped back down. The living room smelled like pizza. Sam followed his nose into the kitchen, where half of a large one was waiting on the counter. Sam picked up the whole box and took it with him back to the living room. Dean bent his legs to let him sit.
“You want some of this pizza?”
“All yours.” Dean didn’t look away from the screen, though they both must’ve seen the movie a hundred times.
Sam chewed his first slice and eyed Dean’s feet, which were officially too close to his food, but he didn’t feel like complaining. They were just feet. It was just Dean. Sam finished two slices while thinking of what he wanted to say, the cold pizza sitting like stones in his stomach.
“I got fired today,” he said. Dean looked at him, and in the dark his expression was hard to read. “From my tutoring job.”
“That English gig with the freak twins?”
The freak twins. “Yeah, that one. They were my friends, actually.” Past tense, definitely.
“Okay.” Dean pushed himself up against the armrest a little, to be able to see Sam better. “What happened?”
Sam had an entire speech that ran through his head over and over again as he walked home, the bike forgotten back at the park. There were all these words in him, about personal freedom, and responsibility, and about what it was like to live your life bent to somebody else’s will. Somehow, the sick and disabled were always expected to give up a part of their freedom, as if a leaky mitral valve rendered one incapable of making decisions. He wanted to say this. But a few blocks away from the house, somewhere on the edge of the urban ruin, the indignation fled Sam.
“They wanted to go to the theme park,” he said. “And then they wanted to climb the roller coaster.”
“Can they? I mean, are they coordinated enough?”
“No. I told them not to, but they wouldn’t listen. They wouldn’t come down from there.” Sam omitted the part where the roller coaster sighed like a living thing and he got spooked, because the place looked nothing if not haunted, though it was probably just the wind. “I had to call the cops to get them down. They stopped talking to me. Now I’m fired, and they’re probably under house arrest until they’re forty.”
As soon as the words were out of his mouth, Sam realized that the Westmoreland twins were probably never going to live to see forty. They had two hearts between them, both with congenital conditions - unclosed holes in them, as if their bodies couldn’t figure out which way to grow. Luke’s heart was weaker, and Matt’s was already enlarged from trying to compensate.
“Ah, don’t sweat it, Sammy,” Dean said, and poked him on the shoulder with a foot as some sort of a hands-free pat. “We got enough money from my job. It’s no big deal.”
“Jesus, Dean! That’s not why.”
“Whatever. Eat your pizza.”
On the screen, the three survivors were getting into the escape capsules. Sam opened his mouth and tried to say something, to explain, to accuse Dean of being deliberately dense. He sat there, but the words didn’t come. He finished the pizza instead.
~~~~
The phone was ringing somewhere close by. There was a drool spot on Dean’s pillow, and he had his face smashed into it. He rubbed his hand over his eyes, but the room was still pitch black. He wondered why the answering machine wasn’t kicking in, then remembered that the ancient house phone didn’t have one. The ringing went on. Dean struggled with the blankets until he was mostly out of them, dropped off the couch, landing on the empty pizza box, and went to look for the phone by feel.
“Hello?”
“Dean?”
The sleep was suddenly gone. “Dad.” He found his wristwatch and squinted at it until he could make out the faintly glowing numbers. It was just past two in the morning. “What’s going on?”
“You tell me. Who’s Sophia Westmoreland?”
Dad sounded pissed, not worried, which still didn’t necessarily mean that Dad wasn’t in trouble. “Who?”
“Some woman named Sophia Westmoreland left me a screaming message, something about how Sam almost killed her sons. The hell is she talking about?”
“Oh, that.” Dean sighed and rubbed his chest, feeling as though something had just let go inside, like waking up after a nightmare and realizing that none of it actually happened. “Sam is friends with her sons. They’ve got a shit ton of health issues, and Sam took them to that closed theme park down the road. They were just playing. She flipped.”
Dad sighed, and there was silence on the line. Dean strained his hearing but heard nothing, absolutely no background noise. Dad was probably deep in the woods, up at night to be on the same clock with the predators, supernatural or otherwise.
“That’s it?” Dad said. “That’s what she’s screaming at me for - boys playing in the park?”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“Some people.” Civilians, Dean practically heard, Dad was thinking it so loud. “Are you boys alright there?”
“Sure.” Dean fingered the light switch, but decided against turning it on, in case it woke Sam up for good. He turned on the kitchen exhaust light over the stove instead and sat on the counter. “How are you, Dad? How’s the hunt going?”
“I’m looking. Haven’t found anything yet. Alright, I gotta get back to work, you handle the-.”
“What is it?” Dean interrupted quickly, before Dad could hang up. “What are you hunting?” Dad didn’t answer, and Dean rushed on forward. “You know, in case we hear anything in town that might be connected.”
Dad didn’t like to talk about his hunts until they were finished - perhaps out of superstition, perhaps out of his secretive nature. Dean couldn’t even count how many nights he spent sleepless, staring at the ceiling and imagining the worst monsters, some evil personified, all teeth and claws, maybe even infectious. The only time Dean was honest-to-god scared of monsters was when his dad was out there, fighting them without backup. And fuck scared anyway, but this secrecy was just impractical. What if he needed to come rescue Dad? Wouldn’t it help to know what he needed rescuing from?
“The town is out of its range, as far as I can tell,” Dad said finally, sounding grumpy. Dean crossed the fingers on his free hand for luck and waited. “It’s killing teenagers, thirteen to sixteen. Bodies have been showing up in the woods, one every year or so, no signs of violent death on them.”
“No mutilation?”
“There’s some animal activity, but nothing unusual, not with how long the bodies were exposed to nature. Nothing’s consistent either. The coroner didn’t seem puzzled.” Dad sighed, and Dean heard the scratch of nails against stubble. “I have a list of things that could be doing it, but it’s a long one, and I’ve got no other clues to work with.”
“Okay.” Dean bit his nail, thinking of the little things, stupid coincidences, patterns and random encounters. You spend your whole life looking for patterns in everyday occurrences, and then you try separating truth from paranoia. He eyed the bedroom door, but everything was quiet there. “Dad, you sure this has nothing to do with the town?”
“Why?”
“Those kids that Sam is friends with are Siamese twins. How many of those have you seen, ever? There’s a dwarf at my work, and I’ve seen three more around, not related. The cashier at the store has four fingers on each hand, born that way. I dropped by Sam’s school once or twice, and you know how many kids with birth defects they have there?” He left it at that, letting Dad absorb the information and measure it against whatever research he’d already done for the case.
“Huh. It’s an industrial area around here. Could be just plain contamination.” He didn’t sound too sure though. “Alright. I still think it’s out of range, but you look into that.”
Dean grinned. “Got it. Hey, good hunting!”
Dad grumbled something and hung up. Dean sat on the counter in the dark house, tethered to an old wall phone, and thought about all the deformed, disabled people he’d seen around. Was it that unusual, or did he notice because he was looking? The phone line started to beep, so he hung up. It could’ve been pollution, not necessarily anything supernatural.
After a while, he went back to the couch, picked up the blanket from the floor and tried to go back to sleep, unsuccessfully. Siamese twins, for fuck’s sake. How many of those were even around, in the whole country? What that had to do with some dead teenagers turning up miles away was anyone’s guess, but it was interesting. There was no sleeping after that, so Dean got dressed, scribbled a quick note for Sam and went outside for a run.
This late at night, the town looked dead. A cold fog hung over the lower parts like milky pools, so thick that Dean could hardly see anything beyond ten feet. No streetlights worked on their abandoned block, and the semaphore light over the train tracks was a faint smudge of color in the white. Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea after all to go for a run in this. How dumb would it be to break his neck? But the thought of going back to the couch seemed repulsive. Dean picked a direction and set off at a light jog, picking up speed as he went. The empty neighborhood was soon behind him, and he had a weird thought that Sam was now the sole living, breathing person in a four block radius there. And speaking of Sam, didn’t he leave that bike he loved so much in the amusement park? The park was as good a destination as any, so Dean adjusted his course and headed west. His body warmed up as he ran, and the cold soon became a skin-deep thing, something he felt but wasn’t bothered by.
Once he reached the park’s overgrown road, Dean slowed down to a walk and switched on a flashlight. Who the hell could even tell what sort of construction debris could be hiding in the grass? Far from human habitat and busy roads, the place was eerily quiet. Dean walked to a former electrical car rink, shining his flashlight into the bushes, looking for a glimpse of metal.
The quiet was definitely getting on his nerves. Dean hummed a few notes under his breath, the first song that came to mind. “Black Betty had a child, bam-ba-lam, the damn thing gone wild, bam-ba-lam.”
There, over the tall bushes and the roof of the former pavilion, poking out the fog, was a hump of a wooden roller coaster, shiny from condensation. Dean stood still for a minute, holding the structure in the flashlight beam, until he realized that he was waiting for something to happen. He picked up a rock and loped it at the roller coaster, just to see if he could hit it. A crack of rock on wood echoed over the park.
“Hey!” The echo picked up his voice and bounced it around. “Hey, roller coaster!”
Don’t call out to ghosts in empty places. There was an older, wiser voice that sometimes sounded in Dean’s head and had saved his ass in the past. It was probably right this time, too. He shook his head and dropped the second rock, turned around to leave and almost tripped over Sam’s bike.
He was walking back, pushing the bike along and not thinking about much except getting back to sleep, when the memory caught up with him, sharp and sudden like a bite, out of nowhere. It was a woman's voice laden with a deep Southern accent, and it said, How about his brother?
~~~~
Dad was back. Sam knew by the heavy steps and by the low grumbling coming from the kitchen. He swung his feet off the bed and went out the bedroom, down the narrow hallway and into the living room, and there was John Winchester. The light was weak, and Sam realized that it was still night. Why did he come back in the dead of the night? He looked dirty, Sam saw in the illumination from the open fridge as his dad checked the shelves and the pans for something edible. He opened the egg carton, pushed it aside - a little too hard - opened the milk bottle and sniffed the contents, poked at the bread. He took the lid off a pan with leftover fried rice Dean made for dinner last night, made a satisfied grunt and took a handful, stuffing the food into his mouth. A piece of sausage and a small square of carrot got stuck to the beard he had grown out again. John picked the sausage off, flicked the carrot away.
Something was wrong. Sam wrapped his arms around himself and shuffled from foot to foot on the bare floor of the hallway. The light was weird. Where was it coming from? He looked over to the couch, but Dean wasn’t there, only his blanket. Where did he go at this hour?
“Dad?”
Sam took a small step into the living room, and John jumped and turned to him. He smiled, wiping a greasy hand on his jeans. He was terribly pale, or perhaps it was just the light. There was dried blood on his wrist, and something that looked like teeth marks, in a semi-circle. Sam backed away into the living room, until his knees hit the couch. Dad took a step closer. There was dried blood on the couch and all over the blanket. Dad smiled, and there was blood on his teeth as well.
“Sam. Is there anything to eat around here or what?”
Sam bolted up from his bed, gasping for air. He sat there for a minute, waiting for the world to stop spinning, for the real memories to untangle themselves from the nightmare, for stability. None of that happened, he realized, feeling the rabbit-fast fluttering in his chest. None of it. Diffuse light of an early morning crept in around the curtains, perfectly ordinary. Dad was out on a job, and Dean was probably still asleep on a Saturday morning. Sam pressed his face to his bent knees and took a few deep breaths. He had to get out of this life, somehow. He had to get out before it got him killed or drove him nuts.
Somebody was moving around in the kitchen.
Quickly and quietly, Sam slipped from under the blankets and pulled on the clothes he dumped on the floor last night. He stepped out into the dark hallway, just like he did in the dream. He made himself slow his breathing down as he tiptoed toward the living room and the kitchen. Five long steps. Sam peered around the corner, from the shadows. But it was only Dean in the kitchen, with the phone in his hand, eyeing it like a man contemplating a cliff dive. Sam had seen guys look at loaded guns like that.
“Don’t call him.”
Dean looked up and frowned at him. “What are you doing creeping around there?”
Is there anything to eat around here or what?
“Nothing.” Sam stepped out into the living room and gave Dean the most innocent smile. “I mean Dad, don’t call him. You know how he hates to be interrupted on a job.”
Dean looked suspicious for a moment, but he shrugged and hung up the phone. Sam squeezed past him to the fridge to get the milk. For some reason, Dean pressed himself into the counter to let him through, as though he didn’t want even the smallest contact. Sam drank the milk from the bottle and watched his brother from the corner of his eye. Oh, he thought, oh, it was going to be one of those days. Not even ten minutes in, and the morning was already going sideways.
“Don’t eat yet,” Dean said, popping some pieces of dry cereal into his mouth. “We’re going for a run to that theme park of yours.”
“Why?”
“I wanna check it out. The place gives me the hibbie-jibbies.”
What was great about Dean and sucked about Dad was that Dean had no problem admitting to the hibbie-jibbies, while Dad kept his to himself. Dad never admitted to having a bad feeling about something because bad feelings were too flimsy for him, but Sam suspected that he got them anyway, like everybody else.
“Okay, hibbie-jibbies it is, let me get changed.” And when Dean turned away, Sam reached out, quick, and touched the back of his neck. Dean swatted his hand away but didn’t take the bait and didn’t turn around. It was definitely a sideways sort of morning.
Outside, Dean set out at a fast pace, too fast for conversation. Sam played along, watched him while Dean wasn’t looking, and waited for his moment.
They passed the dead block, accelerating, jumped over the flooded storm drain at the end of the street and turned onto the road that led out of town. The gas station down the road was empty of customers, but Veronica was cleaning the windows. She turned to wave at them, and Dean made some dorky salute her way that made Sam laugh, breathless. They settled at a steady rate Sam welcomed. He savored the hot flow of blood in his muscles, the flushing of his skin that kept off the cold, his lungs expanding, heart pumping, the impact of his feet on the asphalt. It made him feel real, grounded him, and the nightmares gradually drained away. They splashed through a shallow puddle, both noticing it too late to avoid it. Sam kept watching Dean and saw the tension leave his body little by little, until he looked normal again, not like the wary, suspicious thing Sam found in the kitchen earlier.
Dean had the advantage of being more in tune with his body and the disadvantage of bowlegs. Sam had the advantage of long bones and the disadvantage of not knowing exactly what to do with them.
The park’s billboard with missing tiles showed up ahead once they turned the corner, and both picked up speed. They ran over the railroad tracks and onto the unpaved road overgrown with weeds, where their feet slipped on pebbles. They passed through the former parking lot at breakneck speed and reached the park’s ruined walkway with Sam slightly in the lead. It made his blood boil - thinking that Dean let him win at the last few feet, like he was some little kid.
Sam saw the opening he’d been waiting for all morning when Dean beamed at him and leaned forward with his hands on his knees to catch his breath. Sam had just enough rage and exhilaration built up. He jumped on Dean’s back without a word, clamping his knees around Dean’s sides like he used to do when he was smaller.
Dean had time to breathe out, “Fuck,” before they both went down.
They landed in the uncut grass, bringing down a shower of dew. Sam’s nostrils filled with the smell of the woods, overwhelmingly strong. His heart was beating too fast, he couldn’t get enough air and his head was spinning from adrenalin and lack of oxygen. Dean was right there, Sam had his limbs wrapped around him. Dean was all solid muscle, skin too hot and freezing at the same time, like it could only be after a run. He was right there, and he was everything that was right with the world and everything that was wrong with it, and Sam didn’t know what to do with him. They rolled through the grass in a confused tumble of limbs, Dean trying to shake Sam off, and Sam couldn’t tell from the sounds he made if his brother was mad or happy. Hell, Sam couldn’t tell which emotion there was more of in him. He bit Dean’s shoulder through the soaked shirt and knew immediately that it would bruise.
“Sam, dammit, you little shit!”
Sam held on with his teeth, his arms and legs, feeling like he was holding for dear life.
Dean managed to get a good grip under his knee and on his thigh, twisted and dragged Sam off his back. He was laughing, though, definitely more happy than pissed, and he didn’t fight it when Sam sat on his stomach. Through his hand on Dean’s chest, he could feel the hammering of Dean’s heart. It was good, really damn good to be this close, to feel that drumming. Sam felt suddenly like his hands were on fire, like his head was on fire, and he couldn’t tell then why he grabbed Dean’s ears and kissed him on the mouth.
Dean’s lips were burning hot, and his nose was cold. Everything went perfectly still for a moment.
The slap Sam got on the side of his head was open-handed but the hardest Dean had ever hit him. It threw him clear off Dean’s chest. Sam sat in the grass with his ears ringing, feeling for a moment like the world had gone sideways again, this time literally. Dean was getting up.
“Okay, Dean, you know what?” Sam shut his eyes, to get rid of the spinning. “That wasn’t even-I didn’t mean-.”
“What’s that?”
Sam raised his head and started to speak, but Dean wasn’t even looking at him. He was staring off to the right, where the roller coaster tracks arched up over the treetops. Sam turned that way, too, still rubbing at the side of his head, and his hand froze. There was something up on the tracks, on the highest part. It was a human-shaped something, lying with that perfect stillness that only the dead have. The light morning breeze was tugging on the fabric - clothes? - the thing was wrapped in.
Dean offered him a hand without looking, and Sam grabbed it and stood up next to him. Neither took his eyes off the object on the tracks. Nothing alive could ever be this still.
Sam moved first, down the familiar path trodden through the grounds, circling around a cluster of bushes to where the platform was. Dean followed closely. They climbed up onto the platform and the tracks, and both looked up the slope that led to where the thing lay. From the new angle, Sam saw that it was dark, oddly shaped and wet with morning dew.
“That’s a body,” Dean said. “There’s a shoe.”
Yes, Sam saw, there was a white training shoe, small as a woman’s or a child’s. Now that he saw the foot, he also saw the leg in dark sweat pants, and the sweater that had ridden up, and the strangely delicate curve of a belly underneath.
Dean gave the ties a probing kick, found them solid enough and climbed to get a little closer. He wasn’t going to be able to go all the way - there was a large section missing. Sam had tried. However the person ended up there wasn’t without help.
“Be careful, Dean. It’s rotten.”
“Got it. Stay there.”
Sam knew better than to follow him up, order or no order. He backed away in the other direction, to the shallower slope where the carts used to roll back down to the platform. He felt numb and very cold. From the new angle he made out another shoe, and a bent knee, and there was a third one. Sam frowned, stretching his neck. It didn’t look like there was enough room on the tracks for more than one body.
“Aw, shit,” Dean said, voice small in the huge and empty park.
There was no fourth leg, because it grew at a bad angle, and a surgeon amputated it shortly after birth. Sam had finally climbed far enough, and now he saw Matt Westmoreland’s slack mouth and half-closed eyes. Luke’s face he couldn’t see from where he was standing.
Dean called the police from the gas station, like Sam did just the day before. Veronica stood by the counter with her hand clasped over her mouth the whole time. Sam bit his thumb nail and stared at the way Dean kept rubbing the bruise on his shoulder, under the shirt. They had to go back with the deputies and show exactly where they walked. Nobody mentioned the bite or the kiss, and Sam had no idea why he even thought of that. There was crime scene tape, a homicide detective showed up, and a forensics unit rolled in an hour later from Pittsburgh, as the county didn’t have its own. Sam kept waiting for Mrs. Westmoreland. No, the detective told him, nobody was going to call the mother to the scene. But Sam couldn’t shake the thought that she’d know, somehow.
~~~~
At night, after he was finally left alone, Sam went into his dark bedroom, lay down on the bed and clenched his fists and his jaw until it hurt, until he was shaking. He let it go, then did it again, wondering if he could actually break a tooth like this. It was a distant sort of wonder. Sam kept thinking of Mrs. Westmoreland, the kind, sweet woman who home schooled her kids but hired tutors for English because she was insecure about her second language. Mrs. Westmoreland, who fed him and smiled at him, and who was so scared when she found out that Sam took her sons to the theme park. She was going to have to talk to the police.
When he stopped feeling like there was unexploded tension in his body, Sam just stared at the tree branches against the piece of night sky he could see outside the window. Every time he closed his eyes, he saw the curve of the twins’ belly under the sweater. But he felt a little better, so he lay quietly and waited, figuring that he’d fall asleep eventually.
“Sam.”
Somehow, Dean managed to open the door without a sound. Sam lifted himself on his elbows and moved his legs to let Dean sit down on the edge of the narrow bed.
Dean cleared his throat. “Sorry about your friends, dude.”
“Yeah.” Sam stared at the ceiling, where the previous owners at some point put fluorescent stars that now glowed a faint green, like a pack of tiny ghosts. “I really didn’t know them that well.”
“What are you upset about then?”
Mrs. Westmoreland, he thought, the police, taking the twins to the park, the fucking roller coaster, wanting out of this life, recurrent nightmares about Dad. It was all of that, and it was probably also the shock of being stuck in the middle of a homicide investigation. He didn’t want to explain any of it to Dean. He shrugged.
“You and the drama, I swear.” Dean sighed, and Sam felt himself beginning to smile, though it was all dirty lies about him and the drama.
He freed one leg from the tangle of blankets and gave Dean a light kick on the shoulder, to make a statement. Dean caught his foot and tickled the bottom of it while sitting on Sam’s other leg to stop him from kicking, and he went on doing that until Sam was laughing.
“Well, since you’re done crying,” Dean said, after he finally let Sam’s foot go.
Sam kicked him in the shoulder again. “Fuck you.”
“Since you’re done, I talked to a buddy at the sheriff’s office.” Dean had buddies everywhere, made them almost instantly in every town they went to. “The coroner thinks it was a heart attack, from exertion. They had pretty fucked up hearts, apparently.”
They had septal defects and a pacemaker on Luke’s side, and they knew better than to climb roller coasters with that. “Dean, I tried to climb that loop, and I couldn’t. They’d never make it.”
Dean nodded. “Teenagers dying in the woods of apparently natural causes. That’s the case Dad is working.”
Is there anything to eat around here or what?
“Don’t call him yet.” Sam felt Dean’s suspicious look, even though he couldn’t really see it. He shrugged. “Let’s look into the roller coaster’s history first, so we’d have something to call with. He’s going to put us on that anyway, right?”
“Okay, point.” He stood up to leave. “Get some sleep.”
He wasn’t going to talk about it, Sam realized. He remembered then, with perfect clarity, the feel of Dean’s mouth against his, and his cold nose pressing into Sam’s cheek.
“Hey, sorry if I freaked you out earlier.”
Dean froze halfway to the door. “What?”
“You know, with the,” Sam shrugged, feeling stupid, “the kiss.”
“Okay. Just never do anything like that again.”
Oh, so not only was Dean not going to talk about it; he was going to bury it in the deepest dungeons of his memory, and perhaps he’ll dig it up every few years or so, to have a nightmare about getting a kiss from his brother. Like he didn’t have anything better to have nightmares about. Sam rolled his eyes. “You’re such a freak, man.”
“I’m a freak? You whip out incest, and I’m a freak?”
Sam felt his ears starting to glow and hoped it didn’t show in the dark like the stars on the ceiling. “Fuck you, incest! It was just a kiss. You’re my brother, Dean, I didn’t mean it like ‘Rip my clothes off, you manly man you!’” He delivered the last part in a high squeaky voice.
Dean stood silent for a moment, gaping at him, but the voice got a little chuckle out of him, and Sam saw the tension drain out of his shoulders. Sam flopped down on the bed and threw his arm over his eyes dramatically. “Oh, Dean, your emerald eyes kill me dead!” Sam kicked his feet in the air and clutched his heart. “I can’t take all this manly muscle! Take me, Dean, I’m yours!”
“Shut up, Sammy. Your boobs are too small.”
Sam felt his chest experimentally. “Aw, shit. I guess they are.”
~~~~
Once upon a time in Florida, there lived a wealthy land developer by the name of Thomas Atkins. Mr. Atkins made his fortune by selling pieces of tropical paradise to dreamers in the north in the early 1920s. He was a sharp and ruthless businessman and, in his private life, a convinced bachelor who mistrusted all women. He was even rumored to be a homosexual. Perhaps he was, and perhaps he wasn’t. Those rumors ended in 1922, when Mr. Atkins returned home from a pleasure trip around Africa with a pretty young thing on his arm, at least twenty years his junior.
(Gold-digger, Sam thought in the library, over his notes.)
Perhaps she was, and perhaps she wasn’t. The two were married a week later. The young woman’s name was Sarah Barnard, and she came from a long line of South African white landowners, though she was rumored to be part-black. It would’ve been a big scandal if those rumors were ever confirmed, but they never were. Sarah Atkins nee Barnard was the perfect hostess at social gatherings, a great lover of animals and an amateur botanist whose private garden was an object of wide admiration. She was, despite all of that, not well loved. Women found her strange; men found her crass and unladylike; and babies of both sexes cried in her presence.
In 1926, Florida’s real estate market had begun to collapse, and many land developers like Thomas Atkins went bankrupt. Atkins didn’t. He died suddenly of an aneurysm a year prior, leaving his considerable fortune to his wife. Young, exotic and newly rich, she was expected to remarry. Instead, she moved to Pennsylvania and started building an amusement park, at the heart of which was a wooden roller coaster. The project was quite a success and would’ve made her even richer. But only five months after the construction was finished, widow Atkins sold the park, withdrew all of her late husband’s money from the bank and dropped off the face of the earth, along with the two weird friends she picked up somewhere. Soon after, the Great Depression hit. It was as if Sarah Atkins could see the future.
Part Three .. Master Post