No Light Without Darkness 6/7
May 16th, 9am
Springroad Motel
Sebetha, Kansas
When Dean awoke he tried to shift his position to the side for his back was doing a pretty impressive job at torturing the life out of him. He turned slowly and found himself groaning and cursing through his still half sleeping mind as he had done the dumb move of shifting onto his hurting shoulder. Said body part gave a cry of pain that made him abandon the idea quickly. He lay on the bed back aching and arm howling not yet able to open his eyes. He felt like he hadn’t had enough sleep by far yet and he just wanted to drift off to sleep again. But that would not happen soon because what had awoken him were the aches and pains that crept all over his body. As he found his right arm not hurting - although he wasn’t sure if that were just because of the contrast the left one was creating - he tried again and shifted onto his not as pained side. His back was slightly relieved at that and he sighed trying to go back to sleep again and ignore the pounding of his shoulder in the beat of his pulse.
“Dean?”
That had to be Sam but Dean didn’t find it in him to open his eyes yet. So he only honored his brother with an off-tune grumble.
“Are you okay?”
He grumbled again and wanted to pull his blanket over his head but as he was lying on the one arm he could actually move safely he did not even try.
“Are you in pain?”
He gave up trying to sleep again because he really was in pain and being reminded of that instead of sleeping did not help the matter. He finally peeled his eyes half open and was slightly astonished to see is brother kneeling in front of the bed forehead set in a worried frown.
He drew a deep breath.
“How long have I been sleeping?”
He rolled back onto his back rubbing his weary eyes.
“A couple hours…”
He didn’t look but he knew that Sam was watching his every move. He would’ve too if their places were reversed but he still felt annoyed by it. So he decided to show his little brother there was nothing to worry his pretty little head about and started sitting up. He had to steady his body with the one arm working but got up pretty well while Sam was hovering over him hands at his sides but not touching him just waiting for the need to grip. Dean settled into sitting on the edge of his mattress. He made a point of slowly but steadily adjusting the sling around his left arm but couldn’t help a pained hiss as his joint was moved.
Sam stood back up again and grabbed a white capsule form the table.
“I got some pain medication that will not end in you loosing liters of blood.”
He opened it and handed Dean a big white pill. He was thankful enough for it and plopped it onto his tongue, taking the glass Sam passed him. He let his brother check the bandages and indeed the one around his arm needed changing again. He swore to never take aspirin again. Dean felt tired and weak - though hell’s army wouldn’t make him admit that - and as he looked into the mirror on the wall he found himself white as a ghost.
“Man, I look like Paris Hilton… after she got that stake through her forehead.”
Sam gave him a weak smile. Then he retrieved a little white bag from the table and started unpacking.
“You need to restore your blood count… I bought some nutrition supplements so you’ll be as good as new in no time.”
Dean raised his eyebrows as Sam all but forced him to swallow iron and vitamin pills.
“You know that I could also eat a steak and have a beer instead… which would also be good for my psyche and that empty pit in my stomach. Why can’t I have a busty red headed nurse in a short white outfit instead of a goofy looking kid like you?” He wiggled his eyebrows and grinned at Sam who seemed slightly relieved knowing that when Dean could be his old wise-ass self, the world was not going to end… yet.
“Yeah you probably could but it’s nine in the morning and I don’t think you find anyone who would make you a steak at this time of the day.”
“It’s WHAT? Holy moly… I must have slept like what? Twelve hours?”
Sam cocked his head estimating.
“More like fourteen.”
Dean gave him an unbelieving look.
“And why the hell didn’t you wake me?”
Sam only laughed.
“Sure. You hardly got up now so I should have woken you in the middle of the night just to prove a point and then let you faint on the bed again because there was nothing you could do up to now anyway…”
Dean gave him a death-glare though he wasn’t sure if it was up to his usual standards with one side of his forehead shimmering in the colors of the rainbow.
“I didn’t faint, dude.”
Sam’s face said ‘Whatever’ and the older Winchester huffed once before collecting the thoughts in his slowly waking mind.
“So what did you do all night all alone, geek boy? Anything worth heading to confession about?” Dean gave Sam a dirty grin.
“Sleeping for one… Oh, and of course finding every scrap of Golem-lore that could be dug up outside of library opening hours.”
“Golems… I can’t believe we’ve been forced into tactical retreat by what some evil hell-spawn has pieced together in its demonic sandbox.” He simply refused to call their retreat by it’s real name: flight.
“I think we’re save to say that at least it was one bad ass demonic sandbox.”
That perked Dean’s interest.
“So? How do you kill clay?”
“The only thing you’re interested in is how to snuff things, isn’t it Dean?”
Dean only rolled his eyes.
“No… But I do have some vengeance to administer. You saw what these things did to my car!”
Sam nodded shifting through notes of his apparently thorough research. Dean waited patiently not really feeling too keen on rushing anything at the moment where he had to move his body. Though that would not keep him from torching those bitches when having the chance…
“So Sherlock? Anything helpful?”
Sam looked up at him nodding.
“Plenty. There is lore about Golems and similar creatures in nearly every culture of the world…”
Dean was wondering how often he had actually heard that sentence before. At least this time Sam didn’t use terms like “anti-Claus”…
“There is the Greek legend of Pygmalion, a girl that an artist made from clay to be his perfect wife, then there are the statues of warriors given to great kings in their funerals so they would have an army even in the afterlife… and it goes on like that throughout the countries and times.”
“So what you’re saying is that there is too much lore to sort out the real deal?”
Sam shook his head.
“No. Actually there are some things that are repeating themselves throughout the legends… Apparently most Golems are made from clay and animated by a spell which is written on a scroll of parchment that is inserted in the Golems head.”
Dean thought that through.
“So every Golem is being animated by something… and whatever is behind those guys, I don’t think it’s a kitchen witch overdosing on the Prince-Charming-instant-dough. How do we find out who or what did it?”
Sam looked slightly exited as he knew the answer to that important question.
“Most lore believes that for the incantation to work the scroll also needs to contain the name of the puppet-master or the creator.”
That was making things easy.
“So we don’t even need to punch it out of them but just take a look at the scroll? Well that makes things less complicated.”
Sam nodded once more.
“So how do we kill them? Chop off that magic head of theirs?”
“Not enough. Although they cannot heal inflicted wounds the way living beings can obviously Golems are able to reassemble themselves as long as the body is mostly in one piece and the scroll is still intact… that means we have to get the scroll from their bodies.”
“We could always just torch ‘em?”
“You really are a pyromaniac. Dean, do you know what happens when you burn clay? It becomes solid. When it is then it will be pretty hard to remove those scrolls later on and read who’s the puppet-master…”
“And if they were real demonic handiwork then I can imagine that this freaky set of vases has been burned in purgatory already.”
Sam gave him a slightly weirded out look at this image.
“So how do we kill them?”
Sam gave a sigh and put away his papers looking at Dean with a grave look.
“The best way seems to be dissolving them in water.”
At that the older Winchester was walking the thin line between laughing and crying.
“Oh C’mon! I busted them both full of my best ammo and it didn’t even make them blink twice and now you’re telling me that a super-soaker will do the job?”
Sam shrugged.
“I was thinking more in the line of a high pressure cleaner but essentially, yeah.”
That was when Dean’s cell-phone started ringing and he was groping around his pockets to finally fish it out. He flipped it open.
“Yeah?”
“Dean! What the hell happened? I tried to reach you all day!”
It was Bobby’s voice greeting him and he remembered their conversation last night. Bobby was probably already halfway to Nebraska by now and Dean felt a little bad for not thinking of calling their friend back to tell him about their state of being.
“Hey there, Bobby. I was a little busy this morning.”
“Busy? Boy, be glad you are out of my reach or I would smack you right there! What HAPPENED?”
He scratched his head thinking of where to start. “I found Sammy. He’s alright but we think that we might have a little Golem problem at our hands…”
There was a moment of silence.
“Golem? As in clumps of clay animated by witchcraft?”
Dean laughed a little.
“Yeah, just that these Golems are the newest state of the art… they look exactly like us or at least they did until I shot off half of their faces…”
“Holy crap, boy! Do you know how powerful you have to be to make a golem that good? That would take a high level of craftsmanship.”
“You know us, Bobby, we never go for the low leagues.”
“Are you sure it is Golems?”
“Dead sure… I have a clay-made hand to proof it.”
“Then you’re in serious trouble boys.”
“You don’t say.”
May 17th, 0.30 am
24hours-Market
Kansas City, Kansas
“Sammy, you realize that the thing about the Super Soakers was just a joke, right?”
Dean looked at him slightly exasperated. They stood in front of a huge assortment of playthings looking for the water-pistols with the biggest capacity. Sam only shrugged. They needed to have a way of protecting themselves at least until they managed to lure the Golems closer to a bigger water source.
He loaded an assortment of the neon yellow and orange pseudo-weapons into the shopping cart that already held a few gallons of water in big plastic canisters and pushed it towards the cashier. The lady that typed in their shopping was in her mid-fifties and had short hair with silver and gray strands. She looked into the cart and grinned at them. “Your kid’s birthday party?”
She raised her eyebrows knowingly at Dean who looked at her with slowly widening eyes. His head snapped around to look at Sam. The woman seemed to understand that as a ‘No.’
“You are not some of those frat-boys planning on doing some nonsense with these, are you?”
Sam retrieved his fake-name credit card and handed it to the inquisitive sales woman.
“No, Ma’am. We’re not in college anymore.”
She nodded looking at Dean again with a knowing eye. Her face stated that she had thought Dean was too old to still be a frat-boy from the first moment anyway. Sam expected him to give her a snide remark. But he did not.
“Excuse me, but is there a building with a swimming-pool or a lake or anything like that close around?”
The question irritated Sam until he saw his brother’s cold look over the cashier towards the door. Dean had seen something. Sam’s heart-rate doubled.
The sales-woman frowned.
“The Ambassador’s Hotel down the street has a big pool but that one’s for guests only…”
Dean nodded.
“Yeah, of course. Thanks.”
He pushed Sam the other way they had come in ignoring the strange look she gave him. “I saw them. They’re waiting where we parked the Impala.”
Dean pulled his left arm from the sling with a small grunt and started filling the super soakers with water on their way to the far off exit.
“They’ll notice us not coming out any minute. We’ll have to make a run for it… We gotta reach the hotel before they cut off our path.”
Sam swallowed nodding.
“Okay. It was about two hundred yards down the street from what I saw.”
He took two of the water-guns and held them down like real side-arms. Dean did the same, rolling his shoulder slightly glad to be on a certain amount of pain killers. They pushed the cart through the exit. Only a few yards away half hidden in the shadows stood the Golem with Dean’s face. Sam pushed the cart right into its path as Dean already dashed down the street. The younger Winchester was close behind him, hearing the Golem slam into the shopping cart only a second later. He caught up with his brother within a few steps as Dean was still slightly weakened and just didn’t have the same length to his steps in comparison to Sam’s long legs.
To his astonishment Dean pulled on the speed as soon as he was next to him. He still seemed to have some secret reserve.
If they had learned one thing then it was this: Golems are vicious and strong and pretty good at method acting… but they are not so fast that a Winchester couldn’t run away from them. So here they were sprinting down the main street as fast as their feet could carry them followed by the grotesque twin set of themselves which would have passed as their reflections were they not sporting the holes Dean had shot into them. It was slightly annoying to be chased by the fake remake of yourself after spending so much good ammunition that they should rattle like a coin purse.
Sam felt slightly ridiculous. If he didn’t know it was part of the plan, then this might have looked like they were fleeing. But they were not. They fell back. There was a difference between the two at least if he’d asked Dean.
The Ambassador’s Hotel looked like the kind of place they had never stayed in and never would. It was a huge building with about a dozen floors and an expensive looking entrance. Their luck was that it was already fairly late so there was no-one to bump into as they sprang up the stairs and through the huge glass doors. Dean didn’t miss a beat as a emcee came up looking at them sceptically which was actually not so surprising them being two young ragged looking men carrying children’s water pistols.
“Can I help you?”
Dean took the shield position next to the door as Sam pulled the elder man away from the entrance.
“Where’s the pool?”
The emcee looked not amused.
“Our pent house pool is not for public use, young man.”
“A pent house pool? As in all the way up? Man, you’re shitting me…”
That much to Dean’s reaction… He turned around and ran toward the elevators pushing every button.
The doors flew open and the two Golems entered the hotel lobby. They looked pissed that much was clear. But the looks were probably strengthened by the missing parts of their faces where Dean had made some new holes for ventilation purposes.
A thump sounded behind him and he saw the emcee fainted on the floor. Shot off faces do that to people. Normal people at least. One person less to worry about. They simultaneously brought up their weapons and pulled the trigger. The Golems didn’t scream or try to run and hide… actually the water guns had less of an impression on them as Sam had hoped, but he saw the familiar faces of his brother and him melt under the water into a mask that looked like some model’s peeling mud bath.
“Well, well, well if it isn’t the Wicked Witch of the West…,” said Dean. The Golems walked on towards them uncaring especially as their guns ran out much too fast.
“We should have brought a bucket, Dorothy!”
The Golems jumped at them just as Dean had finished his trademark cocky comment and Sam and Dean dived to the sides. The Golems had split them up and were standing in between the brothers now.
“Man, are you sure we shouldn’t have torched them instead?”
Sam couldn’t see Dean’s moves as he was trying to avoid being gripped and ripped to shreds by the Golem that once had had his face. He tried to slip around it but had to throw himself down on the floor scrambling behind one of the seats in the lobby’s waiting area as a huge - and probably also hugely expensive - vase went flying for his head. As he jumped back to the feet, he found himself only feet from the door leading to the staircase and right next to that there was a little niche in the wall holding a fire extinguisher. Sam leaped for it as he heard the ring of the arriving elevator. He gripped the handle and hauled the fire extinguisher from its fixed place, hardly able to sidestep a side table that smashed against the wall where he had just stood. He pulled the safety and brought the fire extinguisher up to eye level but the Golem was already half over him. He swung the heavy would-be weapon and slammed it against the clay-man’s head, flinging him back a few feet. He could see Dean in front of the elevators throwing his now useless water gun at the slowly closing in Golem.
“Dean, take the elevator! I’ll come via stairway!”
To emphasize his point pulled the handle of the fire extinguisher at the Golem that was coming at him again. A white fountain sprang from its end and clouded the sight. Sam didn’t hesitate and slammed through the door wedging it with the fire extinguisher from the inside as soon as he had shoved it shut again and running up the stairs taking three steps at once. He had just passed the first landing when he heard the door busting open under the insult of superhuman strength and he tried to go even faster… those were a lot of stairs.
Dean grabbed the Chinese looking vase with the huge bouquet of red and white flowers and smashed it on the Golem’s head. Water and shattered china went flying and he kicked his attacker backwards ere storming into the elevator pushing the button of the top floor and the door-closing-switch at the same time. The elevator doors shut just as Dean saw the Golem leap. The gap closed and he heard a loud thump at the impact of the clay-made hell-puppet against the steel doors.
Dean leaned against the elevator wall. Soft non-distinctive music was flowing from an invisible sound-system and he saw himself from all angles as the elevator cabin was clad out with mirrors. He looked like crap. But well, what did you expect? His shoulder hurt like a sonofabitch and he had just performed the sprint of his life. The numbers over the door indicating the floor it was passing grew steadily and combined with the esoteric music, it was like hypnosis. He shook his head after a minute pulling his eyes away. He checked the button he had pushed. A silver label stated it to be the “roof terrace”. The pool was actually one floor below on the penthouse level. He reached out his hand to push the button when there was a creaking bump beneath him shaking the whole cabin. “Holy crap!”
He knew that this could only mean one thing. The Golem had actually entered the elevator shaft. He made a hasty push at the right button, only a couple of floors to go. There was a loud crash from beneath him and the floor shook dangerously. Dean backed away from the source of the noise. Another loud screeching bump sounded and the floor started to budge at one edge of the cabin while it swayed sickeningly somewhere between the 13th and 14th floor. Dean’s eyes flew upwards and he saw the emergency flap. It was a painful and straining exercise but Dean managed to climb onto the rail that went along the side of the cabin and open the flap without being thrown down by the sways and the jerks the cabin made while the floor was slowly being pried open by the sandman from hell.
He nearly got flung to said floor as the cabin tipped sideways at the next jerk and his heart-rate sped up considerably. He saw through the opening in the roof that one of the two cables holding the cabin had ripped. This was bad. The second cable wouldn’t withstand the tons this elevator weighed for very long and Dean could hear his countdown approaching zero as the game master’s clock was ticking faster and faster. He ignored his painful shoulder and flung himself at the opening pulling his body though with a tremendous amount of effort and groans. By that time they had almost reached the top floor and Dean was about two yards underneath the exit to the roof terrace. There was another metallic groan and to his utter horror he saw the steel fibres of the second wire unwind before his eyes screaming “Game Over” to his face. He gripped the remnants of the already ripped cable and pulled himself up to the exit holding on for dear life while trying to push open the steel doors. Then the second cable gave way and with a screeching moan that was loud enough to wake the dead the elevator cabin started to descent… and a hell of a lot faster then Dean would have ever wanted to see. It scratched the cement walls around it with whining metal screaks and then smashed about fifteen floors below in a crash that made Dean’s ears ring and his body shake. All he could do was not letting go in order to cover his ears… he wouldn’t have been surprised to find blood run from them.
A cloud of dust and smothering dark smoke wafted upwards and he hurriedly forced the doors open - which was a thing of near impossibility while holding onto the wire - and fell out into the not as dusty and steely night air, breathing it in for a few seconds not even caring that he had slammed hard onto the expensive looking tiles of the roof terrace.
Next Chapter
FEEDBACK please, yes I do beg.
A/N: This chapter’s title is “Back in Black” from AC/DC as we have heard it in the “Pilot” and “Bloodlust” when we could enjoy Dean’s close relationship with the Impala… Who doesn’t love the Metallicar??