Supernatural 10 - Rite of Passage (30 page)

“What the hell?” Dean said.

Sam saw it too. “The ground’s opening up.”

Fractures and cracks snaked across the asphalt parking lot, expanding into crevices wide enough to capture car tires and human legs. What worried Dean was the logjam of cars whose drivers inched impatiently toward the exits.

“Dude, I’ve got a bad feeling,” Dean said grimly. “All those cars.”

Sam nodded. “Oni bombs.”

As Sam spoke, a car’s rear end dropped a foot. Metal screeched as the axle broke, spraying sparks.

Dean raced across the parking lot, yelling, “Leave your cars! Get out! Run!”

Sam ran in the other direction, shouting similar instructions.

A cop caught Dean by the arm. “Hey, buddy!”

Dean whirled to face him. “Get everyone out of this lot now!”

“Yes, in an orderly—”

“No time for that!” Dean said. “These cars are gonna blow!”

“We’re trying to avoid a riot here, pal.”

“Use your loudspeaker,” Dean insisted. “Get them out now!”

“Listen here—”

With the sound of tortured metal, another car fell into a new crevice. Someone yelled, “Fire!”

An instant later, a gas tank explosion lifted the car in the air with a roaring fireball.

The cop released Dean and raced for his cruiser. A moment later he was instructing everyone over the loudspeaker to abandon their vehicles and run from the lot.

About friggin’ time,
Dean thought.

He flinched as another explosion roared thirty feet away. A burning piece of car shrapnel whistled past his face. “Son of a bitch!” he exclaimed, ducking instinctively.

That was lucky,
he thought.
Another inch or two and …

Dean scanned the surging crowd intently.

“Where the hell are you?” he whispered. “Come out, come out, wherever …”

Everyone was running and stumbling toward the exits, a sea of panic and raw fright. Against that wave of frantic motion, one tall, calm figure stuck out like a sore thumb. The oni stood on the far side of the gated parking lot, near a blue van with a broad white stripe, the handle of a cane held under his overlapping hands. He no longer wore a bowler hat. Dean could clearly see a wave of bright red hair with two bone-white horns angled backward over a lumpy forehead. And in the middle of his forehead—

“Okay, that’s new.”

Dean’s cell phone was ringing. With all the other human and mechanical sounds washing over him, he almost missed it. After checking the number on the display, he pressed the connect button.

“Bobby!” he exclaimed. “Where the hell are you?”

Static warped the voice on the other end.

“… with McClary at stadium … see the sumbitch … the fence …”

“Yeah, he’s hard to miss,” Dean said. “Two horns and three eyes.”

“… meet … stop …”

The call dropped before Dean could answer.

He cupped his hands over his mouth and called Sam, pointing when he had his brother’s attention. They sprinted toward the fence.

Dean saw an abandoned cherry-red Ford F-150 pickup truck with the driver’s door wide open and had an idea.

Twenty-Six

Bobby rode with McClary in his cruiser, buckled up and hanging on in the cramped front seat as McClary raced through red lights with his siren blaring and took turns so sharply the car’s suspension was pushed to the limit. With the oni’s power at work, Bobby worried a catastrophic accident was inevitable. At the speeds McClary was attaining, a fatal head-on collision or multiple rollovers were distinct possibilities.

Once the extent of the stadium collapse had become evident, based upon the progressively dire string of emergency calls coming into the station, McClary abandoned the traffic and security cam feed monitors, placing greater importance on his presence at the disaster scene. For him, the decision was a no-brainer. Why examine camera feeds looking for the oni when it had basically announced where it was? Bobby agreed, but wanted to arrive in one unbroken
piece. Though McClary had accepted the supernatural nature of this particular perp, Bobby doubted he fully appreciated the consequences of dealing with a creature that could tilt the odds so drastically in its favor.

When McClary swerved into oncoming traffic to get around a line of cars blocking the passing lane and nearly slammed into a Chevy Silverado before darting back, Bobby spoke up. “We’re playing with rigged dice here, Sergeant.”

McClary frowned. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“This oni specializes in bad accidents,” Bobby reminded him, “and you’re dealing him face cards.”

McClary eased up on the accelerator a bit and nodded nervously. “Right. Right. The crazy stuff. I keep forgetting.”

His NASCAR tryout would have been interrupted in a couple of blocks anyway, as panicked drivers exiting the stadium snarled up traffic in all directions, maneuvering through the congestion as if blindfolded. The harsh crunch of metal on metal sounded repeatedly as erratic driving led to a string of fender benders. Nobody stopped to exchange insurance information. By some unspoken mutual agreement, their only concern was fleeing the disaster area as quickly as possible.

If McClary hadn’t been forced to slow down, Bobby might have missed the oni, standing calmly outside the parking lot fence on Ellisburg Pike near a blue van with a white stripe. He still wore the dark suit and held his ironbound cane in a two-handed grip, but the bowler hat was gone, revealing the twin bone-like horns, which Bobby judged had grown longer since their last encounter.

“We got him,” Bobby said, pointing.

He called Dean’s cell, but the connection crackled with static and became fainter the closer McClary’s cruiser came to the oni. Bobby caught the sergeant’s arm and nodded toward the tall figure.

“Look how focused he is.”

“Like he’s in a trance,” McClary observed.

“Let’s not spook him.”

McClary nodded, turning on his lightbar without sounding his siren as he edged across three lanes of traffic and parked at the curb a hundred feet from the oni.

Bobby followed McClary to the trunk of the cruiser.

“Let’s change this up,” McClary said, switching out the magazine in his automatic. “Armor-piercing rounds,” he explained. “These might cut through that impenetrable hide of his.” He handed Bobby the shotgun. “Try this on him.”

“Well, I won’t miss,” Bobby said as he hefted the shotgun, “that’s for damn sure.”

They hurried along the curb, McClary giving Bobby a wide berth.

Inside the parking lot, another car exploded in a prodigious ball of flame, the roar rising briefly over the sound of emergency sirens and car alarms. People screamed and staggered toward the exit, squeezing between and climbing over abandoned cars. Beneath them, the ground vibrated with fluctuating intensity, like waves breaking on the shore, retreating, and surging again. Bobby wondered if the oni could create destructive harmonic patterns in the earth.

When they were within twenty feet of the oni, McClary
stopped and raised the automatic in his right hand, braced with his left palm. Conscious of the real possibility of friendly fire in this situation with this particular opponent, Bobby stepped several paces to the side.

The crumbling stadium held the oni’s attention, seemingly to the exclusion of all else.

Now or never,
Bobby thought.

“Die, you motherless bastard,” McClary said an instant before he squeezed the trigger. Bobby followed a split-second later with a blast from the shotgun.

As Dean had guessed, the driver of the red pickup had abandoned the truck in such a rush that they had left the keys in the ignition. Dean unlocked the passenger door for Sam—who jumped in a moment later—before trying to start the engine. His first attempt failed. On his second attempt, the engine turned over briefly, then stalled.

“No, no, no,” Dean said bitterly. “This is small potatoes.”

“Dean?”

“It’s a theory.”

“I’m all ears.”

“A disaster this size, I’m betting the oni is redlined,” Dean said, “maxed out. He might be vulnerable now, if we hit him fast.”

“You know this how?”

“A piece of shrapnel whizzed by my ear.”

“And … ?”

“It didn’t hit me,” Dean said. “An inch to the left and I’d have a skull skylight. I was
lucky
.”

Sam nodded, understanding. “You think he’s spinning too many plates.”

“In his case, juggling too many hatchets.”

“Dean!”

Dean saw it. Bobby and McClary were on the other side of the fence, sneaking up on the oni as he focused on orchestrating the stadium collapse and exacerbating the ensuing mayhem. McClary aimed high and took a head shot. From where the brothers sat, it looked like he hit the oni, whose head twitched to the side, but inflicted no apparent damage, before Bobby hit him with a shotgun.

They finally had the oni’s attention.

The oni turned toward its attackers and McClary proceeded to empty his magazine, aiming high with no evident effect. One of the bullets ricocheted, gouging a furrow in the side panel of the van. Another ricochet sprayed sparks off the ground.

The oni walked toward the two men, raising his cane. Bobby worked the pump-action shotgun and sprayed him from head to toe as he advanced.

Dean tried the ignition once more and this time the engine turned over, running roughly for a few moments then roaring to life as he gave it gas.

“Buckle up!”

He glanced up and saw the oni catch McClary by the wrist of his gun hand and squeeze. As McClary grimaced in pain, Bobby pressed the shotgun muzzle under the oni’s chin and fired his last shell. The oni released McClary, who dropped to his knees, and swung his cane in a backhanded
blow, dislodging the shotgun from Bobby’s hands. With his free hand, the oni grabbed the front of Bobby’s suit, lifted him bodily off the ground and hurled him into the highway. Bobby slammed lengthwise against the windshield of a gray Subaru Outback, fracturing the safety glass, and rolled down the hood of the car.

Dean shifted the pickup into gear and floored the accelerator, racing toward the spiked iron fence and gaining speed every foot of the way. He aimed the front of the pickup at the small gap between two sections of fence closest to the oni.

Sam braced his hand against the dashboard.

Time seemed to slow down.

Looking at the tips of the spiked fence, Dean tried not to think about all the ways the collision could go wrong. He hoped his theory of the oni maxing out his mojo was sound, and tried to coax a little extra bit of speed out of the pickup.

Two seconds before impact, the oni turned toward the truck, his back to the blue and white van. He raised the ironbound cane in both hands and swung the pointed tip toward Dean’s head.

The pickup slammed into the iron fence and, after a brief moment of resistance, the two sections swung apart and down like a mangled gate. As the pickup burst through the gap, Dean ducked his head below the dash, unimpeded by airbags that, naturally, failed to deploy.

The pickup seemed to slam into a wall. Dean and Sam were hurled bodily against their seatbelts then fell backward in unison.

Groggily, Dean looked up and saw what appeared to be a bullet hole through the windshield directly in front of where his face had been. The center of the hood had crumpled in a U-shape.

“Where’s the … ?”

Sam rubbed the side of his head and looked around. “Bobby?”

The Ford’s engine had stalled. Dean shifted the transmission into park and climbed gingerly out of the cab.

McClary was kneeling by the side the road, doubled over in pain as he clutched his injured wrist against his chest. Walking past him, Dean scanned the street. The gray Subaru hadn’t moved after Bobby smashed the windshield. Dean’s gaze traveled forward several yards, his heart in his throat, until he spotted Bobby, lying motionless in the middle of Ellisburg Pike.

Bringing down the stadium from several hundred yards away had taken all Tora’s concentration and power. In comparison, the pedestrian overpass collapse had been simple. He had been in physical contact with the overpass and the structure was simplistic. With the stadium, he had attacked from a distance to avoid interruption by the fleeing masses and to give himself, appropriately enough, a larger playing field on which to wreak havoc. His third eye guided his destructive power to where it would cause the greatest damage, and his
kanabo
, currently molded into the shape of a cane with an ironbound handle and tip, directed the waves of force to the intended targets.

While his third eye became dominant—and he reveled in the destruction it facilitated—his other senses lost priority. A human might have described his state of consciousness as a trance. As a result of his inattention, the two men he remembered from the previous night’s car chase snuck up on him. The one in the uniform fired bullets at close range that actually stung the oni. Though they couldn’t break his skin, they did break his concentration. Then the other man fired the shotgun at him, another distracting annoyance.

He broke the wrist of the lawman and would have ripped the offending gun hand off that wrist if the other man hadn’t fired his shotgun—as if the weapon could harm him, even with the muzzle pressed against his skin. After batting away the toy, he tossed the older man aside like an impudent child.