THIRTY-SEVEN

Sarah Rafferty grabbed hold of the flatcar and pulled herself up until she was standing next to the Gatling gun mounted there on a turret. Sheriff Daniels was already positioned behind it, inspecting the gun’s hand-crank. She grabbed the lever in both hands and struggled to turn it, pushing down with all her weight, but the mechanism was frozen in place.

“You think this is going to work?” Sarah said.

“Do I think...” Leaning out of the locomotive’s cab, Dean glanced down at Sam. “Tell ‘em, Sammy.”

“Tell me what?”

“Dean loves Clint Eastwood movies,” Sam said.

Sarah stared at the Winchester brothers.

“What am I missing?”

“Ever see The Gauntlet?” Dean asked.

“No, I don’t think so.”

Dean rolled his eyes. “No appreciation for the classics. Okay, Eastwood plays a washed-up cop bringing back an ex-hooker who’s testifying against this corrupt big-city police commissioner. All he has to do is get the witness back alive. Except the commish has every cop on the force out waiting for Eastwood and they’re armed to the teeth, turning the streets of downtown Phoenix into the world’s biggest shooting gallery. So Clint shows up on the outskirts of town in a clanking old Greyhound bus that he’s tricked out with sheet metal over the windshield, and he and his witness have to run the gauntlet.”

He looked at the women expectantly. Sarah and Sheriff Daniels were both staring at him blankly.

Sarah spoke first.

“And this is supposed to make me feel better how?”

Dean started to answer with something witty and sarcastic, when he turned to take his first good look around the steam engine’s cab.

Suddenly he wasn’t so sure either.

The massive iron boiler in front of him looked as big as a house. Gauges, levers, valves and pipes sprouted out from it in every direction. A chunky thing that looked like an aluminum teapot with a brass handle stuck out by his legs. Down below, the ancient firebox hung open, cold and dead like the mouth of a giant, exhaling the long-lost coal vapors from fuel that had burned up a century before.

Come on. Get ahold of yourself, he said silently. It’s just internal combustion, right? How different can it be from the Impala?

He grabbed the big lever that ran horizontally across the cab from left to right. It had to be the throttle. Gripping in both hands, he jerked on it as hard as he could.

It didn’t budge.

“Uh, Sam?”

Sam climbed through the empty coal car into the cab with the bloody wads of bundled up bandages in his arms.

“You better hang on.”

“What? Why—”

Without bothering to answer, Sam shoved half the demon-blood stained rags through the fire door into the empty box, slammed the metal grate, and stepped back.

Nothing happened.

He and Dean stood momentarily silent, looking at it.

“I think when Doug Henning did this trick,” Dean said, “it worked out better.”

“Hang on.” Sam bent down and peered through the slots in the grate. He could see the rags piled up in there. They didn’t appear to have changed.

Pulling the fire door open again, he picked up a long iron poker that was leaning against the boiler and stuck it inside, extending it slowly toward the pile of fabric. He nudged it gently, like a kid poking a sleeping snake with a stick.

“I don’t get it.” He pushed harder, the tip of the poker scraping across the metal floor, throwing up sparks. “Maybe it needs more bl—”

The rags exploded.

It was like a rocket going off inside a tinderbox. Flame shot out of the fire door in a thick jet of blue headed right toward Sam’s face. At the last instant he jolted sideways, the poker flying from his hand, clattering across the floor, and for a dizzying second his equilibrium was gone and he almost fell out of the cab.

Dean’s hand swung down and grabbed his collar, pulling him back.

“Shut the door!” Sam shouted. “Get it closed!”

Dean grabbed the poker and rammed it forward, aiming at the grate again and clapping it shut. Blue flames spewed and flickered eagerly out of the slots, writhing like serpents’ tongues.

All around them, the railway cab gave a massive shudder and a sharp clank. Dean could hear the sound of old iron as the air around him filled with churning smoke, steam creaking through the engine’s pipes, its valves straining under long forgotten pressure. The needles sprang to life on the gauges in front of him, twitching and arrowing upward in great optimistic leaps.

He could see tiny puffs of vapor hissing from the boiler’s seams.

Dean clung onto a pipe, felt it growing hotter in his hand until he couldn’t hold on any longer. He leaned out of the doorway. One of the women—Dean thought it was the sheriff—was shouting up at him from the flatcar.

“What’s going on? Is it working?”

Before he could answer, the locomotive jerked forward. In July 1938, the locomotive Mallard set the land speed record for steam on a run from London’s King’s Cross station, England, on the East Coast Main Line. Officials clocked her at a hundred and twenty-six miles per hour before the engine’s bearings started to overheat and the engineer had to slow it down. “Any more speed, lads,” he’d supposedly told his fireman, “and we’d be sitting down for a kip with the Almighty Himself.”

When the Winchesters saw the outskirts of Mission’s Ridge coming up in front of them, they weren’t traveling quite that fast—probably only eighty, although it felt like a hundred up in the cab, where Dean had the throttle all the way open. The whistle screamed steadily overhead. The other valve-control was a hand-release lever called the Johnson bar. A half-mile from downtown, Dean had his Johnson running full-tilt, as well.

Within minutes, they’d be there.

The train rocketed hard down the tracks, pistons pounding, chuffing smoke. It was impossible not to think of it as a living thing. Dean held the regulator steady at maximum as the last of the woods blurred past them, giving way to houses and farms.

“Dean!”

Standing up in the cab, his eyes tearing up from the wind and velocity, Sam had to shout to be heard.

“We have to stop!”

“What?”

“Stop!”

“That’s crazy! It—”

Then Dean saw why.

Up ahead in the distance, where the first storefronts and shops marked the beginning of Mission’s Ridge proper, the tracks were covered with bodies.

And some of them appeared to be still alive.

McClane had gotten the idea at the last moment, looking at the poor bastard impaled in front of Blockbuster. He’d heard the locomotive’s whistle shrieking off in the distance and understood immediately how the Winchesters were bringing the noose back to the church.

Kneeling down in the middle of Main Street, resting his hands on the rails, he could already feel them humming.

“Quick!” he said. “Somebody get me some kids!”

They were tied to the tracks.

Dean could see the faces from a hundred yards away, though for a moment his mind refused to accept it. A little blonde girl in a blue dress and white tights, her face a pale porcelain sculpture of pure terror.

Behind her, arms and legs tied, were maybe a dozen other children from town, all looking up and screaming—some silently, others not. His heart froze. A single thought pulsed through his mind—Where are their parents?—but the answer was already there, pounding like the wheels underneath them.

Possessed. Or worse.

Dead. Dead. Dead.

Dean grabbed the air brake and yanked it back as hard as he could. Tortured metal howled. The engine lurched hard, its couplings slamming together between the cars, pistons fuming, wheels grinding, dumping off showers of sparks in every direction, but still ramming forward, ensnared in its own momentum.

“There’s not enough time!” Sam shouted.

The train scraped on, brake shoes hissing as the locomotive slithered inexorably down Main Street on insufficient friction. They were slowing down—twenty, now fifteen miles per hour—but the process was taking too long. Dean stood at the brake, his mouth pinched into an expression of absolute concentration, as if he could somehow stop their progress through sheer force of will.

Sam jumped.

Dean didn’t even realize Sam had done it until he saw his brother, not just running, but flat-out sprinting, ahead. He saw something flash in Sam’s hand, it looked like a pair of pliers, and then he was actually moving along the rails in front of the locomotive.

Reaching the blonde girl tied to the tracks, Sam pushed the pliers down and started snapping ropes, chopping through them as fast as he could. Once freed, the girl sprang up tearfully, and he turned to the next child, a five-year-old boy in a ripped t-shirt and grubby red shorts.

He got the boy’s arms free, but his legs were slick with sweat and grease from the tracks, and he wouldn’t hold still. Then Sam got it, and the boy scrabbled away.

He moved on to the next one, but behind him now, he could feel the bulk of the train roaring closer, not just shaking the rails but pounding them, shocking them to life with a steady, awful vibration of unthinkable force and power.

He looked up at the rest of the children. So many of them—too many of them—ten more at least, each tied tightly and separately into place.

They were all staring straight at him.

The shadow of the train swept down. And Sam Winchester understood he wouldn’t be able to save them all.

He turned around and looked.

The train was still coming.

Fifty feet away.

Thirty.

Twenty.

He stood paralyzed, riveted to the spot. Fate seemed to be pointing its skeletal finger directly at him. For one illogical moment he considered throwing himself down on the tracks in the hope of providing the last necessary bit of obstruction. Maybe it would save the last kid in line. Maybe it would—

He shut his eyes.

With a final scraping squeal, the engine halted.

He looked up again. It was less than three feet in front of him. He could have reached out and touched the cowcatcher.

“Sam!” Dean shouted, from up in the cab. “Cut those kids loose! We’re sitting—”

Then, from the upper windows of Main Street, the first gunshots rang out.

The adrenaline was on him now, and Sam worked fast, his trembling hands moving with almost superhuman speed. But he wasn’t fast enough. Two of the kids were injured, one cut by his pliers, the other hit in the leg by a stray bullet.

When he glanced around, Dean was next to him with Ruby’s knife, and they hunched together slashing the ropes in quick deliberate swipes, getting the kids loose and pushing them hard toward the nearest open doors on the far side of the street.

They could feel bits of sidewalk and asphalt spitting up at them as the muskets fired.

Sam didn’t need to look up to know what was happening.

Demons were shooting down from both sides, spanking the concrete with a hail of grapeshot.

They’re shooting around me, he thought. They still don’t want to harm the vessel.

When he flicked his gaze up again, he saw the last of the children ducking into the shelter of a restaurant called Whotta Lotta Pizza. Ten seconds later, the pizza parlour window burst apart under heavy gunfire. He hoped—prayed—that the kids were smart enough to stay down.

Hemmed in by bullets and utterly exposed, Sam looked at Dean. He could see the soldiers now and realized that the first fusillade of shots had been playful, meant to instill fear. But playtime was over. They were crouching in windows and standing on top of buildings, and the comparison to The Gauntlet wasn’t just some rallying cry anymore. It was happening, and they were in the middle of it.

We’re dead meat, he thought. Or at least Dean is.

Suddenly, from the flatcar at the back of the train, he heard a new sound, a mechanical clanking noise. A steady stream of blasts accompanied it, as if someone back there had just opened up with a machine gun.

What the—

Before Sam understood what was happening, the demons started falling. From above, along the rooftops, they dropped their weapons and were pitching backward in every direction, flung aside in twitching ballistic dances. Sagging, they went limp and then fell forward, plummeting to earth as if they themselves were no more than Hell’s own re-enactors, playing out their own Light-bringer’s famous descent from grace.

He glanced back at the flatcar.

Sheriff Daniels was standing behind the Civil War Gatling gun, turning the crank with a fierce concentration. The smoking barrels rotated steadily, spitting out a firestorm upward and around. The iron shafts were gleaming with a pale scarlet color where they’d been wiped down with the bloody rags.

Daniels worked the crank faster. Behind her, Sarah Rafferty held the turret of the gun, rotating the sheriff around to spray the upper rooftops.

The sheriff saw Sam watching her, and took one hand off the gun, pawing violently at the air.

“Get moving,” she shouted. “Run!”