Day 8: Heartless
Suptober20
Tags: Sam POV, OFC, original MOTW, casefic
Sam looked puzzled. “Whatever this is, it’s not a werewolf,” he mused.
“I mean, it’s a textbook werewolf attack, right?” Dean seemed out-of-sorts; physically, he was here, but ever since they arrived in town, he’d had his head buried in his phone.
“But check out the chest wound.”
Dean peered at the corpse on the table. “There. Isn’t one.”
“Right? The coroner’s report clearly states that the guy had been mauled, so when she said he was heartless, I just assumed... This is something else.”
“Yep, something else,” Dean muttered.
Sam was officially past wondering about his brother’s level of disengagement and was now pushing into perturbed territory. “Listen, Dean, I don’t know what is so fascinating about your phone, but can you at least try to pay attention? This thing, whatever it is, is still out there!”
Dean jerked his head up. “Huh? Whatever.” He drifted out the door, back to the coroner’s office, Sam presumed.
Until he heard a shout. A struggle. A gruff snarling growl and higher pitched pleading.
“Dr Colby?” Sam raced to the outer offices, looking for the source of the sound. “Dean? Where are you?” He pulled up short at the door to the lobby. A woman lay panting on the floor, deep claw marks on her arms, torso, face. Just like the body now lying in the morgue.
“You’re the receptionist, right?” The woman nodded, feebly. “Who did this to you? Did you see your attackers?”
“Attacker. One attacker.” She struggled to sit upright. Sam extended a hand; she took it. Then she looked him dead in the eyes. “It was the other agent. Agent DeYoung. He went that way,” she rasped, pointing out towards the street.
He hated to leave her alone like this but what choice did he have? Either Dean was possessed or something was wearing his face. He had to catch up to him.
“I’ll send help. Promise.”
He got to the car without seeing any trace of Dean. He tried shouting for him; no answer. His phone went to voicemail. Sam checked for his location.
He stopped cold.
Dean was still in the building!
He ran back inside, suddenly aware that the once-bustling lobby was deserted. No one waiting to speak to a clerk, and no clerks either. He felt a chill, and he was fairly certain it wasn’t a cold spot. Something was very wrong here.
“Dean!” He passed the place where he’d left the coroner’s receptionist, but she was gone, not so much as a bloodstain to indicate that she’d ever been there. “Dean!” He shoved open every door in the hallway and found nothing but uninhabited offices. Like everyone had simply gone home for the day. At two in the afternoon on a very ordinary Thursday. “Dean!”
He returned to the morgue. The body was gone! Again, no trace of blood.
Sam had to stop, had to collect himself. He propped himself against an unoccupied desk and squeezed his eyes shut. What did he know? Dean was being weird, an entire office building of regular government employees had seemingly fucked off to who-knows-where, and two deeply wounded persons, one of whom was actually dead, had vanished.
The hearts.
He reached deep into his memory. Hadn’t there been some saint that had been fatally mauled by wolves, only to rise from the dead and proclaim that he’d been resurrected by God himself? Yes. He died many years later of old age, and his body was miraculously preserved as a relic. Just a few years ago, the Church had ordered a restoration of his remains, and the preservation experts performed a CT scan. Turns out, the sainted mummy had no heart. No chest wounds (his body was otherwise intact), nor could the scientists point to any intentional mummification processes to explain the absence.
Shortly thereafter, the remains were lost. Supposedly, the hospital where they ran the tests sent him off for cremation, but there was no paper trail to corroborate the story. Folks chalked it up to general ineptitude and didn’t think to follow up.
What if the mummy wasn’t dead, though? What if it had escaped and was now stalking St Louis, turning people, making them disappear.
No. Making them not care.
The monster inflicted apathy on bystanders. Then it- what? Shredded the victims? Stole their hearts out of their ribcages, without ever breaking the skin?
A thought occurred to him, and he suddenly understood what was happening.
He had to find Dean.
In the employee parking lot behind the building, Sam hit the jackpot. At least twenty drivers sitting in their cars, all engrossed in their phones or staring quietly into space, all with looks of barely simmering frustration. Among them, lounging against a dumpster (gross) was Dean. He was still unharmed! But still glued to his screen.
Sam didn’t bother to attract his attention. Somewhere, one of these zombies was actually a centuries-old mummy. Kill the sire, break the spell? He could only hope. But how to pick him out?
He spotted the receptionist in a late-model sedan, one that struck him as just a bit pricier than a municipal staffer might typically afford. She and three passengers had the same posture as everyone else in the parking lot: head down, eyes glazed, empty.
He knocked on her window, and she jumped, startled. None of the other people in the car moved a muscle. He recognized Dr Colby among them. He motioned for her to roll down the window. “Sandy, right?” He asked. “Glad to see you recovered so quickly.” She squinted up at him but said nothing. “Listen, Sandy, I wonder if you have a key to the morgue. I think I left my wallet in there.”
“How careless,” came a deep voice, spoken by her and not at all.
He tried not to grimace. He forced a smile instead. “Yeah, I’d lose my own head if it wasn’t attached. So can you let me in?”
“One moment please,” the voice rumbled. A receptionist’s words in the voice of an ancient malevolent evil.
Sam smiled again.
The receptionist unfolded herself from the car and stepped briskly to the employee entrance. She tapped a key card from the lanyard around her neck.
As the door chirped its welcome, Sam plunged a red-tinged knife into the hollow at the base of her skull. “Heartless One, I name you false saint. With the blood of an unbled victim, you die.”
The monster gave one last scream, rising suddenly to the scream of the human receptionist, Sandy, before both voices were caught on the wind and carried away. The knife slipped from the flesh as the figure crumpled. Sam’s chest heaved once. Was that enough?
“Sam?”
He turned. “Dean?”
“What’s going on? I thought we were going on a hunt. Why are we at - what, the DMV?”
Sam grabbed him up in a bear hug. The back of Dean’s neck was still bleeding where Sam had christened the blade, but he hadn’t yet noticed the injury.
“We were, we did. It was a blood wight. It infected your heart. That’s why the hearts were missing. It infects the heart with apathy, and when the flesh of the heart has been devoured, the victim becomes a blood wight in turn. They normally only create one or two offspring in a century, but this one...” He gestured at the stunned professional types, staggering away from their vehicles and blinking in the sunshine. “Hello, Dr Colby,” he said, greeting a middle-aged woman in a white coat; the woman just glared as she hurried past him.
Dean screwed up his face. “Man, either I started drinking way too early, or you did. What?”
Sam laughed, his heart feeling remarkably light. Buoyant. “I’ll catch you up on the way home. I’m driving.”
“What? Why?”
“Because I know where the Impala is, and you don’t.”
Dean scowled. He dug into his pocket for the keys and plunked them onto Sam’s open palm. “Okay, but you owe me.”
“We’ll stop for burgers before we get on the highway.”
“Don’t judge me, but I can’t even think of meat right now. I could murder a Caesar salad, though.”
Sam grinned. This kind of Dean weirdness felt very normal.