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Cold Walkers

Chapter 02: So Much for Retirement

Sam sat on the couch across from Carlo, whose face was covered in gauze and bandages on the left cheek. Along his tanned arms were deep scratches—some bandaged, some not—from the old woman’s jagged, unkept fingernails. Sam had made his way into the Cuban family’s house by insisting he was with the old woman’s insurance company and needed to hear his side of the story before confirming payment for his hospital visits. The high school boy rested his hand on his bouncing knee, nervous as he recollected the attack from the small woman.

“So my client, Mrs. Dockery… Before she attacked you, did you see her face?” Sam leaned forward from his spot on the old, floral-print furniture. “Did she seem strange at all? Look strange in any way? Were her eyes… black?”

“Black?” Carlo frowned. “No, man, they were really light blue, almost white. And her pupils were really, really small.” He touched the bandages on his face, grimacing at the memory. “She just stood there and stared into space for a while. Then all of a sudden it’s like her brain switched on and she just…” He hesitated. “She jumped at me and bit me.”

Sam winced as the boy shuddered and sunk back into his chair, looking uncomfortable. Suddenly Carlo’s thin, willowy mother entered the room, huffing irritably. “Alright, that is enough. Go now,” she said, standing in front of Sam and making curt shooing motions with her hands. “You are upsetting my son. Your company can call us when the money is ready and we will give more information then. Go.”

Outside, Sam waited by the street for his brother. Soon enough the Impala cruised into view and paused beside him so he could hop in. Dean, at the wheel, sped off through the neighborhood and asked, “So what’d you find out?”

“It doesn’t sound like Mrs. Dockery was possessed,” he replied. “At least not by a demon. Her eyes weren’t black. Actually, he said they were so pale blue they were almost white, and the pupils were very small.”

Dean furrowed his brow. “Weird.”

“What about you, what’d you find out?” the younger hunter asked.

“Well Mrs. Dockery is just as unresponsive as Carlo claimed in the police reports.” Dean shrugged. “She’s a patient at a nearby nursing home and usually she’s the typical kind, sweet old lady. But one day, while on some ‘old people’ field trip, she disappeared and had already been missing for several days before she attacked the kids. Now, she won’t speak, won’t eat, won’t even look at anyone.”

Sam mulled over the information for a while. “What are we dealing with, Dean?”

“I don’t know, man,” he replied, “But creepy old ladies biting high school boys sounds like the worst kind of porn plot if you ask me.”

“Oh god, Dean, come on.”

“I’m just saying, Sammy.”


Carlo stood in front of the bathroom mirror, peeling away the bandages on his face and grunting against the tingling pain. He stared at the deep hole in his cheek, at the exposed raw muscle, and shuddered as the memory of the attack flashed through his mind.

“Carlo!” his mother cried from the other side of the door. “Deja de molestarte la herida en tu cara, solo la empeoraras!” Don’t be bothering the injury on your face, you’ll just make it worse!

“Dejame en paz, mama, no me la estoy molestando,” he replied, exasperated. Leave me alone, mom, I’m not bothering it. “Solo estoy cambiando los bendajes.” I’m just changing the bandages.

She harrumphed, and as she walked away she said, “Bueno, date prisa, muchacho! Pronto empezare a hacer la cena y no necesito que sangres en la mesa!” Well hurry up, boy! I’m making dinner soon and I don’t need you to bleed on the table!

Carlo rolled his eyes, carefully placing a new piece of gauze over the wound and bandaging it. His head was beginning to hurt, though he attributed it to seeing the gory nightmare on his face in the mirror, and he felt himself becoming very tired. As he washed his hands of the blood on his fingers, the headache began to throb in his temples and he winced, assuming a migraine was coming on.

Carlo.

The boy blinked at the voice, turning and opening the door to the bathroom. He couldn’t see his mother, nor anyone who could have called his name. Carlo furrowed his brow

Carlo, come back in here.

Rubbing his temples, he moved back into the bathroom and faced the mirror. He started, shocked, when he saw staring back at him not his deep brown eyes, but rather a pair of milky white ones. He reached out and touched the surface of the mirror uncertainly, believing his eyes to be playing tricks on him.

Let go, Carlo. Let go.

The migraine burst forth and seared across his brain, and his vision went white. Carlo leaned against the sink, shoulders hunched over as he slumped down and his vision began to fade. He groaned helplessly, feeling his control dissipating and his consciousness slipping.

You will be safe, Carlo. I promise.

Carlo succumbed to the pain and fainted, though his body remained upright. It quivered a moment, shuddering as if the life was leaving it. Then, his head rose. The pupils within the colorless eyes had shrunk down to barely a pinhead’s size. His hand reached up, peeled off the freshly placed bandages, and revealed the bloody wound.

“Carlo!” his mother shouted from the kitchen. “Cena!”

The eyes shifted to the door. A hand reached out and opened the door.

The face smiled.


Quinn cranked the radio up slightly as she and Kimberly rode toward the Tampa Bay Times Forum, listening to the news report as it changed abruptly from the weather forecast to a breaking story.

Yesterday at roughly five o’clock in the afternoon, a high school boy attacked his mother in their own home and bit into her arm, ripping the flesh away and attempting to eat it in a cannibalistic manner. This is not the first in a pattern of crazed flesh-eating attacks since last year, and as of late it is occurring much more frequently. Investigators say they are looking into the possibility of drug involvement, while locals are beginning to spread rumors once again about the zombie virus finally—

“Quinn,” Kimberly said, exasperated. “We don’t need to hear this.”

“I’m just curious,” Quinn insisted, turning the volume back down as the news turned toward traffic reports. “It’s weird, isn’t it? This ‘zombie’ thing showing up again, after an entire year.”

“It is weird,” she admitted. “Especially since it suddenly flared back up with force, and now people are chewing on each other left and right. Doesn’t sound right.”

There was a lull of silence as Kimberly drove into the parking lot of the Forum before Quinn said, “We could check it out.”

“Don’t tempt me,” her friend replied, following directions from an attendant and working her way toward an empty space. “Look, the Winchesters are obviously here, so if something freaky is going on I’m sure they’re checking it out. They don’t need us.”

Quinn squinted at her. “You’re curious, and you know it. Don’t make it sound like this is all me.”

“Of course I’m curious!” she exclaimed. “I’m dying to know what’s going on. But I also said we’d actually retire this time, after several failed attempts before.”

Her comrade pouted as Kimberly parked and turned the engine off. “What if they need our help?”

“You know they probably saw our car when we pulled in,” she replied. “If they need us, they know we’re here. Look, let’s stay out of the way for now and at least try to just have a vacation. If we have to, we’ll help out the boys. For now…” She pulled out two tickets and a set of meet-and-greet passes. “Let’s just have fun.”

The two girls headed up to the stadium and made their way to the front door, only to find a crowd of loud, shouting hockey fans stuck outside. They were barricaded from entering by several security guards and policemen forming a human wall in front of the doors.

“This can’t be good,” Kimberly muttered before tapping someone nearby on the shoulder. “Hey, what’s going on?”

The stranger, a portly older man, replied, “They won’t let us in. They say the game is canceled and we’ll be given either a refund or a raincheck for the next game.”

“Why is it canceled?” Quinn pressed, frowning.

“They won’t tell us!” he snapped. “They just keep saying we should go home, but we spent time and money getting here and it’d be nice to have some answers!”

Quinn and Kimberly exchanged glances, eyeing one another a moment, before they both slid out a set of police IDs from their bags and pushed through the crowd. At the front, they raised their badges with hard faces.

“Police?” one of the security guards scoffed. “You both look a bit young—and you’re not in uniform.”

“We’re plainclothesmen,” Kimberly responded curtly. “We heard reports on our police scanner about something happening here at the Forum and thought we’d stop by and offer our help to the guys inside.”

“And we’ll thank you not to insult us by assuming our age,” Quinn added, giving the man a sharp glare. “Thank you.”

After hesitating a moment, the man moved and let the girls slip past. They entered the building, keeping the IDs in hand, and paused just out of earshot to put their tickets and passes into their bags for safekeeping.

“So we’re not going to get involved, huh?” Quinn said, trying to hide a smirk.

“Shut up,” Kimberly replied with a roll of her eyes. “I can’t help it when it’s actually just staring us in the face. Come on, may as well figure out what’s going on.” The girls headed further inside and asked a nearby policeman for directions toward the scene. Soon enough they arrived in the employee’s locker room, teeming with officers and medical examiners. Kimberly and Quinn briefly introduced themselves (“Officers Piper and Amber, sir.”) and then turned a corner around a set of lockers to find the source of the trouble.

Splayed out on the ground were several of the Forum employees, already proper uniforms for the evening game. Some were dead. Most were unconscious. All were wounded. Similar to the news story on the radio, the victims were missing chunks of their flesh that had apparently been bitten off or torn off in some manner.

“What did this?” Kimberly asked, squatting down beside one of the bodies and grimacing at the lack of an ear on the side of its head.

An officer beside them answered, “Another employee, believe it or not. Romero Georges. He wandered in wearing his uniform for work and, according to one of the few conscious victims we have with EMTs outside, wouldn’t speak or look at anyone. Then he suddenly started attacking everyone within reach, biting and clawing and tearing at their skin. Some have already died either from wounds or blood loss, but the rest are unconscious and unresponsive or are barely conscious.” The officer shook his head with a grimace. “I’m sure you’ve heard, but this isn’t the first attack.”

“We’ve heard,” Quinn replied, glancing at her cellphone and eyeing a name in her contacts. She looked at Kimberly, who nodded, before stepping out of the crowd and dialing their number. After a few rings it picked up.

“James’ Dry Cleaning, how can I help you?”

“Dean,” Quinn said, and the other side was silent a moment. “Dean, it’s Quinn.”

“I know,” he said. “Somehow I’m not surprised. Out here hunting the same little flesh-eaters we are, huh?”

“We didn’t intend to,” she replied slowly. “But, well, you know how it goes. Look, Dean, you need to drive to the Times Forum.”

He chuckled. “As much as I love watching some hockey—”

“No, Dean,” she said impatiently, “Listen. There was an attack here. A big one. You might want to come see this.”

Another pause. Then she heard him speaking to his brother, Sam, likely covering the phone to muffle their voices. “Alright,” he said after a minute. “We’ll be there.”


“Just how bad was this attack?” Sam muttered as he and Dean walked toward the Forum. The disheartened fans were finally trickling away, realizing they weren’t going to get the answers they wanted and they’d just have to come back for the next game. On another side of the arena, an ambulance and two or three squad cars were parked near the employee’s back entrance. This is where the Winchesters headed, clad in the typical suit and tie for “work.”

“Who are you?” one of the policemen asked, eyeing them as they stepped through the door and into the crime scene.

“I’m agent Bill, this is agent Ted,” Dean replied, gesturing first to himself and then to Sam as they held up Homeland Security badges. “We heard there was an attack that fits a pattern as of late and we were assigned to come investigate.” He stared at the bloodied floor, now covered with tape outlines as most of the bodies had been removed by now. “Did anybody survive?”

“Actually, only a few died,” the officer replied as Sam headed over to check out the bloodstains. “Most were left unconscious. We’re loading the survivors up into the ambulance now, and we have another on the way to come pick up the… rest of them.”

Dean nodded and walked past him to stand beside his brother, who had discreetly pulled out an EMF meter as he stood beside the bloodstains. “Anything?”

Sam nodded as the meter started to whine slightly. “Something weird has been going on here, it’s not just random cannibalism or drugs. The meter goes off pretty significantly the closer to the bloodstains you get, and look…” He knelt down and held it beside the last dead body in the room. The whining noise increased significantly, and the other officers in the room winced and frowned in their direction. Shrugging apologetically, he shut it off and put it back in his blazer pocket.

“Really strong around the bodies that were attacked,” Dean mused. “Huh. So something unnatural is all up in Romero’s business. I wonder what Quinn and…” He trailed off, looking around. “Hey, Sammy. You see them anywhere?”

“Who?”

“Quinn and Kimmy,” he replied. “They called us, remember?”

Sam frowned and turned to a nearby security guard, who looked rather pale as she glanced at the corpse on the floor. “Hey, were there two other… women here earlier?” he asked, catching the officer’s attention. “Other officers from another unit?”

“Oh, yeah,” she replied, nodding and gesturing out of the room. “They left to try and catch the attacker, Romero.”

Catch him?” Dean repeated. “You mean he’s still here?”

She nodded. “After attacking them, one of the conscious survivors said he didn’t leave, that he ran somewhere else inside the building. That’s why there are other security guards and policemen manning the doors—so we can keep him inside until he’s found.”

The brothers exchanged a glance before turning around and leaving the room, heading deeper into the Forum as Dean dialed Quinn’s number on his phone.


“Dammit, Dean,” Quinn hissed, muting her phone when it began to ring. She shoved it back into her shorts pocket and returned her hand to her Ruger 1911. Kimberly, beside her, held a reliable Glock 17 as they perused the quiet corridors outside the stadium seating. Every once in a while they ducked into the bathrooms to check each stall for the flesh-eating criminal, hoping not to kill him but to instead catch him long enough to get a good look at what, exactly, he was. They had just reached the second level when someone back down below screamed loudly.

Dashing downstairs and toward the back rooms, the girls found a rather tall man fighting off the Cuban flesh-eater, who was trying to claw and bite at him. Unfortunately for Romero, said man had a hockey stick in hand that he was currently using to keep him at a distance, pushing him back and hitting him hard against the face. Quinn took a step forward and shot the boy in the shoulder, knocking him backwards long enough for the man to flip the stick around and shove the boy to the ground with the handle. Kimberly dashed forward, pushing the boy over onto his stomach and shoving her knee into his back, pressing down on him.

“I got him,” she said, holstering her pistol just before the boy surprisingly bucked her off and flipped over, intending to leap upon her. Quinn didn’t have time to raise her Ruger again before a gun fired behind her and the bullet slammed into the boy’s shoulder again as Dean Winchester dodged past and pushed him back onto the ground, his weight much heavier than Kimberly’s and enough to keep the boy down as he struggled.

“This is almost like trying to ride a mechanical bull,” he said, pushing Romero’s face into the hard floor. “Easy, Fu Manchu, you’re not going anywhere.”

Kimberly got to her feet and sighed in relief, glancing at the tall man from earlier. Recognition lit up her features and she slapped Quinn’s arm a few times, trying not to smile. “Bergeron, right?”

The Tampa Bay Lightning player nodded, holding a hand out. “Thanks for the help…?”

“Kimberly,” she replied, and gestured immediately to Quinn as she took his hand and shook it. “And this is Quinn. We’re plainclothesmen working on the case.”

“Nice to meet you.” He gestured toward Romero with his hockey stick, frowning. “Is this the guy who killed the others? We were told to head into the locker room and stay there until he could be caught. I was just going back after grabbing my stick when he jumped me.”

Dean struggled to pull the monstrous boy to his feet, holding his arms behind him and, upon seeing a few police officers heading down the hallway, shouted, “I need a pair of cuffs!”

A cop jogged over and offered him a pair as Sam holstered his gun and walked up to Quinn and Kimberly. “It’s been a while,” he said, smiling amiably.

“Hi, Sam,” Kimberly replied, smiling back. “How’s things?”

“Same as usual,” he replied. “How about you two? Thought you were off the job now.”

“Yeah, we were trying the whole ‘retiring’ thing,” Quinn said. “Evidently, it’s just not working out. Have you found out anything else concerning this… pattern?”

He nodded as Dean informed the police officers they would be taking Romero into their own custody for Homeland Security purposes. The other brother walked over, pushing Romero along, and made a face as the teenager drooled mindlessly and eyed the people around him hungrily.

“Is he on drugs?” Bergeron asked uncertainly. “His eyes are weird as hell and he’s ridiculously strong. Steroids?”

“Possibly,” Sam replied, trying to maintain the faux professional guise. “We can’t divulge much at the moment. He may be involved in a matter of national security.” Bergeron raised his eyebrows incredulously as Dean and Sam began to walk the boy out of the hall.

“Sorry your game was canceled,” Quinn said to him. “We were actually coming to attend the game once we were off duty. Had meet-and-greets and everything.”

“Really?” He nodded thoughtfully, then said, “Well I do owe you guys for helping me out here. You got some time?”

The girls exchanged looks with one another before turning to face the Winchesters, who had paused to wait for them. Sam rolled his eyes and waved a dismissive hand. Dean groaned. “Go,” Sam said. “You know where to find us later. We’ll talk then.”

“Be careful,” Kimberly offered as they turned to go. Then, she shifted her focus back to the hockey player.

“Come on,” he said, beckoning them with a wave toward the Lightning locker rooms. “You can still do a ‘meet and greet’ now. That is, if you’re off duty.”

Quinn grinned as they followed him into the room. “Yeah, we are most definitely off duty.”

Notes

Hope it's not too bad so far. Some time with the team is up next!

Comments

@CanadaHockey Can't*

CatrinaMarie CatrinaMarie
12/30/13

I'm still so sad that this story is over, I was cleaning out my subscriptions and saw this and was like no I can unsubscribe I love it too much! :)

CatrinaMarie CatrinaMarie
12/30/13
haw kuul
drw25 drw25
9/23/13
Omg I am dying stop keeping me in suspense I'm literally crying and plus I leave for a trip tmrw so I can't read till like late friday, there are tears pouring from my eyes
CatrinaMarie CatrinaMarie
6/5/13
@RNH_Fan
Just did! :D
Puck Butt Puck Butt
6/5/13