Losing Lives / Book Six / The Life Series / Supernatural

The Girl With the Dungeon and Dragons Tattoo

Sam, Dean and I were currently residing back in Rufus' cabin.

Sam was talking on his cell, pacing in front of a wall covering with research. "Yeah, I hear you. All right. Well, thanks for looking. Yep. Bye." He hung up. "So, Nora didn't see any pattern to the dig sites, either."

Dean sat down on the sofa. "Yeah, 'cause they got nothing in common." He sat on the arm of the sofa. "And I got nothing from local lore 50 miles in every direction of all of them. I mean, it's like they're just... old dirt. What's Dick looking for?"

I took a drink from Dad's flask.

The lights flickered.

Sam, Dean and I stood ready, drawing our guns, turning toward the figure that appeared, aiming at him.

Dad was the one there. "Hey, hey, go easy, you idjits. Sorry for the jump scare."

"So, how does this work, huh?" I asked. "I leave the cap off and you just genie your way out?"

"I wish it were that easy," Dad told us. "The thing—"

Dad flickered, vanishing.

"Bobby?" Sam asked.

Dad reappeared. "Damn it. It's hard to stay focused. I'm still kind of worn out."

"You've been pretty busy for a dead guy," I told him.

"All right," Dad told us. "Listen. I—I don't know how long before my next ghost nap, so let's just skip to the skinny. Those numbers I gave you."

"The empty lot in Cheeseville?" I asked.

"Yeah, well, it ain't gonna be empty for long," Dad told us. "I got a gander at Dick's big plan, right before he Lincoln'ed me. They're breaking ground. What month is this?"

"Uh..." Sam trailed off. "Uh, April."

Dad sighed. "Ground's broke. They're building as we're yammering. Check it out yourself. It's all right. I mean, you guys missed it because you've been kind of busy..." I opened the laptop. "Killing ghosts the past few days. But Dick is about to get into the Soylent Green business. That site'll show you they're building a biotech lab, right?" The laptop screen showed Geothrive's 'Standard plans for an efficient slaughterhouse'. "Biotech my ass. That sucker is a state-of-the-art slaughterhouse. And we're the beef."

"Don't you think that's a little bold, even for Dick?" Dean asked.

"I bet you no one will even notice, 'cause at first, he's gonna dumb us all down with Turducken-style munchies," Dad told us. "Make us docile."

"Yeah, we haven't been to Biggerson's since that whole fiasco," Dean told us.

"Biggerson's?" Dad repeated. "He's bought a list of joints 10 pages long."

I nodded. "Ah."

"Next, he's gonna cure us," Dad told us.

"Cure us of what?" Sam asked.

"All the biggies," Dad answered. "Cancer, AIDS, heart disease. Let's just say they got an affinity for stem-cell research."

I looked at Sam and Dean. "The, uh, leviathan real-estate mooks building that cancer center."

"They're not hunting anymore," Dad told us. "They're engineering the perfect herd. Now, we've gone up against plenty liked to eat a few folk in the woods. This ain't that. This is about knocking us off the top of the food chain. This is about them Levis living here forever, one-percenter style, while we march our dopey, fat asses down to the shiny new death camps at every corner."