Nothing Left To Fear

27

The hunter's name is unimportant, however the photos he sends from the scene have Dean in the van with his demons and angel right beside him. The coordinates are for Cicero, Indiana, and it was a drive by check. The area had been haunted by changelings a few years back and they had been cleared out, but sometimes hunters missed things so whilst in the area they swung back just to make sure.

There had been no kids playing on the grass. The entire block was eerily silent apart from the meaty flapping of vultures and the terrible buzzing of flies. The hunter broke into a house to find out what had happened.

It was like something from a Clive Barker novel, it had long gone past Stephen King and Shaun Hutson might have squirmed. Even Eli Roth might have gone running for the nearest bush to be sick.

In those first houses there was only hints of what had happened: suspicious fly struck stains on the upholstery and carpeting; piles of sulfur against the windowsills, hidden wards destroyed with violent weapons.

In one place there was a pool of what looked like drool, which was odd because demons didn't eat what they killed, they just liked to kill.

There were no demonic sigils for that was the sort of horror movie tacky that demons didn't do, instead there was the joy of slaughter.

In the last house, the one that had belonged to Lisa Braeden, they found the corpses, or what was left of them.

Several of them had been stitched together wrong, a leg of one on the torso of another, a pair of arms stitched where the head should be.

In one of the houses a body was hung with a rifle sight set at the window, the hunter when he looked through it saw that the hung body parts were arranged anamorphically to form the image of a goat headed demon sat cross legged.

The heads had been taken and placed on spikes, not in the Elizabethan method of using the neck as a socket, but instead went through the back of the head to erupt through the mouth complete with brain tissue and maggots. Details such as the eyes were long since gone, except in a few cases where they had been covered with something akin to super-glue to preserve them.

This had taken days at least, and they had enjoyed themselves tremendously - that was apparent.

Yet there was a child's bedroom, with train wallpaper and a Buzz Lightyear bed spread. Those things had been pushed to the side, the toys reverently placed on the mattress but they had all had their eyes burned out, possibly with cigarettes. The child was the only corpse who had not been mutilated.

He was perfect, embalmed in fact, though judging by the wound at his neck where they had done that - clumsily, all to preserve him until he was found. Around him, sprayed with some sort of plastic glue that preserved them, the same that greyed the child's skin and frosted in his hair, were the intestines and other internal organs of the other victims, of which there might be more than twenty. They had been formed into a garland flowers, tied in place with hair and their own meat like a child's balloon.

Across the wall written in blood and other gore, and swarmed with flies, was a smily face and underneath it the words "Dean Winchester," and then very carefully punctuated "in nomine PATRIS et FILII et spiritus sancti. An eye for an eye; A tooth for a tooth.".

Research showed the child's name as Ben Braeden and date of birth. Dean got into the car so fast he caught the seatbelt in the door and went halfway there with it scraping the road behind him. Even Castiel was antsy, which was unusual.

When he saw the inscription across the wall he blazed with anger, clenching his fists and his face going pale. "I didn't know," he said sadly to the angel. "I didn't know." He turned around, clutched his wrist tightly. "He has to die, there can be no more mercy." He lowers his eyes, takes a deep breath. "I'm sorry" he says, "I didn't know." He stands over the child for long minutes, and mouths something to the corpse, running his fingertips along the curve of a cheek still plump with baby fat.

When he leaves the building, shoulders down and head tilted, jaw jutting out and mouth open in rage, eyes desolate and apocalyptic. "Burn it," he says, "burn it all down."