Supernatural Fresh Meat - By Alice Henderson Page 0,10

sleeping bags, so finally Dean came to the hard conclusion that they should go back and regroup. They were no good to anyone dead.

He stopped. “We have to go back.”

Bobby paused, turning around.

Sam said, “I was thinking the same thing. We need more firepower.”

“This thing’s too fast for Molotovs. We’d have to get lucky. Another flamethrower wouldn’t hurt,” Bobby said. “If we could figure out where its main lair is, we could surprise it there and kill it. Might be our only chance.”

Dean nodded. “I’m in.”

They turned and headed out of the forest, the cold seeping into Dean’s bones. He only hoped they could find that lair before more people disappeared.

SIX

While Sam and Dean checked out the newspaper morgue of the Truckee Herald, Bobby visited the Truckee library. Bobby’s bruised ribs were already on the mend, and Sam was feeling more hopeful about the hunt. He pored over newspaper indices while his brother retrieved the microfiche and looked up the articles.

“Here’s one,” Sam said, writing the catalog number down on a piece of paper. “A pair of hikers disappeared in this same area about fifteen years ago.” Dean took the paper and moved to the metal file cabinets that held the microfiche. The overworked clerk at the desk told them to look at whatever they wanted, just be sure to refile it all in the right place.

Sam scanned further back in time. There had been another set of disappearances a few years before, and still another a few years before that.

The newspaper files stopped in 1879, when the newspaper was founded. But that year a team of miners had vanished from a silver mine near Lake Spaulding. “Check this out. Ten miners vanished from the Panfil Silver Mine, which is only five miles from Emigrant Gap.”

Dean looked up from his screen. “I got one here, too. A group of surveyors vanished while planning the route of Highway 80 through Emigrant Gap.”

“This thing’s been busy.”

“I’ll say.”

“Disappearances going back at least through 1879. And those are just the reported ones. A lot of emigrants came westward then. A lot of anonymous faces and plenty of people to disappear.”

Dean jotted down notes from the surveyors. “I wonder what Bobby found.”

The Truckee library was a nice one, with large, open windows looking out onto pine trees. There weren’t many people milling around the shelves when the Winchesters entered. They walked past an older man perusing the magazines and a young girl in the science-fiction section.

Bobby sat at a table in a back corner, books piled high around him. He’d been trawling through the local history section. Tomes on the Emigrant Trail, mining, and California pioneers took up every available inch of the table. Sam felt a tinge of sadness when he saw Bobby nose deep in an old book with yellowed pages and a faded spine. Bobby’s house in South Dakota had held a repository of books on all manner of arcane and supernatural knowledge; ancient books and new books, journals, diagrams, parchment folios, illuminated manuscripts. Bobby had lost it all when his house burned. Now he stayed at his friend Rufus’s cabin in Whitefish, Montana. Sam knew it was torture for him to have lost all those books. Bobby was one hell of a researcher.

Bobby looked up as they entered the room. “Glad you could make it. Take a seat.”

Sam sat opposite Bobby and leaned in to talk quietly.

“What’d you find at the newspaper morgue?” Bobby asked.

Sam spoke in a low voice. “A series of disappearances dating back to 1879.”

“What happened then?”

“Newspaper was founded,” Dean told him.

Bobby closed the book he was looking at and pulled his notes closer. “Well, you know all those emigrants coming through in the mid-eighteen hundreds?”

They nodded.

“Seems a lot of people have been getting lost around Donner Lake.”

Dean leaned forward. “As in the Donner Party?”

“None other.” Bobby nodded. “In 1845, a group of emigrants decided to take a cutoff advertised by one Lansford Hastings. It was supposed to allow them to traverse the Great Salt Desert in two days and a night. But it took much longer, taking them extra weeks and costing lives. The upshot was they got delayed and hit the Sierra Nevadas in late October, just as winter was setting in. They tried to make it out, but deep snowdrifts held them back. They retreated to what is now Donner Lake. Another group in the party had a wagon axle break at Alder Creek and holed up there. They weren’t a cohesive bunch. No team