Supernatural Fresh Meat - By Alice Henderson Page 0,50
a guard rail.
“Jesus!” Bobby cursed, angling around it just in time.
The Escort recovered and pulled back onto the road.
“Idjits!”
As they moved along, it seemed to Bobby the road was filled with people who had never driven in snow before. Cars skidded dangerously close to each other, and they passed one that had gotten hung up near the median after driving into a snowdrift. A tow truck was attempting to pull it out. The cycling yellow light on top of the truck cut through the snowy haze, causing Sam to squint.
It was going to take them a long time to reach Truckee at this rate. Sam only hoped that Dean was somewhere warm and dry.
He looked into the back seat. The whip rested reassuringly by his winter jacket. Outside, snow obscured the road, making it hard to determine where lanes ended and began. Consequently, everyone had merged into a single, painstakingly slow line. Sam hoped Dean could hang on a little longer.
THIRTY
Plunging into thigh-deep snow, Dean hefted the carpet full of eggs through the blinding storm. Ice crystals stung his eyes and he struggled to see. At times the wind surged up, blowing so much snow at him he had to stop and wait for it to die down.
He needed to find someplace secure, somewhere they couldn’t be seen from the air and preferably where he could bury them in case the aswang could track them by scent. Maybe the snow would even help in that way.
He came to a river and walked alongside it, using it as a guide to keep from getting lost in the storm. The water surged past as he hiked upstream, burbling past boulders and fallen tree branches. The driftwood was soaked through and dark red, almost black. He glanced behind, making sure he was long out of sight of the cabin. The cloud layer had descended, so thick that Dean couldn’t make out more than forty feet in front of him, let alone see all the way to the cabin. But he kept hiking, trying to stick along the creek bank where the snow wasn’t so deep.
After half an hour, he looked back the way he’d come, surprised to see that the snow had covered his tracks completely. It fell hard and fast, unrelenting.
Dean searched around, finding a massive group of granite boulders with a large cleft between the two biggest ones. He hefted his burden over to it and peered inside.
It was tight, but full of wind-blown dirt. He could probably wedge himself all the way to the middle. Deciding on it, he tossed the carpet of eggs into the cleft.
Pulling himself up and into the crevice, he inched along, squeezing himself through. The cleft was so narrow he couldn’t straighten his feet, and had to walk on his toes, wedging his boots against the rock and inching sideways. In some places he had to exhale to even fit.
He reached the makeshift sack and threw it again, farther inside. Then he slithered toward it.
The deeper he penetrated, the darker it grew. Above him, the two granite boulders came together, blocking out the white sky and the storm. The break from the wind was incredibly welcome. Dean squeezed himself closer to the sack, and as he wedged his foot down to pivot and grab it, it slipped, falling down into a small hole. His toe hit something hard and he felt the obstruction move slightly. Granite bit into his ankle and he cursed. He tried to pull his foot up, but it was trapped beneath the huge boulder and the rock that had toppled over.
Dean tried to look down at his foot, but after hitting his forehead against the cold stone, he knew the space was too small for him to dip his head forward. He tried to crane his neck around to see out of the corner of his eye. All he could tell was that his foot had been swallowed up under a lip of granite. He twisted his foot again and tugged upward, trying to free it. He placed his hands on the stone wall in front of him, trying to pull himself up and get leverage. Managing only an inch or so, he let himself settle back into the space. He could smell the cold dank of the stone, the wetness of the soil beneath him.
He tried to take a deep breath and found he couldn’t.
To his left, his grasping fingers could just feel the fabric of the carpet.