Supernatural - Chapter 8: Preparations Before the Battle (Patreon)

Early on the fifth morning, before they set off.

“I checked out that place you mentioned last night, and something's definitely wrong. Crops have been failing around a nearby farm, and there's a plague of cicadas. All signs of demonic activity, except...” Bobby paused. “So far, there haven't been any reported deaths.”

“Then we should start by checking the farms. Though I don't think we're going to like what we find.” Murphy remembered the innocent family that had died in the original story. She regretted not getting there sooner, but there really hadn't been any way to act faster.

The others exchanged uneasy glances. The mood grew somber.

“Either way, let's move,” Dean said, slamming the trunk shut.

...

The four of them reached the farmland outside Lincoln without immediately finding what they were looking for.

Bobby had marked off a fairly small search area, but farmhouses were still scattered across it. They drove slowly along the country roads. The farther they went, the more withered the roadside crops became, and the incessant buzzing of cicadas grew so dense it seemed to press into their cars from every direction.

Finally, as they passed one farmhouse, Bobby pulled over in front of them.

Dean braked and rolled down his window. Bobby was already selecting weapons. “What's up?”

“The cicadas are thickest here, and the crops around this house are in the worst shape.” Bobby eyed the motionless farmhouse. Years of experience told him something was wrong. “Looks like the source of the infestation.”

They got out and began taking weapons from the cars. As he checked his ammunition, Dean asked Murphy, “So what's actually going on here?”

“Seven demons escaped through the Devil's Gate and gathered around Lincoln. Each one represents one of humanity's Seven Deadly Sins.” Murphy studied the farmhouse. Even with the cicadas screaming all around it, the building seemed utterly lifeless. “They can magnify people's desires until their victims can't stop indulging them, even if it kills them.”

Sam glanced at the closed front door. “You think this family fell victim to one of them?”

“Unless something's changed, yes. This looks a lot like what I remember.” Murphy didn't sugarcoat it. “If I'm right, the family of three inside was affected by Sloth. They'll sit on the living-room couch without eating or drinking until they die of thirst and starvation.”

Dean closed his eyes briefly, picturing it. “Fucking demons.”

“Originally, by the time you got here, they'd already been dead for days.” Murphy gripped her gun tightly, her face grave. “We've arrived a day earlier this time. I have no idea what we'll find when we open that door.”

The farmhouse was locked. Dean took out his lockpicks and opened it in moments. He went in first. The television was playing in the living room, and a stale, sickening smell hit them as soon as he opened the door.

They all knew what that smell meant. Three people sat on the living-room couch as though they'd simply fallen asleep. But their faces were badly sunken, their skin gray and taut. Their cracked lips hung slightly open, and their exposed eyes were cloudy and shriveled.

Murphy remained in the doorway for a moment, unable to bring herself to examine the bodies up close. Her stomach churned.

“I'm going outside to look for other traces,” she said, trying to sound casual. Her face was already twisting with nausea.

She turned and left before anyone could answer.

The air outside was almost suffocatingly humid, but at least it didn't smell of death. Murphy took several deep breaths. She doubted she'd ever forget that smell. Without stopping, she began walking around the farmhouse to look for clues.

Behind her came the faint crunch of a loose pebble.

Murphy spun and stepped aside just as a hand reached for her wrist and missed. She instinctively caught the attacker's arm, ready to use it to shove him away, but another figure closed in from the side and swiftly pinned her gun hand.

“Let me go!” Murphy snapped.

“Put down the gun first,” a man replied in a low voice.

She struggled twice and couldn't break free. Then she raised her head to see who had attacked her and stopped dead when she recognized his face.

“Isaac! Tamara!” Bobby came running at the sound of the scuffle, calling out both names in surprise. Dean followed, wary and bewildered.

Their words barely registered with Murphy as the grip on her arms loosened. Why were those two here today? They weren't supposed to cross paths with the Winchesters until tomorrow, according to the original timeline.

“Murphy? Murphy!” Dean's voice pulled her back. “What's wrong?”

“...I'm fine. I'll explain later.” She looked toward Tamara, the wife of the hunter couple.

“Easy, honey.” Tamara raised both hands. “All we wanted was for you to lower the gun.”

Bobby stepped between the two still-wary groups. “We're all on the same side. Isaac, Tamara, this is Dean. Sam's inside. As for her...”

“Murphy. Just call me Murphy,” she supplied.

Isaac's gaze shifted from her to Dean. Once he recognized the man in front of him, his expression darkened further. Sam chose that moment to emerge from the farmhouse, having heard the commotion outside.

Isaac looked between the brothers and gave a contemptuous snort. “So you're the Winchesters. You're the ones who opened that damned Devil's Gate.”

Dean's previously relaxed expression vanished. The gun in his hand dropped toward the ground. Sam stopped several paces away, pressing his lips into a thin line.

“I don't care who told you that. It isn't true. They didn't open the Devil's Gate,” Murphy cut in before either brother could respond.

“And who are you supposed to be?” Isaac scrutinized her. “Who said you get to speak for them?”

Tamara tugged at her husband's arm, displeased that he'd spoken to a young woman that way.

“The Yellow-Eyed Demon used someone else to open the gate with the Colt. And Dean and Sam, the 'criminals' you're blaming, not only closed the Devil's Gate but killed the Yellow-Eyed Demon too.” Murphy ignored his attitude, her tone level. “Without them, even more demons would have escaped. You don't have to like the Winchesters. But you don't get to pin somebody else's mistake on them.”

Dean looked at Murphy in surprise. They'd known each other for only a few days, and she hadn't even been on a proper hunt with them yet. Still, she'd defended them without a second's hesitation, as though there'd never been any question of doing otherwise.

Sam was watching her too. Some of the tension left his face.

Isaac opened his mouth to argue again, but Bobby cut him off impatiently. “She's telling the truth. If you want to start a fight, save it until we've dealt with these demons.”

Tamara gave her disgruntled husband a look and deliberately changed the subject. “What did you find inside?”

“The whole family's dead,” Sam replied. “Probably only a day or two, but the bodies look almost mummified.”

Tamara sighed softly. “Demons.”

She and Isaac had followed reports of widespread crop failure and the unnatural cicada infestation to the same farmland. Their leads weren't much different from Bobby's. All they knew for certain was that there was extensive demonic activity near Lincoln. They hadn't located the demons' gathering place.

After listening to their findings, Murphy thought for a moment and gave them the location she remembered.

“The Old Terminal Pub. It's a bar in Lincoln,” she said. “Unless things have changed, all seven of the Deadly Sins are gathered there.”

Isaac looked her over skeptically. “Seven Deadly Sins? And how would you know?”

Murphy's patience was wearing thin. “You can believe me or not. But trust me, you don't want to find out what happens when you charge in without thinking.”

She was warning them because she knew what was coming. That didn't mean she owed a stranger the truth about where she'd come from or every secret she held, just to earn his trust. Whether Isaac listened was up to him.

Dean glanced at her, neither objecting to her tone nor offering to explain for her. He simply stepped a little closer. Sam moved to her other side, between her and Isaac, keeping his eyes on the man.

“We can't just walk straight into that bar. Especially you two. I know you're in a hurry,” Murphy continued. “But there are too many demons inside, and we have no way to kill them outright. We might be able to exorcise some, but almost all the customers and staff are possessed. There's no telling how many we're dealing with.”

“What? The entire bar?” Bobby exclaimed. Dean and Sam looked just as shocked. This was much worse than they'd expected.

Isaac plainly resented being told what to do by a young woman who didn't look like she'd hunted much of anything. “So you're saying we know exactly where they are, and we're just supposed to hide?”

Murphy met his gaze. “If you want to march in there and get yourself killed, be my guest.”

Isaac snorted contemptuously.

Bobby ignored his attitude and turned to Tamara. “Let's head back to where you're staying. We'll make a plan before we move. We should still have time.”

Tamara agreed. Isaac kept scowling, but he didn't charge off toward the bar alone.

As everyone prepared to leave the farmhouse, Dean was walking behind Murphy. Near the cars, he quickened his pace. As he passed her, his lips moved as though he were reconsidering something. A few seconds later, he finally murmured, “Thank you.”

Murphy took a moment to realize what he meant, then gave a small laugh. “You're welcome. Besides, everything I said was true, wasn't it?”

Dean scratched the back of his head awkwardly, but a faint smile crept onto his face.

Murphy got into Dean and Sam's car. As they drove, Dean remembered something she'd said when Isaac and Tamara had appeared.

He glanced at her in the rearview mirror. “All right, you going to tell us now? What's wrong with those two?”

“What?” Sam asked, completely lost. Neither of them paid him any attention.

“Nothing's wrong with them. It's the timing that's off.”

Murphy cleared her throat. “Normally, you weren't supposed to meet them until tomorrow. I thought coming here a day early meant we'd miss them altogether.”

“So the timeline's starting to change?” Sam asked thoughtfully.

“I guess my arrival and the information I gave you changed what you did.” Murphy picked at her fingers. “We came a day early, and the other events shifted too.”

Was it because the brothers were the main characters? Were they destined to run into the same people no matter what? But the hunter couple should have been following the pace of their own investigation. Why would they suddenly show up a day earlier as well? For the first time, Murphy wasn't entirely sure she could change the brothers' ending.

“Were we originally supposed to get hurt?” Dean asked.

“No. But something happened to that couple, and it almost got you hurt too.” Murphy recalled the scene, her expression hardening. If arrogant Isaac had listened, he wouldn't have charged into a bar full of demons and been forced to drink an entire bottle of cleaning fluid, dying on the spot.

Tamara had barely survived. Bobby and the others drove a car into the bar to get her out. Later, when the demons used her dead husband's possessed body to provoke her, she fell for it and rushed out of the safe house, breaking the salt line. The demons poured inside, putting everyone's lives in danger.

“We'll be ready this time. Everybody's going to be okay.” Dean saw her expression, swallowed his rising irritation and tried to sound relaxed.

No one said much for the rest of the drive.

...

Isaac and Tamara were staying in an old house on the outskirts of Lincoln, with few neighbors nearby. It had only a handful of windows, an entrance at the front and another at the back, and a path from the backyard straight to the road.

As a temporary safe house, it was more than adequate.

Everyone assembled in the living room, and Murphy laid out everything she knew along with her plan.

Besides the Seven Deadly Sins, the pub was packed with ordinary demons that had escaped through the Devil's Gate. The hunters' guns and regular knives couldn't truly kill them, and someone could easily interrupt an exorcism in the middle of a fight. There was no chance of winning a direct assault.

The bar therefore had to be the first stage of the operation, not the final battlefield.

They would prepare the house as a safe haven first, laying salt lines and devil's traps, readying recordings of exorcisms, and arranging escape routes. Once everything was set, they'd go to the bar and take the demons by surprise, exorcising as many of the numerous ordinary demons as possible.

The Seven Deadly Sins were far stronger than ordinary demons and would retaliate quickly. If the fight got out of hand, everyone had to retreat immediately. No staying behind to finish a battle they couldn't win.

Before leaving, though, they had to find a way to capture one of the seven.

Bobby could draw a devil's trap inside a car trunk ahead of time. Once one demon was locked inside, it couldn't escape by itself. The remaining Sins wouldn't abandon one of their own to the hunters, so they'd follow them all the way to the safe house.

And there, facing traps and defenses prepared in advance, the hunters would have the advantage instead of the demons.

Murphy explained the entire plan from beginning to end. She wasn't expecting every step to go smoothly. On the contrary, she'd designed it by thinking through what they'd do if something went wrong at each stage.

Sam caught on to her reasoning halfway through. His eyes lit up as he watched her, occasionally bending over the floor plan to mark good locations for traps and for covering one another.

No sooner had Murphy pointed out a narrow stretch of corridor that they could cut off with a salt line than Sam marked a second spot nearby for someone to recite an exorcism.

“If they destroy the recording in the living room, someone here can carry on,” he explained.

“And the equipment upstairs won't be exposed at the same time,” Murphy added, following his reasoning.

They barely needed to explain anything to each other. Together, they quickly turned the original plan into something more thorough.

Dean stood nearby, watching the marks multiply across the paper. His expression gradually shifted from confusion to disbelief.

“What the hell goes on inside those heads?” Dean felt as though he'd wandered into a board meeting at some giant corporation, with Murphy and Sam playing the executives. “How do you even think of all this?”

That reminded Murphy of the plan the brothers would have followed originally. Oh, right. There hadn't really been a plan. They'd just charged in and left Bobby to clean up the mess.

“Better safe than sorry.” She shrugged.

Isaac and Tamara exchanged a look. Neither had ever seen hunters plan a job in such detail. “How many demons have you actually hunted?” Isaac asked skeptically.

“Not a single one,” Murphy admitted without embarrassment.

Distrust immediately returned to Isaac's face.

“Then do you have a better plan?” she challenged, looking straight at him.

“I don't have any objections,” Bobby put in. For once, he felt as though he'd found someone who spoke his language. He'd always thought he was the only one who believed in preparing ahead!

They got to work at once.

Sam and Bobby drew devil's traps and recorded exorcisms. Dean and Isaac checked the doors and windows and laid lines of salt. Tamara divided holy water into portable containers and organized first-aid supplies for wounds and blood loss.

Murphy moved through the house with pen and paper, marking every possible route the demons might use to break through their defenses.

They sealed unused windows and the back door with salt and laid the first trap just beyond the front entrance. A second salt line crossed the narrow corridor leading to the living room, where they'd drawn their largest devil's traps on both the floor and the ceiling.

Even if the outer defenses failed, anyone still inside could fall back to the next area and continue the exorcisms.

They positioned several recording devices in the living room, corridor and an upstairs room, far enough apart that the demons couldn't destroy them all at once. They filled the bathtub with holy water and placed bottles of holy water, salt and spare weapons where everyone could reach them quickly.

Bobby also drew a complete devil's trap on the inside of his car trunk, ready to imprison the demon they planned to bring back from the bar as bait.

A few hours later, the ordinary old house had been transformed into a safe house protected by layer upon layer of defenses.

A getaway vehicle waited outside the back door, with first-aid supplies and spare weapons near their final defensive position. They deliberately left an accessible route through the front door. Any demons pursuing them that way would run straight into an area covered by several overlapping traps.

Murphy made one last circuit of the recording devices, checking that every one could play the entire exorcism without interruption.

She was about to put away her notes when Sam took the checklist from her and went through every item again.

“Nothing's missing,” he said. They smiled at one another.

Dean picked his car keys up off the table, looking from one of them to the other. “All right, geniuses. Ready to go?”

Murphy surveyed the fully prepared safe house. Everything that could be done in advance was done. As for the actual operation, they'd have to do their best and hope things worked out.

Now it was time to go to the pub and draw the Seven Deadly Sins away from the battlefield the demons had chosen.