Supernatural--Cold Fire Read Free

tucked under his midsection, left arm above his head, fingers clutching loose weeds, his legs splayed inelegantly to the sides. For a few agonizing seconds, her heart seemed to pause as she strained to see if he was breathing, the slightest rise and fall of his chest.
    “Oh, my God! Dave!”
    She dropped to her knees beside him, shook him and called his name again and received no response, not even a moan or grunt of pain. If not for the blood all over the fence, she might have thought he’d had a heart attack and simply collapsed, unnoticed back here. She spared no time speculating on the reason why he’d gone behind the shed. Instead, she focused on what she could do now, alone, since she’d left her cell phone in the kitchen. Although she’d never taken a CPR class, she’d seen the procedure performed on television often enough to give it a try. Grabbing his right shoulder and hip, she flipped him over to—
    “Oh! Oh—oh, oh, God, please no,” she sputtered as she recoiled, flinging herself backward and slamming painfully into the back wall of the utility shed. “No, no, no, no!”
    For a terrifying moment, it seemed as if Dave was staring accusingly at her, but that was impossible. He couldn’t stare. Not without eyes. Only bloody gaping sockets where his ice-blue eyes had been. Dark voids in a blood-smeared face, shockingly pale. And less than an instant must have passed before she noticed another bloody void, a ragged hole in his midsection, extending from beneath his ribcage to his waistline, and framed in the dripping, shredded remains of intestines. Small twigs and bits of dried leaves clung to the gore. And insects were already—
    Whipping her head to the side, Sally dropped to all fours and expelled the remains of her food court lunch, gagging interspersed with uncontrollable sobbing until only thin strings of bile remained. She pushed herself to her feet, shaking as she stumbled away from her husband’s body, shrieking once as her foot slipped in blood-matted leaves. Irrational fear surged through her. She imagined some evil presence—a monster born of nightmares—had caught her ankle, determined to pull her back to finish its macabre task.
    Screaming as conscious thought abandoned her, she flung herself around the corner of the shed, tearing several fingernails, and charged through the tangle of overlapping bushes as if her very survival depended on it.

TWO

    Two minutes in, and Dean was gone.
    Preferring a more cautious approach, Sam took in their surroundings. The setting sun leached all color from the graffiti decorating the drab and cracked walls of the abandoned three-story factory that dominated this particular city block of urban decay. A poured concrete foundation supported a ground floor of bleached cinderblock beneath two additional stories of faded and crumbling red brick. The hundreds of upper level windowpanes, perhaps intended to provide visual relief from the oppressive monotony of brick, had been transformed into endless daggers of glass, which caught the fading light in a golden glow and seemed to set the condemned structure ablaze. Whatever dark secrets the building held, they were hidden from the street view.
    At some point after the factory closure, most likely after the majority of the graffiti artists tagged the then-fresh urban canvas, the building owners had erected a cyclone fence topped with loops of barbed wire around the perimeter, in case the metal No T RESPASSING – P RIVATE P ROPERTY sign—now tagged as well—affixed to the padlocked gate provided insufficient deterrent.
    Rather than scale the fence and navigate the barbed wire, Dean had removed a pair of bolt cutters from the trunk of the Impala and made short work of the padlock. Then, exchanging the bolt cutters for a long-handled ax, Dean slipped through the gate, told Sam to take the front, and sprinted toward the rear of the forgotten factory.
    “Dean!” Sam whispered, too late for his brother to hear, and