Handcuffs, Hunters, and First Aid Spray (Resident Evil/Supernatural)

[FireWalkWithMe99]

SAM

The scanner had been squawking for two days before Dad finally called it.

Sam had lost count of how many times he'd heard some variation of the same report crackle out of the speakers — hikers gone missing off marked trails, a ranger station that stopped answering its radio for six hours before someone picked up and swore up and down that it had just been a "generator issue." Livestock torn open outside Raccoon City past the county line, in a way the local paper described as 'consistent with animal predation' and then, three sentences later, admitted didn't match any animal native to the area. That was usually the tell with these sorts of things.

"Werewolf," Dean had said, like it was already decided, chewing on a piece of beef jerky he'd been rationing since Ohio. "Bet you a twenty."

"You don't have a twenty," Sam said. "You have four dollars and a Denny's coupon."

Dean reached over and flicked the corner of the textbook still open on Sam's lap. "You gonna cite your sources when you're wrong?"

"When I'm wrong?" Sam didn't look up from the page. "I've got a pretty solid case for skinwalker built already, if you want to hear it."

"Nobody wants to hear it, Sammy. This isn't your debate club."

"It's called being prepared."

Dean jerked a thumb at the duffel behind the seat like he was introducing it. "Some of us prepare by making sure the sawed-off's actually sawed off."

Dad hadn't laughed at all the whole drive, which was impressive given the sense of humor Dad and his brother often shared, much to his personal dismay. Sam had learned a long time ago that when John Winchester's humor was nowhere to be found, it meant, "Don't talk to me right now; I'm planning."

Sam had plans; he had a chem final in six days. He had a chem final in less than a week. Instead of studying, he was watching pine trees blur past the impala window in a part of Colorado he was pretty sure didn't have a name on most maps, because his father had decided a string of vague news stories added up to something.

Honestly, it probably did, and that in itself was troubling. Dad was usually right about these hunches of his, and here they were in the middle of who the hell knows where.

The mountains came up out of the dark suddenly in a way that surely would've spooked him a bit a few years prior. The Ranges of Arklay; Sam had seen the name maybe twice in his life before this week, once on a hunting map Dad kept folded into the journal, once in a newspaper clipping about a pharmaceutical company that had bought up half the forest for "environmental studies," which was the kind of phrase that meant nothing in their profession, but everything to journalists trying to get a juicy scoop as Alyssa Ashcroft's various articles on the topic seemed to indicate with her frequent mention of Umbrella included in almost any story about missing people along the Arklay Mountains..

They lost the signs of civilization an hour after they lost the road, and they began their hike, abandoning the car where the ranges got more dense.

"There," Dean said, and Sam followed his brother's line of sight out towards a section where the trees became a bit less dense, expecting nothing but a deer, or some crows maybe.

It wasn't a deer.

It was a train. Stopped dead on tracks that, as far as Sam's map was concerned, didn't exist out here at all — no station marked, or track lines drawn, just forest and then, impossibly, five or six cars sitting silent under the moonlit sky. Some lights on inside, others clearly out of commission. No sound he could hear, not people asking for help or even screaming. Sam had seen enough of the hunting world now to know that silence was more often an omen than a stroke of luck.

Dad's steps died under him at the site.

"That's not on any map," Sam said.

"I know," Dad said.

"That's not a werewolf thing. Werewolves don't stop trains… at least one couldn't." Sam stopped. Because Dad was already reaching for the shotgun strapped to his back, and that was always the end of the conversation, whether or not Sam had actually finished making his point.

---

John Winchester — Journal Entry

July 23rd, 1998

Colorado lead was a dead end; Rockford boy turned up alive, half-starved, nothing supernatural about it but bad luck and a bad ankle. Redirected south into the Arklay range off three overlapping reports: missing hikers (4, over 6 wks), livestock mutilation consistent w/ predator attack but no tracks, and a ranger station gone quiet for the better part of a day. Pattern smells like wendigo, maybe a werewolf in isolation, winter kills bleeding into summer ones, victims never fully accounted for. Considered skinwalker, ruled out for now.

Found something else first.

A private train, stopped dead on an unmapped track, no station listing, but plenty of lights still on. Boys spotted it before I did. No visible damage to the cars I can see from the clearing. No movement. Going to need to get closer before I can call it anything.

Whatever's out here, I don't like that there are train tracks nobody put on a map.

Dean's steady. Sam's asking the right questions, which is its own kind of trouble tonight; he's not wrong that this doesn't fit the werewolf or even a wendigo pattern cleanly.

Going in at first light unless something forces our hand sooner.

---

JOHN

First light didn't get the chance to matter.

They'd made camp above the tree line, close enough to watch the train without being anything more than shapes in the dark themselves. John liked to watch things longer than needed; he had a lifetime of learning what happened to men who didn't. So he easily settled in for a cold, uneventful wait when sound came in above the ridge. A helicopter, running dark, no lights until it was nearly on top of the clearing. Smoke was coming out around where the engine would be. John didn't need his mechanic knowledge to tell him that wasn't good.

It came down hard and fast in a spot maybe two hundred yards off the last car, rotor wash flattening the brush, kicking up a storm of dead pines that took a good while to settle. Whoever was flying it knew what they were doing: an ugly, combat-style landing, though the way the team came off it read less and less like assault or SWAT. No breach formation. A young, short brunette woman up front carrying what looked like a med kit instead of the point position he was used to from his days in Nam.

Several of them, moving toward the train at a jog. John caught fragments of chatter carried through the clearing: distress call, checking for survivors— it was a group expecting to find helpless people in need, not something evil waiting.

"Rescue op," Dean muttered, flat on his stomach in the brush beside John, binoculars up. "Guess somebody upstairs noticed the train too."

Then one of them stopped short near the tracks, crouched, came up holding something that had been lying in the dirt, blown loose, maybe from one of the open windows further down the train cars? A folder. John could tell whatever was contained in the folder wasn't good: shoulders stalling in place, as their hand came up to wave the other members of the team over.

The wind gave him pieces after that. The brunette woman's voice, reading off the folder in the clipped cadence barely concealing her youth. "Prisoner Transport, Billy…Coen. Court-martialed, did he escape custody?" A man's voice cutting in over her, harder. "Base, this is Bravo Team One. Be advised, we've got engine failure, forced touchdown three miles southwest of intended location, negative on the civilian search. We're on the ground near a stalled train, unidentified, no record of tracks on any line we've got. Situation's changed — this isn't strictly search and rescue anymore. Possible armed fugitive on site, name of Billy Coen. Requesting instruction and support from Alpha team, over."

"They didn't come here for that," Sam said quietly, from John's other side. His youngest was already three steps past the words. Nothing slipped past Sam's ears these days. He liked it less and less each time he was reminded.

The pilot who just sent the distress call quickly peeled off from the team going into the train entrance briefly with the woman, then quickly splitting off, heading towards the head of the train where the engine would no doubt be.

With the quiet returning to the clearing and the boys seeming no worse for wear, John ran the events again in his head. A helicopter engine suddenly fried dead, a train stalled cold on tracks with no record of ever existing. Two different kinds of complex machines, both quit within shouting distance of each other in the same stretch of woods. He didn't believe in coincidences anymore hadn't really since he'd learned what actually went bump in the night.

Spirit maybe? A Witch, working something bigger than usual? Or worse, the kind of worse that put Mary on the ceiling and left her there burning. His hands closed into fists at his sides, knuckles going white, and he made himself breathe until they didn't.

But the EMF meter clipped to his belt sat dead quiet. No pull, or a single beep even; nothing, granted they were still a good stretch off from the train itself, close enough to watch, far enough to not alert anyone or anything. He and the boys were still back at their makeshift camp several meters back from the clearing where the treeline thickened up a little again, cover enough to watch the whole scene without being part of it.

And John sure as hell wasn't walking out into the open in front of a search-and-rescue crew and whatever brass was backing them, not till he knew if this was their kind of hunt or just some very bad luck for everybody involved. But the pieces kept stacking up wrong in ways that felt less like accident and more like the family business.

The pilot came back in his sights again, seemingly done with whatever he was trying to accomplish at the front of the train… now holding post outside around the only door ajar on the train, third car down near the center of the locomotive. Pistol going back to the tried-and-true position. The young man, whoever he was, seemed to have good instincts, no doubt going under a fair bit of training given how quickly he settled into place.

But something in the man's resolve had changed since the radio call. Whatever had been holding him steady back there had gone thin. He kept glancing off into the treeline to his left, pistol drifting an inch that direction and back.

Then suddenly a chaotic series of barks came from that very direction as dogs came rushing out of the treeline like something had poured them. All looked like some offshoot of a Doberman, but he couldn't say.

John didn't get a clean read on them at first; they had a strange motion. They moved fast as you'd expect of most dogs, but off in a way; it made his eyes want to correct for it and fail. The pilot saw them in time, at least. Planted his feet, brought his pistol up, and put three rounds into the lead dog at a range that should have ended the conversation right there.

Yet, it didn't even break stride.

"That's not-" Dean's binoculars had gone still. "Dad, that's three rounds. Center mass."

The pilot backed up a step, fired again — two more, into the same dog this time, close enough now that John could see it flinch with each hit and keep coming anyway.

A second dog broke off wide, flanking, and the man had to swing his body to track it, which cost him the half-second he needed to finish the first one off. He emptied what sounded like the rest of a mag into the pair of them six rounds, seven now- backing toward the train car behind him with nowhere left to retreat to.

None of it slowed them down near enough to matter.


John was moving before he'd finished deciding to, shotgun coming off his shoulder, boots already eating the distance down the slope. He wasn't close enough. He knew he wasn't before his first shot even left the barrel.

The lead dog hit the pilot low, took him off his feet, and by the time John's first slug caught it in the side, the thing had already gotten a mouthful of his forearm and wrenched its head once breaking off more skin. The man screamed raggedly — and John's second shot finally took the dog off him entirely, throwing it sideways into the dirt where it didn't get back up.

That was when the scream came from inside the train.

A Different voice, much higher-pitched, cut off far too fast. The silence after was worse than the sound itself; something in it dropped through him.

"Dean, cover the tree line." John was already moving toward the fallen guard. "Sam, with me."

---

The man's eyes were still open when they reached him, which John hadn't expected, shamed as he was to admit. Forearm torn open where the dreaded hounds had gotten him, blood coming faster than it should've for a wound that size, like whatever was in that bite wasn't just dog saliva. Sam's hands went straight to it anyway, pressure, keep pressure, the same drilled reflex John had put into both his boys before either of them was old enough to have a say in it. John went to wrap the man's wound with ample amounts of gauze in his pack.

The man's eyes found Sam's, unfocused, then sharpened for one hard second like he was fighting his way up through something to get a sentence out.

"Get—" A wet cough. "Get Rebecca. She's our medic. She'll know what…" His hand closed around Sam's wrist, tightly like he was trying to hold onto the world that was leaving his mind. "Please. She's—"

He didn't finish it. John couldn't tell if the pain had taken the rest of the sentence, or if some part of the man already had settled.

John met Sam's eyes over the man's writhing form, and for once there was no plan drumming itself out in the back of his skull.

Something's still in there doing the killing, and it only ever is solved one way.

"We're going in," John said, and didn't wait to see if either of his sons seemed reluctant.

He had two names now, out of everyone on that train. A medic and a fugitive. A stalled train, a broken helicopter, supernaturally resilient fighter dogs… just what was going on here.

---

John — Voicemail to Bobby Singer

[Beep.]

"Bobby. John. It's — hell, I don't even know what time it is out here; it's late. Look, I'm up in the Arklay range, Colorado, southern… fuck. No, wait, that's not right; more specifically it's the mountains ten miles northwest outside a big city here, Raccoon City. Don't ask me who names these places.

"Anyway. Came up on a wendigo possible werewolf lead; might still be, I guess, but im thinking not. Everything about this screams something else, maybe a Strong Spirit, a Witch, or something worse. There's a train stopped out here in the middle of nowhere, no station, not on any map I've got, and I was still trying to figure out how to read that when a chopper broke down practically on top of us. Search and rescue team, looked like not long after one of the men got attacked by uncharacteristically resilient dogs, like moving bullet sponges. Definitely something about this is our brand of weird, as to what we'll have to see."

"I've got the boys with me. Sam's got that look on him I hate. Dean wants to go in guns first, which normally I'd tell him that's the plan, but something about this one's got my neck tingling. "

"If you don't hear from me by... say Sunday, start making calls. Not the usual kind. I mean it, Bobby. Something about this seems weird; I think it might be something older than what we're used to, might even be something like whatever took Mary from me."

"...Also, if you talk to Sam's school, tell 'em he's got the flu or something. Boy's got a test he's going to miss, and he'll never let me hear the end of it.

"Alright. That's it. Talk soon."

[End of message.]

---

A.N. Hope people enjoy this idea. It came to me when I first started my playthrough of Zero about a week ago, and I finally finished the game the other day, and the ideas I had somehow fit even better now. I have made a few changes here, like: for example edward does not fall through a window but instead gets attacked outside near one of the entrance doors. I hope I captured John and a younger Sam and Dean decently. It's a little tough with young Dean since i'd say we get young Sam flashbacks a bit more often, but I tried my best. Still would appreciate feedback on both the premise in general and also the characterization of everyone. Comments encouraged and welcome.

 

[Xodarap]

A.N. Hope people enjoy this idea. It came to me when I first started my playthrough of Zero about a week ago, and I finally finished the game the other day, and the ideas I had somehow fit even better now. I have made a few changes here, like: for example edward does not fall through a window but instead gets attacked outside near one of the entrance doors. I hope I captured John and a younger Sam and Dean decently. It's a little tough with young Dean since i'd say we get young Sam flashbacks a bit more often, but I tried my best. Still would appreciate feedback on both the premise in general and also the characterization of everyone. Comments encouraged and welcome.

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Nice to see it ported here after the first chapter on SB a week ago

 

[FireWalkWithMe99]

Black text doesn't show up on black background


Nice to see it ported here after the first chapter on SB a week ago

Click to shrink...

Yea wanted to post chapter 2 on sb and ao3 but not quite done fixing it up.

 

[Sliverhero]

Nice to see that John and the boys are seeing how sometimes humans are the biggest monsters