TWENTY-FIVE

When Dean woke the next day, Sam was standing in the doorway. Silent. He made a face. Dean shrugged. Sam soundlessly closed the door behind him.

Dean looked at Julia still asleep beside him, then levered himself carefully out of bed. He grabbed his jeans and leather jacket, then struggled to get his boots on. He left the room and walked across the gravel parking lot. Sam was nowhere to be seen. Dean muttered curses under his breath. He needed coffee and Sam had wandered off like a kid at Disneyland.

Then Sam swung into the parking lot. Dean gulped as he saw his brother was driving a brand-new green-and-white 1953 Oldsmobile Fiesta. It had a large chrome grill like a duck bill on the front, white wall tires, 170 horsepower and two-tone seats. Only four were made in 1953.

“Do you know how much one of these is worth?” Dean said excitedly.

“Keep your voice down. The sticker price is $5,700. I found it in the glove compartment.”

“One of these sold at auction for 150 K, just last year. Well, you know, in fifty-five years. Man, I wish I could bring this back with me!”

“Speaking of which. Let’s get on the road. I have an idea that Don will know to look for us in Waubay.”

“Sure.”

Dean got into the passenger seat.

“You don’t want to drive?” Sam asked.

“Didn’t get much sleep.” Dean smirked. “By the way, they have a network of like a hundred hunters.”

Sam looked at his brother in surprise.

“You’re kidding me. We’ve never come across that big an organised group before. What do you think happened to them?”

Dean shrugged. “And supposedly, they all know about the scroll. Specifically the War Scroll.”

Sam looked stunned. He pulled the car out onto the two-lane highway and headed north.

“How do they know about it?”

“I don’t know. A whole group of hunters all believing the scroll has a meaning. Sounds sort of like a cult. But they know about it, that’s for sure.”

“Do you think Julia and Walter told them?”

Dean looked out of the window. “Whether they did or not, we’ll be long gone into the future by the time they find out.”

For the first time since they were flung back to 1954, Dean felt a squeeze of regret. Sure he had spent loads of time with plenty of women. But it was true that very few of them meant anything to him. Somehow Julia seemed different. Not only did she know the life that Dean had grown up in, but she was similar to him. Dean never had trouble being himself around people—that insecurity type thing wasn’t his bag, there were too many other more important things to deal with—but Julia made Dean want to be better. Just being around her made him want to not be such a jerk. He’d been fighting it since they met. But somehow Julia had an affect on Dean. Oh my god, am I turning into Jack Nicholson in that Helen Hunt movie?

Dean swallowed and noticed there was a lump in his throat. He looked down at his sweaty hands leaving imprints on his jeans.

Sam glanced over at his brother.

“What’s your problem?” Sam raised a curious eyebrow.

“Nothing. Shut up.”

For about a hundred miles Dean stared out of the window. He kept going over and over in his mind the first time they had met. He didn’t feel guilty about leaving her. He had a job to do. He’d left plenty of women while they were sleeping.

So why was he feeling guilty now?

Seven hours later they pulled into Waubay. The town didn’t look much different in the 1950s, everything just looked fresher, the paint wasn’t peeling and the roads were newly paved. The bar where they would meet Don was basically the same, except the building didn’t have as many cracks in it.

They took a booth in the back and ordered two beers.

Sam brought out the flour can with the scroll stuffed inside.

“Put that away,” Dean hissed, scowling. “If Don zaps us back to 2010, we don’t want to accidentally leave the scroll behind.”

“So, I have a thought. If in the future only the last pages of the scroll are missing, what do you think happens to the rest of it? We know it eventually ends up back in Israel. How do you think it gets there?”

Dean shrugged. “Maybe Eli the garden gnome shows up again and takes it there. Who knows? I don’t care. We have the scroll, we’ve got what we came for.”

The Winchester brothers finished three more beers apiece. Still no Don. Dean was getting agitated. Local patrons had come and gone. The bartender had already given them complimentary fish sticks. But still Don was nowhere to be seen.

“You think we should use the sigil?” Sam asked.

“No, that will invite every angel that’s on Earth right now. We’ve flown under the radar up until now, let’s not draw attention to ourselves.”

“Good point.”

The bar closed at twelve. The brothers thanked the bartender, a large gruff guy in a plaid shirt, and told him that if anyone showed up looking for them, they’d be at the motel down the road. The bartender nodded.

The next day, the boys resumed their vigil in the bar, still waiting for Don to zap them back to 2010.

“What the hell is taking him so long?” Dean growled.

“I don’t know. There really isn’t anything else to do but wait.”

“Great. Waiting around for another angel, exactly what I wanted to spend my life doing. At this rate we’ll be seventy by the time he shows up.” A cloud passed over Dean’s face. “You don’t think he’ll leave us here that long, do you?”

“I don’t know. But think about it this way—you could spend the rest of your life with Julia. Happily ever after.”

Dean knuckle punched Sam’s arm. “Shut up.”

He tried to change the subject. “Why don’t you just study up and translate the scroll? Maybe we can get out of here that way.”

“I’ve been trying. It’s beyond what I can translate, Dean. It’s ancient Aramaic, written in Aramaic script. It’s half language, half symbols. I have no idea what it says. Without Don we have no chance of finding out the final battle plan for Lucifer.”

“Well, can’t you learn?”

“I could, but we would need to go to a large university, like Chicago or Berkeley. The texts that would teach me ancient Aramaic aren’t just lying around the Waubay Library. And then I would need to study for months to be able to understand even the most elementary of symbols. I mean, look at it.”

Sam made sure no one in the bar was taking notice. Then carefully pulled out the scroll and smoothed it onto the table top.

“Look at how complicated this is. It’s not like learning an alphabet. There is a symbol for every word. And a sound that goes with every symbol.”

That was the end of the discussion.

On their third day of waiting around in Waubay, Dean got out of bed and looked out of the window at the foggy summer morning. They had to do something. This was ridiculous.

“Sam.”

No answer.

“Sam, wake up.”

Sam rubbed the sleep from his eyes. “I’m up. What?”

“We’ve got to call Julia and Walter. We need Walter to translate the scroll. It doesn’t matter anymore if he knows what the scroll says. Someone else will have to know what the last pages say besides us, right? We have to call them.”

“Dean, we have no way of getting in touch with them. They don’t have cell phones. I can try Walter’s office back at the Biblical Society in New York, but I doubt they went back there. What do you suggest? Besides, are you sure this isn’t because you just want to see Julia?”

“No, Sam, it’s not. We have nowhere else to turn. If you have a better idea, I’m all ears.”

Dean did in fact want to see Julia. Every fiber of his body wanted to, but his mind kept telling him, “No.”

In truth though, Julia and Walter were the only people they knew in 1954 that could help them. If they translated the page, they would have an idea how to defeat Lucifer. At least with that information they could call the angels to help them.

Sam and Dean had—very reluctantly on Dean’s part— ditched the Oldsmobile Fiesta and hotwired an old Chevy instead. It didn’t go very fast, but they didn’t want to draw attention to themselves anyway.

They rolled into a local electronics store. It was filled with black-and-white TVs. In the center of the store, on a raised platform covered in a green shag rug, was a color television. Mesmerized kids sat in a cluster in front of it. Even the adults couldn’t look away.

A guy in a brown suit approached Sam and Dean.

“Looking to buy a new television set, gentlemen? Look at this beauty, a hundred dollars, top of the line. Technicolor they call it. Look at that picture. It’s like you’re really there.”

“Thanks Crazy Eddie. Do you have CB radios?” Dean asked.

“Of course, all brand new. Biggest craze yet, huh? Right over here.”

Crazy Eddie led them to the back of the shop, where a series of CBs and ham radios were set up. None of them were plugged in.

Dean looked at Sam. Sam looked at Dean. Eddie went back to the customers crowded around the color TV. Sam and Dean grabbed some equipment and hid it in their leather jackets.

As they walked out, Dean patted Crazy Eddie on the back.

“Thanks, think we’ll pass.”

“Anytime,” the man said genially.

Back at the motel, Sam and Dean set up the ham radio and CB.

“How do you know they’ll even be on a CB or ham radio?” Sam said as he plugged one of the units into the wall socket.

“Guess we’ll just have to chance it. How else is this group of hunters communicating?”

Sam and Dean spent the next couple of hours putting out feelers on the radio units.

“Breaker, breaker. Looking for Papa Bear and Baby Bear. Ten, thirty-five. We’re up in the land of the Walleye. Anyone read?”

Sam and Dean had no idea what Julia and Walter’s handle would be. But they had an idea that they would be monitoring the airwaves.

About six hours later, Julia’s voice crackled over the CB radio.

“This is Baby Bear.” Dean could tell from Julia’s tone that she wasn’t happy with his moniker for her.

“Is this Dopey? Come in Dopey?”

“Yeah Baby Bear, this is Dopey. You and Papa Bear want to meet up?”

There was silence on the other end of the radio.

Eventually, “What’s your twenty?” Julia asked.

“Two Pines Motel,” Dean said.

“Be there in twelve hours,” Julia responded. “Over and out.”

The radio was taken over by static. Dean looked at Sam.

“Aren’t you the least bit pissed that we didn’t know they were hunters?” Sam asked.

“What else can we do? Besides, does it matter? Let’s just get out of here as soon as we can.”