The Wheels On The Bus Chapter 5

Belphegor had snapped a memory of the woman and her daughter into Adam and Michael’s minds, so all that’s left is for them to find her. Unfortunately, this is better said than done in a school filled with the entire town’s population. 

Adam knows what the woman looks like, but as he stands at the hallway overlooking the lobby, looking out at the faces of the people in front of him, every face just seems to be unrecognizable to him in a way that he can tell they have faces but he can’t really see them. 

He blinks and rubs at his eyes. Maybe there’s something wrong with this body.

“Is everything okay?” Michael asks.

“I can’t see their faces properly,” Adam says. “I know they’re faces, but I just...can’t see that they’re faces.”

“Ah,” Michael says. “I have the same problem.”

Adam looks up. “Yeah?”

“Yes. I can tell apart souls though,” Michael says. Adam sticks his tongue out as Michael starts to grin. 

“Lucky you,” Adam says.

“I believe this is because I don’t make it a habit to galavant about Earth,” Michael says. “You might be experiencing the same thing from spending so long in the Cage.”

“Oh.” Adam thinks about it for a moment. He shrugs. At the very least, he can still recognize Sam and Dean and Cas, although it might be because he’s seen them before he fell into Hell. He smacks his own cheeks lightly. “Alright, can you tell where the mom is?”

“I’m trying,” Michael says, looking about the area. Adam stands on his toes to try to get a better vantage point. It doesn’t help. He pouts as he shifts his weight back onto his heels.

Being twelve sucks.

“Winchesters incoming,” Michael says. 

Adam spots his brothers pushing open the school entrance and immediately grabs Michael’s sleeve/ They slip back into the hallway, hiding.

Great. He’s not sure if they’ll recognize his face when it’s twelve, but he’s not taking that chance.

“Did you see the mom?” he asks.

“No, she might not be in the room,” Michael says.

“Let’s go check the other ones, then.” Adam pauses. “Wait, what about the gym? There’s a lot of people there.”

Michael nods. “Good idea.”

They find the nearest building map tacked to a wall and head for the gym as soon as they figure out where to go. The few people walking around that see them rushing down the hallways are thankfully not paying them any mind, letting them pass by without so much as a glance. Being a kid lends to the advantage of being unassuming, apparently. 

There’s too many people in the gym. The whole area is full, even the bleachers. Adam winces as his brain fails to register what everyone looks like again. Everyone’s just blurring together for him.

“There,” Michael says, pointing one tiny hand towards the leftside bleachers. Adam cannot recognize who he’s pointing to. “It’s her.”

“Lead the way, big guy, I can’t tell these people apart for shit.”

Michael does, careful not to let him go as they start to weave their way through the crowd. They both make sure not to seem like they’re in a hurry. The plan is to make it so that they’re being overheard, after all, not like they’re approaching someone deliberately. 

Adam coughs lightly as he starts up his act. “I’m telling you, that was a ghost.”

“Ghosts don’t exist,” Michael says. Adam is suddenly struck with the sudden need to burst out laughing at hearing that from him. “It was just an earthquake.”

“It was not an earthquake,” Adam says. He looks up and tries to see if he can recognize who they’re looking for. It’s easier making out people’s faces up close, but he still can’t pinpoint the mom. He just looks to Michael instead. We close?

She’s sitting a few feet away. White shirt that says AMAZING THINGS WILL HAPPEN, brown khakis. 

Adam searches for the shirt. He finds it. The lady is only a few paces away. He raises his voice a little and hopes it carries over the faint murmur of people moving about and talking.

“And you saw that weird clown guy,” he says. 

The lady in the shirt seems to freeze. She turns to them.

“Probably some drunk guy,” Michael says.

“He had a knife.”

“A really drunk guy.”

“Who had a knife?”

“Maybe he was from a birthday party.”

“That was not a cake knife, that was a kitchen knife,” Adam says, hoping to god that Wayne Gacy really was holding a kitchen knife. Belphegor’s only told them that the lady and kid got chased but not if Gacy was running at them with a machete or anything. “And that was so a ghost.”

“Why didn’t he look wispy, then?” Michael asks, because he’s already dramatic and has this down and cinema lost a star when Chuck decided that he was going to be an archangel instead of a human actor. “And why didn’t he look dead?”

Adam pauses. “Mike, he looked like he crawled out a grave and a sewer at the same time.”

They’re really close to the woman. Michael starts to climb up the bleachers and helps pull Adam up with him. 

“He probably fell over a lot,” Michael says.

The lady is staring at them. Adam can tell because he’s having a hard time climbing up onto the second step of the bleachers and she’s only about three feet away from him. 

“What about that earthquake in the cemetery, then?” Adam asks.

“Didn’t you hear? There was a chemical leak,” Michael says. “Some pipe probably burst under from there.”

“Since when did chemicals have faces when they escaped from a crack in the earth?” Adam says. “I’m betting those are ghosts. A lot of ghosts. I bet there’s more ghosts than there are people here.” 

Michael grabs onto his other arm and pulls him up, finally, because he’s genuinely having a hard time. Stupid tiny twelve-year-old legs.

Is it working? He sends at Michael. 

A bit, I believe, Michael sends back.

Do you think you should give her a little push? Adam asks, You know, let her believe us just a bit?

If it comes to it. But she’s listening. If all goes well, we won’t even have to talk to her, we just have to let her find the evidence for herself and then go tell the Winchesters, Michael thinks. Out loud, he says, “I’m sure, Addie.”

“No, look, I tried looking it up,” Adam says. “Nothing on the news about a chemical leak. Nothing. And isn’t it funny that there’s literally nobody with cameras who’s come here?”

Michael raises an eyebrow at him as if he’s actually questioning what Adam’s saying.

“There was a huge earthquake. No news. There’s a chemical leak that had everyone evacuate, but there’s zero coverage,” Adam says, and then pauses and gives Michael a meaningful look because he can’t turn and look at the woman directly to check if she’s listening.

Go on, Michael says.

“Something’s fishy,” Adam says. “And I tried to look it up, like maybe the chemical leak causes hallucinations or something. And I found some news, right on the recommended feed, that there was this huge earthquake in Chicago.”

Jack had showed them the news. He knows where the rips are. 

“Big thing. Some people said they saw the ghosts of their dead loved ones too,” Adam says.

“Could be a hallucination,” Michael says.

“Yeah, but the same thing happened in Cairo.”

“Illinois?”

“No, Egypt,” Adam moves to Michael’s side and sits. He can see the lady from here, from his peripheral. She’s listening, and she’s trying not to seem like she is. “And there was a couple more articles about it from France too. And the UK. And Brazil. And all over, basically.” He waves his hands around, exaggerating. “Same thing. Huge earthquake. Ghosts of the dead.”

“Your point is?”

“That something big’s happening and it’s not just in this town,” Adam says, conspiratorial while Michael is staring at him with a straight, unimpressed face. “And that clown guy we saw was a ghost.”

“Of who?”

“I don’t know, some clown murderer?”

“...that penny guy?”

Adam wrinkles his nose. Too many movies, Michael.

You and the others insist on it. 

“No, John Wayne Gacy.”

Aren’t you supposed to be twelve? Michael asks.

Shut up, some kids have weird habits and this mom is only going to know us for like a day, Adam throws back.

“Okay,” Michael asks. “Where is he, then? We haven’t seen him or any ghost in a while.”

“I don’t know. Maybe he’s somewhere else,” Adam says. “And aha! You admit it’s a ghost.”

“No.”

“Yes.”

“No.”

“Yes.”

“Absolutely not,” Michael says. 

Adam just haughtily raises his head and looks out onto the crowd, making sure to glance at the lady as he does. 

She looks down and away, and this time Adam turns to her. Michael does as well. Adam pushes at the grace in his soul a bit, borrowing a bit of power and skirting around the woman’s emotions, lightly touching it to get a feel.

Worry. Concern for her daughter. Anxiety. An impulse to tell the two weird men and that guy in the glasses. 

Adam lets go of the grace, sitting back and leaning on his weight on his palms. 

“We just have to make sure the news spreads to the hunters,” Michael says quietly. 

Adam pauses. Well. The initial plan is to just have the woman tell Sam and Dean, but they can spread the news a little faster by being talkative little gremlins, right?

He turns to Michael, who meets his gaze like he knows exactly what he’s thinking. He probably does. They’ve developed a bit of a synchronicity ever since he’s gone patchwork nephilim. 

“Wanna go run around campus?” Adam asks.

Michael lifts a shoulder. “Why not?”

-

Jack opens his eyes in the bathtub and sits up, gasping in a breath. 

Belphegor immediately pulls the drain plug and snaps his fingers. The lights turn on. He hands Jack the towel he’s been holding for the past hour.

“So?” he asks. 

Jack dries his face, pausing to gasp in air again every few seconds or so. Holding your breath for an hour will do that. He gets his breath to steady before he answers. “Well.”

“Did the Empty agree?”

“No,” Jack says. He holds a hand out. Belphegor smacks it in a high five and immediately feels the memory reel rush at him, building a headache between his eyes that’s gone in the next blink. He shakes his head as the tinnitus fades away. 

“Okay, so the Empty took your essay and handed it back with red marks,” he says. “What do we do?”

“We need to find a way to make sure Chuck doesn’t notice that we’re working with the Empty,” Jack says. “He’s going to feel the angels coming back, so we need to make sure the initial surge of power and the steady feeling of power is undetectable.”

“Hm.” Belphegor sits on the edge of the bathtub, thinking. Jack decides being soaked sucks and snaps his fingers. All the water still in the bathtub and still clinging to him vanishes. 

The initial surge of power they can probably cover up. Continuously covering it up and making sure nobody notices is the tricky part, especially over a longer period of time. They either need to resurrect the angels as a last resort or immediately end this clownshow after they’ve resurrected everybody.

“You got any ideas?” Belphegor asks.

Jack shrugs. “I mean, Donatello could feel it when I got thrown down here. I highly doubt resurrecting an angel could get past Chuck.”

“You’re a nephilim, though,” Belphegor says. “I don’t think every single angel is going to ping Chuck’s radar.”

They share a look for a while.

“That’s an idea, huh?” Belphegor asks.

“Yeah, although I’m not sure about which angels are powerful or not.”

“Don’t worry, we got you,” Belphegor says. “We can resurrect lower-tier angels bit by bit. If we space it out, we can probably slip by undetected since the shift in power would be so slow that no one probably wouldn’t notice.”

“Heaven would ask questions, though, because we can’t just let the angels run around. They might help Chuck,” Jack says. 

“Oh, true, and we can’t hide them here either,” Belphegor says. “Michael?”

“Our best bet,” Jack says. “If he can convince them to help us and to stay on Earth, we might be able to stabilize Heaven and keep them away from helping Chuck.”

“If they don’t betray us.”

“And if it does stabilize Heaven, even from afar.”

“Eh, it will, angels have been here in droves before. Heaven hadn’t been on the verge of collapse when they did. I think,” Belphegor says. He waves a hand. “It’ll be fine. Then we can work our way up to the higher-tier angels.”

Jack pauses. 

“Kid?”

“Could we resurrect someone from here if they died from another universe?” Jack asks. 

It’s Belphegor’s turn to pause. Jack is looking down at the floor, quiet and downcast.

“I don’t know this story,” Belphegor says, making an effort to sound gentle. “Do you want to tell me about it?”

Jack doesn’t answer right away. He leans back on the bathtub. “I met my uncle, Gabriel,” Jack says. “He was nice. A little chaotic and messy, but overall, he just wanted to have fun and he wanted to help.”

He goes silent again. Belphegor waits for him to continue. 

“He did not like my father,” Jack says. “Lucifer, I mean. He was fine with Cas.”

“That’s a change,” Belphegor says.

Jack snorts. “Yeah, he was - he liked humanity. Liked the world.” The boy motions with a hand. “There was a reason the Winchesters liked him and worked with him. He went with them when they tried to rescue us from Apocalypse-world.”

“You and their mom, right? If I’ve overheard correctly?”

Jack nods. “Mary and I were helping people from the other side. The plan was to get everyone here, let them regroup and replan and then they could go back and reclaim their world from the angels in the other universe, so they were getting everyone,” Jack says. “Michael caught us. He killed Gabriel.”

Belphegor nods, understanding. 

“And then Lucifer sold us out,” Jack says. He scoffs. “Bastard.”

“No love lost there?”

“He stole my grace and left me for dead.”

“Ah,” Belphegor says. 

“Hmm.” Jack looks down, going silent again. After a while, when neither of them say anything, he starts wringing the towel in his hand, only slightly damp. 

Belphegor clicks his tongue and crosses his arms. “Well,” he says, “None of us really know our fathers.”

Jack bursts out laughing, and Belphegor snickers. 

“Thanks,” Jack says, after his laughter calms down.

“No problem, kid,” Belphegor says. “I mean, this household really is just a couple of dudes who got screwed over by their dads.” He kicks one foot back and forth. “The Winchesters. Cas and Michael. You.”

“Yeah,” Jack says. “I guess.” He looks up at Belphegor. “What about you?”

“What about me?”

“Did you get screwed over?”

Belphegor hums, thinking about it for a moment. He shrugs. “I don’t remember.”

Jack blinks. “You don’t remember?”

“No,” Belphegor says. “I’ve been down here for so long I can hardly remember how Heaven looks like, let alone feels like.” He draws in a breath. “Much less what the Father was like.”

“Oh,” Jack says, looking down. 

“It happens,” Belphegor says. “Sometimes shit gets horrible enough that you just start doing things because you have to do things, you know? It’s something to do, something to keep you moving, but the thing is that none of it sticks to your memory and even when you want it to, it doesn’t anyway.” He lifts a shoulder in a shrug again. “Funny how that works sometimes.”

Belphegor takes off his glasses for a moment. He doesn’t really need them around Jack, but it’s habit to have them on at this point. He scratches between his empty eye sockets, trying to get an itch out. 

“I’m sorry,” Jack says.

Belphegor stops. He lowers his hand. “Hardly your fault,” he says. “Besides, no harm done. Can’t remember, can’t be traumatized further by it, right?”

He laughs. He puts his glasses back on. “Anyway, we can just ask the Empty if we can resurrect your uncle. If it can’t then, we can ask if it can connect to all the other Empties across reality. If not, ask Billie or something,” he says. “If we can slow-cooker this resurrection approach and make sure everyone’s following Michael, then we can do this. Next step would be to make sure that all the demons are rounded up, the ghosts are taken care of, and the rifts are closed.”

“How do we take care of the ghosts?” Jack asks.

“Beats me, but if we can get angels and demons on our side? That sounds easy,” Belphegor says. “It’s just the rifts that are the problem, then.”

“Yeah…” Jack says. He looks up at the ceiling and doesn’t say anything for a while.

“You thinking about something, kid?” Belphegor asks.

“I…” Jack frowns. He sits up. “What if I can close the rifts?”