Riza Nodd, murdered and reborn as a wrathful pontianak over fifty years ago, appeared beside her former shallow grave.
At the moment of her arrival, Sam felt a sudden chill and a brief displacement in the air as a sweet-smelling breeze washed over him. But he didn’t see her. Not at first.
His attention had been focused on Dean, on the far side of the military hospital bed speaking to Castiel. Before making that call, Dean had laid his machete at the foot of the bed, but he still held the flashlight in his left hand, which he had pressed to his left ear. As he talked and turned at random, the beam of light played about the interior of the underground workroom, splashing against the warped plywood walls, gleaming off the bed rails, exposing the ruin of the supply cabinet but without dipping low enough to highlight Calvin Nodd’s shattered ribs and ruined eye sockets.
As he swiveled to face the bed, Sam turned away from the bright beam and saw her standing there, less than three feet behind him, motionless as a rotting statue.
Caught off-guard by her sudden appearance, Sam froze as well. She gave the impression of coiled menace. Like a startled snake, she might strike at the slightest provocation. He was uncomfortably aware that he and Dean had invaded her lair. She might as well have posted a sign on the black door: TRESPASSERS WILL BE DISEMBOWELED.
Without looking her directly in the eyes—a surefire provocation—he examined her in that long moment before either one of them reacted to the presence of the other. With her head bowed, her long straggly black hair falling forward, her pale face was mostly hidden. Thin to the point of emaciation, she wore the tattered remnants of a black burial dress that left her dirt-smeared arms and most of her legs and bare feet exposed. Her narrow frame made her swollen abdomen appear even more pronounced—damning evidence of the child never born. But his gaze settled on her long fingers ending in thick, hooked claws with sharp points. Once he noticed them, the fingers twitched, as if she couldn’t wait to rip him open.
“Dean.”
“Just a second.”
Her head turned ever so slightly.
Sam followed the line of her gaze to—Calvin Nodd’s body.
Even through the stringy veil of her black hair, Sam saw her wicked smile at the sight of her dead father. Worse, the broad smile stretched wide to reveal a fearsome row of pointed teeth.
“Dean!” Sam called. With Riza about to attack, Sam needed to act fast and Dean had no idea all hell was about to break loose. “Riza.”
Finally, Dean looked up from his call. “What about R—?”
But now he could see for himself.
“She’s here.”
Dean shoved his phone in his pocket, his gaze darting to the machete he’d left at the foot of the bed, currently out of arm’s reach. And he, like Sam, must have had the sense that any sudden movement would trigger an attack.
“Avoid direct eye contact,” Sam said softly to Dean, reminding him of her trigger. Then Sam looked toward the pontianak, his eyes hooded a bit, focused on a spot beneath her chin, peripherally aware that she still stared at her father’s withered corpse. “He deserved it,” Sam said, addressing her directly. “For what he did to you and the others.”
A sound halfway between a groan and a sigh rose from her throat, which Sam interpreted as assent.
“But the others didn’t,” Sam continued. “The men you killed were innocent. You have to stop—now. Whatever you’re doing at the hospital, you’re killing mothers and unborn babies.”
The strangled growl that erupted from her throat was ripe with disagreement. She had no intention of stopping anything. The guttural sound was the only warning Sam had of her impending attack. All the ominous energy brimming beneath the surface of her inhuman exterior exploded in a sudden lunge, claws extended, fangs bared.
With practiced ease, Sam swung his shotgun in front of her and fired a rock salt round at close range—to no effect. If she’d been an angry spirit, the salt would have forced her to dissipate briefly, but her rebirth as a pontianak had repurposed her flesh and bones, and different rules applied. Nevertheless, Sam worked the slide to eject the spent shell casing and pump a fresh round in the chamber, firing again just to keep her at bay.
Dean whipped his Beretta semi-automatic handgun out from the back of his waistband and emptied the magazine into her, almost every round striking home. The bullets ripped into her decayed flesh, most passing through her body to gouge holes in the plywood walls behind her. But no blood flowed from the wounds, the damage strictly cosmetic. Obviously, the force animating her body had little if any need for flowing blood or functioning internal organs.
She tilted her head to the side, almost as if to ask, Is that all you got?
With the slight motion, a clump of stringy hair shifted away from her dark, sunken eyes and Sam caught a brief glimpse of them—completely dark and inhuman—an instant before she lunged at him for the second time. Instead of shooting her with a harmless blast of rock salt, he held the shotgun up in both hands to block her vicious claws from gutting him. But the force of the blow staggered him, sending shockwaves down his arms.
She grabbed the shotgun in her long hands and hurled him against the broken cabinet. His body struck the front, lengthwise, and it fell on top of him, pinning him against Nodd’s desiccated corpse. Sam felt several of Nodd’s remaining ribs crack under the pressure.
Riza pounced on top of the cabinet, landing heavily despite her frail-looking form, and her added weight drove Sam further into Nodd’s corpse. With a loud crack, his sternum gave way, and the remaining ribs broke and crumbled in rapid succession. Sam’s weight squashed what was left of the corpse’s shriveled organs. Trapped between a reanimated corpse and a long-dead one, Sam turned his head to the side, trying to escape the overpowering stench of decay. But he had a more immediate concern.
Riza lashed out with her powerful claws, smashing her way through the back of the cabinet, ripping out whole sections of wood, to reach Sam’s flesh in the most direct way possible.
Trapped under the cabinet, Sam glimpsed Dean’s legs moving to the foot of the military hospital bed, no doubt to try his luck with the machete since bullets had failed to slow her down. As Dean rushed toward Sam’s position, the smashing over his head stopped. Riza had seen Dean’s approach. Sam heard the blade of the machete whistle through the air, punctuated by Dean’s grunt of effort. He was swinging for the fences, but the pontianak must have caught his forearm mid-strike. A moment later, the flashlight dropped to the floor as Dean’s feet abruptly rose from the ground, and this time Riza grunted with the effort of hurling Dean across the room. A thunderous impact followed, as if someone had set off a small bomb behind one of the plywood walls.
Dean’s body slumped to the wooden floor, pieces of rotted plywood scattered around his legs. As Dean groaned, the handle of the machete slipped from his hand, and his body, what little Sam could see of it from his restricted view, seemed to fall backward into the gap behind the shattered wall. Sam stared, helpless but hopeful. Unfortunately, Dean lay still, apparently unconscious.
A moment later, the destruction of the cabinet over his head resumed. After one powerful blow, Sam felt the cabinet shift above him. Wood cracked and split. The weight atop him seemed to ease. The cabinet had been split down the middle and, as Riza’s weight shifted, each side slid away from Sam’s pinned body.
Perched on the cabinet half to his left, Riza Nodd crouched above him, head leaning over the gap, her hair hanging down around her death-pale face and soulless black eyes. Her mouth opened wide, exposing rows of pointed teeth, and a wet hiss rose from the back of her throat. Saliva hung from her lower lip and chin in viscous strands. Raising her right forearm beside her face, she opened and closed her hand one finger at a time, either admiring her claws or savoring the moment before she disemboweled him.
She’d forgotten one minor detail. Sam still gripped the shotgun in both hands and, no longer pinned under the weight of the cabinet, he could finally move his arms again. With a rapid motion, he worked the shotgun’s slide and blasted a round of rock salt into her black eyes at point blank range. In an instant, the flesh around her eyes was scoured away. The eyes themselves appeared pitted and cloudy, shifting from obsidian to milky white. Howling, she leapt off the smashed cabinet.
Freeing his legs, Sam scrambled away on all fours, desperately trying to put some distance between them. Blinded or not, she came after him, her bare feet slapping lightly against the cold wooden floor. He rolled over, shoving the shotgun barrel crosswise over his head, barely in time to block her claws. Parrying a second and a third blow, his arms grew numb from the sheer force of her attacks.
A fourth blow dislodged the shotgun from his grasp and she swatted it aside. It struck the black door then fell to the floor, far out of reach. She oriented on Sam’s breathing, waiting a moment as the white film seemed to evaporate from her eyes, restoring them to pure black. Flashing her wicked, pointy-toothed smile, she raised her arms and pounced.
Sam rolled under the bed, avoiding the swipe of claws, which raked deep furrows in the wooden floor inches from his leg. With a frustrated roar, she backhanded the hospital bed, sending it sailing across the workroom, trailing its rotted mattress, pillow and stained bed covers before it crashed into the far corner of the room.
Gulping breaths of the fetid air, Sam sat on the floor with his knees drawn up, arms outstretched behind him, palms pressed to the floor for support.
Riza loomed over him, claws twitching at her side, ready to counter any move he made, seconds away from gutting him like a fish and feasting on his organs. He had to wonder if she’d gouge out his eyes before or after.