salver

He's done a little more research since he bought his first laptop, and he's not exactly running his own server, but it's on his list of projects-for-when-he's-bored.

One thing he did accomplish, though, is an overhaul of his security system. Motion detectors are overkill, he thinks -- that damn dog gets everywhere, and he's seen raccoons in the trash, and cats too, sometimes -- but those aren't the only projects you can run from the house. He's had a few closed-circuit cameras, but he adds more, and figures out how to connect them to his computer, and -- maybe most important -- he buys a sat-phone, and a cell phone. The cell phone comes with a little card that goes in a jack and (the smiling young lady says at the cell store in town) will connect him to the internet at dial-up speed as long as he's within a cell network.

Insurance, Bobby thinks.

He does one more thing before he goes back to reading Romanian history (and alternating, of course, with Steinbeck): he sets up an alert system in case his land line, his modem, and his power get cut, in combination or by themselves.

It passes the time between trips. And as the lady wrote, the life he saves could be his own.

***

He's started to get a few reports, both from the myriad news alerts he's set up and from phone calls coming in, and he doesn't like what he's hearing.

Then again, Bobby rarely does.

Maybe he'll set up an alert for Local kid makes good, he thinks, emptying a can of hash into a pan.

It's hearsay, but from what I hear, Central Asia is crawling with demons and spirits. The closer you get to the Himalayas the worse it gets. Of course all of this could be bullshit because it's not like there's any kind of exchange program for the folks who do this. But you know (or you ought to) that

Bobby looks up, reaches for the cassette player, flips the tape, slurps some coffee, and peers back at the monitor. Hunt and peck's getting old, but he's getting better. It's been a long time since he took typing. Senior year. Whatever. He'll keep hunting and pecking until it works better.

all kinds of things have come across this way from that region of the globe. Tulpas and daevas, though those last are a little further east. If you don't want to get killed you need at least some kind of grasp of most of the major world religions and some kind of appreciation for cultural anthropology wouldn't hurt you none either.

I guess maybe you want to know why I am bothering with this project when I didn't figure out some way to safeguard these words on this machine yet. Something like it's been on my mind for a while. This is something a lot of us don't understand until we have been in this for three years or so, if we're really into it. We don't understand this until we make this what we do. There's all this lore from a couple of hundred years ago and further on back, but nobody's adding to it now. I guess you could say the useful reference materials went out when mysticism went out in the public eye, at least in the West. Like I said, I don't know about the East.

Maybe it's going to come across better with some kind of example. If you're reading this and you're young enough, you're probably not going to know who

He's half-singing, half-humming under his breath. "This old earthquake's gonna leave me in the poorhouse, it seems like this whole town's insane -- "

Gram Parsons was. It's enough to know he was a country star who never quite made it to stardom like some of his pals did, and he stayed out of Nashville. He rose to what prominence he had in the late sixties and died before thirty of an overdose, like plenty of the good ones did.

That's not the interesting thing about Gram Parsons. His buddies stole his body out of the Los Angeles airport and brought it back to Joshua Tree to cremate it.

That's one of the first things you learn. Or it ought to be. You don't ever leave a hunter's body whole. You don't leave any body whole, if you can help it. You burn the sucker until it's gone.

I always wondered about old Gram, once I got started learning the life. It takes balls to steal your buddy's corpse out of the Los Angeles airport, and I guess it could be done today but it would be a hell of a lot more difficult than it was back then. They said Gram talked to them before he passed and said that if he did pass, he wanted to be cremated out there. And the son of a bitch was crazy enough to do that anyhow.

I just can't help but think that maybe we should have known whether he was or whether he wasn't, for sure. Maybe he knew something we didn't -- something that maybe would have saved somebody's life somewhere. I can tell you that lots of the ones that have fallen in our line have taken some stuff with them.

I'm not sure that setting all this down is the right thing to do. But hell, it's not like this is anything but a bunch of damn code in a machine anyhow. I run a magnet past it and it's all gone. And they wonder why I keep this old house so full of books.

Laboriously he clicks on File, then Save As. The file gets named parsons.doc.

Before he can lose his courage, he types, as fast as he can, Maybe if somebody taught me any of this I'd know what to do about that goddamned bar.

He closes the program -- "No, I don't want to save the damned changes." -- gets up, goes to the window, sliding his hand in his pocket with his other hand holding his coffee. The morning's just getting started, and Bobby's not sure how awake he is yet.

" -- shit." He was going to go out to the shed, see if he couldn't find a sheaf of tax papers that he's pretty sure he stuffed in one of the old Folgers cans he keeps around. Out into the South Dakota morning he goes, following the thin beaten path into his shed.

His shoulder jostles a beam in the interior, and Bobby scowls out of reflex before starting to hunt for papers.

It's maybe five minutes later when one of his coffee cans full of nuts and bolts waiting patiently to hold something together falls from its rafter and hits him on the head. Bobby goes down like a sack of bricks.











Later, he blinks at parsons.doc, with his other hand holding an icepack to the side of his head, and he turns off the monitor and goes to find something else to do until the headache goes away.

He doesn't remember that last sentence he wrote, and didn't save.

John Winchester is dead.

Bobby Singer might be a little drunk. Just a little. Not enough to leave him in a world of hurt tomorrow morning, not enough to really kill his aim, but -- drunk enough.

There's a fine drizzle going on outside, and the reason he knows that is because he just went out back to check the tarp on what's left of the Impala for the umpteenth time. Whether or not Dean can get it up and running again -- and Bobby's got his doubts on that score, and he's not stupid enough to voice them -- Dean's likely to get a little (more than a little) furious if the frame's rusted. So -- not on his watch.

Like my watch does any goddamn good.

At the thought, he sits upright. "You just stop that," he says to the air. "Right now."

Hunters get into the life for plenty of reasons; John got in because of his wife. Lots of people knew that. And that probably explains why Bobby provided John with the necessary supplies to summon a goddamn demon -- and then John turned around and died, while Dean, who wasn't even conscious, suddenly turns up as Mr. Miracle Recovery.

It doesn't take a goddamn genius. And Bobby doesn't think John's toasting marshmallows, where he is.

And coming up on fifteen years ago --

"That," says Bobby to the air, "is kind of the definition of irony. Here's Dean." He sweeps his arm out. "And there goes John."

Coming up on fifteen years ago, John Winchester asked Bobby Singer to do him a favor; Bobby didn't do it for John's sake.

Memory's a bitch.