"I'm fine," I say. "Just sore."
"You didn't tear out any of your stitches, did you?" he asks.
"No. It's fine."
"Good. Let me get the big ones. You get the others."
We manage to pile everything into the corner of the wagon, and the driver pulls off. Sam and I turn back around to look out over the field, then venture out to look for Dean and Xavier.
Chapter Twenty-Five
“There they are,” I point, after another twenty minutes of looking for Dean and Xavier.
“What are they doing?” Sam asks.
“I don't know. Looks like they’re looking at something. Dean! Xavier!”
They turn toward the sound of my voice and wave at me.
“Come over here!” Xavier says. “Look what we found.”
Sam and I exchange glances. There's something slightly disconcerting about that coming out of Xavier’s mouth. He doesn't seem upset, so at least there's that. Sam takes my hand, and we make our way through the tangled, matted vines in this all-but forgotten section of the patch. This must be where they pick the pumpkins that go to the displays at the front of the patch near the parking area.
With the exception of a few mangled remnants that either got too ripe on the vine and had to be left behind or otherwise met their end, this section of the patch is devoid of the bright orange pumpkins dotting the rest of the field. Sam's foot gets stuck under some of the knotted vines, and he tries to use me to catch his balance.
There's a touch-and-go moment when we could either get back to our feet or end up stumbling over each other onto the ground. Dean and Xavier wait while we negotiate with gravity, but we eventually come out still standing. When we get to them, Dean gestures toward a small wooden sign sticking up out of the ground beside a narrow, dark path leading into the woods.
"Haunted trail," he reads in a theatrical voice, adding a couple of ghostly sound effects for good measure.
"What is it?" I ask.
"A haunted trail," Xavier says.
"Thank you."
"I'm assuming it's part of their Halloween attractions," Dean says. "We got turned around while we were in the patch and were trying to find our way back out."
"No stars," Xavier says.
Dean gestures toward him and nods. "But we figured the patch couldn't go on forever."
"Both for logical permanence of space reasons and because we could see the trees," Xavier adds.
"So, we headed this way thinking we'd probably find a path leading back up to the front of the patch."
"But we got stuck," Xavier says.
"But we found this," Dean says, holding his hands up dramatically to display the sign.
"Well, it is a path,” Sam observes. “So you were in the right general sphere.”
“Let's go down it,” Xavier says. “I want to see what's down there.”
“Can we just remember for a second what happened last time we decided to go through something haunted?” I ask.
“Come on, Emma,” Dean says. “It's the middle of the afternoon. Bright daylight. I doubt anybody is even down there. It would just be interesting to see the sets. Remember, we're doing ‘fun Halloween’.”
He does another gesture with his hands, sweeping them in circles to either side of his face like a magician talking about an illusion. I glance over at Sam. He makes the same gesture, and I know I'm outnumbered.
"Alright," I relent. "But if there is a reaper down there with a scythe and he takes out my other arm, I am going to be pissed.”
I want to be joking, and part of me is, but there's another part of me that is glad my gun is tucked securely in my holster, and my knife is concealed under my shirt. That's Sam's doing. My gun is always enough to make me feel confident, but it's not enough for him.
Somebody can take your gun, he always tells me. Somebody can kick it out of your hand. Have something else. That's how I ended up with a specialized bra designed to hold a small knife against my rib cage. In all honesty, it sounded absolutely ridiculous when I first heard about it. But, to comfort Sam, I bought it. It was meant to be like the pumpkins up at the front of the patch, a display piece. But then I thought about it some more and realized it wasn’t that terrible an idea for somebody in my line of work.
I haven’t had reason to use it yet, but I’m glad it's there.
We start down the path, and it's not long before I'm confident Dean was right in his assessment. The path is wider once we get past the entrance into the trees. The deep ruts under our feet tell me this is actually used for a haunted hayride rather than a walking path.
To either side of the path, Halloween decorations and gory props create tableaus of various horrific scenes. They aren't as convincing in the daylight. Rubber and paint are pretty harmless when the sun is pouring down on them. But darkness and strobe lights can make almost anything seem scary. Throw in the sound of a chainsaw, and rubber and paint get disturbing real fast.
“Jeez,” Dean remarks as we walk past a dilapidated cabin with what looks like a half-man half-pig butcher sitting on the front porch cradling a meat cleaver and human head. “This looks like we're strolling through Hannibal Lecter's Viewfinder.”
“What's a Viewfinder?” Sam asks.
“You know,” Dean says. “From when we were kids. That red thing. It looks like binoculars, and it has those little white circles in it. You hold it up to your face and click the orange tab, and it shows you pictures.”
"A camera," I say.
"What?" Dean asks.
"It looks like a camera. Not binoculars."
"I always thought it was binoculars."
"You're supposed to be pretending to take pictures," I point out. "That's the whole clicking thing. You don't click binoculars."
"Alfredo Balli Trevino," Xavier suddenly says.
"What?" Dean and I ask, turning toward him.
Xavier looks away from the pig, a familiar look on his face. It's a
