Story Post
Jun. 30th, 2008 10:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
oselleIn the "Things I'm Gonna Regret" category, I've got a story for you. It's a Work In Progress and I've never done that before but I'm hoping a good dose of WIP guilt will give me incentive to finish it. I've got the story outlined at seven chapters, so at least there's a plan. Chapters should be posted about two weeks apart, but I'm afraid I can't give a set schedule.
I'm going to do something a little crazy and disable comments on this. This is entirely due to my own considerable neuroses and has nothing to do with any of you wonderful people. I just feel like writing in a vacuum right now. I'll open up comments at the end which should give me more reason to get there. Right? Right??
The evil![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
baylorsr has provided beta assistance on this.
Title: Lazarus Came Forth
Author:oselle
Pairings: None (gen)
Rating: R (for language)
Warnings: Serious angst, some gore, heavily Dean-centric
Spoilers: Through end of Season Three
Word Count: 6,500 for Chapter One
Disclaimer: I don't own nothin and I ain't makin a penny off it.
Summary: Dean makes it out of hell and finds that things topside are not much better than down below. Apocalypse fic of the whimper rather than bang variety.
Lazarus Came Forth
1. Valley of Shadow
He didn't sleep, had never slept. Couldn't remember ever closing his eyes, only an eternity of unbroken, staring consciousness. Then suddenly this new thing, the sensation of waking up from a long-forgotten, oblivious darkness that must have been sleep.
After that, he slept, or thought he slept, most of the time. Each waking was too much like returning to that state of endless wakefulness and every time he woke up he wondered if he'd sleep again or if that had been the last time.
When he did wake, he would find a dim room or it might have been that he couldn't see. There was someone with him but he could never see her clearly and while he could hear her voice and even understand the words he couldn't piece them together. He never said anything to her. He had stopped speaking so long ago that to take it up again seemed unnatural and dangerous. Like losing some last, precious thing that he'd carefully hidden and tended. He didn't speak when she spoke to him or when she touched him. He thought that he wept once and she sat beside him and wiped his eyes and even then he said nothing to her. It was all new and he trusted none of it.
He became able to understand what she was saying and once she told him that he was getting better and only then did he want to talk to her, to tell her there was no getting better from what he was and so he knew she was a liar. But he held his silence and slept when he could and woke to find these new things unchanged.
Finally she came to him and she wasn't smiling or speaking softly, there was terror in her face and this at last was something not new.
"Get up, get up!" she whispered and pulled him to his feet and led him down a flight of stairs in the stifling dark.
"Take this," she said and put something in his hand and his fingers curled around it as if they remembered its shape on their own and when he looked down he saw a gun in his hand and this was also something he understood.
"Run," she said. "Don't look back. Just run."
There was a terrible pounding crash above them and she turned him around and pushed him to a flight of narrow stairs or a ladder that led to an open doorway or hatch. And then suddenly there was something else new, the feeling of warm night air on his face and the sight of stars above.
"Run!" the woman said and then he was running through something that felt like dry grass or brambles, running in his bare feet and he could hear the woman behind him and others in pursuit of them both.
There were shots and she went down behind him and some ancient impulse made him wheel around and try to get her on her feet.
"Get out of here!" she hissed. "Run, hide, go!"
She went limp in his arms, her eyes staring up at the dark sky. He could hear them coming through the dry grass. He dropped the woman's body and set out at a dead run across the field. He heard three shots and felt a flat, sharp blow on his side and the pain that followed was no new thing at all.
He still ran and was amazed that he ran when he knew there was nowhere to run. He reached a dark stand of trees and he fell to his knees and put his back against a trunk and as he was raising the gun the woman had given him there was a roaring explosion and a bright orange gout of flame. He saw a house burning in the distance and the fields he'd run through were on fire. The heat was intense and he couldn't breathe. He heard something screaming and that also was not new.
He thought they would come for him but no one came. His side was bleeding and very painful but he knew that he wouldn't die because he was already dead, dead and damned. And yet he got to his feet and set the burning landscape behind him though he had no idea of where there was to go.
* * *
Like every morning Buddy went down to the river and like every morning July was kneeling there, his eyes closed and his hands clasped in prayer and all seven feet of his handmade cross leaning against his shoulder like the holy pole with which he planned to vault himself to heaven.
"Mornin, preacher."
July paid him no mind so Buddy stuck his hands in his pockets and looked off up the wide track of the river. It was shaping up to be a low, hot day and the water was leadenly reflecting the clouds rolling in above it. At his feet, July shifted his knees in the levee's yellow dirt. Buddy grinned.
"That ain't the Jordan, y'know," he said. "It's the Mississippi. Don't know if the results is the same."
July opened one eye and looked up at Buddy from underneath the brim of his white hat.
"I know what river that is. Lived next to it all my life, didn't I?"
"You sure did and for most of it you was just plain old July Scales from down the road till you went and got the Jesus fever on me. I sure do miss our poker games, July."
"I got better things to do with my time than sit around and play the devil's cardgames with you."
"I'll bet Ol Scratch has got better things to do hisself than worry about two old men shufflin cards."
July made a snorting sound that struck Buddy as more than a little unchristian and went back to his prayer. Buddy looked up the river again. Far in the distance, almost of a color with the gray sky, he could now see a column of smoke rising into the clouds.
"Something's burnin upriver," he said. "Looks like the devil was keepin hisself pretty busy last night after all."
July didn't open his eyes. "Everything's gonna burn soon. As was foretold in The Book."
"Seems that way, don't it? Say, when's that Jesus gettin here, July? Somethin holdin him up?"
"He which testifieth these things saith surely I come quickly."
"He got a strange notion a quick."
"Amen!" July shouted. "Even so, come Lord Jesus!"
"Okay, July," Buddy said. "You keep sayin it, maybe it'll happen."
Buddy walked past July and set off down the dirt road. He didn't know why he came here every morning to have this same old exchange but it would have felt wrong to him if he didn't. There were so few folks left that he knew, so few folks left, period. This stretch of the Delta had never been crowded but after the last flood it had emptied out of damn near everyone. Buddy didn't know where they'd all gone. Jackson maybe, some over the border to Memphis. Things weren't much better in those places from what he heard, in fact they were probably worse. At least out here he still had the house he'd lived in for some forty years and his walks by the river and even old July, crazy as he'd gotten. Buddy teased him but could see how the past few years would drive anyone to religion. Times like these, it helped to believe in something.
What was that about the four horsemen? Buddy ticked them off in his head. War, famine, death, one more. Pestilence. He always forgot that one, hard as that was to believe since it was everywhere these days. Buddy didn't even know where the nearest private hospital was anymore and even if he did he didn't have the papers to get in. A hell of thing, after he'd served his country he couldn't even get into a hospital. But it was like that all over now, things breaking down everywhere and so fast. Four horsemen, bearing down.
His old Army-issue .45 banged on his skinny hip. He felt like a damn fool walking around with that thing but even an old man could be bothered with and there were people out there willing to do it for nothing more than a few chuckles. Lord knows he didn't have anything to steal. Hell, even July kept a shotgun in the house though he was just crazy enough to come out here every day with no defense but his faith. Though Buddy was willing to bet he could have made fancy use of that cross in a pinch.
The fire in the distance was still burning, looked like maybe up by Rena Lara. He didn't know what was up there to burn anymore, probably it was just something had set itself afire and there was no one to put it out. These were some hard times, to be sure. Folks talked about the Depression and about the oil crisis and about September 11 and said we got through all that, we'll get through this, but Buddy thought this might be it. It sure did look like those end times July was always talking about and meanwhile Jesus was taking his sweet old time setting it to rights. Buddy was glad he was an old man, didn't have much farther to go.
Buddy came to a place where the ground sloughed off to the river and he stopped to look out over the water. There were old iron bars across the road here, the remains of some Tennessee Valley Authority drainage project. The bars were flaked with orange rust and the weeds were coming up high around it. There was not so much as a breath of wind and the river rolled on, smooth and oily under the low summer sky. Buddy crossed over the bars and looked down to the banks of the river and saw the body lying there.
The peculiar thing about a dead body was how still it was. There wasn't anything in the world with less life in it, not even a log or a rock. Buddy stood on the drain pipes and knew the body below him was not dead, though it was not moving at all. It didn't have that stillness of death about it.
There were all sorts of people on the road these days and Buddy didn't know what sort of person this was. He might have been a drunk or a dope fiend or someone escaped from the authorities. They'd brought back the chain gangs and maybe this man had dodged off of one of them, though it didn't seem likely with the tracking collars they wore now. Didn't need any bloodhound to find such a man, just had to activate his collar and he'd go down with about three thousand volts in him. Then plug his code into a computer and he'd light up on the map just like a tourist attraction.
Buddy hung over the edge of the bank so he could get a better look at the man lying facedown near the water. He must have fallen off the road and down to the bank unless he'd come up from the river itself. His eyes went to the smoke upriver and he wondered if this man knew anything about that.
For a second he considered scrambling his old bones down there all by himself and then sense took over and he hauled himself up and headed back to where he'd left July kneeling in the yellow dirt waiting for Jesus.
"July," he huffed. "July."
"Get thee behind me, Satan."
"July, there's a man down by the river."
"Maybe it's the devil come for your old heathen soul."
"No, July, I think he's hurt. He's just lyin there."
July opened his eyes and looked up, pushing his hat back on his head. "He's dead. Washed up by the river."
"No, he ain't. I'm pretty sure of it. He's sick or he's hurt. I think he needs help."
"There's a wide white space between what you think and what you know. Where would such a man have come from? No place around here to walk from. Did you see a car?"
"No car, no."
"Then you think he swam the river?"
"Damnit, July, I don't know. Come down with me and take a look."
"I ain't finished my daily devotions."
"I've just about had it with your daily devotions. There's a real live person down there needs some help and you sit there and talk to me about prayin. I don't see the hand a Jesus comin to help that poor soul. I don't see nobody but us. We gonna let someone die in the mud like that? What in the hell would Jesus do?"
July looked up at him. He grasped his white cross and pulled himself up on it.
"You are a blaspheming savage, Buddy Lennox, and you'll account for it on the Day of Judgment."
"I suppose I will but maybe I'll get special dispensation for my good intentions."
July muttered something about what the road to hell was paved with and stalked off in the direction from which Buddy had come.
* * *
July used his cross like a staff, picking his way down the bank. Buddy followed him, feeling old and rickety. If the man had fallen off the road he'd taken a hell of a tumble. They stopped a few feet away from him. He wasn't moving. His right arm was bent under him and his left hand was stretched out, scraped and bleeding. He had blood on his shirt and soaked through the fabric on his left leg. He didn't have any shoes on and his feet were bloody.
"That man is dead," July said and the man raised his head and looked at them.
He didn't seem afraid of them and there was no plea for help in his face. As if he'd been lying there expecting them to come along. For a long moment the three of them just stared at each other.
Buddy took a step towards him and the man pulled his right arm from underneath himself and along with it a big silver semi-automatic, like the ones the hired militias carried. July put a hand on Buddy's arm and Buddy stepped back.
The man made an attempt to aim but he didn't seem to have the strength to hold up the gun and he let his arm fall to the ground. He put his head down and then looked up again, half-propped on his forearms.
"We're here to help you. You ain't gonna shoot us, are you?"
"Why don't you let go of the gun?" July added.
The man said nothing. He stared at them and Buddy could hear his quick, shallow breathing and could see that he was shivering.
"I don't think he's gonna shoot no one," Buddy whispered to July. "I don't think he could lift that thing again."
"Gun like that he could shoot us both dead before we even knew what hit us."
"You're a damn coward, July Scales, for all your sermonizing. Why in the hell're you so keen on savin your old ass anyway?"
"May be old but it's mine. Don't need it perforated."
"Damnit," Buddy said. He shook off July's hand and marched over to the man, his feet sucking in the mud. He bent down and took the gun out of the man's hand and he put up no resistance as if he'd been expecting this too. Buddy shoved the gun down the back of his jeans and put a hand on the man's shoulder. The man didn't look at him.
"I don't know what your story is, but you need some help. I don't think neither me or John the Baptist over there's gonna be able to carry you up outta here. You think you can walk a little, make it to the road?"
The man didn't say anything and Buddy wondered if he was deaf. He let his eyes skate over the man's body. He had lain there long enough to bloody the ground beneath him and there were flies in the blood, there were flies crawling on his bloody clothing.
He leaned over and said softly, "If we leave you out here you're gonna die."
The man heard that. He turned his head and looked at Buddy and smiled with such bitterness that it shook Buddy and scared him and for the first time he wondered what he'd gotten himself into.
* * *
Buddy had an old truck, an '87 Chevy pickup that he kept in the barn. He had gas for it in a canister down in the cellar. He left July at the riverbank with the injured man and trotted back to his house. The day was growing close and very hot, although there was still no sun.
The gas canister was half full and he put as much of it in the tank as he thought he'd need without having to siphon it back out again. He climbed in the cab and sat there and thought for a second and then went back in the house and pulled a blanket off the sofa and got back in the truck with it.
The old truck spluttered with disuse and cut out on him twice. Buddy turned the key in the ignition and gently tapped the gas pedal, trying not to flood the line.
"Come on sweetheart," he whispered. "Come on."
The Chevy finally coughed into life and Buddy felt a surprising exhilaration. He'd enjoyed driving when he was young. Hell, he'd enjoyed driving up until three years ago or so.
When he got back to the levee, he saw July kneeling beside the man. His head was on the ground now and his eyes were closed. Buddy scrambled down the bank holding onto little rocks and roots that jutted out of the earth.
"How's he doin?"
"He's sorta in and out."
"He say anything?"
"Not a word." July lowered his voice. "I lifted up his shirt there. It's real bloody but it looks like he's been shot. Buddy, this boy can't walk. How're we gonna get him up to the truck? "
"Well, you pray for a miracle," Buddy said. He hunkered down across from July and put his hand on the man's shoulder, shaking him a little. His eyes snapped open.
"This is where we're gonna need your help. It's not too far and we'll try to be quick about it."
They got him up on his knees and then they got him up on his feet. He didn't say anything or holler or make any sound at all besides gasping for breath. He seemed like someone following orders. Buddy wondered if maybe he was from the militia but he didn't act like it. They were little more than hired bullies with heavy firepower and one of them would probably have been crying for his momma by now.
They'd taken a few steps, their arms wrapped around the man's waist and his arms over their shoulders, when he suddenly stopped. Buddy looked at him. He was staring at something beyond them and Buddy followed his sightline to where July had left his white cross propped up against the dirt bank. Buddy looked back at the man. His face was shadowed by confusion. Buddy was sweating and the man's blood was soaking into him.
"You religious?" Buddy asked gently, coaxing the man into moving again. "That's a good thing. July here, he's got all sorts a prayers for you."
July wheezed.
* * *
The man made it up the bank but his knees were buckling by the time they got him to the truck. Buddy spread the blanket out in the truckbed and they laid the man down on it and Buddy wrapped him up.
"Snug as a bug," he said. The man stared half-lidded at the heavy sky.
It was ten minutes back to Buddy's house and for the first five neither he nor July said anything. Finally July said, "Spooky, how quiet he is."
"Guess he don't feel up for a chat."
"Somethin ain't right about this."
"Somethin ain't right with a lot of things these days."
They didn't say anything for the rest of the drive.
* * *
July was the bigger of the two of them and he was able to carry the man into Buddy's house over his shoulder. They put him down in the small bedroom off the kitchen. He was still awake but he was gray-white and when Buddy put a hand on his forehead his skin was damp and cool. He went into the kitchen to get some water and July followed him.
"He's in shock, I think," Buddy said. "That's probably why he can't talk."
"What're you fixin to do?"
Buddy thought about this. Now that he had the man in the house, he didn't clearly know what he'd planned to do.
"Where do you think he come from?"
"I don't know," Buddy said. "He must of walked from somewhere. Or maybe someone shoved him out of a car or somethin."
"Someone shot that boy. Maybe they're gonna come lookin for him. Or maybe he shot someone first. You think about that?"
Buddy reached around and pulled the gun from the back of his jeans. It was a big thing, a real hand-cannon. He didn't even know how many rounds were in that clip.
"Maybe so but I don't think he's gonna be any trouble to anyone right now."
He set the gun down on the kitchen table and looked at July.
"The Bible says whatever you do for the least of em, you do it for Jesus. Don't it? What do you think we oughta do for Jesus in there?"
July ran a hand over his sweaty face. He looked old and scared.
"He's lost a lot of blood from the looks of it. No chance of gettin him to a hospital, is there?"
"I couldn't get myself into a hospital, much less some stranger. You know that."
"I know it," July said. "How much of your field training do you remember? Enough to dig a bullet out of someone?"
"Maybe there ain't no bullet. Maybe it went straight through. Hell, July, you worked in a hospital for forty years."
"I did laundry in a hospital for forty years. Didn't pick up too many surgery skills."
Buddy and July looked at each other.
"I sure wish he'd say something," July said. "Anything at all."
By early afternoon the sky had darkened with heavy thunderheads. The old glass ceiling fixture in the bedroom didn't work and the room was greenish dim and stifling. Buddy had gotten the man to drink some water and he'd thrown up the first half a glass but kept down the rest. After that he'd passed into a doze. He still hadn't said anything. He hadn't even so much as shifted since they'd laid him down.
They got a table lamp from the living room and plugged it in. The man turned his face away from the light but didn't open his eyes. Buddy and July stood by the side of the bed. Buddy had a bowl of hot water in his arms. July was holding a stack of Buddy's threadbare washcloths and towels and a pair of steel kitchen scissors.
"Maybe you oughta say a prayer," Buddy said.
July looked dry-mouthed. He settled for crossing himself and Buddy followed suit. Couldn't hurt.
Buddy leaned over the man and gently pushed up his shirt. It had been white but now it was tie-dyed with blood and rivermud. The shirt was stuck to him and Buddy had to tug on it. He looked up at the man's face but he hadn't opened his eyes.
"Give me a washcloth."
July handed him a washcloth as crisply as a registered nurse. Buddy wet it and wrung it out and started wiping away the scale of blood that was dried onto him.
"I don't see no exit wound," he said.
"What's that?"
"What's what?"
"On his belly," July said. "What's that?"
Buddy pushed the shirt up to the man's chest.
"Holy mother of God," he said.
Deeply grooved wounds ran the length of the man's torso, covering his abdomen. They were healed, but seemed recent and they looked as if they'd been stitched up by someone who'd been careful but not skilled with a needle. There was a patternlike nature to them that made Buddy think of tractorlines or rakemarks.
"Maybe he's a veteran," July said.
"I don't know of any weapons that could do something like this. Unless they got whole new bombs I don't know about."
Buddy brushed the back of his fingers over the stitches and felt the man twitch. He pulled his hand away and looked up and the man was awake, looking at him. Buddy smiled.
"Looks like you've been through hell."
The man rolled his eyes up and stared at the ceiling the way he'd stared at the sky in the back of the truck.
"I'm gonna have to get this shirt off you," Buddy said. "I'm gonna cut it off if that's all right. So you don't have to raise your arms or sit up or nothin."
He didn't wait for an answer because he'd figured out by now that there wasn't going to be one. July handed him the scissors and Buddy cut slowly through the shirt up to the neck. He folded open the two sides of the cut shirt. The wounds on the man's chest were even deeper and uglier, especially over his heart. Buddy could see the torn remnants of some tattoo, a star or sunburst maybe, impossible to tell. He had a silver pendant around his neck that looked like a Catholic saint's medal.
"We're gonna turn you over, okay?"
With July's help Buddy turned the man onto his side. He peeled the shirt off him and threw it on the floor. There were more of those stitched wounds on his back, almost as bad as on the front. There was a lot of blood and a fresh bullet hole on his lower left side. The skin around it was blackly bruised and swollen. Buddy cleaned him off and they rolled him onto his back with a clean towel underneath him.
"You're gonna be just fine," Buddy said.
"Just fine," July added. The man didn't look at them.
Buddy went into the bathroom and started pulling things out of his medicine cabinet. Hydrogen peroxide, iodine. He had a first aid kit under the sink and there were gauze bandages and antibiotic ointment in there.
"You got any of those pills in your house?" he asked July. "From when you hurt your hip?"
"If I could find em they'd be three, four years old."
"Well, go find em. There's a bullet in that boy and I'm not keen on diggin around in him while he's wide awake. Doubt he'd appreciate it either."
"Buddy," July said.
"What?"
"You ever done anything like this before?"
"No. But I saw worse than that in Vietnam. I wasn't a medic but I patched up a few guys. Doin it here ain't worse than doin it in the jungle."
"Maybe we just oughta call the police before we start carvin' him up."
Buddy shook his head.
"I can't remember the last time I saw counties around here. I don't think we've even got a sheriff no more. It'd be militia that'd make it out here first and you know what they're like. We'd probably get arrested for harborin a vagrant and God knows what'd happen to that boy. Probably take him out back and shoot him or haul him off to the lockup which'd be as good as killing him."
July nodded and looked at Buddy gravely. "He's probably gonna die anyway. You know that, right?"
"Yessir, well. We can at least make it easy on him."
"You may get through those pearly gates yet, Buddy."
"Just go get those pearly pills. Take my truck, it'll be faster. And July?"
"Yeah?
"Bring your shotgun."
When July left, Buddy went into the back bedroom. The room was very hot and stinking of blood and river water and the man had fallen asleep again or passed out. He was shivering and Buddy pulled the covers up and over him. He paused and leaned over the man and studied the medal around his neck. St. Michael the Archangel. It was shiny and looked very new. Buddy had been raised a Methodist and didn't know much about saints. Carefully, he picked up the medal and studied it on his fingertips. Couldn't make out much but it looked to be an angel standing on a dragon or serpent. Seemed like something July would appreciate.
* * *
By the time July returned it had turned black outside and started thundering. Buddy brought another light into the bedroom. They gave the man two of July's pills and Buddy had to hold him up while he swallowed them. He was weaker than he'd been in the morning and his eyes were drifting. Buddy wondered again if the man had come from whatever was burning up by Rena Lara. If he had, he'd walked more than twenty miles in the dark while so badly injured. He thought about putting this off until tomorrow to let the man rest a little then decided against it.
He went into the bathroom and washed his hands. He poured iodine on them and let them air dry. When he came back into the bedroom the man's eyes were open but unfocused. July had turned him onto his stomach. Buddy got down beside the bed.
"I don't know how much punch those pills had left so this is probably gonna hurt. I'll do the best I can and you, you don't gotta keep quiet, you know. You go ahead and scream your head off if you want. You let those profanities fly, no one's gonna hold it against you."
Buddy only had one thing to probe the wound and that was a pair of long, needle-nosed pliers. He'd sterilized them with a Bic lighter and then poured iodine on them to be sure. He leaned over the man's back and the bullethole looked so much smaller than those pliers and the thought of going in there with them made him feel sick. A first flash of lightning lit up the room and Buddy startled.
"You okay?" July asked.
"Yeah."
"Don't go gettin jumpy on me."
Buddy put his left hand flat around the wound. He took a deep breath and looked at July. July nodded at him.
Buddy went in with the pliers and the man stiffened and hissed. Dark blood welled up out of the wound and the pliers caught and tore at its edges and the man bucked underneath him. His hands were in white-knuckle fists and July tried to take one of them in his own but he pulled it away and twisted it in the bedsheet. Outside the thunder tolled.
He hit the bullet about two inches in. Lord help me, he thought and clamped down on the pliers. His hands were sweating. He wanted to pull the bullet out quickly but knew he would lose it if he did. He pulled it out as slow as he could, feeling it ripple and slide against torn flesh. Lord help me, Buddy thought again. The man was breathing hard through his teeth. The bullet finally came loose with a wet, sucking pop. It looked like a 10-millimeter brass round. Buddy threw it and the pliers on the bed and closed his eyes and wiped his sweating hands on his shirt.
"Hallelujah," July said.
"Don't start the chorus yet."
Buddy held the wound open and flooded it with water, then iodine. The man shuddered and July put a hand between his shoulder blades. "Almost done," he said. A sheet of rain slapped the window.
Buddy packed the wound with gauze and laid a pad over it and taped it in place. They pulled the bloody towel out from underneath him and replaced it with a clean one and then rolled him over onto his back. His eyes were half-closed and running with tears. Buddy wiped his face.
"Damn it," he said. "You're a tough customer. I'd of been screamin bloody murder. July here would of wet himself."
"Almost did just watchin," July said.
"That's the worst of it. You get some rest now." He ran a hand through the man's sweat-drenched hair. "Okay, son?"
The man's eyes focused on Buddy and for a brief moment Buddy saw that same flicker of confusion that he'd seen when the man had caught sight of July's cross. Like he'd encountered something he couldn't understand or had never seen before. He opened his mouth as if to say something at last but a crash of thunder shook the house and a gust of wind slammed it and the lights went out and cast all three of them into the dark.
* * *
They could take his sight if they wanted and take his voice and sometimes they took both and left him in a mute darkness where he could still hear them and still feel everything they did to him and couldn't even cry out against it. They would give him his voice when they wanted to hear him scream or when they wanted him to talk and when he realized what they wanted he refused to give it to them. He didn't fight them and he didn't speak and they hated him all the more for it.
Then they made him talk. They laid him open and made him tell them everything, every secret, every shame, every fear, every love. They made him tell it all until he couldn't bear the sound of his own voice or the sense of them gorging themselves on everything he had tried to hold onto. They left him with nothing to himself and then they told him how they were going to use what they'd wrung from him and they left him alone to scream in the dark until he gave up his voice forever.
When he woke up in the woman's house after somehow being asleep for the first time in eternity, he thought it was a trick and when the woman was gone and he found himself on the road in the night with blood soaking through his clothing he was sure it was some game of theirs. When the two men found him he had no strength or desire to fight them and he waited for them to show what they really were and take whatever they wanted though he had nothing left to give.
Later he was lying in a room lit by some pale flickering light and he could hear rain on the roof and could feel his own body in a way that he hadn't before, not just pain but a physical, real presence of himself. He began to imagine that this was no deception and that he had been here before. Before that sleepless, haunted eternity he had been alive and somehow he was again.
* * *
Around midnight Buddy finally went to lie down. The rain had not let up and he began to worry about flooding. He and July were two old men with nothing but a quarter-century old truck and half a canister of gas between them, and now they had a gravely injured stranger in their company. He didn't know what they would do if they had to evacuate but he was too exhausted to think about it for long.
Some time later July woke him up. The electricity was still out and he was standing over Buddy with a candle. Buddy looked at the old alarm clock next to his bed and saw that it was almost three in the morning.
"What is it?"
"Our boy's not doin too good. He's burnin up. "
"Oh, lord," Buddy said. He got up and padded downstairs in his bare feet, July lighting the way.
There was an oil lamp burning in the back bedroom and Buddy held it to the man's face and saw that he was flushed with fever.
"I hope those antibiotics are still good," he said to July. "They're even older'n your pain pills."
"I'll go get somethin to cool him off with."
"All right. There's some kitchen towels under the sink."
Buddy sat down on the edge of the bed. He took the man's hot hand between his own. After they'd patched him up they had finished cleaning all the blood and river off of him and Buddy had realized that the man was younger than he'd first supposed. He wouldn't have put him at more than thirty. They'd found more of those stitched-up wounds on his leg when they'd changed him into clean clothes and his apparent youth seemed even more striking against all the injuries he bore.
July came back with wet towels and wiped the man's face and neck. They lifted him and got him to drink some water and then lowered him back down. He never opened his eyes.
"I don't know what else to do," Buddy said. "I think maybe we just need to pray for him. July?"
July cleared his throat and Buddy looked up at him.
"I mostly just know the Revelation and the angry prophets, Buddy. I don't think none of them fits."
"Oh, July Scales," he said gently. "I don't believe that. Let's have some of that old time religion."
"Well," July said. "I suppose I can think of somethin."
He sat down on the other side of the bed. He took the man's other hand in his own and took a deep breath.
"The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures. He leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul. He leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for His name's sake. Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil..."
The man's eyes slid open and he looked at July. July stopped.
"Go on," Buddy said.
"I shall fear no evil, for thou art with me. Thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me."
July continued the psalm and the man watched him the whole time. Buddy felt the man faintly returning his grip. When July finished the room fell breathlessly silent.
"Son?" Buddy said. The man rolled his head on the pillow. "Son, what's your name?"
The man just gazed at him and Buddy was sure he wasn't going to answer. He patted the man's hand.
"That's all right, you don't have to..."
"Dean," he said. His eyes slipped closed. "Dean Winchester."
To be continued.
Go ahead to Chapter Two here.
I'm going to do something a little crazy and disable comments on this. This is entirely due to my own considerable neuroses and has nothing to do with any of you wonderful people. I just feel like writing in a vacuum right now. I'll open up comments at the end which should give me more reason to get there. Right? Right??
The evil
baylorsr has provided beta assistance on this.Title: Lazarus Came Forth
Author:
osellePairings: None (gen)
Rating: R (for language)
Warnings: Serious angst, some gore, heavily Dean-centric
Spoilers: Through end of Season Three
Word Count: 6,500 for Chapter One
Disclaimer: I don't own nothin and I ain't makin a penny off it.
Summary: Dean makes it out of hell and finds that things topside are not much better than down below. Apocalypse fic of the whimper rather than bang variety.
Lazarus Came Forth
1. Valley of Shadow
He didn't sleep, had never slept. Couldn't remember ever closing his eyes, only an eternity of unbroken, staring consciousness. Then suddenly this new thing, the sensation of waking up from a long-forgotten, oblivious darkness that must have been sleep.
After that, he slept, or thought he slept, most of the time. Each waking was too much like returning to that state of endless wakefulness and every time he woke up he wondered if he'd sleep again or if that had been the last time.
When he did wake, he would find a dim room or it might have been that he couldn't see. There was someone with him but he could never see her clearly and while he could hear her voice and even understand the words he couldn't piece them together. He never said anything to her. He had stopped speaking so long ago that to take it up again seemed unnatural and dangerous. Like losing some last, precious thing that he'd carefully hidden and tended. He didn't speak when she spoke to him or when she touched him. He thought that he wept once and she sat beside him and wiped his eyes and even then he said nothing to her. It was all new and he trusted none of it.
He became able to understand what she was saying and once she told him that he was getting better and only then did he want to talk to her, to tell her there was no getting better from what he was and so he knew she was a liar. But he held his silence and slept when he could and woke to find these new things unchanged.
Finally she came to him and she wasn't smiling or speaking softly, there was terror in her face and this at last was something not new.
"Get up, get up!" she whispered and pulled him to his feet and led him down a flight of stairs in the stifling dark.
"Take this," she said and put something in his hand and his fingers curled around it as if they remembered its shape on their own and when he looked down he saw a gun in his hand and this was also something he understood.
"Run," she said. "Don't look back. Just run."
There was a terrible pounding crash above them and she turned him around and pushed him to a flight of narrow stairs or a ladder that led to an open doorway or hatch. And then suddenly there was something else new, the feeling of warm night air on his face and the sight of stars above.
"Run!" the woman said and then he was running through something that felt like dry grass or brambles, running in his bare feet and he could hear the woman behind him and others in pursuit of them both.
There were shots and she went down behind him and some ancient impulse made him wheel around and try to get her on her feet.
"Get out of here!" she hissed. "Run, hide, go!"
She went limp in his arms, her eyes staring up at the dark sky. He could hear them coming through the dry grass. He dropped the woman's body and set out at a dead run across the field. He heard three shots and felt a flat, sharp blow on his side and the pain that followed was no new thing at all.
He still ran and was amazed that he ran when he knew there was nowhere to run. He reached a dark stand of trees and he fell to his knees and put his back against a trunk and as he was raising the gun the woman had given him there was a roaring explosion and a bright orange gout of flame. He saw a house burning in the distance and the fields he'd run through were on fire. The heat was intense and he couldn't breathe. He heard something screaming and that also was not new.
He thought they would come for him but no one came. His side was bleeding and very painful but he knew that he wouldn't die because he was already dead, dead and damned. And yet he got to his feet and set the burning landscape behind him though he had no idea of where there was to go.
* * *
Like every morning Buddy went down to the river and like every morning July was kneeling there, his eyes closed and his hands clasped in prayer and all seven feet of his handmade cross leaning against his shoulder like the holy pole with which he planned to vault himself to heaven.
"Mornin, preacher."
July paid him no mind so Buddy stuck his hands in his pockets and looked off up the wide track of the river. It was shaping up to be a low, hot day and the water was leadenly reflecting the clouds rolling in above it. At his feet, July shifted his knees in the levee's yellow dirt. Buddy grinned.
"That ain't the Jordan, y'know," he said. "It's the Mississippi. Don't know if the results is the same."
July opened one eye and looked up at Buddy from underneath the brim of his white hat.
"I know what river that is. Lived next to it all my life, didn't I?"
"You sure did and for most of it you was just plain old July Scales from down the road till you went and got the Jesus fever on me. I sure do miss our poker games, July."
"I got better things to do with my time than sit around and play the devil's cardgames with you."
"I'll bet Ol Scratch has got better things to do hisself than worry about two old men shufflin cards."
July made a snorting sound that struck Buddy as more than a little unchristian and went back to his prayer. Buddy looked up the river again. Far in the distance, almost of a color with the gray sky, he could now see a column of smoke rising into the clouds.
"Something's burnin upriver," he said. "Looks like the devil was keepin hisself pretty busy last night after all."
July didn't open his eyes. "Everything's gonna burn soon. As was foretold in The Book."
"Seems that way, don't it? Say, when's that Jesus gettin here, July? Somethin holdin him up?"
"He which testifieth these things saith surely I come quickly."
"He got a strange notion a quick."
"Amen!" July shouted. "Even so, come Lord Jesus!"
"Okay, July," Buddy said. "You keep sayin it, maybe it'll happen."
Buddy walked past July and set off down the dirt road. He didn't know why he came here every morning to have this same old exchange but it would have felt wrong to him if he didn't. There were so few folks left that he knew, so few folks left, period. This stretch of the Delta had never been crowded but after the last flood it had emptied out of damn near everyone. Buddy didn't know where they'd all gone. Jackson maybe, some over the border to Memphis. Things weren't much better in those places from what he heard, in fact they were probably worse. At least out here he still had the house he'd lived in for some forty years and his walks by the river and even old July, crazy as he'd gotten. Buddy teased him but could see how the past few years would drive anyone to religion. Times like these, it helped to believe in something.
What was that about the four horsemen? Buddy ticked them off in his head. War, famine, death, one more. Pestilence. He always forgot that one, hard as that was to believe since it was everywhere these days. Buddy didn't even know where the nearest private hospital was anymore and even if he did he didn't have the papers to get in. A hell of thing, after he'd served his country he couldn't even get into a hospital. But it was like that all over now, things breaking down everywhere and so fast. Four horsemen, bearing down.
His old Army-issue .45 banged on his skinny hip. He felt like a damn fool walking around with that thing but even an old man could be bothered with and there were people out there willing to do it for nothing more than a few chuckles. Lord knows he didn't have anything to steal. Hell, even July kept a shotgun in the house though he was just crazy enough to come out here every day with no defense but his faith. Though Buddy was willing to bet he could have made fancy use of that cross in a pinch.
The fire in the distance was still burning, looked like maybe up by Rena Lara. He didn't know what was up there to burn anymore, probably it was just something had set itself afire and there was no one to put it out. These were some hard times, to be sure. Folks talked about the Depression and about the oil crisis and about September 11 and said we got through all that, we'll get through this, but Buddy thought this might be it. It sure did look like those end times July was always talking about and meanwhile Jesus was taking his sweet old time setting it to rights. Buddy was glad he was an old man, didn't have much farther to go.
Buddy came to a place where the ground sloughed off to the river and he stopped to look out over the water. There were old iron bars across the road here, the remains of some Tennessee Valley Authority drainage project. The bars were flaked with orange rust and the weeds were coming up high around it. There was not so much as a breath of wind and the river rolled on, smooth and oily under the low summer sky. Buddy crossed over the bars and looked down to the banks of the river and saw the body lying there.
The peculiar thing about a dead body was how still it was. There wasn't anything in the world with less life in it, not even a log or a rock. Buddy stood on the drain pipes and knew the body below him was not dead, though it was not moving at all. It didn't have that stillness of death about it.
There were all sorts of people on the road these days and Buddy didn't know what sort of person this was. He might have been a drunk or a dope fiend or someone escaped from the authorities. They'd brought back the chain gangs and maybe this man had dodged off of one of them, though it didn't seem likely with the tracking collars they wore now. Didn't need any bloodhound to find such a man, just had to activate his collar and he'd go down with about three thousand volts in him. Then plug his code into a computer and he'd light up on the map just like a tourist attraction.
Buddy hung over the edge of the bank so he could get a better look at the man lying facedown near the water. He must have fallen off the road and down to the bank unless he'd come up from the river itself. His eyes went to the smoke upriver and he wondered if this man knew anything about that.
For a second he considered scrambling his old bones down there all by himself and then sense took over and he hauled himself up and headed back to where he'd left July kneeling in the yellow dirt waiting for Jesus.
"July," he huffed. "July."
"Get thee behind me, Satan."
"July, there's a man down by the river."
"Maybe it's the devil come for your old heathen soul."
"No, July, I think he's hurt. He's just lyin there."
July opened his eyes and looked up, pushing his hat back on his head. "He's dead. Washed up by the river."
"No, he ain't. I'm pretty sure of it. He's sick or he's hurt. I think he needs help."
"There's a wide white space between what you think and what you know. Where would such a man have come from? No place around here to walk from. Did you see a car?"
"No car, no."
"Then you think he swam the river?"
"Damnit, July, I don't know. Come down with me and take a look."
"I ain't finished my daily devotions."
"I've just about had it with your daily devotions. There's a real live person down there needs some help and you sit there and talk to me about prayin. I don't see the hand a Jesus comin to help that poor soul. I don't see nobody but us. We gonna let someone die in the mud like that? What in the hell would Jesus do?"
July looked up at him. He grasped his white cross and pulled himself up on it.
"You are a blaspheming savage, Buddy Lennox, and you'll account for it on the Day of Judgment."
"I suppose I will but maybe I'll get special dispensation for my good intentions."
July muttered something about what the road to hell was paved with and stalked off in the direction from which Buddy had come.
* * *
July used his cross like a staff, picking his way down the bank. Buddy followed him, feeling old and rickety. If the man had fallen off the road he'd taken a hell of a tumble. They stopped a few feet away from him. He wasn't moving. His right arm was bent under him and his left hand was stretched out, scraped and bleeding. He had blood on his shirt and soaked through the fabric on his left leg. He didn't have any shoes on and his feet were bloody.
"That man is dead," July said and the man raised his head and looked at them.
He didn't seem afraid of them and there was no plea for help in his face. As if he'd been lying there expecting them to come along. For a long moment the three of them just stared at each other.
Buddy took a step towards him and the man pulled his right arm from underneath himself and along with it a big silver semi-automatic, like the ones the hired militias carried. July put a hand on Buddy's arm and Buddy stepped back.
The man made an attempt to aim but he didn't seem to have the strength to hold up the gun and he let his arm fall to the ground. He put his head down and then looked up again, half-propped on his forearms.
"We're here to help you. You ain't gonna shoot us, are you?"
"Why don't you let go of the gun?" July added.
The man said nothing. He stared at them and Buddy could hear his quick, shallow breathing and could see that he was shivering.
"I don't think he's gonna shoot no one," Buddy whispered to July. "I don't think he could lift that thing again."
"Gun like that he could shoot us both dead before we even knew what hit us."
"You're a damn coward, July Scales, for all your sermonizing. Why in the hell're you so keen on savin your old ass anyway?"
"May be old but it's mine. Don't need it perforated."
"Damnit," Buddy said. He shook off July's hand and marched over to the man, his feet sucking in the mud. He bent down and took the gun out of the man's hand and he put up no resistance as if he'd been expecting this too. Buddy shoved the gun down the back of his jeans and put a hand on the man's shoulder. The man didn't look at him.
"I don't know what your story is, but you need some help. I don't think neither me or John the Baptist over there's gonna be able to carry you up outta here. You think you can walk a little, make it to the road?"
The man didn't say anything and Buddy wondered if he was deaf. He let his eyes skate over the man's body. He had lain there long enough to bloody the ground beneath him and there were flies in the blood, there were flies crawling on his bloody clothing.
He leaned over and said softly, "If we leave you out here you're gonna die."
The man heard that. He turned his head and looked at Buddy and smiled with such bitterness that it shook Buddy and scared him and for the first time he wondered what he'd gotten himself into.
* * *
Buddy had an old truck, an '87 Chevy pickup that he kept in the barn. He had gas for it in a canister down in the cellar. He left July at the riverbank with the injured man and trotted back to his house. The day was growing close and very hot, although there was still no sun.
The gas canister was half full and he put as much of it in the tank as he thought he'd need without having to siphon it back out again. He climbed in the cab and sat there and thought for a second and then went back in the house and pulled a blanket off the sofa and got back in the truck with it.
The old truck spluttered with disuse and cut out on him twice. Buddy turned the key in the ignition and gently tapped the gas pedal, trying not to flood the line.
"Come on sweetheart," he whispered. "Come on."
The Chevy finally coughed into life and Buddy felt a surprising exhilaration. He'd enjoyed driving when he was young. Hell, he'd enjoyed driving up until three years ago or so.
When he got back to the levee, he saw July kneeling beside the man. His head was on the ground now and his eyes were closed. Buddy scrambled down the bank holding onto little rocks and roots that jutted out of the earth.
"How's he doin?"
"He's sorta in and out."
"He say anything?"
"Not a word." July lowered his voice. "I lifted up his shirt there. It's real bloody but it looks like he's been shot. Buddy, this boy can't walk. How're we gonna get him up to the truck? "
"Well, you pray for a miracle," Buddy said. He hunkered down across from July and put his hand on the man's shoulder, shaking him a little. His eyes snapped open.
"This is where we're gonna need your help. It's not too far and we'll try to be quick about it."
They got him up on his knees and then they got him up on his feet. He didn't say anything or holler or make any sound at all besides gasping for breath. He seemed like someone following orders. Buddy wondered if maybe he was from the militia but he didn't act like it. They were little more than hired bullies with heavy firepower and one of them would probably have been crying for his momma by now.
They'd taken a few steps, their arms wrapped around the man's waist and his arms over their shoulders, when he suddenly stopped. Buddy looked at him. He was staring at something beyond them and Buddy followed his sightline to where July had left his white cross propped up against the dirt bank. Buddy looked back at the man. His face was shadowed by confusion. Buddy was sweating and the man's blood was soaking into him.
"You religious?" Buddy asked gently, coaxing the man into moving again. "That's a good thing. July here, he's got all sorts a prayers for you."
July wheezed.
* * *
The man made it up the bank but his knees were buckling by the time they got him to the truck. Buddy spread the blanket out in the truckbed and they laid the man down on it and Buddy wrapped him up.
"Snug as a bug," he said. The man stared half-lidded at the heavy sky.
It was ten minutes back to Buddy's house and for the first five neither he nor July said anything. Finally July said, "Spooky, how quiet he is."
"Guess he don't feel up for a chat."
"Somethin ain't right about this."
"Somethin ain't right with a lot of things these days."
They didn't say anything for the rest of the drive.
* * *
July was the bigger of the two of them and he was able to carry the man into Buddy's house over his shoulder. They put him down in the small bedroom off the kitchen. He was still awake but he was gray-white and when Buddy put a hand on his forehead his skin was damp and cool. He went into the kitchen to get some water and July followed him.
"He's in shock, I think," Buddy said. "That's probably why he can't talk."
"What're you fixin to do?"
Buddy thought about this. Now that he had the man in the house, he didn't clearly know what he'd planned to do.
"Where do you think he come from?"
"I don't know," Buddy said. "He must of walked from somewhere. Or maybe someone shoved him out of a car or somethin."
"Someone shot that boy. Maybe they're gonna come lookin for him. Or maybe he shot someone first. You think about that?"
Buddy reached around and pulled the gun from the back of his jeans. It was a big thing, a real hand-cannon. He didn't even know how many rounds were in that clip.
"Maybe so but I don't think he's gonna be any trouble to anyone right now."
He set the gun down on the kitchen table and looked at July.
"The Bible says whatever you do for the least of em, you do it for Jesus. Don't it? What do you think we oughta do for Jesus in there?"
July ran a hand over his sweaty face. He looked old and scared.
"He's lost a lot of blood from the looks of it. No chance of gettin him to a hospital, is there?"
"I couldn't get myself into a hospital, much less some stranger. You know that."
"I know it," July said. "How much of your field training do you remember? Enough to dig a bullet out of someone?"
"Maybe there ain't no bullet. Maybe it went straight through. Hell, July, you worked in a hospital for forty years."
"I did laundry in a hospital for forty years. Didn't pick up too many surgery skills."
Buddy and July looked at each other.
"I sure wish he'd say something," July said. "Anything at all."
By early afternoon the sky had darkened with heavy thunderheads. The old glass ceiling fixture in the bedroom didn't work and the room was greenish dim and stifling. Buddy had gotten the man to drink some water and he'd thrown up the first half a glass but kept down the rest. After that he'd passed into a doze. He still hadn't said anything. He hadn't even so much as shifted since they'd laid him down.
They got a table lamp from the living room and plugged it in. The man turned his face away from the light but didn't open his eyes. Buddy and July stood by the side of the bed. Buddy had a bowl of hot water in his arms. July was holding a stack of Buddy's threadbare washcloths and towels and a pair of steel kitchen scissors.
"Maybe you oughta say a prayer," Buddy said.
July looked dry-mouthed. He settled for crossing himself and Buddy followed suit. Couldn't hurt.
Buddy leaned over the man and gently pushed up his shirt. It had been white but now it was tie-dyed with blood and rivermud. The shirt was stuck to him and Buddy had to tug on it. He looked up at the man's face but he hadn't opened his eyes.
"Give me a washcloth."
July handed him a washcloth as crisply as a registered nurse. Buddy wet it and wrung it out and started wiping away the scale of blood that was dried onto him.
"I don't see no exit wound," he said.
"What's that?"
"What's what?"
"On his belly," July said. "What's that?"
Buddy pushed the shirt up to the man's chest.
"Holy mother of God," he said.
Deeply grooved wounds ran the length of the man's torso, covering his abdomen. They were healed, but seemed recent and they looked as if they'd been stitched up by someone who'd been careful but not skilled with a needle. There was a patternlike nature to them that made Buddy think of tractorlines or rakemarks.
"Maybe he's a veteran," July said.
"I don't know of any weapons that could do something like this. Unless they got whole new bombs I don't know about."
Buddy brushed the back of his fingers over the stitches and felt the man twitch. He pulled his hand away and looked up and the man was awake, looking at him. Buddy smiled.
"Looks like you've been through hell."
The man rolled his eyes up and stared at the ceiling the way he'd stared at the sky in the back of the truck.
"I'm gonna have to get this shirt off you," Buddy said. "I'm gonna cut it off if that's all right. So you don't have to raise your arms or sit up or nothin."
He didn't wait for an answer because he'd figured out by now that there wasn't going to be one. July handed him the scissors and Buddy cut slowly through the shirt up to the neck. He folded open the two sides of the cut shirt. The wounds on the man's chest were even deeper and uglier, especially over his heart. Buddy could see the torn remnants of some tattoo, a star or sunburst maybe, impossible to tell. He had a silver pendant around his neck that looked like a Catholic saint's medal.
"We're gonna turn you over, okay?"
With July's help Buddy turned the man onto his side. He peeled the shirt off him and threw it on the floor. There were more of those stitched wounds on his back, almost as bad as on the front. There was a lot of blood and a fresh bullet hole on his lower left side. The skin around it was blackly bruised and swollen. Buddy cleaned him off and they rolled him onto his back with a clean towel underneath him.
"You're gonna be just fine," Buddy said.
"Just fine," July added. The man didn't look at them.
Buddy went into the bathroom and started pulling things out of his medicine cabinet. Hydrogen peroxide, iodine. He had a first aid kit under the sink and there were gauze bandages and antibiotic ointment in there.
"You got any of those pills in your house?" he asked July. "From when you hurt your hip?"
"If I could find em they'd be three, four years old."
"Well, go find em. There's a bullet in that boy and I'm not keen on diggin around in him while he's wide awake. Doubt he'd appreciate it either."
"Buddy," July said.
"What?"
"You ever done anything like this before?"
"No. But I saw worse than that in Vietnam. I wasn't a medic but I patched up a few guys. Doin it here ain't worse than doin it in the jungle."
"Maybe we just oughta call the police before we start carvin' him up."
Buddy shook his head.
"I can't remember the last time I saw counties around here. I don't think we've even got a sheriff no more. It'd be militia that'd make it out here first and you know what they're like. We'd probably get arrested for harborin a vagrant and God knows what'd happen to that boy. Probably take him out back and shoot him or haul him off to the lockup which'd be as good as killing him."
July nodded and looked at Buddy gravely. "He's probably gonna die anyway. You know that, right?"
"Yessir, well. We can at least make it easy on him."
"You may get through those pearly gates yet, Buddy."
"Just go get those pearly pills. Take my truck, it'll be faster. And July?"
"Yeah?
"Bring your shotgun."
When July left, Buddy went into the back bedroom. The room was very hot and stinking of blood and river water and the man had fallen asleep again or passed out. He was shivering and Buddy pulled the covers up and over him. He paused and leaned over the man and studied the medal around his neck. St. Michael the Archangel. It was shiny and looked very new. Buddy had been raised a Methodist and didn't know much about saints. Carefully, he picked up the medal and studied it on his fingertips. Couldn't make out much but it looked to be an angel standing on a dragon or serpent. Seemed like something July would appreciate.
* * *
By the time July returned it had turned black outside and started thundering. Buddy brought another light into the bedroom. They gave the man two of July's pills and Buddy had to hold him up while he swallowed them. He was weaker than he'd been in the morning and his eyes were drifting. Buddy wondered again if the man had come from whatever was burning up by Rena Lara. If he had, he'd walked more than twenty miles in the dark while so badly injured. He thought about putting this off until tomorrow to let the man rest a little then decided against it.
He went into the bathroom and washed his hands. He poured iodine on them and let them air dry. When he came back into the bedroom the man's eyes were open but unfocused. July had turned him onto his stomach. Buddy got down beside the bed.
"I don't know how much punch those pills had left so this is probably gonna hurt. I'll do the best I can and you, you don't gotta keep quiet, you know. You go ahead and scream your head off if you want. You let those profanities fly, no one's gonna hold it against you."
Buddy only had one thing to probe the wound and that was a pair of long, needle-nosed pliers. He'd sterilized them with a Bic lighter and then poured iodine on them to be sure. He leaned over the man's back and the bullethole looked so much smaller than those pliers and the thought of going in there with them made him feel sick. A first flash of lightning lit up the room and Buddy startled.
"You okay?" July asked.
"Yeah."
"Don't go gettin jumpy on me."
Buddy put his left hand flat around the wound. He took a deep breath and looked at July. July nodded at him.
Buddy went in with the pliers and the man stiffened and hissed. Dark blood welled up out of the wound and the pliers caught and tore at its edges and the man bucked underneath him. His hands were in white-knuckle fists and July tried to take one of them in his own but he pulled it away and twisted it in the bedsheet. Outside the thunder tolled.
He hit the bullet about two inches in. Lord help me, he thought and clamped down on the pliers. His hands were sweating. He wanted to pull the bullet out quickly but knew he would lose it if he did. He pulled it out as slow as he could, feeling it ripple and slide against torn flesh. Lord help me, Buddy thought again. The man was breathing hard through his teeth. The bullet finally came loose with a wet, sucking pop. It looked like a 10-millimeter brass round. Buddy threw it and the pliers on the bed and closed his eyes and wiped his sweating hands on his shirt.
"Hallelujah," July said.
"Don't start the chorus yet."
Buddy held the wound open and flooded it with water, then iodine. The man shuddered and July put a hand between his shoulder blades. "Almost done," he said. A sheet of rain slapped the window.
Buddy packed the wound with gauze and laid a pad over it and taped it in place. They pulled the bloody towel out from underneath him and replaced it with a clean one and then rolled him over onto his back. His eyes were half-closed and running with tears. Buddy wiped his face.
"Damn it," he said. "You're a tough customer. I'd of been screamin bloody murder. July here would of wet himself."
"Almost did just watchin," July said.
"That's the worst of it. You get some rest now." He ran a hand through the man's sweat-drenched hair. "Okay, son?"
The man's eyes focused on Buddy and for a brief moment Buddy saw that same flicker of confusion that he'd seen when the man had caught sight of July's cross. Like he'd encountered something he couldn't understand or had never seen before. He opened his mouth as if to say something at last but a crash of thunder shook the house and a gust of wind slammed it and the lights went out and cast all three of them into the dark.
* * *
They could take his sight if they wanted and take his voice and sometimes they took both and left him in a mute darkness where he could still hear them and still feel everything they did to him and couldn't even cry out against it. They would give him his voice when they wanted to hear him scream or when they wanted him to talk and when he realized what they wanted he refused to give it to them. He didn't fight them and he didn't speak and they hated him all the more for it.
Then they made him talk. They laid him open and made him tell them everything, every secret, every shame, every fear, every love. They made him tell it all until he couldn't bear the sound of his own voice or the sense of them gorging themselves on everything he had tried to hold onto. They left him with nothing to himself and then they told him how they were going to use what they'd wrung from him and they left him alone to scream in the dark until he gave up his voice forever.
When he woke up in the woman's house after somehow being asleep for the first time in eternity, he thought it was a trick and when the woman was gone and he found himself on the road in the night with blood soaking through his clothing he was sure it was some game of theirs. When the two men found him he had no strength or desire to fight them and he waited for them to show what they really were and take whatever they wanted though he had nothing left to give.
Later he was lying in a room lit by some pale flickering light and he could hear rain on the roof and could feel his own body in a way that he hadn't before, not just pain but a physical, real presence of himself. He began to imagine that this was no deception and that he had been here before. Before that sleepless, haunted eternity he had been alive and somehow he was again.
* * *
Around midnight Buddy finally went to lie down. The rain had not let up and he began to worry about flooding. He and July were two old men with nothing but a quarter-century old truck and half a canister of gas between them, and now they had a gravely injured stranger in their company. He didn't know what they would do if they had to evacuate but he was too exhausted to think about it for long.
Some time later July woke him up. The electricity was still out and he was standing over Buddy with a candle. Buddy looked at the old alarm clock next to his bed and saw that it was almost three in the morning.
"What is it?"
"Our boy's not doin too good. He's burnin up. "
"Oh, lord," Buddy said. He got up and padded downstairs in his bare feet, July lighting the way.
There was an oil lamp burning in the back bedroom and Buddy held it to the man's face and saw that he was flushed with fever.
"I hope those antibiotics are still good," he said to July. "They're even older'n your pain pills."
"I'll go get somethin to cool him off with."
"All right. There's some kitchen towels under the sink."
Buddy sat down on the edge of the bed. He took the man's hot hand between his own. After they'd patched him up they had finished cleaning all the blood and river off of him and Buddy had realized that the man was younger than he'd first supposed. He wouldn't have put him at more than thirty. They'd found more of those stitched-up wounds on his leg when they'd changed him into clean clothes and his apparent youth seemed even more striking against all the injuries he bore.
July came back with wet towels and wiped the man's face and neck. They lifted him and got him to drink some water and then lowered him back down. He never opened his eyes.
"I don't know what else to do," Buddy said. "I think maybe we just need to pray for him. July?"
July cleared his throat and Buddy looked up at him.
"I mostly just know the Revelation and the angry prophets, Buddy. I don't think none of them fits."
"Oh, July Scales," he said gently. "I don't believe that. Let's have some of that old time religion."
"Well," July said. "I suppose I can think of somethin."
He sat down on the other side of the bed. He took the man's other hand in his own and took a deep breath.
"The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures. He leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul. He leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for His name's sake. Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil..."
The man's eyes slid open and he looked at July. July stopped.
"Go on," Buddy said.
"I shall fear no evil, for thou art with me. Thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me."
July continued the psalm and the man watched him the whole time. Buddy felt the man faintly returning his grip. When July finished the room fell breathlessly silent.
"Son?" Buddy said. The man rolled his head on the pillow. "Son, what's your name?"
The man just gazed at him and Buddy was sure he wasn't going to answer. He patted the man's hand.
"That's all right, you don't have to..."
"Dean," he said. His eyes slipped closed. "Dean Winchester."
To be continued.
Go ahead to Chapter Two here.