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Entry tags:
Lazarus Came Forth, Chapter Three
Title: Lazarus Came Forth
Pairings: None (gen)
Rating: R (for language)
Warnings: Serious angst, some gore, heavily Dean-centric
Spoilers: Through end of Season Three
Word Count: 6,900 for Chapter Three
Disclaimer: Not mine and no one's paying me for this but I'd sure take it if offered.
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.
Go back to Chapter Two
Go back to Chapter One
We're getting just about to the halfway point of this story and I'm enabling comments on this chapter in case anyone's hopelessly confused. My Deanalicious icon was created by![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
dawnbreeze.
Lazarus Came Forth
3. Dead Man Running
Dean had been to the Mississippi Delta in his previous life and though he had no exact idea of where he was now he knew that if he kept the river to his left he'd be going north. On the other side of the river was Arkansas and from there he could head up into the Ozarks and through the middle of the country to South Dakota and Bobby's. He had nowhere else to go.
At Roundlake he pulled off into a campsite and parked beneath the green darkness of the low-hanging trees. There was a GPS navigator on the dashboard but not a type he'd ever seen and when he emptied the glovebox he found a nine-millimeter Walther with a spare clip and a rolled up canvas duffel bag with something that looked like a canister of tear gas in it but no maps. He also found a box of double ought buckshot shells and Roy Harlan's Patriots Militia I.D. card with the Confederate flag on the front and something about Ehrlich Defense Contractors on the back and he pitched all of this back in the glovebox and slammed the door and sat up stiffly. The bandage on his back was wet and heavy and his shirt was wet and the air conditioning was chilling him so he turned off the engine and put down the window and sat there listening to the high-summer sound of the woods while the sultry air washed over him.
He tried to remember phone numbers but nothing was coming to him. Bobby had always kept a landline and Dean somehow remembered the area code or thought he did. He closed his eyes and recited the three numbers to himself trying to trigger the other seven and Harlan's words about everyone he knew being dead came back to him but he pushed them away. Four years was a long time but someone had gotten him out of hell so it wasn't true. It just wasn't true. Couldn't be true.
It was warm and close in the H3 and the drone of the flies that had found Harlan's sheet-wrapped body was numbing and Christ he was tired. If Sam had been here he would have been pissing and moaning about how Dean should be in bed before he bled to death or he would have been checking that bandage every fifteen minutes throwing around words like sepsis or God knows what. Sam should have been somebody's mom.
"What the fuck, Sam?" he said and didn't realize he was dozing. "Where are you?"
Come on, Sam said but Dean didn't know where he was only that his voice was very close, as if in his own head. Stay with me, Dean.
I'm with you, Dean thought but he couldn't say the words. I'm with you, Sam, please don't leave me please please...
A crackling burst of radio static jolted him awake so hard he had to grab the steering wheel to steady himself.
"Harlan? Harlan, pick up the fuckin radio. Your vehicle was on the road five fuckin minutes ago so pick up the goddamn radio."
He felt disoriented and sick and it took him a minute to find the radio and by then the voice on the other side was yelling Harlan's name.
"Yeah?"
"Harlan, why isn't your phone on and what the fuck are you doin in Roundlake?"
"I stopped to take a piss."
"Well zip up and get your ass back to Clarksdale. You're in deep shit."
Dean thought for a second. "Rena Lara?"
"You'd better fuckin believe Rena Lara. You know DiRita and Eula are dead?"
"Ah, yeah....they were fine when I left them."
"Well they ain't fine now. Where the fuck were you when your team members were gettin shot in the head? This ain't company policy, Harlan."
Dean tapped the steering wheel.
"What about the fugitive?"
"Fugitive? What fuckin fugitive?"
Dean smiled. There were demons on his ass but at least the whole goddamn army wasn't piling on. Not yet.
"You sit right there, Harlan. We got your position, we're gonna come and pick you up."
"No no no, I'm coming in."
"We got a team in Hushpuckena, gonna send em right over."
"Shit," Dean breathed. "Don't send anyone, I'm coming in."
"Be there in ten minutes. Over and out."
Dean got out of the H3 and opened the back door and dragged Harlan's body out. It was going stiff and was heavy as cordwood. They'd find it when they searched the site but it didn't have to be there waiting for them in the backseat and the search would slow them down. He got back to the H3 and took the Walther and the clip and the shells and looked at the tear gas canister and took that too. He stuffed everything in the bag along with the first aid supplies Buddy had given him and slung it over his shoulder. There was a long-range rifle with a big scope on it and a Remington pump-action shotgun on the rack and he looked both of them over and took only the shotgun.
He listened to hear if any vehicle was approaching but none was so he crossed the road and made for the river and Arkansas on the other side.
* * *
By the time he crossed over to Arkansas it was a tossup between whether his back hurt worse or his feet. He was wearing Harlan's boots and inside them his bandaged feet were bleeding. At the first place he came to there was nothing but one gas station and it was closed and the convenience store next to it was closed too and the doorglass was smashed in.
He pushed the door open, his boots crunching on broken glass. He stood in the hot quiet and looked around. There were still a few goods on the dark shelves though the beer coolers were all empty and the cash register had been torn off its moorings, its drawer left stuck out over the counter like a black tongue. He found one bottle of orange soda and took that but there wasn't anything else worth carrying.
There were restrooms behind the convenience store, explosively hot inside and they stank like decades of piss had baked into the concrete floor. He tried the lights but they didn't work and he stood there with his leg propping open the door and tried the sink but that didn't work either. He went back out into the blazing daylight. There was a pay phone between the men's and women's restrooms and he stopped and looked at it.
He picked up the receiver and the dial tone sounded so steady and normal that for a moment he could only stand there with the hot black plastic pressed to his ear. He dialed zero and waited. The phone rang once, twice, ten times and he was ready to hang up when the automated voice came on and asked him for city and listing.
"Creighton, South Dakota. Listing for Singer Salvage."
He listened to a whisper of static on the line and waited for the number and for the sound of Bobby's voice. Or Sam's voice. He hardly knew what he would say. What the fuck? seemed like a good opener.
The phone clicked and went silent and then the dial tone came back.
"What...?" He held down the lever and released it and when he had a dial tone he punched zero again and waited through another long series of rings and then repeated his information with the same result. On the third try he pressed zero and then zero again when the automated voice came on and he waited for a human operator but none came. He tried this again too and kept coming back to the canned operator.
He put the receiver in the cradle and stepped away from the phone. Phones don't work, he thought. It happens. It doesn't mean anything. Though in all his long experience he'd found that it was usually the very thing that seemed to mean nothing that meant everything.
There was a soft, gravelly step behind him and he spun around and pulled out the handgun. A woman and a little girl were in his line of fire. They both froze. The woman put one hand in the air and the other on the little girl's head.
"We didn't rob that place, sir, it's been like that," she said.
Dean put the gun down and held up a hand. "It's all right, I'm sorry. Is there something wrong with the phones out here?"
"Nossir." The little girl was hugging the woman's leg and staring at Dean over her shoulder. The woman still had her hand in the air as if she were surrendering and her eyes went from the gun in Dean's hand to the shotgun over his shoulder. He put the gun in the back of his waistband.
"Where is this?"
"Deerfield, sir."
"Why are you calling me sir?"
"Respect for the militia, sir."
"Oh," Dean said. He looked down at himself. He'd forgotten what he was wearing. "Okay well that's...duly noted. You can put your hand down."
"Thank you, sir. Can we be goin now, sir?"
"Yeah...wait, wait."
"Yessir?"
"Is there another gas station around here, one that's open? Someplace with running water?"
"There's one in Elaine. About ten miles."
"We've got water..." the little girl said and her mother shushed her sharply and stared at Dean and he could see how frightened she was. He shook his head.
"It's okay," he said. "It's okay. I'm not going to your house." He smiled at the little girl and then looked up at her mother. "Okay?"
She nodded. "Yessir."
"Elaine's this way?"
"Yessir."
"Ten miles?"
"Take you about fifteen minutes. Just stay on this road."
Dean ran a hand through his hair and looked at the dusty blacktop. "Yeah, fifteen minutes."
The woman was standing there looking at him.
"Where's your truck?" she asked.
"Broke down."
She ran her eyes over him. "What happened to your leg?"
He looked down and saw the bloodied hole where he'd shot Harlan. "Skinned my knee?"
After a moment she said, "You're not militia, are you?"
Dean took a breath and studied the woman. "No."
"Are you hurt?"
"Yeah."
"Can you walk to Elaine?"
"Probably," he said. "It might take me a half a day if I don't get a ride."
"There ain't no rides, not on this road. You got any money?"
"Why?"
"You wanna buy a car?"
"What?"
"I got two cars and don't drive neither one. You take the one off my hands and I can give you enough gas to get to Elaine, too."
"How much?"
"Seven-fifty."
"Do I look like I have that kind of money?"
"You look like you're in a tight spot," she said.
"The car runs?"
"It runs. Old, but it runs."
"How old?"
"Eighty-nine. Mercury Grand Marquis. Gas-guzzler, nobody wants it."
"I'll give you five hundred," he said.
She nodded and narrowed her eyes at him. "I'll bring it around."
"Works for me."
"All right," she said. "You sit tight."
"I'm not going anywhere."
She took off down the road pulling the little girl behind her. The girl stared back at Dean and he waved at her. When they were out of sight he went into the shade of the building and sat down and drank the orange soda. It was fizzy and blood-warm. He pulled up his shirt and picked the top of the gauze bandage from his skin and looked at the wound. Blood and yellow serum were leaking out of it but he didn't want to change the dressing until he could get to some water and clean himself up. He pressed the surgical tape back in place.
After about fifteen minutes it occurred to Dean that the woman might come back with cops or militia or whatever the hell was passing for the law these days. If they were people he wasn't too worried but if they were demons he was in bad shape. Silver bullets would slow them down and double ought buckshot might stop one in his tracks if he could get a point-blank shot but he'd never be able to make a run for it. If she didn't come back at all he was still screwed. There was no way he was going to be able to walk ten more miles, not in this heat. It wasn't going to take Harlan's buddies, human or not, too long to start checking out the other side of the river.
He heard a car coming and took out the handgun and stayed in the shelter of the building where he couldn't be seen from the road. A blue sedan came into view with the woman behind the wheel without the little girl. The car was ochre with dust and the windshield was almost opaque with it but for a smeary clean crescent on the driver's side and the tires looked underinflated.
"Title's in the glovebox. Registration's expired but I put a sticker over the old one so it looks new. Just don't get pulled over for nothin."
"That's the plan," he said and handed her the money.
"My husband was one of the strikers at the GM plant in Dumas," she said and he didn't know why she was telling him this. She pressed her lips together and fixed him with a look. "The Arkansas Militia shot him when they busted up the strike. Opened fire on all of them."
"I'm sorry."
"Guess you're not from around here."
"No, I'm from out of town." WAY out of town.
"Well, you'd best be gettin outta town again. I put some of my husband's clothes in the car for you. Any one a them catches you dressed like that you'll have some explainin to do."
"Okay, thanks."
"They find you with that car I'll say someone stole'd it outta my front yard, never saw the guy. You see what'm sayin?"
"Yeah," Dean said. "Yeah, I do."
"All right then. You take it easy."
Dean nodded and the woman turned away. He called her back and held his hand out to her.
"What's this?"
"It's the other two-fifty," he said. "Take it."
She looked at the bills and took them and fanned through them. She put them in her pocket and gave Dean a brittle smile.
"You fuck em if you can," she said. "Fuck all of em."
* * *
He changed clothes before leaving Deerfield and threw Harlan's uniform and dog tags into the trees behind the gas station. In Elaine he blew more than two hundred bucks on gas and thought the pump had gotten it wrong until he checked the plastic numbers posted over the pumps. Twelve bucks a gallon for God's sake. He put air in the tires and bought a road atlas from the dusty selection on the rack. It was two years old and the clerk said he didn't have anything more recent. The bathroom was filthy and there was only a trickle of cold water in the sink so Dean slapped fresh gauze over the wound without changing the dressing and hit the road. It was good to be moving again and the Grand Marquis was better than the disorienting hulk of the H3, though its glassy eighties engine had none of the Impala's throaty power.
"That car'd better be looking good, Sammy," he said and then realized he didn't know where Sam or the Impala was and he couldn't make book on ever seeing either one of them again.
"Bullshit," he said. He shook his head. "That's bullshit."
* * *
He took a switching series of state routes towards Pine Bluff where he'd be able to swing north on Route 365, straight up past Little Rock and through the Ozark range into Missouri. There were few cars on these back roads and the traffic didn't get much thicker once he passed Pine Bluff. Not far from Little Rock the cars in the northbound lane slowed to ten miles an hour and he was suddenly bumper-to-bumper. Ahead of him a black SUV was parked across the southbound lane and a man stood atop it with his legs straddled and a rifle cocked on his hip and Dean had already seen enough to recognize the armed man as militia. Beyond the rifleman a team of men in orange jumpsuits was asphalting the road. They were chained to each other at the leg and each one wore a black plastic collar around his neck. They were guarded by militia, not state troopers or DOC officers, and some were standing in the road, some were atop vehicles, all of them were armed with long-range sniper rifles. There were demons among them.
Dean could see two of them and with the traffic behind and ahead of him there was nowhere for him to go. There was a guardrail on the right side of the road and he wouldn't be able to get up enough speed to go through it and even if he could they'd be able to shoot him right through the back window without breaking a sweat.
One of the demons was flanking the prisoners with his back to the east and would have been close enough to touch if Dean had put out his arm. He had his thumb hooked into his gunbelt and beneath his human skin his hand was charred and claw-tipped and Dean went cold and almost faint. The veil was thin, God it was so thin.
We can smell you, Harlan had said and Dean knew that demons liked big talk but that had made horrible sense. If he could see them then they could probably pick him out but this one hadn't even turned around yet. Dean had his right hand on the gun at the small of his back and his pulse hammered so hard there were starry bursts in the corners of his eyes.
The demon never turned around and gave no sign that he knew Dean was there. He kept his eyes on the prisoners and shuffled a toothpick slowly from one corner of his mouth to the other. Past the chain gang the traffic sped up and spread out and Dean drove about half a mile and then pulled over fast onto the shoulder and kicked open the door and leaned out and threw up. He braced himself on the doorframe and closed his watering eyes and breathed hard through his nose and behind his eyelids he saw the demon by the side of the road and along with it something dreamed or remembered or imagined but wholly unfaceable and nothing that he ever, ever wanted to know. He fought it for another several seconds and then doubled over and puked and spat until he had nothing left to bring up and even then it was a few minutes before he could close the door and get back on the road.
* * *
Highway 65 had grown to four lanes since Dean had been here last but the roadbed was cracked and potholed with high weeds growing up along the sides. He turned on the radio and switched over to the AM dial to see if he'd hear anything about a fugitive from Mississippi on the run in Arkansas and he heard plenty of other news but not that. A blackout in New York City had given the Empire State Militia cause to relieve the city's Chief of Police of his duties and he was being held on charges of obstruction of justice. Wildfires were raging out west while the middle of the country continued to suffer from a record-breaking drought. Galveston was being declared a total loss following three consecutive hurricanes and the refugee camps stretched as far as the Mexican border. And Shiloh Jolie-Pitt had attended her first day of school in Prague.
"Bring on the fucking locusts," Dean muttered and turned off the radio.
* * *
He breathed easier when he crossed the state line into Missouri and saw Branson billboards coming up. If Elvis tributes and Dolly Parton's Dixie Stampede were still reeling them in things couldn't be too bad but when Dean got closer he saw that most of the billboards were from last summer. Like that had been the last time anyone had cared. There were black SUVs traveling the roads here too.
* * *
In Ozark he found a Catholic church and filled two gallon water jugs at the font while a blue-haired woman with a rosary wound around her knuckles watched him. He went to Walmart and bought a hacksaw and file but they said they wouldn't have rocksalt in until maybe October so he bought two boxes of table salt. They didn't have any salt shells in the hunting department and he drove around town until he found a gun shop.
"What do you want with them for?" the clerk asked. "Won't kill nothin."
"There's a bear been hanging around the house. The kids don't want me to kill it, just scare it off."
The clerk brought a box of the big shells out from under the counter. "That oughta do the trick. Might just put a hair across his ass, though."
"Guess we'll see about that."
* * *
It was after seven in the evening and he had about seven hundred miles to go to South Dakota and he thought if he ate something he'd be able to make it there in one long hitch. That would put him at Bobby's near dawn but Dean could remember many times his father had left him and Sam on Bobby's porch like orphans at some crazy hour and barely taken time to ring the bell before heading back out into the night and not coming back for days.
He was sitting at a table in a diner near Kansas City waiting for his order when the bell jangled over the door and a man stepped in and Dean looked at him and pulled his gun out and balanced it on his knee beneath the table. The demon didn't pay attention to him any more than the one guarding the chain gang had done and he sat down at a table opposite and nodded genially in Dean's direction like any old boy stopped off for a cup of joe.
The waitress brought the demon coffee and he sat there pouring a thick white stream of sugar into his cup and clanking the spoon around the rim.
"Gettin breezy out," he said to Dean. "Maybe we're gonna get some rain finally."
Dean smiled stiffly at him. "Maybe."
"Tell you, never seen nothin like this weather. Regular damn dustbowl."
Dean didn't say anything and the demon drank his coffee and read the placemat.
The waitress brought Dean bacon and eggs and grits on a thick china plate and put a bottle of ketchup on the table but Dean couldn't eat. His mouth had gone dry as dust. He drank the coffee and it burned his empty stomach. He scouted the room and noted all of the exits and scanned the parking lot through the big windows and saw only two vehicles, the Grand Marquis and a long-haul truck sitting in the fading daylight with its running lights on.
He watched the demon banter with the waitress about how they were all going to be Okies if this kept up. There was something else going on that only Dean could see, the man's eyes were on the waitress but the demon's eyes were on something else and Dean followed that look and saw a boy of about fourteen wiping down the counter.
The man chatted with the waitress and the busboy came around the counter with a plastic dishpan and started clearing off a table and the demon's eyes followed him and while the man smiled in a neighborly way at the waitress the demon was grinning at the busboy with such ferocity it seemed his head might split in two.
The waitress went back around the counter and Dean heard her tell the busboy he could get on home because it wasn't busy tonight. And the busboy took off his apron and the man paid his check with a smile. And the busboy said goodnight to the waitress and she said to be careful on that bike of his and he went out and the demon followed him.
Dean got up so fast that he banged his knees on the table and the dishes and silverware rattled and the waitress turned and looked at him. He threw a twenty dollar bill on the table and went out and down the steps outside the diner and looked across the parking lot and couldn't see anyone. He went to the car and got the holy water and a box of salt. He pulled himself up into the cab of the truck but it was empty and the sleeper bunk in back of the cab was empty and it stank like beer and pot and sulfur.
They couldn't have gone far if the truck was still here and Dean walked the perimeter of the parking lot looking for a bike and listening for any sound at all. About twenty feet behind the back of the diner the paved lot ended in a sloping ditch and beyond that was a field of high, dense weeds that whispered in the wind. It was dusk now and the sky that deep indigo of late summer and in the bottom of the ditch Dean could see the glimmer of metal wheelspokes with one wheel still spinning and glinting in the last of the light.
"Shit," Dean said. He plowed down the ditch and fell and slid most of the way. He got up panting and listened and heard nothing but the wind in the weeds and then he heard the choked sound of someone trying to yell while being muzzled and he ran in that direction and he found the kid facedown in the weeds with the demon's hand clamped over his mouth and his jeans already off his hips.
"Hey!" Dean said and the demon turned around and Dean let him have it with the holy water and the salt and the demon clutched its face and fell backwards. Before it could get up Dean was on it and he straddled it and with salt in his palm he slammed his hand over the demon's eyes and slammed the demon's head into the ground and exorcised it.
"I know you, I know you!" it gurgled. "I know you now!"
"Yeah? Good for you."
"Winchester, Winchester, they're coming for you!"
"So I've heard," he said and finished the exorcism and the demon went out of the man and he was still.
Dean got off him and went to the kid and pulled his jeans back up and turned him over. He put a hand on the kid's face and patted him a little and after a minute he came to with a start and pushed himself away from Dean.
"It's okay," Dean said. "It's okay."
The kid wiped the back of his hand across his mouth.
"What was he, a fucking pervert?"
"Are you all right?"
"Yeah, yeah."
"You should go home. Okay?"
The kid nodded and turned and ran for his bike and was up and out of the ditch in seconds. Dean turned to the man and in the dim light he could see that he really was a man, the demon was gone from him and he was awake and blinking at the sky.
"Dude," Dean said. "You wanna get in that truck and get outta here."
"What? What am I doing here?"
Dean held out an arm and helped the trucker up. He picked up the trucker's cap and handed it to him. "Trust me. Just clear out."
He left the trucker in the field staring around himself in a daze. There wasn't anything else he could do and he needed to clear out himself before that kid came back with his parents and the militia or counties or Dateline NBC if that still existed. His back was throbbing and he had to get up the side of the ditch on his hands and knees. It was dark now and when he pulled back onto the road his vision was blurred with pain and the headlights were a wavering white smear on the blacktop.
* * *
There were militia checkpoints ringing Kansas City and he skirted them and headed northwest. The reflector sign for Interstate 70 pointed to LAWRENCE - TOPEKA - ALL POINTS WEST. The name still had the sorcerous power to call up memories so awful but also so good, of the last time anything had ever made unquestionable sense and he stared at the sign until he'd passed it on his way not west, but north. There was nothing for him in Lawrence and if he was going to find anything left of his life it would be in South Dakota.
* * *
He reached Nebraska City and knew that he could go no further. The pain in his back was so bad that he couldn't sit upright and he was too tired to see straight. He checked into a Super 8 and had to brace himself on the counter to fill out the registration. The desk clerk looked him up and down and asked if he was feeling all right.
"Fine," he said. "Just tired. Long drive."
"I hear that," the clerk said and Dean knew that the clerk had overcharged him and was staring at him as he limped out of the office.
He made it to the room and salted the door and the one window and then fell on the bed with his clothes on. Lying down didn't make the spine-rattling throb in his back any better but he was too exhausted to do anything except draw up his knees and try to ride it out.
Dean, you better change that dressing, Sam said in his head.
"You do it, Sammy," Dean muttered but Sam wasn't there to do anything.
He lay there for about twenty more minutes and then hauled himself up and got the bag and carried it into the bathroom. He switched on the light and he looked so awful in the mirror that he couldn't believe the desk clerk had let him have a room. He took out Buddy's medical supplies and he took off his shirt and peeled off the two layers of gauze and threw them in the wastebasket where they landed with a wet thud. He pulled out the wound packing in one shot thinking that would hurt less but it didn't and he sat down on the floor so that he'd have a shorter distance to fall in case he passed out. After a while he got up and leaned over the sink and flooded the wound with Betadine and stood there gripping the edge of the sink and rocking back and forth. Then he dried his back and bandaged the wound and taped it and splashed cold water on his face and the back of his neck. The sink was splattered with his watered-down blood and the brown ink of Betadine. He drank two glasses of water and turned off the light and went back to bed shivering with fatigue.
Buddy had given him pills but he was afraid of sleeping too deeply. After an hour of lying awake all twisted up he doubted that anything would make him sleep too deeply and he took one capsule and put the handgun under his pillow and turned off the light. The raw edge of the pain began to blur and his muscles relaxed as his breathing evened out and finally he fell asleep.
* * *
He was descending endless stairs into some black and bottomless cellar with nothing for light but a cone of paper burning from the inside. The stairs kept changing, metal to wood to stone to something that felt like wet earth. The fire in his hand was guttering out and far above him steps had begun to pound on the floor, back and forth. The fire went out and it was completely dark. For a time he heard nothing and he turned in circles and groped around himself in the dark but he touched nothing as if he were in some infinite empty space. There was a low wind blowing from somewhere neither warm nor cool but almost thick, it stank and he could feel it wrapping around his legs like fog. "Sam?" he whispered. "It's all right, it's just dark, see, there's nothing here. It's all right. It's all right." He was alone in this place for a long time and after a while there was a whispering in the darkness and a sense of things scrabbling by though nothing touched him. And then there was a sound like an iron door opening, like the sound of old iron elevator gates being pulled back and though he could see nothing he was taken by one arm and then the other by something big enough to all but lift his feet off the ground and marched out of there and then suddenly there was light at the end of a long tunnel and this was it then, this was hellfire and what had him on one side and the other were not demons but something that had been spawned down in these depths and had never seen the light of day, that not even the most twisted demon would have allowed to walk the earth. At the end of the tunnel was the fire and the sound of a large crowd screaming with laughter, screaming in pain, screaming with rage and he knew they were waiting for him. He tried to pull back but their claws were sunk in his flesh, this new flesh that couldn't die or be released and blood was running down his arms and they were waiting for him. They were waiting for him and the gates swung open and they fell silent and they turned to him. Oh God, Sam, oh Jesus oh God... There were so many of them. There were so many, so many so...
* * *
He woke up terrified with Sam's name still ringing in the room and he fumbled for the light in such a blind panic that if it hadn't been bolted to the nightstand he would have knocked it over. He closed his eyes and then opened them and stared at the room's furnishings, so bland and safe.
"Fucking pills," he said to no one. "Fucked with my head."
He sat up and looked at the clock. It was two-thirty in the morning and he'd been asleep for three hours. He looked back at the bed and saw a watery bloodstain on the white sheet. He got up and dressed and went to the motel office. The clerk was different than the one who had checked him in. He was reading a tabloid spread out on the counter and behind him in the office a blue bank of closed-circuit televisions flickered in the dark revealing shifting views of the motel. Lobby. Parking lot. Stairwell. Lobby. Dean motioned at the office.
"You have a computer in there?"
"Computer's not for guest use."
"Yeah okay, but maybe I could use it. I just need it for a few minutes."
"I guess you want to use my card, too."
"What card?"
"My social security card."
"No, I just want to look something up. It'll take me five minutes."
"On whose card?"
Dean shook his head. "What are you talking about?"
"Internet clearance?" the clerk said.
"What?"
"Where are you from, Canada? You need a valid social security card to get internet access in this state, mister. And I can't let you access that ISP back there with your card. I'd get fired pretty damn quick."
"You want to make some money?"
"Sure, I like making money."
The computer in the back office was old and had something attached to it that looked like a supermarket card scanner. The clerk took a white plastic card out of his wallet and ran the magnetic strip through and the Google homepage came up.
"I'm gonna stand right here and watch what you look up. I don't aim to get redflagged."
"Yeah, you go ahead and do that."
The most recent information on Sam Winchester dated to 2008, when he and his fugitive from justice brother were reported to have died during a botched rescue attempt at a police station in Colorado. There was a summary of their rap sheets along with their mug shots and Dean's own cocky and so different face looked out at him from a lifetime ago along with Sam's, looking pissed as only Sam could look. He stared at the photo for a long time.
Dean sat there for about half an hour absently forking ten-dollar bills over to the motel clerk. Nothing on Bobby or Robert Singer. Nothing on Ellen or Joanna Harvelle. Reports of tornadoes and dust storms in the area around Creighton, South Dakota but the whole region seemed to be having them. A black blizzard of dust had swallowed up half of western Nebraska in the span of one afternoon just a few months before and any surviving population had emptied out of the area. He looked up Rena Lara and found a brief account of the fire on August 29, just five days before, and that a woman named Catherine Parsons had died there. There were no other search matches for Catherine Parsons. He streamed past news reports of fires and floods and storms and militia restoring order and none of it was good.
"What is happening here?" he said to himself but the motel clerk answered.
"End times," he said. "End times if you ask me."
Dean cleared the computer and shut it down and gave the clerk another ten bucks for his time.
"You tryin to find some family out there?"
Dean shook his head and thanked him and went back to his room. He took the shotgun and got out the saw and the file and sawed off the barrel of the gun and the stock and filed them until the gun was short enough to fit in the duffel bag. By the end of this he was in a drenching sweat and he got undressed and unbandaged his back and his feet and took a shower and gave himself a few minutes to stand there while the water drummed on his neck and stung the wound in his back. When he was done he felt a little better and he got dressed and packed his few things and left.
* * *
As dawn broke over Buddy Lennox's vacated house a black sedan pulled up in the front yard. The driver got out and looked around and climbed the porch steps. He didn't knock or ring the bell because the door was standing open. The house already felt as if no one lived there or ever would again.
He walked through the front room, past the overturned and broken furniture and into the kitchen where all the drawers had been pulled out and even the contents of the refrigerator were lying on the floor. Only one space on the kitchen floor remained almost clear and that was the circle of symbols in the doorway. As if no one had dared to go near it.
He heard a thick, furious buzzing from the back of the house and glanced out through the kitchen window and saw the black dog's carcass lying flyblown in the early sun. He could smell it rotting. He stepped out onto the back porch where a battered Kenmore washer sat with its lid standing open. The laundry was pulled out and strewn across the porchrail and he looked it over and saw sheets and towels bearing shadowy stains in washed-out shades of brown.
He went back into the house and into the small bedroom off the kitchen. He stood in the doorway and looked at the pulled-out drawers and broken lamps and the stripped mattress lying half off the bedframe.
In the kitchen he sifted through the overturned garbage and found bloody strips of gauze and cotton swabs and an empty bottle of iodine. He left this and went back to the circle of symbols on the floor and stepped inside it. In a heap inside the circle lay a white shirt and pajama bottoms and he squatted down and picked them up and looked at them. The white shirt was bloody and a half-moon of blood was dried into the back waistband of the pajamas and he put his hand over his own back imagining where a wound would have to be to leave such a pattern. Then he set the clothes down and looked at the drawn symbols. He ran his hand over them thoughtfully and shook his head and mouthed a name and then said it out loud though there was no one to hear him but the flies.
To be continued.
Go ahead to Chapter Four.
Pairings: None (gen)
Rating: R (for language)
Warnings: Serious angst, some gore, heavily Dean-centric
Spoilers: Through end of Season Three
Word Count: 6,900 for Chapter Three
Disclaimer: Not mine and no one's paying me for this but I'd sure take it if offered.
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.
Go back to Chapter Two
Go back to Chapter One
We're getting just about to the halfway point of this story and I'm enabling comments on this chapter in case anyone's hopelessly confused. My Deanalicious icon was created by
dawnbreeze.Lazarus Came Forth
3. Dead Man Running
Dean had been to the Mississippi Delta in his previous life and though he had no exact idea of where he was now he knew that if he kept the river to his left he'd be going north. On the other side of the river was Arkansas and from there he could head up into the Ozarks and through the middle of the country to South Dakota and Bobby's. He had nowhere else to go.
At Roundlake he pulled off into a campsite and parked beneath the green darkness of the low-hanging trees. There was a GPS navigator on the dashboard but not a type he'd ever seen and when he emptied the glovebox he found a nine-millimeter Walther with a spare clip and a rolled up canvas duffel bag with something that looked like a canister of tear gas in it but no maps. He also found a box of double ought buckshot shells and Roy Harlan's Patriots Militia I.D. card with the Confederate flag on the front and something about Ehrlich Defense Contractors on the back and he pitched all of this back in the glovebox and slammed the door and sat up stiffly. The bandage on his back was wet and heavy and his shirt was wet and the air conditioning was chilling him so he turned off the engine and put down the window and sat there listening to the high-summer sound of the woods while the sultry air washed over him.
He tried to remember phone numbers but nothing was coming to him. Bobby had always kept a landline and Dean somehow remembered the area code or thought he did. He closed his eyes and recited the three numbers to himself trying to trigger the other seven and Harlan's words about everyone he knew being dead came back to him but he pushed them away. Four years was a long time but someone had gotten him out of hell so it wasn't true. It just wasn't true. Couldn't be true.
It was warm and close in the H3 and the drone of the flies that had found Harlan's sheet-wrapped body was numbing and Christ he was tired. If Sam had been here he would have been pissing and moaning about how Dean should be in bed before he bled to death or he would have been checking that bandage every fifteen minutes throwing around words like sepsis or God knows what. Sam should have been somebody's mom.
"What the fuck, Sam?" he said and didn't realize he was dozing. "Where are you?"
Come on, Sam said but Dean didn't know where he was only that his voice was very close, as if in his own head. Stay with me, Dean.
I'm with you, Dean thought but he couldn't say the words. I'm with you, Sam, please don't leave me please please...
A crackling burst of radio static jolted him awake so hard he had to grab the steering wheel to steady himself.
"Harlan? Harlan, pick up the fuckin radio. Your vehicle was on the road five fuckin minutes ago so pick up the goddamn radio."
He felt disoriented and sick and it took him a minute to find the radio and by then the voice on the other side was yelling Harlan's name.
"Yeah?"
"Harlan, why isn't your phone on and what the fuck are you doin in Roundlake?"
"I stopped to take a piss."
"Well zip up and get your ass back to Clarksdale. You're in deep shit."
Dean thought for a second. "Rena Lara?"
"You'd better fuckin believe Rena Lara. You know DiRita and Eula are dead?"
"Ah, yeah....they were fine when I left them."
"Well they ain't fine now. Where the fuck were you when your team members were gettin shot in the head? This ain't company policy, Harlan."
Dean tapped the steering wheel.
"What about the fugitive?"
"Fugitive? What fuckin fugitive?"
Dean smiled. There were demons on his ass but at least the whole goddamn army wasn't piling on. Not yet.
"You sit right there, Harlan. We got your position, we're gonna come and pick you up."
"No no no, I'm coming in."
"We got a team in Hushpuckena, gonna send em right over."
"Shit," Dean breathed. "Don't send anyone, I'm coming in."
"Be there in ten minutes. Over and out."
Dean got out of the H3 and opened the back door and dragged Harlan's body out. It was going stiff and was heavy as cordwood. They'd find it when they searched the site but it didn't have to be there waiting for them in the backseat and the search would slow them down. He got back to the H3 and took the Walther and the clip and the shells and looked at the tear gas canister and took that too. He stuffed everything in the bag along with the first aid supplies Buddy had given him and slung it over his shoulder. There was a long-range rifle with a big scope on it and a Remington pump-action shotgun on the rack and he looked both of them over and took only the shotgun.
He listened to hear if any vehicle was approaching but none was so he crossed the road and made for the river and Arkansas on the other side.
* * *
By the time he crossed over to Arkansas it was a tossup between whether his back hurt worse or his feet. He was wearing Harlan's boots and inside them his bandaged feet were bleeding. At the first place he came to there was nothing but one gas station and it was closed and the convenience store next to it was closed too and the doorglass was smashed in.
He pushed the door open, his boots crunching on broken glass. He stood in the hot quiet and looked around. There were still a few goods on the dark shelves though the beer coolers were all empty and the cash register had been torn off its moorings, its drawer left stuck out over the counter like a black tongue. He found one bottle of orange soda and took that but there wasn't anything else worth carrying.
There were restrooms behind the convenience store, explosively hot inside and they stank like decades of piss had baked into the concrete floor. He tried the lights but they didn't work and he stood there with his leg propping open the door and tried the sink but that didn't work either. He went back out into the blazing daylight. There was a pay phone between the men's and women's restrooms and he stopped and looked at it.
He picked up the receiver and the dial tone sounded so steady and normal that for a moment he could only stand there with the hot black plastic pressed to his ear. He dialed zero and waited. The phone rang once, twice, ten times and he was ready to hang up when the automated voice came on and asked him for city and listing.
"Creighton, South Dakota. Listing for Singer Salvage."
He listened to a whisper of static on the line and waited for the number and for the sound of Bobby's voice. Or Sam's voice. He hardly knew what he would say. What the fuck? seemed like a good opener.
The phone clicked and went silent and then the dial tone came back.
"What...?" He held down the lever and released it and when he had a dial tone he punched zero again and waited through another long series of rings and then repeated his information with the same result. On the third try he pressed zero and then zero again when the automated voice came on and he waited for a human operator but none came. He tried this again too and kept coming back to the canned operator.
He put the receiver in the cradle and stepped away from the phone. Phones don't work, he thought. It happens. It doesn't mean anything. Though in all his long experience he'd found that it was usually the very thing that seemed to mean nothing that meant everything.
There was a soft, gravelly step behind him and he spun around and pulled out the handgun. A woman and a little girl were in his line of fire. They both froze. The woman put one hand in the air and the other on the little girl's head.
"We didn't rob that place, sir, it's been like that," she said.
Dean put the gun down and held up a hand. "It's all right, I'm sorry. Is there something wrong with the phones out here?"
"Nossir." The little girl was hugging the woman's leg and staring at Dean over her shoulder. The woman still had her hand in the air as if she were surrendering and her eyes went from the gun in Dean's hand to the shotgun over his shoulder. He put the gun in the back of his waistband.
"Where is this?"
"Deerfield, sir."
"Why are you calling me sir?"
"Respect for the militia, sir."
"Oh," Dean said. He looked down at himself. He'd forgotten what he was wearing. "Okay well that's...duly noted. You can put your hand down."
"Thank you, sir. Can we be goin now, sir?"
"Yeah...wait, wait."
"Yessir?"
"Is there another gas station around here, one that's open? Someplace with running water?"
"There's one in Elaine. About ten miles."
"We've got water..." the little girl said and her mother shushed her sharply and stared at Dean and he could see how frightened she was. He shook his head.
"It's okay," he said. "It's okay. I'm not going to your house." He smiled at the little girl and then looked up at her mother. "Okay?"
She nodded. "Yessir."
"Elaine's this way?"
"Yessir."
"Ten miles?"
"Take you about fifteen minutes. Just stay on this road."
Dean ran a hand through his hair and looked at the dusty blacktop. "Yeah, fifteen minutes."
The woman was standing there looking at him.
"Where's your truck?" she asked.
"Broke down."
She ran her eyes over him. "What happened to your leg?"
He looked down and saw the bloodied hole where he'd shot Harlan. "Skinned my knee?"
After a moment she said, "You're not militia, are you?"
Dean took a breath and studied the woman. "No."
"Are you hurt?"
"Yeah."
"Can you walk to Elaine?"
"Probably," he said. "It might take me a half a day if I don't get a ride."
"There ain't no rides, not on this road. You got any money?"
"Why?"
"You wanna buy a car?"
"What?"
"I got two cars and don't drive neither one. You take the one off my hands and I can give you enough gas to get to Elaine, too."
"How much?"
"Seven-fifty."
"Do I look like I have that kind of money?"
"You look like you're in a tight spot," she said.
"The car runs?"
"It runs. Old, but it runs."
"How old?"
"Eighty-nine. Mercury Grand Marquis. Gas-guzzler, nobody wants it."
"I'll give you five hundred," he said.
She nodded and narrowed her eyes at him. "I'll bring it around."
"Works for me."
"All right," she said. "You sit tight."
"I'm not going anywhere."
She took off down the road pulling the little girl behind her. The girl stared back at Dean and he waved at her. When they were out of sight he went into the shade of the building and sat down and drank the orange soda. It was fizzy and blood-warm. He pulled up his shirt and picked the top of the gauze bandage from his skin and looked at the wound. Blood and yellow serum were leaking out of it but he didn't want to change the dressing until he could get to some water and clean himself up. He pressed the surgical tape back in place.
After about fifteen minutes it occurred to Dean that the woman might come back with cops or militia or whatever the hell was passing for the law these days. If they were people he wasn't too worried but if they were demons he was in bad shape. Silver bullets would slow them down and double ought buckshot might stop one in his tracks if he could get a point-blank shot but he'd never be able to make a run for it. If she didn't come back at all he was still screwed. There was no way he was going to be able to walk ten more miles, not in this heat. It wasn't going to take Harlan's buddies, human or not, too long to start checking out the other side of the river.
He heard a car coming and took out the handgun and stayed in the shelter of the building where he couldn't be seen from the road. A blue sedan came into view with the woman behind the wheel without the little girl. The car was ochre with dust and the windshield was almost opaque with it but for a smeary clean crescent on the driver's side and the tires looked underinflated.
"Title's in the glovebox. Registration's expired but I put a sticker over the old one so it looks new. Just don't get pulled over for nothin."
"That's the plan," he said and handed her the money.
"My husband was one of the strikers at the GM plant in Dumas," she said and he didn't know why she was telling him this. She pressed her lips together and fixed him with a look. "The Arkansas Militia shot him when they busted up the strike. Opened fire on all of them."
"I'm sorry."
"Guess you're not from around here."
"No, I'm from out of town." WAY out of town.
"Well, you'd best be gettin outta town again. I put some of my husband's clothes in the car for you. Any one a them catches you dressed like that you'll have some explainin to do."
"Okay, thanks."
"They find you with that car I'll say someone stole'd it outta my front yard, never saw the guy. You see what'm sayin?"
"Yeah," Dean said. "Yeah, I do."
"All right then. You take it easy."
Dean nodded and the woman turned away. He called her back and held his hand out to her.
"What's this?"
"It's the other two-fifty," he said. "Take it."
She looked at the bills and took them and fanned through them. She put them in her pocket and gave Dean a brittle smile.
"You fuck em if you can," she said. "Fuck all of em."
* * *
He changed clothes before leaving Deerfield and threw Harlan's uniform and dog tags into the trees behind the gas station. In Elaine he blew more than two hundred bucks on gas and thought the pump had gotten it wrong until he checked the plastic numbers posted over the pumps. Twelve bucks a gallon for God's sake. He put air in the tires and bought a road atlas from the dusty selection on the rack. It was two years old and the clerk said he didn't have anything more recent. The bathroom was filthy and there was only a trickle of cold water in the sink so Dean slapped fresh gauze over the wound without changing the dressing and hit the road. It was good to be moving again and the Grand Marquis was better than the disorienting hulk of the H3, though its glassy eighties engine had none of the Impala's throaty power.
"That car'd better be looking good, Sammy," he said and then realized he didn't know where Sam or the Impala was and he couldn't make book on ever seeing either one of them again.
"Bullshit," he said. He shook his head. "That's bullshit."
* * *
He took a switching series of state routes towards Pine Bluff where he'd be able to swing north on Route 365, straight up past Little Rock and through the Ozark range into Missouri. There were few cars on these back roads and the traffic didn't get much thicker once he passed Pine Bluff. Not far from Little Rock the cars in the northbound lane slowed to ten miles an hour and he was suddenly bumper-to-bumper. Ahead of him a black SUV was parked across the southbound lane and a man stood atop it with his legs straddled and a rifle cocked on his hip and Dean had already seen enough to recognize the armed man as militia. Beyond the rifleman a team of men in orange jumpsuits was asphalting the road. They were chained to each other at the leg and each one wore a black plastic collar around his neck. They were guarded by militia, not state troopers or DOC officers, and some were standing in the road, some were atop vehicles, all of them were armed with long-range sniper rifles. There were demons among them.
Dean could see two of them and with the traffic behind and ahead of him there was nowhere for him to go. There was a guardrail on the right side of the road and he wouldn't be able to get up enough speed to go through it and even if he could they'd be able to shoot him right through the back window without breaking a sweat.
One of the demons was flanking the prisoners with his back to the east and would have been close enough to touch if Dean had put out his arm. He had his thumb hooked into his gunbelt and beneath his human skin his hand was charred and claw-tipped and Dean went cold and almost faint. The veil was thin, God it was so thin.
We can smell you, Harlan had said and Dean knew that demons liked big talk but that had made horrible sense. If he could see them then they could probably pick him out but this one hadn't even turned around yet. Dean had his right hand on the gun at the small of his back and his pulse hammered so hard there were starry bursts in the corners of his eyes.
The demon never turned around and gave no sign that he knew Dean was there. He kept his eyes on the prisoners and shuffled a toothpick slowly from one corner of his mouth to the other. Past the chain gang the traffic sped up and spread out and Dean drove about half a mile and then pulled over fast onto the shoulder and kicked open the door and leaned out and threw up. He braced himself on the doorframe and closed his watering eyes and breathed hard through his nose and behind his eyelids he saw the demon by the side of the road and along with it something dreamed or remembered or imagined but wholly unfaceable and nothing that he ever, ever wanted to know. He fought it for another several seconds and then doubled over and puked and spat until he had nothing left to bring up and even then it was a few minutes before he could close the door and get back on the road.
* * *
Highway 65 had grown to four lanes since Dean had been here last but the roadbed was cracked and potholed with high weeds growing up along the sides. He turned on the radio and switched over to the AM dial to see if he'd hear anything about a fugitive from Mississippi on the run in Arkansas and he heard plenty of other news but not that. A blackout in New York City had given the Empire State Militia cause to relieve the city's Chief of Police of his duties and he was being held on charges of obstruction of justice. Wildfires were raging out west while the middle of the country continued to suffer from a record-breaking drought. Galveston was being declared a total loss following three consecutive hurricanes and the refugee camps stretched as far as the Mexican border. And Shiloh Jolie-Pitt had attended her first day of school in Prague.
"Bring on the fucking locusts," Dean muttered and turned off the radio.
* * *
He breathed easier when he crossed the state line into Missouri and saw Branson billboards coming up. If Elvis tributes and Dolly Parton's Dixie Stampede were still reeling them in things couldn't be too bad but when Dean got closer he saw that most of the billboards were from last summer. Like that had been the last time anyone had cared. There were black SUVs traveling the roads here too.
* * *
In Ozark he found a Catholic church and filled two gallon water jugs at the font while a blue-haired woman with a rosary wound around her knuckles watched him. He went to Walmart and bought a hacksaw and file but they said they wouldn't have rocksalt in until maybe October so he bought two boxes of table salt. They didn't have any salt shells in the hunting department and he drove around town until he found a gun shop.
"What do you want with them for?" the clerk asked. "Won't kill nothin."
"There's a bear been hanging around the house. The kids don't want me to kill it, just scare it off."
The clerk brought a box of the big shells out from under the counter. "That oughta do the trick. Might just put a hair across his ass, though."
"Guess we'll see about that."
* * *
It was after seven in the evening and he had about seven hundred miles to go to South Dakota and he thought if he ate something he'd be able to make it there in one long hitch. That would put him at Bobby's near dawn but Dean could remember many times his father had left him and Sam on Bobby's porch like orphans at some crazy hour and barely taken time to ring the bell before heading back out into the night and not coming back for days.
He was sitting at a table in a diner near Kansas City waiting for his order when the bell jangled over the door and a man stepped in and Dean looked at him and pulled his gun out and balanced it on his knee beneath the table. The demon didn't pay attention to him any more than the one guarding the chain gang had done and he sat down at a table opposite and nodded genially in Dean's direction like any old boy stopped off for a cup of joe.
The waitress brought the demon coffee and he sat there pouring a thick white stream of sugar into his cup and clanking the spoon around the rim.
"Gettin breezy out," he said to Dean. "Maybe we're gonna get some rain finally."
Dean smiled stiffly at him. "Maybe."
"Tell you, never seen nothin like this weather. Regular damn dustbowl."
Dean didn't say anything and the demon drank his coffee and read the placemat.
The waitress brought Dean bacon and eggs and grits on a thick china plate and put a bottle of ketchup on the table but Dean couldn't eat. His mouth had gone dry as dust. He drank the coffee and it burned his empty stomach. He scouted the room and noted all of the exits and scanned the parking lot through the big windows and saw only two vehicles, the Grand Marquis and a long-haul truck sitting in the fading daylight with its running lights on.
He watched the demon banter with the waitress about how they were all going to be Okies if this kept up. There was something else going on that only Dean could see, the man's eyes were on the waitress but the demon's eyes were on something else and Dean followed that look and saw a boy of about fourteen wiping down the counter.
The man chatted with the waitress and the busboy came around the counter with a plastic dishpan and started clearing off a table and the demon's eyes followed him and while the man smiled in a neighborly way at the waitress the demon was grinning at the busboy with such ferocity it seemed his head might split in two.
The waitress went back around the counter and Dean heard her tell the busboy he could get on home because it wasn't busy tonight. And the busboy took off his apron and the man paid his check with a smile. And the busboy said goodnight to the waitress and she said to be careful on that bike of his and he went out and the demon followed him.
Dean got up so fast that he banged his knees on the table and the dishes and silverware rattled and the waitress turned and looked at him. He threw a twenty dollar bill on the table and went out and down the steps outside the diner and looked across the parking lot and couldn't see anyone. He went to the car and got the holy water and a box of salt. He pulled himself up into the cab of the truck but it was empty and the sleeper bunk in back of the cab was empty and it stank like beer and pot and sulfur.
They couldn't have gone far if the truck was still here and Dean walked the perimeter of the parking lot looking for a bike and listening for any sound at all. About twenty feet behind the back of the diner the paved lot ended in a sloping ditch and beyond that was a field of high, dense weeds that whispered in the wind. It was dusk now and the sky that deep indigo of late summer and in the bottom of the ditch Dean could see the glimmer of metal wheelspokes with one wheel still spinning and glinting in the last of the light.
"Shit," Dean said. He plowed down the ditch and fell and slid most of the way. He got up panting and listened and heard nothing but the wind in the weeds and then he heard the choked sound of someone trying to yell while being muzzled and he ran in that direction and he found the kid facedown in the weeds with the demon's hand clamped over his mouth and his jeans already off his hips.
"Hey!" Dean said and the demon turned around and Dean let him have it with the holy water and the salt and the demon clutched its face and fell backwards. Before it could get up Dean was on it and he straddled it and with salt in his palm he slammed his hand over the demon's eyes and slammed the demon's head into the ground and exorcised it.
"I know you, I know you!" it gurgled. "I know you now!"
"Yeah? Good for you."
"Winchester, Winchester, they're coming for you!"
"So I've heard," he said and finished the exorcism and the demon went out of the man and he was still.
Dean got off him and went to the kid and pulled his jeans back up and turned him over. He put a hand on the kid's face and patted him a little and after a minute he came to with a start and pushed himself away from Dean.
"It's okay," Dean said. "It's okay."
The kid wiped the back of his hand across his mouth.
"What was he, a fucking pervert?"
"Are you all right?"
"Yeah, yeah."
"You should go home. Okay?"
The kid nodded and turned and ran for his bike and was up and out of the ditch in seconds. Dean turned to the man and in the dim light he could see that he really was a man, the demon was gone from him and he was awake and blinking at the sky.
"Dude," Dean said. "You wanna get in that truck and get outta here."
"What? What am I doing here?"
Dean held out an arm and helped the trucker up. He picked up the trucker's cap and handed it to him. "Trust me. Just clear out."
He left the trucker in the field staring around himself in a daze. There wasn't anything else he could do and he needed to clear out himself before that kid came back with his parents and the militia or counties or Dateline NBC if that still existed. His back was throbbing and he had to get up the side of the ditch on his hands and knees. It was dark now and when he pulled back onto the road his vision was blurred with pain and the headlights were a wavering white smear on the blacktop.
* * *
There were militia checkpoints ringing Kansas City and he skirted them and headed northwest. The reflector sign for Interstate 70 pointed to LAWRENCE - TOPEKA - ALL POINTS WEST. The name still had the sorcerous power to call up memories so awful but also so good, of the last time anything had ever made unquestionable sense and he stared at the sign until he'd passed it on his way not west, but north. There was nothing for him in Lawrence and if he was going to find anything left of his life it would be in South Dakota.
* * *
He reached Nebraska City and knew that he could go no further. The pain in his back was so bad that he couldn't sit upright and he was too tired to see straight. He checked into a Super 8 and had to brace himself on the counter to fill out the registration. The desk clerk looked him up and down and asked if he was feeling all right.
"Fine," he said. "Just tired. Long drive."
"I hear that," the clerk said and Dean knew that the clerk had overcharged him and was staring at him as he limped out of the office.
He made it to the room and salted the door and the one window and then fell on the bed with his clothes on. Lying down didn't make the spine-rattling throb in his back any better but he was too exhausted to do anything except draw up his knees and try to ride it out.
Dean, you better change that dressing, Sam said in his head.
"You do it, Sammy," Dean muttered but Sam wasn't there to do anything.
He lay there for about twenty more minutes and then hauled himself up and got the bag and carried it into the bathroom. He switched on the light and he looked so awful in the mirror that he couldn't believe the desk clerk had let him have a room. He took out Buddy's medical supplies and he took off his shirt and peeled off the two layers of gauze and threw them in the wastebasket where they landed with a wet thud. He pulled out the wound packing in one shot thinking that would hurt less but it didn't and he sat down on the floor so that he'd have a shorter distance to fall in case he passed out. After a while he got up and leaned over the sink and flooded the wound with Betadine and stood there gripping the edge of the sink and rocking back and forth. Then he dried his back and bandaged the wound and taped it and splashed cold water on his face and the back of his neck. The sink was splattered with his watered-down blood and the brown ink of Betadine. He drank two glasses of water and turned off the light and went back to bed shivering with fatigue.
Buddy had given him pills but he was afraid of sleeping too deeply. After an hour of lying awake all twisted up he doubted that anything would make him sleep too deeply and he took one capsule and put the handgun under his pillow and turned off the light. The raw edge of the pain began to blur and his muscles relaxed as his breathing evened out and finally he fell asleep.
* * *
He was descending endless stairs into some black and bottomless cellar with nothing for light but a cone of paper burning from the inside. The stairs kept changing, metal to wood to stone to something that felt like wet earth. The fire in his hand was guttering out and far above him steps had begun to pound on the floor, back and forth. The fire went out and it was completely dark. For a time he heard nothing and he turned in circles and groped around himself in the dark but he touched nothing as if he were in some infinite empty space. There was a low wind blowing from somewhere neither warm nor cool but almost thick, it stank and he could feel it wrapping around his legs like fog. "Sam?" he whispered. "It's all right, it's just dark, see, there's nothing here. It's all right. It's all right." He was alone in this place for a long time and after a while there was a whispering in the darkness and a sense of things scrabbling by though nothing touched him. And then there was a sound like an iron door opening, like the sound of old iron elevator gates being pulled back and though he could see nothing he was taken by one arm and then the other by something big enough to all but lift his feet off the ground and marched out of there and then suddenly there was light at the end of a long tunnel and this was it then, this was hellfire and what had him on one side and the other were not demons but something that had been spawned down in these depths and had never seen the light of day, that not even the most twisted demon would have allowed to walk the earth. At the end of the tunnel was the fire and the sound of a large crowd screaming with laughter, screaming in pain, screaming with rage and he knew they were waiting for him. He tried to pull back but their claws were sunk in his flesh, this new flesh that couldn't die or be released and blood was running down his arms and they were waiting for him. They were waiting for him and the gates swung open and they fell silent and they turned to him. Oh God, Sam, oh Jesus oh God... There were so many of them. There were so many, so many so...
* * *
He woke up terrified with Sam's name still ringing in the room and he fumbled for the light in such a blind panic that if it hadn't been bolted to the nightstand he would have knocked it over. He closed his eyes and then opened them and stared at the room's furnishings, so bland and safe.
"Fucking pills," he said to no one. "Fucked with my head."
He sat up and looked at the clock. It was two-thirty in the morning and he'd been asleep for three hours. He looked back at the bed and saw a watery bloodstain on the white sheet. He got up and dressed and went to the motel office. The clerk was different than the one who had checked him in. He was reading a tabloid spread out on the counter and behind him in the office a blue bank of closed-circuit televisions flickered in the dark revealing shifting views of the motel. Lobby. Parking lot. Stairwell. Lobby. Dean motioned at the office.
"You have a computer in there?"
"Computer's not for guest use."
"Yeah okay, but maybe I could use it. I just need it for a few minutes."
"I guess you want to use my card, too."
"What card?"
"My social security card."
"No, I just want to look something up. It'll take me five minutes."
"On whose card?"
Dean shook his head. "What are you talking about?"
"Internet clearance?" the clerk said.
"What?"
"Where are you from, Canada? You need a valid social security card to get internet access in this state, mister. And I can't let you access that ISP back there with your card. I'd get fired pretty damn quick."
"You want to make some money?"
"Sure, I like making money."
The computer in the back office was old and had something attached to it that looked like a supermarket card scanner. The clerk took a white plastic card out of his wallet and ran the magnetic strip through and the Google homepage came up.
"I'm gonna stand right here and watch what you look up. I don't aim to get redflagged."
"Yeah, you go ahead and do that."
The most recent information on Sam Winchester dated to 2008, when he and his fugitive from justice brother were reported to have died during a botched rescue attempt at a police station in Colorado. There was a summary of their rap sheets along with their mug shots and Dean's own cocky and so different face looked out at him from a lifetime ago along with Sam's, looking pissed as only Sam could look. He stared at the photo for a long time.
Dean sat there for about half an hour absently forking ten-dollar bills over to the motel clerk. Nothing on Bobby or Robert Singer. Nothing on Ellen or Joanna Harvelle. Reports of tornadoes and dust storms in the area around Creighton, South Dakota but the whole region seemed to be having them. A black blizzard of dust had swallowed up half of western Nebraska in the span of one afternoon just a few months before and any surviving population had emptied out of the area. He looked up Rena Lara and found a brief account of the fire on August 29, just five days before, and that a woman named Catherine Parsons had died there. There were no other search matches for Catherine Parsons. He streamed past news reports of fires and floods and storms and militia restoring order and none of it was good.
"What is happening here?" he said to himself but the motel clerk answered.
"End times," he said. "End times if you ask me."
Dean cleared the computer and shut it down and gave the clerk another ten bucks for his time.
"You tryin to find some family out there?"
Dean shook his head and thanked him and went back to his room. He took the shotgun and got out the saw and the file and sawed off the barrel of the gun and the stock and filed them until the gun was short enough to fit in the duffel bag. By the end of this he was in a drenching sweat and he got undressed and unbandaged his back and his feet and took a shower and gave himself a few minutes to stand there while the water drummed on his neck and stung the wound in his back. When he was done he felt a little better and he got dressed and packed his few things and left.
* * *
As dawn broke over Buddy Lennox's vacated house a black sedan pulled up in the front yard. The driver got out and looked around and climbed the porch steps. He didn't knock or ring the bell because the door was standing open. The house already felt as if no one lived there or ever would again.
He walked through the front room, past the overturned and broken furniture and into the kitchen where all the drawers had been pulled out and even the contents of the refrigerator were lying on the floor. Only one space on the kitchen floor remained almost clear and that was the circle of symbols in the doorway. As if no one had dared to go near it.
He heard a thick, furious buzzing from the back of the house and glanced out through the kitchen window and saw the black dog's carcass lying flyblown in the early sun. He could smell it rotting. He stepped out onto the back porch where a battered Kenmore washer sat with its lid standing open. The laundry was pulled out and strewn across the porchrail and he looked it over and saw sheets and towels bearing shadowy stains in washed-out shades of brown.
He went back into the house and into the small bedroom off the kitchen. He stood in the doorway and looked at the pulled-out drawers and broken lamps and the stripped mattress lying half off the bedframe.
In the kitchen he sifted through the overturned garbage and found bloody strips of gauze and cotton swabs and an empty bottle of iodine. He left this and went back to the circle of symbols on the floor and stepped inside it. In a heap inside the circle lay a white shirt and pajama bottoms and he squatted down and picked them up and looked at them. The white shirt was bloody and a half-moon of blood was dried into the back waistband of the pajamas and he put his hand over his own back imagining where a wound would have to be to leave such a pattern. Then he set the clothes down and looked at the drawn symbols. He ran his hand over them thoughtfully and shook his head and mouthed a name and then said it out loud though there was no one to hear him but the flies.
To be continued.
Go ahead to Chapter Four.
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I won't ask, though I'm dying to, who the stranger is who went into that empty house. I'm loving this story.
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And for Dean--dude, I'm completely sucked into Dean's experience. I feel like Sam's in the story even though he hasn't found him yet. Each time there's a new section I'm kind of desperately hoping that we'll see where Sam is, but then we don't I realize that I'm glad we didn't.
So yeah, it's awesome even without knowing the show or the characters well. It feels a lot like just reading an original work for me.
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It feels a lot like just reading an original work for me.
I should buy you lunch for this comment!
And for Dean--dude, I'm completely sucked into Dean's experience.
Since you don't watch the show, I feel the need to remind you that Dean is also terribly good-looking:
(Any excuse to post this picture.)
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I will resist the urge to go into a long rant about the Real ID Act and how what you describe with the computers is the dark path we are headed down if we don't get control of our federal government. Ditto on the hired militia. And $12 a gallon gas.
That better be Bobby poking around Buddy's house. Someone needs to be looking for Dean, all alone and adrift in the world!
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Everything in this fic about America 2012 (except the demons, of course) was based on something I read -- not fiction, but news. You literally cannot make some of this stuff up. Wait till I get to the shock restraints. They're not fiction, either.
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Eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we will be cold and hungry and ruled by Republican overlords.
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I don't see what's so funny about "J2." It's not funny it's ba-yoooo-ti-full!
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You know the pic that got me into this whole phenomenon in the first place was a closeup of their shoes. I have to find it. You'll see what I mean.
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x.
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Can't wait to see what happens next!
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BTW, how do stories wind up on Delicious? Because I was surprised to see both this story there and a very old AU one-shot that I wrote and I have no idea how they got there! Not that I mind but wow...the depths of the internet are unfathomable indeed.
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As for Delicious, all it takes to get there is to have someone with an account bookmark the story. Most people tag them as well, and I have a subscription to "apocafic", so that's how I found it--someone had tagged it that way.
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You're probably not going to answer here, but I'm just going to throw this out just the same: the man in that last scene, he has to be Sam, yes? *bites nails*
BTW, are you posting updates to this in any SPN fic comms? I'd love to be able to keep up with this properly.
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I can't answer your question...sorry! Spoiler!!
*iz annoying*
Right now I'm only posting updates to this at
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One of the best apocafic I ever read.. now I will continue reading this wonderful fic
thank you for sharing
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Cat
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