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'Bring Out Your Dead' - SPN - an unolass production - Dean & Cas - PG13 - 2/2
Bring Out Your Dead
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lassiterfics & unoshot. Continuation of The Future As B-Movie.
Supernatural. Dean, Castiel, zombies, and vampires. PG13. Spoilers through 5x13. Warnings: violence, gore.
This future isn't much better than that other one. / Surviving the Monsterpocalypse 101 / Worst road trip ever. ~16,886 words (Part 2: 7940 words)
Part 1
They don’t leave that afternoon because – well, because they are hammered, and Dean vaguely recalls Cas saying, “Dean, you’re burning,” and the sun being bright and cruel, and then they’re staggering up the steps and there’s sand itching in his hair and then the next thing he knows he’s on the couch and there’s still a good quarter bottle of tequila, which he puts to good use while Cas brings him a plateful of Twinkies, sliced and arranged like fine hors d’oeuvres.
“Nice,” approves Dean, and he tilts his head back and lets the Patrón – which is getting smoother by the draught – slide down his throat. “Fuckin’ livin’ large.”
Cas has stopped drinking, which doesn’t prevent his eyes from being hooded and a little dazed. “We’re not driving,” he observes, mildly. “We can stay one more night.”
“Guess so.” Dean lets the bottle rest against his thigh, and reaches for a handful of Twinkie. “Nowhere to be, anyway.”
Cas goes back to the kitchen and returns with a bottle of warm Gatorade, which Dean thinks is a shitty choice, but then Dean isn’t the one who has to keep his … platelet levels up, or whatever.
He makes a note to find some juice or something, for later.
“S’weird,” says Dean, “not having anywhere to go. I mean – we never did, Sam and Dad and me, we never had places, but we had… places, you know?”
Cas sips at his Gatorade, and Dean takes another swig of tequila as Cas goes to look out the window at the beach and the clouding light.
Cas is not holding up his end of the conversation, but Dean will compensate if he must. “S’posed to be different,” he mutters. “Stayed with Sammy, didn’t we? Ditched on Detroit. Except – your dick friends are still gone, and Lucifer’s still out there, and the world’s gone to shit and – we have no fucking plan, Cas, we have fuck all, not even the goddamn Colt worked, and things were s’posed to be different except they’re not.”
Cas leans his forehead against the window.
“Are you – do you – maybe it was stupid, shit, it was stupid, but maybe just for a while there I thought – we could do something, you know? Dude, are you even –“
“You had a purpose,” interrupts Cas, low-voiced, “and now you don’t. Yes, Dean. I understand.”
Dean shuts up, because he guesses maybe Cas does, at that. Which doesn’t leave him anything to say except, “Fuck.”
Then Cas takes the tequila away, and Dean would complain but he can’t quite get the sentence together in his head, and the bottle’s mostly empty anyway. The room is moving with every breath, like it’s gonna get swept away by the sea.
Which gives him a brilliant idea, so he says, “We should make a raft.”
“What?”
Cas drops into the chair across the little living room, thin and loose, letting his head fall back and bounce against the faded pillows.
“Raft,” repeats Dean, with great patience, because he is feeling magnanimous.
When Cas stares at him, blank and puzzled, Cas has got that old empty look on his face and his hair’s all tufted up and he’s – he’d even shaved that morning, with a razor from the medicine cabinet, and it’s so much like that old Castiel magic that Dean almost chokes, laughing.
“Dean,” intones Cas, sternly, and that doesn’t help matters at all, and Dean curls on the old couch and laughs and laughs, until his stomach hurts and he can’t breathe and he’s going to puke Patrón all over the sandy linoleum floor, except he does not, because that would be a damn fucking waste.
“Dean,” says Cas again, and Cas has somehow crossed the room – like magic, like he got all his mojo back and then wasted it just to save five feet of space – and Dean gasps for air, grabbing, locking his hand hard around Cas’s knobby wrist.
He feels a rough scab beneath his palm, sees Cas wince, and then it’s not so funny anymore, but Dean stares at Cas intently – because it’s hard to see, with the room spinning – and he explains, very clearly, “There’re no vampires in the ocean.”
Dean loses track of what happens next, except Cas says, “Come and lie down,” and somehow later Dean is lying on an honest-to-god mattress and he swears to god that they’ve won and this, this is heaven right here, and he could melt into it except Cas won’t shut up and keeps saying annoying shit, like, “Let go of my wrist, Dean.”
“F’ckoff,” mutters Dean, and he buries his face in the so-soft, dusty pillow.
“Dean,” says Cas, and Dean tightens his grip and slurs, “You cannot fuckin’ be trusted,” and Cas sighs, and sits down beside him, resting his non-winged back against the headboard.
“Right,” says Dean, satisfied, and then he sleeps.
+
It's pitch black when Dean fumbles into consciousness. His head is crowded and blurry in that familiar way that warns him he better go back to sleep right now before his body realizes he has a headache. Dean groans into the pillow, but making noise just wakes him up even more.
He hasn't been hungover in a while. Dean hasn't been hammered in ages because it's not like the vampires and croats give him any space to be drunk anyway, so maybe this is like a blessing in disguise. Hangovers are a sign you're doing parties right, Ash used to say. But Ash's idea of a good time was drinking PBR and translating Sumerian summoning rituals, so Dean took his aphorisms with a grain of salt.
Ash. Shit, they forgot to drink to Ash.
And, oh fuck: the pain starts behind Dean's eyeballs somewhere to the left, and the longer he silently swears at it, the more it grows. There's aspirin and bottled water somewhere in his bag, but his bag is a million miles away on the floor, and is it worth it? Should Dean just close his eyes and vehemently attempt sleep? His vision's adjusting to the dark, and Dean turns his head to judge the distance between the bed and his bag, and sees three things:
1) The aspirin, on the nightstand.
2) A bottle of water, also on the nightstand.
3) Cas, asleep in bed next to him.
Dean supposes he’s slept in stranger places after tequila.
“I think I'm still drunk,” he confesses, and Cas is unresponsive.
Dean pushes himself up onto his elbows, blinking blearily as his brain recenters itself. He reaches over Cas to grab the aspirin, and takes two. He's reaching for the water when Cas maybe says something.
“Hurnh?” Dean responds, but Cas is still asleep.
It's not an easy sleep. Cas's eyes flicker behind his eyelids, and he's breathing in uneven hitches. Running from something? Running to someone? The muscles twitch in his limbs and lines appear on his face, because even in their dreams there is no escape.
Dean drinks half the bottled water in one go, then just sits on the bed for a while, pressing his eyes into his head with the insides of his wrists. Beside him, Cas continues to make snuffling noises and Dean tries to remember what he used to do with Sammy when the kid had nightmares. Not the prophetic kind, just the regular ones where the ghosts go 'boo!'.
The first dream Cas ever had was about driving the Impala through the desert.
“We were driving west,” Cas recalled, in tones of muted wonder, “and you were beside me telling me about your plan to outsmart Michael. You said it'll be easy once we get there, but I don't remember what else you said, or where 'there' is. I was watching the road, so I only saw glimpses of you in the mirror. But when I looked over, you weren't there at all. Maybe you were never there. Maybe I had been talking to myself all that time. I don't know. I didn't know. Then I tried to go faster but the car wouldn’t speed up. I tried to stop but I couldn't.”
Cas lost angel radio and gained a subconscious. Suddenly the voices in his head were only his own.
Do fallen angels dream of excommunicated sheep?
He feels Cas twitch against his leg and hears him inhale sharply, and before Dean can even think about it, he reaches over and brushes his fingers against Cas's temple. He doesn’t know why he does it. He knows it won't achieve anything. He knows.
“You're okay, kid,” Dean adds, and his voice is like sandpaper.
Dean turns away and puts both feet on the floor, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees. His head is throbbing, his mouth tastes like ass, and he closes his eyes. He rests his head in his hands and listens, and doesn't move until Cas's breathing slows to regularity behind him, until he can't tell the sound of it from the wash of the waves outside.
+
In the morning, Dean dumps a little water in the bathroom sink and he shaves in the mirror and it feels like rebirth, although it would be better if he didn’t have a tiny jackhammer in his skull. He scrubs a wet cloth over his skin and wanders into the main room, where Cas has made the last of the coffee and there’s a box of dry cereal waiting.
Dean munches muesli or whatever the fuck it is, and makes a tour of the house, adding to his little pile of things that might be useful. They travel light, but still: a pack of AA batteries, a flashlight, a bottle of camp fuel, the razor, pens and paper. They’ve got the liquor and some new random scraps of food (he is suddenly less enthused about Twinkies, but packs them anyway). He adds a book, for Cas, because Maeve Binchy is probably better than nothing and hell, Cas used to read Chuck.
Dean goes outside to tell him to get a move on, but Cas is draped loose across a deck chair with a faded blanket on his lap and the cloudy morning gray across the pale lines of his fingers.
Dean doesn’t know if he should be worried about all this sleep. But he supposes it’s better than running or bleeding, which are the other two things they do.
“Hm,” enquires Cas, without opening his eyes, and Dean says, “It’s cool,” and goes back in, letting the torn screen door slide shut.
He pokes around a little more.
In a small desk in the bedroom, he finds a couple of old postcards – one from Chicago, one from San Diego – and learns that the beach house is apparently owned by Margaret, and Margaret has friends who wish she was there. Dean, on a whim, takes a half-dried bottle of white-out and erases the address on the San Diego card, then writes, “Camp Chitaqua, NY” and leaves the scribbled message as is.
‘Wish you were here.’
He adds a stick figure of a vampire.
Dean walks out to the road and puts the postcard in the mailbox, where it keeps company with spider webs and a two-year-old water bill.
Under the circumstances, he’s not really worried about the stamp.
Then he packs up the car – he adds, after a moment’s hesitation, the smallest of the bedroom pillows – and he takes a breath of salt air, resting a hand on the Impala’s hood. The black metal’s got new scratches, and Dean murmurs, “Sorry, baby,” and “I’ll make it up to you.” The crack in the windshield taunts him, glittering – he can see it’s spread another two inches.
He frowns, pats the car again, and heads back up to the deck. “Hey,” he says. “Time.”
There are heavier clouds creeping in from the west, but Cas still looks warm and lazy. Dean realizes he can see the first hints of silver gleaming in the other man’s dark hair, and when Cas opens his shadowed eyes Dean has to clench his jaw, look stern and resolved. “Hm,” says Cas again, but he gets up uncomplaining, stretching his shoulders, and he leaves the blanket on the chair as he walks past Dean down the steps to the beach and the car.
Dean is the one who stares at the house for a long beat, and then he shakes his head. He closes the door, for all the good it will do, before he follows Cas.
The ocean whispers, murky and secretive, and the Impala smells like disinfectant and oil.
As Dean drives, Cas reaches into the back seat and pulls up his bag, fishing around. “Here,” he says. “I found these in a drawer.”
Cas passes over a couple of cassettes, still in cracked cases, and Dean keeps one hand on the steering wheel as he takes them and gives them a cursory glance.
A second later, Jesus Christ Superstar flies out the driver’s side window and clatters on the side of the road.
Cas looks like he can’t decide whether to be wounded or annoyed or just confused. Dean glances to the side and relents, “Sorry, dude,” setting the other cassette down on the seat. “Evita can stay.”
+
They don’t get to sleep very much after that. It’s back to cat naps in the back seat, short hours stolen in ravaged houses and battered motels. South of the beach house, the highway is blocked by a burned-out semi, the husk of Miller Lite and shattered beer bottles spilled across the road.
“Shit,” says Dean, and, “Well, it was lite beer anyway.”
To either side are rocky fields and the stumps of trees. There is no passage for great black vintage beasts. Dean turns the car around, and at the next exit they head west.
It doesn’t really matter.
Cas is picking the music, though, and it doesn’t take Dean very long to get pretty fucking tired of Don’t Cry For Me Argentina.
They pass a gang of croat zombies at the side of the road, ripping into the carcass of some unfortunate meaty thing that Dean tries not to see. In the glow of the Impala’s headlights, one of the croats looks up, feral and crimson-mouthed, eyes shining like a cat’s.
+
The demons are like coming home. They know how to deal with demons, and suddenly it's like 2009 all over again, the good old days when the Apocalypse was a looming but avoidable threat.
There were three demons, now two. Dean twists Ruby's knife in the shoulder of a man with black eyes, and growls, “Eat Christ, asshole,” and crams communion wafers in his face, exulting in the demon's screams and the way the skin blisters under his palm.
God may not be on any flatbread, but He sure as hell can be in communion wafers. “Transfiguration's a bitch,” Dean informs the demon.
Gotta love those Catholics.
They're in a CVS, and in the next aisle over, a woman howls in pain, telling him that Cas isn't doing too shabby either. Cas's voice rises, chanting Latin, and Dean puts all his weight on the demon, holding him down as he thrashes and gurgles at the words of a defunct religion.
“This is not over, Dean Winchester,” the demon hisses. “Lucifer draws near! We will rise!”
“Yeah, yeah,” Dean says through gritted teeth, and then the demon screams one last time, vomiting smoke into the air. Dean closes his eyes against the sting of sulfur, and then it's over. He is holding a bloody corpse in his hands, and the air stinks of rotten eggs.
Dean falls back and crashes against the shelf, dislodging cubes of post-it notes that bounce off his head.
“Cas, you okay?” he calls out.
“Yes.” Breathless, ragged, but alive. “Dean.”
Dean closes his eyes, listening to the blood pounding in his head. Clean-up in aisle four, he thinks.
“Dean,” Cas says again. “She's still alive.”
He pushes himself to his feet, and when he comes around the aisle, Cas has the woman's head cradled in his lap. He's pushing his hand against her side, but the puddle of blood beside her gets bigger and bigger anyway. Dean can't avoid stepping in it when he crouches next to them, and he brushes her hair from her face.
“Hey, hey, take it easy,” he says softly, and she's panting, panicked, and only a matter of time.
“The demons,” she gasps.
“I know, they're gone. It's okay.”
“They're gathering,” she insists. “They're--”
“It's okay,” Dean assures her, and she sobs, “No,” and Dean holds her hand and Cas strokes her hair until the light goes out of her eyes.
Cas slouches, exhaling shakily, and shuffles back to lean against the shelf, supporting the woman's head as it slides to the floor. He mutters something, and Dean says, “What?”
Cas says, “God is with us.”
“Uh-huh. I'm going to have to go with 'no' on that one.”
“If the exorcism worked, God's power is still in the world,” Cas says, something bright and fragile in his eyes. “Our words still carry Him.”
“Well, where the hell is He because He sure isn't carrying us.” Dean pushes himself to his feet, wiping his hands on his jeans. “Ever heard of a death echo?”
Cas's face goes hard. “God isn't dead.”
“He's gone, same thing,” Dean snaps. “Look, if He's not dead, then we're dead to Him, and that isn't a whole lot better.”
Dean has a lot more to say on the subject, he really does, but the look Cas gives him stops him. Yelling isn't going to do anything. Arguing about absent fathers leads nowhere fast, and Dean should know.
He sighs roughly, and says, “Sorry,” and knows he doesn't sound like he means it. “Look, let's take what we can and get the hell out of here.”
The CVS is all looted out; they barely find anything. There's a half-hearted argument about whether loofahs and contact solution might be good for anything, and in the end they leave it. Cas finds a toenail clipper in aisle six, though, and raises his eyebrows at Dean, who shrugs. Cas puts the toenail clipper in his pocket.
Outside, the Impala gleams in the sun. Cas climbs in and slams the car door a little too hard. Dean frowns but doesn't say anything, just rolls out of the parking lot and drives.
In fact, they don't say anything for a long time. Dean can see where Cas is coming from, but what the hell can either of them do about it anyway? Flying to France to eat pastries with deities is not really an option at this point.
They're gathering.
Dean wonders what the end of the world is like in France. Is the French Apocalypse different from the American Apocalypse?
This is not over, Dean Winchester.
Probably they say “Mon dieu!” a lot more. Dean doesn't really know that much about France.
+
It doesn’t matter how careful they are; sometimes there are too many monsters and no damn gas. They’re lucky – sort of -- that when the Impala sputters to a halt, they only have to walk half a mile before they find a roadside 7-11 with six candy bars on the shelf and an abandoned truck with no rear tires but three quarters of a tank left. Dean makes with the rubber hose and spits foul rainbows on the pavement as the gas can fills; inside the remnants of the store, a Hershey bar at least kills some of the taste.
“You like these, right?” Dean asks, tossing an Almond Joy at Cas. Dean is not so much a fan of coconut. He keeps the Twizzlers for himself, though.
On a whim, he checks the cash register, and thinks he shouldn't be surprised as he is to find it still full of cash. Money: how quaint. Habit makes him want to stuff all the bills inside his bag, but what can they use it for anyway? Kindling? Mementos?
“Hey, did that demon say anything to you?” Dean asks as they walk back, boots kicking up dust. “Back at the CVS?”
“She called me a bag of bones and shit.”
“That's not what I mean.”
“Then what do you mean.”
“Mine said they're rising, or whatever.” Dean tries to end that sentence light. “He said Lucifer will come.” He looks at Cas. “Can you... Would you know that? I mean, do you...? I mean, he's your brother, right?”
Cas frowns darkly. “What does that have to with anything?”
That's a weird question, Dean thinks. But then he realizes he's not sure how to answer it. He asks another question instead. “You think the demons could... I don't know. Be going somewhere?”
“Are you suggesting that demons migrate?”
Dean quirks his mouth. Cas starts to get that vague, puzzled look (why are you laughing, Dean?) just before he raises his head, expression emptying completely.
Then Cas says, “Run,” flat and without affect, and Dean does not question.
He reaches a hand to grab and pull at Cas’s upper arm; he keeps the gas can in his other hand. The gas is sloshing and heavy, and Cas is slightly too slow, but he can’t let go of either.
They stumble down the highway, feet picking up noticeably as they hear the first starved howlings rise somewhere behind them.
“How far?” gasps Dean, and Cas repeats, “Run.”
The air is hot and muggy, every breath drawn in wet. The Impala glimmers in the distance like a mirage.
+
Dean has not had a high-speed car chase in a while. He has to admit, it's kind of fun – at least, until the Impala pays the price of ditching their pursuit, marked in shuddering impact and Dean’s heartfelt curse before the Buick goes spinning off and down the side of an overpass.
He hopes to see a fireball behind them, but there’s no such luck. Life isn’t an action movie so much as a low-budget horror flick, and there aren’t nearly enough explosions.
They drive, and Dean seethes.
“That is so not fair.”
“It’s reasonable that a vampire might know how to drive, Dean.”
“Goddamn bloodsuckers and their goddamn -- who the hell drives a Buick in the Apocalypse anyway – what the fuck, man. That is not going to buff out. All down the … I dunno if your door’s gonna open. That is not going to buff out.”
Dean drives faster than he needs to, faster than he should. He rests his hand on the dashboard, feels the smooth purr of the engine vibrate beneath his palm.
“We’re okay,” he says.
And, “Goddamn.”
The crack in the windshield runs all the way across now, dividing the night in two.
+
He loses time at least once. Dean comes to with the taste of blood in his mouth, and smoke lingering harsh and unforgiving in his lungs. He coughs, and there's a hot throbbing somewhere in his core.
"Dean," says a familiar voice, rumbling, and Dean realizes that he has his ear against Cas's chest; he can feel Cas's voice vibrate through ribs and flesh, feel the solid arm around his shoulders.
They’re in the Impala, of course and always, Cas’s free hand on the steering wheel and the world roaring by in darkness outside.
Dean is drunk, maybe, or -- he is detached, the world gone black at the edges, and he feels a brief burst of gratitude.
"Nightmare," he mutters, unnecessarily, and Cas's arm tightens around him.
"Wait," adds Dean, "no." Because there's smoke, still, in his throat, and he hacks on it -- son of a bitch, that hurts -- and squints up at Cas's face, which is blurred and pale.
There was a farm, he recalls vaguely -- maybe gas, maybe grain. The rafters of the barn were aglow, like some crackling cathedral. He remembers hearing whispers, and laughter, and a low, sick moan. He's not sure if that last was his own.
But there are blue eyes staring down at him, ancient and -- softer now, was it, with mortality or good old fashioned suffering, but Dean can't remember why that thought was important. He just wants to know why Castiel looks so wrecked. "Sam," he says, past the bubble in his throat, but that's not right -- he doesn't know where it came from -- and he frowns, perplexed. "Cas. You flew us out of there?"
He hears Cas's heart beat, beneath the ribs where Dean's head lies.
“Yes,” says the angel, quietly -- and Cas lifts his other hand up from somewhere, dripping red, to touch crimson, sticky fingers to Dean's temple. “We're okay.”
Dean thinks of razor-sharp smiles in a hayloft. An image flickers, glaring bloody Cas with Dean’s crossbow and a burning two-by-four. Something is – “You can’t fly,” he mutters, into Cas’s grimy shirt.
"I’m humoring you," murmurs Cas. Then he says something in Enochian that does not end, flows soft and steady like a river. Dean feels Cas’s palm against his cheek, imagines soft black feathers pillowing his spine.
He closes his eyes.
+
All the towns are the same after a while. They avoid cities – cities are inevitably infested. Towns are unpredictable, but always shattered and burned. Dean can’t always remember what the world was like before it was covered in dust and broken glass and unholy things.
Sometimes they get a day or two in peace. Sometimes the vampires come in waves; sometimes the croats rush the car.
Once they see an old man, sitting on his porch with a shotgun and a straw hat, but when Dean pulls the Impala up the drive, the man just puts a round into the ground in front of the driver’s side door. He doesn’t change expression. Dean puts the car into reverse.
Mostly they run.
Sometimes they just bleed.
“Dude, you have to tell me this shit.” Dean wrenches the car to a sliding stop at the side of the road, tires crunching over gravel, and he reaches into the back seat for the first aid kit.
“We were busy,” points out Cas, resigned. He blinks a couple of times, too slowly, and Dean says, “Shut up and give me your arm.”
It’s pitch black outside – Dean cannot remember the last time they managed to see stars past the encroaching cloud cover. The nights are chill and damp. He peers at Cas’s forearm by the lights of the dashboard, unwinding the sticky warmth of the wet bandage. The gash is long, deep, like a suicide. “You look so fucking emo right now,” he says, and then, “Stitches aren’t holding.” He sucks air between his teeth and punches at the cigarette lighter on the dash. “You’re not gonna like this.”
“I’m not liking it now.”
“Yeah,” acknowledges Dean, and he presses a gauze pad down on the vampire’s mark, watching blood ooze slowly but steadily across the white.
Cas rests his head against the seat and stares up at the utterly empty sky.
“Hold still,” Dean says after a minute. “I mean it.” He takes off the gauze and wraps his hand tightly around Cas’s wrist, holding it against the seat. He reaches for the cigarette lighter with his other hand.
“A spiritu fornicationis,” murmurs Cas, half under his breath. He watches Dean with a dull resignation that does not have the energy for shock; he waits, very still. “A fulgure et tempestate, a flagell – Jesus H. motherfucking Christ.”
“Atta boy.” Dean holds searing metal against rigid, trapped flesh, holds it, clenches tight when Cas’s arm jerks under his hand. He hears Cas’s breath catch to nothing; the scent of burned meat fills the car, carrion grilled. “You’re okay. Fuck. Sorry. You’re okay. Hey – maybe the vamps won’t like you well done.”
Cas’s teeth are clenched and grinding tight; he says nothing at all.
Dean has the worst damn headache of his life.
+
They find a garage that hasn’t been completely decimated, and limp the Impala in. Dean stares upward at the hidden workings of his baby, tapping his wrench against the rear wheel strut. “Muffler’s tight,” he says, “but I don’t like the way this looks. We’ll have to jack it up.”
“Hm.” If Dean turns his head to the left, he can see Cas’s foot, where Cas is stretched out against the wall. Cas doesn’t move much lately if it doesn’t involve something with teeth.
“Hey, can you find me a – never mind.” Cas doesn’t know shit about cars. Dean makes a face, reaching up to run his fingers over the fuel line.
But Cas rises – Dean can hear the slide of denim across the floor, the way Cas’s breath hitches when he stands. “I said never mind,” says Dean, and he looks to the side but he can’t see that foot anymore.
“Cas?”
“Keep working,” replies Cas, low and tired. “Croat. I’ve got it.”
“You sure?”
“It’s only one.”
Dean frowns, but the brake pads might need changing and he’s not sure about that rear left tire, and by the time he’s decided that maybe Cas could use a hand he can already hear the gurgling, the choked scream, the quick violent sounds from outside.
Cas comes back and drops a pipe on the ground with a clatter, sliding down the wall to resume his previous position. Dean can see his foot again, knows that Cas is sitting there with his bandaged arm across his stomach and his eyes closed, a paperback dog-eared and neglected beside him.
The shoe didn’t have blood splatter on it before. At least, not that fresh.
“Cool?”
“Fine.”
“Tell me if there’re any more.” Dean stretches, switches one wrench for another.
They’re maybe too used to this.
+
Dean turns into the military base because military bases almost always have generators, and maybe other useful shit – he knows, at the back of his head, that they’re running out of ammo again. He can count the clips in the trunk on the fingers of one... actually on just one finger, and that shit won’t do.
Bases are so useful that Dean is kind of surprised that this one seems to be empty. He nudges the car through the unlocked gate, sending chain link swinging before them. “Vampires?”
There’s a pause before Cas stirs himself in the passenger seat, where he has been staring at nothing for at least the past hour. “I don’t know,” he says, empty.
“Cas. Focus.” Dean puts the car in park so he can better glare. “Are there. Any. Vampires.”
“The answer is always yes, Dean.” But Cas raises his good hand, scrubs it across his face, shakes his head; Dean waits, glaring still, until Cas says, “Not close yet.” And, “No croats.”
“Fine. Goddamn, man.” Dean checks his gun, an automatic gesture, then gets out of the car and looks around at the low, paint-flaked green buildings, the torn fences and dusty flat horizon.
When they find the body just inside the door of the first building, Dean knows why the base is empty. He’s only grateful the corpse isn’t fresh; he steps over the skeleton, the dried stretched flesh and tattered remnants of a uniform, and looks to the desk where someone else died half sprawled in a chair, dusty telephone off the hook and broken on the floor.
“Tough break,” he says, and Cas doesn’t answer and neither do the dead.
He stops counting the bodies after ten. There is indeed a generator, though, and Dean fires that up. They find the mess hall and a stack of freeze-dried rations, which are better than nothing even though they taste like the tinfoil and cardboard they’re wrapped in. There’s fresh water, too, whole cooler bottles, and Dean gets one into the Impala’s trunk despite the weight, because water is even better than toilet paper.
Toilet paper is what he sends Cas to look for, just before he finds the radio and really, that’s what Dean’s been hunting all along.
It takes him over an hour to get through. Even through the crackling static he can hear Chuck’s unflattering amazement, Sam’s exhausted relief.
“We’re still on tour,” Dean says. “Giving the people what they want. How’s tricks?”
The camp is still in one piece, apparently, and they’ve gained some and lost some and Sam and Chuck and Becky are okay, which is really the part that Dean wants to hear. Cas wanders in midway through, drops himself into a worn wheeled chair and listens.
“You get my postcard?”
“The mail’s been kind of slow.”
There’s a brief beat of silence. Sam says, “Hey, is Cas there?”
Dean raises an eyebrow. “Nah. I ditched him weeks ago.”
“Lemme talk to him.”
So Dean passes over the radio handset and Cas presses down on the button and says, “Hello, Sam,” all low and earnest like old times. Sam must hear it too, because he chuckles for a second and answers, “Hey, Cas. Holding up?”
“Still alive,” concedes Cas, after the slightest pause. Then there’s silence, because Cas is even worse at small talk than Dean, and Sam doesn’t seem really keen on leaping into whatever he wanted in the first place.
Just as Dean is about to say something sarcastic and impatient, Sam’s voice crackles, “Listen, you know that thing you did a couple of years ago, to get Lucifer out of my head? Is that something I can do myself?”
Cas and Dean go very still, and then Cas says, carefully, “That would take an angel.”
“Shit,” says Sam, “That’s what I –“ but Dean has already grabbed the radio back from Cas, and he forgets about Cas’s arm and Cas loses all color and grips the edge of the table. Dean can’t apologize, because all his attention is on the distant tinny sound of Sam’s voice.
“Is that asshole back again?”
There’s another pause, before Sam ventures, “Yeah. It’s no big – he just talks. You know how it is. Guy won’t shut up.”
“Sammy –“ Dean’s hands are cold. Something pounds hard and fierce in his skull.
“It’s fine, Dean.”
It’s not fine; it is very far from fine, but Cas has taken the radio back again, and Cas says, “The books that were in my cabin – you’ll find some notes in the back of the Septaguint. But I don’t – he’s an archangel.”
“Yeah.”
Dean stares at the floor, and Cas adds, “We have reason to believe the demons may be gathering. Lucifer may have a new plan.”
“Fuck,” says Sam, resigned. “I thought he’d at least given up on me, I guess.”
“You’re the true vessel, Sam.” Cas’s response is not without sympathy. “Try the sigils for vision or memory; they may have some relation to dreaming.”
“Yeah. Okay, thanks. Listen, Dean –“
Then everything goes to static, and then there’s nothing at all.
Dean stares for a blank second, then he lunges for the radio dials and re-tunes, frantic, seeking a signal. “Fuck,” he says, more under his breath than anything. “Fuck, shit, damn, goddamn, come back, come on Sammy –“
“The generator, Dean.”
“Fuck.”
The hissing silence lingers in Dean’s ears and taunts him, the static moments of everything gone unsaid. Wasted time, lost signal.
He tries to fix the generator for two more hours while Cas packs up the car, and when the generator can’t be fixed, Dean takes a dusty mickey of vodka from some dead sergeant’s desk and works on that instead.
Cas has to drag him out, later, when the vampires are already past the outer fence; at the Impala’s wheel, Cas mows through the crying undead without remorse, as though they were bowling pins or broken stalks of grass, and Dean’s laugh is sharp and crazed.
+
They find a medical clinic but aren’t surprised when it’s already cleaned out. Dean scours empty cabinets, scowling. He at least finds a pack of scalpels, some gauze, another length of hose. He sits Cas down in the lobby – he doesn’t like those little examination rooms, too small, one exit – and he pulls the clinking bottles from his bag.
Bacardi citrus bullshit versus Johnnie Walker blue.
Sometimes it’s left to Dean to make the hard choices.
“What a waste,” he says. “You think Bacardi Limon’ll disinfect?”
He doesn’t have to look up to feel the stare. Cas’s response is dry: “Explain to me again your mortal humor.”
“Heh.” Dean hands the rum to Cas. “Drink this. And I mean drink it – this is gonna hurt like a bitch.”
They are neither of them unscathed – Dean is pretty sure the last two fingers of his left hand are broken, thanks to a croat with half a shattered chair, and he’s got a vamp bite on his shoulder that stings like a burn and itches where the gauze is taped at his collarbone. Cas is just a mess of pink scars and scabbing gouges, undead druggie greed marked in tracks down his neck.
It’s still that deep gouge on Cas’s inner arm, just below the elbow, that’s the issue. Neither of them even remembers which vamp it was. Dean retains an image of a teenaged boy, denim jacket and wild empty eyes in a stairwell, with all his buddies coming up from below, but Dean isn’t really sure if that was the one or if it was the other time, that little girl with her jaw half-unhinged and the sores on her mouth where her teeth had been too sharp for her lips, or maybe the other – he forgets.
He remembers the cigarette lighter and the blood that would not slow.
There are vampires everywhere and Cas’s arm is red and swollen and scorched, infection creeping.
Cas makes a face, lowering the bottle, and Dean says, “Keep drinking.” Followed by, “Listen man, I don’t really know what I’m doing with – this is not a first aid thing.”
Cas nods, and doesn’t say anything; he looks toward the door, but when Dean tenses, Cas shakes his head. Dean goes back to salt all the entrances and troll the cupboards again, and he finds more gauze shoved in a back corner but that’s really about it.
Cas is a real lightweight these days, so Dean goes and takes the bottle away and waits. Cas stares into midair for a while, silent, blinking, and then Dean slices the scalpel – new, sharp – into Cas’s hot arm and mops away the black blood and yellow pus when it comes erupting out; he turns his face from the rancid sweet rotting scent of it, and Cas makes a sound and Dean says, “Yeah. Hold still. Bite this.”
He doesn’t know if the rum helps at all, when he pours the whiskey across that seeping wound and Cas just jerks and writhes in the lobby chair, heels pounding at the cheap carpet, head thrown back. Cas doesn’t scream and Dean is brutal and unrelenting. When he bandages up that arm again, Cas is staring at the ceiling with unseeing eyes and breath that comes ragged and fast. Bile and rum and the remnants of the morning’s nutritional Twinkie are fresh and wet on his stained shirt, crusting at the corners of his lips.
“Sorry, buddy.” Dean wipes it away as best he can. “Hey, next time yell ‘Kelly Clarkson.’”
A moment later, he says, “Cas?”
He hears something crunch outside, a footstep on broken glass; Dean puts down the roll of gauze and picks up the crossbow from where it sits next to the bag. He goes outside and finds the vampire, and when it leaps for him, he shoots it three times before it slams into him. Its teeth graze his collar and Dean jams Ruby’s knife into its throat, sharp and slicing back, back, far back through sinew and esophagus to the bony spine.
He saws off its head, and then he stabs it in the chest. Repeatedly. For good measure.
When the vamp’s torso is a mass of wasted flesh and yellow-white ribs – when Dean’s hands have stopped shaking -- Dean wipes off the knife and goes to get Cas into the car.
He can see whispering movement on the horizon.
+
They are stretched and harried, squinting against the day and blind in the dark. For every ten vamps they kill, every twenty croats, one gets too close; they are shredded and torn at the edges. Cas is white and bloodless grey; the blistered slash on his arm oozes, sends spreading lines like dark worms into his flesh, and he staggers when he gets up too fast. Dean has a throbbing at the base of his skull, rainbows in his vision that won’t go away. He sees shadows that aren’t there, and Cas has to make him eat, has to pry his hands from the wheel.
They fight over rationing the bandages, and whether three books are too many to carry, and whether a crowbar is worth the weight.
They keep their guns ready.
They stop to stretch their legs; the air tastes of sulfur, and the unbroken cloud cover is the color of steel. Standing in the dead grass, they watch a hawk fall from the sky and smack fierce and twitching into the hot pavement of the road. Its feathers are broken and faded; Dean can see its one eye staring, mad and golden and empty.
“KFC tonight?” Dean isn’t sure whether he’s serious or not.
Cas answers him in a language Dean has never heard before – not Enochian, not anything else. It vibrates through Dean’s bones, sets the migraine flaring in his temples. “Dude,” he says, in protest, but Cas is distant, swaying, watching the hawk as it dies.
“Okay, so, I’m driving.”
Two hours later, they pass a familiar stretch of road and a billboard that Dean knows he’s seen before – “McDermott’s Family Restaurant,” it reads, and it was faded then, too. He remembers a pretty, faceless waitress and a blueberry pie he would kill for; he can still taste the hint of cinnamon. His mouth waters.
He flashes half a grin and glances into the back seat, to ask Sam if he remembers and if he wants to stop.
His shout is instinctive and panicked; he sets the Impala skidding when his brother isn’t there, and then Cas takes the wheel again.
Cas sweats as he drives, eyes rigid on the road, one hand too tight on the wheel to compensate for the other fingers he can no longer close. Dean leans his head against the passenger window and the glass is cool against his skin.
Whatever you do, Dean remembers Sam's voice saying in the midst of thunder and gunfire, you will always end up here.
They are all of them falling apart despite their best efforts. Lucifer is in Sam’s dreams, and Hell still knows Dean's name.
Dean hears the distant shriek of vampires and doesn’t know anymore which ones are real.
+
The day Cas is too dizzy to walk, Dean leaves him pale and soaked in the back seat, two spots of color like paint across his cheekbones.
Dean breaks into the sad remnants of a strip mall pharmacy, and manages to find a thermometer in the baby aisle and a series of bottles still locked safe in the back, waiting like a miracle or a gift. He shoots the lock open about five seconds before he hears an answering shot from outside; he grabs what he can and runs.
There are two croats on the Impala in the parking lot, because if it's not one thing it's another, and one of them is crawling on the hood, smashing bloody palms against the roof, while the other one hurls itself over and over again into the dented passenger side door. A third -- what used to be a woman, Dean thinks, catching a slip of flowery dress -- lies on the ground with its brains spread across the pavement.
Dean shoots the other two. When he gets back to the car, he realizes they're missing a rear window because one of the zombies bashed it in with a rock.
Cas is crusted in shattered glass; he doesn't say anything, eyes gone glazed and fingers clutched around the butt of his Glock. Dean coaxes the gun away, low and careful; he cleans the shards away and gets a handful of pills and half a cup of orange soda down Cas's throat.
The thermometer says 104, but Dean can do nothing but drive.
In the back seat, Cas drips and pants and stares at nothing, muttering. "Was the Lord displeased against the rivers?" Dean catches, after a while. "Was thine anger against the rivers? Was thy wrath against the sea, that thou didst ride upon thine horses and thy chariots of salvation?"
"Cas?" he says, and Cas replies, "O God, thou hast cast us off, thou hast scattered us, thou hast been displeased; o turn thyself to us again."
"Cas," tries Dean again, "Look, we'll find someplace nice tonight, okay? Something with an actual mattress. I think there're a couple of towns coming up; they can't all suck."
"And if thy right eye offend thee," murmurs Cas, after a moment's silence and with peculiar care, "pluck it out, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell."
Dean glances in the rearview mirror, and that glassy blue gaze is staring right at him.
"Fuck you," he responds, and reaches down to slide Guns n’ Roses into the deck. He cranks it high, and the black spike the noise sends through his head is almost a friend.
“That’s getting repetitive, Dean.” Cas sounds, briefly and reasonably, entirely lucid – and Dean isn’t sure whether Cas means the swearing or that particular cassette, but when he glances back again Cas’s eyes have rolled to whites, so Dean just presses his foot down on the accelerator. There’s a low knocking coming from the engine, and he ignores it, mouthing lyrics instead.
He doesn’t think about how they’re going to run out – of gas, or food, or luck, or blood.
Dean sets his gaze on the road, and drives.
[end.]
by
lassiterfics & unoshot. Continuation of The Future As B-Movie.Supernatural. Dean, Castiel, zombies, and vampires. PG13. Spoilers through 5x13. Warnings: violence, gore.
This future isn't much better than that other one. / Surviving the Monsterpocalypse 101 / Worst road trip ever. ~16,886 words (Part 2: 7940 words)
Part 1
They don’t leave that afternoon because – well, because they are hammered, and Dean vaguely recalls Cas saying, “Dean, you’re burning,” and the sun being bright and cruel, and then they’re staggering up the steps and there’s sand itching in his hair and then the next thing he knows he’s on the couch and there’s still a good quarter bottle of tequila, which he puts to good use while Cas brings him a plateful of Twinkies, sliced and arranged like fine hors d’oeuvres.
“Nice,” approves Dean, and he tilts his head back and lets the Patrón – which is getting smoother by the draught – slide down his throat. “Fuckin’ livin’ large.”
Cas has stopped drinking, which doesn’t prevent his eyes from being hooded and a little dazed. “We’re not driving,” he observes, mildly. “We can stay one more night.”
“Guess so.” Dean lets the bottle rest against his thigh, and reaches for a handful of Twinkie. “Nowhere to be, anyway.”
Cas goes back to the kitchen and returns with a bottle of warm Gatorade, which Dean thinks is a shitty choice, but then Dean isn’t the one who has to keep his … platelet levels up, or whatever.
He makes a note to find some juice or something, for later.
“S’weird,” says Dean, “not having anywhere to go. I mean – we never did, Sam and Dad and me, we never had places, but we had… places, you know?”
Cas sips at his Gatorade, and Dean takes another swig of tequila as Cas goes to look out the window at the beach and the clouding light.
Cas is not holding up his end of the conversation, but Dean will compensate if he must. “S’posed to be different,” he mutters. “Stayed with Sammy, didn’t we? Ditched on Detroit. Except – your dick friends are still gone, and Lucifer’s still out there, and the world’s gone to shit and – we have no fucking plan, Cas, we have fuck all, not even the goddamn Colt worked, and things were s’posed to be different except they’re not.”
Cas leans his forehead against the window.
“Are you – do you – maybe it was stupid, shit, it was stupid, but maybe just for a while there I thought – we could do something, you know? Dude, are you even –“
“You had a purpose,” interrupts Cas, low-voiced, “and now you don’t. Yes, Dean. I understand.”
Dean shuts up, because he guesses maybe Cas does, at that. Which doesn’t leave him anything to say except, “Fuck.”
Then Cas takes the tequila away, and Dean would complain but he can’t quite get the sentence together in his head, and the bottle’s mostly empty anyway. The room is moving with every breath, like it’s gonna get swept away by the sea.
Which gives him a brilliant idea, so he says, “We should make a raft.”
“What?”
Cas drops into the chair across the little living room, thin and loose, letting his head fall back and bounce against the faded pillows.
“Raft,” repeats Dean, with great patience, because he is feeling magnanimous.
When Cas stares at him, blank and puzzled, Cas has got that old empty look on his face and his hair’s all tufted up and he’s – he’d even shaved that morning, with a razor from the medicine cabinet, and it’s so much like that old Castiel magic that Dean almost chokes, laughing.
“Dean,” intones Cas, sternly, and that doesn’t help matters at all, and Dean curls on the old couch and laughs and laughs, until his stomach hurts and he can’t breathe and he’s going to puke Patrón all over the sandy linoleum floor, except he does not, because that would be a damn fucking waste.
“Dean,” says Cas again, and Cas has somehow crossed the room – like magic, like he got all his mojo back and then wasted it just to save five feet of space – and Dean gasps for air, grabbing, locking his hand hard around Cas’s knobby wrist.
He feels a rough scab beneath his palm, sees Cas wince, and then it’s not so funny anymore, but Dean stares at Cas intently – because it’s hard to see, with the room spinning – and he explains, very clearly, “There’re no vampires in the ocean.”
Dean loses track of what happens next, except Cas says, “Come and lie down,” and somehow later Dean is lying on an honest-to-god mattress and he swears to god that they’ve won and this, this is heaven right here, and he could melt into it except Cas won’t shut up and keeps saying annoying shit, like, “Let go of my wrist, Dean.”
“F’ckoff,” mutters Dean, and he buries his face in the so-soft, dusty pillow.
“Dean,” says Cas, and Dean tightens his grip and slurs, “You cannot fuckin’ be trusted,” and Cas sighs, and sits down beside him, resting his non-winged back against the headboard.
“Right,” says Dean, satisfied, and then he sleeps.
+
It's pitch black when Dean fumbles into consciousness. His head is crowded and blurry in that familiar way that warns him he better go back to sleep right now before his body realizes he has a headache. Dean groans into the pillow, but making noise just wakes him up even more.
He hasn't been hungover in a while. Dean hasn't been hammered in ages because it's not like the vampires and croats give him any space to be drunk anyway, so maybe this is like a blessing in disguise. Hangovers are a sign you're doing parties right, Ash used to say. But Ash's idea of a good time was drinking PBR and translating Sumerian summoning rituals, so Dean took his aphorisms with a grain of salt.
Ash. Shit, they forgot to drink to Ash.
And, oh fuck: the pain starts behind Dean's eyeballs somewhere to the left, and the longer he silently swears at it, the more it grows. There's aspirin and bottled water somewhere in his bag, but his bag is a million miles away on the floor, and is it worth it? Should Dean just close his eyes and vehemently attempt sleep? His vision's adjusting to the dark, and Dean turns his head to judge the distance between the bed and his bag, and sees three things:
1) The aspirin, on the nightstand.
2) A bottle of water, also on the nightstand.
3) Cas, asleep in bed next to him.
Dean supposes he’s slept in stranger places after tequila.
“I think I'm still drunk,” he confesses, and Cas is unresponsive.
Dean pushes himself up onto his elbows, blinking blearily as his brain recenters itself. He reaches over Cas to grab the aspirin, and takes two. He's reaching for the water when Cas maybe says something.
“Hurnh?” Dean responds, but Cas is still asleep.
It's not an easy sleep. Cas's eyes flicker behind his eyelids, and he's breathing in uneven hitches. Running from something? Running to someone? The muscles twitch in his limbs and lines appear on his face, because even in their dreams there is no escape.
Dean drinks half the bottled water in one go, then just sits on the bed for a while, pressing his eyes into his head with the insides of his wrists. Beside him, Cas continues to make snuffling noises and Dean tries to remember what he used to do with Sammy when the kid had nightmares. Not the prophetic kind, just the regular ones where the ghosts go 'boo!'.
The first dream Cas ever had was about driving the Impala through the desert.
“We were driving west,” Cas recalled, in tones of muted wonder, “and you were beside me telling me about your plan to outsmart Michael. You said it'll be easy once we get there, but I don't remember what else you said, or where 'there' is. I was watching the road, so I only saw glimpses of you in the mirror. But when I looked over, you weren't there at all. Maybe you were never there. Maybe I had been talking to myself all that time. I don't know. I didn't know. Then I tried to go faster but the car wouldn’t speed up. I tried to stop but I couldn't.”
Cas lost angel radio and gained a subconscious. Suddenly the voices in his head were only his own.
Do fallen angels dream of excommunicated sheep?
He feels Cas twitch against his leg and hears him inhale sharply, and before Dean can even think about it, he reaches over and brushes his fingers against Cas's temple. He doesn’t know why he does it. He knows it won't achieve anything. He knows.
“You're okay, kid,” Dean adds, and his voice is like sandpaper.
Dean turns away and puts both feet on the floor, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees. His head is throbbing, his mouth tastes like ass, and he closes his eyes. He rests his head in his hands and listens, and doesn't move until Cas's breathing slows to regularity behind him, until he can't tell the sound of it from the wash of the waves outside.
+
In the morning, Dean dumps a little water in the bathroom sink and he shaves in the mirror and it feels like rebirth, although it would be better if he didn’t have a tiny jackhammer in his skull. He scrubs a wet cloth over his skin and wanders into the main room, where Cas has made the last of the coffee and there’s a box of dry cereal waiting.
Dean munches muesli or whatever the fuck it is, and makes a tour of the house, adding to his little pile of things that might be useful. They travel light, but still: a pack of AA batteries, a flashlight, a bottle of camp fuel, the razor, pens and paper. They’ve got the liquor and some new random scraps of food (he is suddenly less enthused about Twinkies, but packs them anyway). He adds a book, for Cas, because Maeve Binchy is probably better than nothing and hell, Cas used to read Chuck.
Dean goes outside to tell him to get a move on, but Cas is draped loose across a deck chair with a faded blanket on his lap and the cloudy morning gray across the pale lines of his fingers.
Dean doesn’t know if he should be worried about all this sleep. But he supposes it’s better than running or bleeding, which are the other two things they do.
“Hm,” enquires Cas, without opening his eyes, and Dean says, “It’s cool,” and goes back in, letting the torn screen door slide shut.
He pokes around a little more.
In a small desk in the bedroom, he finds a couple of old postcards – one from Chicago, one from San Diego – and learns that the beach house is apparently owned by Margaret, and Margaret has friends who wish she was there. Dean, on a whim, takes a half-dried bottle of white-out and erases the address on the San Diego card, then writes, “Camp Chitaqua, NY” and leaves the scribbled message as is.
‘Wish you were here.’
He adds a stick figure of a vampire.
Dean walks out to the road and puts the postcard in the mailbox, where it keeps company with spider webs and a two-year-old water bill.
Under the circumstances, he’s not really worried about the stamp.
Then he packs up the car – he adds, after a moment’s hesitation, the smallest of the bedroom pillows – and he takes a breath of salt air, resting a hand on the Impala’s hood. The black metal’s got new scratches, and Dean murmurs, “Sorry, baby,” and “I’ll make it up to you.” The crack in the windshield taunts him, glittering – he can see it’s spread another two inches.
He frowns, pats the car again, and heads back up to the deck. “Hey,” he says. “Time.”
There are heavier clouds creeping in from the west, but Cas still looks warm and lazy. Dean realizes he can see the first hints of silver gleaming in the other man’s dark hair, and when Cas opens his shadowed eyes Dean has to clench his jaw, look stern and resolved. “Hm,” says Cas again, but he gets up uncomplaining, stretching his shoulders, and he leaves the blanket on the chair as he walks past Dean down the steps to the beach and the car.
Dean is the one who stares at the house for a long beat, and then he shakes his head. He closes the door, for all the good it will do, before he follows Cas.
The ocean whispers, murky and secretive, and the Impala smells like disinfectant and oil.
As Dean drives, Cas reaches into the back seat and pulls up his bag, fishing around. “Here,” he says. “I found these in a drawer.”
Cas passes over a couple of cassettes, still in cracked cases, and Dean keeps one hand on the steering wheel as he takes them and gives them a cursory glance.
A second later, Jesus Christ Superstar flies out the driver’s side window and clatters on the side of the road.
Cas looks like he can’t decide whether to be wounded or annoyed or just confused. Dean glances to the side and relents, “Sorry, dude,” setting the other cassette down on the seat. “Evita can stay.”
+
They don’t get to sleep very much after that. It’s back to cat naps in the back seat, short hours stolen in ravaged houses and battered motels. South of the beach house, the highway is blocked by a burned-out semi, the husk of Miller Lite and shattered beer bottles spilled across the road.
“Shit,” says Dean, and, “Well, it was lite beer anyway.”
To either side are rocky fields and the stumps of trees. There is no passage for great black vintage beasts. Dean turns the car around, and at the next exit they head west.
It doesn’t really matter.
Cas is picking the music, though, and it doesn’t take Dean very long to get pretty fucking tired of Don’t Cry For Me Argentina.
They pass a gang of croat zombies at the side of the road, ripping into the carcass of some unfortunate meaty thing that Dean tries not to see. In the glow of the Impala’s headlights, one of the croats looks up, feral and crimson-mouthed, eyes shining like a cat’s.
+
The demons are like coming home. They know how to deal with demons, and suddenly it's like 2009 all over again, the good old days when the Apocalypse was a looming but avoidable threat.
There were three demons, now two. Dean twists Ruby's knife in the shoulder of a man with black eyes, and growls, “Eat Christ, asshole,” and crams communion wafers in his face, exulting in the demon's screams and the way the skin blisters under his palm.
God may not be on any flatbread, but He sure as hell can be in communion wafers. “Transfiguration's a bitch,” Dean informs the demon.
Gotta love those Catholics.
They're in a CVS, and in the next aisle over, a woman howls in pain, telling him that Cas isn't doing too shabby either. Cas's voice rises, chanting Latin, and Dean puts all his weight on the demon, holding him down as he thrashes and gurgles at the words of a defunct religion.
“This is not over, Dean Winchester,” the demon hisses. “Lucifer draws near! We will rise!”
“Yeah, yeah,” Dean says through gritted teeth, and then the demon screams one last time, vomiting smoke into the air. Dean closes his eyes against the sting of sulfur, and then it's over. He is holding a bloody corpse in his hands, and the air stinks of rotten eggs.
Dean falls back and crashes against the shelf, dislodging cubes of post-it notes that bounce off his head.
“Cas, you okay?” he calls out.
“Yes.” Breathless, ragged, but alive. “Dean.”
Dean closes his eyes, listening to the blood pounding in his head. Clean-up in aisle four, he thinks.
“Dean,” Cas says again. “She's still alive.”
He pushes himself to his feet, and when he comes around the aisle, Cas has the woman's head cradled in his lap. He's pushing his hand against her side, but the puddle of blood beside her gets bigger and bigger anyway. Dean can't avoid stepping in it when he crouches next to them, and he brushes her hair from her face.
“Hey, hey, take it easy,” he says softly, and she's panting, panicked, and only a matter of time.
“The demons,” she gasps.
“I know, they're gone. It's okay.”
“They're gathering,” she insists. “They're--”
“It's okay,” Dean assures her, and she sobs, “No,” and Dean holds her hand and Cas strokes her hair until the light goes out of her eyes.
Cas slouches, exhaling shakily, and shuffles back to lean against the shelf, supporting the woman's head as it slides to the floor. He mutters something, and Dean says, “What?”
Cas says, “God is with us.”
“Uh-huh. I'm going to have to go with 'no' on that one.”
“If the exorcism worked, God's power is still in the world,” Cas says, something bright and fragile in his eyes. “Our words still carry Him.”
“Well, where the hell is He because He sure isn't carrying us.” Dean pushes himself to his feet, wiping his hands on his jeans. “Ever heard of a death echo?”
Cas's face goes hard. “God isn't dead.”
“He's gone, same thing,” Dean snaps. “Look, if He's not dead, then we're dead to Him, and that isn't a whole lot better.”
Dean has a lot more to say on the subject, he really does, but the look Cas gives him stops him. Yelling isn't going to do anything. Arguing about absent fathers leads nowhere fast, and Dean should know.
He sighs roughly, and says, “Sorry,” and knows he doesn't sound like he means it. “Look, let's take what we can and get the hell out of here.”
The CVS is all looted out; they barely find anything. There's a half-hearted argument about whether loofahs and contact solution might be good for anything, and in the end they leave it. Cas finds a toenail clipper in aisle six, though, and raises his eyebrows at Dean, who shrugs. Cas puts the toenail clipper in his pocket.
Outside, the Impala gleams in the sun. Cas climbs in and slams the car door a little too hard. Dean frowns but doesn't say anything, just rolls out of the parking lot and drives.
In fact, they don't say anything for a long time. Dean can see where Cas is coming from, but what the hell can either of them do about it anyway? Flying to France to eat pastries with deities is not really an option at this point.
They're gathering.
Dean wonders what the end of the world is like in France. Is the French Apocalypse different from the American Apocalypse?
This is not over, Dean Winchester.
Probably they say “Mon dieu!” a lot more. Dean doesn't really know that much about France.
+
It doesn’t matter how careful they are; sometimes there are too many monsters and no damn gas. They’re lucky – sort of -- that when the Impala sputters to a halt, they only have to walk half a mile before they find a roadside 7-11 with six candy bars on the shelf and an abandoned truck with no rear tires but three quarters of a tank left. Dean makes with the rubber hose and spits foul rainbows on the pavement as the gas can fills; inside the remnants of the store, a Hershey bar at least kills some of the taste.
“You like these, right?” Dean asks, tossing an Almond Joy at Cas. Dean is not so much a fan of coconut. He keeps the Twizzlers for himself, though.
On a whim, he checks the cash register, and thinks he shouldn't be surprised as he is to find it still full of cash. Money: how quaint. Habit makes him want to stuff all the bills inside his bag, but what can they use it for anyway? Kindling? Mementos?
“Hey, did that demon say anything to you?” Dean asks as they walk back, boots kicking up dust. “Back at the CVS?”
“She called me a bag of bones and shit.”
“That's not what I mean.”
“Then what do you mean.”
“Mine said they're rising, or whatever.” Dean tries to end that sentence light. “He said Lucifer will come.” He looks at Cas. “Can you... Would you know that? I mean, do you...? I mean, he's your brother, right?”
Cas frowns darkly. “What does that have to with anything?”
That's a weird question, Dean thinks. But then he realizes he's not sure how to answer it. He asks another question instead. “You think the demons could... I don't know. Be going somewhere?”
“Are you suggesting that demons migrate?”
Dean quirks his mouth. Cas starts to get that vague, puzzled look (why are you laughing, Dean?) just before he raises his head, expression emptying completely.
Then Cas says, “Run,” flat and without affect, and Dean does not question.
He reaches a hand to grab and pull at Cas’s upper arm; he keeps the gas can in his other hand. The gas is sloshing and heavy, and Cas is slightly too slow, but he can’t let go of either.
They stumble down the highway, feet picking up noticeably as they hear the first starved howlings rise somewhere behind them.
“How far?” gasps Dean, and Cas repeats, “Run.”
The air is hot and muggy, every breath drawn in wet. The Impala glimmers in the distance like a mirage.
+
Dean has not had a high-speed car chase in a while. He has to admit, it's kind of fun – at least, until the Impala pays the price of ditching their pursuit, marked in shuddering impact and Dean’s heartfelt curse before the Buick goes spinning off and down the side of an overpass.
He hopes to see a fireball behind them, but there’s no such luck. Life isn’t an action movie so much as a low-budget horror flick, and there aren’t nearly enough explosions.
They drive, and Dean seethes.
“That is so not fair.”
“It’s reasonable that a vampire might know how to drive, Dean.”
“Goddamn bloodsuckers and their goddamn -- who the hell drives a Buick in the Apocalypse anyway – what the fuck, man. That is not going to buff out. All down the … I dunno if your door’s gonna open. That is not going to buff out.”
Dean drives faster than he needs to, faster than he should. He rests his hand on the dashboard, feels the smooth purr of the engine vibrate beneath his palm.
“We’re okay,” he says.
And, “Goddamn.”
The crack in the windshield runs all the way across now, dividing the night in two.
+
He loses time at least once. Dean comes to with the taste of blood in his mouth, and smoke lingering harsh and unforgiving in his lungs. He coughs, and there's a hot throbbing somewhere in his core.
"Dean," says a familiar voice, rumbling, and Dean realizes that he has his ear against Cas's chest; he can feel Cas's voice vibrate through ribs and flesh, feel the solid arm around his shoulders.
They’re in the Impala, of course and always, Cas’s free hand on the steering wheel and the world roaring by in darkness outside.
Dean is drunk, maybe, or -- he is detached, the world gone black at the edges, and he feels a brief burst of gratitude.
"Nightmare," he mutters, unnecessarily, and Cas's arm tightens around him.
"Wait," adds Dean, "no." Because there's smoke, still, in his throat, and he hacks on it -- son of a bitch, that hurts -- and squints up at Cas's face, which is blurred and pale.
There was a farm, he recalls vaguely -- maybe gas, maybe grain. The rafters of the barn were aglow, like some crackling cathedral. He remembers hearing whispers, and laughter, and a low, sick moan. He's not sure if that last was his own.
But there are blue eyes staring down at him, ancient and -- softer now, was it, with mortality or good old fashioned suffering, but Dean can't remember why that thought was important. He just wants to know why Castiel looks so wrecked. "Sam," he says, past the bubble in his throat, but that's not right -- he doesn't know where it came from -- and he frowns, perplexed. "Cas. You flew us out of there?"
He hears Cas's heart beat, beneath the ribs where Dean's head lies.
“Yes,” says the angel, quietly -- and Cas lifts his other hand up from somewhere, dripping red, to touch crimson, sticky fingers to Dean's temple. “We're okay.”
Dean thinks of razor-sharp smiles in a hayloft. An image flickers, glaring bloody Cas with Dean’s crossbow and a burning two-by-four. Something is – “You can’t fly,” he mutters, into Cas’s grimy shirt.
"I’m humoring you," murmurs Cas. Then he says something in Enochian that does not end, flows soft and steady like a river. Dean feels Cas’s palm against his cheek, imagines soft black feathers pillowing his spine.
He closes his eyes.
+
All the towns are the same after a while. They avoid cities – cities are inevitably infested. Towns are unpredictable, but always shattered and burned. Dean can’t always remember what the world was like before it was covered in dust and broken glass and unholy things.
Sometimes they get a day or two in peace. Sometimes the vampires come in waves; sometimes the croats rush the car.
Once they see an old man, sitting on his porch with a shotgun and a straw hat, but when Dean pulls the Impala up the drive, the man just puts a round into the ground in front of the driver’s side door. He doesn’t change expression. Dean puts the car into reverse.
Mostly they run.
Sometimes they just bleed.
“Dude, you have to tell me this shit.” Dean wrenches the car to a sliding stop at the side of the road, tires crunching over gravel, and he reaches into the back seat for the first aid kit.
“We were busy,” points out Cas, resigned. He blinks a couple of times, too slowly, and Dean says, “Shut up and give me your arm.”
It’s pitch black outside – Dean cannot remember the last time they managed to see stars past the encroaching cloud cover. The nights are chill and damp. He peers at Cas’s forearm by the lights of the dashboard, unwinding the sticky warmth of the wet bandage. The gash is long, deep, like a suicide. “You look so fucking emo right now,” he says, and then, “Stitches aren’t holding.” He sucks air between his teeth and punches at the cigarette lighter on the dash. “You’re not gonna like this.”
“I’m not liking it now.”
“Yeah,” acknowledges Dean, and he presses a gauze pad down on the vampire’s mark, watching blood ooze slowly but steadily across the white.
Cas rests his head against the seat and stares up at the utterly empty sky.
“Hold still,” Dean says after a minute. “I mean it.” He takes off the gauze and wraps his hand tightly around Cas’s wrist, holding it against the seat. He reaches for the cigarette lighter with his other hand.
“A spiritu fornicationis,” murmurs Cas, half under his breath. He watches Dean with a dull resignation that does not have the energy for shock; he waits, very still. “A fulgure et tempestate, a flagell – Jesus H. motherfucking Christ.”
“Atta boy.” Dean holds searing metal against rigid, trapped flesh, holds it, clenches tight when Cas’s arm jerks under his hand. He hears Cas’s breath catch to nothing; the scent of burned meat fills the car, carrion grilled. “You’re okay. Fuck. Sorry. You’re okay. Hey – maybe the vamps won’t like you well done.”
Cas’s teeth are clenched and grinding tight; he says nothing at all.
Dean has the worst damn headache of his life.
+
They find a garage that hasn’t been completely decimated, and limp the Impala in. Dean stares upward at the hidden workings of his baby, tapping his wrench against the rear wheel strut. “Muffler’s tight,” he says, “but I don’t like the way this looks. We’ll have to jack it up.”
“Hm.” If Dean turns his head to the left, he can see Cas’s foot, where Cas is stretched out against the wall. Cas doesn’t move much lately if it doesn’t involve something with teeth.
“Hey, can you find me a – never mind.” Cas doesn’t know shit about cars. Dean makes a face, reaching up to run his fingers over the fuel line.
But Cas rises – Dean can hear the slide of denim across the floor, the way Cas’s breath hitches when he stands. “I said never mind,” says Dean, and he looks to the side but he can’t see that foot anymore.
“Cas?”
“Keep working,” replies Cas, low and tired. “Croat. I’ve got it.”
“You sure?”
“It’s only one.”
Dean frowns, but the brake pads might need changing and he’s not sure about that rear left tire, and by the time he’s decided that maybe Cas could use a hand he can already hear the gurgling, the choked scream, the quick violent sounds from outside.
Cas comes back and drops a pipe on the ground with a clatter, sliding down the wall to resume his previous position. Dean can see his foot again, knows that Cas is sitting there with his bandaged arm across his stomach and his eyes closed, a paperback dog-eared and neglected beside him.
The shoe didn’t have blood splatter on it before. At least, not that fresh.
“Cool?”
“Fine.”
“Tell me if there’re any more.” Dean stretches, switches one wrench for another.
They’re maybe too used to this.
+
Dean turns into the military base because military bases almost always have generators, and maybe other useful shit – he knows, at the back of his head, that they’re running out of ammo again. He can count the clips in the trunk on the fingers of one... actually on just one finger, and that shit won’t do.
Bases are so useful that Dean is kind of surprised that this one seems to be empty. He nudges the car through the unlocked gate, sending chain link swinging before them. “Vampires?”
There’s a pause before Cas stirs himself in the passenger seat, where he has been staring at nothing for at least the past hour. “I don’t know,” he says, empty.
“Cas. Focus.” Dean puts the car in park so he can better glare. “Are there. Any. Vampires.”
“The answer is always yes, Dean.” But Cas raises his good hand, scrubs it across his face, shakes his head; Dean waits, glaring still, until Cas says, “Not close yet.” And, “No croats.”
“Fine. Goddamn, man.” Dean checks his gun, an automatic gesture, then gets out of the car and looks around at the low, paint-flaked green buildings, the torn fences and dusty flat horizon.
When they find the body just inside the door of the first building, Dean knows why the base is empty. He’s only grateful the corpse isn’t fresh; he steps over the skeleton, the dried stretched flesh and tattered remnants of a uniform, and looks to the desk where someone else died half sprawled in a chair, dusty telephone off the hook and broken on the floor.
“Tough break,” he says, and Cas doesn’t answer and neither do the dead.
He stops counting the bodies after ten. There is indeed a generator, though, and Dean fires that up. They find the mess hall and a stack of freeze-dried rations, which are better than nothing even though they taste like the tinfoil and cardboard they’re wrapped in. There’s fresh water, too, whole cooler bottles, and Dean gets one into the Impala’s trunk despite the weight, because water is even better than toilet paper.
Toilet paper is what he sends Cas to look for, just before he finds the radio and really, that’s what Dean’s been hunting all along.
It takes him over an hour to get through. Even through the crackling static he can hear Chuck’s unflattering amazement, Sam’s exhausted relief.
“We’re still on tour,” Dean says. “Giving the people what they want. How’s tricks?”
The camp is still in one piece, apparently, and they’ve gained some and lost some and Sam and Chuck and Becky are okay, which is really the part that Dean wants to hear. Cas wanders in midway through, drops himself into a worn wheeled chair and listens.
“You get my postcard?”
“The mail’s been kind of slow.”
There’s a brief beat of silence. Sam says, “Hey, is Cas there?”
Dean raises an eyebrow. “Nah. I ditched him weeks ago.”
“Lemme talk to him.”
So Dean passes over the radio handset and Cas presses down on the button and says, “Hello, Sam,” all low and earnest like old times. Sam must hear it too, because he chuckles for a second and answers, “Hey, Cas. Holding up?”
“Still alive,” concedes Cas, after the slightest pause. Then there’s silence, because Cas is even worse at small talk than Dean, and Sam doesn’t seem really keen on leaping into whatever he wanted in the first place.
Just as Dean is about to say something sarcastic and impatient, Sam’s voice crackles, “Listen, you know that thing you did a couple of years ago, to get Lucifer out of my head? Is that something I can do myself?”
Cas and Dean go very still, and then Cas says, carefully, “That would take an angel.”
“Shit,” says Sam, “That’s what I –“ but Dean has already grabbed the radio back from Cas, and he forgets about Cas’s arm and Cas loses all color and grips the edge of the table. Dean can’t apologize, because all his attention is on the distant tinny sound of Sam’s voice.
“Is that asshole back again?”
There’s another pause, before Sam ventures, “Yeah. It’s no big – he just talks. You know how it is. Guy won’t shut up.”
“Sammy –“ Dean’s hands are cold. Something pounds hard and fierce in his skull.
“It’s fine, Dean.”
It’s not fine; it is very far from fine, but Cas has taken the radio back again, and Cas says, “The books that were in my cabin – you’ll find some notes in the back of the Septaguint. But I don’t – he’s an archangel.”
“Yeah.”
Dean stares at the floor, and Cas adds, “We have reason to believe the demons may be gathering. Lucifer may have a new plan.”
“Fuck,” says Sam, resigned. “I thought he’d at least given up on me, I guess.”
“You’re the true vessel, Sam.” Cas’s response is not without sympathy. “Try the sigils for vision or memory; they may have some relation to dreaming.”
“Yeah. Okay, thanks. Listen, Dean –“
Then everything goes to static, and then there’s nothing at all.
Dean stares for a blank second, then he lunges for the radio dials and re-tunes, frantic, seeking a signal. “Fuck,” he says, more under his breath than anything. “Fuck, shit, damn, goddamn, come back, come on Sammy –“
“The generator, Dean.”
“Fuck.”
The hissing silence lingers in Dean’s ears and taunts him, the static moments of everything gone unsaid. Wasted time, lost signal.
He tries to fix the generator for two more hours while Cas packs up the car, and when the generator can’t be fixed, Dean takes a dusty mickey of vodka from some dead sergeant’s desk and works on that instead.
Cas has to drag him out, later, when the vampires are already past the outer fence; at the Impala’s wheel, Cas mows through the crying undead without remorse, as though they were bowling pins or broken stalks of grass, and Dean’s laugh is sharp and crazed.
+
They find a medical clinic but aren’t surprised when it’s already cleaned out. Dean scours empty cabinets, scowling. He at least finds a pack of scalpels, some gauze, another length of hose. He sits Cas down in the lobby – he doesn’t like those little examination rooms, too small, one exit – and he pulls the clinking bottles from his bag.
Bacardi citrus bullshit versus Johnnie Walker blue.
Sometimes it’s left to Dean to make the hard choices.
“What a waste,” he says. “You think Bacardi Limon’ll disinfect?”
He doesn’t have to look up to feel the stare. Cas’s response is dry: “Explain to me again your mortal humor.”
“Heh.” Dean hands the rum to Cas. “Drink this. And I mean drink it – this is gonna hurt like a bitch.”
They are neither of them unscathed – Dean is pretty sure the last two fingers of his left hand are broken, thanks to a croat with half a shattered chair, and he’s got a vamp bite on his shoulder that stings like a burn and itches where the gauze is taped at his collarbone. Cas is just a mess of pink scars and scabbing gouges, undead druggie greed marked in tracks down his neck.
It’s still that deep gouge on Cas’s inner arm, just below the elbow, that’s the issue. Neither of them even remembers which vamp it was. Dean retains an image of a teenaged boy, denim jacket and wild empty eyes in a stairwell, with all his buddies coming up from below, but Dean isn’t really sure if that was the one or if it was the other time, that little girl with her jaw half-unhinged and the sores on her mouth where her teeth had been too sharp for her lips, or maybe the other – he forgets.
He remembers the cigarette lighter and the blood that would not slow.
There are vampires everywhere and Cas’s arm is red and swollen and scorched, infection creeping.
Cas makes a face, lowering the bottle, and Dean says, “Keep drinking.” Followed by, “Listen man, I don’t really know what I’m doing with – this is not a first aid thing.”
Cas nods, and doesn’t say anything; he looks toward the door, but when Dean tenses, Cas shakes his head. Dean goes back to salt all the entrances and troll the cupboards again, and he finds more gauze shoved in a back corner but that’s really about it.
Cas is a real lightweight these days, so Dean goes and takes the bottle away and waits. Cas stares into midair for a while, silent, blinking, and then Dean slices the scalpel – new, sharp – into Cas’s hot arm and mops away the black blood and yellow pus when it comes erupting out; he turns his face from the rancid sweet rotting scent of it, and Cas makes a sound and Dean says, “Yeah. Hold still. Bite this.”
He doesn’t know if the rum helps at all, when he pours the whiskey across that seeping wound and Cas just jerks and writhes in the lobby chair, heels pounding at the cheap carpet, head thrown back. Cas doesn’t scream and Dean is brutal and unrelenting. When he bandages up that arm again, Cas is staring at the ceiling with unseeing eyes and breath that comes ragged and fast. Bile and rum and the remnants of the morning’s nutritional Twinkie are fresh and wet on his stained shirt, crusting at the corners of his lips.
“Sorry, buddy.” Dean wipes it away as best he can. “Hey, next time yell ‘Kelly Clarkson.’”
A moment later, he says, “Cas?”
He hears something crunch outside, a footstep on broken glass; Dean puts down the roll of gauze and picks up the crossbow from where it sits next to the bag. He goes outside and finds the vampire, and when it leaps for him, he shoots it three times before it slams into him. Its teeth graze his collar and Dean jams Ruby’s knife into its throat, sharp and slicing back, back, far back through sinew and esophagus to the bony spine.
He saws off its head, and then he stabs it in the chest. Repeatedly. For good measure.
When the vamp’s torso is a mass of wasted flesh and yellow-white ribs – when Dean’s hands have stopped shaking -- Dean wipes off the knife and goes to get Cas into the car.
He can see whispering movement on the horizon.
+
They are stretched and harried, squinting against the day and blind in the dark. For every ten vamps they kill, every twenty croats, one gets too close; they are shredded and torn at the edges. Cas is white and bloodless grey; the blistered slash on his arm oozes, sends spreading lines like dark worms into his flesh, and he staggers when he gets up too fast. Dean has a throbbing at the base of his skull, rainbows in his vision that won’t go away. He sees shadows that aren’t there, and Cas has to make him eat, has to pry his hands from the wheel.
They fight over rationing the bandages, and whether three books are too many to carry, and whether a crowbar is worth the weight.
They keep their guns ready.
They stop to stretch their legs; the air tastes of sulfur, and the unbroken cloud cover is the color of steel. Standing in the dead grass, they watch a hawk fall from the sky and smack fierce and twitching into the hot pavement of the road. Its feathers are broken and faded; Dean can see its one eye staring, mad and golden and empty.
“KFC tonight?” Dean isn’t sure whether he’s serious or not.
Cas answers him in a language Dean has never heard before – not Enochian, not anything else. It vibrates through Dean’s bones, sets the migraine flaring in his temples. “Dude,” he says, in protest, but Cas is distant, swaying, watching the hawk as it dies.
“Okay, so, I’m driving.”
Two hours later, they pass a familiar stretch of road and a billboard that Dean knows he’s seen before – “McDermott’s Family Restaurant,” it reads, and it was faded then, too. He remembers a pretty, faceless waitress and a blueberry pie he would kill for; he can still taste the hint of cinnamon. His mouth waters.
He flashes half a grin and glances into the back seat, to ask Sam if he remembers and if he wants to stop.
His shout is instinctive and panicked; he sets the Impala skidding when his brother isn’t there, and then Cas takes the wheel again.
Cas sweats as he drives, eyes rigid on the road, one hand too tight on the wheel to compensate for the other fingers he can no longer close. Dean leans his head against the passenger window and the glass is cool against his skin.
Whatever you do, Dean remembers Sam's voice saying in the midst of thunder and gunfire, you will always end up here.
They are all of them falling apart despite their best efforts. Lucifer is in Sam’s dreams, and Hell still knows Dean's name.
Dean hears the distant shriek of vampires and doesn’t know anymore which ones are real.
+
The day Cas is too dizzy to walk, Dean leaves him pale and soaked in the back seat, two spots of color like paint across his cheekbones.
Dean breaks into the sad remnants of a strip mall pharmacy, and manages to find a thermometer in the baby aisle and a series of bottles still locked safe in the back, waiting like a miracle or a gift. He shoots the lock open about five seconds before he hears an answering shot from outside; he grabs what he can and runs.
There are two croats on the Impala in the parking lot, because if it's not one thing it's another, and one of them is crawling on the hood, smashing bloody palms against the roof, while the other one hurls itself over and over again into the dented passenger side door. A third -- what used to be a woman, Dean thinks, catching a slip of flowery dress -- lies on the ground with its brains spread across the pavement.
Dean shoots the other two. When he gets back to the car, he realizes they're missing a rear window because one of the zombies bashed it in with a rock.
Cas is crusted in shattered glass; he doesn't say anything, eyes gone glazed and fingers clutched around the butt of his Glock. Dean coaxes the gun away, low and careful; he cleans the shards away and gets a handful of pills and half a cup of orange soda down Cas's throat.
The thermometer says 104, but Dean can do nothing but drive.
In the back seat, Cas drips and pants and stares at nothing, muttering. "Was the Lord displeased against the rivers?" Dean catches, after a while. "Was thine anger against the rivers? Was thy wrath against the sea, that thou didst ride upon thine horses and thy chariots of salvation?"
"Cas?" he says, and Cas replies, "O God, thou hast cast us off, thou hast scattered us, thou hast been displeased; o turn thyself to us again."
"Cas," tries Dean again, "Look, we'll find someplace nice tonight, okay? Something with an actual mattress. I think there're a couple of towns coming up; they can't all suck."
"And if thy right eye offend thee," murmurs Cas, after a moment's silence and with peculiar care, "pluck it out, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell."
Dean glances in the rearview mirror, and that glassy blue gaze is staring right at him.
"Fuck you," he responds, and reaches down to slide Guns n’ Roses into the deck. He cranks it high, and the black spike the noise sends through his head is almost a friend.
“That’s getting repetitive, Dean.” Cas sounds, briefly and reasonably, entirely lucid – and Dean isn’t sure whether Cas means the swearing or that particular cassette, but when he glances back again Cas’s eyes have rolled to whites, so Dean just presses his foot down on the accelerator. There’s a low knocking coming from the engine, and he ignores it, mouthing lyrics instead.
He doesn’t think about how they’re going to run out – of gas, or food, or luck, or blood.
Dean sets his gaze on the road, and drives.
[end.]
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