Five Ways the Winchesters Were Never Undead
A while back I came across a fabulous FST by bangles that lamented the UNFORGIVABLE LACK OF UNDEAD STORIES in the Supernatural fandom. So this happened. Five stories of undead Winchesters, written for no better reason than I was itching to write something new, I love AUs, and undead characters are fun.
These stories got way longer than I intended, so I'm putting them up one per post as I get their final revisions finished. bangles and sabella_a were kind enough to beta them for me. The stories have absolutely nothing to do with each other beyond the shared theme, so there'll be separate ratings and comments with each.
All comments, criticisms, and questions are appreciated.
MASTER LIST:
I. Rain Dogs
II. Simple Interrupted
III. 19121
IV. Some Kind of Monster
V. Non Timetis Messor
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TITLE: Five Ways the Winchesters Were Never Undead (I. Rain Dogs)
AUTHOR: barhaven
CATEGORY: Gen (AU)
RATING: PG
SPOILERS: 1x22 and 2x01
COMMENTS: This is the least Winchester-focussed of the five stories, since it's from an OC's POV and the payoff doesn't come until the very end. All the others revolve around Sam and/or Dean, I promise. I won't be offended if you skip this one. (Seriously, I won't. Look, here's the next one. It has zombie snark!) Still, it felt right to put this one first. Both this and the last one draw heavily on "Devil's Trap" and "In My Time of Dying", so they bookend things nicely.
Non-CCR songs are this and this, just so things make sense.
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There are stories about this road.
There are stories about every road. Winding highways, rural routes, freeways, city streets, all the way to tiny, hollow cul-de-sacs. Their namesakes and ghosts, rumours and legends, disasters and triumphs, all spread along the cracked asphalt.
Silvia knew all about them. A few years and a lifetime behind her, there were tales about the stretch of highway a few minutes from her home. The most memorable were rumours a ghostly figure on the roadside, near the white wooden cross and faded plastic flowers that marked the site where a young man lost his life to a drunk driver. It wasn't until later that Silvia discovered highways were universally haunted with every manner of phantom hitchhiker, lurking Sasquatch, stalking serial killer, trailing UFO, and ghostly tragedy imaginable.
Silvia's pick-up plunged through the night, a lukewarm coffee in the cupholder and an assortment of CDs crowding the space in the armrest. If there was an up side to the spectacular loss of her job, husband, and home a few years ago, it was that picking up 36 years worth of stakes and leaving on the road to nowhere bestowed an appreciation of travelling tales that she didn't know she had. In the space behind the front seats, a plastic bag held the collection of travel books she'd accumulated. Hitchhiking across Japan or trekking across the Australian outback might be a far cry from meandering across the same few states working odd jobs, but it was something to shoot for.
The books always seemed to work in a ghost story or two. People were bizarrely proud of their local ghosts. Interesting tales, but not really Silvia's thing. She had more appreciation for the stories of eccentric backpackers and chance encounters at those faded, jukebox-lulled roadside diners.
From the truck's CD player, Tom Waits wove a rambling tale about a hitchhiker and his ride in a ghostly big rig. "Out there," the song rambled, "at that cold, lonely crossroads, well, they say it was the end of the line for Big Joe and Phantom 309..." Silvia wasn't partial to Waits' singing -- it made her think of that piano-playing dog from 'The Muppet Show' -- but his sentiments always struck home. Phantom semis, emotional weather reports, and stories about the increasing difficulty of getting a bad cup of coffee. That about summed things up for life on the great American highways, byways, and backroads.
There are always stories. This road jealously guards its own, waiting to play them out with a captive audience.
When tail lights appeared a short distance up the road, it gave Sylvia a moment of bafflement. The highway was dark, but this stretch of road was clear and straight for miles ahead. It had been ten minutes since she'd seen another vehicle in either direction. There hadn't been so much as a trace of another car ahead, let alone one so close. It was a long night, sure, but how could she possibly have missed--?
Then another vehicle appeared, and confusion took a back seat to survival instincts.
The semi came, a leviathan materializing from the darkness, and the smaller vehicle had no chance. The scream of metal was crunching, explosive, deafening as it barrelled forward, veering off the road and crushing the car along in front of it.
As Silvia jerked the wheel to one side and slammed her sneaker down on the brakes, the only tiny part of her not focussed on survival was dead certain that the semi couldn't have been there a moment ago.
Even over the grinding of brakes, the rattle of gravel as her truck veered off the road and away from the incoming disaster, the meandering barroom-piano melody streaming oblivious from the truck's speakers.... God, she could hear it. That metal-twisting, glass-shatter, body- breaking sound tearing from the two vehicles, telling her that even with the impossible semi, the collision was perfectly real.
The next moment was a blur, the shock of the accident just barely displaced by the practical fear of careening into a ditch or plowing into a tree. After an eternity of bumps and gravel pelting the underside of her truck, it eventually came to the kind of stop that made her grateful for seatbelts.
Somewhere in the distance, the mangled-metal cacophony came to an end.
Silvia popped her seatbelt from its buckle. At least the aggressive braking hadn't left her wrapped around a tree or bleeding from a collision with the windshield. She was shaken, her back and neck aching from the force of the sudden stop, but she was fine.
The passengers in that car couldn't be nearly so lucky.
A glance in a rearview mirror showed nothing of the two vehicles. She'd gone significantly off the road, and from what she'd glimpsed of the semi's veering trajectory, it and the car probably ended up somewhere off the other side of the highway.
The driver's side door flew open. Without so much as turning off the ignition or the music, she jumped from the cab and landed in ankle-deep roadside weeds. As Waits crooned about rain dogs and dustmen and shipwrecked trains, Silvia ran towards the gentle, muddy incline leading back to the highway.
When she reached the stretch of road and stepped onto the edge of the asphalt, the semi was nowhere in sight.
A practical streak jumped in before speculation had the chance. The truck driver must have turned that collision into a hit-and-run. Simple as that.
The semi was gone, but the victimised car remained. Its outline was visible in the vacant field stretching beyond the other side of the road. Through a shattered window Silvia could see one person in the car, motionless enough that they had to be unconscious or worse.
A familiar song drifted from the darkness. Bad moons rising, troubles on the way.
Behind her, music still blared from the open door of her truck. The songs collided in the middle of the highway as she ran across, tangling into a disjointed narrative. A perky "Don't come around tonight, it's bound to take your life..." overlapping that matter-of-fact "You'll never be going back home..."
The music was as good as a beacon, and Silvia followed.
There are stories about this road. It has its phantoms, its monsters, and its black marks of tragedy.
Years back, there was an accident. A '67 Impala with three passengers collided with a transport truck. The truck driver called in the accident, but claimed to have no memory of the moment of collision. There were rumours of drugs, careless driving, falling asleep at the wheel, but blame was never squarely assigned.
The victims were never positively identified. White male, approximately 25. White male, approximately 25. White male, approximately 45.
The accident left questions, but none of the car's occupants were forthcoming.
One died at the scene. The paramedics tried, but he was lost before they even managed to remove him from the wreckage.
Another died of his injuries after a few days in the hospital. Which injuries proved a contentious issue. The autopsy found trauma suspiciously inconsistent with a car crash, but nothing was ever proven.
The third vanished from his hospital room. No witnesses, no clues, no answers. Just an empty bed.
Time passed. Details faded. There were never any answers. Only the highway and its stories.
Sometimes there are shadowed glimpses of a totalled Impala on the side of the road, a man slumped in his seat bloody and still, there and gone again in the time it takes to glance from the rear-view to the roadside.
There are uneasy warnings of passing semis plagued with inexplicable, dangerous mechanical problems, blamed for the road's disproportionate number of near-misses and accidents.
There are rumours of a song whispering past in the background of radios and echoing in the ears of hitchhikers: "Looks like we're in for nasty weather, one eye is taken for an eye..."
And sometimes vehicles are found abandoned on the roadside, looking for all the world like their owners simply stepped out and fell off the face of the earth.
There are only details. For answers, the stories are silent.
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