and i just blame everything on you
hi there! i got a hella long supernatural fic for y'all, hope you are in the mood.
sam/dean, nc-17, 43430 words. like a giant weight off my shoulders, there it goes. ahh.
one two three four
The Elko County Adventure
By Candle Beck
Eggs at four in the morning, glowing sickly yellow under the diner's fluorescent lights, and Dean has no stomach for it. It's the hour, the highway time. Sam is nodding in and out of sleep across the table, a fork clinging stubbornly to his loose fingers.
A thousand miles behind them today. The distance has been ground into Dean's skin, printed on him like a tattoo. Colorado and Utah and now Nevada, high desert and difficult to breathe outside, the thin air.
These fucking eggs. One narrow level above powdered, sticking in Dean's throat in exactly the same way. The waitress creamed Dean's coffee without even asking him, now it looks like mud.
Dean's in a mood, which is directly attributable to Sam's mood, which is usually how it goes.
Lousy kinda scene anyway, this crappy truckstop a couple hours outside of Carson City, near deserted now. Dirty Indian tile, red vinyl booths marred by gashes of gray stuffing, sleepy thickish waitress slumping behind the counter with the wilting bouquet of a magazine drooping in her hands. Nothing to look at out the windows, not for hundreds of miles.
Sam drops his fork, looks up with bleary determination. "I'm done."
Dean nods, shoveling in another bite of eggs mechanically. "Goo'fer you."
Indistinct harmless glare from Sam, the back of his hand rubbing across his mouth.
"Let's go, it's late, come on."
Dean contemplates his eggs, the crescent moon he's bitten in his toast. His stomach feels like it's full of rocks.
"Almost done, Sammy."
Dean grins around a mouthful of egg, sure that he's got bits in his teeth and it's pretty gross. Sam doesn't disappoint, eyes widening as familiar disgust curls his lip, and Dean cheers inwardly.
"There are seriously wild animals with a firmer grasp on table manners than you have," Sam informs him flatly.
Quick digging search for any affection behind the general irritation in Sam's voice, and Dean comes up empty. Sam's still just fucking sick of him.
(--it's become a common chorus in his head recently, something said to Dean in anger four days ago, in a laundromat in Kentucky with the machines rolling over rhythmically at their backs like watches wound too tight. A single-load box of powder detergent bought out of the vending machine with a palmful of sticky car-scrounged coins, and later spilled, spraying bluish-white crystals across the floor. Seventeen minutes left to go on the first wash cycle and the Winchester brothers occupied themselves counterproductively, to say the least. It was the eighth-worst fight Dean has ever had with his brother, and number one since their father died. The heart of the matter boiled down to Sam spitting, "Just fucking sick of you, Dean," which is a vicious thing to say and an impossible thing to defend against. The buzz of the washing machine sounded like a fight bell, Dean staggering to his corner bloody and legless and down a hundred points. Not the best metaphor, really--Dean would rather get the snot beat out of him every day for a month than have to live through Sam saying anything like that again. So anyway, that's where that comes from.)
They're going to finish up here and Dean's gonna get a Styrofoam cup of Coke for the road (still fucking Styrofoam in tall snow-white towers by the soda machine, like it's 1973 and the world is still evergreeen). He's gonna put on the Cheap Trick mix that functions as aural adrenaline, and make it to Carson City before dawn if it kills him.
"C'mon, hurry up," Sam says, bitchy and tired. "If you're not gonna let us stop yet, at least keep going so I can sleep in the car."
"But I'm still enjoying my eggs," Dean says placidly, and manages to hold down his gag reflex. The eggs taste like glue. Sam's face is pretty much worth it, though.
"Dean," Sam begins, that particular climbing note that predicts a spectacular whine upcoming, and Dean braces his eyes to roll, his mouth forming a pre-emptive smirk, and then the building starts shaking.
It's brief and violent, clouds of dust from the creaking ceiling, silverware cartwheeling to the floor. A ketchup bottle jolts off a table and dies a gory death on the tile. Falling-pan chaos from the kitchen, the surprised holler of the line cook, and the waitress has disappeared, taking cover beneath the counter with only a persistent stream of profanities betraying her location.
"Fuck, earthquake?" Sam says, gripping the table as the windows tremble.
"Ob-obviously," comes jarring out of Dean, and like that's the break word for a spell, the shaking comes to a stop.
A tense moment, a collective breath held. A black-and-white photograph of men building the Hoover Dam shivers and leaps belatedly off its nail, the glass shattering.
"Is--is that it?" Sam asks. Both of his hands are still wrapped around the lip of the table. "That was kinda short for a quake that strong, wasn't it?"
"Who am I, Joe Richter Scale?" Dean looks over, and raises his voice, "Hey, everybody okay in here?"
A shout in disgruntled but uninjured Spanish answers him from the kitchen area. The waitress stands from behind the counter, scowling and feeling at her hair for any damage. "Motherfuckin' earthquakes."
"Do you get them that bad, usually?" Sam asks, standing and retrieving a few pieces of cutlery from the ground. "Pretty far east for something that strong, right?"
"Third time this week," the waitress tells him. "Fuckin' annoying, woke up my kid in the middle of the night last time and it took about an hour to get him back down."
"But where's the epicenter?" Sam persists, single-minded. "Is there a fault line around here?"
"Not that I know of. Didn't used to be like this either. Used to be just aftershocks from the big ones in California."
"But there haven't been any big ones recently. And that didn't feel like an aftershock."
"Yeah, fuckin' strange, ain't it."
The waitress takes Sam's proffered clutch of cutlery rescued from the floor, and dumps the whole mess with a clatter into the dirty dishes bin. A loose piece of graying brown hair bites at her eyes, and she smooths it back with the heel of her hand.
"Three times in the past week, you said?" Sam asks, definitely not sleepy anymore.
"Three times," the waitress agrees, shooting Sam that askance you-might-be-a-crazy-person look that all the Winchesters know so well. "If you boys don't need anything else just now, I'm gonna make sure Ramon didn't crack his skull or nothing."
Sam waves her off, then turns on the stool he's procured, facing Dean still in the booth with his gut-turning plate of eggs.
"Three mysterious earthquakes inside a week? That's a little suspicious, I'd say."
"I guess," Dean says, non-committal.
"I've been in a real quake," Sam tells him. "I had friends at Berkeley when I was, uh--in California, and they lived basically on top of the Hayward fault. Wake up and the whole house feels like it's about to come down around you, like the pictures off the walls and the books on the shelf and everything. I was sleeping on the couch, I remember I woke up on the floor."
"Yeah, what's your point, man?" Impatient, he's off the goddamn topic again, stupid fucking detours.
"We're like five hundred miles away from the nearest fault line," Sam says, a frustrated teacher's tone in his voice. "That tremor was too strong, it couldn't have been natural."
"Shit, Sam," and Dean shoves out of the booth, stalks up to the counter, one hand digging for his wallet. "You're really reaching here, buddy."
Sam glares, and he's really very good at glaring by now, the undefeated world champion. Dean can see exactly which lines are going to be carved into his face if his brother survives to middle age.
"I'm just saying we check it out," Sam says as Dean counts out cash to pay. "Takes, what, a day? Just see if anything's been weird recently."
"We're on a fuckin' schedule-" Dean mutters, and is summarily cut off.
"Fuck that, nobody wants to go to Carson City but you. That lead on the demon is bullshit and you know it's bullshit."
Sam smiles, sudden and disarming, catching Dean aback like a missed step, a stumble on flat ground.
"C'mon, Dean," onslaught of charm from Sam, eyes and all, "we haven't had shit to do for days, let's just check it out. Just real quick, check it out and it'll probably be nothing anyway, and then we can get on with it."
Dean huffs, looking away from his brother. A bottle of syrup fell during the so-called earthquake, and now there's a tacky dark puddle like week-old blood. Bad omens notwithstanding, Dean's already been won over. Typical.
"Excuse me, waitress lady," Dean calls. "We're leaving the money on the counter."
The waitress's face appears in the food window, eyeing the messy pile of bills and giving Dean an unamused look. "You call that a fuckin' tip?"
Dean peels off another single, muttering under his breath, and then leads his brother out of the truckstop. The night sky comes all the way down to ground level, uninterrupted black in every direction.
"Who the fuck are you even planning to talk to, I wanna know?" Dean asks, belligerent. "Middle of fuckin' nowhere out here."
"We're not too far away from Perfection."
"We're--what?"
Sam half-smiles. "Perfection, Nevada. Burt and Heather, remember?"
"Damn, they're still alive?" Dean asks.
"Here's hoping," Sam says as they reach the car.
Hard drop into the seat, and then Dean's hands are on the wheel, staring at the bugs murdered by the windshield. He sneaks a glance at Sam, wondering how long this little burst of excitement and civility will last. Sam's got his teeth in something and he can better tolerate Dean like this.
"It's not gonna amount to anything, you know," Dean tells him, wishing it was colder.
Sam tightens his jaw and doesn't look at him, answering, "Yeah, I know, so what?" Sam wants to add 'fuck you,' Dean can see it pressing its snarling shape against his mouth, but he doesn't, swallows it back. "Just go, man, stop thinking about it so much."
Dean starts the car, headlights showing a wedge of gray desert ground that looks like a dinosaur's been at it, claw marks in the rock and all. Used-up lonely feeling to the scene, empty tables through the truckstop windows, sodium lights and unconscious truckers entombed inside their eighteen-wheelers. Sam with that goddamn tension in his face. Highway asphalt is what Dean wants, black and smooth and broken up by the double yellow line that everybody follows, the one that runs from one side of the world to the other, and anywhere else they might want to go.
*
Perfection, Nevada, population 28, which is actually double what it was the last time Dean and Sam were here--some kind of land rush, Dean can only assume. They come down through the steep cliffs into the valley, shallow bowl carpeted in scrub brush and stunted trees, bare pale chunks of rock protruding from the thin ground.
The town proper consists of Chang's general store, and a few small wooden houses and blocked-up mobile homes disintegrating in the sun. A water tower looms low, rust-colored and squat like a snowman on stilts.
Dean pulls in front of the store, parking alongside a battered Volkswagen that looks as if it drove itself all the way from Germany. It's just after dawn, pink light everywhere. The sun is still behind the mountains.
The store is open, red Coca-Cola sign shining, and smells of fresh coffee. There is a woman at the cash register, putting her magazine down as Sam and Dean come in.
"Howdy, boys," the woman greets them, straightens up. Dirty blonde and maybe as old as thirty, more handsome than pretty with her squarish face, wide shoulders though she's a little thing, Dean can tell even while she's sitting. "Welcome to Perfection."
She smirks her way through it, like a minimum-wage greeter at some cheesy amusement park ride, and they laugh it off.
"Morning, honey," Dean says with an introductory smile. "Damn if that coffee doesn't smell good."
The clerk hops to her feet to get them both a cup, dropping a double handful of creamers and sugar packets on the counter.
"There you go. It's good stuff, drink it slow. You boys want me to make you up some quick breakfast sandwiches? We got the best sausage in the state."
Dean lifts his eyebrows, tempted, but Sam is a tangible presence at his back, slurping his coffee like a man whose train is late.
"Nah, thank you though. We're just passing through, you know."
"Vegas?" she asks.
Big grin, that's a gimme. "Damn right. Gonna come back here on the drive home and you'll have a couple of millionaires drinking your coffee."
She laughs, becomes abruptly and extremely appealing, one of those faces that works like that. Dean re-evaluates, darting his eyes down her body, considering making a play for it before remembering the dig of Sam at his back and mentally backing off.
He smiles, friendly-like. "You laugh, but wait and see."
"Dean."
Sam, hushed demanding voice skittering along the back of Dean's neck, such a goddamn bitch all the time. Dean clenches his teeth, not losing the ease of his expression.
"But listen, sugar, we're taking the long way down hoping we might stop in and see our old friend Burt Gummer. Do you know him and his wife Heather?"
The clerk blinks, stumbles over a kind of a huffing laugh. "Oh sure. Known 'em all my life, in fact, and I think I can count the times they've had friends come calling on one hand."
That you know about, Dean doesn't say. The Gummers have been established in the hunting community for decades as trackers and weapons procurers, and no doubt there have been dozens of clandestine visits to their deceptively normal-seeming survivalist stronghold.
He gives the clerk a few more notches of a grin, ducking his head for a self-conscious air. "Well, I'll be honest, we ain't seen them in about a decade, and Burt was really more a friend of our dad's--he's dead now."
There it is, the clutching of sympathy in the clerk's face, her falling eyebrows. Dean shrugs, lowered eyes, playing it up best he knows how, which is pretty damn good.
"We're on this trip anyway and figured we might stop off to tell Burt and Heather, you know, let them know how much Dad really liked them."
"Oh, of course." The clerk nods fast, a sudden silverish bolt of surety shooting into her eyes. "They're wonderful people, Burt and Heather. They, actually, they saved my life when I was a little girl. The two of them and my mom and a few others, and I've just. I've always been real grateful."
Dean pauses, and looks at her again, probing. She looks right back, steady as all hell, plain brown eyes and a pogo stick mounted like a revered trophy on the wall behind her. She's been through some shit, it's pretty evident. Dean tips his chin at her in acknowledgement.
"Yes ma'am, exactly. Can you help us remember where their spread is? We haven't been here since we were kids."
After such an expertly applied set-up, she's only too happy to help, and even draws them a little map on the back of the deli menu. It's not until they're back in the Impala that Dean notices the clerk's name and number written too, Mindy with a underline, and he smiles to himself, tucks it away.
"You told her an awful lot of the truth," Sam says, leaning his elbow on the window.
"Easier to keep track of the story that way," Dean answers. "Hiding in plain sight is what we're gonna call it. Only makes sense, town this size. There's gonna be no sneaking around a place like this."
Sam grunts, scratches uncomfortably at his hair, three days since the last chance for a shower and hippie-ass Sam always feels it first.
They ride out of town a few miles, up into the rocky foothills of the mountains, and they don't talk much. An actual tumbleweed gets caught up in the undercarriage of the car, and Dean stops to pull it free before it scratches up his paint job. He sneaks looks at Sam through the windshield while he's outside the car, saving them up for all the times he won't be able to look at Sam when they're sitting right next to each other.
*
Burt and Heather Gummer live behind barbed wire fence in a bunker that only appears small from the outside; there's at least three big rooms underground, and subterranean armory to supplement the wall of their rec room, which is a giant piece of particle board hung with dozens of guns. The couple's dinged faded red SUV rests inside the fence, caked in skin-colored dust up to its wheel wells.
Dean parks outside the fence, and they stand in the growing heat of the day, debating their next move.
"It's early still," Sam says.
"Burt was a Marine, I'm pretty sure he's up by eight in the morning."
"It's quarter till," Sam mutters, but he's splitting hairs and Dean ignores him effortlessly.
"If I chuck a rock at the bunker, what do you think? That'll get their attention."
"That'll get your ass shot."
Dean slants his brother a look of overdone exasperation. "Always such a goddamn killjoy."
"Hey, don't let me stop you from getting your ass shot. Man's gotta do what he's gotta do, right Dean?"
"Shut up." Dean has been awake for just approaching twenty-five hours now. There's crushed glass in his eyes. He's in a ditch, still shy of his second wind. "Be helpful or keep your mouth shut."
Sam is silent for a moment. Dean stares through the diamond pattern of the fence, one hand fisted in his jacket pocket. Sun's coming up, hotter out here by the minute.
"Hey Burt!" Sam shouts without warning. Dean starts, and falls back from the fence. Sam grins wildly, two points in their endless game of one-upmanship, and hollers even louder, "Heather! Are you guys in there!"
"Jesus, Sam," Dean hisses, reaching instinctively for Sam's wrist, but Sam only shakes him off. "So much for fucking subtlety."
"Wasn't getting us anywhere," Sam says cheerfully, and then the bunker door bangs open and Burt Gummer, rifle chocked into his shoulder, sticks half his head out and squints at them through the sight. Sam waves like a kid catching sight of his mom in the audience.
"If that's the car I'm thinking of," Burt yells from his lethal position at the door, "you better be the Winchester boys."
"None other," Sam calls back, spreading his arms out wide and Dean wants to grab him, pull him back. Sam's whole chest is exposed. "All grown up and everything!"
Burt laughs, and comes out into the yard. He takes his rifle with him, but flicks the safety on and it becomes a harmless accessory, looking as unremarkable in his hand as a cup of coffee would have.
"Well I'll be goddamned," Burt says as he approaches the fence, big grin taking up the space under his neat gray mustache. Still rangy and vaguely wild-eyed, dirty Atlanta Hawks cap glued to his head, which is probably a cue-ball by now, and Dean remembers abruptly Burt teaching him how to brace against the kick of an elephant gun, out in the narrow canyons where the echo sounded like the sky cracking open.
"Good to see you boys, you look great." Burt has pulled a keyring out, working at the lock on the gate. "Hell, Sam, I think you're about two feet taller than you was the last time I saw you."
"Yeah, that happened," Sam says, waiting until the gate swings open before offering Burt his hand and clapping him on the shoulder. "How've you been, man? How's Heather?"
The smile on Burt's face flickers, and he says, "Yeah you know, she's hangin' in," before moving on to Dean, all his teeth showing again. "Dean Winchester, look at you."
"Hey Burt, good to see you." Low-level smile, just the default setting of Dean's charm. "Still got this little patch of heaven, huh?"
"Gonna have 'em bury me right over there," Burt says jovially with a gesture to the high bluff overlooking the valley. "Well, come on in, boys. Car's lookin' good, when did you drop a new engine into her?"
Dean and Burt talk about the Impala into the bunker, down to the rec room, and through the first cup of coffee. Dean finds himself obliged to omit certain details of the circumstances surrounding the rebuild of the Impala, but the cover is flimsy and doesn't last long.
"What about your dad, then?" Burt asks, kicking back in his chair with the wall of guns stretching surreally at his back. "Still raising hell just to beat it down?"
It's a concrete feeling, the collapse of the look on Dean's face, like invisible hooks yanking downwards. His gaze flies to his brother instinctively, and Sam is studiously not paying attention, inspecting the elephant gun in its glass case, his back bent in a shallow bow.
"Aw hell," Burt says, voice rumbling with sympathy, and Dean is uncountably relieved that he won't be required to say the words out loud. "I'm real sorry about that, boys. What was it got him, if you don't mind me asking?"
"Demon," says Dean. "Same--the same one that. The same demon."
"Yeah," Burt says, knowing their history in the same way Sam and Dean know that thirty years ago Burt and Heather were parents to a little girl, until the werewolf came. "Motherfucker will get what's coming to him, I know you'll see to that."
"Yes sir." Dean's speaking by rote. He's watching the curl of Sam's shoulders, Sam's long fingers smudging the glass.
"Is that why you've come out here?" Burt asks, interest lighting in his eyes. "You got a lead, need to pick up some firepower?"
"Our lead sucks," Sam contributes. "Guns still work, though. Thanks anyway."
Burt looks back to Dean. "So what've you come out here for?"
"Well." Dean slouches deeper into the chair he remembers Heather knitting in, soft camouflaged ammo pouches to string onto their belts. "Sam, you wanna tell him about your crazy evil earthquake theory?"
"Don't listen to him, he's just talking shit," Sam says dismissively, and Dean's nails dig into the inside of his palm. "We felt a pretty serious shake a couple hours north of here, and apparently it's been happening for a week now. I was wondering if you'd been tracking anything like that."
"Earthquakes?" Burt says, lifting his eyebrows into the shadow of his cap brim.
"Tremors," Dean clarifies. Sam shoots him a glare, doesn't want any of his input right now.
"It was too quick," Sam tells Burt. "Didn't last long enough to be as powerful as it was. Like, almost like a sonic boom or something, a shockwave that just passed through. But, like. Like it was in the ground instead of the air."
There's a clue in that, or a code, something. Burt sits up, his hand moving unconsciously for the rifle propped up next to his chair. His long dapper face becomes tense and solemn.
"It felt like something in the ground?" Burt asks.
"Yeah." Sam has caught the flare of suspense in Burt's face, his eyes narrowing. "Like something real big."
"Up north, you said? Where exactly?"
"Uh, unincorporated Elko County."
"The sheep, the fuckin' sheep," Burt says under his breath, and then, "course she was right," and Sam glances at Dean to ensure that neither of them know what he's talking about.
"You familiar with this, Burt?"
"Maybe. Christ, I hope not." Burt stands, the chair squealing back on the floor. He paces half across the room, pulling off his cap to swipe a hand over his smooth head. "We got them all, I was sure we got them all."
"What?" Sam asks, eagerness having made its insidious way into his voice. "What is it?"
"Graboids," Burt answers, and then his mouth twists in disgust. "Always hated that damn name."
"I've never heard of them." Sam checks with Dean, "Have you ever heard of them?"
Dean shakes his head. Burt is still antsy, bestirred. He picks up his rifle for a moment and some of the tension breathes out of his shoulders.
"It's a bit of a story, boys. Might wanna sit down, Sam."
Sam obliges in that easy-to-please way that everyone but Dean warrants. The guns on the wall shine dull black and gray and brown, a calming sense of security in the excessiveness of it all.
"It was, Christ, what was it? Sixteen years ago now. The graboids killed eight people. Almost wiped this whole damn town off the map."
Burt tells them the whole story. Giant underground prehistoric snake monsters, sensitive to the slightest vibrations, a footstep, a voice raised above a whisper. A gut-wrenching nightmare come surging through a cinderblock wall, seeking snake tongues reaching blindly out of its mouth. The flocks of mutilated sheep and Old Fred's head in the sand, Edgar dead of dehydration on the electrical tower, and then the danger closing in, the road knocked out by a rockslide and the power lines down and the valley like a prison, a sprawling unbreakable cell. Nobody on the outside even knew anything was wrong.
"We tried to stay up on the roofs," Burt tells them. "But then they got smart. They're smart, these monsters. They learn. They figured out how to dig sinkholes, disabled our vehicles that way. And they figured out how to tear right through a building's foundations, bring it down from the inside. We woulda been dead meat if we'd stayed in town, sooner rather than later, so we made a break for it in the back of a Cat--attached a flatbed trailer to the 'dozer so everyone would fit."
"How many of you were there?" Dean asks.
"Nine of us got on the Cat, and we all made it out alive. Miguel and Mindy and Earl still live in the valley."
Dean nods, wanting to curl his mouth around a cat's smile and say, oh yeah, Mindy, but he bites his tongue, extrapolating that it's probably a father-daughter kind of thing between them.
"We almost made it to the mountains," Burt says, sour taste to the memory. "Just a mile or two shy, and then they--the graboids, they dug us a trap. Huge sinkhole, big enough to cripple the Cat. We made a run for a solid rock formation with them after us every step of the way, and we made it, but that was only gonna be good enough to let us die of thirst instead of being eaten."
"But you didn't die of thirst," Sam prompts.
A ghostly smile creases Burt's face, and he shakes his head, flicking the brim of his cap up a notch.
"No, we killed those bastards. Blew one of them up with a homemade incendiary, and then Val ran the last one off a cliff."
"Hell, a happy ending," Dean says, mildly surprised because it doesn't usually work out like that for people like them.
"Tell that to Walter Chang," Burt says, and then gestures away Sam's questioning look, his hard eyes moving to the gun wall. "Just an old friend of ours that didn't make it."
"Sorry, Burt," Sam says, which is unnecessary and probably unwanted.
"Yeah, well. That's baseball, ain't it."
They're quiet for a second, the standard accepted moment of respectful silence reserved for dead people you don't know, and then Sam asks:
"What happened after? How come the Perfection Valley Graboid didn't end up on the cover of National Geographic and shit?"
Burt exhales, coarse like he's been swallowing sandpaper. The rifle he shifts from shoulder to shoulder, lowering to tap the stock on the ground, spinning in his hands, an exhibition drill in extreme slow-motion. Lines dig deeper around his mouth, experience carving him up.
"It was a clusterfuck after we killed the last of them. We were gonna call the newspapers, and Rhonda--she was a graduate student doing seismology experiments out here, whip-smart--she was gonna publish a research paper, but then someone called the goddamn feds."
Dean winces in pre-emptive sympathy. The Gummers' antipathy for the U.S. government is visceral and intense, even considering the misanthropic anarchistic nature of the hunting population as a whole.
"They came down here, at least twenty of them," Burt says, bitterness drenched in his voice. "In their fuckin' trucks, fuckin' light artillery and surveillance and mobile labs and all this gear, set up tents in the desert and stayed for almost a month. Me and Heather packed up and got the hell out 'til Earl called to say it was all clear."
"What were they doing?"
"Erasing every trace--every fuckin' trace. They took all the corpses, scrubbed the rocks clean, combed the fuckin' desert. Feds even broke into our place here and took the graboid that came through that wall, took every shell casing even though we musta gone through a thousand rounds killing that fucker. But they took it all. Like it never happened."
"But there must've been pictures," Sam says, leaning forward over his knees. "You said there was a grad student, science grad student, she woulda known to take pictures."
"Fat lot a good it did her." Burt pushes his Atlanta Hawks cap back, scratches high on his forehead. "There were pictures, and the data from the seismology machines she had set up, but there was a break-in at her hotel room once she and Val got back to UCLA. They stole every piece of physical evidence, left us with nothing but a bunch of stories that made people think we were all crazy. Swept the whole fuckin' saga under the rug."
"A cover-up," Dean says, itchy shivering feeling on his tongue. He's always appreciated a good conspiracy.
"Really?" Sam's playing the skeptic, doubting angle to his jawline. "Sounds kinda elaborate, and I mean, a lot of this is hearsay, isn't it? You said you weren't around to see everything the feds were doing yourself, right Burt?"
Burt sets the rifle down to lean against a cabinet, the better to cross his arms over his chest and stare Sam down. Dean is amused, and able to hide it.
"My information comes from a man named Earl Basset, who I'd trust with my life. Did trust him with it, matter a fact, and since you're seeing me standing here, I guess he's fuckin' good for it, huh?"
Sam raises his hands, large-eyed but Dean can tell he's mostly faking.
"Shit, man, no offense meant. If Earl's word is good with you, it's more than good with me, that's for sure."
Burt holds the hostile pose a moment longer, and then lets his arms come loose. Mindless habit executed, cap tugged up, hand swept over his head, cap pulled back down. Dean catches a glimpse of the pure silver horseshoed around Burt's scalp, several shades lighter than his mustache. Burt's getting old, or maybe he already is and just covering with that big voice, low-slung madman's grin. Dean's perception of these things has been all screwed up ever since his father died.
"Hell," Burt sighs. "I didn't mean to snap at you, kid. This shit is--it was a pretty rough hunt, I'm just not looking forward to reliving it, you know?"
"Yeah, of course." Fast nodding Sam, and Dean watches his brother's hand fiddling with a closed switchblade on the table. "Hopefully it's just a weird freak fault line that's just become active or something. Have you felt anything out here?"
"I've been in Bixby," Burt says in a tone that immediately forestalls any further questions. "I'll give Earl a call, see what he knows."
"Is he, does he," and Dean doesn't know what this stuttering bullshit is about, vaguely scandalized at his own tongue. "Is he a fellow traveler?"
Burt looses a hard grin, shaking his head. "Naw, all he knows about our business he saw in that one week. Freak occurrence, you know how civilians think. Always did think he'd make a damn good hunter, him and Val both."
"This Val, he's not around anymore?"
"Went back to California with Rhonda after the whole mess. We still get Christmas cards from them, they got a whole pack of kids and everything. Wouldn't do to drag them back into it."
"No, we can work with what we have," Sam says. "Of the survivors who are still around, there's Earl, and who else did you say, Miguel?"
"And Mindy," Dean offers.
Burt nods, double-takes and lets out a surprised coughing laugh. "She was only a little girl, I don't know how much she even remembers."
"We met her down in the store, seemed pretty tough to me."
Sam is glaring at Dean. Not even shielded or subtle, but glaring right at him, murky color glittering and his mouth like something hammered out of metal. Dean doesn't have any idea what wrong thing Sam thinks he's done this time.
"Yeah, she holds her own," Burt says, lightening edge of pride. "Crackshot with a rifle, too, Heather and me taught her just about everything we know."
"Well, there you go." Dean tips back, tocking one heel against the cement floor. "So what happens now? How can we even be sure it is these graboid things? And let's not forget that this whole fucking theory is based on Sam being freaked out by a five-second earthquake."
Sam looks away just as Dean checks for his reaction, showing only a tense profile and speaking directly to Burt.
"If something's happened once, it's that much more likely to happen again, right?"
Burt huffs. "Your dad used to say that."
"Yeah I know. What do you say, man? You think there's something to it?"
"I think we're not gonna wait around until eight people are dead before figuring it out this time." Burt looks at the both of them in turn, taking their measures, rubbing his chin. "I'll try and raise Earl on the CB. If he's around we'll ride over there in my truck."
"Thanks Burt."
An unthinking nod, and then Burt's gaze drifts away to the cinderblock wall that had once exploded inward under the force of a bloodthirsty slug the size of a school bus. A weird joyless smile bends his mouth slightly.
"Fuckin' graboids again," Burt mutters, and then he snaps out of it. "All right, go on, get your car inside the fence and then lock up, okay?"
He tosses Dean his keyring and the Winchesters effect an exit, leaving Burt bent over the CB radio searching the frequencies for his friend.
Sam doesn't say anything until they're hiking their duffels and camp rolls out of the trunk, and then, "Something must have happened to Heather, right?"
Dean flinches for unknown reasons. Maybe a gnat bit him or something. "How the hell should I know?" he answers, sharper than he means to be, harsher, and that's the end of Sam talking to him again.
*
They pile into Burt's truck and drive out to the other side of the valley where Earl lives. The sun is out with full force now, heat-blur everywhere and hallucinatory curls of steam rising from the ground. Sam keeps his window rolled down because he's a lunatic, and Dean strips down to his plain black undershirt, slipping the ring off his finger 'cause he's not trying to accidentally brand himself or anything.
On the way, Burt tells them about a pattern of sheep mutilations that has sprung up in the wasteland ranch towns between Perfection and Carson City.
"That's how they start, they kill a fuckload of sheep and then move on to humans," Burt says. "Heather's been tracing it from the newspapers and state police blotters, but we were thinking a Satanic thing, a ritual."
Burt pushes his cap back on his head, disgruntled. "Never assume, only amateurs assume."
"Hey!" Dean says, recognition flare. "Our dad used to say that too."
Burt smirks. "Then he picked it up from me."
Dean forgets himself and looks to Sam in the backseat, an engaging smile on his face, but it dies a swift death. Sam is staring back at him, baldly stricken and infuriated for some goddamn reason, and not knowing why doesn't stop the reflective pain from spearing through Dean. Never could take that fucking look on Sam's face.
Dean faces front quickly, a pulse pounding uncomfortably in his throat. It's a rule between the two of them, one of those unspoken ones that always seem to mean more. They try not to talk about it. Dad. The inarguable difference in the pitch of the Impala's new engine when it's running at ninety-five miles an hour. Everything. Sometimes Dean slips up.
They get to Earl's place, which is a white double-wide trailer that's baking, splintering in the heat. There is a pick-up truck that's only a few years old in the lot, a crooked stencil on the door proclaiming, 'V+E ODD JOBS.' The man himself waits on the jerry-rigged front steps, cinderblock and two-by-eights and stapled twine.
Sam and Dean are afforded a moment of observation as Earl and Burt shake hands and reacquaint themselves with each other as if it's been a few weeks. Earl is compact in a blue cowboy shirt and jeans and boots, playing the part to the hilt. Gun-metal gray beard and hair, heavy eyebrows, scars on the backs of his hands. Burt introduces everybody, and then Earl invites them inside his trailer.
"What's goin' on, Burt?" Earl says. He sits down on the threadbare couch, and Burt pulls out the single metal folding chair from under the flimsy card table. Dean and Sam stay standing, shifting their weight on the insubstantial trailer floor.
"We got trouble again," Burt tells him, dropping his voice so Earl knows he's serious. "These boys just come from up north, and the story they tell sounds an awful lot like graboids to me."
"Graboids?" An instinctive disbelieving laugh, Earl's eyes going wide. "We killed 'em all."
"We killed all the ones back then," Burt says. "Maybe one of them left behind a buncha little baby graboids that we never knew about."
"Has someone seen one?" Earl looks immediately at Sam and Dean, distrust sparking vividly in his deep-set eyes. "Did you boys see one?"
Sam's mouth opens, but Dean beats him to it. "No, we haven't. Felt the ground shaking up in Elko County, that's all."
"And the sheep, Earl." Burt gives him a significant look, eyebrows up. "Heather's pinpointed at least three separate incidents, whole flock wiped out just like Old Fred's."
"You bringin' her the papers down there in Bixby?" Earl asks, and Burt says yeah quickly, fingers his shirt cuff and changes the subject.
"I figure we can triangulate where the sheep got killed and where they felt the tremors, give us a geographical range to work in. We'll talk to the ranchers and see if they seen anything."
Earl scratches his nails through his beard, eyes squinted. "Goin' all the way up to Elko County on a pretty shoddy hunch, sounds like."
A flash, Burt's face tightening and his thumb hooking resolutely in a belt loop. "My hunches tend to pan out."
"Yeah, all right," and Earl is chuckling, looking away. "Whatever you say, Sarge."
"Don't-" Burt cuts himself off, snatching glance at Sam and Dean who are watching awkwardly from too close, fucking tin can. Death glare for Earl, and Burt tells him, "What, you ain't got the stones for it without Valentine here to back you up, is that it?"
The slight mocking smile runs away from Earl's face, and now there are death glares going in both directions. A Mexican standoff kind of anxiety infects the trailer, and Dean picks at the back of his shirt, sweat-sticky already, not even eleven o'clock in the morning yet.
"Val ain't got nothing to do with it," Earl says eventually. "Just sounds like a goddamn wild goose chase."
"Fair enough. First rancher they find bit in half, first little girl sucked down with her pogo stick, you can be the one tells the family that we know how to stop these fuckers and that we always knew."
"Goddamn it, Burt." Earl thumps his fist on the table, making the whole rig shudder. "You're worse than my mother with your fuckin' guilt trips."
Burt lights up, sharklike smile. "Comin' along, aren't ya?"
"Yeah, what the hell," Earl sighs. "Heather'd never forgive me if I let you go alone, that's for damn sure."
"Good, get your shit together. I wanna leave no later than one o'clock."
"Are you thinkin' you're in charge or something?" Earl grumbles, but he gets to his feet.
His eyes fall on Sam and Dean, and Earl doesn't bother concealing an ill-tempered impatient grimace. "You guys better be good at something other than standing around like a pair of morons."
"Don't worry about us," Sam shoots back, straightening from his slouch to make full use of his height, shoulders stretching out and Earl's eyes widening just slightly, just those few precious centimeters that betray sudden respect, and for a moment Dean is unreservedly happy to have Sam on his side.
*
Burt drops Sam and Dean off back at the bunker before heading out again.
"Gonna check in with a few folks around town, make sure they know what might be coming."
Dean slides a hand down the back of his head and his palm comes away gritty. "Are they gonna believe you?"
"I'll get Miguel and Mindy to back me up, guess we'll find out how much good it does. Lock and load, we're moving at thirteen hundred hours."
"Sir yes sir," Dean says automatically, and in the corner of his eye he can see Sam flinching.
Burt roars off in a paling cloud of dust. Sam and Dean go down into the rec room to inspect the wall of weaponry.
"Model 70, H and H mag. Mossberg 935. This is like a whole catalog worth of Brownings. Jesus, a Heckler & Koch G3A3, I haven't seen one of these in years. They're not fucking around," Dean says, brushing his fingertips along barrels and stocks.
Sam doesn't answer. He's testing one of the Browning autos in the pocket of his shoulder, sighting up at the tiny jail cell windows.
"We have that exact same gun," Dean comments.
Still nothing from Sam, three-quarters turned away. Annoyance rises up hot in Dean, staring at the bit of his brother's neck that he can see between his shirt and too-long hair.
"What, you're not talking to me at all now? That's not gonna be awkward and ridiculously dangerous at all."
Sam fires a glare back over his shoulder. "Is it like, some physical compulsion you have to run your mouth ninety percent of the time, or what?"
"Just trying to make some fuckin' conversation, Christ. Shouldn't have even bothered, huh?"
"No, Dean, you shouldn't have, 'cause no one cares," Sam answers plainly, with an astonishing lack of care. He hunches, screws his eye into the rifle sight again; Sam's looking at the world through crosshairs.
Dean has gone largely numb, some kind of protective response due to the blinding rage, and he looks down to see an old-fashioned Colt .38 in his hand that he doesn't remember picking up. Cautiously, watching himself from afar, Dean sets the Colt back onto its pegs on the wall, then turns and books it the fuck out of there.
Up on the surface world, it's at least ninety-five degrees, hits Dean like an open-handed slap. Dean pulls his forearm across his face. Every part of him that's exposed to the sun feels shiny and overtight.
"Bitch," Dean spits at the rocks. He can say it a hundred different ways and most of them have some measure of fondness in them, but this is the dark side of the spectrum. "Bitch."
It's too hot. Dean wants to get in his car because he thinks better in his car, but it's too fuckin' hot. He paces around the bunker, out towards the short bluff where Burt intends to be buried someday.
Rough few months. The awful scene in that laundry room in Kentucky (fucking sick of you, Dean) had been an inevitability for thousands of miles leading up to it. Sam short-tempered and moody, Dean not much better, all those damaging vicious three-sentence exchanges under truckstop lights. Murdering the good feeling between them by inches, by erosion.
It's been eight months since their father died. Seven months since Dean resurrected the Impala and got them back out on the road again. Something left off-kilter, like the way the driver's side door doesn't close easily anymore, you gotta jam it in with the handle turned. The random pings of the settling metal in the new side panels, the alien whine of the engine. His dad's number is still saved in Dean's phone.
Dean picks out a handful of sturdy rocks to hurl off the bluff. His body likes the motion, the whip of his arm over top, the shifting balance of his weight from one leg to the other. His pulse ticks up noticeably under his skin.
Handling it badly, they're both just handling it very badly. They never talk about it. They get pissed off at each other for stupid things, impossible-to-fix things, all the unconscious mannerisms they've picked up along the way, John's beaten leather jacket on Dean's back, Sam's way of sneezing and saying "goddamn," because that's what their dad did.
And nothing has changed on the highways, same truckstops and diners and roadhouse bars, same ducking oil derricks and fields of unbelievable corn. All these places they've already been, all this stuff they've seen before. Imprinted on the backs of Dean's eyelids is the picture of his father with one hand on the wheel and one elbow out the window, the shuffling scenes of the world flashing by in the background. Whole fuckin' country has been seeded with landmines.
Dean chucks a rock at a cactus plant sticking out of the ground like a stubby finger, and hits it dead-on, solid thunk that he can hear.
"Strike three," he mutters, and looks back at the bunker involuntarily. Nothing, of course nothing, he doesn't know what he was expecting to see.
Dean throws some more rocks, but his hands are getting sweaty and the grip's no good. He goes over to the Impala, opens the trunk and pulls up the gun rack. He feels a little better once he has his favorite Glock in hand.
Eventually it feels like he's melting, and Dean puts everything away, closes up, trudges back to the bunker like a convict leaving the sunlight for another twenty-three hours.
Sam has a burlap sack laid out on the floor of the rec room, a few lucky weapons picked out to take on the job. Sam is sitting cross-legged next to the cache, methodically stripping and cleaning the Mossberg. He doesn't look up as Dean comes in.
Dean can ignore with the best of them. He chooses a Browning X-Bolt to work with and takes a seat in the chair that he remembers as Heather's.
A few minutes pass, totally silent but for the metallic snicks and shuffles of the weapons. Dean has Sam's curved back to look at, but he's not. He's got better things to do with his time.
And Sam says without turning around, "If you're gonna start trading stories about Dad with Burt, make sure I'm not around first, all right?"
Aggressively passive-aggressive in Sam's long-practiced way, and Dean observes his hands stilling on the rifle, noting the sensation of steel threads pulling through his veins.
"Wasn't planning on it," he answers.
"Good." Sam's curt, dismissive, and Dean wants to throw something at the back of his head. He wants to shake Sam, slap him, pull his hair. Something.
"And maybe you can stop talking about me like I'm a fuckin' idiot when there's other people around, what do you think about that?"
Dean likes his tone, likes the anger soaking his voice ahead of heartache and despair. He likes the way Sam's back stiffens, his head coming up as if hearing far-away gunshots.
"You stop saying idiotic stuff and I'll stop talking about you that way," Sam says, half-turns momentarily to show Dean a cold slicing smile. "It's a compromise."
"Oh fuck you," Dean says, and wishes he could have come up with something better. He wishes Sam would turn back around.
"Look, let's just get through this job," Sam tells him, forcibly even voice.
"This fucking excuse for a job," Dean fires back at him. "You ran a pretty good game on Burt, got him to run a pretty good one on Earl, but you know there ain't shit tying that random-ass earthquake to some freaky worm monsters that got wiped out sixteen years ago."
"Fine, Dean, believe what you fuckin' want. We're going up there regardless, and I'm not interested in listening to you disagree with everything I say and make me look like a goddamn amateur in front of these guys."
Sam lays down the weapon he's working on and gets jerkily to his feet. His hands are smudgy with black grease, fingers clawed like he has itches everywhere but can't scratch. He wipes his forehead on his shoulder and upper arm, looks down at Dean on a slant.
"I have a feeling about it," Sam says, and remarkably most of the barb has gone out of his voice. "Just, I have a bad feeling, Dean."
Dean wraps his fingers around the barrel, swallows hard.
"There could be a lot of reasons for that," Dean tells him, all hoarse and scraped up for some reason.
Brief surprise, Sam's gaze flying to meet Dean's, and then he shutters his face again and says, "I'm gonna get some more coffee," and leaves the room.
Dean sits back in his chair, heavy sigh that seems to take half the air out of the room. He rubs at his forehead, and then remembers his grimy hands, and then decides he doesn't actually give a fuck.
Burt needs to come back already. They need to get on the road.
*
Just before one o'clock, Burt pulls in front of the bunker. Sam and Dean come out to meet him, carrying guns bundled in burlap sacks. They don't recognize Burt's passenger until she gets out of his truck.
"Soon as I told her what was happening, she insisted on coming," Burt explains.
"Mindy," Dean says with a reflexive smile. "How'd I know I'd see you again?"
She smiles back, a hastily packed day bag slung around her shoulder. "That's luck for ya. Luck and graboids."
"Those two things don't belong in the same sentence," Burt says. "Seems like you already know Dean, that tall one's Sam."
"Hiya," Mindy says, friendly smile shot at Sam, who nods, affecting to be occupied with his weapons bundle. "Little bit of a detour from Vegas, huh?"
"Yeah, sure is." Dean shrugs it away. "I probably wasn't gonna come back a millionaire anyway."
"Probably not," Mindy agrees. "This is gonna be better, though. I've been waiting to face down one of these bastards for years. "
Dean bites his tongue to keep from laughing at her. Hunting as tourism is never the best attitude to have. He sneaks a look at Sam and finds him glowering, silent over-tall dark cloud.
"All right, Earl's on his way over," Burt says, spreading out one of the bundles on the hood of his truck for inspection. "You guys'll take the Impala and I'll ride with Earl in his pick-up."
"Why the pick-up, why not your truck?" Dean asks. "Yours has an actual backseat."
"Negative," Burt says. "We need the cargo room for the cannon."
"The what-"
"A cannon?"
Sam and Dean stumble over each other, talking at the same time, and Burt smirks, checking the bolt on a Browning.
"Whatever picture you got in your head about how big these mothers are, double it," Burt tells them.
"Triple it," Mindy throws in. "They're huge, really really huge and gross."
A look of exasperated affection on Burt's face as he says, "I told Val not to take you to look at that thing's carcass."
"I poked it with a stick," Mindy confides in Dean, and he grins.
"I probably would have done the same thing."
"All right, c'mon," Burt says, folding the burlap over the guns. "Gonna need all hands to get the Howitzer up from the armory."
They troop around the bunker and spend the next fifteen minutes wrestling the Howitzer cannon (an actual goddamn cannon, metallic gray and squat and ridiculously warlike) out of the subterranean armory. Earl shows up at some point, and they embark on the secondary task of getting the cannon up into the bed of his truck.
The pick-up groans and whines under the new weight, and Earl shouts, "Goddamn it Burt!" a few times when paint gets scraped off here and there.
Eventually the Howitzer rests massively, gray and stuporous, and Burt says, "You boys will have to take the cannonballs in the Impala, I don't think we wanna load anything more on Earl's old girl here."
"Cannonballs, sure," Dean says. Can't be surprised by anything in this business.
"Earl, you got some rope? Tie that thing down. I gotta make a quick phone call, and then we're heading out."
Earl and Sam commence securing the cannon to the back of the truck. Mindy runs to and from the armory, boxes of ammunition and grenades still in their fat little packages. Dean is feeling useless, and he heads back into the bunker to make sure they haven't left anything behind.
He can hear Burt on the phone in the kitchen, hears him saying, "I reckon we'll make it to Pete Weskoe's place by four or five. Good place to start, that cuss always keeps an ear to the ground." A pause, then a brief fond laugh. "I'll be sure to remind him of that, yes ma'am."
Something in Burt's voice, the soft worn-denim edge to it, makes Dean uncomfortable, shouldn't be hearing that, and he slips down to the rec room.
The switchblade Sam was fiddling with earlier is still on the table, and Dean pockets it without much thought. He stands for a moment in the center of the room, thick yolky chunks of sunlight pouring through the high windows. One of those surface trances, a floater. Dean's mind skims shallowly, firearm specifics and the road back to Elko County and his brother, thoughts of Sam like a shadow-play background to everything.
He comes out of it, blinks awake. Silent-footed back up the stairs and right to the door, but Dean still overhears the hoarse tone as Burt says, "I'll call before you go to sleep," and he can't get it out of his head for hours.
*
onwards!
sam/dean, nc-17, 43430 words. like a giant weight off my shoulders, there it goes. ahh.
one two three four
The Elko County Adventure
By Candle Beck
Eggs at four in the morning, glowing sickly yellow under the diner's fluorescent lights, and Dean has no stomach for it. It's the hour, the highway time. Sam is nodding in and out of sleep across the table, a fork clinging stubbornly to his loose fingers.
A thousand miles behind them today. The distance has been ground into Dean's skin, printed on him like a tattoo. Colorado and Utah and now Nevada, high desert and difficult to breathe outside, the thin air.
These fucking eggs. One narrow level above powdered, sticking in Dean's throat in exactly the same way. The waitress creamed Dean's coffee without even asking him, now it looks like mud.
Dean's in a mood, which is directly attributable to Sam's mood, which is usually how it goes.
Lousy kinda scene anyway, this crappy truckstop a couple hours outside of Carson City, near deserted now. Dirty Indian tile, red vinyl booths marred by gashes of gray stuffing, sleepy thickish waitress slumping behind the counter with the wilting bouquet of a magazine drooping in her hands. Nothing to look at out the windows, not for hundreds of miles.
Sam drops his fork, looks up with bleary determination. "I'm done."
Dean nods, shoveling in another bite of eggs mechanically. "Goo'fer you."
Indistinct harmless glare from Sam, the back of his hand rubbing across his mouth.
"Let's go, it's late, come on."
Dean contemplates his eggs, the crescent moon he's bitten in his toast. His stomach feels like it's full of rocks.
"Almost done, Sammy."
Dean grins around a mouthful of egg, sure that he's got bits in his teeth and it's pretty gross. Sam doesn't disappoint, eyes widening as familiar disgust curls his lip, and Dean cheers inwardly.
"There are seriously wild animals with a firmer grasp on table manners than you have," Sam informs him flatly.
Quick digging search for any affection behind the general irritation in Sam's voice, and Dean comes up empty. Sam's still just fucking sick of him.
(--it's become a common chorus in his head recently, something said to Dean in anger four days ago, in a laundromat in Kentucky with the machines rolling over rhythmically at their backs like watches wound too tight. A single-load box of powder detergent bought out of the vending machine with a palmful of sticky car-scrounged coins, and later spilled, spraying bluish-white crystals across the floor. Seventeen minutes left to go on the first wash cycle and the Winchester brothers occupied themselves counterproductively, to say the least. It was the eighth-worst fight Dean has ever had with his brother, and number one since their father died. The heart of the matter boiled down to Sam spitting, "Just fucking sick of you, Dean," which is a vicious thing to say and an impossible thing to defend against. The buzz of the washing machine sounded like a fight bell, Dean staggering to his corner bloody and legless and down a hundred points. Not the best metaphor, really--Dean would rather get the snot beat out of him every day for a month than have to live through Sam saying anything like that again. So anyway, that's where that comes from.)
They're going to finish up here and Dean's gonna get a Styrofoam cup of Coke for the road (still fucking Styrofoam in tall snow-white towers by the soda machine, like it's 1973 and the world is still evergreeen). He's gonna put on the Cheap Trick mix that functions as aural adrenaline, and make it to Carson City before dawn if it kills him.
"C'mon, hurry up," Sam says, bitchy and tired. "If you're not gonna let us stop yet, at least keep going so I can sleep in the car."
"But I'm still enjoying my eggs," Dean says placidly, and manages to hold down his gag reflex. The eggs taste like glue. Sam's face is pretty much worth it, though.
"Dean," Sam begins, that particular climbing note that predicts a spectacular whine upcoming, and Dean braces his eyes to roll, his mouth forming a pre-emptive smirk, and then the building starts shaking.
It's brief and violent, clouds of dust from the creaking ceiling, silverware cartwheeling to the floor. A ketchup bottle jolts off a table and dies a gory death on the tile. Falling-pan chaos from the kitchen, the surprised holler of the line cook, and the waitress has disappeared, taking cover beneath the counter with only a persistent stream of profanities betraying her location.
"Fuck, earthquake?" Sam says, gripping the table as the windows tremble.
"Ob-obviously," comes jarring out of Dean, and like that's the break word for a spell, the shaking comes to a stop.
A tense moment, a collective breath held. A black-and-white photograph of men building the Hoover Dam shivers and leaps belatedly off its nail, the glass shattering.
"Is--is that it?" Sam asks. Both of his hands are still wrapped around the lip of the table. "That was kinda short for a quake that strong, wasn't it?"
"Who am I, Joe Richter Scale?" Dean looks over, and raises his voice, "Hey, everybody okay in here?"
A shout in disgruntled but uninjured Spanish answers him from the kitchen area. The waitress stands from behind the counter, scowling and feeling at her hair for any damage. "Motherfuckin' earthquakes."
"Do you get them that bad, usually?" Sam asks, standing and retrieving a few pieces of cutlery from the ground. "Pretty far east for something that strong, right?"
"Third time this week," the waitress tells him. "Fuckin' annoying, woke up my kid in the middle of the night last time and it took about an hour to get him back down."
"But where's the epicenter?" Sam persists, single-minded. "Is there a fault line around here?"
"Not that I know of. Didn't used to be like this either. Used to be just aftershocks from the big ones in California."
"But there haven't been any big ones recently. And that didn't feel like an aftershock."
"Yeah, fuckin' strange, ain't it."
The waitress takes Sam's proffered clutch of cutlery rescued from the floor, and dumps the whole mess with a clatter into the dirty dishes bin. A loose piece of graying brown hair bites at her eyes, and she smooths it back with the heel of her hand.
"Three times in the past week, you said?" Sam asks, definitely not sleepy anymore.
"Three times," the waitress agrees, shooting Sam that askance you-might-be-a-crazy-person look that all the Winchesters know so well. "If you boys don't need anything else just now, I'm gonna make sure Ramon didn't crack his skull or nothing."
Sam waves her off, then turns on the stool he's procured, facing Dean still in the booth with his gut-turning plate of eggs.
"Three mysterious earthquakes inside a week? That's a little suspicious, I'd say."
"I guess," Dean says, non-committal.
"I've been in a real quake," Sam tells him. "I had friends at Berkeley when I was, uh--in California, and they lived basically on top of the Hayward fault. Wake up and the whole house feels like it's about to come down around you, like the pictures off the walls and the books on the shelf and everything. I was sleeping on the couch, I remember I woke up on the floor."
"Yeah, what's your point, man?" Impatient, he's off the goddamn topic again, stupid fucking detours.
"We're like five hundred miles away from the nearest fault line," Sam says, a frustrated teacher's tone in his voice. "That tremor was too strong, it couldn't have been natural."
"Shit, Sam," and Dean shoves out of the booth, stalks up to the counter, one hand digging for his wallet. "You're really reaching here, buddy."
Sam glares, and he's really very good at glaring by now, the undefeated world champion. Dean can see exactly which lines are going to be carved into his face if his brother survives to middle age.
"I'm just saying we check it out," Sam says as Dean counts out cash to pay. "Takes, what, a day? Just see if anything's been weird recently."
"We're on a fuckin' schedule-" Dean mutters, and is summarily cut off.
"Fuck that, nobody wants to go to Carson City but you. That lead on the demon is bullshit and you know it's bullshit."
Sam smiles, sudden and disarming, catching Dean aback like a missed step, a stumble on flat ground.
"C'mon, Dean," onslaught of charm from Sam, eyes and all, "we haven't had shit to do for days, let's just check it out. Just real quick, check it out and it'll probably be nothing anyway, and then we can get on with it."
Dean huffs, looking away from his brother. A bottle of syrup fell during the so-called earthquake, and now there's a tacky dark puddle like week-old blood. Bad omens notwithstanding, Dean's already been won over. Typical.
"Excuse me, waitress lady," Dean calls. "We're leaving the money on the counter."
The waitress's face appears in the food window, eyeing the messy pile of bills and giving Dean an unamused look. "You call that a fuckin' tip?"
Dean peels off another single, muttering under his breath, and then leads his brother out of the truckstop. The night sky comes all the way down to ground level, uninterrupted black in every direction.
"Who the fuck are you even planning to talk to, I wanna know?" Dean asks, belligerent. "Middle of fuckin' nowhere out here."
"We're not too far away from Perfection."
"We're--what?"
Sam half-smiles. "Perfection, Nevada. Burt and Heather, remember?"
"Damn, they're still alive?" Dean asks.
"Here's hoping," Sam says as they reach the car.
Hard drop into the seat, and then Dean's hands are on the wheel, staring at the bugs murdered by the windshield. He sneaks a glance at Sam, wondering how long this little burst of excitement and civility will last. Sam's got his teeth in something and he can better tolerate Dean like this.
"It's not gonna amount to anything, you know," Dean tells him, wishing it was colder.
Sam tightens his jaw and doesn't look at him, answering, "Yeah, I know, so what?" Sam wants to add 'fuck you,' Dean can see it pressing its snarling shape against his mouth, but he doesn't, swallows it back. "Just go, man, stop thinking about it so much."
Dean starts the car, headlights showing a wedge of gray desert ground that looks like a dinosaur's been at it, claw marks in the rock and all. Used-up lonely feeling to the scene, empty tables through the truckstop windows, sodium lights and unconscious truckers entombed inside their eighteen-wheelers. Sam with that goddamn tension in his face. Highway asphalt is what Dean wants, black and smooth and broken up by the double yellow line that everybody follows, the one that runs from one side of the world to the other, and anywhere else they might want to go.
*
Perfection, Nevada, population 28, which is actually double what it was the last time Dean and Sam were here--some kind of land rush, Dean can only assume. They come down through the steep cliffs into the valley, shallow bowl carpeted in scrub brush and stunted trees, bare pale chunks of rock protruding from the thin ground.
The town proper consists of Chang's general store, and a few small wooden houses and blocked-up mobile homes disintegrating in the sun. A water tower looms low, rust-colored and squat like a snowman on stilts.
Dean pulls in front of the store, parking alongside a battered Volkswagen that looks as if it drove itself all the way from Germany. It's just after dawn, pink light everywhere. The sun is still behind the mountains.
The store is open, red Coca-Cola sign shining, and smells of fresh coffee. There is a woman at the cash register, putting her magazine down as Sam and Dean come in.
"Howdy, boys," the woman greets them, straightens up. Dirty blonde and maybe as old as thirty, more handsome than pretty with her squarish face, wide shoulders though she's a little thing, Dean can tell even while she's sitting. "Welcome to Perfection."
She smirks her way through it, like a minimum-wage greeter at some cheesy amusement park ride, and they laugh it off.
"Morning, honey," Dean says with an introductory smile. "Damn if that coffee doesn't smell good."
The clerk hops to her feet to get them both a cup, dropping a double handful of creamers and sugar packets on the counter.
"There you go. It's good stuff, drink it slow. You boys want me to make you up some quick breakfast sandwiches? We got the best sausage in the state."
Dean lifts his eyebrows, tempted, but Sam is a tangible presence at his back, slurping his coffee like a man whose train is late.
"Nah, thank you though. We're just passing through, you know."
"Vegas?" she asks.
Big grin, that's a gimme. "Damn right. Gonna come back here on the drive home and you'll have a couple of millionaires drinking your coffee."
She laughs, becomes abruptly and extremely appealing, one of those faces that works like that. Dean re-evaluates, darting his eyes down her body, considering making a play for it before remembering the dig of Sam at his back and mentally backing off.
He smiles, friendly-like. "You laugh, but wait and see."
"Dean."
Sam, hushed demanding voice skittering along the back of Dean's neck, such a goddamn bitch all the time. Dean clenches his teeth, not losing the ease of his expression.
"But listen, sugar, we're taking the long way down hoping we might stop in and see our old friend Burt Gummer. Do you know him and his wife Heather?"
The clerk blinks, stumbles over a kind of a huffing laugh. "Oh sure. Known 'em all my life, in fact, and I think I can count the times they've had friends come calling on one hand."
That you know about, Dean doesn't say. The Gummers have been established in the hunting community for decades as trackers and weapons procurers, and no doubt there have been dozens of clandestine visits to their deceptively normal-seeming survivalist stronghold.
He gives the clerk a few more notches of a grin, ducking his head for a self-conscious air. "Well, I'll be honest, we ain't seen them in about a decade, and Burt was really more a friend of our dad's--he's dead now."
There it is, the clutching of sympathy in the clerk's face, her falling eyebrows. Dean shrugs, lowered eyes, playing it up best he knows how, which is pretty damn good.
"We're on this trip anyway and figured we might stop off to tell Burt and Heather, you know, let them know how much Dad really liked them."
"Oh, of course." The clerk nods fast, a sudden silverish bolt of surety shooting into her eyes. "They're wonderful people, Burt and Heather. They, actually, they saved my life when I was a little girl. The two of them and my mom and a few others, and I've just. I've always been real grateful."
Dean pauses, and looks at her again, probing. She looks right back, steady as all hell, plain brown eyes and a pogo stick mounted like a revered trophy on the wall behind her. She's been through some shit, it's pretty evident. Dean tips his chin at her in acknowledgement.
"Yes ma'am, exactly. Can you help us remember where their spread is? We haven't been here since we were kids."
After such an expertly applied set-up, she's only too happy to help, and even draws them a little map on the back of the deli menu. It's not until they're back in the Impala that Dean notices the clerk's name and number written too, Mindy with a underline, and he smiles to himself, tucks it away.
"You told her an awful lot of the truth," Sam says, leaning his elbow on the window.
"Easier to keep track of the story that way," Dean answers. "Hiding in plain sight is what we're gonna call it. Only makes sense, town this size. There's gonna be no sneaking around a place like this."
Sam grunts, scratches uncomfortably at his hair, three days since the last chance for a shower and hippie-ass Sam always feels it first.
They ride out of town a few miles, up into the rocky foothills of the mountains, and they don't talk much. An actual tumbleweed gets caught up in the undercarriage of the car, and Dean stops to pull it free before it scratches up his paint job. He sneaks looks at Sam through the windshield while he's outside the car, saving them up for all the times he won't be able to look at Sam when they're sitting right next to each other.
*
Burt and Heather Gummer live behind barbed wire fence in a bunker that only appears small from the outside; there's at least three big rooms underground, and subterranean armory to supplement the wall of their rec room, which is a giant piece of particle board hung with dozens of guns. The couple's dinged faded red SUV rests inside the fence, caked in skin-colored dust up to its wheel wells.
Dean parks outside the fence, and they stand in the growing heat of the day, debating their next move.
"It's early still," Sam says.
"Burt was a Marine, I'm pretty sure he's up by eight in the morning."
"It's quarter till," Sam mutters, but he's splitting hairs and Dean ignores him effortlessly.
"If I chuck a rock at the bunker, what do you think? That'll get their attention."
"That'll get your ass shot."
Dean slants his brother a look of overdone exasperation. "Always such a goddamn killjoy."
"Hey, don't let me stop you from getting your ass shot. Man's gotta do what he's gotta do, right Dean?"
"Shut up." Dean has been awake for just approaching twenty-five hours now. There's crushed glass in his eyes. He's in a ditch, still shy of his second wind. "Be helpful or keep your mouth shut."
Sam is silent for a moment. Dean stares through the diamond pattern of the fence, one hand fisted in his jacket pocket. Sun's coming up, hotter out here by the minute.
"Hey Burt!" Sam shouts without warning. Dean starts, and falls back from the fence. Sam grins wildly, two points in their endless game of one-upmanship, and hollers even louder, "Heather! Are you guys in there!"
"Jesus, Sam," Dean hisses, reaching instinctively for Sam's wrist, but Sam only shakes him off. "So much for fucking subtlety."
"Wasn't getting us anywhere," Sam says cheerfully, and then the bunker door bangs open and Burt Gummer, rifle chocked into his shoulder, sticks half his head out and squints at them through the sight. Sam waves like a kid catching sight of his mom in the audience.
"If that's the car I'm thinking of," Burt yells from his lethal position at the door, "you better be the Winchester boys."
"None other," Sam calls back, spreading his arms out wide and Dean wants to grab him, pull him back. Sam's whole chest is exposed. "All grown up and everything!"
Burt laughs, and comes out into the yard. He takes his rifle with him, but flicks the safety on and it becomes a harmless accessory, looking as unremarkable in his hand as a cup of coffee would have.
"Well I'll be goddamned," Burt says as he approaches the fence, big grin taking up the space under his neat gray mustache. Still rangy and vaguely wild-eyed, dirty Atlanta Hawks cap glued to his head, which is probably a cue-ball by now, and Dean remembers abruptly Burt teaching him how to brace against the kick of an elephant gun, out in the narrow canyons where the echo sounded like the sky cracking open.
"Good to see you boys, you look great." Burt has pulled a keyring out, working at the lock on the gate. "Hell, Sam, I think you're about two feet taller than you was the last time I saw you."
"Yeah, that happened," Sam says, waiting until the gate swings open before offering Burt his hand and clapping him on the shoulder. "How've you been, man? How's Heather?"
The smile on Burt's face flickers, and he says, "Yeah you know, she's hangin' in," before moving on to Dean, all his teeth showing again. "Dean Winchester, look at you."
"Hey Burt, good to see you." Low-level smile, just the default setting of Dean's charm. "Still got this little patch of heaven, huh?"
"Gonna have 'em bury me right over there," Burt says jovially with a gesture to the high bluff overlooking the valley. "Well, come on in, boys. Car's lookin' good, when did you drop a new engine into her?"
Dean and Burt talk about the Impala into the bunker, down to the rec room, and through the first cup of coffee. Dean finds himself obliged to omit certain details of the circumstances surrounding the rebuild of the Impala, but the cover is flimsy and doesn't last long.
"What about your dad, then?" Burt asks, kicking back in his chair with the wall of guns stretching surreally at his back. "Still raising hell just to beat it down?"
It's a concrete feeling, the collapse of the look on Dean's face, like invisible hooks yanking downwards. His gaze flies to his brother instinctively, and Sam is studiously not paying attention, inspecting the elephant gun in its glass case, his back bent in a shallow bow.
"Aw hell," Burt says, voice rumbling with sympathy, and Dean is uncountably relieved that he won't be required to say the words out loud. "I'm real sorry about that, boys. What was it got him, if you don't mind me asking?"
"Demon," says Dean. "Same--the same one that. The same demon."
"Yeah," Burt says, knowing their history in the same way Sam and Dean know that thirty years ago Burt and Heather were parents to a little girl, until the werewolf came. "Motherfucker will get what's coming to him, I know you'll see to that."
"Yes sir." Dean's speaking by rote. He's watching the curl of Sam's shoulders, Sam's long fingers smudging the glass.
"Is that why you've come out here?" Burt asks, interest lighting in his eyes. "You got a lead, need to pick up some firepower?"
"Our lead sucks," Sam contributes. "Guns still work, though. Thanks anyway."
Burt looks back to Dean. "So what've you come out here for?"
"Well." Dean slouches deeper into the chair he remembers Heather knitting in, soft camouflaged ammo pouches to string onto their belts. "Sam, you wanna tell him about your crazy evil earthquake theory?"
"Don't listen to him, he's just talking shit," Sam says dismissively, and Dean's nails dig into the inside of his palm. "We felt a pretty serious shake a couple hours north of here, and apparently it's been happening for a week now. I was wondering if you'd been tracking anything like that."
"Earthquakes?" Burt says, lifting his eyebrows into the shadow of his cap brim.
"Tremors," Dean clarifies. Sam shoots him a glare, doesn't want any of his input right now.
"It was too quick," Sam tells Burt. "Didn't last long enough to be as powerful as it was. Like, almost like a sonic boom or something, a shockwave that just passed through. But, like. Like it was in the ground instead of the air."
There's a clue in that, or a code, something. Burt sits up, his hand moving unconsciously for the rifle propped up next to his chair. His long dapper face becomes tense and solemn.
"It felt like something in the ground?" Burt asks.
"Yeah." Sam has caught the flare of suspense in Burt's face, his eyes narrowing. "Like something real big."
"Up north, you said? Where exactly?"
"Uh, unincorporated Elko County."
"The sheep, the fuckin' sheep," Burt says under his breath, and then, "course she was right," and Sam glances at Dean to ensure that neither of them know what he's talking about.
"You familiar with this, Burt?"
"Maybe. Christ, I hope not." Burt stands, the chair squealing back on the floor. He paces half across the room, pulling off his cap to swipe a hand over his smooth head. "We got them all, I was sure we got them all."
"What?" Sam asks, eagerness having made its insidious way into his voice. "What is it?"
"Graboids," Burt answers, and then his mouth twists in disgust. "Always hated that damn name."
"I've never heard of them." Sam checks with Dean, "Have you ever heard of them?"
Dean shakes his head. Burt is still antsy, bestirred. He picks up his rifle for a moment and some of the tension breathes out of his shoulders.
"It's a bit of a story, boys. Might wanna sit down, Sam."
Sam obliges in that easy-to-please way that everyone but Dean warrants. The guns on the wall shine dull black and gray and brown, a calming sense of security in the excessiveness of it all.
"It was, Christ, what was it? Sixteen years ago now. The graboids killed eight people. Almost wiped this whole damn town off the map."
Burt tells them the whole story. Giant underground prehistoric snake monsters, sensitive to the slightest vibrations, a footstep, a voice raised above a whisper. A gut-wrenching nightmare come surging through a cinderblock wall, seeking snake tongues reaching blindly out of its mouth. The flocks of mutilated sheep and Old Fred's head in the sand, Edgar dead of dehydration on the electrical tower, and then the danger closing in, the road knocked out by a rockslide and the power lines down and the valley like a prison, a sprawling unbreakable cell. Nobody on the outside even knew anything was wrong.
"We tried to stay up on the roofs," Burt tells them. "But then they got smart. They're smart, these monsters. They learn. They figured out how to dig sinkholes, disabled our vehicles that way. And they figured out how to tear right through a building's foundations, bring it down from the inside. We woulda been dead meat if we'd stayed in town, sooner rather than later, so we made a break for it in the back of a Cat--attached a flatbed trailer to the 'dozer so everyone would fit."
"How many of you were there?" Dean asks.
"Nine of us got on the Cat, and we all made it out alive. Miguel and Mindy and Earl still live in the valley."
Dean nods, wanting to curl his mouth around a cat's smile and say, oh yeah, Mindy, but he bites his tongue, extrapolating that it's probably a father-daughter kind of thing between them.
"We almost made it to the mountains," Burt says, sour taste to the memory. "Just a mile or two shy, and then they--the graboids, they dug us a trap. Huge sinkhole, big enough to cripple the Cat. We made a run for a solid rock formation with them after us every step of the way, and we made it, but that was only gonna be good enough to let us die of thirst instead of being eaten."
"But you didn't die of thirst," Sam prompts.
A ghostly smile creases Burt's face, and he shakes his head, flicking the brim of his cap up a notch.
"No, we killed those bastards. Blew one of them up with a homemade incendiary, and then Val ran the last one off a cliff."
"Hell, a happy ending," Dean says, mildly surprised because it doesn't usually work out like that for people like them.
"Tell that to Walter Chang," Burt says, and then gestures away Sam's questioning look, his hard eyes moving to the gun wall. "Just an old friend of ours that didn't make it."
"Sorry, Burt," Sam says, which is unnecessary and probably unwanted.
"Yeah, well. That's baseball, ain't it."
They're quiet for a second, the standard accepted moment of respectful silence reserved for dead people you don't know, and then Sam asks:
"What happened after? How come the Perfection Valley Graboid didn't end up on the cover of National Geographic and shit?"
Burt exhales, coarse like he's been swallowing sandpaper. The rifle he shifts from shoulder to shoulder, lowering to tap the stock on the ground, spinning in his hands, an exhibition drill in extreme slow-motion. Lines dig deeper around his mouth, experience carving him up.
"It was a clusterfuck after we killed the last of them. We were gonna call the newspapers, and Rhonda--she was a graduate student doing seismology experiments out here, whip-smart--she was gonna publish a research paper, but then someone called the goddamn feds."
Dean winces in pre-emptive sympathy. The Gummers' antipathy for the U.S. government is visceral and intense, even considering the misanthropic anarchistic nature of the hunting population as a whole.
"They came down here, at least twenty of them," Burt says, bitterness drenched in his voice. "In their fuckin' trucks, fuckin' light artillery and surveillance and mobile labs and all this gear, set up tents in the desert and stayed for almost a month. Me and Heather packed up and got the hell out 'til Earl called to say it was all clear."
"What were they doing?"
"Erasing every trace--every fuckin' trace. They took all the corpses, scrubbed the rocks clean, combed the fuckin' desert. Feds even broke into our place here and took the graboid that came through that wall, took every shell casing even though we musta gone through a thousand rounds killing that fucker. But they took it all. Like it never happened."
"But there must've been pictures," Sam says, leaning forward over his knees. "You said there was a grad student, science grad student, she woulda known to take pictures."
"Fat lot a good it did her." Burt pushes his Atlanta Hawks cap back, scratches high on his forehead. "There were pictures, and the data from the seismology machines she had set up, but there was a break-in at her hotel room once she and Val got back to UCLA. They stole every piece of physical evidence, left us with nothing but a bunch of stories that made people think we were all crazy. Swept the whole fuckin' saga under the rug."
"A cover-up," Dean says, itchy shivering feeling on his tongue. He's always appreciated a good conspiracy.
"Really?" Sam's playing the skeptic, doubting angle to his jawline. "Sounds kinda elaborate, and I mean, a lot of this is hearsay, isn't it? You said you weren't around to see everything the feds were doing yourself, right Burt?"
Burt sets the rifle down to lean against a cabinet, the better to cross his arms over his chest and stare Sam down. Dean is amused, and able to hide it.
"My information comes from a man named Earl Basset, who I'd trust with my life. Did trust him with it, matter a fact, and since you're seeing me standing here, I guess he's fuckin' good for it, huh?"
Sam raises his hands, large-eyed but Dean can tell he's mostly faking.
"Shit, man, no offense meant. If Earl's word is good with you, it's more than good with me, that's for sure."
Burt holds the hostile pose a moment longer, and then lets his arms come loose. Mindless habit executed, cap tugged up, hand swept over his head, cap pulled back down. Dean catches a glimpse of the pure silver horseshoed around Burt's scalp, several shades lighter than his mustache. Burt's getting old, or maybe he already is and just covering with that big voice, low-slung madman's grin. Dean's perception of these things has been all screwed up ever since his father died.
"Hell," Burt sighs. "I didn't mean to snap at you, kid. This shit is--it was a pretty rough hunt, I'm just not looking forward to reliving it, you know?"
"Yeah, of course." Fast nodding Sam, and Dean watches his brother's hand fiddling with a closed switchblade on the table. "Hopefully it's just a weird freak fault line that's just become active or something. Have you felt anything out here?"
"I've been in Bixby," Burt says in a tone that immediately forestalls any further questions. "I'll give Earl a call, see what he knows."
"Is he, does he," and Dean doesn't know what this stuttering bullshit is about, vaguely scandalized at his own tongue. "Is he a fellow traveler?"
Burt looses a hard grin, shaking his head. "Naw, all he knows about our business he saw in that one week. Freak occurrence, you know how civilians think. Always did think he'd make a damn good hunter, him and Val both."
"This Val, he's not around anymore?"
"Went back to California with Rhonda after the whole mess. We still get Christmas cards from them, they got a whole pack of kids and everything. Wouldn't do to drag them back into it."
"No, we can work with what we have," Sam says. "Of the survivors who are still around, there's Earl, and who else did you say, Miguel?"
"And Mindy," Dean offers.
Burt nods, double-takes and lets out a surprised coughing laugh. "She was only a little girl, I don't know how much she even remembers."
"We met her down in the store, seemed pretty tough to me."
Sam is glaring at Dean. Not even shielded or subtle, but glaring right at him, murky color glittering and his mouth like something hammered out of metal. Dean doesn't have any idea what wrong thing Sam thinks he's done this time.
"Yeah, she holds her own," Burt says, lightening edge of pride. "Crackshot with a rifle, too, Heather and me taught her just about everything we know."
"Well, there you go." Dean tips back, tocking one heel against the cement floor. "So what happens now? How can we even be sure it is these graboid things? And let's not forget that this whole fucking theory is based on Sam being freaked out by a five-second earthquake."
Sam looks away just as Dean checks for his reaction, showing only a tense profile and speaking directly to Burt.
"If something's happened once, it's that much more likely to happen again, right?"
Burt huffs. "Your dad used to say that."
"Yeah I know. What do you say, man? You think there's something to it?"
"I think we're not gonna wait around until eight people are dead before figuring it out this time." Burt looks at the both of them in turn, taking their measures, rubbing his chin. "I'll try and raise Earl on the CB. If he's around we'll ride over there in my truck."
"Thanks Burt."
An unthinking nod, and then Burt's gaze drifts away to the cinderblock wall that had once exploded inward under the force of a bloodthirsty slug the size of a school bus. A weird joyless smile bends his mouth slightly.
"Fuckin' graboids again," Burt mutters, and then he snaps out of it. "All right, go on, get your car inside the fence and then lock up, okay?"
He tosses Dean his keyring and the Winchesters effect an exit, leaving Burt bent over the CB radio searching the frequencies for his friend.
Sam doesn't say anything until they're hiking their duffels and camp rolls out of the trunk, and then, "Something must have happened to Heather, right?"
Dean flinches for unknown reasons. Maybe a gnat bit him or something. "How the hell should I know?" he answers, sharper than he means to be, harsher, and that's the end of Sam talking to him again.
*
They pile into Burt's truck and drive out to the other side of the valley where Earl lives. The sun is out with full force now, heat-blur everywhere and hallucinatory curls of steam rising from the ground. Sam keeps his window rolled down because he's a lunatic, and Dean strips down to his plain black undershirt, slipping the ring off his finger 'cause he's not trying to accidentally brand himself or anything.
On the way, Burt tells them about a pattern of sheep mutilations that has sprung up in the wasteland ranch towns between Perfection and Carson City.
"That's how they start, they kill a fuckload of sheep and then move on to humans," Burt says. "Heather's been tracing it from the newspapers and state police blotters, but we were thinking a Satanic thing, a ritual."
Burt pushes his cap back on his head, disgruntled. "Never assume, only amateurs assume."
"Hey!" Dean says, recognition flare. "Our dad used to say that too."
Burt smirks. "Then he picked it up from me."
Dean forgets himself and looks to Sam in the backseat, an engaging smile on his face, but it dies a swift death. Sam is staring back at him, baldly stricken and infuriated for some goddamn reason, and not knowing why doesn't stop the reflective pain from spearing through Dean. Never could take that fucking look on Sam's face.
Dean faces front quickly, a pulse pounding uncomfortably in his throat. It's a rule between the two of them, one of those unspoken ones that always seem to mean more. They try not to talk about it. Dad. The inarguable difference in the pitch of the Impala's new engine when it's running at ninety-five miles an hour. Everything. Sometimes Dean slips up.
They get to Earl's place, which is a white double-wide trailer that's baking, splintering in the heat. There is a pick-up truck that's only a few years old in the lot, a crooked stencil on the door proclaiming, 'V+E ODD JOBS.' The man himself waits on the jerry-rigged front steps, cinderblock and two-by-eights and stapled twine.
Sam and Dean are afforded a moment of observation as Earl and Burt shake hands and reacquaint themselves with each other as if it's been a few weeks. Earl is compact in a blue cowboy shirt and jeans and boots, playing the part to the hilt. Gun-metal gray beard and hair, heavy eyebrows, scars on the backs of his hands. Burt introduces everybody, and then Earl invites them inside his trailer.
"What's goin' on, Burt?" Earl says. He sits down on the threadbare couch, and Burt pulls out the single metal folding chair from under the flimsy card table. Dean and Sam stay standing, shifting their weight on the insubstantial trailer floor.
"We got trouble again," Burt tells him, dropping his voice so Earl knows he's serious. "These boys just come from up north, and the story they tell sounds an awful lot like graboids to me."
"Graboids?" An instinctive disbelieving laugh, Earl's eyes going wide. "We killed 'em all."
"We killed all the ones back then," Burt says. "Maybe one of them left behind a buncha little baby graboids that we never knew about."
"Has someone seen one?" Earl looks immediately at Sam and Dean, distrust sparking vividly in his deep-set eyes. "Did you boys see one?"
Sam's mouth opens, but Dean beats him to it. "No, we haven't. Felt the ground shaking up in Elko County, that's all."
"And the sheep, Earl." Burt gives him a significant look, eyebrows up. "Heather's pinpointed at least three separate incidents, whole flock wiped out just like Old Fred's."
"You bringin' her the papers down there in Bixby?" Earl asks, and Burt says yeah quickly, fingers his shirt cuff and changes the subject.
"I figure we can triangulate where the sheep got killed and where they felt the tremors, give us a geographical range to work in. We'll talk to the ranchers and see if they seen anything."
Earl scratches his nails through his beard, eyes squinted. "Goin' all the way up to Elko County on a pretty shoddy hunch, sounds like."
A flash, Burt's face tightening and his thumb hooking resolutely in a belt loop. "My hunches tend to pan out."
"Yeah, all right," and Earl is chuckling, looking away. "Whatever you say, Sarge."
"Don't-" Burt cuts himself off, snatching glance at Sam and Dean who are watching awkwardly from too close, fucking tin can. Death glare for Earl, and Burt tells him, "What, you ain't got the stones for it without Valentine here to back you up, is that it?"
The slight mocking smile runs away from Earl's face, and now there are death glares going in both directions. A Mexican standoff kind of anxiety infects the trailer, and Dean picks at the back of his shirt, sweat-sticky already, not even eleven o'clock in the morning yet.
"Val ain't got nothing to do with it," Earl says eventually. "Just sounds like a goddamn wild goose chase."
"Fair enough. First rancher they find bit in half, first little girl sucked down with her pogo stick, you can be the one tells the family that we know how to stop these fuckers and that we always knew."
"Goddamn it, Burt." Earl thumps his fist on the table, making the whole rig shudder. "You're worse than my mother with your fuckin' guilt trips."
Burt lights up, sharklike smile. "Comin' along, aren't ya?"
"Yeah, what the hell," Earl sighs. "Heather'd never forgive me if I let you go alone, that's for damn sure."
"Good, get your shit together. I wanna leave no later than one o'clock."
"Are you thinkin' you're in charge or something?" Earl grumbles, but he gets to his feet.
His eyes fall on Sam and Dean, and Earl doesn't bother concealing an ill-tempered impatient grimace. "You guys better be good at something other than standing around like a pair of morons."
"Don't worry about us," Sam shoots back, straightening from his slouch to make full use of his height, shoulders stretching out and Earl's eyes widening just slightly, just those few precious centimeters that betray sudden respect, and for a moment Dean is unreservedly happy to have Sam on his side.
*
Burt drops Sam and Dean off back at the bunker before heading out again.
"Gonna check in with a few folks around town, make sure they know what might be coming."
Dean slides a hand down the back of his head and his palm comes away gritty. "Are they gonna believe you?"
"I'll get Miguel and Mindy to back me up, guess we'll find out how much good it does. Lock and load, we're moving at thirteen hundred hours."
"Sir yes sir," Dean says automatically, and in the corner of his eye he can see Sam flinching.
Burt roars off in a paling cloud of dust. Sam and Dean go down into the rec room to inspect the wall of weaponry.
"Model 70, H and H mag. Mossberg 935. This is like a whole catalog worth of Brownings. Jesus, a Heckler & Koch G3A3, I haven't seen one of these in years. They're not fucking around," Dean says, brushing his fingertips along barrels and stocks.
Sam doesn't answer. He's testing one of the Browning autos in the pocket of his shoulder, sighting up at the tiny jail cell windows.
"We have that exact same gun," Dean comments.
Still nothing from Sam, three-quarters turned away. Annoyance rises up hot in Dean, staring at the bit of his brother's neck that he can see between his shirt and too-long hair.
"What, you're not talking to me at all now? That's not gonna be awkward and ridiculously dangerous at all."
Sam fires a glare back over his shoulder. "Is it like, some physical compulsion you have to run your mouth ninety percent of the time, or what?"
"Just trying to make some fuckin' conversation, Christ. Shouldn't have even bothered, huh?"
"No, Dean, you shouldn't have, 'cause no one cares," Sam answers plainly, with an astonishing lack of care. He hunches, screws his eye into the rifle sight again; Sam's looking at the world through crosshairs.
Dean has gone largely numb, some kind of protective response due to the blinding rage, and he looks down to see an old-fashioned Colt .38 in his hand that he doesn't remember picking up. Cautiously, watching himself from afar, Dean sets the Colt back onto its pegs on the wall, then turns and books it the fuck out of there.
Up on the surface world, it's at least ninety-five degrees, hits Dean like an open-handed slap. Dean pulls his forearm across his face. Every part of him that's exposed to the sun feels shiny and overtight.
"Bitch," Dean spits at the rocks. He can say it a hundred different ways and most of them have some measure of fondness in them, but this is the dark side of the spectrum. "Bitch."
It's too hot. Dean wants to get in his car because he thinks better in his car, but it's too fuckin' hot. He paces around the bunker, out towards the short bluff where Burt intends to be buried someday.
Rough few months. The awful scene in that laundry room in Kentucky (fucking sick of you, Dean) had been an inevitability for thousands of miles leading up to it. Sam short-tempered and moody, Dean not much better, all those damaging vicious three-sentence exchanges under truckstop lights. Murdering the good feeling between them by inches, by erosion.
It's been eight months since their father died. Seven months since Dean resurrected the Impala and got them back out on the road again. Something left off-kilter, like the way the driver's side door doesn't close easily anymore, you gotta jam it in with the handle turned. The random pings of the settling metal in the new side panels, the alien whine of the engine. His dad's number is still saved in Dean's phone.
Dean picks out a handful of sturdy rocks to hurl off the bluff. His body likes the motion, the whip of his arm over top, the shifting balance of his weight from one leg to the other. His pulse ticks up noticeably under his skin.
Handling it badly, they're both just handling it very badly. They never talk about it. They get pissed off at each other for stupid things, impossible-to-fix things, all the unconscious mannerisms they've picked up along the way, John's beaten leather jacket on Dean's back, Sam's way of sneezing and saying "goddamn," because that's what their dad did.
And nothing has changed on the highways, same truckstops and diners and roadhouse bars, same ducking oil derricks and fields of unbelievable corn. All these places they've already been, all this stuff they've seen before. Imprinted on the backs of Dean's eyelids is the picture of his father with one hand on the wheel and one elbow out the window, the shuffling scenes of the world flashing by in the background. Whole fuckin' country has been seeded with landmines.
Dean chucks a rock at a cactus plant sticking out of the ground like a stubby finger, and hits it dead-on, solid thunk that he can hear.
"Strike three," he mutters, and looks back at the bunker involuntarily. Nothing, of course nothing, he doesn't know what he was expecting to see.
Dean throws some more rocks, but his hands are getting sweaty and the grip's no good. He goes over to the Impala, opens the trunk and pulls up the gun rack. He feels a little better once he has his favorite Glock in hand.
Eventually it feels like he's melting, and Dean puts everything away, closes up, trudges back to the bunker like a convict leaving the sunlight for another twenty-three hours.
Sam has a burlap sack laid out on the floor of the rec room, a few lucky weapons picked out to take on the job. Sam is sitting cross-legged next to the cache, methodically stripping and cleaning the Mossberg. He doesn't look up as Dean comes in.
Dean can ignore with the best of them. He chooses a Browning X-Bolt to work with and takes a seat in the chair that he remembers as Heather's.
A few minutes pass, totally silent but for the metallic snicks and shuffles of the weapons. Dean has Sam's curved back to look at, but he's not. He's got better things to do with his time.
And Sam says without turning around, "If you're gonna start trading stories about Dad with Burt, make sure I'm not around first, all right?"
Aggressively passive-aggressive in Sam's long-practiced way, and Dean observes his hands stilling on the rifle, noting the sensation of steel threads pulling through his veins.
"Wasn't planning on it," he answers.
"Good." Sam's curt, dismissive, and Dean wants to throw something at the back of his head. He wants to shake Sam, slap him, pull his hair. Something.
"And maybe you can stop talking about me like I'm a fuckin' idiot when there's other people around, what do you think about that?"
Dean likes his tone, likes the anger soaking his voice ahead of heartache and despair. He likes the way Sam's back stiffens, his head coming up as if hearing far-away gunshots.
"You stop saying idiotic stuff and I'll stop talking about you that way," Sam says, half-turns momentarily to show Dean a cold slicing smile. "It's a compromise."
"Oh fuck you," Dean says, and wishes he could have come up with something better. He wishes Sam would turn back around.
"Look, let's just get through this job," Sam tells him, forcibly even voice.
"This fucking excuse for a job," Dean fires back at him. "You ran a pretty good game on Burt, got him to run a pretty good one on Earl, but you know there ain't shit tying that random-ass earthquake to some freaky worm monsters that got wiped out sixteen years ago."
"Fine, Dean, believe what you fuckin' want. We're going up there regardless, and I'm not interested in listening to you disagree with everything I say and make me look like a goddamn amateur in front of these guys."
Sam lays down the weapon he's working on and gets jerkily to his feet. His hands are smudgy with black grease, fingers clawed like he has itches everywhere but can't scratch. He wipes his forehead on his shoulder and upper arm, looks down at Dean on a slant.
"I have a feeling about it," Sam says, and remarkably most of the barb has gone out of his voice. "Just, I have a bad feeling, Dean."
Dean wraps his fingers around the barrel, swallows hard.
"There could be a lot of reasons for that," Dean tells him, all hoarse and scraped up for some reason.
Brief surprise, Sam's gaze flying to meet Dean's, and then he shutters his face again and says, "I'm gonna get some more coffee," and leaves the room.
Dean sits back in his chair, heavy sigh that seems to take half the air out of the room. He rubs at his forehead, and then remembers his grimy hands, and then decides he doesn't actually give a fuck.
Burt needs to come back already. They need to get on the road.
*
Just before one o'clock, Burt pulls in front of the bunker. Sam and Dean come out to meet him, carrying guns bundled in burlap sacks. They don't recognize Burt's passenger until she gets out of his truck.
"Soon as I told her what was happening, she insisted on coming," Burt explains.
"Mindy," Dean says with a reflexive smile. "How'd I know I'd see you again?"
She smiles back, a hastily packed day bag slung around her shoulder. "That's luck for ya. Luck and graboids."
"Those two things don't belong in the same sentence," Burt says. "Seems like you already know Dean, that tall one's Sam."
"Hiya," Mindy says, friendly smile shot at Sam, who nods, affecting to be occupied with his weapons bundle. "Little bit of a detour from Vegas, huh?"
"Yeah, sure is." Dean shrugs it away. "I probably wasn't gonna come back a millionaire anyway."
"Probably not," Mindy agrees. "This is gonna be better, though. I've been waiting to face down one of these bastards for years. "
Dean bites his tongue to keep from laughing at her. Hunting as tourism is never the best attitude to have. He sneaks a look at Sam and finds him glowering, silent over-tall dark cloud.
"All right, Earl's on his way over," Burt says, spreading out one of the bundles on the hood of his truck for inspection. "You guys'll take the Impala and I'll ride with Earl in his pick-up."
"Why the pick-up, why not your truck?" Dean asks. "Yours has an actual backseat."
"Negative," Burt says. "We need the cargo room for the cannon."
"The what-"
"A cannon?"
Sam and Dean stumble over each other, talking at the same time, and Burt smirks, checking the bolt on a Browning.
"Whatever picture you got in your head about how big these mothers are, double it," Burt tells them.
"Triple it," Mindy throws in. "They're huge, really really huge and gross."
A look of exasperated affection on Burt's face as he says, "I told Val not to take you to look at that thing's carcass."
"I poked it with a stick," Mindy confides in Dean, and he grins.
"I probably would have done the same thing."
"All right, c'mon," Burt says, folding the burlap over the guns. "Gonna need all hands to get the Howitzer up from the armory."
They troop around the bunker and spend the next fifteen minutes wrestling the Howitzer cannon (an actual goddamn cannon, metallic gray and squat and ridiculously warlike) out of the subterranean armory. Earl shows up at some point, and they embark on the secondary task of getting the cannon up into the bed of his truck.
The pick-up groans and whines under the new weight, and Earl shouts, "Goddamn it Burt!" a few times when paint gets scraped off here and there.
Eventually the Howitzer rests massively, gray and stuporous, and Burt says, "You boys will have to take the cannonballs in the Impala, I don't think we wanna load anything more on Earl's old girl here."
"Cannonballs, sure," Dean says. Can't be surprised by anything in this business.
"Earl, you got some rope? Tie that thing down. I gotta make a quick phone call, and then we're heading out."
Earl and Sam commence securing the cannon to the back of the truck. Mindy runs to and from the armory, boxes of ammunition and grenades still in their fat little packages. Dean is feeling useless, and he heads back into the bunker to make sure they haven't left anything behind.
He can hear Burt on the phone in the kitchen, hears him saying, "I reckon we'll make it to Pete Weskoe's place by four or five. Good place to start, that cuss always keeps an ear to the ground." A pause, then a brief fond laugh. "I'll be sure to remind him of that, yes ma'am."
Something in Burt's voice, the soft worn-denim edge to it, makes Dean uncomfortable, shouldn't be hearing that, and he slips down to the rec room.
The switchblade Sam was fiddling with earlier is still on the table, and Dean pockets it without much thought. He stands for a moment in the center of the room, thick yolky chunks of sunlight pouring through the high windows. One of those surface trances, a floater. Dean's mind skims shallowly, firearm specifics and the road back to Elko County and his brother, thoughts of Sam like a shadow-play background to everything.
He comes out of it, blinks awake. Silent-footed back up the stairs and right to the door, but Dean still overhears the hoarse tone as Burt says, "I'll call before you go to sleep," and he can't get it out of his head for hours.
*
onwards!