Post-apocalyptic setting
Your character's world has ended and purgatory awaits them, a wasteland full of ruined buildings. The surrounding desert constantly wears down the buildings with a neverending wind. There aren't any monsters to worry about, no zombies or demons, but your characters are haunted by the ghosts of people they once knew and there's only one escape from
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"Drink up," Dean said. It wasn't an order.
It wasn't a question, either. It just was what it was.
Dean had memories of ordering his brother around in the past, even teasing him and jerking his leg with pranks, but those days were over, maybe even for good. All that was left was that thought of protect Sam and nothing else but Sam. Being trapped on that table, even when doomsday rolled around, hearing the door open and seeing his brother's silhouette against the flickering overhead light was burned into his mind with a vivid intensity that overshadowed all his previous memories. Dean couldn't remember if he begged Sam to take him with or not; all he could remember was that sheer sense of relief, something downright unnatural after being used to the pain. The loneliness.
Dean frowned, looking down at his own arm. His wrist was still bleeding at that same slow pace as before. Probably had something to do with being some kind of manufactured demon, for all he knew (and there was a lot he didn't know about what he was, thanks to those asshole doctors in Landels not even leaving a handbook before they died). His injuries - the surface ones, at least - did heal, if slowly, and his blood seemed to take twice as long as Sam's to begin to scab over. He could be bleeding from both the headshot wound and the knife cut for days. It did leave him wondering how he didn't run outta blood at the rate he went through the stuff, or what would happen if he did. Still, he was bleeding now, so...
Saving him outside took a lot outta Sam, even with the pick-me-up he'd gotten from sucking down some of his blood. A year ago, he might've been horrified at the idea of Sam sucking blood, much less demon blood. Nowadays, he couldn't give a shit, 'cause all that mattered was Sam survived and that was it, end of story.
Dean mutely held out his bloodied wrist toward his brother.
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He suspected it had to do with the demon blood, either what Ruby and Dean had given him or what had always been in him ever since Azazel. He didn't know how else to explain it. It sure as hell wasn't luck or anything ridiculous like that. And it most definitely wasn't divine intervention. If there'd been any to begin with, they'd long abandoned this world.
There wasn't much to talk about or anything to do while Dean fixed him up, so Sam just sat there and tried not to think about how he really wished they had a bottle of aspirin or ibuprofen or something because his head was freaking killing him and the hole in his arm was rapidly catching up. He could destroy the very essence of demons without a sweat, but apparently he couldn't nudge pencil without nearly bursting a blood vessel or three.
He'd get better, though. If he got enough practice, enough blood. For a moment, he thought about telling Dean that he would've told him later about how his abilities were growing, when it would've been something worth telling-he hadn't missed the why didn't you let me know in Dean's eyes earlier-but he shrugged it away. He owed Dean an explanation, owed Dean a lot of things, but he wasn't sure how to repay any of that. Even if he knew where to start, even if he knew, he didn't think he had the right to try and regain his brother's trust again or make up for everything. It was too much. He'd done too much. And while Sam wanted to believe Dean stuck around to take care of him because Dean was Dean, being his big brother, he knew better. Dean was here because the only other option was being alone. It sure as hell wasn't because Dean owed him anything.
Sam couldn't bring himself to reject that. The reason didn't matter; if Dean stayed, it was enough. He couldn't ask for more.
He reached for the nearest water bottle with his free hand, holding it in place between his legs so he could twist off the cap. Still sealed-that was lucky. It wasn't often he came across half a bottle this fresh, never mind several. He wasn't watching, but he could tell Dean was nearing the end of the stitching from where the needle was piercing. Lucky, too, that Dean had somehow found them a proper suture needle. Not that something makeshift wouldn't have worked, but doing it with a straight needle was difficult and dug deeper into the flesh than it needed to.
Not that holding the wound together was their biggest problem. He'd have to keep an eye on it over the next few days. It would get infected, he was sure of it. That was unavoidable; he never healed as fast as he was supposed to, even the smallest cuts growing red and angry before getting better. The question was just how bad.
Nothing to do but wait and see, though.
Lulled by the silence and the rapid descent from the earlier rush of adrenaline, his focus slipped away from him for a brief moment; by the time he pulled his attention back, Dean had his wrist in front of him, blood still flowing from the cut. Sam blinked. Belated guilt struck him out of nowhere. Dean had always given, even when Sam had never asked, but Sam hadn't ever taken blood from Dean while he was down like that. He knew Dean wouldn't have said no, but that wasn't the point, and now his brother wasn't even hesitating to offer more.
Sam started to turn him down, trying to regain some semblance of self-control maybe, but the blood started to drip and he thought, screw it. There was no one around to give a damn, no one to look and think, monster. There was only him and Dean, and pretending to be what he wasn't, pretending to be something other than a freak, was worth nothing here.
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For a second, he thought Sam had enough.
There was just that split second of hesitation. His brother reached out, grabbed his wrist in a grip that would’ve bruised him if he’d been alive, and pulled him closer so he could drink from the bleeding knife-cut. Dean waited patiently for him to finish. Dean knew his blood somehow helped his brother, kept him from blacking out, kept him on the ground and on his feet, but he still didn't know why. He knew he should just be glad he could help Sammy and leave it at that...but there was also this uneasy feeling, something he guessed was a throwback to when he'd been alive. At first he couldn't pinpoint it exactly. Then he remembered. Dad knew something about Sammy, only he hadn't said anything aside from that kill-order. Dean could remember that, even undead, and with his memory riddled with holes.
One day he planned to ask Sam about it. For now, he was content to just sit there, headshot wound and all, and sit there with his little brother while he got his fill.
xxxxx
“It’s empty,” Dean said later that evening as he came back from scouting the rest of the Wal-Mart’s interior. This time, he’d been extra thorough, even taking the time to block up any of the possible exits so they wouldn’t get any more surprise visitors. Getting shot in the head like that had been an experience in itself; he’d only been trapped for maybe ten, fifteen minutes tops, but he’d learned better.
It didn’t matter if he could survive it. He didn’t want to if it meant he could be paralyzed in his own corpse like that again, if he left Sam alone and without backup ‘cause all it took was a single slug to the head to knock him out of commission and make him useless. Which reminded him - he needed to ask Sam about removing the tattoo, or at least breaking a line in it so he could at least have a backdoor out in case he got stuck or his corpse finally crapped out on him. It wasn't like he couldn't find someone else to possess, or even just another body (Dean wasn't too particular, so long as he could get back in the game). Looking at his brother, still nursing his wounded arm and needing a place to get some rest and heal, Dean used what little tact he still had left and kept his friggen mouth shut. Tomorrow. He’d ask tomorrow, ‘cause he sure as hell couldn’t do it himself. It wasn’t like he hadn’t tried, when Sam wasn’t looking. On one hand, Sam gave him the tattoo personally, which meant it was something automatically important - on the other hand, it was now more of a liability than anything else. He couldn’t be possessed if he was already possessing himself, way he figured it when he waited until Sam was sleeping before trying to remove the tattoo with a steak knife months ago, thinking if he cut deep enough, he’d be able to break the line. Dean couldn’t even touch it with the tip of the blade. It just slid off, and instead he’d just ended up with a nice big gash on his shoulder, right to the bone.
Obviously it was demon proof.
Someone else had to do it. Technically, any human could. Dean wanted only Sam to do it.
After everything he’d seen, including today’s headshot, Dean thought cutting into the tattoo wasn’t gonna be too traumatic. Okay, so maybe he didn’t have the best judgment on what counted as “traumatic” in the first place these days, but he knew Sam wasn’t squeamish; you couldn’t be, not after the world ended.
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“Best I could find. Either that or we had back to the apartments,” Dean shrugged. He seemed to have almost forgotten about the bleeding gunshot wound in his head as he turned his attention away from Sam to the sleeping bags. Some of them were awful small, in brighter colors than the others. For kids, he guessed. Wasn’t like they’d need them anymore. “There’s no food here, just the water. Sorry, Sammy.”
Tomorrow, he’d find something. Some food, a working car, hopefully some gas.
Dean ran down the checklist of things he had to do, not caring how long it’d take or that he’d probably be moving all night or all day. Leaving Sam alone after the firefight didn’t sit well with him; still didn’t change the fact he had to, especially since he could cover ground faster and more steadily than his brother, even if he wasn’t wounded. He hadn’t exactly told Sammy about his plan to outrun the ghosts, or that he planned to make it less of a living hell for his brother, no matter what it took or how many people he had to kill to make it happen. West. Keep moving west.
California. Dean had privately decided on California. As far away as they could get from the East Coast.
He wanted to surprise Sam. Dean couldn’t remember exactly why he’d picked California over, say, Oregon or Mexico. Something in California had been important to Sam, he guessed.
There was always going home to Lawrence. Even dead, Dean wasn’t cool with that idea at all. It hadn’t been home even when he’d been alive, just a place to be avoided. Now it was probably just a pile of rubble and parched weeds. Dean just had a better feeling about California, whether or not he could remember all the details or not.
By then, he hoped to make things better along the way. Weird, how all those months of being dead, being maimed and experimented on, then left in the dark waiting for those doors to open again, that he could still think stuff like that. Dean wouldn’t say it was optimism. More like it was the only thing he could think of, the only goal that made any sense to him and that meant he obsessed over it, thought about it as much as he thought about all those months in Landels, his brother standing over him, undoing the straps binding him to that table while everything fell apart around them.
Sometimes it occurred to him to wonder how Sam knew to find him there of all places. That and why he even kept looking for him, all these months after his contract ended.
Sam hadn’t offered an explanation - they’d been too busy trying to escape, then trying to survive, which quickly turned into just making sure Sam survived, ‘cause Dean was apparently a human cockroach now - and Dean hadn’t brought it up. Maybe once they hit California, and things settled down, he’d ask.
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An image of a girl stared up at him from one of the sleeping bags and Sam resisted the sudden urge to flip the damn thing over. Dean would've made fun of him once. This was a golden opportunity for that. But there wasn't even a flicker of amusement. Granted, he hadn't expected anything. Not by now. It was just, a part of him couldn't help waiting for it, anyway.
Sam sat down on the makeshift (extremely makeshift) bed. He tugged the Glock out of his waistband and placed it within reach, shaking his head at the suggestion that they head back.
"This'll do. Thanks."
Sleeping on a real mattress would save him from waking up with a kink in his spine, true, and the apartment, despite being in shambles, was a bit better insulated than this place. But convenience was more important than comfort. Wasn't as if he hadn't made do with worse, sleeping propped up against a pile of broken concrete or in the cargo bed of an abandoned pickup truck once with a tarp thrown over to protect from the dusty wind, the bodies of a couple still inside the vehicle itself. When you were half dead on your feet, where you slept became a non-issue so long as you found somewhere to do it. Somewhere that wouldn’t get you killed or looted or both in two seconds flat.
Lack of food was a slight disappointment, too, but not a big deal. He'd gotten used to living on water. The blood did sate him a little bit, took the edge off the gnawing hunger. Whether it was due to the buzz or something else, he had no idea, but he wasn't gonna complain. He knew he'd lost weight, probably a lot of weight, actually. He'd always lost weight easily, once he'd gotten past that whole short-and-chubby stage and hit his growth spurt. The way things were, he was never gonna regain any of it back. Hostess cakes and chocolate bars made for a poor diet. Fridges had stopped running so most stuff was spoiled, if they were even still around. But Dean came back with things sometimes. Cans of soup, usually.
Not tonight, though. The water would have to be good enough. Maybe if they hit a rare patch of luck, he could scrounge up a case of Coke or something so he could run on sugar and caffeine, if nothing else. They had a couple of days to look around. He didn't intend to stay long, but they could use the time out.
Wasn't like the world could end twice. They weren't in a big rush. There was nothing left to outrun when you'd already outrun the end of days.
He hooked a finger around his jacket, the black jean material beyond worn, but durable enough. He'd taken to using it as a blanket when he could. Next best thing. It didn't quite keep him warm, but it kept him covered and while he could sleep without if he wanted to, he didn't like the illusion of exposure. They were just fortunate the temperature hadn't dipped into freezing levels. Yet. He was waiting for it. Another reason to keep on moving, moving south at the very least. The last thing they needed was to be caught in a snowstorm or even heavy rainfall. There weren't a lot of places to take cover. Catching pneumonia? Really not high on his list.
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Not that his plan was foolproof; sometimes he'd open his eyes and she'd be burning all the same, but standing beside him instead. Without Dean here-God, he probably would've gone insane by now if Jess had been his only companion. Dean kept a barrier between him and the spirits, gave him something else to focus on.
Sleep took him fast, the way it often did. He used to have trouble falling asleep, but that'd stopped. Exhaustion did that to you. Dreams escaped him, too; he could never remember even if he knew he must've dreamed something because sometimes he'd snap awake in cold sweat or to Dean shaking him out of it. He didn't stay asleep for long-the stop-and-go pattern of their daily lives meant that he awoke at one or two hour intervals. If nothing was going on, if Dean wasn't looking edgy, then he went back to sleep.
When he woke up this time, though, something was going on. Dean, reading. That wasn't entirely new in and of itself; with no more televisions, books were all that was available to refresh his memory or keep him occupied. He didn't need the sleep and Sam supposed standing guard had its dull moments. He knew his brother was constantly on the alert regardless despite seemingly preoccupied with the book.
He thought about settling back in for another hour of rest-he didn't quite feel like it, but he knew he needed to recharge-but curiosity took over and he flicked on his flashlight (they'd need to look for new batteries, as well, he thought absently), shining it in Dean's direction. The beam caught the cover. It was torn down the middle, almost in half, and he could see a few pages on the floor at Dean's feet where they'd fallen out, but Sam could still make out the overly chiseled chest of a man with long, flowing black hair, a petite woman wrapped in his arms.
One eyebrow went up. "Dude." He propped himself up on one elbow, sleep-roughed voice."Are you reading a Harlequin?"
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Huh. He wasn't sure what it was about a "harlequin" that made his brother use that tone - he didn't seem angry, just...amused - except it might've something to do with the illustration, which was pretty unrealistic, he guessed. You couldn't get that buff without a lot of exercise and good food, which wasn't easy to come by these days. Dean couldn't exactly call himself an expert on books or drawings; he just could go with instincts, and when those failed, he'd just scrounge up whatever he could find and read everything he could lay his hands on, trying to jog his memory, see if anything was familiar. At the very least, try to learn something.
The problem was a lot of the things he'd found - newspaper pages, scraps of magazines, once a computer manual - were outdated, and while he didn't know the exact date (did it even matter?), he did know that there was Before Doomsday and After, and all of what he'd found so far was definitely After.
Dean idly flipped through the pages of the harlequin, shrugging.
"This doesn't seem like it's world news to me," he said, and for a moment, there was a flicker of his old self in his face as he broke into a lop-sided grin, even as he reached up absently to wipe away the blood starting to inch down from his forehead, "This whole thing between the guy and the girl? You think getting laid was friggen D-Day or something."
Dean could safely say he did know what D-Day was - it wasn't when the doctors vanished, leaving him to be rescued, but it'd been before his time and there had been an assload of planning. Unfortunately, the history book he'd picked up had most of the pages missing, and he'd jumped from D-Day straight to the '69 moon landing thanks to what had been a lot of missing chapters there. He wondered if that damn flag was still up there. Good chance it was, even if good ol' Earth wasn't much more alive than the moon. Aside from a few survivors, patches of dried up weeds, dead trees, and the occasional feral dog slinking by, all sunken ribs and dripping foam at the mouth, he hadn't seen a lot of life ever since leaving Landels. The problem was even with his memory riddled with holes, there was a lot of what it was like before that he did remember.
The thing that always got him wasn't how many people he didn't see driving cars or walking down the sidewalk.
For some reason, it was the food.
Dean really, really missed the food.
Funny, considering he hadn't eaten in months. Still, sometimes he surprised himself when he didn't keep turning back to memories of that lab table, prisoner in his own corpse as they worked, or Sam's rescue, but instead to a big, sloppy, juicy t-bone steak at this place called Apple John's, some crappy hole-in-the-wall in Nebraska that had been totally worth driving out of the way for.
Now he just snapped the book shut. Despite having been engrossed in reading every page like his undead life depended on it, Dean practically tossed it aside with a second thought now that Sammy was awake. Dean's eyes flickered to the bandage on his brother's arm.
"You okay? Sure you don't need more sleep?" Dean asked. Reach up, wipe the blood and clear fluid from trickling down the bridge of his nose again. Rinse, repeat when necessary. It'd only been a few hours since he'd sat up with a new souvenir, enough that it was just another rhythm in his day already. "You weren't out that long. Don't you need sleep to heal?"
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Human, maybe. Wasn't much of a reference point for that anymore, though.
He watched Dean for a moment, surprised by the crooked grin he hadn't seen Dean break out since...it'd been awhile. There were flashes of who Dean had been before every so often, a cocky remark here and there, but it was rare. He never thought he'd ever miss dragging Dean away from a girl so they could actually focus on a case like they were supposed to. There were no cases, no girls, and Dean's focus was always intense, never wavering. He always knew when Dean was nearby-more so than he'd been able to before-because Dean was always watching him when he was there. Dean only ever stopped watching when Sam was out of sight.
He huffed out a sound that almost passed for a laugh. He really should tell Dean to cover up that bullet hole, but he didn't want to bring it up, make it seem like it bothered him. Even if Dean probably already knew. And it shouldn't have bothered him because it was still Dean, but-just. Being reminded of all the ways Dean wasn't himself anymore, of what Sam had completely failed to stop from happening.
Killing the one responsible didn't even come close to what he'd wanted to do. It still itched at him sometimes, despite knowing that there wasn't anything left to hunt down. But Dean didn't need to know about any of that.
"Never thought I'd see you touch a trashy novel meant for housewives, that's all," he replied quietly instead. A half-hearted explanation, if anything.
His elbow started to ache from the awkward position he'd raised himself up on so he settled back down on the sleeping bags, rolling over onto his back. It was usually okay to look up at the ceiling when he was awake, when Dean was there to talk to. Or, kind of talk to. They mostly spoke about where to go, what they found, how safe it was. Whether the other was doing okay. Better than nothing, he supposed.
Sam lay there for another minute or two before he sat up all the way. The jacket slipped off his chest. He peered at the bandage on his arm, the blood starting to soak through already. It wasn't his right arm, at least. He could still fire a gun. He could work left-handed if he really had to-their dad had made sure of that-but it wasn't quite up to par.
It'd been awhile since he'd trained, too. They didn't have enough bullets for target practice, and expending energy in a sparring session wasn't the best idea when you were running on empty constantly. He missed it, though. He missed a lot of things.
Like sleep.
He shrugged, forgetting his injury, and hid a wince. A cockroach peeked over the corner of one of the sleeping bags. Unwilling to have a crushed insect smeared all over his bedding, he picked it up and flicked it a ways off, watching it land somewhere between two crates. There was no point in killing it; get rid of one and more came along. The insect equivalent of a demon.
"In a bit," he said. Dean wasn't wrong; he did need the sleep. He needed the rest, but rest was a joke right now. Especially right after consuming the blood, it made it even harder than usual for him to settle down in proper sleep. He swept his flashlight over the room, the beam casting angles of light over the boxes of supplies. "How're we doing on batteries and ammo?"
Another thing he let Dean do. Sam kept track of all their supplies, too, of course, but he always asked Dean. It was something to talk about. Pathetic that they were reduced to this, but undeniable. And it was better than the stretches of silence that would grow and grow until he could nearly feel it pressing down on him.
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Almost laughing, actually.
Dean sat up a little straighter at it - he couldn't forget a sound like that, even with his body torn to pieces and his brain pretty much just a gray pulp, thanks to today's run-in with fellow survivors, and searching his fragmented memory, he remembered Sam laughing a lot more before Landels, remembered doing stupid crap like pranking him in the car, and sometimes getting a laugh out of him, even if it was one of those Dean, you're being retarded laughs. Dean relished in that almost-laugh, making it a point to hold on extra tight to this new memory even if it didn't seem like nothing much. Dean's mouth almost started to quirk up in a smile again. He turned away, standing up and going over to their duffles to search through what they had.
They didn't have much. It was basically a whatever you could carry basis, and while he could carry a lot, way more than Sam possibly could, he did in the end have the same number of arms and legs as his brother, which did limit what they kept and what they left behind.
"Got a few AAA's. Four AA's," Dean said, almost like he was reciting it. He unzipped a side pocket, "Ammo's low, but since we got some stiffs on our hands, we can just loot whatever they got. I think that rifle would be pretty useful."
One of the things he did remember was how to handle a gun. Dean knew he was supposed to just help himself to the rifle, but what was the point? He'd been able to coast by fine without it and shooting from a distance just didn't seem fun to him. It didn't give him that warm feeling through his corpse like it had when he'd smashed that girl's skull in earlier today, his hands bathing in blood and bits of bone. Although...Dean didn't like it, but after today, finding out he could be taken out - maybe not killed, but incapacitated, which might as well be the same thing - he was wondering if maybe he should pick up a gun for himself. Dean was silent as he thought about that, undecided.
Killing up close and personal - 'scuse him, "self-defense" - didn't make Dean feel alive. Nah, he was plenty aware he was on the wrong side of the dead line, and that this time, there'd be no deals, no reapers bound by magic or any voodoo crap that would change that. It was, however, something new, something that wasn't sitting there wishing he knew just how much of him was missing after getting killed by the hellhounds and frantically trying to play catch-up with this other Dean Winchester.
He had a feeling Sam knew at least some of what he was thinking - he'd caught him more than once trying to read everything he came across, but this was really the first time he'd directly confronted him about it. Dean didn't know what it was like on the other end, having to travel around with someone who wasn't really your brother anymore; he was just glad Sam stuck with him all these months, and whatever he asked, Dean was more than happy to do. He'd make it up to Sammy, he promised himself. California was his first real goal that wasn't just directly related to making sure Sam survived into tomorrow.
It was actually a pretty powerful thing, having a goal. For the first time in his new life as some half-assed demon, he found himself thinking slightly less about those labs and more about California.
Probably was ruined, like the others, but he hoped that by the time they got there, all the other survivors would be dead, maybe killed each other off. It'd just be him and Sammy, and whatever was out there that was important to him.
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Though it could help him see somewhat. That was something, at least.
He pushed to his feet as Dean went for the duffle bags, a little lightheaded still, but otherwise better. He really needed to get a move on with his abilities, making sure he didn't feel like passing out after using it just the slightest. There were no more demons to take care of. Just Dean and Ruby, and he wasn't looking to exorcise or kill the only two people he had left.
Which left him with the option of developing other skill sets. Something useful, so he wouldn't be such a burden on Dean. He knew better than to consider breaking away so that Dean no longer had to watch out for him-he wouldn't leave his brother in that way-but while Sam was willing to let Dean take care of him, he wasn't willing to actually allow himself to need it.
No, he had to be able to do this on his own, he needed to not be so damn useless all the time. Today had proven that demon or not, Dean could still hit his own brand of trouble. What if next time, it was something worse? What if he could never put his brother back together again?
Not for the first time, he thought about bringing up breaking the tattooed trap on Dean, but a selfishness stopped him, the part of him that was sure that if Dean could escape this body, he would and he'd never come back. But he should-he should do it. He knew it, he just...maybe when Dean brought it up of his own accord. Dean probably would bring it up eventually, especially after what'd happened today.
Anyway. For now, they had the supplies to sort through.
"I'll take a look."
Sam didn't wait for an answer, just headed back out to the receiving area, where the bodies of the kids they'd taken out were still sprawled on the concrete. Another sweep of the flashlight lit up the contents of someone's stomach. The smell of blood hit him hard-a different kind, not demonic; somehow, he could tell the difference-but he ignored it. He'd encountered enough blood and corpses, even before the world ended, that it was easy to look past it. The slight chill in the weather and the swirl of dust meant that the bodies took longer to rot. Small favours; ignoring blood was one thing, but rotting corpses was another entirely. That was something you never completely used to.
The fact that these people were dead by his hand, though...
Well, only one of them, technically. But Dean was the way he was because of Sam, because Sam hadn't saved him in time, and for every person Dean tore apart, he couldn't help but feel as if it fell on him in the end.
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It didn't take too long for him to make his round and head back. He hadn't lingered to search too much, wanting only to grab the important items first. Dean would likely do a second, more thorough, sweep while Sam tried to grab another couple of hours of shuteye.
He slid the items next to the dufflebags, trying to ignore the fact that they'd basically killed three or four kids for a couple of guns and bullets and a flashlight. Yeah, they'd been attacked first, but both of them were capable of putting down a threat without taking a life. At the very least, they were capable of attempting that option. But Sam hadn't even bothered; it had barely crossed his mind.
He nodded at the rifle. "Worth lugging around, if you can manage."
Which he suspected Dean could. In terms of easy travelling, Sam didn't mind sticking with the pistol. Something small that didn't take up too much space or weight, and it was all they needed when you were basically dealing with other humans. Still, if they ever hit the open road, a more forested area, a rifle wouldn't hurt in terms of hunting game.
If they ever made it that far, that was.
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Even dead, he couldn't forget that. Maybe over time they could've peeled that away too: lucky for Sammy, he guessed, they hadn't and it was one of those weird bits of his ex-life that he could still think back on and remember with barely any gaps in it.
"Okay," Dean said, even though it hadn't been an outright question. It sounded to him like Sammy wanted him to carry it around, so he was gonna carry it around - or, according to his brother, "lug" it around, despite the fact he barely even registered the weight of the rifle. There was no difference at all between that, the heavy duffle or the rubble he moved earlier today.
He'd use the rifle if there was no choice. Fighting indoors wouldn't mean it'd be too useful, unless they were in a mall, but sooner or later they'd run out of city and hit the open road. Dean figured he could probably hunt whatever wildlife was still left out there - it wasn't like he didn't have all the time to track something down and tire it out, steadily following, unable to get tired - but it'd probably help hunting if he could just cut the crap and shoot the damn animals. Dean lowered the rifle, setting it on the ground and glancing almost pointedly at Sam as he bent down and picked up the harlequin, flipping back to a page as he took up his guard position again.
"Should probably get an early start tomorrow, Sammy," he said, and while he didn't exactly order his brother to get some rest - and not just for a couple of hours - he didn't need to. With his wound, he needed to sleep and do his best to heal.
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He didn't remember much about that lab. He remembered everything shaking apart and he remembered fighting off what'd felt like a cross between a bad hangover and losing too much blood, dizziness and a piercing headache all at once. It hadn't been Lilith, he knew it hadn't, but the eyes, that pupil-less white-it wasn't anyone low on the food chain, either. He'd only meant to exorcise the demon, he hadn't even known it was possible to do anything else, but somehow-
Either way, by the time he'd stumbled his way to Dean, he'd been far too preoccupied to notice anything but Dean. Dean and the blood everywhere, too much blood, and that should've been his first clue that something was wrong. No one could've survived that much blood loss. No one human, that was. If Dean hadn't been awake, if he'd been unconscious, Sam never would've known he was alive, but his eyes had been open.
It'd been too dark in there for him to have noticed the flash of black right away, though. He'd had his hands full trying to even get Dean to come with him in the first place, anyway. He didn't know who Dean thought he'd been, but it was obvious enough Dean hadn't recognized him. It'd been a good thing Dean hadn't been in any shape to be fighting off a guy half his size; Sam had ended up having to damn near manhandle him out the door. They'd gone a good distance away from the lab, and Sam clearly remembered yanking Dean out of the way of a falling light fixture when he'd barely heard Dean say, Sammy over the crash of glass and metal. After that-after that, Sam had been pretty sure that even if Dean could've stood on his own, he probably wouldn't have let go of Sam.
But they never talked about that night. Sam couldn't tell how much Dean remembered. He suspected not much, and he suspected that Dean wanted to know, too. It wasn't that Sam didn't want to tell him; there simply hadn't been a right time to sit there and swap stories. Plus, there was never going to be a not awkward way to ask, Tell me about that time the world ended and you found me broken and half-dead strapped to a table.
That, and Sam had learned not to look back. They were here. They'd made it out, for whatever that was worth when out meant nothing more than an equally crappy world that everyone had to share because there was nothing else.
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Sam adjusted the duffle strap; he hadn't been able to switch sides because of his arm and when you were dragging crap along for several days straight, discomfort was bound to happen. And the bullet wound should've been better by now, but it wasn't. He hadn't mentioned it to Dean. Considering Dean was always right there even when he wasn't the one checking the bandaging, he was sure Dean knew without having to be told. There was no way Dean could've missed the ragged, puffy edges of broken skin, the streaks of red radiating away from the site of injury that was a sure sign of spreading infection. He probably hadn't missed the way Sam was slowing down more than usual, either.
Not that Sam was big on hiding that something was wrong. Grin and bear it in the field, yeah, but covering up how much you were hurt was one of the stupider things you could do when it came to the more serious stuff. It misled someone into depending on you more than they should, thereby possibly getting everyone killed. Really not something he wanted to risk.
So when they ducked into another building for a short break, he brushed off the broken glass and sat down on what used to be a bar stool before announcing bluntly, "I think I'm getting a fever."
They didn't have a thermometer, but they didn't need one. He could more than feel the flush, had shrugged off his jacket a couple of miles back. It wasn't the first time he'd caught an infection, not even the second or the third. The hunter's brand of field med-the kind where they avoided hospitals until death was up next on the list-meant that sometimes, you just couldn't avoid it. They just often had the antibiotics and disinfectants on hand to treat it. This time, not so much.
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"From the gunshot?" Dean asked, even though there wasn't a lot other reasons he could think of. Sam could, of course, just get sick like a normal human, but he wanted to say it was that gunshot wound getting infected. Dean unconsciously had a hand on his brother's good shoulder, his touch gentle as if he was handling glass - and he might as well be, especially when these days all he had to do was squeeze too hard on accident and crush Sam's skin to the bone. He glanced from the injured shoulder to Sam's face.
He did look flushed slightly, even as there was a thin sheet of sweat beading his brother's forehead and upper lip that had nothing to do with the day's travel. Dean tried to remember what Sam told him about infections, fevers. He was surprised to realized that a lot of what he knew, it didn't really have "Fever and how to deal with it" in there - Sam probably had been more concerned with making sure he could set a broken bone or do stitches than worry about something like that. Somehow he doubted that harlequin book he read the other night was gonna help him with this.
Dean set Sam's duffle bag down for him. The diner they were sitting in was pretty much half blown out, sand already inching its way across the floor with each passing day, a few skeletons with bits of flesh hanging off still in the blasted booths or on the floor, and the entire kitchen was a scorched mess, as if it'd gone up in flames when doomsday hit. He still didn't know what, exactly, happened when everything ended. War? Dean would've wanted to say nukes, except where was the fallout, the radiation? Demons? Where were they?
Sam might know more about the lab, the events of that first day out of Landels and into the new scorched Earth better than Dean could recall it, but he didn't know the why or the how. All they knew was the majority of the humans out there had been wiped out, and every city they'd traveled to, everything had that deserted, destroyed look since the last one.
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Still. He'd take too much Dean over no Dean, any day.
Dean was handling him like Sam would break apart at the slightest touch, and that was one more thing he hated, too. Illogically, maybe, since he knew why, but...Then again, he couldn't help but think, either, that for the first time, he wouldn't be the one to outlive them both, and there was a certain relief that he couldn't deny.
"Yeah. Bottled water's not really the number one choice for cleaning out a gunshot wound." And the bullet had sat in there awhile, too, with the whole brief thing with Dean getting, well. Shot in the head.
He shifted on his stool, partly to get comfortable and partly to just keep himself awake. He could feel the lethargy catching up to him, but seriously, they couldn't afford to take a break every couple of miles so he could sleep. He knew he hadn't been getting enough, but he'd been managing up until now.
Pushing a plate of mouldy fries and the bag aside, he leaned against the space cleared on the counter. There was no corpse accompanying the plate this time; it must've fallen elsewhere or been dragged off by wild animals. The last diner they'd gone into, he'd seen a coffee mug with a hand curled around it, and no arm attached to the wrist. He'd tried to determine what might've happened there, but there were too many options to choose from. Sam hadn't actually been out here when all this went down. He had no idea what'd happened outside, what might've started it. If he had the presence of mind to investigate, he might've turned up a theory or two, but-what was the point?
Though he supposed, looking back now, he realized there'd been signs. It'd been too quiet, everything too routine and slow. He should've known, but he hadn't, in the same way he should've known Stanford would never last, but didn't because foresight was never about knowing so much as it was about bringing yourself to acknowledge what was painfully obvious.
It was just as hot inside here, and he knew it wasn't about the temperature, could feel himself sweating just a bit, though not in a way that meant the fever had broken. He'd only be so lucky. No, his temperature was gonna keep shooting up and they had nothing to keep it down with. No ice, barely any water, never mind cold water. He knew the chills would set in eventually, too. Sam had been bitten and shot and stabbed, but the hot and cold of a fever? That was right at the top of the list as one of the things he tried extremely hard to avoid.
Which meant they couldn't stay here. They had to move before the infection set in even further, see if they could find-hell , a drug store or someone's medical cabinet, anything at all. A dentist office would do, too; they had to have something. Odds were, it'd be raided clean by now, but there was always a chance. It was better than doing nothing.
He took a drink of water, then shouldered his duffle bag and slid off the stool. "We should keep going. You've seen any hospitals or doctor's offices when you were scoping out the area?"
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