Shockholm, Chapter 3
Title: Shockholm
Summary: Tag to 8.23 "Sacrifice." The angels have fallen. Cas has vanished. Sam is dying. The lengths Dean will go to save him scares even him. AU.
Author's Note: This is a multi-chapter that I wrote this summer before the start of season 9. It's mostly told from a perspective of another character. I absolutely love it. I hope you do too!
Chapter Three: Shock Me Twice Shame On You
She ran away from Sam's glowing arms and his guttural sounds of pain, away from his Dean's palpable helplessness and charismatic violence. The rain still pounded the earth but with more mercy than before. Adele had made it passed the black boat of a car and a few paces down the road before she was once again manhandled from behind. This time, Adele fought like a junkyard dog, remembering the self-defense classes her brother forced her to take. She jammed her elbow back at an inward angle, hitting what felt like a rib, and slammed her head backwards until she felt a nasty crunch. The arm loosened around her waist and Adele hit the ground sprinting. A lone meteor--the first one she'd seen in hours--careened through the sky, whirring up the air like a tornado. It zipped over her head, shooting through the trees, the wet branches burning white in its wake, before colliding with the road in an explosion of catering concrete and dirt. The resulting calamity swept Adele off her feet. Shielding her head was the only thing she could do, but it left the rest of her body vulnerable to the blizzarding debris and the jarring impact.
As quickly as it came, it was quiet just the same.
Adele uncovered her head and panned around the deserted freeway. Fire dotted the dark horizon, and the thick concrete had been cratered on impact, its edges thick, puckered and smoldering.
She limped a few feet in deference to her battered, spasming thigh and hip, mesmerized by the fact that the fire burned despite the rain, its flames a brilliant white.
Inevitability and curiosity won over. To escape, Adele would have to pass by the meteor and she was a scientist, after all. When she couldn't find Dean in the rain-soaked darkness, Adele jogged forward, gritting her teeth. Fear could heighten senses and Adele felt like prey, hobbling for her life through the dark as the sky fell and and the earth burned and a hunter tracked her. Every sound reverberated through her ears, crisper than anything she'd ever heard. She knew she wouldn't forget the toxic odor of burning ozone and dampness as long as she lived. For a brief instant, she was superhuman.
Out of the darkness of the shattered road arose, not the edges of a meteor but the head and shoulders of a man. The ground beneath him a shattered and cracked in the same of man, not mineral.
His blond hair was impeccably combed. He wore a trenchcoat over a dark suit. He emerged from the dimpled earth and glanced up at the heavens before his eyes locked on her.
She had maxed out on running for her life, fighting death, and now she was gobsmacked, paralyzed in horrific disbelief. The man continued to gape, appearing to be just as stricken as she felt, then he staggered back, loping away.
A wall of leather appeared in front of her.
As sharp and vivid as the world had been a second ago, now it was dim and distant, reduced to sickening hum in her ears and bile in her throat.
Dean grabbed her shoulders. His lips were moving, his voice merely an indecipherable string of white noise.
Shock, she realized, she was in shock.
Sounds clicked back in with a clap of pain across her cheek. "...don't check out on me...Adele?"
She vomited in the road-the mess extinguishing a tendril of white fire. Dean cursed and then comforted. "You're fine, doc, you're fine. Just feel the ground beneath you."
She laughed, and it sounded manic and detached. She was damn sure everything about the world had just imploded around her. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. "Why's it raining people?"
Dean scoffed, unfazed by his busted nose or the hurricane of humans. "More like trenchcoated douchebags," Dean corrected. "Let's go. We left Sam back there."
Dean tugged her by the hand back to the motel.
She let herself be dragged. "Aliens? Is this an alien thing?" Adele asked. "Is your brother one of them?"
"You're a doctor, and you're asking me if my Sammy's ET?"
"Cut me some slack here. All of those meteors are people, and your brother just went up like a Christmas tree...I-I can't help him if I don't know everything."
"You said you liked the unknown, right?"
Sam was in an unconscious heap, awkwardly slumped half-on and half-off the mattress when they straggled in, drenched and drained. Dean heaved him back in bed and untangled his spindly limbs while Adele stood in numbly in the doorway.
The seriousness of his condition managed to rid her of the numbing shock. She soon got to work, checked his injuries, abdomen and breath sounds. His fever was bonfire-hot, his vitals were alarmingly erratic, and he was exhibiting stridor, the quality of his breathing had decompensated so much his pallor was darkening from a gleaming white to a dusky gray, with a blue leeching into his lips. Dean had even swiped an oxygen tank and mask, so she put those to good use, hoping to improve Sam's oxygenation. While she worked, Dean made good on his promise to tell her everything. His gravelly voice spun an apocalyptic tale about demons and trials and a quest from God himself that seemed like the perfect YA novel Adele would dive into in the hospital breakroom. She found herself in tears through some of it, wishing, praying and raging against believing such horrors existed, but she knew with unwavering absolution that this man, this dark stranger who'd kidnapped her in an alley, but could show such compassion for his brother and even for her, was telling the truth.
Dean finally closed his mouth, turning away from her to tend to Sam. Adele wiped her face, pressed her head against the soiled mattress and prayed to an angel-less heaven. She needed the strength to continue and to find somehow to save Sam, who had sacrificed so much to save...everything.
She had to focus on the science. Whatever was hurting Sam coulbe controlled by man-made medicine, so Adele felt confident that he could be cured.
When Sam glowed, Adele remembered smelling a faint hint of ozone and felt the crackle of energy, like static, like the meteors.
Like electricity.
She gasped and groped for her stethoscope. Dean jerked, lifting his head out of his hand, but keeping Sam's limp one in firm grasp. "What?"
"I need to check something..."
"What?"
Adele ignored him, shoving the cool towels off of Sam's bar chest and replacing it with the end of the device. Holding her breath, she listened to his heartbeat, to the symphony of life.
And Sam's was dreadfully off-beat.
"What are you doing?" Dean hissed.
She ignored him, closing her eyes to focus further. A second later, she was on her feet, swatting at the duffel bag that had propped up Sam's legs. "We need to get him flat...help me, Dean."
"You know what's wrong with him?" She didn't miss the wisp of hope coupled with the tremble of fear in his voice.
"You said Sam had been struck with some sort of...energy after each...trial?"
"Yeah, whammied with white light..."
"That white light screwed with his electrical rhythms. I thought I'd heard something before but I wasn't sure and we don't have the equipment to track it, but I don't need it anymore. Whatever happened to him, when he was glowing, it exacerbated the problem, and I've seen this before. In people who'd been electrocuted. He's tachy...his heartrate is too way fast and and the beat is uneven. It's dangerous, but I can fix it."
Spurred on by answers, Dean gently removed the pillows propping up Sam's upper body, supporting his head when he laid him on the mattress. "Get his belt off...and take off his watch. Anything metal."
"How are going to fix him?"
Adele bit her lip and brandished the portable defibrillator. "I'm going to shock him back to sinus."
The color drained from Dean's face and his jaw plummeting. "No."
"This is the only way."
The grace and intensity of the monster-hunter had returned when Dean moved in front of the bed, fiercely protecting. "You're crazier than I am if you think I'm letting you near my brother with that shock box! After everything he's been through, you're not frying him like bacon! Can't you give him some medication or a shot?"
"Dean." Adele said softly. "This rhythm is throwing everything off. His heart, his breathing. Your brother is very sick...and he won't last much longer. His heart...his entire system can't take this for much longer."
"I'll take him to a real hospital then," Dean hedged.
Adele took another step forward, her eyes never leaving Dean's. "He won't last that long."
The sound Dean made, a broken angry growl crossed with a sob, would be imprinted in Adele's mind forever. But he didn't move, didn't bend until he heard the scraped whisper behind him. "...let'er do it."
A second later, Dean was hovering over his brother. "Sam, no."
A trembling hand pulled off his the mask. "...then...take me t'Crowley...let me...f-finish it." Sam said, face twisted in misery. "I can't keep fightin' this...not even f-for you."
"Sammy," Dean said, his voice tremoring and wet. He turned his head away, shoulders shaking, for a long moment. When he turned back he gently pulled off Sam's watch and then his belt.
A few minutes and one jail-broken defibrillator later, Adele was ready, using the paddles to monitor Sam's erratic heartrate that was worsening by the minute. She had to deliver the current at a precise moment between beats during the safest part of the cardiac cycle. She glanced down at Sam's wasted face and bluing lips as he rocked and arched from the effort it took to breathe and the pain of the a galloping heart. "I'm can't lie to you, Sam, this is the best chance you have, but I can't give you anything for the pain. This is going to hurt...a lot."
"Had worse." Sam whispered. His eyes softened and warmed. "...s'okay." He then turned his face his brother.
"You got this, bitch. Piece of cake, right?"
Sam tried to smile, "pie…piece o'pie."
Adele lubed the paddles, placed them on the pads and watched the tiny monitor, measuring the peaks and valleys. She was sweating and nauseous and terrified. But then Sam released a gurgled scream of pain, toes curling, the rhythm jumped and skittered, and the moment became clear. Adele depressed the buttons, heard the snap of electricity and braced for the violent fling of Sam's body.
Sam cried out, face twisted in pain. "I'm sorry, Sam. You're doing great, just hang on for me." She plied her patient with encouragement as she checked the rhythm. It was unchanged.
"I'm sorry, Sam. We have to go one more time."
Sweat pooled in the hollow of his throat and his head rolled against the mattress. His chest heaved in grating, uneven jerks like each lung was failing at a different pace. Dean nudged the oxygen mask back over his face. Adele waited.
He peeled his eyes open, hands curled into fists, bracing for the pain.
"He's ready. Go again," Dean said.
It was another tense thirty seconds of waiting before she shocked him again.
Sam's eyes rolled back in his head. The waves on the monitor arched up like a rocket and leveled off...into a pristine flatline.
"Did his heart just stop?! Sam, no!" Dean lunged for his brother, not to cradle and rock, like some loved ones did, but to curl his first and deliver a precise and practiced thump to his heart in an attempt to restart it.
Adele cranked up voltage to life-saving levels. "Clear!" He obeyed and she shocked him again.
The electric current snapped Sam's long body taut like a guitar string, his torso cresting off the mattress, muscles stretched in a corded rictus before he flopped still again. His heart wasn't beating and the last breath fizzled out of his lungs.
His chest didn't rise again.
Finality ambled over the derelict motel room like an eclipse, blotting out the light and leaving nothing but dark. Adele froze with a white-knuckled grip on the defibrillator. She could shock him again. She could inject him with adrenaline and epinephrine. With all of the medications Dean had stolen and her stubbornness, Adele could flog his body for another hour and force life back into him. She'd done it before.
Dean was crying, which seemed as improbable as her failure, but Adele didn't care. She dove for the bag, tearing open syringes with her teeth. She injected the epi into Sam's IV with trembling hands and leaped for the paddles, placing them over his pads to check the rhythm. When there wasn't one, she pounded n the charge button with impatience.
"Dean, I need to focus for me. The machine's recharging. It's going to take a few seconds, so you have to breathe for him. Come on, Dean, two breaths."
Dean didn't move, body bowed. The grief pulled ugly, feral sounds from him.
"He's not gone yet, Dean. I promise you he's not. Breathe for him right now!"
"...you can still save him?"
"I promise you, on my life, I will save your brother."
With that, Dean dipped down, sealing his mouth over Sam's and puffed in two quick breaths.
The charge was complete and Adele shocked immediately, barely waiting for Dean back away.
Before she could check for a heartbeat, the battery-operated lanterns tucked in the corners of the room began to flicker, the hastily-barred windows rattled and the stench of sulfur burned Adele's nose. Dean flew to his feet, checking the lines of salt that the raging wind displacing. With a newfound fury, he snatched all of the supplies, not the bag of weapons, but the medical supplies and threw them into the bathroom. A moment later, she was shoved out of the way, and he bodily hefted his brother over his shoulder, with no regard for the IV that tore out of his arm with a small spray of blood, and hauled into the same space.
He grabbed Adele by the collar of her scrubs and dragged her into the window-less room with a reeking, plugged toilet, murky, thick water puddling into the rub and Sam laid out on the rotting floor. He shoved her over the threshold and salted the doorway inside and out. "Something bad's comin' and I'll hold it off with everything I got, but I need you to sponsor another miracle. I need you to save my brother. If something happens to me, call Jodi Mills at the Sherriff's office. She'll take care of you."
He slammed the door before Adele could agree.
But it didn't matter. There was nothing left to do but focus on Sam. If she was going to die, she was going to do it saving a life. Bolstered by the sudden epiphany that maybe she had been meant to cross paths with these brothers, that maybe she could do something remarkably good, Adele wasn't scared anymore.
She knelt over Sam, palpating through the darkness to find his carotid. There was still no pulse, so Adele started CPR.
Her world was reduced to compressions and breaths, the knock of Sam's knuckles against the floor as she manually pumped his heart. The IV had been torn out when Dean moved Sam, and there was no light to read the medications, so Adele had to rely on her CPR and the defibrillator.
She heard terrible sounds emanating from the other side of the door: taunting nasty voices, the report of a shotgun, the thrashing of combat and eventually, terribly, Dean's screams.
After she'd shocked Sam for the fourth time, something careened against the wall, sending bits of plaster crunched into her hair.
And Sam still wasn't responding.
Her lungs sizzled breathing for Sam for her long, oily busts of color bled into her vision, and sweat soaked her scrubs. She was engaged in a battle of her own.
Everything was thunderous, from the blood rushing through her ears, to the violence just beyond the door, but she felt movement a jagged twitch of life.
Light exploded into the room, silhouetting a figure too round and short to be Dean. A stripe of light fell over its eyes that were completely and impossibly black. It attacked before Adele could scream.
There was a piercing, gutting pain, a brilliant flare of red and a crack of porcelain tile.
And then there was nothing.
Read Part 1 here
Read Part 2 here
Summary: Tag to 8.23 "Sacrifice." The angels have fallen. Cas has vanished. Sam is dying. The lengths Dean will go to save him scares even him. AU.
Author's Note: This is a multi-chapter that I wrote this summer before the start of season 9. It's mostly told from a perspective of another character. I absolutely love it. I hope you do too!
Chapter Three: Shock Me Twice Shame On You
She ran away from Sam's glowing arms and his guttural sounds of pain, away from his Dean's palpable helplessness and charismatic violence. The rain still pounded the earth but with more mercy than before. Adele had made it passed the black boat of a car and a few paces down the road before she was once again manhandled from behind. This time, Adele fought like a junkyard dog, remembering the self-defense classes her brother forced her to take. She jammed her elbow back at an inward angle, hitting what felt like a rib, and slammed her head backwards until she felt a nasty crunch. The arm loosened around her waist and Adele hit the ground sprinting. A lone meteor--the first one she'd seen in hours--careened through the sky, whirring up the air like a tornado. It zipped over her head, shooting through the trees, the wet branches burning white in its wake, before colliding with the road in an explosion of catering concrete and dirt. The resulting calamity swept Adele off her feet. Shielding her head was the only thing she could do, but it left the rest of her body vulnerable to the blizzarding debris and the jarring impact.
As quickly as it came, it was quiet just the same.
Adele uncovered her head and panned around the deserted freeway. Fire dotted the dark horizon, and the thick concrete had been cratered on impact, its edges thick, puckered and smoldering.
She limped a few feet in deference to her battered, spasming thigh and hip, mesmerized by the fact that the fire burned despite the rain, its flames a brilliant white.
Inevitability and curiosity won over. To escape, Adele would have to pass by the meteor and she was a scientist, after all. When she couldn't find Dean in the rain-soaked darkness, Adele jogged forward, gritting her teeth. Fear could heighten senses and Adele felt like prey, hobbling for her life through the dark as the sky fell and and the earth burned and a hunter tracked her. Every sound reverberated through her ears, crisper than anything she'd ever heard. She knew she wouldn't forget the toxic odor of burning ozone and dampness as long as she lived. For a brief instant, she was superhuman.
Out of the darkness of the shattered road arose, not the edges of a meteor but the head and shoulders of a man. The ground beneath him a shattered and cracked in the same of man, not mineral.
His blond hair was impeccably combed. He wore a trenchcoat over a dark suit. He emerged from the dimpled earth and glanced up at the heavens before his eyes locked on her.
She had maxed out on running for her life, fighting death, and now she was gobsmacked, paralyzed in horrific disbelief. The man continued to gape, appearing to be just as stricken as she felt, then he staggered back, loping away.
A wall of leather appeared in front of her.
As sharp and vivid as the world had been a second ago, now it was dim and distant, reduced to sickening hum in her ears and bile in her throat.
Dean grabbed her shoulders. His lips were moving, his voice merely an indecipherable string of white noise.
Shock, she realized, she was in shock.
Sounds clicked back in with a clap of pain across her cheek. "...don't check out on me...Adele?"
She vomited in the road-the mess extinguishing a tendril of white fire. Dean cursed and then comforted. "You're fine, doc, you're fine. Just feel the ground beneath you."
She laughed, and it sounded manic and detached. She was damn sure everything about the world had just imploded around her. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. "Why's it raining people?"
Dean scoffed, unfazed by his busted nose or the hurricane of humans. "More like trenchcoated douchebags," Dean corrected. "Let's go. We left Sam back there."
Dean tugged her by the hand back to the motel.
She let herself be dragged. "Aliens? Is this an alien thing?" Adele asked. "Is your brother one of them?"
"You're a doctor, and you're asking me if my Sammy's ET?"
"Cut me some slack here. All of those meteors are people, and your brother just went up like a Christmas tree...I-I can't help him if I don't know everything."
"You said you liked the unknown, right?"
Sam was in an unconscious heap, awkwardly slumped half-on and half-off the mattress when they straggled in, drenched and drained. Dean heaved him back in bed and untangled his spindly limbs while Adele stood in numbly in the doorway.
The seriousness of his condition managed to rid her of the numbing shock. She soon got to work, checked his injuries, abdomen and breath sounds. His fever was bonfire-hot, his vitals were alarmingly erratic, and he was exhibiting stridor, the quality of his breathing had decompensated so much his pallor was darkening from a gleaming white to a dusky gray, with a blue leeching into his lips. Dean had even swiped an oxygen tank and mask, so she put those to good use, hoping to improve Sam's oxygenation. While she worked, Dean made good on his promise to tell her everything. His gravelly voice spun an apocalyptic tale about demons and trials and a quest from God himself that seemed like the perfect YA novel Adele would dive into in the hospital breakroom. She found herself in tears through some of it, wishing, praying and raging against believing such horrors existed, but she knew with unwavering absolution that this man, this dark stranger who'd kidnapped her in an alley, but could show such compassion for his brother and even for her, was telling the truth.
Dean finally closed his mouth, turning away from her to tend to Sam. Adele wiped her face, pressed her head against the soiled mattress and prayed to an angel-less heaven. She needed the strength to continue and to find somehow to save Sam, who had sacrificed so much to save...everything.
She had to focus on the science. Whatever was hurting Sam coulbe controlled by man-made medicine, so Adele felt confident that he could be cured.
When Sam glowed, Adele remembered smelling a faint hint of ozone and felt the crackle of energy, like static, like the meteors.
Like electricity.
She gasped and groped for her stethoscope. Dean jerked, lifting his head out of his hand, but keeping Sam's limp one in firm grasp. "What?"
"I need to check something..."
"What?"
Adele ignored him, shoving the cool towels off of Sam's bar chest and replacing it with the end of the device. Holding her breath, she listened to his heartbeat, to the symphony of life.
And Sam's was dreadfully off-beat.
"What are you doing?" Dean hissed.
She ignored him, closing her eyes to focus further. A second later, she was on her feet, swatting at the duffel bag that had propped up Sam's legs. "We need to get him flat...help me, Dean."
"You know what's wrong with him?" She didn't miss the wisp of hope coupled with the tremble of fear in his voice.
"You said Sam had been struck with some sort of...energy after each...trial?"
"Yeah, whammied with white light..."
"That white light screwed with his electrical rhythms. I thought I'd heard something before but I wasn't sure and we don't have the equipment to track it, but I don't need it anymore. Whatever happened to him, when he was glowing, it exacerbated the problem, and I've seen this before. In people who'd been electrocuted. He's tachy...his heartrate is too way fast and and the beat is uneven. It's dangerous, but I can fix it."
Spurred on by answers, Dean gently removed the pillows propping up Sam's upper body, supporting his head when he laid him on the mattress. "Get his belt off...and take off his watch. Anything metal."
"How are going to fix him?"
Adele bit her lip and brandished the portable defibrillator. "I'm going to shock him back to sinus."
The color drained from Dean's face and his jaw plummeting. "No."
"This is the only way."
The grace and intensity of the monster-hunter had returned when Dean moved in front of the bed, fiercely protecting. "You're crazier than I am if you think I'm letting you near my brother with that shock box! After everything he's been through, you're not frying him like bacon! Can't you give him some medication or a shot?"
"Dean." Adele said softly. "This rhythm is throwing everything off. His heart, his breathing. Your brother is very sick...and he won't last much longer. His heart...his entire system can't take this for much longer."
"I'll take him to a real hospital then," Dean hedged.
Adele took another step forward, her eyes never leaving Dean's. "He won't last that long."
The sound Dean made, a broken angry growl crossed with a sob, would be imprinted in Adele's mind forever. But he didn't move, didn't bend until he heard the scraped whisper behind him. "...let'er do it."
A second later, Dean was hovering over his brother. "Sam, no."
A trembling hand pulled off his the mask. "...then...take me t'Crowley...let me...f-finish it." Sam said, face twisted in misery. "I can't keep fightin' this...not even f-for you."
"Sammy," Dean said, his voice tremoring and wet. He turned his head away, shoulders shaking, for a long moment. When he turned back he gently pulled off Sam's watch and then his belt.
A few minutes and one jail-broken defibrillator later, Adele was ready, using the paddles to monitor Sam's erratic heartrate that was worsening by the minute. She had to deliver the current at a precise moment between beats during the safest part of the cardiac cycle. She glanced down at Sam's wasted face and bluing lips as he rocked and arched from the effort it took to breathe and the pain of the a galloping heart. "I'm can't lie to you, Sam, this is the best chance you have, but I can't give you anything for the pain. This is going to hurt...a lot."
"Had worse." Sam whispered. His eyes softened and warmed. "...s'okay." He then turned his face his brother.
"You got this, bitch. Piece of cake, right?"
Sam tried to smile, "pie…piece o'pie."
Adele lubed the paddles, placed them on the pads and watched the tiny monitor, measuring the peaks and valleys. She was sweating and nauseous and terrified. But then Sam released a gurgled scream of pain, toes curling, the rhythm jumped and skittered, and the moment became clear. Adele depressed the buttons, heard the snap of electricity and braced for the violent fling of Sam's body.
Sam cried out, face twisted in pain. "I'm sorry, Sam. You're doing great, just hang on for me." She plied her patient with encouragement as she checked the rhythm. It was unchanged.
"I'm sorry, Sam. We have to go one more time."
Sweat pooled in the hollow of his throat and his head rolled against the mattress. His chest heaved in grating, uneven jerks like each lung was failing at a different pace. Dean nudged the oxygen mask back over his face. Adele waited.
He peeled his eyes open, hands curled into fists, bracing for the pain.
"He's ready. Go again," Dean said.
It was another tense thirty seconds of waiting before she shocked him again.
Sam's eyes rolled back in his head. The waves on the monitor arched up like a rocket and leveled off...into a pristine flatline.
"Did his heart just stop?! Sam, no!" Dean lunged for his brother, not to cradle and rock, like some loved ones did, but to curl his first and deliver a precise and practiced thump to his heart in an attempt to restart it.
Adele cranked up voltage to life-saving levels. "Clear!" He obeyed and she shocked him again.
The electric current snapped Sam's long body taut like a guitar string, his torso cresting off the mattress, muscles stretched in a corded rictus before he flopped still again. His heart wasn't beating and the last breath fizzled out of his lungs.
His chest didn't rise again.
Finality ambled over the derelict motel room like an eclipse, blotting out the light and leaving nothing but dark. Adele froze with a white-knuckled grip on the defibrillator. She could shock him again. She could inject him with adrenaline and epinephrine. With all of the medications Dean had stolen and her stubbornness, Adele could flog his body for another hour and force life back into him. She'd done it before.
Dean was crying, which seemed as improbable as her failure, but Adele didn't care. She dove for the bag, tearing open syringes with her teeth. She injected the epi into Sam's IV with trembling hands and leaped for the paddles, placing them over his pads to check the rhythm. When there wasn't one, she pounded n the charge button with impatience.
"Dean, I need to focus for me. The machine's recharging. It's going to take a few seconds, so you have to breathe for him. Come on, Dean, two breaths."
Dean didn't move, body bowed. The grief pulled ugly, feral sounds from him.
"He's not gone yet, Dean. I promise you he's not. Breathe for him right now!"
"...you can still save him?"
"I promise you, on my life, I will save your brother."
With that, Dean dipped down, sealing his mouth over Sam's and puffed in two quick breaths.
The charge was complete and Adele shocked immediately, barely waiting for Dean back away.
Before she could check for a heartbeat, the battery-operated lanterns tucked in the corners of the room began to flicker, the hastily-barred windows rattled and the stench of sulfur burned Adele's nose. Dean flew to his feet, checking the lines of salt that the raging wind displacing. With a newfound fury, he snatched all of the supplies, not the bag of weapons, but the medical supplies and threw them into the bathroom. A moment later, she was shoved out of the way, and he bodily hefted his brother over his shoulder, with no regard for the IV that tore out of his arm with a small spray of blood, and hauled into the same space.
He grabbed Adele by the collar of her scrubs and dragged her into the window-less room with a reeking, plugged toilet, murky, thick water puddling into the rub and Sam laid out on the rotting floor. He shoved her over the threshold and salted the doorway inside and out. "Something bad's comin' and I'll hold it off with everything I got, but I need you to sponsor another miracle. I need you to save my brother. If something happens to me, call Jodi Mills at the Sherriff's office. She'll take care of you."
He slammed the door before Adele could agree.
But it didn't matter. There was nothing left to do but focus on Sam. If she was going to die, she was going to do it saving a life. Bolstered by the sudden epiphany that maybe she had been meant to cross paths with these brothers, that maybe she could do something remarkably good, Adele wasn't scared anymore.
She knelt over Sam, palpating through the darkness to find his carotid. There was still no pulse, so Adele started CPR.
Her world was reduced to compressions and breaths, the knock of Sam's knuckles against the floor as she manually pumped his heart. The IV had been torn out when Dean moved Sam, and there was no light to read the medications, so Adele had to rely on her CPR and the defibrillator.
She heard terrible sounds emanating from the other side of the door: taunting nasty voices, the report of a shotgun, the thrashing of combat and eventually, terribly, Dean's screams.
After she'd shocked Sam for the fourth time, something careened against the wall, sending bits of plaster crunched into her hair.
And Sam still wasn't responding.
Her lungs sizzled breathing for Sam for her long, oily busts of color bled into her vision, and sweat soaked her scrubs. She was engaged in a battle of her own.
Everything was thunderous, from the blood rushing through her ears, to the violence just beyond the door, but she felt movement a jagged twitch of life.
Light exploded into the room, silhouetting a figure too round and short to be Dean. A stripe of light fell over its eyes that were completely and impossibly black. It attacked before Adele could scream.
There was a piercing, gutting pain, a brilliant flare of red and a crack of porcelain tile.
And then there was nothing.
Read Part 1 here
Read Part 2 here