SPN FIC: Haven
Title: Haven
Summary: Written for the following prompt by quickreaver over at ohsam: Dick has won. Leviathan have insinuated themselves into our world, and we are becoming fat, lazy cattle. But Our Boys know better, of course. There's still a decent supply of untainted canned food product -- which Dean tolerates far better than Sammy -- but Sam needs his fresh greens, which are very hard to come by. Sam's getting sick from his picky eating habits, run-down and cranky (possibly food-poisoned?), so Dean decides to locate one of a growing number of secret resistance groups trying to grow their own food. Post-apocalyptic-ish, yay!
Characters: Sam, Dean, OCs
Genre: h/c, AU, post-apocalyptic(ish)
Rating: PG-13 (language)
Disclaimer: Not my sandbox
Warnings: Uh. So. This got a little dark. Beware rampant nihilism.
Sometimes Dean wakes up before Sam. Sam sleeps a lot these days. Keebler says that’s normal and Dean thinks no it’s not because Sam has never been a heavy sleeper. Carl says a farmer’s lot is hard, especially when your crops matter so much. He says that Sam works real hard and Dean tells him not to let Sam work too hard because he’s just gotten over being sick.
Sam’s always “just gotten over being sick.”
Dean watches the breeze bat the curtains hanging in their small window and he laughs because this is the closest to domesticated he’s been since Lisa. Domesticated isn’t even the right word, but for fuck’s sake, they have blue curtains trimmed in dainty white lace hanging in their bedroom window, curtains that Sam reluctantly picked the fabric for (only because Moira said that if he didn’t pick, she’d pick for him, and she had this lovely lavender silk squirreled away) and helped sew back when he was still too weak to do much more than stare at the ceiling or sleep.. You can tell which panel is the result of Sam’s handiwork. It’s a little sloppy and ragged and he joked that “It’s kind’ve messed up that I’m more comfortable stitching skin back together, isn’t it?”
There’s maybe a hundred people here, probably fewer, and they call it “Haven,” this patch of crumbling houses along an abandoned stretch of highway. According to Keebler, the oldest man in the camp and, Dean thinks, the grouchiest (including Sam and himself) it used to be called Coal Haven.* It used to be a fairly busy place through the fifties, until the mine shut down in ’62, struggling along until the highway was rerouted, bypassing the town altogether, and giving no one any reason to go there, including the handful who still lived there.
“We all went down the mountain for most’a the things we needed anyway, once the company store closed,” Keebler said, shrugging as he placed a stethoscope against Sam’s sweat slick chest. His bedside manner left something to be desired, but he was the only doctor who had the paperwork to prove it and Moira sent her youngest boy to fetch him when Sam’s fever spiked, when he couldn’t even keep water down and his breath rattled in his chest, “Fever’s broken. He’ll sleep now. Get some water in him when he wakes up” He paused,. Where you boys from again?”
“Little bit of everywhere,” Dean said, and when Keebler frowned at the vague answer (vague answers tend to set off everyone’s bullshit meters in Haven), he said, “Kansas, originally. Sam spent some time in California. We mostly lived on the road though, you know?”
“The rest of the country this fucked up?”
Dean swallowed, “Yeah. Things are fucked all over.”
After the showdown in Chicago, things slid downhill quickly. Bobby asked them to torch the flask-eventually-and Dean spent the next week pin-balling in and out of bars in Wrigleyville while Sam tried to decipher the language on the block of clay snagged from Dick. He came up empty and they headed to the hospital in Indiana, only to find it abandoned. No Castiel. No Meg.
No one answered their summons.
No one.
And that’s when Dean noticed it, the oddly empty streets, even four-lane expressways into major cities, desolate and unused. It was like no one travelled anymore. He could walk into any motel and get a room, often for free, because the desk was either unmanned, or the attendant at the desk too absorbed in whatever drivel DickTV was airing (Fun Fact: sometime after July, ALL TV became DickTV). Lately, every channel shows some colorful test pattern, Dick Roman’s soothing voice encouraging viewers to have a seat, let his people pamper them.
He’s the President now too, by the way. He jumped into the race late in the game, shortly before both primary candidates pulled out citing a sudden “disinterest” in the position.
After that, Sam noticed the lack of online activity. News sites, message boards, even social networks all ground to a halt. Stores were empty, unlocked, and mostly undisturbed.
Dean thinks about the aimless wandering of those subsequent months, the trip back to Sioux Falls to pull his baby out of lock-up, swinging by the overgrown remnants of the salvage yard, trying to contact Sheriff Mills and getting a disconnected number. They swung by her house and found the lights on, the door unlocked, and a sluggish Mills curled on the sofa, transfixed by DickTV, shoveling handfuls of Dick’s Best brand peanuts in her mouth.
“Hey, Sheriff.” Sam sat beside her, spoke softly like she was an animal that might spook. She grinned lazily and never took her eyes away from the television.
“Heeeeeey.”
Dean leaned over and turned the television off. Only seconds later, Sheriff Mills started to scream, loudly, desperately as though she was burning alive. As soon as the television was turned back on, she stopped.
They didn't want to leave her. Dean turned the TV off again. She screamed again. He turned it back on. Sam locked the door behind them as they left.
*
There is one main drag through Haven-- the cracked main street lined with shattered storefronts and a boarded up gas station on one corner. That street is bisected by four other streets, narrower than the main line and the last one, where Moira’s place is, disintegrates to gravel as it winds further up the mountain. There’s an old gate blocking the way when it hits the steep incline, the woods, and the weed infested cemetery. Keebler says his parents are up there, his pa’s was the last funeral to take place there, “End of ‘69” he says.
You have to walk to get anywhere past the gate, through the dense woods and the traps Dean taught the farmers how to lay and how to maintain. He’s not sure what good they’ll do against a Leviathan, but they give everyone a little piece of mind and sometimes they snag a stray deer or a rabbit. Past the cemetery thicket, the crumbling tipple and a small camp of rusting coal cars, the woods start to thin out again, sunlight streaming through the gaps in the trees. The overgrown trail turns into mossy cobblestones, steps, and the burned out remains of the old mansion. “The company president used to live up there.” Keebler says, “Top notch place. Used to have a greenhouse in the back. His wife used to grow flowers, donate them to the Lutheran church at Christmastime.”
There’s still a greenhouse in the back. That’s where Dean usually finds Sam, tending the rows of beans, peppers, and tomatoes. There’s corn, potatoes, and onions, beets and melons and cucumber in the meadow further out; talk of fencing a portion off and raising cattle, though Dean’s voiced the concern at numerous meetings that a fenced off corral of domesticated cattle would look mighty suspicious in the middle of nowhere from the air. Yeah, the occasional airplane still passes overhead. Dean is certain its Roman-owned spycraft and Sam agrees but Moira wishes he wouldn’t SAY that. It scares the kids, sends them scrambling for one of the houses when they hear the engines.
Dean wants to say that’s probably for the best, but Sam always jabs an elbow in his ribs.
Sam likes it here. They were never meant to stay, only ever supposed to get Sam well, snag a few jars of pickles, beets, and beans, a few loaves of cornbread and be on their way, but Sam was sicker than they thought and the veggies would run out eventually, and Dean doesn’t know how many places like Haven exist, or whether they would be as accommodating to the strangers with a trunk full of Borax.
Truthfully, he doesn’t even know how to go about finding a place like Haven. He ran into Moira’s oldest, Brandon, entirely by accident, in the market at the bottom of the mountain, a one-stoplight town called Derwood where the lights in the houses came on at night, but no one ever left and Maraschino’s Market, the gleaming cinderblock grocery store stood ignored while bright blue vans emblazoned with Dapper Dick’s Mobile Menu parked on each street, grinning monsters unloading boxes and boxes of frozen mind control for their happy customers. He’d left Sam back at the motel, shivering under a pile of blankets, his Taurus tucked beneath the pillow. Almost a year after Chicago, and Sam was wasting away.
The problem wasn’t a lack of food. It was a lack of food that Sam could eat.
He tried. Dean watched him try. Canned vegetables were alright, tuna, applesauce. The three became Sam’s major food groups. Then Sam’s only food groups. Then the expiration dates started to run out on a good chunk of his options. Dean’s too, to be fair, but he had started out with more and had more time on his clock even as it started to wind down. He didn’t open up a can of Spam or chili and smell his skin melting from his bones.
Sam tried. Sam got sick. Sam stopped trying and he got sick anyway.
*
There are twenty-nine abandoned structures in Haven. There is the boarded up gas station with the faded Esso sign still standing on its perch. There is the small Baptist church caddy cornered to the old Lutheran church. Two blocks over is the Catholic church, windowless and covered with thick ivy. Down Main Street are several empty storefronts, the low, squat company store where most of the residents meet on the dusty floor to discuss crops and news and, more recently (and Dean and Sam both fervently hope that they haven’t made a mistake by lighting this spark) a plan of attack. There is a duo of identical red brick office buildings with shattered windows that Keebler says used to be the company offices, and a long Victorian-styled building with a partially collapsed wrap-around porch, “The clubhouse,” says Keebler, “where the single fellas stayed,” and then, pointing at a small house styled to look like it was crafted from gingerbread, “and this was Desdamona’s Den,” he chuckles, “My momma caught my daddy sneaking out that front window, oh, winter of ‘48. Threatened to beat his head in with a spoon, she did. Passed on not long after that. Cancer. Daddy never went back.”
Keebler is a crabass who chases the handful of kids that live in Haven off his weedy, overgrown lawn. He doesn’t hunt, or serve time watching the perimeter, or work out in the fields, arguing that the doctor should always been on call and he has a fucking bad knee anyway. But Dean likes him, and the other residents put up with his shit because he brews good shine in his tub and gives their kids old, hard pieces of butterscotch candy from a dusty dish in his exam room every time one of them needs a look. And he took care of Sam, camped out in their small room at Moira’s for days while Sam burned and coughed and threw up all over their sleeping bags, then the blankets she gave them, then the bare floor.
Moira’s house is like the other houses, a little bigger because it used to be the foreman’s place. The houses in Haven are mostly identical, clapboard company houses with weedy lawns and sagging porches. Four are too dilapidated to occupy at all-- one is a burned out husk, two have caved roofs, and the last one, floors so thoroughly rotted that you can see into the cellar in some spots. Four are perfectly sound, save a few broken windows, and since Dean and Sam decided to stay, Carl and Gloria, who seem to take charge of most situations, extended an offer toward them, ownership of any of the empty houses.
Sometimes Dean floats the idea past Sam, usually when they’re trying to sleep and Moira is up with her grandkid, a fussy infant who routinely wakes the whole house up with her crying. Sam always shrugs and says, “If you think we’ll be here long enough to justify it” and Dean lies, says, “I got no big plan, Sammy.”
Sam walks up to the greenhouse in the morning. He borrows moldy books from Keebler’s library and when he feels up to it, tags along on the nightly raids to Derwood, breaking into the library while everyone else stuffs their bags with food, tools, clothes, and batteries.
Sam counts how many windows have gone dark since they took up in Haven and keeps the information to himself. Dean only knows because he’s a snoop and there are only so many places in their small room that Sam can hide his journal-- one of those marbled composition books rather than the cracked leather like their fathers. He started keeping it after they found the hospital empty in Indiana and Dean only snooped because he worried that with Castiel missing, maimed, or dead, that Sam’s hallucinations would return. They haven’t, or at least, Sam isn’t mentioning them. Truth be told, Sam’s journal is boring, almost clinically detached from the world he describes. Dean remembers when Sam was a kid and would write these really thrilling adventure stories about their hunting trips. They were really great, but he stopped writing them after their stint at Truman.
Anyway, almost half of the houses in Derwood are empty now.
*
Sometimes Dean wakes up before Sam and he doesn’t pay attention to the curtains, watches Sam sleep instead. He realizes how creepy and weird that sounds, but he’s not in the habit of giving a shit anymore, that week of nights spent watching a very awake Sam tweak and flinch at an unseen tormenter in Indiana still fresh in his memory. Then, later, their first week here in Haven, when Sam slept (and cried, and writhed, and burned) and Keebler wasn’t sure he’d wake up. He’d been sick for days before that, bent over with cramps and shits and projectile vomiting after eating a bunch of hard, wormy apples plucked from some questionable looking trees along the side of the road in Ohio.
Keebler assured Dean that it wasn’t the apples alone that almost killed him (Dean had been reluctant to let Sam eat them, relented only after a hundred miles of listening to Sam’s stomach growl angrily) but rather pushed Sam’s malnourished body over the edge into critical condition. He was in bad shape the next day. They waited it out in an unoccupied motel outside Pittsburgh but Sam just got worse. They ran out of water in Derwood and Dean didn’t trust anything that came out of the tap. He draped a cold cloth over Sam’s forehead and slid his gun beneath the pillow, acutely aware that Sam was too far gone to use it if the situation called for it, but unwilling to leave him unarmed and alone while he went foraging.
Dean drove by moonlight, pulled into the small lot outside of the darkened Maraschino’s Market. There was a van parked near the door, but it wasn’t one of Dick’s, so Dean paid it little mind. The unlocked door didn’t set off any alarms. Most of these places were never formally closed. People just stopped coming to work or shop.
The empty shelves though...those were a different sight. The empty shelves made Dean’s hackles rise. Then the guns in his face, also worrisome, until his eyes adjusted and he blinked twice, hard, and asked, “Are those waterguns?”
“We got real ones too. Don’t you worry.”
“That’s a really good idea, the water guns, can’t believe we didn’t come up with that one. You packin’ Borax in those bad boys?”
To answer, one of the shadows shot him in the cheek. He reached up and wiped the soapy substance, sniffed his fingers and nodded, “Awesome. Well, since you’re carrying the right ammo and my face isn’t melting, I’m sure you know what that means. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll just grab a case of water and be out of your hair in a minute.”
“Ain’t no water here. Cleaned it out weeks ago.” The leader, dark-skinned, almost as tall as Sam, didn’t lower his water pistol.
Juice was expired at that point. Dean didn’t really want to give Sam soda, but in a pinch, maybe, “Shit,” Dean swore, “Fucking SHIT. Do you have anything? Just a jug. Even that flavored shit--.”
“Took it up to camp,” one of the others said and the tall one glared, then shot Dean a sour look.
“No water here. Try the Wal-Mart in Ebensburg.” He tossed his water gun to Dean. It was hot pink and the opaque liquid inside sloshed reassuringly. He pulled another one, neon green, from his back pocket and slid it in the front waistband of his jeans. Dean took in the giant Super Soaker slung over his shoulders, watched as he turned away and crouched to lift a pallet of egg noodles.
Dean had no idea where the fuck Ebensburg was, didn’t want to go on a scavenger hunt with Sam delirious back at the motel. He shook the pink pistol and watched the Borax foam reassuringly, then shot the tall one in the arm.
When the skin didn’t sizzle, he took a deep breath and said, “I need help. My brother is sick.”
*
If Carl and Gloria are the de facto leaders of Haven, Brandon is their second-in-command, and recently, Dean has come to realize that he is Brandon’s. Brandon is almost as tall as Sam and skinnier than a fence-post. He’s allergic to everything under the sun, which is how he managed to avoid Dick’s Best brainwashing du jour. Same with Moira. Carl and Gloria were subsistence farmers who rarely ate out and politely sent Dick’s Mobile Menu crew on their way when they offered an indefinite supply of free samples. Keebler just noticed all the weird shit happening after that Biggerson’s opened in Derwood. The others’ stories are similar. Haven is a hodgepodge of picky eaters, hippie co-op members, walking allergic reactions and people who are too observant for their own good.
Brandon drove the Impala into the camp that night, following the supply van and arguing that it was a narrow road, winding over and around a river, and it had to be driven without headlights. He floated the idea of blindfolding Dean for the drive, but took a look at Sam, who had puked in Dean’s absence, missing the waste basket entirely, and changed his mind.
Dean had to carry Sam out to the car, swathed in the scratchy motel sheets. His head bobbed bonelessly and Dean tucked it beneath his chin. The night air was cool and Sam moaned at the chill that worked its way through the sheets. Dean said, “Shh. I’m gettin’ you some help, bro. You’re gonna be ok,” and Brandon reached into a black duffel, held out a lukewarm bottle of spring water. Dean pressed the bottle against Sam’s lips, let a thin stream dribble on his tongue, watching like a hawk to make sure he swallowed without choking. It was a forty minute crawl up the narrow mountain roads to the overgrown turnoff for Coal Haven. Brandon talked about how they used to bring girls up here in high school, tell them ghost stories to scare them, then get them to take their panties off, but Dean was only half listening.
“No ghosts up here, though. It’s a good location too. You can see anything coming up the mountain before it gets here. Houses are solid. Been abandoned so long it don’t show up on any maps.” He smiled at Dean in the rearview, then frowned, “How your brother holdin’ up?”
Dean had his hand wrapped around Sam’s bony wrist since they pulled out of the motel lot. His pulse raced like a hummingbird was trapped beneath the skin. He hadn’t really been lucid since well before Dean snuck out to the market.
Dean ignored Brandon’s question and asked, “How much farther?”
“Not long.”
“And there’s food?”
A nod, “Been clearing out the stores around here for some variety, stock up on things we ain’t figured out how to make yet. We got a farmer. And his wife’s good with a rifle, keeps us in rabbit and deer, sometimes a goose or a wild turkey. Nobody’s gonna get fat in Haven, but no one’s gonna starve either.”
*
Sam still doesn’t look like much more than thin, wiry muscle and bones that didn’t know when to stop growing. Keebler told Dean that his metabolism got fucked for good when he got sick, that his heart’s weak, that he’ll get better, but he’ll never be well. He asked Keebler not to make a big deal out of it, that when he told Sam, maybe make it sound not so bad, because that’s when Dean decided to stay here and he didn’t want Sam to think it was his fault.
Sam spent the winter shivering and refusing to cop to being cold. Moira made him sleep downstairs next to the fireplace. Winter was long and gray and everyone got sick of beans, got sick of being cold, and just plain got sick. Dean spent a week huddled under his sleeping bag in January, hollered every time Sam came near him for fear of getting him sick and undoing months of care and feeding. Sam only just got strong enough to walk around at the end of the summer, and he tired easily, fell asleep at the dinner table, and was more prone to an upset stomach, even Brandon with his laundry list of allergies.
But he looks okay now, deceptively so, Dean thinks, and he thinks that’s cruel, but he doesn’t know who to blame for it. Sam’s skin is tanned to a healthy glow from all the time he spends outside and god, he’s always outside, always with soil beneath his fingernails, smelling like grass and rain and sweat. It’s late summer now, their second summer, and Dean is certain that Sam spent more time outside than inside these past few months.
Sam came down from the greenhouse with a big, dorky grin on his face and an uprooted rosebush, one of the bushes from outside the president’s mansion, Dean recalls, in a rusty wheelbarrow this morning, parking it on the cracked sidewalk and sitting on the groaning porch steps next to Dean.
“Where’s Moira?”
Dean rolls his eyes, “Where do you think?”
“Jerk.”
“Bitch. What the fuck is that?” Dean points at the bush.
“What’s it look like?”
“You’re such a suck up.”
Sam shoots Dean a sideways look and laughs as the screen door opens with a high-pitched squeal. Moira’s hair is frazzled from the humidity, sticking out as though electrified from where it escaped her bun. She has a basket of unshelled peas and a chipped blue bowl. She smiles at Sam and places the peas and the bowl on the weathered and warped surface of the porch, “And here I thought I was gonna have to shell these bad boys all by myself.”
Sam says, “Dean was just gonna sit here and watch you work? Well that’s typical.”
Dean swats him playfully and stands up, “I was actually about to go get your ass. Target practice with the other hunters.” No, not those kind of hunters, but Dean’s getting them there. He still dreams of mounting Dick Roman’s head on the Impala like a morbid hood ornament. Sam does too, Dean knows, from whispered hopes in this brave new world shared across the bare floor between their sleeping bags. But Sam’s tired, and he doesn’t want to drag these people into their messy revenge.
Dean has tried to summon Castiel exactly nine times since they settled in here, twice when Sam burned with that awful fever and once, the night Keebler gave Dean a water stained book about cardiac arrhythmia. The other six times, Dean was drunk on Keebler’s bathtub booze and sad because sometimes Sam walks up the stairs to their room and has to lean against the wall to catch his breath.
Dean’s tried Meg, and even Crowley, and the radio silence is so profound that there’s a twinge in his gut that doesn’t believe he’s being ignored, that doesn’t believe anyone heard him to begin with. One night, he asked Sam if he thought the Leviathan could invade heaven. Sam said, “I don’t know. Why?” and Dean rolled over so that Sam couldn’t look at him and know that his throat just closed up.
Still, it’s not in Dean’s nature to just lay low, plant some beans, and wait for the meat wagons to come rolling up the mountainside.
And for the record, Dean hasn’t dragged anyone into anything. He shows them how to shoot better, how to lay traps, build bombs out of Borax and whatever is laying around their dilapidated dwellings. Sometimes, when he’s pissy, Sam accuses him of trying to build an army, of being incapable of letting go. He says he’s done, and he says it so serenely, like a man who knows he’s dying.
Dean signs up for shifts patrolling the perimeter of Haven. Dean trains the others, teaches them about their current oppressors, and the other things that go bump in the night, because when Dick is dead, they’ll need a few good men (“and women,” always said with a wink) to take up the fight. He grins when the others call him by that nickname they gave him, “The General,” because he’s the man with the plan, the one who will lead them down off the mountain and into victory.
Dean has no intention of leading anybody anywhere.
Sam doesn’t want to head up to the archery range. He says he’s tired. He asks Dean if he’ll help him plant the roses when he gets back.
“We can do it now,” Dean says.
“We can do it later,” Sam absently rubs his chest, then quickly stops and smiles up at Dean, “Go assemble your avengers. I’ll be here.” Sam bites into a pea pod so crisp that Dean can hear it snap between his teeth. Dean watches Sam pop the seam on the pods, dislodging the innards with his thumb. His hands are steady. Sometimes they’re not. But today, right now, he could hit any target placed in front of him, Dean would bet money on it.
It’ll be hard, Dean thinks, going in without back-up.
He knows it’s not right, knows it would crush Sam, so he keeps letting him fall asleep to bedtime stories where Dean is the big damn hero, the man with the plan, the leader of the free world. He lets Sam think that he’s training an army for some great invasion, some grand assault on the enemy, hell, he lets the army think it too. “Every window in Alcatraz has a view of San Francisco.” Sam said, once, the one and only time he willingly told Dean about what the cage was like. Then he smiled sadly and said, “That’s from a book.”*
It’ll be hard, going in without back-up, but when Dean falls asleep to the sound of Sam’s heavy breathing, wondering if tonight will be the night that he stops breathing, or maybe it’ll be another fever that takes him away, or a freak frost will wipe out half the crops, or maybe the Leviathan will find come up the mountain one day and slaughter them all, even the poor, pitiful army that Dean pushes so hard, promises that one day they’ll get more than just a sad view from their barred windows.
The part of him that cracks under the weight of it all finds solace in the knowledge that when he goes in, he won’t be coming back out.
* This story was actually loosely adapted from an original story I wrote about people making camp in an old abandoned coal town during a zombie invasion. While Coal Haven, PA is not and was not ever a real place (as far as I know) I based it heavily on Frick's Lock, PA (cool pictures!), Livermore, PA (not far from where I grew up, creepy as fuck, and yes, the boys took us there and scared the panties off of us in high school), and Coalwood, WV of October Sky fame.
**The book is Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen.
Summary: Written for the following prompt by quickreaver over at ohsam: Dick has won. Leviathan have insinuated themselves into our world, and we are becoming fat, lazy cattle. But Our Boys know better, of course. There's still a decent supply of untainted canned food product -- which Dean tolerates far better than Sammy -- but Sam needs his fresh greens, which are very hard to come by. Sam's getting sick from his picky eating habits, run-down and cranky (possibly food-poisoned?), so Dean decides to locate one of a growing number of secret resistance groups trying to grow their own food. Post-apocalyptic-ish, yay!
Characters: Sam, Dean, OCs
Genre: h/c, AU, post-apocalyptic(ish)
Rating: PG-13 (language)
Disclaimer: Not my sandbox
Warnings: Uh. So. This got a little dark. Beware rampant nihilism.
Sometimes Dean wakes up before Sam. Sam sleeps a lot these days. Keebler says that’s normal and Dean thinks no it’s not because Sam has never been a heavy sleeper. Carl says a farmer’s lot is hard, especially when your crops matter so much. He says that Sam works real hard and Dean tells him not to let Sam work too hard because he’s just gotten over being sick.
Sam’s always “just gotten over being sick.”
Dean watches the breeze bat the curtains hanging in their small window and he laughs because this is the closest to domesticated he’s been since Lisa. Domesticated isn’t even the right word, but for fuck’s sake, they have blue curtains trimmed in dainty white lace hanging in their bedroom window, curtains that Sam reluctantly picked the fabric for (only because Moira said that if he didn’t pick, she’d pick for him, and she had this lovely lavender silk squirreled away) and helped sew back when he was still too weak to do much more than stare at the ceiling or sleep.. You can tell which panel is the result of Sam’s handiwork. It’s a little sloppy and ragged and he joked that “It’s kind’ve messed up that I’m more comfortable stitching skin back together, isn’t it?”
There’s maybe a hundred people here, probably fewer, and they call it “Haven,” this patch of crumbling houses along an abandoned stretch of highway. According to Keebler, the oldest man in the camp and, Dean thinks, the grouchiest (including Sam and himself) it used to be called Coal Haven.* It used to be a fairly busy place through the fifties, until the mine shut down in ’62, struggling along until the highway was rerouted, bypassing the town altogether, and giving no one any reason to go there, including the handful who still lived there.
“We all went down the mountain for most’a the things we needed anyway, once the company store closed,” Keebler said, shrugging as he placed a stethoscope against Sam’s sweat slick chest. His bedside manner left something to be desired, but he was the only doctor who had the paperwork to prove it and Moira sent her youngest boy to fetch him when Sam’s fever spiked, when he couldn’t even keep water down and his breath rattled in his chest, “Fever’s broken. He’ll sleep now. Get some water in him when he wakes up” He paused,. Where you boys from again?”
“Little bit of everywhere,” Dean said, and when Keebler frowned at the vague answer (vague answers tend to set off everyone’s bullshit meters in Haven), he said, “Kansas, originally. Sam spent some time in California. We mostly lived on the road though, you know?”
“The rest of the country this fucked up?”
Dean swallowed, “Yeah. Things are fucked all over.”
After the showdown in Chicago, things slid downhill quickly. Bobby asked them to torch the flask-eventually-and Dean spent the next week pin-balling in and out of bars in Wrigleyville while Sam tried to decipher the language on the block of clay snagged from Dick. He came up empty and they headed to the hospital in Indiana, only to find it abandoned. No Castiel. No Meg.
No one answered their summons.
No one.
And that’s when Dean noticed it, the oddly empty streets, even four-lane expressways into major cities, desolate and unused. It was like no one travelled anymore. He could walk into any motel and get a room, often for free, because the desk was either unmanned, or the attendant at the desk too absorbed in whatever drivel DickTV was airing (Fun Fact: sometime after July, ALL TV became DickTV). Lately, every channel shows some colorful test pattern, Dick Roman’s soothing voice encouraging viewers to have a seat, let his people pamper them.
He’s the President now too, by the way. He jumped into the race late in the game, shortly before both primary candidates pulled out citing a sudden “disinterest” in the position.
After that, Sam noticed the lack of online activity. News sites, message boards, even social networks all ground to a halt. Stores were empty, unlocked, and mostly undisturbed.
Dean thinks about the aimless wandering of those subsequent months, the trip back to Sioux Falls to pull his baby out of lock-up, swinging by the overgrown remnants of the salvage yard, trying to contact Sheriff Mills and getting a disconnected number. They swung by her house and found the lights on, the door unlocked, and a sluggish Mills curled on the sofa, transfixed by DickTV, shoveling handfuls of Dick’s Best brand peanuts in her mouth.
“Hey, Sheriff.” Sam sat beside her, spoke softly like she was an animal that might spook. She grinned lazily and never took her eyes away from the television.
“Heeeeeey.”
Dean leaned over and turned the television off. Only seconds later, Sheriff Mills started to scream, loudly, desperately as though she was burning alive. As soon as the television was turned back on, she stopped.
They didn't want to leave her. Dean turned the TV off again. She screamed again. He turned it back on. Sam locked the door behind them as they left.
*
There is one main drag through Haven-- the cracked main street lined with shattered storefronts and a boarded up gas station on one corner. That street is bisected by four other streets, narrower than the main line and the last one, where Moira’s place is, disintegrates to gravel as it winds further up the mountain. There’s an old gate blocking the way when it hits the steep incline, the woods, and the weed infested cemetery. Keebler says his parents are up there, his pa’s was the last funeral to take place there, “End of ‘69” he says.
You have to walk to get anywhere past the gate, through the dense woods and the traps Dean taught the farmers how to lay and how to maintain. He’s not sure what good they’ll do against a Leviathan, but they give everyone a little piece of mind and sometimes they snag a stray deer or a rabbit. Past the cemetery thicket, the crumbling tipple and a small camp of rusting coal cars, the woods start to thin out again, sunlight streaming through the gaps in the trees. The overgrown trail turns into mossy cobblestones, steps, and the burned out remains of the old mansion. “The company president used to live up there.” Keebler says, “Top notch place. Used to have a greenhouse in the back. His wife used to grow flowers, donate them to the Lutheran church at Christmastime.”
There’s still a greenhouse in the back. That’s where Dean usually finds Sam, tending the rows of beans, peppers, and tomatoes. There’s corn, potatoes, and onions, beets and melons and cucumber in the meadow further out; talk of fencing a portion off and raising cattle, though Dean’s voiced the concern at numerous meetings that a fenced off corral of domesticated cattle would look mighty suspicious in the middle of nowhere from the air. Yeah, the occasional airplane still passes overhead. Dean is certain its Roman-owned spycraft and Sam agrees but Moira wishes he wouldn’t SAY that. It scares the kids, sends them scrambling for one of the houses when they hear the engines.
Dean wants to say that’s probably for the best, but Sam always jabs an elbow in his ribs.
Sam likes it here. They were never meant to stay, only ever supposed to get Sam well, snag a few jars of pickles, beets, and beans, a few loaves of cornbread and be on their way, but Sam was sicker than they thought and the veggies would run out eventually, and Dean doesn’t know how many places like Haven exist, or whether they would be as accommodating to the strangers with a trunk full of Borax.
Truthfully, he doesn’t even know how to go about finding a place like Haven. He ran into Moira’s oldest, Brandon, entirely by accident, in the market at the bottom of the mountain, a one-stoplight town called Derwood where the lights in the houses came on at night, but no one ever left and Maraschino’s Market, the gleaming cinderblock grocery store stood ignored while bright blue vans emblazoned with Dapper Dick’s Mobile Menu parked on each street, grinning monsters unloading boxes and boxes of frozen mind control for their happy customers. He’d left Sam back at the motel, shivering under a pile of blankets, his Taurus tucked beneath the pillow. Almost a year after Chicago, and Sam was wasting away.
The problem wasn’t a lack of food. It was a lack of food that Sam could eat.
He tried. Dean watched him try. Canned vegetables were alright, tuna, applesauce. The three became Sam’s major food groups. Then Sam’s only food groups. Then the expiration dates started to run out on a good chunk of his options. Dean’s too, to be fair, but he had started out with more and had more time on his clock even as it started to wind down. He didn’t open up a can of Spam or chili and smell his skin melting from his bones.
Sam tried. Sam got sick. Sam stopped trying and he got sick anyway.
*
There are twenty-nine abandoned structures in Haven. There is the boarded up gas station with the faded Esso sign still standing on its perch. There is the small Baptist church caddy cornered to the old Lutheran church. Two blocks over is the Catholic church, windowless and covered with thick ivy. Down Main Street are several empty storefronts, the low, squat company store where most of the residents meet on the dusty floor to discuss crops and news and, more recently (and Dean and Sam both fervently hope that they haven’t made a mistake by lighting this spark) a plan of attack. There is a duo of identical red brick office buildings with shattered windows that Keebler says used to be the company offices, and a long Victorian-styled building with a partially collapsed wrap-around porch, “The clubhouse,” says Keebler, “where the single fellas stayed,” and then, pointing at a small house styled to look like it was crafted from gingerbread, “and this was Desdamona’s Den,” he chuckles, “My momma caught my daddy sneaking out that front window, oh, winter of ‘48. Threatened to beat his head in with a spoon, she did. Passed on not long after that. Cancer. Daddy never went back.”
Keebler is a crabass who chases the handful of kids that live in Haven off his weedy, overgrown lawn. He doesn’t hunt, or serve time watching the perimeter, or work out in the fields, arguing that the doctor should always been on call and he has a fucking bad knee anyway. But Dean likes him, and the other residents put up with his shit because he brews good shine in his tub and gives their kids old, hard pieces of butterscotch candy from a dusty dish in his exam room every time one of them needs a look. And he took care of Sam, camped out in their small room at Moira’s for days while Sam burned and coughed and threw up all over their sleeping bags, then the blankets she gave them, then the bare floor.
Moira’s house is like the other houses, a little bigger because it used to be the foreman’s place. The houses in Haven are mostly identical, clapboard company houses with weedy lawns and sagging porches. Four are too dilapidated to occupy at all-- one is a burned out husk, two have caved roofs, and the last one, floors so thoroughly rotted that you can see into the cellar in some spots. Four are perfectly sound, save a few broken windows, and since Dean and Sam decided to stay, Carl and Gloria, who seem to take charge of most situations, extended an offer toward them, ownership of any of the empty houses.
Sometimes Dean floats the idea past Sam, usually when they’re trying to sleep and Moira is up with her grandkid, a fussy infant who routinely wakes the whole house up with her crying. Sam always shrugs and says, “If you think we’ll be here long enough to justify it” and Dean lies, says, “I got no big plan, Sammy.”
Sam walks up to the greenhouse in the morning. He borrows moldy books from Keebler’s library and when he feels up to it, tags along on the nightly raids to Derwood, breaking into the library while everyone else stuffs their bags with food, tools, clothes, and batteries.
Sam counts how many windows have gone dark since they took up in Haven and keeps the information to himself. Dean only knows because he’s a snoop and there are only so many places in their small room that Sam can hide his journal-- one of those marbled composition books rather than the cracked leather like their fathers. He started keeping it after they found the hospital empty in Indiana and Dean only snooped because he worried that with Castiel missing, maimed, or dead, that Sam’s hallucinations would return. They haven’t, or at least, Sam isn’t mentioning them. Truth be told, Sam’s journal is boring, almost clinically detached from the world he describes. Dean remembers when Sam was a kid and would write these really thrilling adventure stories about their hunting trips. They were really great, but he stopped writing them after their stint at Truman.
Anyway, almost half of the houses in Derwood are empty now.
*
Sometimes Dean wakes up before Sam and he doesn’t pay attention to the curtains, watches Sam sleep instead. He realizes how creepy and weird that sounds, but he’s not in the habit of giving a shit anymore, that week of nights spent watching a very awake Sam tweak and flinch at an unseen tormenter in Indiana still fresh in his memory. Then, later, their first week here in Haven, when Sam slept (and cried, and writhed, and burned) and Keebler wasn’t sure he’d wake up. He’d been sick for days before that, bent over with cramps and shits and projectile vomiting after eating a bunch of hard, wormy apples plucked from some questionable looking trees along the side of the road in Ohio.
Keebler assured Dean that it wasn’t the apples alone that almost killed him (Dean had been reluctant to let Sam eat them, relented only after a hundred miles of listening to Sam’s stomach growl angrily) but rather pushed Sam’s malnourished body over the edge into critical condition. He was in bad shape the next day. They waited it out in an unoccupied motel outside Pittsburgh but Sam just got worse. They ran out of water in Derwood and Dean didn’t trust anything that came out of the tap. He draped a cold cloth over Sam’s forehead and slid his gun beneath the pillow, acutely aware that Sam was too far gone to use it if the situation called for it, but unwilling to leave him unarmed and alone while he went foraging.
Dean drove by moonlight, pulled into the small lot outside of the darkened Maraschino’s Market. There was a van parked near the door, but it wasn’t one of Dick’s, so Dean paid it little mind. The unlocked door didn’t set off any alarms. Most of these places were never formally closed. People just stopped coming to work or shop.
The empty shelves though...those were a different sight. The empty shelves made Dean’s hackles rise. Then the guns in his face, also worrisome, until his eyes adjusted and he blinked twice, hard, and asked, “Are those waterguns?”
“We got real ones too. Don’t you worry.”
“That’s a really good idea, the water guns, can’t believe we didn’t come up with that one. You packin’ Borax in those bad boys?”
To answer, one of the shadows shot him in the cheek. He reached up and wiped the soapy substance, sniffed his fingers and nodded, “Awesome. Well, since you’re carrying the right ammo and my face isn’t melting, I’m sure you know what that means. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll just grab a case of water and be out of your hair in a minute.”
“Ain’t no water here. Cleaned it out weeks ago.” The leader, dark-skinned, almost as tall as Sam, didn’t lower his water pistol.
Juice was expired at that point. Dean didn’t really want to give Sam soda, but in a pinch, maybe, “Shit,” Dean swore, “Fucking SHIT. Do you have anything? Just a jug. Even that flavored shit--.”
“Took it up to camp,” one of the others said and the tall one glared, then shot Dean a sour look.
“No water here. Try the Wal-Mart in Ebensburg.” He tossed his water gun to Dean. It was hot pink and the opaque liquid inside sloshed reassuringly. He pulled another one, neon green, from his back pocket and slid it in the front waistband of his jeans. Dean took in the giant Super Soaker slung over his shoulders, watched as he turned away and crouched to lift a pallet of egg noodles.
Dean had no idea where the fuck Ebensburg was, didn’t want to go on a scavenger hunt with Sam delirious back at the motel. He shook the pink pistol and watched the Borax foam reassuringly, then shot the tall one in the arm.
When the skin didn’t sizzle, he took a deep breath and said, “I need help. My brother is sick.”
*
If Carl and Gloria are the de facto leaders of Haven, Brandon is their second-in-command, and recently, Dean has come to realize that he is Brandon’s. Brandon is almost as tall as Sam and skinnier than a fence-post. He’s allergic to everything under the sun, which is how he managed to avoid Dick’s Best brainwashing du jour. Same with Moira. Carl and Gloria were subsistence farmers who rarely ate out and politely sent Dick’s Mobile Menu crew on their way when they offered an indefinite supply of free samples. Keebler just noticed all the weird shit happening after that Biggerson’s opened in Derwood. The others’ stories are similar. Haven is a hodgepodge of picky eaters, hippie co-op members, walking allergic reactions and people who are too observant for their own good.
Brandon drove the Impala into the camp that night, following the supply van and arguing that it was a narrow road, winding over and around a river, and it had to be driven without headlights. He floated the idea of blindfolding Dean for the drive, but took a look at Sam, who had puked in Dean’s absence, missing the waste basket entirely, and changed his mind.
Dean had to carry Sam out to the car, swathed in the scratchy motel sheets. His head bobbed bonelessly and Dean tucked it beneath his chin. The night air was cool and Sam moaned at the chill that worked its way through the sheets. Dean said, “Shh. I’m gettin’ you some help, bro. You’re gonna be ok,” and Brandon reached into a black duffel, held out a lukewarm bottle of spring water. Dean pressed the bottle against Sam’s lips, let a thin stream dribble on his tongue, watching like a hawk to make sure he swallowed without choking. It was a forty minute crawl up the narrow mountain roads to the overgrown turnoff for Coal Haven. Brandon talked about how they used to bring girls up here in high school, tell them ghost stories to scare them, then get them to take their panties off, but Dean was only half listening.
“No ghosts up here, though. It’s a good location too. You can see anything coming up the mountain before it gets here. Houses are solid. Been abandoned so long it don’t show up on any maps.” He smiled at Dean in the rearview, then frowned, “How your brother holdin’ up?”
Dean had his hand wrapped around Sam’s bony wrist since they pulled out of the motel lot. His pulse raced like a hummingbird was trapped beneath the skin. He hadn’t really been lucid since well before Dean snuck out to the market.
Dean ignored Brandon’s question and asked, “How much farther?”
“Not long.”
“And there’s food?”
A nod, “Been clearing out the stores around here for some variety, stock up on things we ain’t figured out how to make yet. We got a farmer. And his wife’s good with a rifle, keeps us in rabbit and deer, sometimes a goose or a wild turkey. Nobody’s gonna get fat in Haven, but no one’s gonna starve either.”
*
Sam still doesn’t look like much more than thin, wiry muscle and bones that didn’t know when to stop growing. Keebler told Dean that his metabolism got fucked for good when he got sick, that his heart’s weak, that he’ll get better, but he’ll never be well. He asked Keebler not to make a big deal out of it, that when he told Sam, maybe make it sound not so bad, because that’s when Dean decided to stay here and he didn’t want Sam to think it was his fault.
Sam spent the winter shivering and refusing to cop to being cold. Moira made him sleep downstairs next to the fireplace. Winter was long and gray and everyone got sick of beans, got sick of being cold, and just plain got sick. Dean spent a week huddled under his sleeping bag in January, hollered every time Sam came near him for fear of getting him sick and undoing months of care and feeding. Sam only just got strong enough to walk around at the end of the summer, and he tired easily, fell asleep at the dinner table, and was more prone to an upset stomach, even Brandon with his laundry list of allergies.
But he looks okay now, deceptively so, Dean thinks, and he thinks that’s cruel, but he doesn’t know who to blame for it. Sam’s skin is tanned to a healthy glow from all the time he spends outside and god, he’s always outside, always with soil beneath his fingernails, smelling like grass and rain and sweat. It’s late summer now, their second summer, and Dean is certain that Sam spent more time outside than inside these past few months.
Sam came down from the greenhouse with a big, dorky grin on his face and an uprooted rosebush, one of the bushes from outside the president’s mansion, Dean recalls, in a rusty wheelbarrow this morning, parking it on the cracked sidewalk and sitting on the groaning porch steps next to Dean.
“Where’s Moira?”
Dean rolls his eyes, “Where do you think?”
“Jerk.”
“Bitch. What the fuck is that?” Dean points at the bush.
“What’s it look like?”
“You’re such a suck up.”
Sam shoots Dean a sideways look and laughs as the screen door opens with a high-pitched squeal. Moira’s hair is frazzled from the humidity, sticking out as though electrified from where it escaped her bun. She has a basket of unshelled peas and a chipped blue bowl. She smiles at Sam and places the peas and the bowl on the weathered and warped surface of the porch, “And here I thought I was gonna have to shell these bad boys all by myself.”
Sam says, “Dean was just gonna sit here and watch you work? Well that’s typical.”
Dean swats him playfully and stands up, “I was actually about to go get your ass. Target practice with the other hunters.” No, not those kind of hunters, but Dean’s getting them there. He still dreams of mounting Dick Roman’s head on the Impala like a morbid hood ornament. Sam does too, Dean knows, from whispered hopes in this brave new world shared across the bare floor between their sleeping bags. But Sam’s tired, and he doesn’t want to drag these people into their messy revenge.
Dean has tried to summon Castiel exactly nine times since they settled in here, twice when Sam burned with that awful fever and once, the night Keebler gave Dean a water stained book about cardiac arrhythmia. The other six times, Dean was drunk on Keebler’s bathtub booze and sad because sometimes Sam walks up the stairs to their room and has to lean against the wall to catch his breath.
Dean’s tried Meg, and even Crowley, and the radio silence is so profound that there’s a twinge in his gut that doesn’t believe he’s being ignored, that doesn’t believe anyone heard him to begin with. One night, he asked Sam if he thought the Leviathan could invade heaven. Sam said, “I don’t know. Why?” and Dean rolled over so that Sam couldn’t look at him and know that his throat just closed up.
Still, it’s not in Dean’s nature to just lay low, plant some beans, and wait for the meat wagons to come rolling up the mountainside.
And for the record, Dean hasn’t dragged anyone into anything. He shows them how to shoot better, how to lay traps, build bombs out of Borax and whatever is laying around their dilapidated dwellings. Sometimes, when he’s pissy, Sam accuses him of trying to build an army, of being incapable of letting go. He says he’s done, and he says it so serenely, like a man who knows he’s dying.
Dean signs up for shifts patrolling the perimeter of Haven. Dean trains the others, teaches them about their current oppressors, and the other things that go bump in the night, because when Dick is dead, they’ll need a few good men (“and women,” always said with a wink) to take up the fight. He grins when the others call him by that nickname they gave him, “The General,” because he’s the man with the plan, the one who will lead them down off the mountain and into victory.
Dean has no intention of leading anybody anywhere.
Sam doesn’t want to head up to the archery range. He says he’s tired. He asks Dean if he’ll help him plant the roses when he gets back.
“We can do it now,” Dean says.
“We can do it later,” Sam absently rubs his chest, then quickly stops and smiles up at Dean, “Go assemble your avengers. I’ll be here.” Sam bites into a pea pod so crisp that Dean can hear it snap between his teeth. Dean watches Sam pop the seam on the pods, dislodging the innards with his thumb. His hands are steady. Sometimes they’re not. But today, right now, he could hit any target placed in front of him, Dean would bet money on it.
It’ll be hard, Dean thinks, going in without back-up.
He knows it’s not right, knows it would crush Sam, so he keeps letting him fall asleep to bedtime stories where Dean is the big damn hero, the man with the plan, the leader of the free world. He lets Sam think that he’s training an army for some great invasion, some grand assault on the enemy, hell, he lets the army think it too. “Every window in Alcatraz has a view of San Francisco.” Sam said, once, the one and only time he willingly told Dean about what the cage was like. Then he smiled sadly and said, “That’s from a book.”*
It’ll be hard, going in without back-up, but when Dean falls asleep to the sound of Sam’s heavy breathing, wondering if tonight will be the night that he stops breathing, or maybe it’ll be another fever that takes him away, or a freak frost will wipe out half the crops, or maybe the Leviathan will find come up the mountain one day and slaughter them all, even the poor, pitiful army that Dean pushes so hard, promises that one day they’ll get more than just a sad view from their barred windows.
The part of him that cracks under the weight of it all finds solace in the knowledge that when he goes in, he won’t be coming back out.
* This story was actually loosely adapted from an original story I wrote about people making camp in an old abandoned coal town during a zombie invasion. While Coal Haven, PA is not and was not ever a real place (as far as I know) I based it heavily on Frick's Lock, PA (cool pictures!), Livermore, PA (not far from where I grew up, creepy as fuck, and yes, the boys took us there and scared the panties off of us in high school), and Coalwood, WV of October Sky fame.
**The book is Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen.