Fic: We Are The Abyss
Title: We Are The Abyss
Fandom: Supernatural
Pairing: Sam/Dean
Rating: R
Word Count: 7,859
Spoilers: None
Warnings: Incest, the Apocalypse, death
Summary/Prompt: Dean never figured he'd be there for the end of the world.
AN: Written for storydivagirl for the apocalyptothon . Huge thank you to sarren for betaing this for me.
Thursday 10th April
***
It began in a small diner on the tenth of April.
Dean was dropping ketchup on the paper, eating a ridiculously large grilled sandwich over the smiling picture of one Dr Harold Barnes, the fourteenth mysterious disappearance from a Wyoming community church in the last fifty years.
Dr Harold Barnes smiled at them from page two, ketchup just missing the long length of his sensible jacket and tie.
Sam laid a hand flat on the paper and swivelled it round to read the story himself.
As it turned on the table his eye briefly caught a smaller headline on page three. A report of animal rights activists burning down a laboratory somewhere in Europe.
He didn't think anything of it at the time.
But that was where it began.
***
Thursday April 24th
***
On the twenty fourth of April they ended up seven hundred miles away.
Room 57 was, Dean suspected, exactly the same as every other room in the hotel, dull monochrome, smelling vaguely like lemon air freshener and floor polish.
The only difference was that nineteen people had skipped out of rooms on this floor without paying in the last twenty six years. Not a one of them was ever seen again, and not a one of them was ever actually seen leaving. The room was just found empty, tidied, straightened up, everything put back in its place, trash emptied. The lack of any breakages and the straightening of the room was the only reason the management assumed they'd left rather than being the victim of anything sinister.
Though Dean wasn't exactly sure what they'd suspected, theives with guilty consciences perhaps? Dean had a lot of experience with sinister, with suspect circumstances, and this felt like both to him.
"So are we more or less assuming that none of them ever left the hotel?"
"I'd say it's a pretty good guess."
"And all their stuff disappeared with them."
"As far as the reports state, nothing was ever left behind, not even dirt."
"No employees or guests reported to have died in the hotel, not even any complaints about fighting or assault, and it's only this floor, nothing in the way of disturbances- no noises, no odd smells, nothing."
"Well that's an awful lot of not helpful." Dean pulled a face. "Is there anything we do know?"
"We know that everyone that went missing was male, between twenty and forty and had no family, no girlfriend, no one to miss them, no one saw anything."
"Well then maybe one of us should check out our fellow guests."
***
The hallway was a long space, badly lit and it seemed to narrow as it continued on. Some mockery of an optical illusion that left the far end a world away. All dark doorways and dull faded white walls. The carpet, to Dean's eye, looked like someone had spilled Chinese on it and then tried to market the result.
He still walked the length of it though, getting a feel for every door. There were twenty rooms on this floor. Twenty opportunities for someone to get taken and they were only covering one, room fifty seven.
One of the doors opened and Dean stopped walking, swivelled and leant his back against a stretch of wall, unpleasantly, surprisingly damp through his shirt. He wished, briefly, that he'd never taken his jacket off.
Room 43 was lit inside, the lights creeping out onto the hallway and illuminating the take-out coloured carpet in a way that utterly failed to flatter.
A man walked out through the doorway into the light, became a collection of different tones before he was left bending outside his room, still slowly tying the laces on his sneakers.
When he'd finished he straightened and put a hand on the wall as if to steady himself. He was dishevelled inside his own clothes, and he looked two sizes too thin for his height.
Dean wondered for a fraction of a second if he wasn't not looking at a man but a thing, if whatever had been moving people from the rooms
stood there in human form, a few feet away wearing the shape and structure of a man but unfamiliar with its weight and limbs.
Dean inhaled silently and watched out of the corner of his eye while the man grumbled and fished in his pocket for cigarettes and lighter and then for keys.
He turned to lock the door behind him. And that was when Dean noticed that there was something wrong with his face; there was a faded edge to his tan but the skin didn't look healthy. Dean thought he could see dark veins underneath, running in lines up the man's cheek.
Dean nearly looked away when the man moved sharply, but he was just bringing his hand to his mouth. He coughed, a deep wet noise that rattled all the way through him, twice, three times. He pulled his hand away from his face and looked at it, then wiped it on his jeans.
It left a red smear behind.
When the man left, Dean backed up and headed back the way he'd come along the corridor.
Sam was still scowling over the top of his laptop.
"Well, I think I know where it's headed," Dean told him.
"Where?"
"Mr 43's all on his lonesome and I think he's coming down with something nasty. I'd wager he's going to make one hell of an easy target."
"He's sick."
"Oh, he's sick alright."
"You think the thing will go for him."
Dean didn't like the look of Sam's frown. It put a Sam-sized dent in his plan.
"You think he won't?"
"It depends if the sick guy is going to be ignored because he's sick, or whether he's going to be the perfect bait?"
"I vote for bait," Dean said with a nod.
"You always vote for bait."
"Well, I suppose there's only one way to find out." Dean dragged open the bag with the guns in.
***
Mr 43 came back at eleven o'clock.
"You really think it's going to take him?"
Dean shrugged.
"The way he looks, he's not going to fight too hard."
"Did you see anything else?"
"49, 51, 54 and 55 are all empty. 63 has some sort of salesman convention going on. I think the smell of polyester and cheap cologne is going to pretty much guarantee they don't get their faces eaten off."
Sam turned his laptop round.
"This is my best guess as to what's taking them, or should I say, eating them."
Sam's finger tapped the screen, and the seventeenth century wood carving it held. The creature was a fold of bony limbs and massive jaws. Pretty much half the picture was made up of teeth.
"It's called a Wrack- it's said to devour the lonely, starting with the heart."
"Handsome devil," Dean pointed out.
"The picture's exaggerated, no one's actually seen one up close. So that's the most accurate description of the creature there is. It comes in through the window, and it's fast, really fast."
"I can do fast."
"Could you at least pretend to be paying attention?"
Sam was making his earnest face, which, amusing as it was, was going to turn into his pissed off face if Dean pushed. That would be funny but not productive.
"So, do we wait in here until we get some sign that the thing's next door or do we think up some wildly unlikely story to get inside the room and wait for it in there?"
"We still don't know for certain whether it's going to go for him."
"He looks really lonely. Late night pay-per-view lonely. If I was this thing, I'd eat him."
"That's...slightly disturbing."
Dean pulled a face, nodded.
"We wait here. But at the first sign of trouble we get in the room."
***
The first sign of trouble came at twenty past one.
A shout that cut off halfway through, then the thud of a body hitting the floor, followed by a stream of tiny sounds, like rain hitting water.
Dean was out of the room half a second before Sam, down the hallway and against the front of 43.
One, two, three shoves and the wood cracked, sending them both lurching into the room.
The room was utterly dark, the weak light streaming through the cracked doorway did little but leave the carpet illuminated and give the whole room a faint glow.
Mr 43 had been in bed- Dean's eyes could pick out the shape of him among the jumble of dark sheets.
Sam took a step sideways and turns on the light.
The man was much thinner than he looked in the hallway. He was sprawled on his back in just his boxer shorts, skin stretched tightly over his bones. The black veins that marked his face trailed all the way down his throat and across his chest, what was left of his chest anyway.
There was a hole in the middle of his ribcage, bones splintering outwards. The inside was a black and red mess.
Dean was already taking a step back, already ready to put down anything which made a move in their direction.
"I don't think it finished Sam, I don't think-"
"Dean."
He looked back over his shoulder.
Sam had his gun pointed down at the left side of the bed. Dean took one last look at Mr 43's corpse, then stepped round to join him.
The creature wasn't lying in wait.
It was a crumpled mess of blue-white limbs. They'd contracted in death like a spider's. It's massive lower jaw was distended down, but it was running with fine rivulets of yellow saliva and trails of the same black fluid that covered the bed and filled the veins of Mr 43.
"Whatever this stuff is, the thing wasn't expecting it."
Sam moved sideways while Dean jabbed the fallen creature with a boot. He was almost certain that it was dead but he wasn't taking any chances.
He straightened up to find Sam leaning over the corpse on the bed, face disgusted but curious.
"Jesus, Sam, don't touch him."
"I've never seen anything like it."
"Could you get away from the flesh-eating disease."
"No, it's something in the blood."
"I don't care what it is, get your face away from it." Dean took a step and pulled Sam up by his elbow. Sam let him, moving back away from the corpse. Dean paused for a second longer, then tucked his gun back in his jeans.
"Well, this is new."
"Dean we can't leave them here like this."
"Damn right we can't. Damn it, it's so much easier when they dissolve or burn up...this hotel have an incinerator?"
"I didn't check."
"Do it now."
"Are you gonna-"
"I think they're both past doing anything to me, Sammy."
"No, I mean, just don't touch anything."
"Dude, I'm not gonna touch them."
Dean didn't look at the bodies again until Sam was out of the room.
They hadn't moved an inch but something about them was just wrong. He'd learnt to pay attention when things were wrong, only this time everything was already dead.
Real dead, not pretend dead, or fake dead, or even not-all-the-way dead.
"Awh man."
He pulled the sheet out of the end of the bed, gathered it together around Mr 43's feet and started pulling.
The body shuddered towards the edge, arms twitching.
"Gross."
***
Thursday May 1st
***
"There are more reports coming in of the virus-"
Dean switched off the TV and dumped a paper in Sam's lap.
"We're going to Wisconsin,"
"What's in Wisconsin?" Sam asked over the back of his chair.
"People are being found buried alive in their own basements."
Sam looked up; Dean knew he'd have him nailed with that one.
"In their own basements inside locked houses," he added.
Sam wavered.
"I thought we just got here?"
"Yeah, but I know how much you hate sitting around not saving the world, so get up and lets go."
***
Tuesday May 6th
***
"Dean?"
"Yeah?"
"You remember the guy at the hotel?"
"Creepy dead guy with the veins in his face?"
"Yes, creepy dead guy with the veins in his face. Apparently that's going around."
Sam swivelled his laptop round. He had three pages open but there were more, plenty more. With words like 'disease' and 'baffled' and 'possible quarantine.'
"The government's always paranoid about some sort of outbreak, if global warming isn't going to kill us the birds are."
Dean took a huge bite of his sandwich, rendering conversation impossible for as long as it took him to swallow half of it.
"What is it?"
"Some sort of blood-borne virus that rots you from the inside out."
"That's really nice," Dean said, and finished the rest of his burger; then he raised an eyebrow.
"I've been skimming through some of the stories they've been running on it, and some they haven't. Not that I understand much of it."
"Biology wasn't exactly your strong suit, huh Sammy?"
"Virology, actually."
Dean ignored him in favour of fries, lots of fries. Sam looked away until he'd at least managed to contain them inside his mouth.
"So what does this mean for us?"
Dean swallowed.
"It might be a little harder to cross states."
"What do we do now."
"Same thing we do every day."
"Try to take over the world?" Sam suggested.
Dean was surprised into laughter.
"Funny!" He stole Sam's fries too.
***
Friday May 16th
***
Going into the woods at night was never a good idea. Dean knew this by now.
Especially not when you were up against cannibals that had sold the better part of their souls for the hunting instincts of wild animals.
He had a bite mark on his shoulder to prove it. Though the man that gave it to him was still sprawled on the floor with three bullets in his chest.
So he won that one.
"Dean!"
Sam's voice, demanding, through the trees.
"Here," he called, without taking his eyes off of the corpse at his feet.
Sam found him in a crash of bushes and twigs. He burst into the clearing trailing leaves. Dean raised an eyebrow at his expression of worry, then gestured with the gun at the body on the ground.
"You got him?"
"Not before the bastard tried to take a bite out of my shoulder." Dean pulled his t-shirt aside. "I'm probably going to need shots for that."
Sam didn't look sympathetic about his hideous new wound. He sat down next to him, carefully avoiding treading on the body.
"Where's the other guy?"
"In the well," Sam said simply.
"Is he going to get out of the well?"
Sam shook his head. "Nope." Then he twisted until he could slide his phone out of his pocket, only to scowl at it.
"Still no signal?"
Sam glared at his phone and shook his head, then folded it and stuffed it back in his pocket.
"I don't like it, Bobby always either picks up or gets back to us."
"You're skittish today, what's the matter with you?"
"It's quiet," Sam said, but he was wearing that frown, the frown that said Sam was absolutely certain that something was not right, not right at all.
"Quiet how?"
"Just quiet. Seriously, do you hear any birds? Do you hear anything?"
Dean put his hand very carefully back on his gun.
"You think there's still someone out there?"
"No," Sam shook his head. "No, it's been like that for days. I can't hear anything, nothing."
"We have been crashing through these woods-"
"It's not that, it was like that when we got here. I just assumed it was these guys." Sam did poke the body with a boot then.
"What are you saying then, something else? You're saying there's something else out there?"
Sam sighed and shook his head.
"Dean, there's nothing out there."
"You're not making a lot of sense, Sam."
"It's not here," Sam sighed again, this time in frustration, and held his hands out. "It's not here now, there's just, there's something wrong- Can we get back to town?"
Dean looked at the body at his feet. It was pretty far in the woods, no one would be finding it that soon, and Sam looked...Sam looked like this wasn't going to wait.
"Sure," he said simply and brushed bark off his jeans. "Sure, let's go."
***
They got four miles before they found the first car in the road.
It was stopped at an angle, quiet and unmoving. Sam was out of the car before Dean could protest, goddamn boy scout throwing himself into anything that might be people in trouble. But Dean was a foot behind him, sliding round the car and finding the doors already open.
But the people in the car didn't need help.
They might have done once, but it was too late for them now. They were all silent and still, and cold to the touch. There were two boys in the back seat, no more than ten or twelve. They looked for all the world like they'd tumbled together and fallen asleep.
But the veins in their faces were dark and broken.
"Dean."
Sam barely got it out, he was looking ahead, through the windscreen. Over the corpses of the boys' parents. The road ahead wasn't empty, Dean could see the glint of steel, and the shine of glass on the tarmac.
They both slid back out of the car without shutting the doors, then walked further up the road, boots crazily loud.
One car became two, three, five, until it just became a jumble on the road, open doors and broken windows, and bodies, nothing but bodies. Every one filled with the same black rot, fallen against steering wheels and seats, limbs dry against upholstery warmed by the sun.
"Get back in the car," Dean said quietly, and Sam didn't say a word, he just turned round and started walking.
Dean pulled the Impala out onto the verge, drove past the trail of silent cars.
Three miles up the road they found out what held them all here.
The roadblock was completely silent, no one stepped out, no one stopped them. Dean slowed the Impala to a crawl.
The military vehicles were more than large enough to be imposing. There was even a gun mounted on the largest truck. But the canvas sides were pitted with rips and bullet holes and blackened spaces where they'd been burned.
"Dean." Sam had a better view out of the passenger window. Behind the trucks and the spiked blocks and wire there was a scatter of shapes in uniform, all on the ground. The corpses of crows lay stiffly next to them, but the soldiers had been dead for a while, their black veined faces were already pinched and dried in the sun.
"They're all dead," Sam said carefully.
"Don't get out," Dean said in a tight, hard voice. Sam hadn't even realised his hand was sliding back and forth over the door latch.
Dean didn't say anything else, he just pulled the wheel sideways and drove round both the roadblock and the bodies.
"They should have been replaced by now...unless there's a quarantine."
"You don't get quarantines like this without the whole world watching."
Sam dragged his phone out of his pocket but there was still nothing, nothing at all.
"No service?"
Sam shook his head. "No service. Dean, we need to talk to Bobby."
"I think we need to find out what the hell is going on first."
Dean turned off the road.
The first town they came to was just as quiet as the wood, streets almost deserted. The only place that was open was a small diner just off the town square. But there was the chance of a pay phone, gas, and hopefully some answers.
The place was empty, save for an exhausted-looking woman leaning on the counter.
She seemed surprised to see them.
No, she seemed surprised to see anyone.
She was also not as alone as they'd thought, there was a girl, no more than four or five attached to the folds of the woman's skirt, tiny hands fisted in the fabric. She looked for all the world like she was trying to hide there.
But when she moved to rub her nose she exposed the left side of her face and black moved under the fine skin of her face.
The woman simply stood there for a moment, before lifting a pot from the counter.
"Coffee?" She offered warily.
Dean was staring too, Sam could feel it behind him, and it didn't go unnoticed. The woman cupped the side of her daughter's head protectively, like she expected them to recoil. Like she'd experienced the stares, the fear and the accusation a thousand times.
"Coffee would be perfect, thanks," Sam said quietly.
He offered a smile, for all that was worth. But she surprised him by smiling back, by very gently uncoiling out of her rigid line of tension and nodding.
The child seemed to be made entirely of curling yellow hair and nervous eyes. The fine tree of black made her look fragile, almost alien.
Her mother petted her hair, over and over, like she could drag the infection out of her.
Sam couldn't look, there was just so much naked hopelessness it was almost unbearable. He turned his head away, pressed his mouth into a line and looked at the menu on the back wall.
Dean came to life then, stepping forward and leaning on the counter.
"Do you have a phone we could -"
"The phones don't work," she said quietly. "Not a one, they haven't worked for days."
Dean turned his head and looked at him, and Sam could read that look well enough.
"We passed a roadblock on the way here -" Sam started.
"They're dead," the woman interrupted again, though with no heat, just a quiet flat honesty. "They're all dead, the ones they replaced and the ones that replaced them. All of them."
"What happened here?" Sam asked quietly.
The woman gave them both a look, cautious and wary, as if they'd walked into something that had been going on, somethign that they were supposed to know about.
"We've been in the woods for the last two weeks."
"Hunting," Dean added quietly.
The woman's expression slid into something sadder, something sympathetic.
She reached up and turned on the television.
"It's everywhere," she said softly. "Everywhere."
It was everywhere, and it was on every channel, the words 'global pandemic' slid across the bottom of the screen but didn't sink in.
Sam was just left staring and shaking his head because things like this didn't happen, people didn't just start dying in their millions worldwide.
Dean said nothing but Sam could see tension roll back and forth across his shoulders like a living thing and there was nothing, nothing he could do. So he turned back to the screen and kept watching while people died.
The coffee went cold on the table but they paid for it anyway.
Later in the day they drove past the diner on their way out of town and the 'closed' sign hung in the window.
Sam couldn't shake the feeling that it would never say 'open' again.
***
Thursday May 22nd
***
Bobby's house was empty; it was a cold empty place with no one in it and Sam didn't know how much he was hoping to find him there, to see him there until he wasn't, and all the breath fell out of him.
Bobby's TV said the same as the one in the diner, only now it was worse, now it was burning its way across the planet.
"Dean -" his voice shook and he couldn't stop it.
"It's an epidemic," Dean said simply. "We've survived epidemics. We had the black death, and everyone thought that was the end of the world, but they were wrong."
Sam wanted to believe it, he wanted to throw off the creeping chill that had settled between his shoulder blades and accept that this was a horrible, horrible plague, but it wasn't the end of the world.
But the world outside the window smelled like death.
***
In Wichita they came across a nest of vampires that had starved to death.
The raggedly populated town they live on the outskirts of was a sea of skin shot through with black.
The herd animals were dying.
It was Dean's analogy and Sam didn't like it, but it seemed strangely appropriate.
***
Wednesday May 28th
***
Dean wasn't stupid.
He didn't miss the way every town they rolled into had less people than the one before. He didn't miss the way the shops were looted until there was nothing left and then left as glass-strewn empty shells, anything made of paper swept out into the deserted streets to gather against walls and doors and streetlights.
No one seemed to turn their TV off anymore. They just left them on to ramble endlessly. The same empty words from the same blank faces. 'Stay calm, stay indoors, don't panic.'
Most people weren't listening anymore, if they were listening to start with, and there were less people to listen anyway. No matter how many scientists they brought out they didn't do anything but pass around the words theories and progress and cure.
But the death toll was -
Jesus, the death toll was impossible, and Dean knew that they never told you the whole truth, if there was one thing he'd learned it was that it was always, always worse than you thought.
The endless drone was repeated over and over by the newsreaders.
And then the scientists stopped coming.
Then the newsreaders.
Four days later all of the channels had been reduced to static.
Dean let it play in the background while he stripped and cleaned his guns. Though for the first time he didn't know what he was supposed to kill.
He was left listening to that hiss and fuzz in the background while his mind scrambled through everyone he'd ever known, everyone they'd ever saved, laying at some roadside with their insides burned out.
Or piled up in some haphazard military grave, left to fester when there was no one left to heft bodies.
He left the TV, wandered to the table and packed everything they owned into one bag.
Sam was folded over on his arms at the table, drooling into the material of his jacket, somewhere far into sleep and looking for all the world like he needed it.
He'd collapsed in the middle of his own research by the look of it.
Dean leant over and pulled the yellow folded paper out from under Sam's hand. It was peppered with prophesies concerning the apocalypse, Armageddon, the end of days. Pictures of beasts rising from the earth. The sky full of fire and the ground covered in bodies.
Dean swallowed and very carefully slotted the paper back where it came from. His hand hovered for a moment over the mess that was Sam's hair but in the end he let it drop, took the bag to the door and set it down.
It was raining outside their motel room, a shuddering downpour that didn't care if humanity was dying around it.
He stood watching it pelt against the glass before it became too much and he returned to the couch, to the shiny collection of neatly assembled guns.
Sam moved behind him. A quick draw of breath and the slide of arms on wood.
When he saw the static playing on the TV his expression went hard in an instant. He rubbed his hands over his face, shook his head hard.
"We have to do something," Sam said and under the fury there was desperation and frustration and earnestness. Like Dean didn't know, like he hadn't been thinking about nothing else since the world went mad. That his every second wasn't now obsessed with the 'why' and the 'how' though he still didn't quite believe it was happening, even now.
"What?" Dean demanded, voice too loud and too hard.
"What is it you want me to do Sam? How exactly can we help?
"How can we stop this, how can we fight this?"
"I don't know."
Sam spread his arms. "But we must be able to, somehow, there must be some way, something -"
"This isn't demons Sam, this isn't what we know. This is nothing to do with us."
"This is everything to do with us, we're supposed to help people, we're supposed to save people, Dean."
"People, Sam, people. Not the whole damn planet! We can't do a damn thing!"
"How do you know that?" Sam said fiercely. "How do you know that for certain?"
"Have you looked outside the window?"
"Have you? Damn it Dean, will you open your eyes and look at what's going on!"
Dean had an answer to that burning in the back of his throat.
But then the whole world was plunged into darkness.
The lights were just gone.
***
Sunday June 1st
***
The power didn't come back.
Dean's protest that driving through cities would be more dangerous became a non-issue. There weren't enough people left to bother driving anywhere and anyone walking alone at night usually ended up a shape on the sidewalk by morning.
They did find something in the city though.
A pale shape in an empty playground, a face behind a fall of blonde hair. Though when they got closer they found the blonde hair trailed black lines too. Ruby's skin was half dead already.
"I thought the rats deserted when the ship was sinking," Dean said viciously.
"Funny," Ruby said flatly.
For the first time she looked cold standing among the trees, hair blowing in the wind in rough untidy lines.
Sam was torn between relief at finding her alive and horror at finding her infected. Not sure if either mattered, or even counted, appearances were nothing for demons after all.
But there were more important things.
"What is this?" He asked straight away. "What's happening?"
"I don't know." Ruby said quietly, words quick and toneless.
"Why is it -"
"I don't know!" Ruby said this time louder, a hard edge to the words. "No one knows, and that's why everything is completely fucked, no one knows anything."
"It's happening to you too," Sam said quietly. He lifted a hand and Dean took a step, arm already raised to drag him out of touching distance.
But Ruby stepped back on her own.
"This body's dying."
"Then get the hell out of it?" Dean said.
Ruby's mouth twisted into something that was sharp and unhappy.
"I can't."
"What do you mean you can't?"
"I mean I can't, this thing, whatever it is, whatever it is, it rots you from the inside. Even the parts you can't see."
Dean got it before Sam did.
"Jesus."
"What?"
"The thing's eating you, all of you?"
She scowled at Dean and for a long moment she looked unwilling to answer.
"Yes," she said finally. "But of course, I have less to lose than some." She looked at him, pointedly.
"If you leave," Sam started. "If you get out of here -"
Ruby waved an angry hand.
"You don't get it, do you, when this thing kills people it kills all of them. They just disappear. All of them, every piece. They're not filling heaven and they're not filling hell. They're just gone."
There was a long moment of silence while they both digested the impossible.
"So it is a supernatural plague?" Sam frowned, lost somewhere between shaken and horrified.
"Maybe nature just had enough of you," Ruby said tightly but something in her eyes, something in her eyes was sliding between furious and hopeless.
"Why should we believe you, why should we believe a damn word you say?"
"Dean?"
"Damn it Sam, at least admit to the possibility that she's lying."
Sam looked at Ruby, and no matter what she was or what she'd done, he believed her.
"Sam!"
And Dean hated it.
Ruby tipped her head sideways, looked at Dean like he didn't matter, like nothing mattered.
"I don't care if you believe me or not," she said quietly.
She gave Sam one last look, an expression that was strangely lost on her face and it was so far from her usual confident arrogance that Dean held on to whatever it was he was going to say.
The she turned around and walked away.
Sam didn't follow her.
They didn't see her again.
***
Corpses piled up on the streets and stayed there. Soon there weren't just piles, people fell and no one moved them, they filled the roads like bloated leaves. The insects that ate them died, and the birds and small mammals that ate the insects died.
Until all that was moving was hair and feathers in the wind.
They'd spent their whole lives protecting mankind from hell, and mankind had built their own.
"It's the end of the world," Sam said quietly.
He wanted, he desperately wanted Dean to protest.
But for the first time Dean didn't say a damn thing.
***
June 4th
***
Sam dreamt that the plague wasn't science gone wrong. He dreamt that it was the last great plan of the demons, the last great battle. The dead rose at dusk, the black rot flowing from their mouths as they stumbled across the asphalt, eyes white and dry and dead.
It was something to fight, something to strike back at, and inbetween heartbeats he'd measured out ammunition and filled bottles with gasoline and strips of cheap motel bed linen, and the walking dead were falling-
He woke up stiff and thick-headed, mouth utterly dry.
Dean was sitting by the window, staring out.
The early sun was low, spearing in and forcing Sam to shut his eyes again.
There were no shambling dead outside.
Though far along the street, came the faint sound of a woman crying like she had nothing left in the world.
***
Dean took to passing through towns without stopping. He just laid his foot down on the gas and coasted all the way through. All of them were deserted, no sluggish trail of slow small town trucks, and the sidewalks held no people. The rare living ones they did see walked slowly, directionlessly from one place to the other.
Sam was never close enough to tell if their skin was run through with black.
But no one was immune.
No one anyone had ever found.
Which made it just a matter of time.
Then few became none, it had been six days since they'd seen anyone at all, and Sam could feel terror in the back of his throat like a living thing.
"We should stop."
"There's no point," Dean said harshly. His hands slid on the wheel until it squeaked.
"We could help."
'Help who?' Dean wanted to say. Because they'd had this conversation before, this conversation and variations of it, and they all ended the same way. They all ended in shouting and impotent fury and quietly horrible unvoiced certainty that there was no one left to help.
Sam swallowed through a throat that felt too dry and rubbed his eyes. They ached underneath his thumbs, and he realised that he hadn't slept properly in days, weeks maybe. He hadn't slept properly since the world started dying.
***
Thursday June 12th
***
The next motel they came to had rooms free, but there was no one to pay, no power, just keys and broken windows and dust.
It didn't seem to matter.
Dean picked one closest to the road, then sat by the window and loaded his guns in quick angry gestures that meant nothing but kept him moving, always moving. Because sometimes he thought that if he stopped moving he'd end up dead too.
Dean hadn't ever dreamed he'd be around for the end of the world.
***
The shower worked, but the water was freezing and the pressure shot to hell. Sam didn't much care because it was close enough to normal for just a little while.
He reached up and adjusted the showerhead so it was actually spraying down rather than out in random directions. It was little better.
He reached up to tip it again -
There was a curl of black across the back of his left hand.
Sam's heart was instantly in his mouth, the black trails that had been certain to get them eventually. It had only been a matter of time. Blood turning to poison in his veins and he could hear himself breathing over the water, a rasp of trapped air that broke as he realised that this was the end, that his time was finite....what did the TV say? Four days?
He laughed, quiet and harsh and it ached all the way.
Four days and then nothing, and Dean would be left alone.
And it was that more than anything else, that last laugh from fate. Hell never got a chance to take him, and now he was going to be left here alone, after everyone else was gone.
The black slid down the back of his hand, creeping up his wrist and arm and Sam choked and shook his hand, pulse a thrum of blood and panic.
And then just as quickly it was gone.
Sliding away with the water, a stream of black/grey across his arm, gone to reveal the perfect tan of his skin underneath.
It was mould, it was a stream of mould from the showerhead and the relief was a mountain in his throat that he was forced to let loose or choke on, until he was left leaning against the shower wall, too exhausted and breathless to feel anything at all.
He couldn't stay in the shower, he stumbled his way out, dried himself until every inch of his skin hurt.
He stood in front of the tiny bathroom mirror for a while.
His skin was clean.
He dressed, though he still felt uncomfortable, so he walked straight past Dean without looking at him, without answering the half-mumbled question, threw the door open and walked far enough that he could feel the wind.
There was no one out there, no one for miles.
Maybe no one for thousands of miles.
A tiny voice in the back of Sam's head said 'maybe no one at all.'
Outside everything was quiet, and dark. Sam had never seen the whole world this dark before, the landscape just a smear of black in the distance.
He found the steps and sat down on them, stared at the empty stretch of road.
It took Dean two minutes to open the motel room door and come to sit beside him.
He'd stolen a beer from somewhere while Sam was showering and he was now holding it crookedly, foam and liquid trailing over his fingers.
"What are we supposed to do now?" Sam said quietly.
Dean didn't say anything, and he always had something to say, even if he had nothing to offer he always had something to say.
Sam looked across at him, but he was staring out into the night too.
"I have all this -" Sam made a noise in his throat until the words came out straight again. "I have all this stuff inside, but it's too late isn't it, there's nothing left to fight against, there's nothing left for us to do. And we're supposed to just accept it? Wait until we die too?"
"I don't know what you want me to say, Sam."
"I want you to say something, I want you to react, it's like we've spent this whole time building up to nothing and we haven't even tried to stop it, we haven't even-"
He kicked at the dirt angrily, watched dust flare up from the toe of his boot.
"I think we died," Sam said quietly. "I think we died and this is hell."
Dean paused in the act of lifting the bottle to his mouth, lowered it again, a shift of something going through the line of his jaw made it tighter, harder. He got up without a word, boots sliding loudly on the stone.
He slammed the door behind him.
Sam instantly felt like a complete bastard, he pushed himself off of the steps and headed back inside.
Dean was a dark sharp across the room, just a highlight in the light from the curtains.
"I'm sorry," Sam said quietly. "I didn't mean it I'm just- it's just this, it never stops."
"I know," Dean said, but there was still tension in his shoulders, still that flat tone to his voice that told Sam he'd screwed up worse than he'd thought.
"I'm sorry," he said again. "I just need to pretend that the world is still going on somewhere. I need to pretend everything isn't just gone."
Dean didn't speak for a long moment, then he dropped a hand, caught the edge of his t-shirt and pulled it up.
It dragged on the edge of his jeans, then rose higher, material shifting to reveal skin laced through with flares of black, and Sam couldn't speak, he couldn't breathe.
Because that was everything, right there, everything.
Dean let the material drop, dragged a fresh bottle out of his bag and twisted the top off.
The silence stretched out to endless, and Sam had to either break it or go mad.
"How long?" he asked quietly, and he was amazed at how flat his voice was.
"I noticed it this morning," Dean very carefully picked at the label on his beer, left it in ragged pieces on the table.
Sam shook his head.
"It was just a matter of time," Dean added, and Sam opened his mouth instantly to protest...but there was nothing.
He'd been thinking it himself for days, for weeks.
"This is it, this is all we get, ever and I can't just." Dean turned around, angrily shoving the bag across the table. "I can't just leave it, I know I should but I can't."
"What? Dean -"
"Shut up for a minute and let me do this, Sam."
Dean's hand was suddenly warm on the back of his neck, fingers dug in tight like he wanted to shake him and Sam said nothing because Dean was so taut he was almost vibrating. He twitched forward, like he wanted to move but couldn't. But he took a breath and leant in.
One hard press of forehead against forehead and Sam can hear Dean breathing, too hard against his own mouth.
"Dean?"
"Don't say no, please don't say no, just let me, just let me." Dean pressed their mouths together on an exhale, and Sam wasn't expecting it, he'd been expecting anything, anything but the soft push of lips against his own and for a second Sam was certain, absolutely certain that this was part of some plan, some thing, some confusing but necessary plan that Dean hadn't told him about.
But that wasn't true.
He knew that wasn't true.
His fingers closed round the material of Dean's sleeve, and it crumpled in his palm. A soft breath of sound in the dark and it was that sound, that harmless sound that made him take a breath.
Sam thought he was going to pull away then, he thought he was going to move back and leave this thing as just that moment, as something that was screwed up and unexpected but forgivable. There was so much they'd already forgiven each other for after all.
But he didn't pull away.
Dean's hands were cold on Sam's face, fingers edging into the weight of his hair, but not pulling, it was careful, it was need in the way Dean was holding him as tightly as he'd ever held anything in his life.
He tasted like beer, enough to make every breath heavy and hard, and he was breathing into him, making the kiss hot and open in a way it shouldn't be and for a long second in that cold, dark motel room it wasn't real.
Until Dean took that moment of uncertain stillness as something perilously close to acceptance. As permission to tighten his hand in Sam's hair and hold him there.
There was a touch of franticness to the kiss then, a flavour of desperation, slipping in inches from Dean in a way that felt like it was chasing something before he lost the chance.
And Sam still couldn't quite work out why the thing was apparently him.
Because this was Dean when he had nothing left to fight but himself.
And that was something Sam had never seen.
Had never been allowed to see.
Everything was suddenly real then, the darkness, the plague, the slow death of every living thing on the planet...and the fact that his brother was kissing him.
Like he was the only thing in the world that mattered anyway.
They'd done worse than this, they'd lived worse than this, and Sam thought that maybe this was how it ended, that this was how it should end.
Until Dean pulled away, almost viciously, and turned to the table, fists resting on the wood. He was breathing too fast, swallowing like he couldn't stop and when Sam touched him he tugged out of his grip.
Sam didn't let him go far, didn't let him go anywhere.
"You really think this is the end?" Sam asked quietly. "You really think this is the end of everything?"
Because Dean never did anything for himself. It was always other people, or for Sam, or for their father.
It was never just for him.
And now, in a shitty hotel room where they had nothing left, no world, no people, no time. This was it, this was the end of everything, forever and ever.
Sam was tall enough to lean in, tall enough to make the table creak under his hands and to press in until he could see the pulse thumping in Dean's throat, until he can lean as close as he dared, the side of his face resting against his brother's.
"Dean..." he started and his voice broke. Dean swallowed against the side of his face, took a breath like Sam might take everything, and Sam wanted to say that it didn't matter, that at the end of everything how could it matter.
Because the human race didn't deserve this, it didn't deserve to be wiped out in a few months. It deserved better, but it had its time and now no one would care. There was no one left to care, no one left to condemn
He dug his fingers in Dean's hair, twisted his head to the side until he could find the hot flare of his breath and he kissed him again.
Fandom: Supernatural
Pairing: Sam/Dean
Rating: R
Word Count: 7,859
Spoilers: None
Warnings: Incest, the Apocalypse, death
Summary/Prompt: Dean never figured he'd be there for the end of the world.
AN: Written for storydivagirl for the apocalyptothon . Huge thank you to sarren for betaing this for me.
Thursday 10th April
***
It began in a small diner on the tenth of April.
Dean was dropping ketchup on the paper, eating a ridiculously large grilled sandwich over the smiling picture of one Dr Harold Barnes, the fourteenth mysterious disappearance from a Wyoming community church in the last fifty years.
Dr Harold Barnes smiled at them from page two, ketchup just missing the long length of his sensible jacket and tie.
Sam laid a hand flat on the paper and swivelled it round to read the story himself.
As it turned on the table his eye briefly caught a smaller headline on page three. A report of animal rights activists burning down a laboratory somewhere in Europe.
He didn't think anything of it at the time.
But that was where it began.
***
Thursday April 24th
***
On the twenty fourth of April they ended up seven hundred miles away.
Room 57 was, Dean suspected, exactly the same as every other room in the hotel, dull monochrome, smelling vaguely like lemon air freshener and floor polish.
The only difference was that nineteen people had skipped out of rooms on this floor without paying in the last twenty six years. Not a one of them was ever seen again, and not a one of them was ever actually seen leaving. The room was just found empty, tidied, straightened up, everything put back in its place, trash emptied. The lack of any breakages and the straightening of the room was the only reason the management assumed they'd left rather than being the victim of anything sinister.
Though Dean wasn't exactly sure what they'd suspected, theives with guilty consciences perhaps? Dean had a lot of experience with sinister, with suspect circumstances, and this felt like both to him.
"So are we more or less assuming that none of them ever left the hotel?"
"I'd say it's a pretty good guess."
"And all their stuff disappeared with them."
"As far as the reports state, nothing was ever left behind, not even dirt."
"No employees or guests reported to have died in the hotel, not even any complaints about fighting or assault, and it's only this floor, nothing in the way of disturbances- no noises, no odd smells, nothing."
"Well that's an awful lot of not helpful." Dean pulled a face. "Is there anything we do know?"
"We know that everyone that went missing was male, between twenty and forty and had no family, no girlfriend, no one to miss them, no one saw anything."
"Well then maybe one of us should check out our fellow guests."
***
The hallway was a long space, badly lit and it seemed to narrow as it continued on. Some mockery of an optical illusion that left the far end a world away. All dark doorways and dull faded white walls. The carpet, to Dean's eye, looked like someone had spilled Chinese on it and then tried to market the result.
He still walked the length of it though, getting a feel for every door. There were twenty rooms on this floor. Twenty opportunities for someone to get taken and they were only covering one, room fifty seven.
One of the doors opened and Dean stopped walking, swivelled and leant his back against a stretch of wall, unpleasantly, surprisingly damp through his shirt. He wished, briefly, that he'd never taken his jacket off.
Room 43 was lit inside, the lights creeping out onto the hallway and illuminating the take-out coloured carpet in a way that utterly failed to flatter.
A man walked out through the doorway into the light, became a collection of different tones before he was left bending outside his room, still slowly tying the laces on his sneakers.
When he'd finished he straightened and put a hand on the wall as if to steady himself. He was dishevelled inside his own clothes, and he looked two sizes too thin for his height.
Dean wondered for a fraction of a second if he wasn't not looking at a man but a thing, if whatever had been moving people from the rooms
stood there in human form, a few feet away wearing the shape and structure of a man but unfamiliar with its weight and limbs.
Dean inhaled silently and watched out of the corner of his eye while the man grumbled and fished in his pocket for cigarettes and lighter and then for keys.
He turned to lock the door behind him. And that was when Dean noticed that there was something wrong with his face; there was a faded edge to his tan but the skin didn't look healthy. Dean thought he could see dark veins underneath, running in lines up the man's cheek.
Dean nearly looked away when the man moved sharply, but he was just bringing his hand to his mouth. He coughed, a deep wet noise that rattled all the way through him, twice, three times. He pulled his hand away from his face and looked at it, then wiped it on his jeans.
It left a red smear behind.
When the man left, Dean backed up and headed back the way he'd come along the corridor.
Sam was still scowling over the top of his laptop.
"Well, I think I know where it's headed," Dean told him.
"Where?"
"Mr 43's all on his lonesome and I think he's coming down with something nasty. I'd wager he's going to make one hell of an easy target."
"He's sick."
"Oh, he's sick alright."
"You think the thing will go for him."
Dean didn't like the look of Sam's frown. It put a Sam-sized dent in his plan.
"You think he won't?"
"It depends if the sick guy is going to be ignored because he's sick, or whether he's going to be the perfect bait?"
"I vote for bait," Dean said with a nod.
"You always vote for bait."
"Well, I suppose there's only one way to find out." Dean dragged open the bag with the guns in.
***
Mr 43 came back at eleven o'clock.
"You really think it's going to take him?"
Dean shrugged.
"The way he looks, he's not going to fight too hard."
"Did you see anything else?"
"49, 51, 54 and 55 are all empty. 63 has some sort of salesman convention going on. I think the smell of polyester and cheap cologne is going to pretty much guarantee they don't get their faces eaten off."
Sam turned his laptop round.
"This is my best guess as to what's taking them, or should I say, eating them."
Sam's finger tapped the screen, and the seventeenth century wood carving it held. The creature was a fold of bony limbs and massive jaws. Pretty much half the picture was made up of teeth.
"It's called a Wrack- it's said to devour the lonely, starting with the heart."
"Handsome devil," Dean pointed out.
"The picture's exaggerated, no one's actually seen one up close. So that's the most accurate description of the creature there is. It comes in through the window, and it's fast, really fast."
"I can do fast."
"Could you at least pretend to be paying attention?"
Sam was making his earnest face, which, amusing as it was, was going to turn into his pissed off face if Dean pushed. That would be funny but not productive.
"So, do we wait in here until we get some sign that the thing's next door or do we think up some wildly unlikely story to get inside the room and wait for it in there?"
"We still don't know for certain whether it's going to go for him."
"He looks really lonely. Late night pay-per-view lonely. If I was this thing, I'd eat him."
"That's...slightly disturbing."
Dean pulled a face, nodded.
"We wait here. But at the first sign of trouble we get in the room."
***
The first sign of trouble came at twenty past one.
A shout that cut off halfway through, then the thud of a body hitting the floor, followed by a stream of tiny sounds, like rain hitting water.
Dean was out of the room half a second before Sam, down the hallway and against the front of 43.
One, two, three shoves and the wood cracked, sending them both lurching into the room.
The room was utterly dark, the weak light streaming through the cracked doorway did little but leave the carpet illuminated and give the whole room a faint glow.
Mr 43 had been in bed- Dean's eyes could pick out the shape of him among the jumble of dark sheets.
Sam took a step sideways and turns on the light.
The man was much thinner than he looked in the hallway. He was sprawled on his back in just his boxer shorts, skin stretched tightly over his bones. The black veins that marked his face trailed all the way down his throat and across his chest, what was left of his chest anyway.
There was a hole in the middle of his ribcage, bones splintering outwards. The inside was a black and red mess.
Dean was already taking a step back, already ready to put down anything which made a move in their direction.
"I don't think it finished Sam, I don't think-"
"Dean."
He looked back over his shoulder.
Sam had his gun pointed down at the left side of the bed. Dean took one last look at Mr 43's corpse, then stepped round to join him.
The creature wasn't lying in wait.
It was a crumpled mess of blue-white limbs. They'd contracted in death like a spider's. It's massive lower jaw was distended down, but it was running with fine rivulets of yellow saliva and trails of the same black fluid that covered the bed and filled the veins of Mr 43.
"Whatever this stuff is, the thing wasn't expecting it."
Sam moved sideways while Dean jabbed the fallen creature with a boot. He was almost certain that it was dead but he wasn't taking any chances.
He straightened up to find Sam leaning over the corpse on the bed, face disgusted but curious.
"Jesus, Sam, don't touch him."
"I've never seen anything like it."
"Could you get away from the flesh-eating disease."
"No, it's something in the blood."
"I don't care what it is, get your face away from it." Dean took a step and pulled Sam up by his elbow. Sam let him, moving back away from the corpse. Dean paused for a second longer, then tucked his gun back in his jeans.
"Well, this is new."
"Dean we can't leave them here like this."
"Damn right we can't. Damn it, it's so much easier when they dissolve or burn up...this hotel have an incinerator?"
"I didn't check."
"Do it now."
"Are you gonna-"
"I think they're both past doing anything to me, Sammy."
"No, I mean, just don't touch anything."
"Dude, I'm not gonna touch them."
Dean didn't look at the bodies again until Sam was out of the room.
They hadn't moved an inch but something about them was just wrong. He'd learnt to pay attention when things were wrong, only this time everything was already dead.
Real dead, not pretend dead, or fake dead, or even not-all-the-way dead.
"Awh man."
He pulled the sheet out of the end of the bed, gathered it together around Mr 43's feet and started pulling.
The body shuddered towards the edge, arms twitching.
"Gross."
***
Thursday May 1st
***
"There are more reports coming in of the virus-"
Dean switched off the TV and dumped a paper in Sam's lap.
"We're going to Wisconsin,"
"What's in Wisconsin?" Sam asked over the back of his chair.
"People are being found buried alive in their own basements."
Sam looked up; Dean knew he'd have him nailed with that one.
"In their own basements inside locked houses," he added.
Sam wavered.
"I thought we just got here?"
"Yeah, but I know how much you hate sitting around not saving the world, so get up and lets go."
***
Tuesday May 6th
***
"Dean?"
"Yeah?"
"You remember the guy at the hotel?"
"Creepy dead guy with the veins in his face?"
"Yes, creepy dead guy with the veins in his face. Apparently that's going around."
Sam swivelled his laptop round. He had three pages open but there were more, plenty more. With words like 'disease' and 'baffled' and 'possible quarantine.'
"The government's always paranoid about some sort of outbreak, if global warming isn't going to kill us the birds are."
Dean took a huge bite of his sandwich, rendering conversation impossible for as long as it took him to swallow half of it.
"What is it?"
"Some sort of blood-borne virus that rots you from the inside out."
"That's really nice," Dean said, and finished the rest of his burger; then he raised an eyebrow.
"I've been skimming through some of the stories they've been running on it, and some they haven't. Not that I understand much of it."
"Biology wasn't exactly your strong suit, huh Sammy?"
"Virology, actually."
Dean ignored him in favour of fries, lots of fries. Sam looked away until he'd at least managed to contain them inside his mouth.
"So what does this mean for us?"
Dean swallowed.
"It might be a little harder to cross states."
"What do we do now."
"Same thing we do every day."
"Try to take over the world?" Sam suggested.
Dean was surprised into laughter.
"Funny!" He stole Sam's fries too.
***
Friday May 16th
***
Going into the woods at night was never a good idea. Dean knew this by now.
Especially not when you were up against cannibals that had sold the better part of their souls for the hunting instincts of wild animals.
He had a bite mark on his shoulder to prove it. Though the man that gave it to him was still sprawled on the floor with three bullets in his chest.
So he won that one.
"Dean!"
Sam's voice, demanding, through the trees.
"Here," he called, without taking his eyes off of the corpse at his feet.
Sam found him in a crash of bushes and twigs. He burst into the clearing trailing leaves. Dean raised an eyebrow at his expression of worry, then gestured with the gun at the body on the ground.
"You got him?"
"Not before the bastard tried to take a bite out of my shoulder." Dean pulled his t-shirt aside. "I'm probably going to need shots for that."
Sam didn't look sympathetic about his hideous new wound. He sat down next to him, carefully avoiding treading on the body.
"Where's the other guy?"
"In the well," Sam said simply.
"Is he going to get out of the well?"
Sam shook his head. "Nope." Then he twisted until he could slide his phone out of his pocket, only to scowl at it.
"Still no signal?"
Sam glared at his phone and shook his head, then folded it and stuffed it back in his pocket.
"I don't like it, Bobby always either picks up or gets back to us."
"You're skittish today, what's the matter with you?"
"It's quiet," Sam said, but he was wearing that frown, the frown that said Sam was absolutely certain that something was not right, not right at all.
"Quiet how?"
"Just quiet. Seriously, do you hear any birds? Do you hear anything?"
Dean put his hand very carefully back on his gun.
"You think there's still someone out there?"
"No," Sam shook his head. "No, it's been like that for days. I can't hear anything, nothing."
"We have been crashing through these woods-"
"It's not that, it was like that when we got here. I just assumed it was these guys." Sam did poke the body with a boot then.
"What are you saying then, something else? You're saying there's something else out there?"
Sam sighed and shook his head.
"Dean, there's nothing out there."
"You're not making a lot of sense, Sam."
"It's not here," Sam sighed again, this time in frustration, and held his hands out. "It's not here now, there's just, there's something wrong- Can we get back to town?"
Dean looked at the body at his feet. It was pretty far in the woods, no one would be finding it that soon, and Sam looked...Sam looked like this wasn't going to wait.
"Sure," he said simply and brushed bark off his jeans. "Sure, let's go."
***
They got four miles before they found the first car in the road.
It was stopped at an angle, quiet and unmoving. Sam was out of the car before Dean could protest, goddamn boy scout throwing himself into anything that might be people in trouble. But Dean was a foot behind him, sliding round the car and finding the doors already open.
But the people in the car didn't need help.
They might have done once, but it was too late for them now. They were all silent and still, and cold to the touch. There were two boys in the back seat, no more than ten or twelve. They looked for all the world like they'd tumbled together and fallen asleep.
But the veins in their faces were dark and broken.
"Dean."
Sam barely got it out, he was looking ahead, through the windscreen. Over the corpses of the boys' parents. The road ahead wasn't empty, Dean could see the glint of steel, and the shine of glass on the tarmac.
They both slid back out of the car without shutting the doors, then walked further up the road, boots crazily loud.
One car became two, three, five, until it just became a jumble on the road, open doors and broken windows, and bodies, nothing but bodies. Every one filled with the same black rot, fallen against steering wheels and seats, limbs dry against upholstery warmed by the sun.
"Get back in the car," Dean said quietly, and Sam didn't say a word, he just turned round and started walking.
Dean pulled the Impala out onto the verge, drove past the trail of silent cars.
Three miles up the road they found out what held them all here.
The roadblock was completely silent, no one stepped out, no one stopped them. Dean slowed the Impala to a crawl.
The military vehicles were more than large enough to be imposing. There was even a gun mounted on the largest truck. But the canvas sides were pitted with rips and bullet holes and blackened spaces where they'd been burned.
"Dean." Sam had a better view out of the passenger window. Behind the trucks and the spiked blocks and wire there was a scatter of shapes in uniform, all on the ground. The corpses of crows lay stiffly next to them, but the soldiers had been dead for a while, their black veined faces were already pinched and dried in the sun.
"They're all dead," Sam said carefully.
"Don't get out," Dean said in a tight, hard voice. Sam hadn't even realised his hand was sliding back and forth over the door latch.
Dean didn't say anything else, he just pulled the wheel sideways and drove round both the roadblock and the bodies.
"They should have been replaced by now...unless there's a quarantine."
"You don't get quarantines like this without the whole world watching."
Sam dragged his phone out of his pocket but there was still nothing, nothing at all.
"No service?"
Sam shook his head. "No service. Dean, we need to talk to Bobby."
"I think we need to find out what the hell is going on first."
Dean turned off the road.
The first town they came to was just as quiet as the wood, streets almost deserted. The only place that was open was a small diner just off the town square. But there was the chance of a pay phone, gas, and hopefully some answers.
The place was empty, save for an exhausted-looking woman leaning on the counter.
She seemed surprised to see them.
No, she seemed surprised to see anyone.
She was also not as alone as they'd thought, there was a girl, no more than four or five attached to the folds of the woman's skirt, tiny hands fisted in the fabric. She looked for all the world like she was trying to hide there.
But when she moved to rub her nose she exposed the left side of her face and black moved under the fine skin of her face.
The woman simply stood there for a moment, before lifting a pot from the counter.
"Coffee?" She offered warily.
Dean was staring too, Sam could feel it behind him, and it didn't go unnoticed. The woman cupped the side of her daughter's head protectively, like she expected them to recoil. Like she'd experienced the stares, the fear and the accusation a thousand times.
"Coffee would be perfect, thanks," Sam said quietly.
He offered a smile, for all that was worth. But she surprised him by smiling back, by very gently uncoiling out of her rigid line of tension and nodding.
The child seemed to be made entirely of curling yellow hair and nervous eyes. The fine tree of black made her look fragile, almost alien.
Her mother petted her hair, over and over, like she could drag the infection out of her.
Sam couldn't look, there was just so much naked hopelessness it was almost unbearable. He turned his head away, pressed his mouth into a line and looked at the menu on the back wall.
Dean came to life then, stepping forward and leaning on the counter.
"Do you have a phone we could -"
"The phones don't work," she said quietly. "Not a one, they haven't worked for days."
Dean turned his head and looked at him, and Sam could read that look well enough.
"We passed a roadblock on the way here -" Sam started.
"They're dead," the woman interrupted again, though with no heat, just a quiet flat honesty. "They're all dead, the ones they replaced and the ones that replaced them. All of them."
"What happened here?" Sam asked quietly.
The woman gave them both a look, cautious and wary, as if they'd walked into something that had been going on, somethign that they were supposed to know about.
"We've been in the woods for the last two weeks."
"Hunting," Dean added quietly.
The woman's expression slid into something sadder, something sympathetic.
She reached up and turned on the television.
"It's everywhere," she said softly. "Everywhere."
It was everywhere, and it was on every channel, the words 'global pandemic' slid across the bottom of the screen but didn't sink in.
Sam was just left staring and shaking his head because things like this didn't happen, people didn't just start dying in their millions worldwide.
Dean said nothing but Sam could see tension roll back and forth across his shoulders like a living thing and there was nothing, nothing he could do. So he turned back to the screen and kept watching while people died.
The coffee went cold on the table but they paid for it anyway.
Later in the day they drove past the diner on their way out of town and the 'closed' sign hung in the window.
Sam couldn't shake the feeling that it would never say 'open' again.
***
Thursday May 22nd
***
Bobby's house was empty; it was a cold empty place with no one in it and Sam didn't know how much he was hoping to find him there, to see him there until he wasn't, and all the breath fell out of him.
Bobby's TV said the same as the one in the diner, only now it was worse, now it was burning its way across the planet.
"Dean -" his voice shook and he couldn't stop it.
"It's an epidemic," Dean said simply. "We've survived epidemics. We had the black death, and everyone thought that was the end of the world, but they were wrong."
Sam wanted to believe it, he wanted to throw off the creeping chill that had settled between his shoulder blades and accept that this was a horrible, horrible plague, but it wasn't the end of the world.
But the world outside the window smelled like death.
***
In Wichita they came across a nest of vampires that had starved to death.
The raggedly populated town they live on the outskirts of was a sea of skin shot through with black.
The herd animals were dying.
It was Dean's analogy and Sam didn't like it, but it seemed strangely appropriate.
***
Wednesday May 28th
***
Dean wasn't stupid.
He didn't miss the way every town they rolled into had less people than the one before. He didn't miss the way the shops were looted until there was nothing left and then left as glass-strewn empty shells, anything made of paper swept out into the deserted streets to gather against walls and doors and streetlights.
No one seemed to turn their TV off anymore. They just left them on to ramble endlessly. The same empty words from the same blank faces. 'Stay calm, stay indoors, don't panic.'
Most people weren't listening anymore, if they were listening to start with, and there were less people to listen anyway. No matter how many scientists they brought out they didn't do anything but pass around the words theories and progress and cure.
But the death toll was -
Jesus, the death toll was impossible, and Dean knew that they never told you the whole truth, if there was one thing he'd learned it was that it was always, always worse than you thought.
The endless drone was repeated over and over by the newsreaders.
And then the scientists stopped coming.
Then the newsreaders.
Four days later all of the channels had been reduced to static.
Dean let it play in the background while he stripped and cleaned his guns. Though for the first time he didn't know what he was supposed to kill.
He was left listening to that hiss and fuzz in the background while his mind scrambled through everyone he'd ever known, everyone they'd ever saved, laying at some roadside with their insides burned out.
Or piled up in some haphazard military grave, left to fester when there was no one left to heft bodies.
He left the TV, wandered to the table and packed everything they owned into one bag.
Sam was folded over on his arms at the table, drooling into the material of his jacket, somewhere far into sleep and looking for all the world like he needed it.
He'd collapsed in the middle of his own research by the look of it.
Dean leant over and pulled the yellow folded paper out from under Sam's hand. It was peppered with prophesies concerning the apocalypse, Armageddon, the end of days. Pictures of beasts rising from the earth. The sky full of fire and the ground covered in bodies.
Dean swallowed and very carefully slotted the paper back where it came from. His hand hovered for a moment over the mess that was Sam's hair but in the end he let it drop, took the bag to the door and set it down.
It was raining outside their motel room, a shuddering downpour that didn't care if humanity was dying around it.
He stood watching it pelt against the glass before it became too much and he returned to the couch, to the shiny collection of neatly assembled guns.
Sam moved behind him. A quick draw of breath and the slide of arms on wood.
When he saw the static playing on the TV his expression went hard in an instant. He rubbed his hands over his face, shook his head hard.
"We have to do something," Sam said and under the fury there was desperation and frustration and earnestness. Like Dean didn't know, like he hadn't been thinking about nothing else since the world went mad. That his every second wasn't now obsessed with the 'why' and the 'how' though he still didn't quite believe it was happening, even now.
"What?" Dean demanded, voice too loud and too hard.
"What is it you want me to do Sam? How exactly can we help?
"How can we stop this, how can we fight this?"
"I don't know."
Sam spread his arms. "But we must be able to, somehow, there must be some way, something -"
"This isn't demons Sam, this isn't what we know. This is nothing to do with us."
"This is everything to do with us, we're supposed to help people, we're supposed to save people, Dean."
"People, Sam, people. Not the whole damn planet! We can't do a damn thing!"
"How do you know that?" Sam said fiercely. "How do you know that for certain?"
"Have you looked outside the window?"
"Have you? Damn it Dean, will you open your eyes and look at what's going on!"
Dean had an answer to that burning in the back of his throat.
But then the whole world was plunged into darkness.
The lights were just gone.
***
Sunday June 1st
***
The power didn't come back.
Dean's protest that driving through cities would be more dangerous became a non-issue. There weren't enough people left to bother driving anywhere and anyone walking alone at night usually ended up a shape on the sidewalk by morning.
They did find something in the city though.
A pale shape in an empty playground, a face behind a fall of blonde hair. Though when they got closer they found the blonde hair trailed black lines too. Ruby's skin was half dead already.
"I thought the rats deserted when the ship was sinking," Dean said viciously.
"Funny," Ruby said flatly.
For the first time she looked cold standing among the trees, hair blowing in the wind in rough untidy lines.
Sam was torn between relief at finding her alive and horror at finding her infected. Not sure if either mattered, or even counted, appearances were nothing for demons after all.
But there were more important things.
"What is this?" He asked straight away. "What's happening?"
"I don't know." Ruby said quietly, words quick and toneless.
"Why is it -"
"I don't know!" Ruby said this time louder, a hard edge to the words. "No one knows, and that's why everything is completely fucked, no one knows anything."
"It's happening to you too," Sam said quietly. He lifted a hand and Dean took a step, arm already raised to drag him out of touching distance.
But Ruby stepped back on her own.
"This body's dying."
"Then get the hell out of it?" Dean said.
Ruby's mouth twisted into something that was sharp and unhappy.
"I can't."
"What do you mean you can't?"
"I mean I can't, this thing, whatever it is, whatever it is, it rots you from the inside. Even the parts you can't see."
Dean got it before Sam did.
"Jesus."
"What?"
"The thing's eating you, all of you?"
She scowled at Dean and for a long moment she looked unwilling to answer.
"Yes," she said finally. "But of course, I have less to lose than some." She looked at him, pointedly.
"If you leave," Sam started. "If you get out of here -"
Ruby waved an angry hand.
"You don't get it, do you, when this thing kills people it kills all of them. They just disappear. All of them, every piece. They're not filling heaven and they're not filling hell. They're just gone."
There was a long moment of silence while they both digested the impossible.
"So it is a supernatural plague?" Sam frowned, lost somewhere between shaken and horrified.
"Maybe nature just had enough of you," Ruby said tightly but something in her eyes, something in her eyes was sliding between furious and hopeless.
"Why should we believe you, why should we believe a damn word you say?"
"Dean?"
"Damn it Sam, at least admit to the possibility that she's lying."
Sam looked at Ruby, and no matter what she was or what she'd done, he believed her.
"Sam!"
And Dean hated it.
Ruby tipped her head sideways, looked at Dean like he didn't matter, like nothing mattered.
"I don't care if you believe me or not," she said quietly.
She gave Sam one last look, an expression that was strangely lost on her face and it was so far from her usual confident arrogance that Dean held on to whatever it was he was going to say.
The she turned around and walked away.
Sam didn't follow her.
They didn't see her again.
***
Corpses piled up on the streets and stayed there. Soon there weren't just piles, people fell and no one moved them, they filled the roads like bloated leaves. The insects that ate them died, and the birds and small mammals that ate the insects died.
Until all that was moving was hair and feathers in the wind.
They'd spent their whole lives protecting mankind from hell, and mankind had built their own.
"It's the end of the world," Sam said quietly.
He wanted, he desperately wanted Dean to protest.
But for the first time Dean didn't say a damn thing.
***
June 4th
***
Sam dreamt that the plague wasn't science gone wrong. He dreamt that it was the last great plan of the demons, the last great battle. The dead rose at dusk, the black rot flowing from their mouths as they stumbled across the asphalt, eyes white and dry and dead.
It was something to fight, something to strike back at, and inbetween heartbeats he'd measured out ammunition and filled bottles with gasoline and strips of cheap motel bed linen, and the walking dead were falling-
He woke up stiff and thick-headed, mouth utterly dry.
Dean was sitting by the window, staring out.
The early sun was low, spearing in and forcing Sam to shut his eyes again.
There were no shambling dead outside.
Though far along the street, came the faint sound of a woman crying like she had nothing left in the world.
***
Dean took to passing through towns without stopping. He just laid his foot down on the gas and coasted all the way through. All of them were deserted, no sluggish trail of slow small town trucks, and the sidewalks held no people. The rare living ones they did see walked slowly, directionlessly from one place to the other.
Sam was never close enough to tell if their skin was run through with black.
But no one was immune.
No one anyone had ever found.
Which made it just a matter of time.
Then few became none, it had been six days since they'd seen anyone at all, and Sam could feel terror in the back of his throat like a living thing.
"We should stop."
"There's no point," Dean said harshly. His hands slid on the wheel until it squeaked.
"We could help."
'Help who?' Dean wanted to say. Because they'd had this conversation before, this conversation and variations of it, and they all ended the same way. They all ended in shouting and impotent fury and quietly horrible unvoiced certainty that there was no one left to help.
Sam swallowed through a throat that felt too dry and rubbed his eyes. They ached underneath his thumbs, and he realised that he hadn't slept properly in days, weeks maybe. He hadn't slept properly since the world started dying.
***
Thursday June 12th
***
The next motel they came to had rooms free, but there was no one to pay, no power, just keys and broken windows and dust.
It didn't seem to matter.
Dean picked one closest to the road, then sat by the window and loaded his guns in quick angry gestures that meant nothing but kept him moving, always moving. Because sometimes he thought that if he stopped moving he'd end up dead too.
Dean hadn't ever dreamed he'd be around for the end of the world.
***
The shower worked, but the water was freezing and the pressure shot to hell. Sam didn't much care because it was close enough to normal for just a little while.
He reached up and adjusted the showerhead so it was actually spraying down rather than out in random directions. It was little better.
He reached up to tip it again -
There was a curl of black across the back of his left hand.
Sam's heart was instantly in his mouth, the black trails that had been certain to get them eventually. It had only been a matter of time. Blood turning to poison in his veins and he could hear himself breathing over the water, a rasp of trapped air that broke as he realised that this was the end, that his time was finite....what did the TV say? Four days?
He laughed, quiet and harsh and it ached all the way.
Four days and then nothing, and Dean would be left alone.
And it was that more than anything else, that last laugh from fate. Hell never got a chance to take him, and now he was going to be left here alone, after everyone else was gone.
The black slid down the back of his hand, creeping up his wrist and arm and Sam choked and shook his hand, pulse a thrum of blood and panic.
And then just as quickly it was gone.
Sliding away with the water, a stream of black/grey across his arm, gone to reveal the perfect tan of his skin underneath.
It was mould, it was a stream of mould from the showerhead and the relief was a mountain in his throat that he was forced to let loose or choke on, until he was left leaning against the shower wall, too exhausted and breathless to feel anything at all.
He couldn't stay in the shower, he stumbled his way out, dried himself until every inch of his skin hurt.
He stood in front of the tiny bathroom mirror for a while.
His skin was clean.
He dressed, though he still felt uncomfortable, so he walked straight past Dean without looking at him, without answering the half-mumbled question, threw the door open and walked far enough that he could feel the wind.
There was no one out there, no one for miles.
Maybe no one for thousands of miles.
A tiny voice in the back of Sam's head said 'maybe no one at all.'
Outside everything was quiet, and dark. Sam had never seen the whole world this dark before, the landscape just a smear of black in the distance.
He found the steps and sat down on them, stared at the empty stretch of road.
It took Dean two minutes to open the motel room door and come to sit beside him.
He'd stolen a beer from somewhere while Sam was showering and he was now holding it crookedly, foam and liquid trailing over his fingers.
"What are we supposed to do now?" Sam said quietly.
Dean didn't say anything, and he always had something to say, even if he had nothing to offer he always had something to say.
Sam looked across at him, but he was staring out into the night too.
"I have all this -" Sam made a noise in his throat until the words came out straight again. "I have all this stuff inside, but it's too late isn't it, there's nothing left to fight against, there's nothing left for us to do. And we're supposed to just accept it? Wait until we die too?"
"I don't know what you want me to say, Sam."
"I want you to say something, I want you to react, it's like we've spent this whole time building up to nothing and we haven't even tried to stop it, we haven't even-"
He kicked at the dirt angrily, watched dust flare up from the toe of his boot.
"I think we died," Sam said quietly. "I think we died and this is hell."
Dean paused in the act of lifting the bottle to his mouth, lowered it again, a shift of something going through the line of his jaw made it tighter, harder. He got up without a word, boots sliding loudly on the stone.
He slammed the door behind him.
Sam instantly felt like a complete bastard, he pushed himself off of the steps and headed back inside.
Dean was a dark sharp across the room, just a highlight in the light from the curtains.
"I'm sorry," Sam said quietly. "I didn't mean it I'm just- it's just this, it never stops."
"I know," Dean said, but there was still tension in his shoulders, still that flat tone to his voice that told Sam he'd screwed up worse than he'd thought.
"I'm sorry," he said again. "I just need to pretend that the world is still going on somewhere. I need to pretend everything isn't just gone."
Dean didn't speak for a long moment, then he dropped a hand, caught the edge of his t-shirt and pulled it up.
It dragged on the edge of his jeans, then rose higher, material shifting to reveal skin laced through with flares of black, and Sam couldn't speak, he couldn't breathe.
Because that was everything, right there, everything.
Dean let the material drop, dragged a fresh bottle out of his bag and twisted the top off.
The silence stretched out to endless, and Sam had to either break it or go mad.
"How long?" he asked quietly, and he was amazed at how flat his voice was.
"I noticed it this morning," Dean very carefully picked at the label on his beer, left it in ragged pieces on the table.
Sam shook his head.
"It was just a matter of time," Dean added, and Sam opened his mouth instantly to protest...but there was nothing.
He'd been thinking it himself for days, for weeks.
"This is it, this is all we get, ever and I can't just." Dean turned around, angrily shoving the bag across the table. "I can't just leave it, I know I should but I can't."
"What? Dean -"
"Shut up for a minute and let me do this, Sam."
Dean's hand was suddenly warm on the back of his neck, fingers dug in tight like he wanted to shake him and Sam said nothing because Dean was so taut he was almost vibrating. He twitched forward, like he wanted to move but couldn't. But he took a breath and leant in.
One hard press of forehead against forehead and Sam can hear Dean breathing, too hard against his own mouth.
"Dean?"
"Don't say no, please don't say no, just let me, just let me." Dean pressed their mouths together on an exhale, and Sam wasn't expecting it, he'd been expecting anything, anything but the soft push of lips against his own and for a second Sam was certain, absolutely certain that this was part of some plan, some thing, some confusing but necessary plan that Dean hadn't told him about.
But that wasn't true.
He knew that wasn't true.
His fingers closed round the material of Dean's sleeve, and it crumpled in his palm. A soft breath of sound in the dark and it was that sound, that harmless sound that made him take a breath.
Sam thought he was going to pull away then, he thought he was going to move back and leave this thing as just that moment, as something that was screwed up and unexpected but forgivable. There was so much they'd already forgiven each other for after all.
But he didn't pull away.
Dean's hands were cold on Sam's face, fingers edging into the weight of his hair, but not pulling, it was careful, it was need in the way Dean was holding him as tightly as he'd ever held anything in his life.
He tasted like beer, enough to make every breath heavy and hard, and he was breathing into him, making the kiss hot and open in a way it shouldn't be and for a long second in that cold, dark motel room it wasn't real.
Until Dean took that moment of uncertain stillness as something perilously close to acceptance. As permission to tighten his hand in Sam's hair and hold him there.
There was a touch of franticness to the kiss then, a flavour of desperation, slipping in inches from Dean in a way that felt like it was chasing something before he lost the chance.
And Sam still couldn't quite work out why the thing was apparently him.
Because this was Dean when he had nothing left to fight but himself.
And that was something Sam had never seen.
Had never been allowed to see.
Everything was suddenly real then, the darkness, the plague, the slow death of every living thing on the planet...and the fact that his brother was kissing him.
Like he was the only thing in the world that mattered anyway.
They'd done worse than this, they'd lived worse than this, and Sam thought that maybe this was how it ended, that this was how it should end.
Until Dean pulled away, almost viciously, and turned to the table, fists resting on the wood. He was breathing too fast, swallowing like he couldn't stop and when Sam touched him he tugged out of his grip.
Sam didn't let him go far, didn't let him go anywhere.
"You really think this is the end?" Sam asked quietly. "You really think this is the end of everything?"
Because Dean never did anything for himself. It was always other people, or for Sam, or for their father.
It was never just for him.
And now, in a shitty hotel room where they had nothing left, no world, no people, no time. This was it, this was the end of everything, forever and ever.
Sam was tall enough to lean in, tall enough to make the table creak under his hands and to press in until he could see the pulse thumping in Dean's throat, until he can lean as close as he dared, the side of his face resting against his brother's.
"Dean..." he started and his voice broke. Dean swallowed against the side of his face, took a breath like Sam might take everything, and Sam wanted to say that it didn't matter, that at the end of everything how could it matter.
Because the human race didn't deserve this, it didn't deserve to be wiped out in a few months. It deserved better, but it had its time and now no one would care. There was no one left to care, no one left to condemn
He dug his fingers in Dean's hair, twisted his head to the side until he could find the hot flare of his breath and he kissed him again.