SPN Fic: There is no death, only a change of worlds // PG-13 // gen // follow-up
I didn't make any progress last night in my spn_j2_bigbang because I got distracted by a game. THAT I BEAT! But distracted nonetheless. So tonight. TONIGHT I MAKE PROGRESS. In the meantime, have some other fic.
OH! And, and, and! If y'all have a second can you go vote at likethegun_lims? It ends tonight and I guess there are ties. Help a comm out?
Title: There is no death, only a change of worlds
Pairing: None
Rating: PG-13
Words: 2600-ish, beta'd by mclachlan (who was also incredibly encouraging) and delphinapterus
Warnings: apocalypse aftermath, sequel to a Sam/Dean death!fic. This fic, I'd say, is actually happy.
Disclaimer: If I owned it I'd never share it. I'm greedy that way.
Summary: "What are you looking for?"
A brief smile crossed her face as she crossed the room to pull a blue jacket off the back of one of the chairs at the table. She reached into the inside pocket and pulled out what looked like a leather journal triumphantly. Jim felt something in his chest jump as he looked down at the journal in her tiny hands.
A/N: This is a follow up to I am become Death, shatterer of worlds (NC-17, Sam/Dean). That fic is the piece of writing I might be most proud of, just for following through with something that, at that time, was one of the longest single piece of writing I'd ever done and was definitely something I'd never done before. The idea for the follow up came about as I was writing the original and I've had it in the back of my mind for about a year and a half now.
This may serve as proof (and maybe relief?) that I do return to fics sometimes, for people who were curious if there was a second part to Between the truth and the search for it, I choose the second. One of these nights the follow up to that one might dive out at my head and gnaw on my brain until I write it, like this one did, lol.
The small resort town was no different than any of the others they'd passed through in recent weeks. Deserted and desolate with a stilted smell in the air. There was less snow than usual that winter, probably because it'd been too ball-numbing cold to snow more than a few spits here and there.
But there was enough to make his seven year-old daughter, Amy, sit up and pull her attention away from one of the three books she'd been re-reading over the past year, squinting out the window against the bright midday sun. She turned to him, determined, and nodded.
"Here?" he asked, skeptical.
"Stop, daddy," she said softly. He got on the CB, ripped from a rig left abandoned on the side of the road four months back, and radioed to the vehicles behind that they were stopping. No one argued.
He pulled off, into the parking lot of some tiny, kitschy diner and waited for everyone to line up beside his pickup. Amy didn't hop out until everyone was parked and he followed her, hissing lightly at the blast of cold air as he opened the truck door.
"Any reason why we stopped, Dave?" Jim, the driver of a retrofitted minivan two vehicles down, called out. Dave shook his head and waved vaguely to his daughter who was walking to the edge of the parking lot slowly, looking around.
"We'll look through the buildings for supplies," Jim's wife, Sharon, called out and signaled to the six others on their journey with them to follow. Everyone pulled a gun out of their waistband or a rifle out of their vehicle automatically and fell into a now-familiar pattern as they flanked the diner. Jim signaled silently to everyone what positions they should take and the effort went off without a hitch. They disappeared into the building quietly while Jim went to join Amy.
"What is it?" he asked as he approached.
"There's something here," she replied in the way that always made the hairs on the back of Jim's neck stand up. He reached for his own gun, strapped in a holster under his jacket but she reached up and stopped him with her hand. "Not like that."
"Amy, you're not making sense," Jim tried. She shook her head, though, and cocked her head, as if listening to something.
"There's a motel down the road. We have to go there." Jim opened his mouth to protest but she looked up at him with sure eyes. "Please."
"Just for a few minutes," he conceded, uneasy. She led the way quickly, almost skipping as she went down the road. He tried putting her hair into a ponytail that morning but it was half falling out, falling around her head messily. Jim followed a few steps behind, waiting and watching for the rustle of a bush, a snarl from behind the overgrown hedge, a fresh blood trail--even though he knew there wouldn't be any.
Everything had and hadn't turned out like the movies. It had because people turned into goddamn zombies. There was no other way to describe it. But it hadn't been at all like the movies because it was way fucking scarier. You couldn't turn the movie off and step away for a breather. The screams were too loud, the blood was too red. Blood had a smell for days after the killings ended. Jim was sure he could still smell it when he turned too quickly or in the middle of the night when he woke up, awash in sweat and reaching over for his daughter's hand to make sure she was still warm.
The movies never showed you how it ended, if it ever did. Presumably all the humans died in those movies so there was no way to know how it did end. Well Jim knew. At least he knew how this part of it ended.
The killings and reanimations ended when there were no more people left to find. The ones who survived were just goddamn lucky. There was no natural immunity, like the fucking movies sometimes showed, you just died. And then came back. But after awhile the zombies, the reanimated humans, stopped finding new people to feed on so there was nothing for them to do. They couldn't "feed", they didn't eat or drink anymore so they did nothing. They eventually slowed down because their bodies were rotting around them. From the inside out, from the outside in. Jim still wasn't sure if the smell of that was better or 10,000 times worse than the smell of thick blood. Both had their pros and cons, he supposed.
So now, a year after the beginning of it all, there was just skin and bones. Mostly bones, really. Scattered everywhere. The zombies clearly had no courtesy for the few survivors when their bodies finally decided to collapse and leave them to further rot and snap their teeth randomly until their jaws fell off.
Even now Jim could see scraps of clothing heaped atop small piles of bones with mummified bits of skin stuck to them in places. At first he was horrified, especially for Amy. She'd already been exposed to the trauma of everything that happened, he didn't want her to face the aftermath like that. He soon learned that she was either in shock, didn't see the heaps like he did, or just didn't care.
Jim continued to follow his daughter as the motel came into sight. He shook his hands to warm them up some and risked zipping his jacket up halfway against the cold. He was slowly trying to break himself of the habit of reaching for his gun at the slightest movement. He'd get someone real shot that way now. Besides, he knew, deep down, that if his daughter wasn't scared he had no reason to be either.
"There it is, daddy!" she called out happily, pointing to the once-quaint two-story motel a hundred yards away. From here Jim could see that it was charred, possibly half burned. She waited by the staircase to the second level for him as he caught up. He looked up at the second floor dubiously.
"It doesn't look safe, sweetie."
"It's okay, daddy. I promise," she assured him. He raised an eyebrow but once she started climbing the stairs he had no other choice but to follow. Once they got to the second floor Jim could see through some of the windows that the back part of the building had been partially burned away. Nothing was wobbling or crumbling away while he followed his daughter, who was counting the rooms.
"This one," she announced when she stopped outside 217.
"This one for what?" he questioned but she just stared up at him. "You're really starting to freak me out, you know that?"
"I know, daddy," she replied but didn't give in. She waited for him to try the knob. Finding it locked, he sighed and stepped back, gearing up to bust it open. It only took a couple well placed kicks to the doorknob for it to swing open. He held a hand out so she wouldn't rush ahead of him, and he pulled the gun out of his holster, cocking it before he stepped into the room carefully.
This was the room where the fire started, he saw. Even he could identify the burn pattern as it radiated from the center of the room to the back and beyond. It was no warmer in the room because the entire back wall was gone, the floor tilting down toward the back slightly.
"Too cold to burn properly?" he mused to himself as he stepped further into the room. "Be careful, honey."
She didn't reply as she walked around him to the far bed where there was a lump covered by a sheet. The sheet was stained brown red and was covered in black soot and some snow.
"Honey-"
"It's okay, daddy," she repeated. "He's gone now."
"He?"
"He didn't turn into one of them, he was stopped." She stepped back, her brow furrowed. Jim stepped forward with his gun cocked automatically but she held up a hand to stop him. She looked around the room slowly, taking in what was left of it. There were a couple of duffel bags by the door, some scattered bits of clothing here and there on the floor, remnants of canned food on the table beside a laptop that was basically useless now without internet or electricity anywhere. All very typical. He watched her as she scrutinized the room, as if trying to find what was out of place.
"What are you looking for?"
A brief smile crossed her face as she crossed the room to pull a blue jacket off the back of one of the chairs at the table. She reached into the inside pocket and pulled out what looked like a leather journal triumphantly. Jim felt something in his chest jump as he looked down at the journal in her tiny hands. He took it from her and turned it over carefully, as if there was a spider on it.
"What's this for?" he asked quietly.
"It's why we had to come here," she explained patiently. "They want us to have it."
"They?"
She went to the window and pulled back the curtain, exposing a cliff on the other side of the small ravine across from the motel. "He's up there."
"Who is?" Jim asked, feeling panic start to rise inside. Amy wasn't like other kids. She'd never been and she definitely wasn't now. He knew the other people in their traveling party followed him because he seemed sure but that his surety was all Amy. She'd never let him down so far so he trusted her to keep them all safe. Perhaps foolishly.
He exhaled shakily and stepped forward to pull the curtain from her fingers. "This has to stop."
She turned to him with serious eyes, reaching up to pull the journal out of his hands so she could hug it to her chest. "This is all we have to do, daddy. We had to come here to get this and now we have to go up there."
"Why?" Jim asked desperately.
"Please. Believe this just once, dad. Please," she begged. His palms were sweating, making the gun harder to hold, as he nodded slowly. She crossed the room back to the bed and leaned over to whisper something to the body under the sheet.
"What did you say?" Jim asked as they left the room. Jim closed the door behind him, feeling like it was the respectful thing to do.
"I said, 'I'll keep it safe for you, Dean'."
~~~
He wouldn't let them walk to the cliff unprotected and he didn't know how long it would take them to get there so they walked back to the diner to get the truck. The others had cleared the diner and were going to start on a couple of the other smaller shops down the road. Jim explained they were going to check out something quickly but they'd be back and for the group to avoid the motel as it was half burned. No one questioned Jim. No one ever questioned him.
The drive was short, once Jim found the path up the side to the top of the cliff. Amy didn't even wait for him to shut the engine off before she hopped out, journal in hand, to run across the small clearing to a black car. He threw his door open, heart in his throat, and tore after her yelling her name, gun tight in hand. Near the edge of the cliff she was standing beside a mint 1967 black Chevy Impala.
"Wow," Jim whispered.
"This was Dean's," she announced proudly. Jim reached out and ran his hand over the trunk lovingly.
"Your grampy had one of these before I was born. I only ever saw pictures but I always wanted one," Jim said, partially to himself. "I wonder-"
"No!" she said sharply. Jim jerked his hand away from the car as if burned. "This is Dean's. Besides," she said, walking to the hood and gesturing to something Jim couldn't see. "Sam's here."
"Sam? Who the hell-" Jim walked over and gasped as he saw a body on the hood. There was blood all over the windshield, a gun fallen and now likely frozen to the chest. Dead eyes seemed to stare right at them. Jim could see that he hadn't been infected when he shot himself and once he was dead the zombies left him alone, to be in peace, oddly enough.
"Amy!" Jim grabbed her and pulled her close to him, turning her head against his chest. "Why in the hell are we here?"
She wrenched away from him and stood by the car again, reaching out to touch Sam's hand. Jim yanked her away again.
"Daddy," she said quietly. "It's okay. He brought us here."
"What?" Jim whispered.
"This is Sam," Amy said, gesturing to the body. "He's Dean's brother. Daddy, he's like me."
"Like ... you?" Jim whispered. He needed to sit down. He needed a cup of coffee and hot meal. He needed to be sitting at some desk somewhere, working to pay off his monthly child support and for rent for his tiny two-bedroom crap-hole apartment. He just needed-
"You've known all along," Amy was saying slowly, patiently. "But it's fine. I'm okay with it but you need to be, too."
"I don't know if I can take this, Amy," Jim replied.
"He met mom."
"What?" Jim looked up at the body sharply.
"Before she ... before. She was coming here but they got to her, tried to make her like them. Sam talked to her. Stopped her, like he stopped Dean. That's why we're here, Daddy. I'm like him, and they gave us this." She held up the journal towards him. He accepted it carefully, then under Amy's watchful gaze he unsnapped the piece that held it together.
"What the hell?" Jim breathed as he opened the journal and started looking at the contents.
Demons, ghosts, spirits, black dogs, hoo doo, spells, Latin--the pages flipped by under his fingers as he turned them quickly. Amy watched passively, waiting to speak again.
"What do we do with this?" he asked, confused, a few minutes later.
"What we've been doing all this time. It can help us live."
"Vampires," Jim snorted, pointing to a page he'd just flipped to.
"Daddy," Amy said patiently. "If zombies are real, why can't vampires be?"
Hard to argue with that kind of logic, after all.
Jim let Amy say goodbye to Sam. She whispered something to him, too, but he didn't ask what this time. He slipped the journal into his inside jacket pocket where it weighed heavily against his chest, on the other side of his gun. When they got back to the diner the rest of the group was ready to leave and Amy nodded that it was time.
When they climbed into the truck he looked over at her. "Where to now?"
She shrugged as her messy hair fell into her eyes and Jim was reminded at once how young she really was. He laughed at her, the first real laugh he remembered having in months. She looked at him oddly, then turned her attention to her book. As the caravan of survivors left the small tourist town Jim looked in his rear view mirror as they passed the cliff and for a second he thought he saw a flash from the hood of the Impala but he blinked and it was gone.
All for the better.
OH! And, and, and! If y'all have a second can you go vote at likethegun_lims? It ends tonight and I guess there are ties. Help a comm out?
Title: There is no death, only a change of worlds
Pairing: None
Rating: PG-13
Words: 2600-ish, beta'd by mclachlan (who was also incredibly encouraging) and delphinapterus
Warnings: apocalypse aftermath, sequel to a Sam/Dean death!fic. This fic, I'd say, is actually happy.
Disclaimer: If I owned it I'd never share it. I'm greedy that way.
Summary: "What are you looking for?"
A brief smile crossed her face as she crossed the room to pull a blue jacket off the back of one of the chairs at the table. She reached into the inside pocket and pulled out what looked like a leather journal triumphantly. Jim felt something in his chest jump as he looked down at the journal in her tiny hands.
A/N: This is a follow up to I am become Death, shatterer of worlds (NC-17, Sam/Dean). That fic is the piece of writing I might be most proud of, just for following through with something that, at that time, was one of the longest single piece of writing I'd ever done and was definitely something I'd never done before. The idea for the follow up came about as I was writing the original and I've had it in the back of my mind for about a year and a half now.
This may serve as proof (and maybe relief?) that I do return to fics sometimes, for people who were curious if there was a second part to Between the truth and the search for it, I choose the second. One of these nights the follow up to that one might dive out at my head and gnaw on my brain until I write it, like this one did, lol.
The small resort town was no different than any of the others they'd passed through in recent weeks. Deserted and desolate with a stilted smell in the air. There was less snow than usual that winter, probably because it'd been too ball-numbing cold to snow more than a few spits here and there.
But there was enough to make his seven year-old daughter, Amy, sit up and pull her attention away from one of the three books she'd been re-reading over the past year, squinting out the window against the bright midday sun. She turned to him, determined, and nodded.
"Here?" he asked, skeptical.
"Stop, daddy," she said softly. He got on the CB, ripped from a rig left abandoned on the side of the road four months back, and radioed to the vehicles behind that they were stopping. No one argued.
He pulled off, into the parking lot of some tiny, kitschy diner and waited for everyone to line up beside his pickup. Amy didn't hop out until everyone was parked and he followed her, hissing lightly at the blast of cold air as he opened the truck door.
"Any reason why we stopped, Dave?" Jim, the driver of a retrofitted minivan two vehicles down, called out. Dave shook his head and waved vaguely to his daughter who was walking to the edge of the parking lot slowly, looking around.
"We'll look through the buildings for supplies," Jim's wife, Sharon, called out and signaled to the six others on their journey with them to follow. Everyone pulled a gun out of their waistband or a rifle out of their vehicle automatically and fell into a now-familiar pattern as they flanked the diner. Jim signaled silently to everyone what positions they should take and the effort went off without a hitch. They disappeared into the building quietly while Jim went to join Amy.
"What is it?" he asked as he approached.
"There's something here," she replied in the way that always made the hairs on the back of Jim's neck stand up. He reached for his own gun, strapped in a holster under his jacket but she reached up and stopped him with her hand. "Not like that."
"Amy, you're not making sense," Jim tried. She shook her head, though, and cocked her head, as if listening to something.
"There's a motel down the road. We have to go there." Jim opened his mouth to protest but she looked up at him with sure eyes. "Please."
"Just for a few minutes," he conceded, uneasy. She led the way quickly, almost skipping as she went down the road. He tried putting her hair into a ponytail that morning but it was half falling out, falling around her head messily. Jim followed a few steps behind, waiting and watching for the rustle of a bush, a snarl from behind the overgrown hedge, a fresh blood trail--even though he knew there wouldn't be any.
Everything had and hadn't turned out like the movies. It had because people turned into goddamn zombies. There was no other way to describe it. But it hadn't been at all like the movies because it was way fucking scarier. You couldn't turn the movie off and step away for a breather. The screams were too loud, the blood was too red. Blood had a smell for days after the killings ended. Jim was sure he could still smell it when he turned too quickly or in the middle of the night when he woke up, awash in sweat and reaching over for his daughter's hand to make sure she was still warm.
The movies never showed you how it ended, if it ever did. Presumably all the humans died in those movies so there was no way to know how it did end. Well Jim knew. At least he knew how this part of it ended.
The killings and reanimations ended when there were no more people left to find. The ones who survived were just goddamn lucky. There was no natural immunity, like the fucking movies sometimes showed, you just died. And then came back. But after awhile the zombies, the reanimated humans, stopped finding new people to feed on so there was nothing for them to do. They couldn't "feed", they didn't eat or drink anymore so they did nothing. They eventually slowed down because their bodies were rotting around them. From the inside out, from the outside in. Jim still wasn't sure if the smell of that was better or 10,000 times worse than the smell of thick blood. Both had their pros and cons, he supposed.
So now, a year after the beginning of it all, there was just skin and bones. Mostly bones, really. Scattered everywhere. The zombies clearly had no courtesy for the few survivors when their bodies finally decided to collapse and leave them to further rot and snap their teeth randomly until their jaws fell off.
Even now Jim could see scraps of clothing heaped atop small piles of bones with mummified bits of skin stuck to them in places. At first he was horrified, especially for Amy. She'd already been exposed to the trauma of everything that happened, he didn't want her to face the aftermath like that. He soon learned that she was either in shock, didn't see the heaps like he did, or just didn't care.
Jim continued to follow his daughter as the motel came into sight. He shook his hands to warm them up some and risked zipping his jacket up halfway against the cold. He was slowly trying to break himself of the habit of reaching for his gun at the slightest movement. He'd get someone real shot that way now. Besides, he knew, deep down, that if his daughter wasn't scared he had no reason to be either.
"There it is, daddy!" she called out happily, pointing to the once-quaint two-story motel a hundred yards away. From here Jim could see that it was charred, possibly half burned. She waited by the staircase to the second level for him as he caught up. He looked up at the second floor dubiously.
"It doesn't look safe, sweetie."
"It's okay, daddy. I promise," she assured him. He raised an eyebrow but once she started climbing the stairs he had no other choice but to follow. Once they got to the second floor Jim could see through some of the windows that the back part of the building had been partially burned away. Nothing was wobbling or crumbling away while he followed his daughter, who was counting the rooms.
"This one," she announced when she stopped outside 217.
"This one for what?" he questioned but she just stared up at him. "You're really starting to freak me out, you know that?"
"I know, daddy," she replied but didn't give in. She waited for him to try the knob. Finding it locked, he sighed and stepped back, gearing up to bust it open. It only took a couple well placed kicks to the doorknob for it to swing open. He held a hand out so she wouldn't rush ahead of him, and he pulled the gun out of his holster, cocking it before he stepped into the room carefully.
This was the room where the fire started, he saw. Even he could identify the burn pattern as it radiated from the center of the room to the back and beyond. It was no warmer in the room because the entire back wall was gone, the floor tilting down toward the back slightly.
"Too cold to burn properly?" he mused to himself as he stepped further into the room. "Be careful, honey."
She didn't reply as she walked around him to the far bed where there was a lump covered by a sheet. The sheet was stained brown red and was covered in black soot and some snow.
"Honey-"
"It's okay, daddy," she repeated. "He's gone now."
"He?"
"He didn't turn into one of them, he was stopped." She stepped back, her brow furrowed. Jim stepped forward with his gun cocked automatically but she held up a hand to stop him. She looked around the room slowly, taking in what was left of it. There were a couple of duffel bags by the door, some scattered bits of clothing here and there on the floor, remnants of canned food on the table beside a laptop that was basically useless now without internet or electricity anywhere. All very typical. He watched her as she scrutinized the room, as if trying to find what was out of place.
"What are you looking for?"
A brief smile crossed her face as she crossed the room to pull a blue jacket off the back of one of the chairs at the table. She reached into the inside pocket and pulled out what looked like a leather journal triumphantly. Jim felt something in his chest jump as he looked down at the journal in her tiny hands. He took it from her and turned it over carefully, as if there was a spider on it.
"What's this for?" he asked quietly.
"It's why we had to come here," she explained patiently. "They want us to have it."
"They?"
She went to the window and pulled back the curtain, exposing a cliff on the other side of the small ravine across from the motel. "He's up there."
"Who is?" Jim asked, feeling panic start to rise inside. Amy wasn't like other kids. She'd never been and she definitely wasn't now. He knew the other people in their traveling party followed him because he seemed sure but that his surety was all Amy. She'd never let him down so far so he trusted her to keep them all safe. Perhaps foolishly.
He exhaled shakily and stepped forward to pull the curtain from her fingers. "This has to stop."
She turned to him with serious eyes, reaching up to pull the journal out of his hands so she could hug it to her chest. "This is all we have to do, daddy. We had to come here to get this and now we have to go up there."
"Why?" Jim asked desperately.
"Please. Believe this just once, dad. Please," she begged. His palms were sweating, making the gun harder to hold, as he nodded slowly. She crossed the room back to the bed and leaned over to whisper something to the body under the sheet.
"What did you say?" Jim asked as they left the room. Jim closed the door behind him, feeling like it was the respectful thing to do.
"I said, 'I'll keep it safe for you, Dean'."
~~~
He wouldn't let them walk to the cliff unprotected and he didn't know how long it would take them to get there so they walked back to the diner to get the truck. The others had cleared the diner and were going to start on a couple of the other smaller shops down the road. Jim explained they were going to check out something quickly but they'd be back and for the group to avoid the motel as it was half burned. No one questioned Jim. No one ever questioned him.
The drive was short, once Jim found the path up the side to the top of the cliff. Amy didn't even wait for him to shut the engine off before she hopped out, journal in hand, to run across the small clearing to a black car. He threw his door open, heart in his throat, and tore after her yelling her name, gun tight in hand. Near the edge of the cliff she was standing beside a mint 1967 black Chevy Impala.
"Wow," Jim whispered.
"This was Dean's," she announced proudly. Jim reached out and ran his hand over the trunk lovingly.
"Your grampy had one of these before I was born. I only ever saw pictures but I always wanted one," Jim said, partially to himself. "I wonder-"
"No!" she said sharply. Jim jerked his hand away from the car as if burned. "This is Dean's. Besides," she said, walking to the hood and gesturing to something Jim couldn't see. "Sam's here."
"Sam? Who the hell-" Jim walked over and gasped as he saw a body on the hood. There was blood all over the windshield, a gun fallen and now likely frozen to the chest. Dead eyes seemed to stare right at them. Jim could see that he hadn't been infected when he shot himself and once he was dead the zombies left him alone, to be in peace, oddly enough.
"Amy!" Jim grabbed her and pulled her close to him, turning her head against his chest. "Why in the hell are we here?"
She wrenched away from him and stood by the car again, reaching out to touch Sam's hand. Jim yanked her away again.
"Daddy," she said quietly. "It's okay. He brought us here."
"What?" Jim whispered.
"This is Sam," Amy said, gesturing to the body. "He's Dean's brother. Daddy, he's like me."
"Like ... you?" Jim whispered. He needed to sit down. He needed a cup of coffee and hot meal. He needed to be sitting at some desk somewhere, working to pay off his monthly child support and for rent for his tiny two-bedroom crap-hole apartment. He just needed-
"You've known all along," Amy was saying slowly, patiently. "But it's fine. I'm okay with it but you need to be, too."
"I don't know if I can take this, Amy," Jim replied.
"He met mom."
"What?" Jim looked up at the body sharply.
"Before she ... before. She was coming here but they got to her, tried to make her like them. Sam talked to her. Stopped her, like he stopped Dean. That's why we're here, Daddy. I'm like him, and they gave us this." She held up the journal towards him. He accepted it carefully, then under Amy's watchful gaze he unsnapped the piece that held it together.
"What the hell?" Jim breathed as he opened the journal and started looking at the contents.
Demons, ghosts, spirits, black dogs, hoo doo, spells, Latin--the pages flipped by under his fingers as he turned them quickly. Amy watched passively, waiting to speak again.
"What do we do with this?" he asked, confused, a few minutes later.
"What we've been doing all this time. It can help us live."
"Vampires," Jim snorted, pointing to a page he'd just flipped to.
"Daddy," Amy said patiently. "If zombies are real, why can't vampires be?"
Hard to argue with that kind of logic, after all.
Jim let Amy say goodbye to Sam. She whispered something to him, too, but he didn't ask what this time. He slipped the journal into his inside jacket pocket where it weighed heavily against his chest, on the other side of his gun. When they got back to the diner the rest of the group was ready to leave and Amy nodded that it was time.
When they climbed into the truck he looked over at her. "Where to now?"
She shrugged as her messy hair fell into her eyes and Jim was reminded at once how young she really was. He laughed at her, the first real laugh he remembered having in months. She looked at him oddly, then turned her attention to her book. As the caravan of survivors left the small tourist town Jim looked in his rear view mirror as they passed the cliff and for a second he thought he saw a flash from the hood of the Impala but he blinked and it was gone.
All for the better.