Writing on the Wall (2/2)
Part I
The streets were all but deserted, which was a blessing. There were no people, not anymore: they'd all been evacuated long before. At least, those who'd managed to escape. The only occupants of the streets these days were zombies and their victims, some of them too decayed to keep moving, or torn apart by the others and scattered about like carrion. The town wasn't that large, and although Dean desperately wanted to avoid the more densely populated downtown area, that went directly against his plan of taking the most straightforward route to the safe house. He hustled them along as quickly as they could manage, especially Sheila, who wasn't exactly the gym bunny type. She wasn't in terrible shape or anything, but she was a little overweight, more accustomed to pushing a cart around a grocery store and wrangling small children than to running long distances in the hopes of escaping flesh-eating monsters. Sam, too, was beginning to lag ever so slightly, favouring his injured leg, though right now it was subtle enough that only Dean knew to look for it.
Danny was turning out to be an unexpectedly competent ally. He'd figured out how to use a gun when he had to, and turned out to be more than a decent shot, to hear him speak of it. He was also pretty cheerful, when he wasn't being slammed up against walls by Dean's younger brother. He'd easily forgiven Sam for the earlier scuffle.
“Desperate times, right?” he'd said, dismissing Sam's more earnest apologies, when they became forthcoming. “Don't sweat it.”
Sheila had pulled her hands into the sleeves of her denim jacket, the night turning cool. “Are you sure you know where you're going?”
Dean shrugged. “Well, you know your town better than I do. We're supposed to be heading for a warehouse behind some place called 'Al's.' You know where that is?”
She nodded. “Yeah. It's another mile away or so, maybe less if we can cut through buildings, like you said.”
“I'm not sure that's a good idea,” Sam said, even as he kept watch for movement in the side alleys. “Buildings are likely to have hidden pockets of zombies, and those feral ones tend to lurk in hidden nooks and crannies and ambush you.”
“Pretty good hunters,” Dean agreed. “But so what? They lurk outside just as much as they lurk inside. Better to take the fastest route we can.”
“Straighter doesn't mean faster,” Sam argued. “There's no guarantee that once we're inside a building that we'll be able to get out again. What if the exits are blocked? The doors could be barred, or the exits filled with zombies. We could get trapped, at the very least waste a hell of a lot of time looking for an exit.”
They were still going at a brisk trot down the street, Sheila panting slightly behind Dean, Danny and Sam moving ahead to scout the route and make sure it was secure. Even as he went, Dean couldn't help the twist of fear and adrenaline in his stomach at the unnatural stillness of the streets. It was as though every other sign of life had been wiped from existence: there were no birds, no rats, not even cockroaches left. All there was were broken windows and abandoned cars with cracked windshields, garbage littering the pavement along with bits and pieces of human flesh.
They were passing an alley when Sheila suddenly let out a shriek from a few paces behind him. He whirled in time to see her wrench herself out of the claws of a zombie which had come out of nowhere, a heavyset guy, half of his face eaten away by decay and disease, part of her jacket firmly gripped in one rotting hand.
“Sheila, shoot it!” Dean yelled, not wanting to risk the shot when she was still in such close quarters with it. The thing moaned and yanked on her jacket, a string of bloody saliva hanging from its mouth as it lowered yellowed, rotting teeth toward the flesh of her shoulder.
Sheila shrieked again, but she somehow managed to keep her cool enough to wrench one of the pistols from her belt and fire off several shots in the zombie's general direction. She was panicky, though, and most of the shots went wide, but at least one found its mark, taking the zombie through the jaw, the bullet piercing through the soft palate and into the brain. The creature collapsed against her even as she kept emptying bullets in its general direction, and the sound of tearing fabric rent the air as its weight all but ripped her jacket off her arm.
"Sheila, stop!" Dean started after her, anxious about the amount of ammunition she was wasting. "Stop, it's dead!"
And of course, that was when one of her bullets went wider than the rest, and shattered the already-broken windshield of a nearby car. Immediately the night was filled with the shrill wailing of the car alarm, high and bright in the otherwise silent street, and Dean's stomach dropped, his mouth going dry.
"Oh, fuck," he exhaled sharply. Then, "Run!"
He grabbed Sheila roughly by her elbow shoved her ahead of him, making her drop her gun, but there was no time to stop and pick it up now. Already he could hear the sound of distant screaming as the horde approached. It was a high, wild, feral sound, and it chilled Dean's blood to the marrow. The last time they had encountered the horde Sam had gone through most of his ammunition and nearly gotten himself killed in the process, if it hadn't been for a couple of lucky shots on Dean's parts. Having already proven himself to be no one's fool, Danny had taken to his heels ahead of them, although Sam was moving back toward them, worry written all over his face.
"What happened?"
"Not now! Just go! Go, go, go!" Dean yelled, as the screaming got louder. A glance over his shoulder confirmed his worst fears as a seething mass of creatures surged through the alleyway and erupted into the street behind them, their screams echoing off the abandoned buildings.
They ran. Sheila put on a burst of speed that surprised them all, and they ducked and weaved their way through the empty streets, the horde hot on their heels and gaining with every passing second. There was no time to look over their shoulders, to see just how close the zombies were, let alone to try to take aim and take some of them out. For all Dean knew, they were right on top of them, their foetid breath hot on the back of his neck. The only thing to do now was to run as fast as they possibly could and just pray that they could reach some kind of shelter before the horde caught up to them. Sheila was panting next to him, already out of breath, but she was gamely keeping pace ―anything else would spell certain death for her, possibly for them all.
There was another startled yell from ahead, and he saw Danny make a comical leap to the side as what appeared to be a completely separate horde of zombies came seemingly out of nowhere, bearing down on them like a freight train. It figured, Dean had just enough time to think, that the universe thought they didn't have enough trouble on their plates as it was.
After that, it was nothing but screaming and snarling and thrashing limbs, the sound of repeated gunfire barking loudly in his ears, the smell of gunpowder sharp in his nose, mingling with the cloying scent of decay. Dean pulled both his pistols from the holsters he’d rigged around his hips, backed both himself and Sheila against a wall, and tried to make a stand. For now, the best he could do was to make every single one of his shots count, and they might just make it out of here alive. He had just enough ammunition, he figured, to get them through this one assault, if he didn't get himself or Sheila bitten or clawed. For all that they’d been depicted as a marauding band of thousands of zombies by all the news services they'd had been listening to, the horde of zombies was actually more like a group of fifteen or twenty zombies at most, gathered together by chance more than anything else. So while he could easily burn through a couple of clips trying to survive the onslaught, the onslaught could, in fact, be survived if you went about it right. The only way to survive this sort of an onslaught, he and Sam had learned, was to use the zombies' sheer numbers against them: find a place to shelter your back, preferably enclosed, and limit the zombies' access to you. Then kill them off, one by one. Make your shots count, aim for the head, and soon you’d have a makeshift barricade made up entirely of rotting corpses, which would further limit the zombies' access to you. And all the while, you just prayed that you wouldn’t run out of bullets.
The zombies screamed and railed and threw themselves headlong into the line of fire, heedless of their safety. They were far beyond that now, and if one fell, the others simply tried to climb over it, shrieking and moaning and scrabbling for purchase. Time stretched out until it felt as though he'd been surrounded by a sea of red, of limbs and teeth and the fetid stench of zombies forever stretching back and forth through time, and his ears rang with the constant noise. Another head exploded in front of him in a welter of gore, and suddenly everything fell quiet. When his vision cleared he and Sheila were still standing, a pile of corpses at their feet. Dean let his head fall back against the wall for a moment with a dull thud, panting harshly in the the sudden silence, waiting for his heartbeat to go back to normal.
“You okay?” he asked, once he was sure he could speak without his voice betraying just how pants-wettingly terrified he was.
“Yeah, yeah. I'm okay,” she shivered, huddling against him. “I lost my gun.”
“Don't worry about it. We'll find you another.” He drew himself upright, looked around for his brother. “Sam? Sammy?” he yelled, heedless of the zombies. With two hordes dead, he figured they were probably good for a few minutes. “Sam!”
“Over here.” The reply was breathless, and sounded like it was coming from a few buildings over. “We're okay.”
“Thank God.”
He pushed himself off the wall, drew in a shaky breath, pulled Sheila after him, and found Sam and Danny standing in the street, a few feet away from another pile of rotting corpses, their faces drawn with fear and stress and covered in grime. Sam was leaning heavily against the wall, hair falling forward to obscure his face, and Dean's stomach performed an unpleasant flip-flop. Sheila stumbled in his wake, shaky now that the adrenaline of the encounter had worn off.
“No one got bitten? Scratched? Sammy?” he put out a hand tentatively, hesitated before actually touching his brother.
“No,” Sam shook his head, and the vice that gad been gripping Dean's heart relaxed its hold. Sam looked pale, though, his lips pressed together in an expression that suggested he was in more pain than he was trying to let on, and sweat was trickling along his hairline.
“You sure you're okay?”
Sam shrugged. “Wrenched my knee,” he explained, and Dean winced in sympathy. This was not a good time to be aggravating leg injuries, not when they still had so far to go. “On the plus side, check it out,” Sam bared his teeth in a painful grin, and pointed at an arrow drawn very clearly on the door of a nearby shop. The sign above it read simply: 'Al's.'
Dean found himself grinning back, and he clapped his brother on the shoulder. “Hot damn, Sammy. You found the safe house!”
The safe house was little more than a couple of rooms behind two massive stainless steel doors. It took a hell of an effort for Dean, along with Danny, to heave open the door and then shut it again behind them. Sam was of no use, his wrenched knee barely able to hold his weight, so he stood off to the side, keeping himself between Sheila and anything that might come at them from the street before they managed to get inside. It was a damned good thing that zombies couldn't figure out how to work a door handle, Dean thought, because, safe house or no, he never felt really safe unless he was behind locked doors, preferably with a whole bunch of salt between himself and the outside world as well, and maybe a couple of Devil's Traps. Oh, and some goofer dust while he was at it. Unfortunately, none of that shit worked on zombies, except maybe the locks, to keep them away.
He let Danny and Sheila inside, then when he saw how badly Sam was limping, pulled his arm over his shoulder to help him inside. Sam sank down on a packing crate by the closest wall, pressing a hand to his thigh with a grimace, all the colour leeching from his face. At the worried look Dean threw him he shrugged. “Think I tore something. If you find a first aid kit in here, I can strap it up. Even if you don't, I can probably rig something.”
“Well, we've got some Aspirin left, enough to see you through tonight and tomorrow at least. Take the edge off. I'll see what else I can find,” Dean promised. “Stay put, okay? And stay off it!”
“Yeah, really not an issue.”
Danny was already making a sweep of the place, trotting up the metal staircase that led to what looked like a tiny storage area on the landing. “Well, definitely no zombies here!” he called down. “Got a couple of first-aid kits, God only knows what's in 'em, but it's better than nothing. I'm amazed no one's made off with them yet. Some canned stuff, and a note asking oh-so-nice for us to leave something behind if possible, so that the shelter's never completely empty.”
“Yeah, well, they're kind of SOL this time,” Dean said sourly. “We've got ammo and the clothes on our back, and I for one am not going to be leaving any bullets here for the completely hypothetical people who might, hypothetically, be coming after us.”
“Got an ace bandage here. Catch,” Danny dropped it into Dean's waiting hands. “You guys got anything down there?”
“A whole bunch of crates, and a whole lot of graffiti.”
Dean paced along the walls, fascinated by the messages scrawled in magic marker all over the filthy surfaces. Some were just signatures, names and dates, as though the people who'd been here before had simply wanted to prove ―to themselves or others, who knew?― that they were still alive, that they existed, that they mattered to someone. Others were directions to other safe houses, a couple mentioned a new evacuation zone. Most of them were messages left by survivors desperate enough to hope that their loved ones would follow them here, and maybe all the way to safety.
Maya, we're heading toward the evac zone. We'll look for you there!
Love, Ron and Allie.
John, I have the kids with me. We're all safe.
Meet us at Mom's place, we'll wait for you. Diane.
Seeing his father's name gave him pause, but it wasn't like John wasn't a common name. Dad had been dead for months, now, and there was no bringing him back. Other graffiti was the same coarse bullshit you saw everywhere else, all jokes about sex and bodily functions, and the rest was all the deranged ramblings you could expect in a place like this. One of them screamed at him from the centre of the largest wall:
THEY CAN'T CHANGE BACK!
DON'T TAKE THEM W/YOU
SAVE YOURSELF!
He was staring at one which said simply 'Exodus 9:15' when he became aware of Sheila's presence at his elbow. She looked at it, and her lip curled in disgust.
“Problem?” Dean asked.
“Religion,” she sneered, then quoted: “For now I will stretch out my hand, that I may smite thee and thy people with pestilence; and thou shalt be cut off from the earth.”
“Cheerful. I love it when people are optimistic like that.”
She snorted, then picked up the magic marker that had been left lying on a nearby crate. “All these people, they're still trying, you know? Trying to pass along messages, as if anyone would read them. You think anybody ever gets the messages meant for them?”
Dean shrugged, uncomfortable at the thought. “I dunno. Maybe?”
“In that case,” she crouched by the wall, and began to write painstakingly under the stranger's imprecation to save themselves. When she was done she pulled back, her expression one of grim triumph, capped the pen and tossed it back onto the crate before going to sit by Sam.
For a moment Dean couldn't bring himself to look, but he knew it would eat at him forever if he didn't. The message was succinct, but she had traced over some of the letters, and underlined a word twice, just to make sure.
CLAUDE HUGGINS
YOU ARE A COWARD
AND YOU LET
YOR CHILDREN DIE!
Dean shivered. He supposed Sam would have something to say about the fact that she'd misspelled a word, but when he looked at his brother he saw Sam staring at the words blankly, his lips pressed together so hard they had turned white.
Dean cleared his throat, breaking the sudden silence. “You okay, Sammy?”
His brother started a bit, then nodded. “Yeah. Could use a hand with this, though.” He motioned to where he'd rolled up his jeans to expose his knee, which was already swelling enough to stretch the fabric of his pants.
“Sure,” Dean dropped to one knee next to him, “just don't get any ideas, all right? I'm not proposing.”
“Bite me.”
“Uh huh. Foot,” Dean patted his thigh, then grabbed Sam's ankle to rest his foot in his lap while he wrapped up his knee as tightly as he could without impeding the circulation, forcing himself to ignore his brother's hiss of pain. “How's that, too tight?”
Sam tested it gingerly, chewing on the inside of his lip. “Yeah, feels okay enough. Thanks.” He accepted the two Aspirin Dean dropped in his hand, dry-swallowed them without so much as batting an eye. It was a little depressing, Dean thought, that they both did that without even questioning it these days.
Danny had come down the stairs, and only cast a cursory glance at the newest decoration on the wall. “So what's the plan. Are we bugging out now? Or do we want to wait until it's not pitch-black out there?”
“I'm all for staying a few hours, catching some sleep, if we can,” Sam ventured. “We've been up for more than twenty-four hours, and I don't think I can do much running at this point. We should have something to eat, too... I don't suppose there's anything like sleeping bags around here?”
“We can check,” Dean promised. “Hey, Sheila, you still with us, doll?” She was staring out into space, but started and looked back at him when he snapped his fingers in her face. “No zoning out, sweetheart,” he gave her his cockiest, most shit-eating grin. The kind that either made women giggle or want to slap him, and he figured that either reaction would be good right about now.
She blinked, then wrinkled her nose. “Does that really work with women?”
For a moment he wondered if she could read his mind. “Sometimes.”
Sam snorted. “Feel free to ignore him. For all he looks young, he was actually born before feminism was invented.”
That got a huff of laughter out of Sheila. “Oh sure,” Dean made a show of complaining. “Him you find funny!”
The crates yielded up a few old blankets, but not much else that was of immediate use. Still, it was enough. They made a cold meal out of canned beans and fruit, and by the time that was done, they were only too glad to roll up in their blankets on the floor and sink gratefully into sleep.
Dean was pretty sure not more than a couple of hours had passed when his eyes snapped open of their own accord. He lay very still on his makeshift bed on the floor, trying to figure out just what had awoken him. It wasn't zombies ―he couldn't hear any of the usual moaning and shuffling from outside, nor even the hiss of a Smoker or the growl of a hunter, nothing. He sat up carefully, holding his breath, until he heard a soft moan from off to the side. Sheila was curled into a tight ball, fast asleep, her breathing fast but regular, and Danny appeared to be asleep as well, splayed out on his back. That left only one person, and really, it wasn't that much of a surprise. Dean was accustomed to being freakishly in tune with his brother's moods, so if Sam was having a nightmare, well, it just meant that Dean was bound to be awake for it. Sometimes, his life really sucked.
He pushed himself to his hands and knees, crawled a few paces over to where his brother was lying tangled in his blankets, murmuring something unintelligible under his breath, and shook him gently by the shoulder. “Sam. Sammy, wake up,” he whispered. “It's just a dream, Sam.”
Sam moaned a little louder, his breath hitching, and he jerked away from the touch as though Dean had electrocuted him. “No..”
Dean shook him harder. “Sam!”
His brother came awake with a gasp, and Dean had to duck out of the way as he instinctively lashed out at whatever was holding him down. For a moment he thought he'd have a fight on his hands, but Sam's vision cleared quickly, and he let himself slump back onto his blankets.
“You scared the shit out of me,” came the quiet complaint.
“Sorry. You were having a nightmare. Was it about... you know?” Dean made a vague twirling motion with one hand, but Sam shook his head.
“No.”
“Then what?”
Sam drew in a shaky breath, puffed out his cheeks as he exhaled slowly, trying to calm himself down, and Dean rubbed his shoulder, settling himself cross-legged on the floor next to him.
“It was, uh... it was the kids. Sheila's.” Sam tried to pull his knees up to his chest to hug them, then gave up with a wince as his left leg refused to bend. “They weren't dead, when I found them.”
Dean nodded, watching as chewed on his lip. He'd suspected, but having it confirmed made him feel sick. “We couldn't do anything for them, Sammy. You know how these things go.”
“I know,” Sam scrubbed at his face with both hands. “But I left them there, you know? Just... they were so small. I don't think the little girl was more than six, and she was... she was tearing chunks out of her brother's arm.” He choked on a sob, swallowed hard. “I should have put them both out of their misery.”
“Aw, Sammy...” Instinctively Dean inched closer, nudged Sam's shoulder with his own. “You couldn't have. Any other zombies for miles around would have come running at the sound of gunfire. We couldn't take the risk.”
“I know, but... I just... I just left them there, dragged their mother away into the night. They're kids, Dean. Babies.”
“They were already dead. You know that. They're just still moving around. Kind of like spirits but with really bad B.O.”
Sam made a face. “You're disgusting.”
He made a show of grinning. “Yeah, well, it's a God-given talent, Sammy. Can't afford to waste it. Hey,” he nudged him again, this time with an elbow. “You think you can get back to sleep? We have a long day ahead of us.”
Sam nodded. “Could use some Aspirin, though.”
“Your leg?”
“Yeah,” Sam sighed. “Lousy timing.”
“Story of our lives,” Dean agreed, shaking out four pills and shoving them at Sam. “Your liver will be fine just this once. We'll double-dose until we get to the Impala and you don't have to run on that leg anymore. Until then, the less pain you're in, the better.”
“I wasn't going to say anything.”
“Sure. Just take your pills, Francis, and go to sleep before you wake everyone else. You going to be okay?”
“Fine,” Sam swallowed the pills, and Dean might have bought it if he couldn't see the kids' hands shaking even as he tugged his blanket back up around him.
“Yeah, okay,” Dean nodded as though he believed every word, then casually reached over and pulled his own blanket up around his shoulders and settled next to Sam.
“What're you doing?”
“What? I'm cold, and you're like a freaking furnace. Is it too much to ask my freakish little brother to share some of that body heat?”
Sam huffed quietly, then scooted closer and draped an arm over his chest. “I'm going to pretend I can't see right through you, okay?”
“Likewise.”
“Thanks,” Sam murmured into his ear, and Dean sighed theatrically.
“Spare me the chick-flick moment, Samantha, and just go to sleep.”
There was a gust of warm air on the back of his neck as Sam settled down, and Dean could already feel the tension draining away from both of them. “Okay.”
Dawn brought the noise of a starving zombie clawing at the door to the safe house. It was the door by which they had come in, and so Dean didn't bother doing much about it other than checking to make sure it hadn't attracted more of its friends.
“We need to get going,” he nudged Sam in the ribs with his toe, stooping to lend him an arm to help him to his feet. Sam stumbled and winced a bit as he put weight on his injured leg. “How's the leg?”
“It'll loosen up in a few minutes. It's just stiff because I haven't used it.” Sam was lying through his teeth, but there really wasn't much they could do about it anyway. It made a certain perverse kind of sense, and Dean himself had been guilty of embracing the philosophy of 'fake it 'til you make it' in the past, so he let it go, shoving the Aspirin at his brother and watching while he swallowed the pills.
“Everyone ready?”
Sheila and Danny roused easily ―none of them had slept particularly well― and within minutes they had folded up their blankets and tidied away the remnants of their meal. The only advantage of having next to nothing with them meant that there was no packing up to do. All they had to do was steel themselves, and go. Dean did a quick inventory of their weapons, along with an extra handgun someone had left behind because it had jammed. It was a simple enough matter to clear the mechanism, and now they were all properly armed again, which went a long way toward reassuring him. The loss of Sheila's gun might have proved to be a serious handicap otherwise.
The coast was clear on the other side of the door through which they were planning to exit. By Dean's calculations, it wasn't all that far to the evac zone ―barely a couple of miles, if that. If they booked it, they could make it in under an hour. Sure, neither he nor Sam were up to their usual ten-minute-mile standards, and he was pretty sure Danny and Sheila couldn't do that even on a good day, but still, it was so close he could practically taste it. He had no idea if they could make it, if the path that led there was riddled with zombies or some other kind of new and improved death trap, but all he wanted right now was to just go, already, and deal with the rest as it came.
He set a pace that was probably going to be punishing for Sheila and especially for Sam, who was trying very hard not to show how badly he was limping, but the faster they got out of here, the faster Sam would be off that leg and the sooner they'd all be safe. Danny volunteered to scout ahead, and Dean acquiesced with a nod and a hand-wave, casting an anxious glance back at Sam, who was doing a creditable imitation of bringing up the rear.
They circumvented one of the weeping zombies ―heard her wailing from far away and carefully skirted the area once Danny returned with a report of her exact whereabouts. Dean could see her in the distance, half-crumpled on the ground, shoulders shaking, legs splayed out to either side. Sheila barely gave her a second glance.
“Witch,” she said.
“Come again?”
“Hey, you get to name the zombies, I figure I should get to name a zombie too.”
He shrugged, kept walking. “Fair enough.”
“You're naming 'em?” Danny was incredulous. “Bad enough they're trying to kill us, but now you gotta go treating 'em like pets,” he added. “Typical that two white guys would come up with something batshit crazy like that instead of just capping them where they stand. They're zombies, not chihuahuas.”
Sam chuckled, then shoved him gently between the shoulder blades. “Just keep going, dude. We're not out of the woods yet. When you're safely in that helicopter, or whatever, then you can mock the crazy white guys to your heart's content, deal?”
“Deal.”
They jogged through the empty streets as fast as they could manage, steering clear of anything that sounded like it might be a horde, or worse, one of the nastier zombies that actively hunted humans rather than simply reacting to their presence. They reached the outskirts of the town as the sun began to rise higher in the sky, with no sign of danger, although a few stray infected blundered across their paths. Those were easily enough evaded without wasting bullets, though, and even Sam dodged around them, his face grey and pinched with pain. They ought to be in time for the next evac, judging by the position of the sun, but Dean checked his watch, just to be sure. “Evacs are four times a day, or were, last I checked. We've got about an hour or so before the next one, should be plenty of time to get there.”
“Yeah, but what do we do while we're waiting?” Danny pointed out. “There ain't a safe house there. Hell, we don't even know that there's even a building, just a helipad. Hell, it's probably just a really flat field. For all we know it'll be wide open and full of the things.”
“It should be pretty clear,” Sam pointed out, with reason. “After all, it's an evac zone. The problem will be getting there: all the vehicles used for evac make a hell of a lot of noise, so I'm guessing the perimeter will be crawling with the infected. We'll just have to make it through without getting bitten.”
Danny snorted. “Easier said than done.”
The words proved prophetic. As they crested the hill above the evac zone, they all but stumbled into a veritable phalanx of zombies, all pressed up against a chain link fence, clawing at the barrier and moaning in almost comical incomprehension. Beyond the perimeter fence, Dean could see a helicopter sitting idle on a makeshift landing pad. They were so close, so freaking close it would be goddamned tragic to fail now. Sam nudged his elbow, pulled him a few paces aside.
“Okay, what now? We've got about two hundred yards of open terrain between us and what looks like a couple hundred infected, spread out along that fence. That sound right to you?”
Dean grimaced. “Yeah, sounds about right.”
“Between the four of us, I'm pretty sure we don't have two hundred rounds of ammo.”
“Nope. Besides, even if we did, no way we'd be able to make only head-shots, and there's no cover. They'd eat us alive if the horde turned on us. Literally.”
Sam grinned mirthlessly. “Wow, are we ever screwed.”
“Pretty much.”
“Right. So, here's what I think. We scout for a weakness in the perimeter, aim for that, run like hell, and hope to God we don't get eaten on our way in. What do you think?”
“Sounds like a plan.”
As plans went, it wasn't one of the more sophisticated ones they'd ever come up with, and that was saying something, because they were the masters of unsophisticated plans. Still, it was better than nothing, and if they were both lucky and good, they stood a decent chance of getting to the landing pad in one piece. The zombies were slow to react, and unless they attacked as a horde, individually they weren't so bad. He hadn't heard anything for a while now ―not the burbling grunt of a Boomer, or the two-pack-a-day rasp of the Smokers, or even the feral snarl of the Hunters. If they were just up against the regular infected, Dean figured their odds were even better.
Sam was the first to spot an opening along the fence, a gap where the infected weren't all pressed up against the chain link and, due to the natural unevenness of the terrain, were actually scattered at a relatively decent distance from each other. There was a large boulder pressed right up against the fence, which looked like it had been hastily put up more as a means to keep out the zombies than anything else. Zombies couldn't climb fences, and definitely couldn't put two and two together in what was left of their brains to even try to clamber up on the boulder in order to try to get over the fence. Humans, on the other hand, could definitely make it into the compound that way.
The four of them crept along the ground, keeping as low as possible and to what cover they could find, until they were almost directly in front of their planned point of entry. Sheila was trembling, whether from fear or exhaustion or both it was hard to say, but her jaw was clenched, her fingernails digging into the palms of her hands, grim determination written all over her features. Danny was nervous too, shifting his weight from foot to foot, but looking just as determined. Freedom was less than three hundred yards away, so close that it felt almost like a living, breathing thing, beckoning them forward.
“Ready?” Dean looked over at Sam as the infected slowly shuffled along, leaving an even bigger gap near the boulder, and they exchanged a nod.
“Go!”
For all that he was injured, Sam put on a burst of speed that had him at the fence first. He hopped up onto the boulder, turned to snatch Sheila up by the waist, and unceremoniously boosted her up and over the ten-foot fence. She landed in an awkward tumble on the ground but immediately rolled over and scrambled to her feet in time to get out of the way when Sam gave a leg-up to Danny. He turned to Dean, who stopped him.
“It's fine, Sam. You first ―I can climb that fence no problem, but I don't want your leg giving out on the wrong side, you know?”
Sam looked over at where the crowd of infected was beginning to stir, having sensed the presence of fresh meat in the air. He seemed about to argue the point, then relented.
“Yeah, okay.”
That was when the ground began to shake.
“What the hell is that?” Dean's eyes widened as the ground lurched beneath their feet, threatening to send them tumbling off the boulder. He grabbed hold of the fence just as Sam caught hold of one of his arms to steady himself.
“No idea, but it can't be good!”
The movements of the infected were already becoming more frenzied, their moans louder than ever, and Dean could see them beginning to come together, slowly but surely, their focus turning toward him and his brother, even as the whole world appeared to tremble and quake around them. There was a deafening bellow, then, and it was all he could do to keep both himself and Sam upright on the boulder where they were already precariously perched. If either of them fell now, it would be straight into the waiting arms of the zombies.
“Oh my God,” the colour leeched from Sam's face.
“What?”
Sam could only point in horror past Dean's shoulder, his face a mask of terror, and when Dean turned to look he felt his blood run cold. Surging up over the crest of the hill, followed by what looked like a tidal wave of the undead, was the largest creature he had ever seen. It was massive, well over a story tall, and built like a tank, if tanks were made of lumpy grey stone. It paused where it had appeared and let out another angry bellow, silhouetted against the afternoon sky, then put its head down and charged directly at them.
“Go!” Sam yelled, and before Dean could stop him he'd stooped and grabbed him neatly around the knees and boosted him over the fence.
He landed in a tangled heap on the grass, scrabbling for purchase, unable for a moment to tell up from down. Something caught him by an arm and yanked, and he very nearly put a bullet in his assailant until he recognized Danny, pulling him to his feet. His footing regained, he pulled his guns from their holsters ―though it was a bit like taking a pea shooter to an elephant― and trained them toward the fence.
“Sam!”
It was too late, though. The thing had already cleared the distance like it was nothing, and had crashed directly through the fence, right where Sam had been standing. There was no sign of his brother, although he could hear a dull whirring sound somewhere behind him that told him the helicopter was coming to life. A voice rang out, metallic and distorted through a megaphone.
“EVAC IS PROCEEDING ON SCHEDULE. WE SEE YOU THERE. IF YOU CAN GET ON BOARD, DO SO NOW!”
He whirled, scanning frantically for Sam, caught sight of Sheila instead, who was standing, transfixed, staring at the monster bearing down on them, her eyes so wide they seemed to engulf her whole face. He grabbed her arm, jerked her roughly away.
“Come on, run!” he shoved her forward and she stumbled, kept her feet, and started running, as though she had only been awaiting his permission to go.
Danny was already sprinting as fast as he could toward the helicopter, but another ear-splitting roar told Dean they might already be too late. The ground trembled and shook as the huge beast lumbered forward, and the next thing Dean knew it felt as though a Mac truck had collided with him. He was thrown off his feet, sent tumbling head over heels along the grass, while Sheila shrieked, long and loud. He landed on his back, winded and seeing stars, couldn’t seem to get his bearings for a moment. There was a whooshing noise followed by the sound of something exploding and an enraged bellow, and the air suddenly filled with an acrid stench that filled his nostrils and made him gag. He struggled to his hands and knees, crawled forward a few paces before he was able to stand again, his ears ringing. He saw the huge monster staggering back a few paces, its chest a mass of shredded tissue, and that’s when he realized that someone in the helicopter was actually aiming what looked like a grenade launcher at it, while automatic rifle fire peppered the ranks of the undead, felling them in droves.
Hysterical laughter bubbled up in his chest, and he swallowed it with difficulty. “Awesome,” he said to no one in particular, breath hiccupping a little frantically.
His ribcage throbbed, and he could taste copper in his mouth. Once the adrenaline wore off, he knew, he was going to be in a world of hurt. He forced himself forward, back up toward the helicopter, where he saw Danny helping Sheila aboard, mostly by dragging her bodily up with him by both arms, legs kicking in the air. The chopper was full, Dean could see it even from where he was, and there was still no sign of Sam. The beast was getting ready to charge again, slowed down but not out for the count by any means, and Dean straightened with an effort, waved at the guy holding the grenade launcher.
“Down here! I can hold ‘im off!” he winced, wrapped an arm around ribs that he was pretty damned sure were at least cracked, if not broken.
“Are you sure?” the guy yelled back.
Dean nodded, took as deep a breath as he could, then called up again. “I’m not leaving without my brother! Give it here, and I’ll hold it off until you’re clear!”
The chopper was already beginning to lift off the ground, but the guy leaned out, hanging off the chopper by one hand, and carefully dropped the weapon into Dean’s waiting arms. “You got a couple shots left -make ‘em count. And good luck! Next transport’s in three hours: we don’t do night runs,” he shouted to make himself heard above the whirring of the helicopter blades. “You hang in there, we’ll be back to get you. What’s your name?”
Dean laughed and hefted the grenade launcher. “Name’s Dean Winchester, dude!” he said. “Always wanted to get my hands on one of these bad boys. Thanks for the loan! Get going before that thing pulverizes you!”
Not for the first time in his life, Dean was grateful for his father’s military background. He dropped to one knee and aimed the weapon at the monster’s midsection. He’d never actually fired one of these things, but he at least understood the basic of how they worked, and that was something, at least. For a moment the rest of the world faded into darkness, and it was just him and the hulking creature charging at him, and nothing else mattered. His first shot almost went wide of the mark, but with a target that huge it was almost impossible to miss, and he caught it in the side, ripping out a chunk of flesh and bone and gristle. He was rewarded with an enraged roar, but the thing’s momentum didn’t decrease in the slightest. Dean swallowed hard, stood his ground, and adjusted his aim. His next shot caught it just below the throat, and in the next moment its head exploded in a welter of gore. It collapsed comically slowly, as though its body hadn’t quite caught on yet to the fact that it was dead.
Dean dropped the grenade launcher and leaped to his feet, heedless of the pain in his chest, and punched the air, whooping. “Take that, you son of a bitch!”
Silence settled over the area like a blanket, the sounds of the chopper fading into the distance as it flew out of sight. Dean leaned on his knees and coughed, spat a bright mouthful of blood onto the green grass, pulled in a careful breath, and straightened up.
“Sam?”
There was a quiet groan from a few yards away. “I’m here.”
Dean found him next to the boulder among the ruins of the chain link fence, pulling himself painfully and laboriously to his feet. The whole left side of Sam’s face was bruised and beginning to swell, his arm held awkwardly to his chest, and he was holding his left leg gingerly so that it didn’t so much as brush against the ground. He grinned, though, as Dean approached, revealing bloodstained teeth.
“Dude, I know I don’t say this to you often enough, but that was awesome.”
Dean limped over, returned the grin. “Hell yeah. Did you see me?”
Sam nodded. “Did I ever. You okay? That thing mowed you down like a steamroller.”
Dean shrugged and grimaced. “Mostly. Cracked some ribs, probably, and my ears are still ringing. Probably have a concussion, but overall I got off pretty lightly. You? Anything bite you?”
“No bites, no scratches,” Sam shook his head. “I’m kind of fucked up -that thing pretty much crushed me against the rock, but I can keep going for now. It’s not going to hurt until later, when the adrenaline starts wearing off. Chopper was full, huh?”
“Yup. They’re coming back for us in three hours, and I figure none of the infected move fast enough to get here between now and then.”
“So we’re not going back for the Impala?”
He hesitated. God only knew, the thought of leaving his baby behind hurt like very little else had hurt before, but it made no sense to risk both his life and Sam's over a car, even if it was a special car. Sam was badly hurt, and he wasn’t much better off. “I don't know. I mean, it wouldn't be safe to go back, you know?”
Sam nodded. “I know. I don’t really want to leave her, though, you know?” he smiled ruefully, rubbed the back of his neck with his good hand. “I'm kind of waiting for you to tell me that I'm being really stupid for wanting to get the car back, in spite of everything. I mean, it’d be one our more suicidal plans, wouldn’t it? Stupid.”
Dean almost laughed with relief. “I wish I could tell you that, but I think I've got the same brand of stupid. So...”
His brother grinned at him. “So we go get the car, and screw the rescue. What the hell, we’ve always rescued ourselves, right?”
“Damn straight.” He checked over his ammunition as well as Sam’s, and not even that could suppress the feeling of giddiness that had swept over him. One look at Sam’s face told him that his brother was feeling the same way, his face flushed, expression exhilarated.
“Ready, Sammy?”
“I was born ready.”
“That’s my boy!” Dean threw his head back with a delighted, if slightly manic laugh. “Let's go!”
And together, they made a break for freedom.
~END~
The streets were all but deserted, which was a blessing. There were no people, not anymore: they'd all been evacuated long before. At least, those who'd managed to escape. The only occupants of the streets these days were zombies and their victims, some of them too decayed to keep moving, or torn apart by the others and scattered about like carrion. The town wasn't that large, and although Dean desperately wanted to avoid the more densely populated downtown area, that went directly against his plan of taking the most straightforward route to the safe house. He hustled them along as quickly as they could manage, especially Sheila, who wasn't exactly the gym bunny type. She wasn't in terrible shape or anything, but she was a little overweight, more accustomed to pushing a cart around a grocery store and wrangling small children than to running long distances in the hopes of escaping flesh-eating monsters. Sam, too, was beginning to lag ever so slightly, favouring his injured leg, though right now it was subtle enough that only Dean knew to look for it.
Danny was turning out to be an unexpectedly competent ally. He'd figured out how to use a gun when he had to, and turned out to be more than a decent shot, to hear him speak of it. He was also pretty cheerful, when he wasn't being slammed up against walls by Dean's younger brother. He'd easily forgiven Sam for the earlier scuffle.
“Desperate times, right?” he'd said, dismissing Sam's more earnest apologies, when they became forthcoming. “Don't sweat it.”
Sheila had pulled her hands into the sleeves of her denim jacket, the night turning cool. “Are you sure you know where you're going?”
Dean shrugged. “Well, you know your town better than I do. We're supposed to be heading for a warehouse behind some place called 'Al's.' You know where that is?”
She nodded. “Yeah. It's another mile away or so, maybe less if we can cut through buildings, like you said.”
“I'm not sure that's a good idea,” Sam said, even as he kept watch for movement in the side alleys. “Buildings are likely to have hidden pockets of zombies, and those feral ones tend to lurk in hidden nooks and crannies and ambush you.”
“Pretty good hunters,” Dean agreed. “But so what? They lurk outside just as much as they lurk inside. Better to take the fastest route we can.”
“Straighter doesn't mean faster,” Sam argued. “There's no guarantee that once we're inside a building that we'll be able to get out again. What if the exits are blocked? The doors could be barred, or the exits filled with zombies. We could get trapped, at the very least waste a hell of a lot of time looking for an exit.”
They were still going at a brisk trot down the street, Sheila panting slightly behind Dean, Danny and Sam moving ahead to scout the route and make sure it was secure. Even as he went, Dean couldn't help the twist of fear and adrenaline in his stomach at the unnatural stillness of the streets. It was as though every other sign of life had been wiped from existence: there were no birds, no rats, not even cockroaches left. All there was were broken windows and abandoned cars with cracked windshields, garbage littering the pavement along with bits and pieces of human flesh.
They were passing an alley when Sheila suddenly let out a shriek from a few paces behind him. He whirled in time to see her wrench herself out of the claws of a zombie which had come out of nowhere, a heavyset guy, half of his face eaten away by decay and disease, part of her jacket firmly gripped in one rotting hand.
“Sheila, shoot it!” Dean yelled, not wanting to risk the shot when she was still in such close quarters with it. The thing moaned and yanked on her jacket, a string of bloody saliva hanging from its mouth as it lowered yellowed, rotting teeth toward the flesh of her shoulder.
Sheila shrieked again, but she somehow managed to keep her cool enough to wrench one of the pistols from her belt and fire off several shots in the zombie's general direction. She was panicky, though, and most of the shots went wide, but at least one found its mark, taking the zombie through the jaw, the bullet piercing through the soft palate and into the brain. The creature collapsed against her even as she kept emptying bullets in its general direction, and the sound of tearing fabric rent the air as its weight all but ripped her jacket off her arm.
"Sheila, stop!" Dean started after her, anxious about the amount of ammunition she was wasting. "Stop, it's dead!"
And of course, that was when one of her bullets went wider than the rest, and shattered the already-broken windshield of a nearby car. Immediately the night was filled with the shrill wailing of the car alarm, high and bright in the otherwise silent street, and Dean's stomach dropped, his mouth going dry.
"Oh, fuck," he exhaled sharply. Then, "Run!"
He grabbed Sheila roughly by her elbow shoved her ahead of him, making her drop her gun, but there was no time to stop and pick it up now. Already he could hear the sound of distant screaming as the horde approached. It was a high, wild, feral sound, and it chilled Dean's blood to the marrow. The last time they had encountered the horde Sam had gone through most of his ammunition and nearly gotten himself killed in the process, if it hadn't been for a couple of lucky shots on Dean's parts. Having already proven himself to be no one's fool, Danny had taken to his heels ahead of them, although Sam was moving back toward them, worry written all over his face.
"What happened?"
"Not now! Just go! Go, go, go!" Dean yelled, as the screaming got louder. A glance over his shoulder confirmed his worst fears as a seething mass of creatures surged through the alleyway and erupted into the street behind them, their screams echoing off the abandoned buildings.
They ran. Sheila put on a burst of speed that surprised them all, and they ducked and weaved their way through the empty streets, the horde hot on their heels and gaining with every passing second. There was no time to look over their shoulders, to see just how close the zombies were, let alone to try to take aim and take some of them out. For all Dean knew, they were right on top of them, their foetid breath hot on the back of his neck. The only thing to do now was to run as fast as they possibly could and just pray that they could reach some kind of shelter before the horde caught up to them. Sheila was panting next to him, already out of breath, but she was gamely keeping pace ―anything else would spell certain death for her, possibly for them all.
There was another startled yell from ahead, and he saw Danny make a comical leap to the side as what appeared to be a completely separate horde of zombies came seemingly out of nowhere, bearing down on them like a freight train. It figured, Dean had just enough time to think, that the universe thought they didn't have enough trouble on their plates as it was.
After that, it was nothing but screaming and snarling and thrashing limbs, the sound of repeated gunfire barking loudly in his ears, the smell of gunpowder sharp in his nose, mingling with the cloying scent of decay. Dean pulled both his pistols from the holsters he’d rigged around his hips, backed both himself and Sheila against a wall, and tried to make a stand. For now, the best he could do was to make every single one of his shots count, and they might just make it out of here alive. He had just enough ammunition, he figured, to get them through this one assault, if he didn't get himself or Sheila bitten or clawed. For all that they’d been depicted as a marauding band of thousands of zombies by all the news services they'd had been listening to, the horde of zombies was actually more like a group of fifteen or twenty zombies at most, gathered together by chance more than anything else. So while he could easily burn through a couple of clips trying to survive the onslaught, the onslaught could, in fact, be survived if you went about it right. The only way to survive this sort of an onslaught, he and Sam had learned, was to use the zombies' sheer numbers against them: find a place to shelter your back, preferably enclosed, and limit the zombies' access to you. Then kill them off, one by one. Make your shots count, aim for the head, and soon you’d have a makeshift barricade made up entirely of rotting corpses, which would further limit the zombies' access to you. And all the while, you just prayed that you wouldn’t run out of bullets.
The zombies screamed and railed and threw themselves headlong into the line of fire, heedless of their safety. They were far beyond that now, and if one fell, the others simply tried to climb over it, shrieking and moaning and scrabbling for purchase. Time stretched out until it felt as though he'd been surrounded by a sea of red, of limbs and teeth and the fetid stench of zombies forever stretching back and forth through time, and his ears rang with the constant noise. Another head exploded in front of him in a welter of gore, and suddenly everything fell quiet. When his vision cleared he and Sheila were still standing, a pile of corpses at their feet. Dean let his head fall back against the wall for a moment with a dull thud, panting harshly in the the sudden silence, waiting for his heartbeat to go back to normal.
“You okay?” he asked, once he was sure he could speak without his voice betraying just how pants-wettingly terrified he was.
“Yeah, yeah. I'm okay,” she shivered, huddling against him. “I lost my gun.”
“Don't worry about it. We'll find you another.” He drew himself upright, looked around for his brother. “Sam? Sammy?” he yelled, heedless of the zombies. With two hordes dead, he figured they were probably good for a few minutes. “Sam!”
“Over here.” The reply was breathless, and sounded like it was coming from a few buildings over. “We're okay.”
“Thank God.”
He pushed himself off the wall, drew in a shaky breath, pulled Sheila after him, and found Sam and Danny standing in the street, a few feet away from another pile of rotting corpses, their faces drawn with fear and stress and covered in grime. Sam was leaning heavily against the wall, hair falling forward to obscure his face, and Dean's stomach performed an unpleasant flip-flop. Sheila stumbled in his wake, shaky now that the adrenaline of the encounter had worn off.
“No one got bitten? Scratched? Sammy?” he put out a hand tentatively, hesitated before actually touching his brother.
“No,” Sam shook his head, and the vice that gad been gripping Dean's heart relaxed its hold. Sam looked pale, though, his lips pressed together in an expression that suggested he was in more pain than he was trying to let on, and sweat was trickling along his hairline.
“You sure you're okay?”
Sam shrugged. “Wrenched my knee,” he explained, and Dean winced in sympathy. This was not a good time to be aggravating leg injuries, not when they still had so far to go. “On the plus side, check it out,” Sam bared his teeth in a painful grin, and pointed at an arrow drawn very clearly on the door of a nearby shop. The sign above it read simply: 'Al's.'
Dean found himself grinning back, and he clapped his brother on the shoulder. “Hot damn, Sammy. You found the safe house!”
The safe house was little more than a couple of rooms behind two massive stainless steel doors. It took a hell of an effort for Dean, along with Danny, to heave open the door and then shut it again behind them. Sam was of no use, his wrenched knee barely able to hold his weight, so he stood off to the side, keeping himself between Sheila and anything that might come at them from the street before they managed to get inside. It was a damned good thing that zombies couldn't figure out how to work a door handle, Dean thought, because, safe house or no, he never felt really safe unless he was behind locked doors, preferably with a whole bunch of salt between himself and the outside world as well, and maybe a couple of Devil's Traps. Oh, and some goofer dust while he was at it. Unfortunately, none of that shit worked on zombies, except maybe the locks, to keep them away.
He let Danny and Sheila inside, then when he saw how badly Sam was limping, pulled his arm over his shoulder to help him inside. Sam sank down on a packing crate by the closest wall, pressing a hand to his thigh with a grimace, all the colour leeching from his face. At the worried look Dean threw him he shrugged. “Think I tore something. If you find a first aid kit in here, I can strap it up. Even if you don't, I can probably rig something.”
“Well, we've got some Aspirin left, enough to see you through tonight and tomorrow at least. Take the edge off. I'll see what else I can find,” Dean promised. “Stay put, okay? And stay off it!”
“Yeah, really not an issue.”
Danny was already making a sweep of the place, trotting up the metal staircase that led to what looked like a tiny storage area on the landing. “Well, definitely no zombies here!” he called down. “Got a couple of first-aid kits, God only knows what's in 'em, but it's better than nothing. I'm amazed no one's made off with them yet. Some canned stuff, and a note asking oh-so-nice for us to leave something behind if possible, so that the shelter's never completely empty.”
“Yeah, well, they're kind of SOL this time,” Dean said sourly. “We've got ammo and the clothes on our back, and I for one am not going to be leaving any bullets here for the completely hypothetical people who might, hypothetically, be coming after us.”
“Got an ace bandage here. Catch,” Danny dropped it into Dean's waiting hands. “You guys got anything down there?”
“A whole bunch of crates, and a whole lot of graffiti.”
Dean paced along the walls, fascinated by the messages scrawled in magic marker all over the filthy surfaces. Some were just signatures, names and dates, as though the people who'd been here before had simply wanted to prove ―to themselves or others, who knew?― that they were still alive, that they existed, that they mattered to someone. Others were directions to other safe houses, a couple mentioned a new evacuation zone. Most of them were messages left by survivors desperate enough to hope that their loved ones would follow them here, and maybe all the way to safety.
Maya, we're heading toward the evac zone. We'll look for you there!
Love, Ron and Allie.
John, I have the kids with me. We're all safe.
Meet us at Mom's place, we'll wait for you. Diane.
Seeing his father's name gave him pause, but it wasn't like John wasn't a common name. Dad had been dead for months, now, and there was no bringing him back. Other graffiti was the same coarse bullshit you saw everywhere else, all jokes about sex and bodily functions, and the rest was all the deranged ramblings you could expect in a place like this. One of them screamed at him from the centre of the largest wall:
THEY CAN'T CHANGE BACK!
DON'T TAKE THEM W/YOU
SAVE YOURSELF!
He was staring at one which said simply 'Exodus 9:15' when he became aware of Sheila's presence at his elbow. She looked at it, and her lip curled in disgust.
“Problem?” Dean asked.
“Religion,” she sneered, then quoted: “For now I will stretch out my hand, that I may smite thee and thy people with pestilence; and thou shalt be cut off from the earth.”
“Cheerful. I love it when people are optimistic like that.”
She snorted, then picked up the magic marker that had been left lying on a nearby crate. “All these people, they're still trying, you know? Trying to pass along messages, as if anyone would read them. You think anybody ever gets the messages meant for them?”
Dean shrugged, uncomfortable at the thought. “I dunno. Maybe?”
“In that case,” she crouched by the wall, and began to write painstakingly under the stranger's imprecation to save themselves. When she was done she pulled back, her expression one of grim triumph, capped the pen and tossed it back onto the crate before going to sit by Sam.
For a moment Dean couldn't bring himself to look, but he knew it would eat at him forever if he didn't. The message was succinct, but she had traced over some of the letters, and underlined a word twice, just to make sure.
CLAUDE HUGGINS
YOU ARE A COWARD
AND YOU LET
YOR CHILDREN DIE!
Dean shivered. He supposed Sam would have something to say about the fact that she'd misspelled a word, but when he looked at his brother he saw Sam staring at the words blankly, his lips pressed together so hard they had turned white.
Dean cleared his throat, breaking the sudden silence. “You okay, Sammy?”
His brother started a bit, then nodded. “Yeah. Could use a hand with this, though.” He motioned to where he'd rolled up his jeans to expose his knee, which was already swelling enough to stretch the fabric of his pants.
“Sure,” Dean dropped to one knee next to him, “just don't get any ideas, all right? I'm not proposing.”
“Bite me.”
“Uh huh. Foot,” Dean patted his thigh, then grabbed Sam's ankle to rest his foot in his lap while he wrapped up his knee as tightly as he could without impeding the circulation, forcing himself to ignore his brother's hiss of pain. “How's that, too tight?”
Sam tested it gingerly, chewing on the inside of his lip. “Yeah, feels okay enough. Thanks.” He accepted the two Aspirin Dean dropped in his hand, dry-swallowed them without so much as batting an eye. It was a little depressing, Dean thought, that they both did that without even questioning it these days.
Danny had come down the stairs, and only cast a cursory glance at the newest decoration on the wall. “So what's the plan. Are we bugging out now? Or do we want to wait until it's not pitch-black out there?”
“I'm all for staying a few hours, catching some sleep, if we can,” Sam ventured. “We've been up for more than twenty-four hours, and I don't think I can do much running at this point. We should have something to eat, too... I don't suppose there's anything like sleeping bags around here?”
“We can check,” Dean promised. “Hey, Sheila, you still with us, doll?” She was staring out into space, but started and looked back at him when he snapped his fingers in her face. “No zoning out, sweetheart,” he gave her his cockiest, most shit-eating grin. The kind that either made women giggle or want to slap him, and he figured that either reaction would be good right about now.
She blinked, then wrinkled her nose. “Does that really work with women?”
For a moment he wondered if she could read his mind. “Sometimes.”
Sam snorted. “Feel free to ignore him. For all he looks young, he was actually born before feminism was invented.”
That got a huff of laughter out of Sheila. “Oh sure,” Dean made a show of complaining. “Him you find funny!”
The crates yielded up a few old blankets, but not much else that was of immediate use. Still, it was enough. They made a cold meal out of canned beans and fruit, and by the time that was done, they were only too glad to roll up in their blankets on the floor and sink gratefully into sleep.
Dean was pretty sure not more than a couple of hours had passed when his eyes snapped open of their own accord. He lay very still on his makeshift bed on the floor, trying to figure out just what had awoken him. It wasn't zombies ―he couldn't hear any of the usual moaning and shuffling from outside, nor even the hiss of a Smoker or the growl of a hunter, nothing. He sat up carefully, holding his breath, until he heard a soft moan from off to the side. Sheila was curled into a tight ball, fast asleep, her breathing fast but regular, and Danny appeared to be asleep as well, splayed out on his back. That left only one person, and really, it wasn't that much of a surprise. Dean was accustomed to being freakishly in tune with his brother's moods, so if Sam was having a nightmare, well, it just meant that Dean was bound to be awake for it. Sometimes, his life really sucked.
He pushed himself to his hands and knees, crawled a few paces over to where his brother was lying tangled in his blankets, murmuring something unintelligible under his breath, and shook him gently by the shoulder. “Sam. Sammy, wake up,” he whispered. “It's just a dream, Sam.”
Sam moaned a little louder, his breath hitching, and he jerked away from the touch as though Dean had electrocuted him. “No..”
Dean shook him harder. “Sam!”
His brother came awake with a gasp, and Dean had to duck out of the way as he instinctively lashed out at whatever was holding him down. For a moment he thought he'd have a fight on his hands, but Sam's vision cleared quickly, and he let himself slump back onto his blankets.
“You scared the shit out of me,” came the quiet complaint.
“Sorry. You were having a nightmare. Was it about... you know?” Dean made a vague twirling motion with one hand, but Sam shook his head.
“No.”
“Then what?”
Sam drew in a shaky breath, puffed out his cheeks as he exhaled slowly, trying to calm himself down, and Dean rubbed his shoulder, settling himself cross-legged on the floor next to him.
“It was, uh... it was the kids. Sheila's.” Sam tried to pull his knees up to his chest to hug them, then gave up with a wince as his left leg refused to bend. “They weren't dead, when I found them.”
Dean nodded, watching as chewed on his lip. He'd suspected, but having it confirmed made him feel sick. “We couldn't do anything for them, Sammy. You know how these things go.”
“I know,” Sam scrubbed at his face with both hands. “But I left them there, you know? Just... they were so small. I don't think the little girl was more than six, and she was... she was tearing chunks out of her brother's arm.” He choked on a sob, swallowed hard. “I should have put them both out of their misery.”
“Aw, Sammy...” Instinctively Dean inched closer, nudged Sam's shoulder with his own. “You couldn't have. Any other zombies for miles around would have come running at the sound of gunfire. We couldn't take the risk.”
“I know, but... I just... I just left them there, dragged their mother away into the night. They're kids, Dean. Babies.”
“They were already dead. You know that. They're just still moving around. Kind of like spirits but with really bad B.O.”
Sam made a face. “You're disgusting.”
He made a show of grinning. “Yeah, well, it's a God-given talent, Sammy. Can't afford to waste it. Hey,” he nudged him again, this time with an elbow. “You think you can get back to sleep? We have a long day ahead of us.”
Sam nodded. “Could use some Aspirin, though.”
“Your leg?”
“Yeah,” Sam sighed. “Lousy timing.”
“Story of our lives,” Dean agreed, shaking out four pills and shoving them at Sam. “Your liver will be fine just this once. We'll double-dose until we get to the Impala and you don't have to run on that leg anymore. Until then, the less pain you're in, the better.”
“I wasn't going to say anything.”
“Sure. Just take your pills, Francis, and go to sleep before you wake everyone else. You going to be okay?”
“Fine,” Sam swallowed the pills, and Dean might have bought it if he couldn't see the kids' hands shaking even as he tugged his blanket back up around him.
“Yeah, okay,” Dean nodded as though he believed every word, then casually reached over and pulled his own blanket up around his shoulders and settled next to Sam.
“What're you doing?”
“What? I'm cold, and you're like a freaking furnace. Is it too much to ask my freakish little brother to share some of that body heat?”
Sam huffed quietly, then scooted closer and draped an arm over his chest. “I'm going to pretend I can't see right through you, okay?”
“Likewise.”
“Thanks,” Sam murmured into his ear, and Dean sighed theatrically.
“Spare me the chick-flick moment, Samantha, and just go to sleep.”
There was a gust of warm air on the back of his neck as Sam settled down, and Dean could already feel the tension draining away from both of them. “Okay.”
Dawn brought the noise of a starving zombie clawing at the door to the safe house. It was the door by which they had come in, and so Dean didn't bother doing much about it other than checking to make sure it hadn't attracted more of its friends.
“We need to get going,” he nudged Sam in the ribs with his toe, stooping to lend him an arm to help him to his feet. Sam stumbled and winced a bit as he put weight on his injured leg. “How's the leg?”
“It'll loosen up in a few minutes. It's just stiff because I haven't used it.” Sam was lying through his teeth, but there really wasn't much they could do about it anyway. It made a certain perverse kind of sense, and Dean himself had been guilty of embracing the philosophy of 'fake it 'til you make it' in the past, so he let it go, shoving the Aspirin at his brother and watching while he swallowed the pills.
“Everyone ready?”
Sheila and Danny roused easily ―none of them had slept particularly well― and within minutes they had folded up their blankets and tidied away the remnants of their meal. The only advantage of having next to nothing with them meant that there was no packing up to do. All they had to do was steel themselves, and go. Dean did a quick inventory of their weapons, along with an extra handgun someone had left behind because it had jammed. It was a simple enough matter to clear the mechanism, and now they were all properly armed again, which went a long way toward reassuring him. The loss of Sheila's gun might have proved to be a serious handicap otherwise.
The coast was clear on the other side of the door through which they were planning to exit. By Dean's calculations, it wasn't all that far to the evac zone ―barely a couple of miles, if that. If they booked it, they could make it in under an hour. Sure, neither he nor Sam were up to their usual ten-minute-mile standards, and he was pretty sure Danny and Sheila couldn't do that even on a good day, but still, it was so close he could practically taste it. He had no idea if they could make it, if the path that led there was riddled with zombies or some other kind of new and improved death trap, but all he wanted right now was to just go, already, and deal with the rest as it came.
He set a pace that was probably going to be punishing for Sheila and especially for Sam, who was trying very hard not to show how badly he was limping, but the faster they got out of here, the faster Sam would be off that leg and the sooner they'd all be safe. Danny volunteered to scout ahead, and Dean acquiesced with a nod and a hand-wave, casting an anxious glance back at Sam, who was doing a creditable imitation of bringing up the rear.
They circumvented one of the weeping zombies ―heard her wailing from far away and carefully skirted the area once Danny returned with a report of her exact whereabouts. Dean could see her in the distance, half-crumpled on the ground, shoulders shaking, legs splayed out to either side. Sheila barely gave her a second glance.
“Witch,” she said.
“Come again?”
“Hey, you get to name the zombies, I figure I should get to name a zombie too.”
He shrugged, kept walking. “Fair enough.”
“You're naming 'em?” Danny was incredulous. “Bad enough they're trying to kill us, but now you gotta go treating 'em like pets,” he added. “Typical that two white guys would come up with something batshit crazy like that instead of just capping them where they stand. They're zombies, not chihuahuas.”
Sam chuckled, then shoved him gently between the shoulder blades. “Just keep going, dude. We're not out of the woods yet. When you're safely in that helicopter, or whatever, then you can mock the crazy white guys to your heart's content, deal?”
“Deal.”
They jogged through the empty streets as fast as they could manage, steering clear of anything that sounded like it might be a horde, or worse, one of the nastier zombies that actively hunted humans rather than simply reacting to their presence. They reached the outskirts of the town as the sun began to rise higher in the sky, with no sign of danger, although a few stray infected blundered across their paths. Those were easily enough evaded without wasting bullets, though, and even Sam dodged around them, his face grey and pinched with pain. They ought to be in time for the next evac, judging by the position of the sun, but Dean checked his watch, just to be sure. “Evacs are four times a day, or were, last I checked. We've got about an hour or so before the next one, should be plenty of time to get there.”
“Yeah, but what do we do while we're waiting?” Danny pointed out. “There ain't a safe house there. Hell, we don't even know that there's even a building, just a helipad. Hell, it's probably just a really flat field. For all we know it'll be wide open and full of the things.”
“It should be pretty clear,” Sam pointed out, with reason. “After all, it's an evac zone. The problem will be getting there: all the vehicles used for evac make a hell of a lot of noise, so I'm guessing the perimeter will be crawling with the infected. We'll just have to make it through without getting bitten.”
Danny snorted. “Easier said than done.”
The words proved prophetic. As they crested the hill above the evac zone, they all but stumbled into a veritable phalanx of zombies, all pressed up against a chain link fence, clawing at the barrier and moaning in almost comical incomprehension. Beyond the perimeter fence, Dean could see a helicopter sitting idle on a makeshift landing pad. They were so close, so freaking close it would be goddamned tragic to fail now. Sam nudged his elbow, pulled him a few paces aside.
“Okay, what now? We've got about two hundred yards of open terrain between us and what looks like a couple hundred infected, spread out along that fence. That sound right to you?”
Dean grimaced. “Yeah, sounds about right.”
“Between the four of us, I'm pretty sure we don't have two hundred rounds of ammo.”
“Nope. Besides, even if we did, no way we'd be able to make only head-shots, and there's no cover. They'd eat us alive if the horde turned on us. Literally.”
Sam grinned mirthlessly. “Wow, are we ever screwed.”
“Pretty much.”
“Right. So, here's what I think. We scout for a weakness in the perimeter, aim for that, run like hell, and hope to God we don't get eaten on our way in. What do you think?”
“Sounds like a plan.”
As plans went, it wasn't one of the more sophisticated ones they'd ever come up with, and that was saying something, because they were the masters of unsophisticated plans. Still, it was better than nothing, and if they were both lucky and good, they stood a decent chance of getting to the landing pad in one piece. The zombies were slow to react, and unless they attacked as a horde, individually they weren't so bad. He hadn't heard anything for a while now ―not the burbling grunt of a Boomer, or the two-pack-a-day rasp of the Smokers, or even the feral snarl of the Hunters. If they were just up against the regular infected, Dean figured their odds were even better.
Sam was the first to spot an opening along the fence, a gap where the infected weren't all pressed up against the chain link and, due to the natural unevenness of the terrain, were actually scattered at a relatively decent distance from each other. There was a large boulder pressed right up against the fence, which looked like it had been hastily put up more as a means to keep out the zombies than anything else. Zombies couldn't climb fences, and definitely couldn't put two and two together in what was left of their brains to even try to clamber up on the boulder in order to try to get over the fence. Humans, on the other hand, could definitely make it into the compound that way.
The four of them crept along the ground, keeping as low as possible and to what cover they could find, until they were almost directly in front of their planned point of entry. Sheila was trembling, whether from fear or exhaustion or both it was hard to say, but her jaw was clenched, her fingernails digging into the palms of her hands, grim determination written all over her features. Danny was nervous too, shifting his weight from foot to foot, but looking just as determined. Freedom was less than three hundred yards away, so close that it felt almost like a living, breathing thing, beckoning them forward.
“Ready?” Dean looked over at Sam as the infected slowly shuffled along, leaving an even bigger gap near the boulder, and they exchanged a nod.
“Go!”
For all that he was injured, Sam put on a burst of speed that had him at the fence first. He hopped up onto the boulder, turned to snatch Sheila up by the waist, and unceremoniously boosted her up and over the ten-foot fence. She landed in an awkward tumble on the ground but immediately rolled over and scrambled to her feet in time to get out of the way when Sam gave a leg-up to Danny. He turned to Dean, who stopped him.
“It's fine, Sam. You first ―I can climb that fence no problem, but I don't want your leg giving out on the wrong side, you know?”
Sam looked over at where the crowd of infected was beginning to stir, having sensed the presence of fresh meat in the air. He seemed about to argue the point, then relented.
“Yeah, okay.”
That was when the ground began to shake.
“What the hell is that?” Dean's eyes widened as the ground lurched beneath their feet, threatening to send them tumbling off the boulder. He grabbed hold of the fence just as Sam caught hold of one of his arms to steady himself.
“No idea, but it can't be good!”
The movements of the infected were already becoming more frenzied, their moans louder than ever, and Dean could see them beginning to come together, slowly but surely, their focus turning toward him and his brother, even as the whole world appeared to tremble and quake around them. There was a deafening bellow, then, and it was all he could do to keep both himself and Sam upright on the boulder where they were already precariously perched. If either of them fell now, it would be straight into the waiting arms of the zombies.
“Oh my God,” the colour leeched from Sam's face.
“What?”
Sam could only point in horror past Dean's shoulder, his face a mask of terror, and when Dean turned to look he felt his blood run cold. Surging up over the crest of the hill, followed by what looked like a tidal wave of the undead, was the largest creature he had ever seen. It was massive, well over a story tall, and built like a tank, if tanks were made of lumpy grey stone. It paused where it had appeared and let out another angry bellow, silhouetted against the afternoon sky, then put its head down and charged directly at them.
“Go!” Sam yelled, and before Dean could stop him he'd stooped and grabbed him neatly around the knees and boosted him over the fence.
He landed in a tangled heap on the grass, scrabbling for purchase, unable for a moment to tell up from down. Something caught him by an arm and yanked, and he very nearly put a bullet in his assailant until he recognized Danny, pulling him to his feet. His footing regained, he pulled his guns from their holsters ―though it was a bit like taking a pea shooter to an elephant― and trained them toward the fence.
“Sam!”
It was too late, though. The thing had already cleared the distance like it was nothing, and had crashed directly through the fence, right where Sam had been standing. There was no sign of his brother, although he could hear a dull whirring sound somewhere behind him that told him the helicopter was coming to life. A voice rang out, metallic and distorted through a megaphone.
“EVAC IS PROCEEDING ON SCHEDULE. WE SEE YOU THERE. IF YOU CAN GET ON BOARD, DO SO NOW!”
He whirled, scanning frantically for Sam, caught sight of Sheila instead, who was standing, transfixed, staring at the monster bearing down on them, her eyes so wide they seemed to engulf her whole face. He grabbed her arm, jerked her roughly away.
“Come on, run!” he shoved her forward and she stumbled, kept her feet, and started running, as though she had only been awaiting his permission to go.
Danny was already sprinting as fast as he could toward the helicopter, but another ear-splitting roar told Dean they might already be too late. The ground trembled and shook as the huge beast lumbered forward, and the next thing Dean knew it felt as though a Mac truck had collided with him. He was thrown off his feet, sent tumbling head over heels along the grass, while Sheila shrieked, long and loud. He landed on his back, winded and seeing stars, couldn’t seem to get his bearings for a moment. There was a whooshing noise followed by the sound of something exploding and an enraged bellow, and the air suddenly filled with an acrid stench that filled his nostrils and made him gag. He struggled to his hands and knees, crawled forward a few paces before he was able to stand again, his ears ringing. He saw the huge monster staggering back a few paces, its chest a mass of shredded tissue, and that’s when he realized that someone in the helicopter was actually aiming what looked like a grenade launcher at it, while automatic rifle fire peppered the ranks of the undead, felling them in droves.
Hysterical laughter bubbled up in his chest, and he swallowed it with difficulty. “Awesome,” he said to no one in particular, breath hiccupping a little frantically.
His ribcage throbbed, and he could taste copper in his mouth. Once the adrenaline wore off, he knew, he was going to be in a world of hurt. He forced himself forward, back up toward the helicopter, where he saw Danny helping Sheila aboard, mostly by dragging her bodily up with him by both arms, legs kicking in the air. The chopper was full, Dean could see it even from where he was, and there was still no sign of Sam. The beast was getting ready to charge again, slowed down but not out for the count by any means, and Dean straightened with an effort, waved at the guy holding the grenade launcher.
“Down here! I can hold ‘im off!” he winced, wrapped an arm around ribs that he was pretty damned sure were at least cracked, if not broken.
“Are you sure?” the guy yelled back.
Dean nodded, took as deep a breath as he could, then called up again. “I’m not leaving without my brother! Give it here, and I’ll hold it off until you’re clear!”
The chopper was already beginning to lift off the ground, but the guy leaned out, hanging off the chopper by one hand, and carefully dropped the weapon into Dean’s waiting arms. “You got a couple shots left -make ‘em count. And good luck! Next transport’s in three hours: we don’t do night runs,” he shouted to make himself heard above the whirring of the helicopter blades. “You hang in there, we’ll be back to get you. What’s your name?”
Dean laughed and hefted the grenade launcher. “Name’s Dean Winchester, dude!” he said. “Always wanted to get my hands on one of these bad boys. Thanks for the loan! Get going before that thing pulverizes you!”
Not for the first time in his life, Dean was grateful for his father’s military background. He dropped to one knee and aimed the weapon at the monster’s midsection. He’d never actually fired one of these things, but he at least understood the basic of how they worked, and that was something, at least. For a moment the rest of the world faded into darkness, and it was just him and the hulking creature charging at him, and nothing else mattered. His first shot almost went wide of the mark, but with a target that huge it was almost impossible to miss, and he caught it in the side, ripping out a chunk of flesh and bone and gristle. He was rewarded with an enraged roar, but the thing’s momentum didn’t decrease in the slightest. Dean swallowed hard, stood his ground, and adjusted his aim. His next shot caught it just below the throat, and in the next moment its head exploded in a welter of gore. It collapsed comically slowly, as though its body hadn’t quite caught on yet to the fact that it was dead.
Dean dropped the grenade launcher and leaped to his feet, heedless of the pain in his chest, and punched the air, whooping. “Take that, you son of a bitch!”
Silence settled over the area like a blanket, the sounds of the chopper fading into the distance as it flew out of sight. Dean leaned on his knees and coughed, spat a bright mouthful of blood onto the green grass, pulled in a careful breath, and straightened up.
“Sam?”
There was a quiet groan from a few yards away. “I’m here.”
Dean found him next to the boulder among the ruins of the chain link fence, pulling himself painfully and laboriously to his feet. The whole left side of Sam’s face was bruised and beginning to swell, his arm held awkwardly to his chest, and he was holding his left leg gingerly so that it didn’t so much as brush against the ground. He grinned, though, as Dean approached, revealing bloodstained teeth.
“Dude, I know I don’t say this to you often enough, but that was awesome.”
Dean limped over, returned the grin. “Hell yeah. Did you see me?”
Sam nodded. “Did I ever. You okay? That thing mowed you down like a steamroller.”
Dean shrugged and grimaced. “Mostly. Cracked some ribs, probably, and my ears are still ringing. Probably have a concussion, but overall I got off pretty lightly. You? Anything bite you?”
“No bites, no scratches,” Sam shook his head. “I’m kind of fucked up -that thing pretty much crushed me against the rock, but I can keep going for now. It’s not going to hurt until later, when the adrenaline starts wearing off. Chopper was full, huh?”
“Yup. They’re coming back for us in three hours, and I figure none of the infected move fast enough to get here between now and then.”
“So we’re not going back for the Impala?”
He hesitated. God only knew, the thought of leaving his baby behind hurt like very little else had hurt before, but it made no sense to risk both his life and Sam's over a car, even if it was a special car. Sam was badly hurt, and he wasn’t much better off. “I don't know. I mean, it wouldn't be safe to go back, you know?”
Sam nodded. “I know. I don’t really want to leave her, though, you know?” he smiled ruefully, rubbed the back of his neck with his good hand. “I'm kind of waiting for you to tell me that I'm being really stupid for wanting to get the car back, in spite of everything. I mean, it’d be one our more suicidal plans, wouldn’t it? Stupid.”
Dean almost laughed with relief. “I wish I could tell you that, but I think I've got the same brand of stupid. So...”
His brother grinned at him. “So we go get the car, and screw the rescue. What the hell, we’ve always rescued ourselves, right?”
“Damn straight.” He checked over his ammunition as well as Sam’s, and not even that could suppress the feeling of giddiness that had swept over him. One look at Sam’s face told him that his brother was feeling the same way, his face flushed, expression exhilarated.
“Ready, Sammy?”
“I was born ready.”
“That’s my boy!” Dean threw his head back with a delighted, if slightly manic laugh. “Let's go!”
And together, they made a break for freedom.
~END~