Ruins of Our Own Construction - Chapter 5
Continued from Chapter 4 - Master post can be found here.
February 4th, 2008
Singer’s Salvage Yard
Bobby’s eyes drifted from the frying eggs to the boy that hung around his kitchen like a ghost. Things had been manageable when Sam had been knocked out on pain meds, but once he’d started healing up and they’d kept him from pneumonia, things had gotten tense. Once he’d been able enough to walk there had been no keeping him in the house. Lately, he'd been rushing out following anything that half sounded like a local lead on his brother. Each day they didn’t find Dean was one more nail in Sam’s coffin.
"It’s bad enough you’re trying to kill me with those cholesterol bombs,” Rufus griped. “You gotta go and burn them too?”
“I don’t see you volunteering to cook,” Bobby replied as he fumbled for the spatula and dished up the only slightly blackened eggs. “This damn wood stove ain’t exactly predictable.”
“Sure, blame the stove.”
While his mouth was complaining, Rufus didn’t hesitate to grab a fork the second the eggs were set in front of him. One of them was gone before he stopped to take another sip of his drink. He swirled the amber liquid in the glass as he looked across the table to where Sam stood.
“You too good to sit with us now?” Rufus asked.
Sam rolled his stiff shoulder before his head jerked up to look at Rufus. “What?”
Bobby was sweating like a hog standing right over the stove, but it wasn’t until Sam came all the way into the kitchen that the kid shrugged off his patched up jacket and draped it over one of the rickety kitchen chairs. He tipped his head back and brushed his bangs aside.
That hair of his was bordering on ridiculously long, but he refused to cut it. Bobby lost what little appetite he’d had when he remembered that conversation. He’d just assumed Sam had been wanting for scissors and had offered a pair. Sam had stared at them until finally choking out that Dean was the only one who knew how to cut it right. They both knew Dean wasn’t the only to have ever cut Sam’s hair, but it was one more blaring hole where Dean had used to be.
“It won’t bring him back, you know.”
At Rufus’s words, Bobby saw that same silent despair again rise in Sam’s eyes. Sorrow and anger were the only two emotions he’d seen from the boy since Rufus had brought him here. Bobby knew what these boys were to each other. There wasn’t one without the other and no good would come of poking at that wound.
“Rufus...” Bobby warned.
“Don’t you ‘Rufus’ me and before you get any ideas, don’t you go shooting the messenger either, but this house is getting too damn crowded with this giant elephant in the room.”
The look in Sam’s eyes sharpened. “Dean’s still out there.”
“No, kid, he ain’t and it’s time that someone said it. Bobby’s not doing you any favors by letting you go on thinking it.” Bobby busied himself shrugging off his apron when Rufus turned in his chair to stare at him. The only sound was the quiet crackling of the fire while they each silently dared the other to say what no one wanted to hear. “Well, I’ll be damned. You’re not just humoring him, are ya?”
“And you’re about to be thrown out on your ass, what’s your point?”
“I think you know.” Rufus settled back in his chair and took another drink before setting the empty glass heavily down on the table. “We got civilians dying left and right, we got demons and zombies and worst of all, we got humans and your cheap ass liquor.”
“This isn’t funny.” Sam said.
“Damn straight. Funny died a long time ago, kid.” Rufus propped his elbows up on the table and folded his hands. “What I know is that you and Bobby are deluded, self-absorbed morons.”
Bobby slammed his hands down on the table hard enough to shake the plates and silverware sitting on it. He pointed a finger at Sam while he leaned in to glare at Rufus. “If he don’t hit you, I will.”
“You go right ahead. Millions, maybe hundreds of million of people are dead or infected. We’ve lost nearly every hunter we had. One kid, Bobby. Three weeks ago one kid went missing and that’s where both your heads are still at.”
Reaching past Rufus, Bobby grabbed the whiskey bottle from the center of the table. He filled his glass and knocked back a good swig of it, letting the burn slide down his throat before finding the words. It was three weeks to the day and Bobby obviously hadn’t been the only one counting.
“You didn’t know this kid.”
It was the fact that Dean had vanished that made it so damn impossible to accept. Dean didn’t have a lot in common with John, but he did have that same larger than life presence that made him seem untouchable. Without a body, there was no way to believe that he was really gone.
Bobby had seen a couple of these test facilities after the officials who had run them had themselves become the Infected. In reality, he knew what had likely become of Dean and that was also the problem. He would lose all reason if he had to accept that Dean, a boy who might as well have been his own son, had died alone in a laboratory.
When Bobby looked up, Sam’s eyes were large and lost. His shoulders slumped so far that his height almost looked reasonable. Bobby had no doubt that the same thoughts were running through the boy’s head. It didn’t help that Sam had seen a lot more of these facilities firsthand than Bobby had.
Rufus pushed back his chair and headed over to the cupboard. “Dean, he’s the lucky one. This war’s over for him.”
“Then there’s nothing left.”
Sam’s words were so quiet that Bobby nearly missed them, but it was hard to disagree. All they were doing was losing ground to monsters who were trying to fill the gaps left by an all but absent human population. It had been almost two weeks since any of them had seen another non-infected soul. They were only still here in Sioux Falls because Sam insisted that someone had to be here for when Dean came back.
“I’m not saying we gotta pack our bags.” Rufus brought four clean glasses to the table and set one in front of the seat Dean should have been sitting in. “It’d just do us all some good to stop pretending.”
Bobby set a hand on Sam’s unwounded shoulder, giving it a squeeze as the boy reluctantly met his eyes. A nod was all Bobby could manage as he guided Sam to a seat while Rufus twisted the cap off of his last bottle of Johnny Walker Blue.
~~~
February 9th, 2008
Nebraska State Penitentiary
Henricksen had entered CEDA claimed facilities so silent that his gentlest footsteps had echoed like thunder down the halls. This wasn’t one of those facilities. Here the sounds of nightmares filled the air and fully masked the fall of his boots on the blood-stained linoleum.
Three weeks ago, he had walked away from everything. He’d tried to get word of the testing to the right people, but they’d either already known, were too afraid to stand up or had flat out declared him a nutcase. When official channels had failed, he’d taken it into his own hands.
A couple of weeks ago, his dress shoes had been retired for work boots. He hadn’t even bothered packing his suits and his familiar pressed slacks had quickly torn and been replaced with grungy jeans. It was just as well, the pants would only be all the more stained by the time he got out of here.
He kept tight to the wall as his eyes strained in search of potential threats hiding in the darkness. Like most of the other facilities he had broken into, this one obviously had backup generators that kept some of the basic functions running even though the staff were long gone, for all the good it did.
The emergency lighting was minimal and while the climate controls were still up in some areas, others might as well be walk-in freezers. If the prisoner housing facilities were without heat, he wasn’t likely to find much aside from more corpses awaiting him.
Victor had never taken failure well and lately, it didn’t feel like anything was enough. With the list of testing sites in hand, he’d spent the last several weeks hopping from facility to facility trying, and mostly failing, to beat the clock.
The things he’d found had made him question everything. Despite what he’d told Reed, despite what he knew to be true, he could no longer believe that the Infected were only humans. It just wasn’t that simple.
He had an even harder time believing that those who had left the test subjects to die had ever had any humanity in them at all. The grotesque shells this disease left behind were so many worlds of wrong, but it was the bodies of those who hadn’t changed, who had never even been sick and had died for nothing - that was more than Victor could take.
Every time he got ready to throw in the towel he found one more survivor. It was enough to keep him going, to keep fighting because there was no other way to justify why he was still here when so many millions of others were gone.
With cautious steps, he proceeded down the hallway. The grating blare of a perpetually sounding security alarm screeched in the distance. The backup lights were just enough to draw out long flickering shadows that had Victor tensing his gun hand at the turn of every corner. He still needed the flashlight to illuminate the long hallways, though he used it as little as possible. For the most part, what lay down these halls wasn’t anything he wanted a full view of.
Already he’d seen enough and it didn’t take lighting the area to smell the nostril stinging stench. What his nose couldn’t pick up, his ears did in the wailing cries, manic laughter and scrambling footsteps just out of sight. This facility was still crawling with Infected and there was no way to know how many were contained and how many were freely roaming the halls.
The cells in this block had been built for solitary confinement. In each cell’s solid door was a small window slit that he could peer in through. He walked down the line, shining his flashlight into each cell and not lingering longer than he had to after confirming the cell’s occupant Infected or deceased. If he found anyone alive and human, it would be a miracle.
When he’d gotten a hold of the keys from the guard station, he’d checked the sign-in sheet. No one had marked down having done rounds for over a week. Each cell had its own sink for water as long as the municipal water functioned, but no one trapped here would have had access to food.
Anger gripped his chest as he found most of the cells occupied. The flare of a flashlight beam shone into the cells triggered many of the subjects to leap and claw at the glass. Even knowing it was coming, he found it difficult not to jump at every Infected that slammed into a viewing window. The silent cells were only worse, holding bodies in various stages of decay.
Victor had nearly decided he’d seen enough when he shone his flashlight into the next cell and found a man sitting on the bed. There were no sheets or blankets and all Victor could see of the huddled man were bare legs tucked to his chest and equally exposed arms wrapped around them in a futile effort to find warmth. There was still heat to this cell block, but not enough that Victor felt the need to strip off any of his three layers.
When the flashlight’s beam hit the man’s face, one of the man’s arms moved up to shield his eyes. His movements were confused and cautious. Rather than flinging himself from the bed, the man raised his head to stare towards the door with empty, but very human eyes.
The man slowly stood, seeming uneasy on his feet. His mouthed moved as if he was speaking, but whatever words came out were too quiet for Victor to hear. He could now see that the man wore a short, rumpled hospital gown as he limped towards the door with a creased brow.
Victor’s own brow furrowed as he watched the frail, young man. There was something familiar about him even in the harsh, narrow light with the man squinting and a thick layer of stubble covering his ghostly face.
“Hey!” the man croaked before clearing his throat. “Who’s there?”
Usually, Victor would have already thrown open the cell door, instead he stood frozen as the man stared out the small opening and tried to see past the flashlight. It had taken a moment to register the thinner face and sunken eyes, though there now was no question that he was looking into the cautiously hopeful eyes of Dean Winchester.
“Let me out!”
It would be easy to keep walking. After the things he’d done, there was no reason that Dean Winchester, of all men, deserved to be one of the few left alive. Maybe this really was hell. Either way, Victor failed in his conviction.
He listened to the thud of Dean’s fist banging weakly against the door and took in the desperate green eyes framed in the small opening. It didn’t matter what Dean was, Victor couldn’t force himself to leave any man to starve or to burn alive when the military arrived to destroy all evidence of this facility. At the very least, he’d end this with a mercy kill.
Victor holstered his gun only long enough to work the key into the lock. The pistol was then back in his hand and cocked by the time he spoke again. “Hands on your head, step away from the door.”
“Gordon? Quit screwing around and get me out of here, you son of a bitch.”
“Come on, Dean, now is that anyway to talk to your rescuer?” Victor asked as he slid open the door. “Get on the ground.”
Dean stumbled backwards, disoriented as Victor surged in with his gun raised. Part of Victor couldn’t help but feel a sense of satisfaction at seeing this smug bastard taken down so many notches. The victory was short-lived. Seeing even the ugliest of humans intentionally put in this state was sickening.
“Henricksen?” Dean asked hoarsely. “Oh, you’ve gotta be freakin’ kidding me.”
“No joke. On the ground. Now!”
Dean’s eyes scanned the area, but he laced his hands behind his head and didn’t make a break for the door. Impatiently, Victor watched as Dean stumbled around instead of dropping to his knees. It took looking down at Dean’s bare feet to see that the man wasn’t playing games. He was trying to get down without putting all his weight on a foot bound in an ankle brace.
“Just get against the wall,” Victor ordered as he gave Dean a halfhearted shove forward.
There was a resignation that Victor hadn’t expected to find as Dean silently complied. His head lowered and he pressed his palms against the concrete wall. Victor quietly put away his gun and slipped out a pair of handcuffs that he hadn’t been able to give up carrying.
He jerked one of Dean’s arms behind his back only to have his resolve waver further. IV track-marks covered the pale forearm. Being a heroine junkie didn’t fit with what he knew about Dean and the man obviously hadn’t had access to shoot up in here.
Victor put away the cuffs so that he could move the flashlight in for a closer view. He twisted Dean’s arm to reveal the full extent of scarring and ran his thumb over the faded bruising that remained from restraints that hadn’t held the man for over a week.
Releasing the left arm, Victor took Dean’s other arm, more gently this time, and found the same marks plus some kind of numeric code tattooed onto Dean’s wrist. Victor ground his teeth as he stared at the cattle style identification marking.
He tapped a finger against the blue-inked numbers. “They do this to you?”
“What do you care?”
With barely a shrug, Dean remained standing still in his open-back hospital gown without breathing a word of cocky commentary or attempting to put up a fight. As Victor listened to the oddly shallow sound of Dean’s breathing, he moved the flashlight away from Dean’s arms to point at his back. Fading cuts, which almost looked like claw marks, littered the exposed skin and his sides were discolored enough that he probably had more than a few badly bruised, if not broken, ribs.
Dean only stiffened as Victor brushed the fabric of the gown forward to further to reveal the full evidence of beatings and weight loss. When Dean shivered, Victor let the gown fall back into place and stepped away. Dean turned his head to throw a cautious look over his shoulder.
Henricksen remembered the day, not long ago, when this now fragile man had seemed the most profound threat facing humanity. Now Dean filled the role of the most human thing Victor had seen in weeks.
When he again pulled out his gun, Dean really met his eyes for the first time. “Just get it over with.”
“Don’t tempt me,” Victor replied before motioning with the pistol. “Let’s get out of here.”
There was only a moment of hesitation before Dean complied and headed towards the door. It was pretty clear by the uncertainty in Dean’s step that the man hadn’t expected to ever leave the cell.
Dean looked up and down the halls before returning his attention to Victor. “Any other survivors?”
“There sure as hell better be because if you’re it, there’s nothing left in this world worth saving.” He’d expected a witty comeback, but was taken aback when he only got a weary nod of agreement. Victor tried not to read too much into it as he resumed checking cells. “So where’s Bonnie?”
Victor shone the flashlight back at Dean when no response came. Dean’s eyes were shifted down and he seemed to withdraw further into himself as his hand came up to rub the back of his neck. It was hard to know what to think when Dean just avoided the question entirely.
“I’m looking for a Gordon Walker,” Dean said. “He should be here.”
The name didn’t ring any bells in Victor’s head. Whoever this Gordon was, it wasn’t someone attached to Dean’s official case file. “Friend of yours?”
“I wouldn’t say friend...let’s just say I owe him. The guy’s a sick bastard, but he doesn’t deserve to die here.”
“Funny, I was thinking the same thing about you.” Victor tapped his finger against his flashlight as he again got only silence from Dean. He couldn’t help but press further, mostly because he needed the distraction from the contents of the cells. “This Gordon, is he a psycho serial killer too?”
“Unlike me, yeah.”
At first Victor thought that Dean had already recovered his attitude, but Dean’s face remained neutral. After so long hunting this man, Victor needed the truth. He already knew what it was, but he needed to hear it from Dean’s mouth.
“You’re still expecting me to believe that you’re one of the good guys? Cut the bull, Dean. There’s no one left to fool. I know you and Sam....”
In less than a second Dean went from barely standing to slamming Victor back into the wall. The pistol and flashlight clattered to the floor as Dean gripped the front of Victor’s jacket. “You can spew whatever kind of crap you want about me, but you keep your mouth shut about my brother. He died a hero.”
There was enough conviction and pain in the words to render even Victor silent. Dean’s grip on him was weak, his hands shaky. Despite Victor’s instinct telling him to take Dean down, he waited.
Slowly, Dean let him go and stepped away before turning his back and looked to the ground. The fallen pistol lay beside Dean’s foot. Instead of reaching for it, Dean braced against the wall so he could kick the weapon back towards Victor. By the time Victor retrieved it and the flashlight, Dean was grimacing at the sight of a fallen body and swearing beneath his breath.
“Is that your ‘friend’?”
“What?” Dean looked up after Victor’s question caught up with him. “No. I just recognized the hair.”
Victor moved the flashlight down the length of the body to see the unusually long, tangled locks. “So you’re a barber in between murder sprees?”
Dean shot him a sharp glare. “You’re batting a thousand, Henricksen.” When Dean looked away, the expression on his face softened to a sadness, which combined with the next words to leave Dean’s mouth, stopped Victor in his tracks. “I promised her she’d be okay.”
There were few things in Victor’s mind so clear as his visual of Dean Winchester. Yet nothing he was seeing or hearing from Dean now fit for a guy that dug up corpses for kicks.
Victor stepped away and tried to talk himself out of trusting a single word coming out of Dean’s mouth. These were the same inconsistencies people had brought to him as proof that Dean wasn’t the monster Victor knew him to be.
He’d blown off each and every one of them. SWAT team, police officers, lawyers and wardens - all reputable professionals that he’d told to go screw themselves for being so damn gullible. It was the same thing the CEDA agents he’d approached had told him about these testing facilities.
“Henricksen!”
Victor’s eyes were focused on searching a cell when Dean shouted the warning. The tone said enough that he spun around with his gun raised. He took a step back as he saw a hugely bloated thing with boil-covered skin lumbering towards him. It let out a groan and stomped closer, moving far slower than a typical Infected. He aimed his gun for the easy shot and pulled the trigger just as Dean’s warning not to shoot reached his ears.
The bullet easily hit its target and the former man exploded in a shower of putrid bile that fell to the ground with noisy plops. He stumbled backwards as it stuck to his skin and clothing and seeped down his forehead, stinging his eyes and blurring his vision. Victor dropped his flashlight in a desperate attempt to clear the thick fluids from his face.
He jumped when he heard the shattering of glass behind him. “What the hell was that?”
“Just getting a weapon,” Dean replied. “That crap you’re covered in is gonna attract every damn zombie in this place.”
“You’ve run into these before?”
Victor’s vision was still blurred, his eyes blinking to try and expel the bile. He could only vaguely make out Dean’s unsteady stance as the man strained just to hold the fireman’s axe he’d pulled from the wall.
“The agents called them Boomers because, well, you saw it. They collected that nasty ass stuff in jars and...we just gotta hope most of these things are locked away.”
It might have been nine kinds of crazy, but Victor got what Dean was saying about the bile-popping Infected. He even heard the confirmation of an approaching horde. What he didn’t get was why Dean was still standing beside him. Dean had been far enough back that the bile shouldn’t have hit him.
“It got you too?”
"No, I’m clean.” As the sounds of the horde grew louder, Dean moved closer to Victor. “But dude, you’re so screwed.”
There was no time to ask why Dean wasn’t running, or at least trying to crawl away, before the first of the horde skidded around the corner. Victor couldn’t clearly see what was happening, but he heard Dean grunt, followed by the sickening thuds of what had to be Dean’s axe burying itself in flesh.
A frenzy of hands reached for Victor, backing him against the wall, but each time one tightened their grip on him, Dean somehow managed to knock it away. His vision was beginning to return when Dean was hurled to the ground.
He landed hard on his back and skidded over the bile coated concrete. The impact stunned him enough that he only cringed and tried to curl onto his side as several of the Infected leapt on top of him, clawing at his chest. Victor pushed off the wall and, with several well aimed shots, felled the remaining Infected.
At Victor’s feet, Dean uselessly pushed at one of the Infected that had collapsed on top of him. By the pained tightness in his face, it was obvious that the body lying over his ribs was the last thing Dean needed. Victor easily pulled it off before he knelt down to help Dean to sit.
Victor struggled to catch his own breath as he watched Dean clutch his side and pull in shallow, pained gasps. The thin fabric of his hospital gown had been torn, leaving the bloody claw marks on his chest and shoulders exposed. Dean’s face contorted in pain as he sat shivering with the tattered fabric barely clinging to him.
There was nothing Victor could say. He could only stare at the half dead young man who hadn’t hesitated to risk his life for him. It was something very few men would do for a perfect stranger, and Victor wasn’t a stranger. He was a man who had made it his life’s work to make Dean’s life hell.
Victor grimaced, wiping the last chunks of glop from his face and wishing he had so much as a clean jacket to offer Dean. Hell, he’d settle for a few intelligent words to break the silence.
“You saved my life.”
It was far from profound, but stating the obvious was the best Victor could come up with right now. Dean looked underwhelmed or maybe just on the verge of passing out.
“Don’t take it too personally,” Dean muttered. “When you got nothing to live for, you’ll die for anything.”
No one wanted to believe it was only that more than Victor, but that wasn’t what he’d seen. “You didn’t even think.”
“There’s my problem.”
Victor shook his head in disbelief and held out a hand to help Dean up. “I’ve never seen a man fight like that.”
“You pick it up hunting monsters.” The words came easily from Dean’s lips as he accepted Victor’s hand. “Like I’ve been trying to tell you, it’s what I do.”
He found himself just staring into Dean’s eyes, searching for even the slightest hint of deception. Not only couldn’t he find one, but the fact was that Dean no longer had a motive to keep up that charade and after the last few weeks, it didn’t even sound that crazy anymore.
“I don’t believe it.”
Once Dean was on his feet, Victor stripped off his jacket and tossed it to the floor. They were going to have to ditch all the clothes before they walked back onto the open streets, but for now Victor unbuttoned his top shirt and held it out to Dean who just stared at it.
“I don’t give a rat’s ass what you believe,” Dean replied as he tentatively took the shirt.
“No, I mean, the whole damn while - it was all the truth.”
“Wow. You catch on fast.”
A smirk ghosted over Victor’s lips at the hint of the Dean he remembered. It was a touch of familiarity in a world that had otherwise been flipped on its head. The comfort was short lived as the full impact of that implication settled over him. To think that saying sorry could touch it seemed an insult.
Dean looked up after slipping on the shirt and wrapping the gown around his waist. He seemed to pick up on Victor’s unease and waved him off. “You can start by buying me dinner.”
Victor was nearly carrying Dean by the time they made it to the next cell block. Whatever reserve of energy had driven the man to be able to fight had all but vanished now. Victor had wanted to call it quits, but Dean had stubbornly insisted on continuing to check cells even as he could only barely stand.
They were on the last section when Victor’s flashlight illuminated a man sitting ramrod straight in one of the cell’s chairs. The man’s expression was disturbingly calm as he moved his eyes up, apparently unbothered by the sudden influx of light.
“I got someone.”
At Victor’s word’s Dean switched to leaning against the wall so that he could peer through the cell’s window. “That’s the son of a bitch,” he confirmed before pounding on the cell door. “Hey, Gordy, you still human in there?”
Gordon stood as Victor unlocked the door. He looked a lot surer on his feet than Dean, but his movements were still slow and overly calculated as he stepped out of the cell.
“Took you long enough,” Gordon remarked with a dismissive glance towards Dean. “I was starting to get hungry.”
There was a detached, coldness in Gordon’s eyes that reminded Victor too much of many of the hardened criminals he’d seen put away. While the look was a familiar one, it only stood out to Victor as he realized for the first time just how far from that Dean really was.
Continue to Chapter 6
February 4th, 2008
Singer’s Salvage Yard
Bobby’s eyes drifted from the frying eggs to the boy that hung around his kitchen like a ghost. Things had been manageable when Sam had been knocked out on pain meds, but once he’d started healing up and they’d kept him from pneumonia, things had gotten tense. Once he’d been able enough to walk there had been no keeping him in the house. Lately, he'd been rushing out following anything that half sounded like a local lead on his brother. Each day they didn’t find Dean was one more nail in Sam’s coffin.
"It’s bad enough you’re trying to kill me with those cholesterol bombs,” Rufus griped. “You gotta go and burn them too?”
“I don’t see you volunteering to cook,” Bobby replied as he fumbled for the spatula and dished up the only slightly blackened eggs. “This damn wood stove ain’t exactly predictable.”
“Sure, blame the stove.”
While his mouth was complaining, Rufus didn’t hesitate to grab a fork the second the eggs were set in front of him. One of them was gone before he stopped to take another sip of his drink. He swirled the amber liquid in the glass as he looked across the table to where Sam stood.
“You too good to sit with us now?” Rufus asked.
Sam rolled his stiff shoulder before his head jerked up to look at Rufus. “What?”
Bobby was sweating like a hog standing right over the stove, but it wasn’t until Sam came all the way into the kitchen that the kid shrugged off his patched up jacket and draped it over one of the rickety kitchen chairs. He tipped his head back and brushed his bangs aside.
That hair of his was bordering on ridiculously long, but he refused to cut it. Bobby lost what little appetite he’d had when he remembered that conversation. He’d just assumed Sam had been wanting for scissors and had offered a pair. Sam had stared at them until finally choking out that Dean was the only one who knew how to cut it right. They both knew Dean wasn’t the only to have ever cut Sam’s hair, but it was one more blaring hole where Dean had used to be.
“It won’t bring him back, you know.”
At Rufus’s words, Bobby saw that same silent despair again rise in Sam’s eyes. Sorrow and anger were the only two emotions he’d seen from the boy since Rufus had brought him here. Bobby knew what these boys were to each other. There wasn’t one without the other and no good would come of poking at that wound.
“Rufus...” Bobby warned.
“Don’t you ‘Rufus’ me and before you get any ideas, don’t you go shooting the messenger either, but this house is getting too damn crowded with this giant elephant in the room.”
The look in Sam’s eyes sharpened. “Dean’s still out there.”
“No, kid, he ain’t and it’s time that someone said it. Bobby’s not doing you any favors by letting you go on thinking it.” Bobby busied himself shrugging off his apron when Rufus turned in his chair to stare at him. The only sound was the quiet crackling of the fire while they each silently dared the other to say what no one wanted to hear. “Well, I’ll be damned. You’re not just humoring him, are ya?”
“And you’re about to be thrown out on your ass, what’s your point?”
“I think you know.” Rufus settled back in his chair and took another drink before setting the empty glass heavily down on the table. “We got civilians dying left and right, we got demons and zombies and worst of all, we got humans and your cheap ass liquor.”
“This isn’t funny.” Sam said.
“Damn straight. Funny died a long time ago, kid.” Rufus propped his elbows up on the table and folded his hands. “What I know is that you and Bobby are deluded, self-absorbed morons.”
Bobby slammed his hands down on the table hard enough to shake the plates and silverware sitting on it. He pointed a finger at Sam while he leaned in to glare at Rufus. “If he don’t hit you, I will.”
“You go right ahead. Millions, maybe hundreds of million of people are dead or infected. We’ve lost nearly every hunter we had. One kid, Bobby. Three weeks ago one kid went missing and that’s where both your heads are still at.”
Reaching past Rufus, Bobby grabbed the whiskey bottle from the center of the table. He filled his glass and knocked back a good swig of it, letting the burn slide down his throat before finding the words. It was three weeks to the day and Bobby obviously hadn’t been the only one counting.
“You didn’t know this kid.”
It was the fact that Dean had vanished that made it so damn impossible to accept. Dean didn’t have a lot in common with John, but he did have that same larger than life presence that made him seem untouchable. Without a body, there was no way to believe that he was really gone.
Bobby had seen a couple of these test facilities after the officials who had run them had themselves become the Infected. In reality, he knew what had likely become of Dean and that was also the problem. He would lose all reason if he had to accept that Dean, a boy who might as well have been his own son, had died alone in a laboratory.
When Bobby looked up, Sam’s eyes were large and lost. His shoulders slumped so far that his height almost looked reasonable. Bobby had no doubt that the same thoughts were running through the boy’s head. It didn’t help that Sam had seen a lot more of these facilities firsthand than Bobby had.
Rufus pushed back his chair and headed over to the cupboard. “Dean, he’s the lucky one. This war’s over for him.”
“Then there’s nothing left.”
Sam’s words were so quiet that Bobby nearly missed them, but it was hard to disagree. All they were doing was losing ground to monsters who were trying to fill the gaps left by an all but absent human population. It had been almost two weeks since any of them had seen another non-infected soul. They were only still here in Sioux Falls because Sam insisted that someone had to be here for when Dean came back.
“I’m not saying we gotta pack our bags.” Rufus brought four clean glasses to the table and set one in front of the seat Dean should have been sitting in. “It’d just do us all some good to stop pretending.”
Bobby set a hand on Sam’s unwounded shoulder, giving it a squeeze as the boy reluctantly met his eyes. A nod was all Bobby could manage as he guided Sam to a seat while Rufus twisted the cap off of his last bottle of Johnny Walker Blue.
~~~
February 9th, 2008
Nebraska State Penitentiary
Henricksen had entered CEDA claimed facilities so silent that his gentlest footsteps had echoed like thunder down the halls. This wasn’t one of those facilities. Here the sounds of nightmares filled the air and fully masked the fall of his boots on the blood-stained linoleum.
Three weeks ago, he had walked away from everything. He’d tried to get word of the testing to the right people, but they’d either already known, were too afraid to stand up or had flat out declared him a nutcase. When official channels had failed, he’d taken it into his own hands.
A couple of weeks ago, his dress shoes had been retired for work boots. He hadn’t even bothered packing his suits and his familiar pressed slacks had quickly torn and been replaced with grungy jeans. It was just as well, the pants would only be all the more stained by the time he got out of here.
He kept tight to the wall as his eyes strained in search of potential threats hiding in the darkness. Like most of the other facilities he had broken into, this one obviously had backup generators that kept some of the basic functions running even though the staff were long gone, for all the good it did.
The emergency lighting was minimal and while the climate controls were still up in some areas, others might as well be walk-in freezers. If the prisoner housing facilities were without heat, he wasn’t likely to find much aside from more corpses awaiting him.
Victor had never taken failure well and lately, it didn’t feel like anything was enough. With the list of testing sites in hand, he’d spent the last several weeks hopping from facility to facility trying, and mostly failing, to beat the clock.
The things he’d found had made him question everything. Despite what he’d told Reed, despite what he knew to be true, he could no longer believe that the Infected were only humans. It just wasn’t that simple.
He had an even harder time believing that those who had left the test subjects to die had ever had any humanity in them at all. The grotesque shells this disease left behind were so many worlds of wrong, but it was the bodies of those who hadn’t changed, who had never even been sick and had died for nothing - that was more than Victor could take.
Every time he got ready to throw in the towel he found one more survivor. It was enough to keep him going, to keep fighting because there was no other way to justify why he was still here when so many millions of others were gone.
With cautious steps, he proceeded down the hallway. The grating blare of a perpetually sounding security alarm screeched in the distance. The backup lights were just enough to draw out long flickering shadows that had Victor tensing his gun hand at the turn of every corner. He still needed the flashlight to illuminate the long hallways, though he used it as little as possible. For the most part, what lay down these halls wasn’t anything he wanted a full view of.
Already he’d seen enough and it didn’t take lighting the area to smell the nostril stinging stench. What his nose couldn’t pick up, his ears did in the wailing cries, manic laughter and scrambling footsteps just out of sight. This facility was still crawling with Infected and there was no way to know how many were contained and how many were freely roaming the halls.
The cells in this block had been built for solitary confinement. In each cell’s solid door was a small window slit that he could peer in through. He walked down the line, shining his flashlight into each cell and not lingering longer than he had to after confirming the cell’s occupant Infected or deceased. If he found anyone alive and human, it would be a miracle.
When he’d gotten a hold of the keys from the guard station, he’d checked the sign-in sheet. No one had marked down having done rounds for over a week. Each cell had its own sink for water as long as the municipal water functioned, but no one trapped here would have had access to food.
Anger gripped his chest as he found most of the cells occupied. The flare of a flashlight beam shone into the cells triggered many of the subjects to leap and claw at the glass. Even knowing it was coming, he found it difficult not to jump at every Infected that slammed into a viewing window. The silent cells were only worse, holding bodies in various stages of decay.
Victor had nearly decided he’d seen enough when he shone his flashlight into the next cell and found a man sitting on the bed. There were no sheets or blankets and all Victor could see of the huddled man were bare legs tucked to his chest and equally exposed arms wrapped around them in a futile effort to find warmth. There was still heat to this cell block, but not enough that Victor felt the need to strip off any of his three layers.
When the flashlight’s beam hit the man’s face, one of the man’s arms moved up to shield his eyes. His movements were confused and cautious. Rather than flinging himself from the bed, the man raised his head to stare towards the door with empty, but very human eyes.
The man slowly stood, seeming uneasy on his feet. His mouthed moved as if he was speaking, but whatever words came out were too quiet for Victor to hear. He could now see that the man wore a short, rumpled hospital gown as he limped towards the door with a creased brow.
Victor’s own brow furrowed as he watched the frail, young man. There was something familiar about him even in the harsh, narrow light with the man squinting and a thick layer of stubble covering his ghostly face.
“Hey!” the man croaked before clearing his throat. “Who’s there?”
Usually, Victor would have already thrown open the cell door, instead he stood frozen as the man stared out the small opening and tried to see past the flashlight. It had taken a moment to register the thinner face and sunken eyes, though there now was no question that he was looking into the cautiously hopeful eyes of Dean Winchester.
“Let me out!”
It would be easy to keep walking. After the things he’d done, there was no reason that Dean Winchester, of all men, deserved to be one of the few left alive. Maybe this really was hell. Either way, Victor failed in his conviction.
He listened to the thud of Dean’s fist banging weakly against the door and took in the desperate green eyes framed in the small opening. It didn’t matter what Dean was, Victor couldn’t force himself to leave any man to starve or to burn alive when the military arrived to destroy all evidence of this facility. At the very least, he’d end this with a mercy kill.
Victor holstered his gun only long enough to work the key into the lock. The pistol was then back in his hand and cocked by the time he spoke again. “Hands on your head, step away from the door.”
“Gordon? Quit screwing around and get me out of here, you son of a bitch.”
“Come on, Dean, now is that anyway to talk to your rescuer?” Victor asked as he slid open the door. “Get on the ground.”
Dean stumbled backwards, disoriented as Victor surged in with his gun raised. Part of Victor couldn’t help but feel a sense of satisfaction at seeing this smug bastard taken down so many notches. The victory was short-lived. Seeing even the ugliest of humans intentionally put in this state was sickening.
“Henricksen?” Dean asked hoarsely. “Oh, you’ve gotta be freakin’ kidding me.”
“No joke. On the ground. Now!”
Dean’s eyes scanned the area, but he laced his hands behind his head and didn’t make a break for the door. Impatiently, Victor watched as Dean stumbled around instead of dropping to his knees. It took looking down at Dean’s bare feet to see that the man wasn’t playing games. He was trying to get down without putting all his weight on a foot bound in an ankle brace.
“Just get against the wall,” Victor ordered as he gave Dean a halfhearted shove forward.
There was a resignation that Victor hadn’t expected to find as Dean silently complied. His head lowered and he pressed his palms against the concrete wall. Victor quietly put away his gun and slipped out a pair of handcuffs that he hadn’t been able to give up carrying.
He jerked one of Dean’s arms behind his back only to have his resolve waver further. IV track-marks covered the pale forearm. Being a heroine junkie didn’t fit with what he knew about Dean and the man obviously hadn’t had access to shoot up in here.
Victor put away the cuffs so that he could move the flashlight in for a closer view. He twisted Dean’s arm to reveal the full extent of scarring and ran his thumb over the faded bruising that remained from restraints that hadn’t held the man for over a week.
Releasing the left arm, Victor took Dean’s other arm, more gently this time, and found the same marks plus some kind of numeric code tattooed onto Dean’s wrist. Victor ground his teeth as he stared at the cattle style identification marking.
He tapped a finger against the blue-inked numbers. “They do this to you?”
“What do you care?”
With barely a shrug, Dean remained standing still in his open-back hospital gown without breathing a word of cocky commentary or attempting to put up a fight. As Victor listened to the oddly shallow sound of Dean’s breathing, he moved the flashlight away from Dean’s arms to point at his back. Fading cuts, which almost looked like claw marks, littered the exposed skin and his sides were discolored enough that he probably had more than a few badly bruised, if not broken, ribs.
Dean only stiffened as Victor brushed the fabric of the gown forward to further to reveal the full evidence of beatings and weight loss. When Dean shivered, Victor let the gown fall back into place and stepped away. Dean turned his head to throw a cautious look over his shoulder.
Henricksen remembered the day, not long ago, when this now fragile man had seemed the most profound threat facing humanity. Now Dean filled the role of the most human thing Victor had seen in weeks.
When he again pulled out his gun, Dean really met his eyes for the first time. “Just get it over with.”
“Don’t tempt me,” Victor replied before motioning with the pistol. “Let’s get out of here.”
There was only a moment of hesitation before Dean complied and headed towards the door. It was pretty clear by the uncertainty in Dean’s step that the man hadn’t expected to ever leave the cell.
Dean looked up and down the halls before returning his attention to Victor. “Any other survivors?”
“There sure as hell better be because if you’re it, there’s nothing left in this world worth saving.” He’d expected a witty comeback, but was taken aback when he only got a weary nod of agreement. Victor tried not to read too much into it as he resumed checking cells. “So where’s Bonnie?”
Victor shone the flashlight back at Dean when no response came. Dean’s eyes were shifted down and he seemed to withdraw further into himself as his hand came up to rub the back of his neck. It was hard to know what to think when Dean just avoided the question entirely.
“I’m looking for a Gordon Walker,” Dean said. “He should be here.”
The name didn’t ring any bells in Victor’s head. Whoever this Gordon was, it wasn’t someone attached to Dean’s official case file. “Friend of yours?”
“I wouldn’t say friend...let’s just say I owe him. The guy’s a sick bastard, but he doesn’t deserve to die here.”
“Funny, I was thinking the same thing about you.” Victor tapped his finger against his flashlight as he again got only silence from Dean. He couldn’t help but press further, mostly because he needed the distraction from the contents of the cells. “This Gordon, is he a psycho serial killer too?”
“Unlike me, yeah.”
At first Victor thought that Dean had already recovered his attitude, but Dean’s face remained neutral. After so long hunting this man, Victor needed the truth. He already knew what it was, but he needed to hear it from Dean’s mouth.
“You’re still expecting me to believe that you’re one of the good guys? Cut the bull, Dean. There’s no one left to fool. I know you and Sam....”
In less than a second Dean went from barely standing to slamming Victor back into the wall. The pistol and flashlight clattered to the floor as Dean gripped the front of Victor’s jacket. “You can spew whatever kind of crap you want about me, but you keep your mouth shut about my brother. He died a hero.”
There was enough conviction and pain in the words to render even Victor silent. Dean’s grip on him was weak, his hands shaky. Despite Victor’s instinct telling him to take Dean down, he waited.
Slowly, Dean let him go and stepped away before turning his back and looked to the ground. The fallen pistol lay beside Dean’s foot. Instead of reaching for it, Dean braced against the wall so he could kick the weapon back towards Victor. By the time Victor retrieved it and the flashlight, Dean was grimacing at the sight of a fallen body and swearing beneath his breath.
“Is that your ‘friend’?”
“What?” Dean looked up after Victor’s question caught up with him. “No. I just recognized the hair.”
Victor moved the flashlight down the length of the body to see the unusually long, tangled locks. “So you’re a barber in between murder sprees?”
Dean shot him a sharp glare. “You’re batting a thousand, Henricksen.” When Dean looked away, the expression on his face softened to a sadness, which combined with the next words to leave Dean’s mouth, stopped Victor in his tracks. “I promised her she’d be okay.”
There were few things in Victor’s mind so clear as his visual of Dean Winchester. Yet nothing he was seeing or hearing from Dean now fit for a guy that dug up corpses for kicks.
Victor stepped away and tried to talk himself out of trusting a single word coming out of Dean’s mouth. These were the same inconsistencies people had brought to him as proof that Dean wasn’t the monster Victor knew him to be.
He’d blown off each and every one of them. SWAT team, police officers, lawyers and wardens - all reputable professionals that he’d told to go screw themselves for being so damn gullible. It was the same thing the CEDA agents he’d approached had told him about these testing facilities.
“Henricksen!”
Victor’s eyes were focused on searching a cell when Dean shouted the warning. The tone said enough that he spun around with his gun raised. He took a step back as he saw a hugely bloated thing with boil-covered skin lumbering towards him. It let out a groan and stomped closer, moving far slower than a typical Infected. He aimed his gun for the easy shot and pulled the trigger just as Dean’s warning not to shoot reached his ears.
The bullet easily hit its target and the former man exploded in a shower of putrid bile that fell to the ground with noisy plops. He stumbled backwards as it stuck to his skin and clothing and seeped down his forehead, stinging his eyes and blurring his vision. Victor dropped his flashlight in a desperate attempt to clear the thick fluids from his face.
He jumped when he heard the shattering of glass behind him. “What the hell was that?”
“Just getting a weapon,” Dean replied. “That crap you’re covered in is gonna attract every damn zombie in this place.”
“You’ve run into these before?”
Victor’s vision was still blurred, his eyes blinking to try and expel the bile. He could only vaguely make out Dean’s unsteady stance as the man strained just to hold the fireman’s axe he’d pulled from the wall.
“The agents called them Boomers because, well, you saw it. They collected that nasty ass stuff in jars and...we just gotta hope most of these things are locked away.”
It might have been nine kinds of crazy, but Victor got what Dean was saying about the bile-popping Infected. He even heard the confirmation of an approaching horde. What he didn’t get was why Dean was still standing beside him. Dean had been far enough back that the bile shouldn’t have hit him.
“It got you too?”
"No, I’m clean.” As the sounds of the horde grew louder, Dean moved closer to Victor. “But dude, you’re so screwed.”
There was no time to ask why Dean wasn’t running, or at least trying to crawl away, before the first of the horde skidded around the corner. Victor couldn’t clearly see what was happening, but he heard Dean grunt, followed by the sickening thuds of what had to be Dean’s axe burying itself in flesh.
A frenzy of hands reached for Victor, backing him against the wall, but each time one tightened their grip on him, Dean somehow managed to knock it away. His vision was beginning to return when Dean was hurled to the ground.
He landed hard on his back and skidded over the bile coated concrete. The impact stunned him enough that he only cringed and tried to curl onto his side as several of the Infected leapt on top of him, clawing at his chest. Victor pushed off the wall and, with several well aimed shots, felled the remaining Infected.
At Victor’s feet, Dean uselessly pushed at one of the Infected that had collapsed on top of him. By the pained tightness in his face, it was obvious that the body lying over his ribs was the last thing Dean needed. Victor easily pulled it off before he knelt down to help Dean to sit.
Victor struggled to catch his own breath as he watched Dean clutch his side and pull in shallow, pained gasps. The thin fabric of his hospital gown had been torn, leaving the bloody claw marks on his chest and shoulders exposed. Dean’s face contorted in pain as he sat shivering with the tattered fabric barely clinging to him.
There was nothing Victor could say. He could only stare at the half dead young man who hadn’t hesitated to risk his life for him. It was something very few men would do for a perfect stranger, and Victor wasn’t a stranger. He was a man who had made it his life’s work to make Dean’s life hell.
Victor grimaced, wiping the last chunks of glop from his face and wishing he had so much as a clean jacket to offer Dean. Hell, he’d settle for a few intelligent words to break the silence.
“You saved my life.”
It was far from profound, but stating the obvious was the best Victor could come up with right now. Dean looked underwhelmed or maybe just on the verge of passing out.
“Don’t take it too personally,” Dean muttered. “When you got nothing to live for, you’ll die for anything.”
No one wanted to believe it was only that more than Victor, but that wasn’t what he’d seen. “You didn’t even think.”
“There’s my problem.”
Victor shook his head in disbelief and held out a hand to help Dean up. “I’ve never seen a man fight like that.”
“You pick it up hunting monsters.” The words came easily from Dean’s lips as he accepted Victor’s hand. “Like I’ve been trying to tell you, it’s what I do.”
He found himself just staring into Dean’s eyes, searching for even the slightest hint of deception. Not only couldn’t he find one, but the fact was that Dean no longer had a motive to keep up that charade and after the last few weeks, it didn’t even sound that crazy anymore.
“I don’t believe it.”
Once Dean was on his feet, Victor stripped off his jacket and tossed it to the floor. They were going to have to ditch all the clothes before they walked back onto the open streets, but for now Victor unbuttoned his top shirt and held it out to Dean who just stared at it.
“I don’t give a rat’s ass what you believe,” Dean replied as he tentatively took the shirt.
“No, I mean, the whole damn while - it was all the truth.”
“Wow. You catch on fast.”
A smirk ghosted over Victor’s lips at the hint of the Dean he remembered. It was a touch of familiarity in a world that had otherwise been flipped on its head. The comfort was short lived as the full impact of that implication settled over him. To think that saying sorry could touch it seemed an insult.
Dean looked up after slipping on the shirt and wrapping the gown around his waist. He seemed to pick up on Victor’s unease and waved him off. “You can start by buying me dinner.”
Victor was nearly carrying Dean by the time they made it to the next cell block. Whatever reserve of energy had driven the man to be able to fight had all but vanished now. Victor had wanted to call it quits, but Dean had stubbornly insisted on continuing to check cells even as he could only barely stand.
They were on the last section when Victor’s flashlight illuminated a man sitting ramrod straight in one of the cell’s chairs. The man’s expression was disturbingly calm as he moved his eyes up, apparently unbothered by the sudden influx of light.
“I got someone.”
At Victor’s word’s Dean switched to leaning against the wall so that he could peer through the cell’s window. “That’s the son of a bitch,” he confirmed before pounding on the cell door. “Hey, Gordy, you still human in there?”
Gordon stood as Victor unlocked the door. He looked a lot surer on his feet than Dean, but his movements were still slow and overly calculated as he stepped out of the cell.
“Took you long enough,” Gordon remarked with a dismissive glance towards Dean. “I was starting to get hungry.”
There was a detached, coldness in Gordon’s eyes that reminded Victor too much of many of the hardened criminals he’d seen put away. While the look was a familiar one, it only stood out to Victor as he realized for the first time just how far from that Dean really was.
Continue to Chapter 6