The Art of Re-Fixing Sour Lemonade Part One
NOW:
There’s a place that exists between pain and numbness, a kind of limbo where the mind whites out and everything explodes like a tank of gasoline from an errant spark. Agony is infinite. The world disappears. Language has no meaning. The whole of the universe dissolves into a single wrenching scream that stretches out into the burning white until the dark overtakes it.
Dying is not pleasant.
Coming back to life is even less so.
Adam takes in air through shredded lungs and spasms, body going rigid and then dissolving into shakes and twitches. He’s got lightning riding under his skin, striking bone and nerves, illuminating his neural pathways, twisting his heart around in a corkscrew until it shudders out one beat, then two, then more.
There’s a cry in the back of his mind laced with fear and confusion.
Adam takes hold of it, of the soul, and forces it out of his new body.
I’m sorry, he thinks. I have to do this.
Adam blacks out at some point. When he wakes up again he’s laid out on the ground in a puddle of sweat, piss, and shit in the middle of a perfect burnt circle. The air is thick with ozone. Every fiber of his body tingles with life and pain.
Adam holds his hands out, turns them over and examines the trembling digits. All present and accounted for. He still wonders, is what he just did considered murder or suicide?
Adam clenches his fists and shakily gets to his feet. He forces the question to the back of his mind in a dark box with all the other dark, niggling questions and thoughts he can’t focus on.
Adam stumbles out of the circle and wobbles, falling down again and again. He stops, forehead pressed to the earth.
Adam breathes in.
He breathes out.
Fuck, this is getting so hard.
Adam gets his feet under him, inch by agonizing inch. He plants the balls of his feet and pushes up, uses his hands to steady himself. He stands, waits, and takes a few steps.
He has no idea where he is this time. Plains of grass and small slopes stretch out from one horizon to another. There might be mountains in the distance, but he doesn’t have his contacts so it could be anything. The sky is cloudy, obscuring the sun, so he picks a direction and starts walking.
He has some Winchesters to find.
Adam hikes along the flat land for hours. He comes across a shallow creek cutting through sand and peels his clothes off to wash. He smells like a ghetto gas station bathroom. The water is cold on his skin. Goose bumps prickle his skin.
Adam spies yucca plant hanging onto the dirt of the bank by the last of its roots. Something, a stolen fragment in his mind, roars to the forefront. He sees women in doeskin dresses talking as they scrub bits of the root into woven garments. The root bubbles up, just like soap.
Adam finds a rock with a small edge. His fingers are slippery and numb, but he manages to break open the root and tear a chunk away.
He washes his clothes and himself, spreads his body and his clothes out to dry in the chilly breeze and weak sun. The sky bleeds red through his eyelids, and then darkens as clouds rolls in thick and chunky, like a giant spilled clam chowder on the stratosphere.
Adam gathers his clothes and dresses even though the jeans are still soggy. The clouds turn black on one side, the dangerous kind of dark that will roll over the plains like wrath and disappear quick as a summer kiss, the kind that leaves a hole in the chest.
He comes across a dirt road that winds its way to blacktop. Wind whips across the landscape and sets the heavy-headed grass to swaying down in the bar ditch. The world is not quiet, but less than loud. Surreal, heady. Adam feels like he could kick both feet off the road and float away lazy-like.
He stops in the middle of the road and grips the horned pendant in his fist.
This will work.
The pendant grows hot in his hands. Wind kicks up dust. Thunder growls.
Adam closes his eyes and concentrates on the pull he can feel in his head, can always feel no matter what time line or world he’s currently occupying.
“Blood calls to blood.” His voice rasps in his throat. “Let the road be clear.”
The words are stolen, just like everything else about Adam. He thinks they came from an old world nursery rhyme, or maybe a movie. It’s hard to tell anymore.
Lightning cracks overhead like breaking bone. The pendant hums against his skin and images flood his mind: a diner outside of Atlanta, slow fans stirring the grease-soaked air, ketchup on fingers, a scowl, a laugh, a messy inked number on a folded napkin, traces of road grime and gasoline under fingernails.
Adam gets a mental hold on the connection. It fuzzes at the edges, strained. He holds his breath, goes weightless, and lets the connection reel him in like a bug tied to a string.
When he opens his eyes, he’s standing in a parking lot with the sun burning bright overhead. There’s half a dozen cars scattered around the lot, the gleaming black Impala among them.
A weird sort of pang goes through his chest. Part of him thinks home. Another part says Dad. And yet another faction of him says run and run as fast as you can.
Adam tucks the pendant back into his shirt and scans the lot and diner. Sam and Dean are sitting inside by the window eating. Dean, ever messy, talks with his mouth full, gestures with his hands, smirks in that irritating asshole way. Sam, across from Dean, picks at a plate of something with both meat and greens, chews and swallows before answering Dean.
A crow lands on the hood of a rusted ‘52 Ford truck. It hops along the hood, eyes Adam, and caws.
Adam flips the bird off. Judgmental bastard.
“I know what I’m doing,” Adam says. He should not be talking to a damn bird, but at this point what’s a little more crazy, right?
Adam flicks his eyes to his brothers. They’re still occupied with food and each other, of course. They always are, forever and ever and always; take your brother outside now, Dean, go-
Adam steals over to the Impala and ducks on the opposite side. He digs out a small knife from his pocket. It’s not much to look at, it’s small enough to fit in his hand, a blade and handle fashioned from chupacabra tusk thrice tempered in sage, pine oil, and heart’s blood willingly given. From his other pocket he draws out a fraying scrap of light-n-thread soul that is turning dull.
Adam slices his hand open and smears his blood on the underside of the car three times for good measure. He tugs loose one of the threads and holds it to the blood smear until it sticks.
Adam slips away as his brothers get up and leave the diner. They get in the car and pull out of the parking lot. He watches until the Impala disappears from sight.
Adam heaves a shuddering sigh.
Another thread down.
The crow comes back, cawing at him in angry bursts. Adam flips it off again and wipes his now healed hand on a patch of bright green grass.
THEN:
Not every life takes place in the range of 2005 to 2014. Sometimes it’s earlier, sometimes later.
Adam has seen Sam and Dean land on the beach at Normandy and watched them sneak into German camps where demons and shape shifters and other monsters hid in plain sight. Sometimes it was opposite and the monsters were kept in cages and experimented on. No matter what world, it seems the Nazis had their obsession to create a perfect soldier, and sometimes that meant stitching humans together with spells and spare creature parts.
Sam saved Ruby from the operating table. He won’t give her up, despite the picture of Jessica he carries inside his helmet.
Sam and Dean aren’t brothers there, but they act like it, and so all of Ruby’s tricks still work on the stupid bastards.
Normandy gives Adam a few clues that none of the other lives do.
One, devotion isn’t about blood or vengeance or relation. Something is hardwired deep inside Sam and Dean on a soul level. That’s the only explanation Adam can find as to why, without fail and no matter the obstacle, those two idiots find each other.
Adam is still with the unit when Sam catches shrapnel that severs his femoral artery. Ruby, still with them and manipulating both Sam and Dean while pushing Adam out of the picture, shows Dean how to summons a crossroads demon while bullets and grenades fly overhead.
Sam comes back to life with a rattling breath and a curse on his lips.
Adam, hands soaked in Sam’s blood from where he tried to stem the flow, takes a bayonet in the back.
He dies in some nameless field in Poland, staring up at the wisps of gun smoke obscuring the sky.
Later, when the angels resurrect Adam, he faces Lucifer wearing Sam on a field of dead soldiers somewhere in Russia. It’s winter and snow dusts the corpses like powdered sugar. Michael burns bright in Adam’s mind and the archangel screams as Sam drags them into the cage.
Down, down down.
NOW:
Adam has a list of names in head that he’s pared down from the tens of thousands. It took him what was probably centuries to find the most important ones, the people who stayed the same no matter what, and the fixed points in history.
Adam visits Bobby first.
It takes him two days by Greyhound to get to Sioux Falls, but that’s enough time to steal new clothes, a couple wallets, and make a supply run.
Adam’s picked up a few skills by watching his brothers through many different worlds.
The scrap yard is on the edge of the city and surrounded by tall fences. Rusting shells of former blacktop eaters are stacked on top of each other and laid out in a pattern of their own. Adam hitches his backpack higher on his shoulder and follows the main road back to the house. A large Rottweiler lifts its head and whuffs in his direction, but doesn’t move from where it’s lazing about on the porch.
Bobby opens the door before Adam raises his hand to knock. Bobby looks good compared to the last time Adam saw one of his versions- innocent soul in hell, body laid out on gurney, flat lining- and raises a curmudgeonly eyebrow at Adam’s hobo-esque appearance.
“Yeah?”
“Hi, Mr. Singer. My name is Adam Milligan. I’m told you’re the guy I need to talk to about supernatural stuff.”
Bobby gives him a guarded look.
“And who sent you my way?”
“Daniel Elkins. I met him a couple weeks ago, right before… Well. He was working on something else he couldn’t leave, so he told me to contact you.”
Bobby raises an eyebrow.
“You couldn’t pick up a phone?”
“I couldn’t stop long enough to get to one.”
Bobby considers him for a moment. Adam can’t see Bobby’s other hand, but he knows the man is clutching a bag of stones charmed to let the owner know if he’s being lied to.
Adam has met many Daniel Elkins in his travels, sometimes before the funeral, but mostly after and one step behind.
“Look, if you wanna cut me with silver and have me drink holy water can we get on with it? I’d really like to get some answers and sit down for a minute. It’s a long walk from the other side of town.”
For a minute, he thinks Bobby is going to shut the door in his face which, well, that will make things harder but not impossible. Instead, Bobby opens the door wide, eyes narrowed.
Adam hesitates only a moment and steps forward.
And then into the living room. He gives Bobby enough space to close the front door and gives him a shrug.
“Can we talk now?”
“Take a seat, kid,” Bobby gestures to the couch. “What are you needing to know?”
Adam puts his bag on the floor and blows out a breath.
“Ghouls,” he says. “How the hell do I get rid of them?”
Despite the many (many, many) lives he’s lived through, Adam has never yet found a way to prevent or kill the ghouls that get him and Mom so many times. He enters the world too late, or just in time, or the timeline is so different that it never figures in.
He’s got some time right now. Not a lot, but some.
Bobby tells him everything he knows about ghouls; how they eat the dead and assume their shapes, steal their memories. Adam’s gut churns. He is no better than the things that killed him and his mother. Irony, thou art a bitch. He shoves it away and listens to Bobby.
Killing them is actually simple. Normal guns with normal bullets, exactly as if you were killing an animal or a person, or something silver, and then simply remove the body for a salt ‘n burn and bury what’s left.
Adam takes it all in; partly relieved it’s simple, and also disappointed, as well. Maybe he’d feel better if these things had a specific and unusual termination ritual, something he couldn’t have possibly known or done at the time.
Maybe, could’a, would’a, should’a. Stop living in the past.
He asks to use the bathroom before he leaves. Adam cuts his hand and places another thread from his soul on the underside of the sink. He washes the blood down the drain, splashes his face, and avoids looking himself in the eyes.
When he goes back down, Bobby is standing in the middle of the room. He looks a little glazed in the face, eyes distant and confused.
“Thank you for your help,” Adam says, sliding around the man.
Bobby shakes his head. His eyes clear for a minute and then cloud again.
“What- what’s going on?” Bobby slurs.
“I’m going to take care of the ghouls. Thank you for your information. You should probably lie down, though. You look tired.”
Adam makes an abortive movement to help the old man to the couch. He bites his lip and wills the thread to work. A small pain in Adam’s chest creeps up, but he ignores it.
“I am tired,” Bobby says.
“You should take a nap.”
“Maybe I should take a nap.”
Bobby heads to the couch, body stiff and jerky. He lies down and pulls a ratty blanket down over him.
Adam stays still until Bobby does sleep, then he moves to the trunks in the library. He opens the ones that are unlocked, digs through them. He finds a UPS box containing a silver knife. That should do.
There’s an arsenal of guns in the other trunks he glances through. Adam hefts a few before he chooses a simple looking revolver. He takes a box of bullets and stuffs it all into his pack.
Then he’s out the door as fast as he can run, the screen door slamming shut behind him. The dog jerks up and barks at him, but Adam keeps going, runs until his new lungs burn and his legs threaten to turn to jelly. He makes it back to the bus stop before the next one pulls out. He shoves his ticket at the driver and finds a new seat near the back, heart hammering in his chest.
Two threads down.
SHADOWLANDS:
Adam is choking on his own blood and scratching at the lid of an old coffin. There are moldering bones beneath him, and he can hear his mother pleading as those things with their faces tear at the flesh of her belly like they did Adam’s.
He’s got sweat, tears, and snot running down his face. There’s blood in the back of his throat. He’s shit and pissed his pants.
Adam closes his eyes. Please, he prays. Please make it stop.
Mom’s screaming fades away. Then Adam hears those things leave and it’s silent except for the weakening thump of his heart.
“Mom?”
It comes out in a gurgle, he chokes. Adam turns his head to the side and spits, feels it dribble down his cheek.
“Mom?”
Silence.
Adam strains his hearing. Mom is still there, she’s still alive. She has to be. She’s so strong, stronger than anyone he’s ever known.
Silence.
“Mom, please.”
Adam’s fingers slip from where they are holding his guts inside his body. One hand falls by his hip and he can’t move it again. Warmth seeps past him replaced by cold. He shivers against the pull of darkness, tries to focus on the few shafts of light coming in the crack on the coffin lid.
They are only ten feet apart, him and his Mom. After a while he can actually hear her, the wet coughs that come from choking on her own fluids. By then Adam can’t talk either. He listens as she chokes and settles and doesn’t fight anymore.
Adam dies freezing and alone in the silence of the tomb. It’s a slow death, the kind that drags on for the rest of the day and half the night. He struggles for breath until his lungs are so full of blood that airflow is impossible.
Adam dies seven hours after his mother. As an only child with a weird love of British TV shows and friends that live solely on the Internet, Adam has never been more alone in all his short years.
Adam wakes up a few minutes later on a bed of sand and harsh scrub brush. A woman is crouched above him, wild brown hair fanned around her face, jeans torn and dirty. She has weird eyes. Rabbit eyes.
“Best get up, I’ll fill you in on the go.”
She extends her hand. Adam takes it, disoriented from the lack of burning pain. The woman pulls him to his feet and pushes him to run.
Above them, the strange swirling sky explodes with light, fire, and high pitched battle cries.
They run across the desert and through hills shaped like giants. Things hit the ground behind them and throw up dust clouds. It makes him think of Saving Private Ryan, of the bullets and bombs and bodies hitting the water at the beaches of Normandy- and for a moment he is there, surrounded by salty sea and blood soaked sand, crawling over the dead and covering for a soldier hunkered over a fallen comrade and-
The woman veers to the left and Adam goes with her. They approach the rim of a canyon that opens like a gaping mouth. Adam has just enough time to suck in a surprised breath before the woman jumps off the edge and takes him with her.
They plummet.
NOW:
Windom is almost exactly as it should be. A few stores are different. There’s no coffee shop on the corner of Main, instead it’s a parking lot for the movie theater, but that doesn’t matter much. Adam hitches his pack and finds his way home without much trouble.
Mom’s car is in the driveway. The blinds in the living room are open. Mom is shuffling around the living room, picking up here and there, running a dust rag over the bookshelves. She’s probably humming to herself, something by Janis Joplin.
She doesn’t know Adam isn’t coming home from the mountains with his friends.
Adam deliberately turns from the house and continues on down the road.
The cemetery isn’t that far from the house, just a few blocks to the south. Gravestones litter the earth like little gray soldiers frozen, waiting for orders. There’s a couple people around the place, some with flowers, others walking around the older graves taking pictures.
Mom used to like that, presumably before she met John the first time and got pregnant with Adam after the initial ghoul debacle. But that thought is not at all helpful right now, so he shoves it away.
Adam finds the mausoleum without any trouble. The ghouls chose one at the back corner of the cemetery among the oldest graves there. The groundskeeper pays it minimal attention if the tangled weeds are anything to go by. Adam jimmies the lock on the door and lets it fall open.
It’s dusty inside, but there are tracks in the dirt, fresh ones. Mice, birds, and something like looks like human footprints.
A high pitched whine starts in the back of Adam’s head. He’s frozen to the spot, just staring at that hole in the wall. His heart thuds hard in his chest. Sweat gathers in his palms. He’s not breathing right, can’t draw in enough air.
Adam stumbles away and throws up all over some poor bastard’s headstone. He can feel phantom claws and teeth in his skin, feel them digging in and ripping his body like cheap cotton.
Adam’s mind kind of fizzes out and when he comes back to himself he’s not in the cemetery anymore. Adam is crouched in an alley near the edge of town with his head between his knees and black spots fading from his vision.
A panic attack. A fucking panic attack. If Adam had the breath he’d be laughing himself stupid. Out of everything he’s seen and what he’s done (what he will do) it’s something as ordinary as a panic attack that sends him reeling.
Adam stays in the alley for a while. No one comes around except for a skinny cat that watches him with wary yellow eyes and disappears into a dumpster down the way.
When he can move without relapsing, it’s evening. That means Mom is going to the hospital tonight, which means the ghouls will be waiting for her when she gets back.
He gets to the house in time to watch Mom pull out of the driveway. Adam hides behind a tree, heart hammering against his ribs. When she’s gone he slips into the backyard and retrieves the spare key from the plastic frog by the back door.
The house even still smells the same. Cinnamon candles. Dove soap. Those mint candies sitting on a bowl in the middle of the table, because Mom buys them in bulk instead of spending extra for small brand name packages.
There’s a pie- blueberry, Adam’s favorite- on the cabinet by the sink, a note propped on top, waiting for Adam to get in from his trip.
Adam wipes at his eyes and sits at the kitchen table. He takes his shoes off, puts them on one of the other chairs. He loads the revolver full and places it on the table within reach. He pulls out the silver knife and keeps it in his other hand, blade resting on his leg.
He waits.
The clock ticking is loud in the dark.
Tick-tock.
Tick-tock.
Minutes crawl by. Adam’s eyes adjust to the near dark. Shafts of light from the moon and the neighbor’s back porch filter in through the kitchen window. He can see the outline of the furniture and appliances.
Minutes become hours before he hears a scratching at the mudroom window. Then there’s a click and the window comes open. Two bodies lever themselves through it.
Adam crosses the kitchen on silent feet and presses himself to the wall. The mudroom door handle twists and it opens with a soft squeak of the hinges. Dark shapes come in.
They don’t look like they did last time. Last time they’d already taken on Adam and Mom’s faces, and wasn’t that a mindfuck to get eaten by himself.
Now they are squat things, hunched over. Their skin looks smooth and a little slimy in the dim light. Not human.
Adam fires the gun point blank at the head of the second ghoul as it comes out the door. Blood and brain matter splatter everything. The shock of it knocks Adam back, and then the second ghoul is right there in his face. He has enough time to see sharp teeth and big pale eyes before they land on the floor and the gun goes skittering away across the linoleum.
Long fingers close around his throat and squeeze. Adam kicks and punches. The ghoul leans down close and bites down on the curve of Adam’s shoulder. He lets out a strangled yell and bucks. It throws the ghoul off balance and he scrambles away.
Fingers clamp around Adam’s ankle and drag him back. He twists and brings the knife up. The blade sinks into the ghoul’s throat and Adam watches its eyes go wide.
The moment hangs suspended. Adam watches the slow realization fill the ghoul’s eyes and then flicker. The features shift through a dozen different faces before they settle and Adam is looking into John Winchester’s face.
Adam jerks back and the knife cuts through the ghoul’s neck like butter, leaving a red line that spurts as he severs an artery. Adam pushes the ghoul off of him and crab walks backwards until he hits the cabinet.
The ghoul gurgles and gasps on its last breaths, body twitching, until it finally stills. Adam heaves in the silence, heart thundering in his ears.
He makes himself move after a moment, unlocking his muscles, gripping the edge of the counter with shaky fingers. He has to hurry.
Getting rid of the bodies is hard as hell. (Wheelbarrow in the shed Mom used for the garden, two hour trip to the cemetery using only alleys and empty lots, stopping to hide from passing cars, shoving the bodies into the crypt.)
Cleaning up after them is easy. It shouldn’t be, but Adam is feeling kind of numb by then and he’s known how to get blood out of tile and carpet since he was six (and 17, and 24, and, once, the ripe old age of 32). He bags his current clothes and borrows some from Other-Adam’s room upstairs.
Adam is back at the bus stop by six am and on a bus at seven. He hunkers down in his seat and pulls his hood up over his head.
His hands don’t stop shaking.
THEN:
In one world John found him when Adam was nine and escaped the ghoul attack that killed Mom. He handed Adam over to Dean, much as he had with Sam, and left the motel room to hunt the ghouls down.
Sam wouldn’t talk to Adam for the longest time. Dean didn’t want to, either, but one hushed conversation from John and Dean was helping Adam with his homework and teaching him how to sharpen knives.
Adam was thirteen when he went along on a hunt. The creature- he can’t remember what it was now, he’s lived so many lives, sometimes they blur together- it knocked him down a ravine and Adam hit his head.
The doctors called it aphasia. Adam could read and write, but the words he knew in his head wouldn’t go out his mouth no matter how hard he pushed.
It was Sam, who had given him dirty looks, ignored him, and refused to acknowledge Adam most days, who learned sign language and then tailored it to work with Adam’s injury. Then Sam taught Dean, and then John.
Three years later Sam died on a hunt while Adam and John were in Ohio chasing a kelpie. Adam will always regret going with John, even though he’d desperately wanted to just be his age and have John to himself for a weekend. Dean sold his soul and got ten minutes with Sam before the hell hounds came calling.
John crashed the truck trying to get to a freaked out Sam in Oklahoma. He died instantly- never did like to wear a seat belt- and the next time Adam woke up two years had passed and Michael was whispering in his ear while the doctors went nuts over their waking coma patient who could speak once more.
NOW:
Adam gets off the bus in some little town in Nebraska. He goes to the diner and orders the special and a slice of pie. The special is goopy and over salted, but the pie is good. It’s homemade, at any rate, with thick cut peach slices and a flaky crust. He snarfs it all down, drains his glass, and leaves a two dollar tip under his empty plate. The food settles uneasy in his stomach.
Then he goes out and stands in the parking lot, just looking at the horizon, forming and discarding plans in his head. He knows a bit better this time, but that doesn’t mean the road is clear, and it’s definitely not easy.
Adam still needs to get close to Meg, Azazel, and Ruby. They scare him on a profound level, though. He’s met them in many lives, sometimes fighting by his brothers’ sides, others when he tried to go off the map and create a new future. They always found him, not the other way around.
Then there’s still the Devil’s Gate in Montana and that town full of psychic kids.
Adam shudders at the thought of going back there. He’s been several times and it never gets less sad or creepy or just plain horrible. The old graveyard on the edge of that town is full of new bones buried in shallow graves.
The miles and years stretch out before Adam. A hopeless noise escapes the back of his throat. So much can still go wrong, and this is his last chance.
“You all right there, kid?”
Adam startles. A bald headed man in a flannel shirt is standing nearby. He looks a little ragged around the edges with tired lines on his face and sickliness to his complexion.
“I’m okay,” Adam says, the lie sits heavy at the back of his throat. “Just trying to figure out where I’m going.”
“I’m taking a load out to Topeka. You’re welcome to ride along if you want. If not you’ll need to find someplace to stay because there’s a storm rolling in.”
Adam bites back a laugh. That’s the story of his life, really, trying to stay one step ahead of the storm. He considers the trucker for a minute. The guy doesn’t give off serial killer vibes. He just looks tired, old, and like Mr. Miller that used to live on Adam’s street and made sure to stand on the corner with an umbrella on rainy days when Adam and the other kids waited for the bus.
It rankles Adam a bit, the unasked for concern. Where was this guy when Adam was getting his guts ripped out and eaten? Where was John Winchester when Adam could have used some concern and caring? Where were his brothers when Adam was left alone in the cage with two archangels?
Topeka is in Kansas, though, he thinks. From there he can get to Lawrence and take care of two loose ends that don’t involve angels or demons, yet.
“A ride sounds good, thanks.”
The man holds out his hand.
“Nathan Cooley.”
“Adam Milligan.”
They shake and Adam follows Nathan out to his rig.
Nathan doesn’t talk much on the drive. It seems to tire him out from what Adam can tell. The interior of the cab smells like old takeout and something sharp and medicinal. The radio is on low in the background. Adam can pick out Queen and Bowie. Adam is fine with that. He closes his eyes and leans against the cool window.
Sometime during the ride Adam actually falls asleep, lulled into a false security by the steady rumble of the engine and the chink-chink noise from the dorky looking charms hanging off the truck visor.
Adam dreams.
He dreams of walking through hills of grass hip high, hands fanned out, his palms tickled by the heavy heads swaying in the breeze. He walks on as the grass gives way to ground soaked red. Adam trips over his own body laid spread eagle, eye sockets open and empty, burned out. He scrambles to his feet and backs away, trips over another body, still his.
He is surrounded by a field of his own corpses.
A hand shoots up and grabs his ankle. Adam falls and another corpse turns over. It latches onto him with too-strong fingers. The others close in. They open their mouths as one, and instead of words, out comes a terrible low screaming wind that sucks him in until he’s falling, falling into the cage and-
Adam jolts awake and has a moment of panic that he’s trapped, but it’s just the seat belt.
“Nightmare?” Nathan asks. Oncoming headlights illuminate the inside of the cab. It bounces off the charms, casting a web of shadows from the dream catcher, which did shit-all to live up to its name.
“Yeah.” Adam scrubs at his face and sits up, wills his brain to full awake.
“There’s some coffee in the thermos,” Nathan gestures to the floorboards.
“Thanks.”
The coffee is bitter despite the cream and sugar, more car battery acid-soaked gym socks than actual drink, but Adam sips on it anyway.
“You don’t have to run forever, you know,” Nathan says. “You were talkin’ in your sleep. Whatever it is that has you all twisted up, you’re not going to find your answers in gas stations and hitching.”
“I’m not looking for answers,” Adam says. His brain is still shaken from the dream, he shouldn’t be talking at all, but the words just come out because Nathan is the only person that’s shown this kind of concern in…Adam can’t remember and that is too depressing. “I already have those; I just have to fix things now.”
“You sure it’s broken?”
Adam huffs a borderline hysterical laugh.
“More than you can imagine.”
They both retreat into their own heads after that. Adam watches the darkness blur outside the windows. They’re in the flatlands now. He doesn’t know what state, but it probably doesn’t matter. It’ll be this way the entire drive to Kansas.
Adam realizes that Nathan’s breathing has changed a couple hours later. He’s wheezing and beads of sweat litter his skin. Adam shakes off his unease and sits up.
“Hey man, you okay?”
Nathan’s knuckles go white on the steering wheel. His face contorts and he’s gasping, spasming.
Nathan jerks the wheel and Adam only has a moment to realize the truck is careening off road. The truck hits the ditch and tips.
The world dissolves into the screech of twisting metal and splintering glass.
PART TWO