Grain Elevator, fic
Grain Elevator
The mulchy rotting floor of the grain elevator circled below him. Blinking, Sam fought his way to consciousness, the spinning blurry floor and close wooden walls created a swell of nausea bubbling inside his gut. Thick ropes clanked and swayed beside him. His legs knocked against something metal as the ground spun.
No, it wasn’t the ground twirling. It was him. He spun, dangling high in the air at about fifty feet up like a fish on a hook. His entire body dragging on one arm, it felt as though it was going to rip out of his socket.
He twisted his head upward to see what he’d gotten hung up in, and pain exploded across his stomach, brutal and sharp, the hard feel of a foreign object jabbing up into his skin, between his rib bones right where his heart was, a stationary pole or stick that was tearing the edges of his flesh as he dangled, spinning around the object jabbing up into him.
The scrape of it along his bones had him heaving out the contents of his stomach, making the jab of pain pierce more forcefully with each shudder. If it went in farther, stabbed his heart…if it hadn’t already…
“Gah,” he wheezed, flailing his un-trapped hand out blindly, groping for something to stop the spinning.
His fingers found wet metal, slipped around it. He grabbed on. His body jerked to a stop, jarring whatever he was impaled on farther across his bones, tearing more of his flesh. Sam sucked in a hiss, clenching his muscles against the brutal shock of pain.
Breathing through it, he closed his eyes, hoping that when he opened them again the world would have settled. Sweat trickled off his face, down his hanging hair. He curled his fingers tighter into the metal, his anchor in this tide of nausea and pain, and opened his eyes to take in the situation he was in.
First and foremost, where was the Prangor he’d pepper sprayed before he went over the edge? Usually salt was their thing but for the ape-like monsters, blinding them long enough to get close to the heart was the plan of action for the day. Wha…where was Dean? They shouldn’t have split up when the tracks got too muddled around the abandoned granary. Dean went low into the storage area while Sam went high toward the barge unloader above the river.
The metal he had a hold of was part of the bucket conveyor that scooped grain from the boats on the river below and carried bucket loads up to fill the silos that were above him on the hill. Or at least would have been before the barge loader was abandoned and a monster claimed the area as its personal hunting ground.
The dampness he felt on the metal was blood. His own, he was sure of it as he felt along the roller chains that once moved the conveyor belt, felt where the metal alignment holding the chain in place had been broken and bent a long time ago in the past when the length of the metal workings had warped and twisted, breaking up like brittle rails snapping off their tracks.
It was just his luck to fall right on to one.
Except his luck hadn’t been all bad. Whatever his arm had been caught up on to stop his fall short, had also spared his heart from being completely impaled by the twisted rail. As it was, he estimated by the feel of it against his bones and where the other part of the rail had broken off still lying flat against the conveyor, it had only gone up into him less than an inch.
He could deal with less than an inch.
Hell knew he’d dealt with worse.
Swallowing, he tilted his head to get a look upward and once again his muscles clamped tight and his head swam with dizziness, nearly taking him under the blackness creeping around the edges of his vision.
Exhaling through the grip of nausea, he made another attempt, this time moving slowly, lifting his head ever so gingerly until he could see a bit of what was above him and the sight nearly had him upchucking again.
His entire arm was red and bleeding, twisted in the barbed wire of the fence the troglodyte had pushed him into. The chain-link fence that was supposed to keep unsuspecting idiots from falling into the abandoned grain elevator. The fence that had given way and dragged him down with it into this mulch pit. The fence that was now twisted and caught up on the broken wooden shell of one of the buckets attached to the conveyor above him.
The only thing holding the fence was a broken bucket hanging onto the warped conveyor and the only thing holding him to the fence and keeping him from dropping and his heart being skewered like a shish kabob was barbed wire cutting into his arm and turning his flesh into wet kibble.
He sucked in a nervous breath at how close he’d come to biting it and felt the stab of metal move sharper into him. Okay, no more of that. Shallow breaths moron. First things first. Get off this stabbing hunk of metal. Worry about getting down after that. And hope to hell that the monster had offed itself in the fall because he was in no shape to tackle one of the beasties now. He was barely remaining conscious.
Blinking through his salty sweat and long bangs, he scanned the area below him, looking for the monster. Although his vision was blurry, he didn’t see any shapes in the debris below that fit a fallen Prangor, but it could just as easily rolled down the sloping floor, gone through the open hatchway and into the river.
Now that would almost be worth falling, given the monsters’ aversion to water.
‘Course if his bone and muscle mass was made of sheer lead, he wouldn’t be signing up for swimming lessons at the Y anytime soon either.
Okay, he was hanging along a broken slanted conveyer with scooping buckets attached at about seven feet intervals. There was one a few feet above his head and then another broken one seven feet above that which the warped chain-link fence was now precariously draped across. If the fence came loose or the bucket broke completely away from the weight, he’d drop on the piece of metal and have a shank pierce through his heart.
So whatever he did had to be quick and gentle enough to not dislodge the fence.
Just a sunny jog in the woods.
He tried looking up again, craning his neck farther to see more of what was above, exactly how precarious the fence was draped, but his vision blackened, his muscles clamped tight, and a sledgehammer rammed against the inside of his skull. Fighting the grayness back, he let his face drop again. He wasn’t sure if it was a head injury or his spine or the way the metal jabbed at his chest when he moved, but tipping his head upward was out of the question.
Didn’t matter. He had to do something. That barbed wire wouldn’t hold his weight all day. If it didn’t tear away from the fence, the prongs and wire would eventually tear through his arm. Either scenario would rip the metal up into his heart.
He swallowed. He purposefully hadn’t been thinking of that glimpse he’d had of his own mangled flesh, had been ignoring how he couldn’t feel his fingers anymore and how he could feel every minute burn of wire cutting and scraping into his arm, the drag of his weight on his armpit, the slide of blood running along his flesh.
Hissing through his teeth, he shut it all down, closed out the image, and focused pointedly at the river lapping into the slanted floor below where barges once anchored to offload their cargo. He could do this. He had to do this.
Steadying his one arm on the roller chain, he pushed himself up, straining. The piece of metal moved upward with him.
Shit, shit. He lowered back down, shaking from exertion, unnerved by how little strength he had. The metal rail scraped inside his flesh, squeezing more blood out to drip down its length. Nearly blind with agony, Sam shifted his knee up, trying to find purchase on the conveyor belt. Both legs were uncooperative, his whole body sluggish. If he didn’t do this now, he wouldn’t have the strength to make another attempt.
Gritting his teeth through the pain, he pushed his knee up, feeling with his leg, the toe of his boot for any kind of leverage. There. He felt a gap, some kind of hole in the other side of the conveyer belt. He wished he could see behind his leg to know what he was dealing with.
He wedged the heel of his boot into the little gap, braced his hand, and pushed, straightening his leg. Every muscle in his body trembled. Perspiration poured down his face and neck, dampened his shirt. Red dots swam across his vision, closing in to cover everything in a sheen of crimson.
It wasn’t working.
Roaring with effort, Sam dug deeper, pushed harder…and the conveyor moved. Just a fraction. Bracing his muscles, he straightened his leg more, pushing hard, so very hard…with everything he had.
The conveyer hitched downward again, a minuscule movement, but it was enough to pull the rail out of his chest. Sam screamed. He didn’t remember it going in but it hurt like a mother coming out. The air froze in his lungs. He couldn’t breathe. It hurt so bad, the pain beyond anything he’d felt before and he wasn’t altogether sure anymore it hadn’t nicked his heart.
Blood gushed out of the hole in his chest, coating everything within his view.
The fence screeched above, rocked. It jerked so hard it felt like his arm tore off. Twisting, Sam scrabbled for whatever was within his grasp, grabbed onto slick metal as the fence slid off the broken bucket and fell, scraping and screeching along the conveyor and ropes in metal sparks from friction, towing him with it, ripping his fingers from his hold. The bloody metal rail ripped across his shoulder, narrowly missed his cheek, and pulled across his scalp, ripping strands of his hair out by the roots as he dropped past it, flailing for something to grab onto.
The shriek of a Prangor clanged against his eardrums, the reverberations falling with him.
His fall jerked to an abrupt stop, dislocating his shoulder in a howl of misery that sent a shock wave through his body. Still dangling, the fence must have caught onto something else. The pain was so horrendous, he almost wished he would have hit the ground. Wetness dribbled down his arm, pooling into the crook between his neck and shoulder. His arm was a mass of throbbing burning hammered meat.
Reaching up with his other arm, he grabbed onto the twisted fence to try to take some of his weight off and came face-to-muzzle with the Prangor.
He flinched back, sending more jolts of torment through his shoulder that nearly cost him his consciousness. He fought to stay awake, breathing so hard his lungs filled to bursting, and let go of the fence to go for his gun at the back of his waistband. The drag on his arm nearly pulled him under again.
The beast screeched, thrashing about, rattling the twisted fence. Its bulbous leathery flesh was caught up, twisted into the length of barbed wire, pinning it to the heap of fence. It must have been above him all this time, out of his range of view, biding its time or possibly unconscious. The wire pulled tight in the brown flesh, lost in its folds of skin, red blossoms puckering where the barbs were buried. The more the Prangor fought, the more the wire embedded itself. The arms were trapped in a way that the beast didn’t have its usual reach otherwise the fatal claws would have already made mincemeat out of the chain-links. Would have made mincemeat out of him.
Blind eyes turned toward him, wide apish nostrils flaring, shooting warm huffs of air that stunk of decay and death. At least the pepper-spray had done that much.
Sam’s hand brushed the small of his back. Empty, his gun gone, most likely fallen, buried in the rotted grain below. He followed along his belt, finding his k-bar secured in its sheath at the back of his hip. With no hesitation and no mercy for the beast, Sam plunged the blade, hilt-deep and then some, straight into the monster’s heart. Noxious gray blood poured over his hand.
The Prangor shrieked, clawed at the air, thrashing against the broken fence, wild with panic. He grinned, even as he barely hung onto consciousness from the shrieking noise and the shaking metal and the pressure on his tearing arm, and twisted the knife harder into the chest cavity of the beast, before wrenching it out.
The ape-beast carried on as though it didn’t feel it, thrashing and twisting, its body writhing into shapes the hulky size shouldn’t be able to twist into. Not caught in the wire as it was. Tough SOB.
Sam’s arm couldn’t take anymore. Dropping the knife, he grabbed onto the chain links to relieve the pressure and the entire fence shifted, tilting downward. He and the Prangor dropped about a foot, his arm jerking once more.
Sam’s head pounded. His arm was a screaming mass of agony. His sight blackened, and then rushed back into a dizzying gray fog. The barbed wire bit into his arm.
Nauseated and weak from blood loss, he dangled, flopping like a puppet with the frenzied movement of the dying animal. Or was it the fence moving? He lifted his head to try and see what was happening and pain jabbed behind his eyelids.
He fell.
The screech of metal ground around him, bumping and crumbling like tin foil along the warped catwalks and wavy ladders scaling the close walls. The monster screamed, its high-pitched wail equaling the hiss of metal as fence, monster and man hurdled toward the ground.
There was nothing he could do to stop it.
The fence slammed onto the bucket conveyor. The Prangor took the hit, breaking apart a bucket.
Sam hit the ground in a paralyzing thud, pummeling the air from his lungs. Old grain flew up in dirty brown clouds just as the rest of the broken fence fell over him and the monster smashed into the floor inches away and kept going, sliding down the slanting concrete, dragging the fence and Sam with it.
Shit, nonononono. Fingers gouged at the mushy grain. That’s all he had, the fingers of one hand. He couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move. Couldn’t tell how bad he’d been hurt by the fall or if he’d simply had the wind knocked out of him, but he couldn’t freaking move, and the weight of the monster and the fence dragged him into-
His chest tightened at the slap of freezing water.
He swam one-armed and kicked against the drag of metal and monster bearing him downward. A jolt dragged on his body when they hit the bottom of the river and the metal fence settled in a plume of disturbed silt and swaying vegetation that caressed like silk across his arms.
Sam yanked and yanked, desperate to free his arm. Visibility sucked. He could see less than two feet around, couldn’t see where the monster was, but felt its frenzied thrashing, shaking the tangled metal. Streams of blood swirled in the water from the lacerations on his arm. So be it. It was his arm or drowning.
His lungs burned, closing, the weight of an iceberg crushing his chest. The panicked sensation to take a breath damn near overpowered his ability to think. Bracing his knees in the sinking mud, he pulled with everything that was in him. He…had…to…free…his arm.
The wire bit deeper into his flesh.
His blood coated the murky water.
Icicles jabbed every nerve ending. Everything was dimming.
He pushed down on the wire, forcing it down into his arm. He couldn’t see if it was working. The blood was too thick. The feeling in his arm was gone. He wouldn’t give up. Not without a fight. That’s not how he was made.
The monster didn’t get him.
Neither would the river.
His dad and brother trained him better than that.
Keep fighting.
Except…A tremor ran through his body. The iceberg crushing his chest shifted, squeezing out any remaining air and his sight blackened. Just before everything went dark he thought he saw the grimly set face of his brother coming toward him.
He came to on a swirl of agony. He thought having the oxygen wrenched out of his lungs was painful, involuntarily trying to refill them was beyond torturous. Sonofa-
“Damn it, Sam, breathe already!”
Wuhh. He was floating in the river, his boots dragging his legs down, every limb felt weighted with lead. His face was barely above water, the back of his head pressed against the curve of someone’s shoulder while an arm snaked partway around his side, and legs tangled with his, kicking, pulsing the water around them, keeping them both afloat. Barely. Whoever had him was breathing heavily with the effort.
“I said breathe!”
He was trying. Damn he was trying, but his chest was locked tight, unable to release and the pain was a monster hollowing out his lungs.
“Breathe!”
A wide pair of fists locked together rammed up into his diaphragm, quick and hard. His lungs expanded in a painful spasm that threw him forward face first into the water. Hands clawed at his shirt, pulling him back up to the surface where he vomited…and vomited again. Volumes upon volumes of dirty river water so hard he swore his ribs were pressing into his spine until finally, finally...he drew in a breath that didn’t feel like his lungs were turning inside out.
Wet gurgling gasps of sweet blessed humid air. He floated, buoyed up by competent hands, the top of his head pressed hard against the collar bone of whoever was helping him. He squinted up at a sharp chin silhouetted in the overhead sun.
“Are you good now? Have it all out?”
Dean. He tried to twist for a better look but he was completely drained and sluggish. He tried to lift his arms but didn’t have the strength to get them out of the water.
“Whoa, hey. Don’t. It’s pretty bad.”
What was bad?
“Just…just stay still and let me do all the work. We’re almost there. You don’t want to look at it.”
Look at it? His arm. A sick slide of dread coiled in his gut. He’d been sawing the barbed wire through his arm to get free. Oh god.
“Stop. Just stop.”
He hadn’t realized he’d been trying to lift his head, trying to see the damage.
“Trust me, it looks worse than it is. You don’t want to see. Let me get us out of the water and I’ll take care of it.”
Take care of it? How could he take care of that?
“Please Sam, trust me.”
The heartfelt plea spoken at his temple broke through.
“Dean,” he croaked out.
“Yeah.”
“How?”
Their knees bumped into slurpy ground. “I’ll tell you all about it once I get you on dry ground. Just…let me get you out.”
He felt Dean shift away from him, before the hands were back, lifting him from beneath his armpits and dragging him up out of the river and onto a bank of coarse river grass. The movement slogged his brain around in his skull.
Dean went to his knees before rolling onto his back beside him, utterly spent. Constantly saving his ass took a lot out of an older brother.
They lay there, water dripping into the grass, numb with cold. Sam let his head roll to the side to get a look at his arm, bracing for how bad he suspected it to be.
He knew what he’d been trying to do. Every working muscle in his body tensed.
Dean was immediately leaning over him, fingers on his chin, trying to turn his face back. “Hey. I told you not to look at it.”
“But…”
“Don’t look. I’ll fix it.”
Because he didn’t want him to know. Panic rose in his chest. He tried to flex his fingers but he couldn’t feel anything. Because…because…
“Hey.” Dean’s eyes bore into his. “You’re okay.”
“But…”
“You’re okay.”
Dean’s gaze flicked lowered on Sam’s torso and widened. “What happened here?” His palm flattened over the hole above his heart and Sam jerked, biting back a whimper he was too late in hiding from his brother.
“You’re bleeding like a stuck pig. How deep is this? Sam, how deep is this?”
Sam’s jaw clenched around a new tide of pain. Shit, Dean, quit pushing on it.
Dean’s face softened in sympathy. “Damn, sorry man. It’s just…I got to keep pressure on this. Geez, you’re a mess.” He stretched his neck, taking in their surroundings. “Impala’s about a mile away.” He went quiet, obviously considering their options.
“I’m going to get this bleeding stopped, then I’m gonna have to leave you for a bit, get the car as close as I can it to this slope then I’ll get you fixed up and warm. Okay?”
Fading, Sam nodded, wondering why being warm mattered anymore. If his hand was gone, he was already bleeding out anyway. He was so cold and numb. He just wanted Dean to stay with him while he slipped away.
He blinked up. “Monster?”
Dean grinned. “You got him. It was floating feet up, well, paws up, dead, strapped to that fence.” A muscle in his jaw ticked. “I got there just in time to see you all slide into the river. I thought I wouldn’t be able to…” Dean looked away, back out into the fading day.
Sam slid his working arm across the ground to bump Dean’s knee. He was going to lose him anyway. He felt the life flowing out of him.
As though he knew what Sam was thinking Dean looked back down at him, his features taking on a fierceness. “Don’t do that. Don’t you dare.”
“But my arm…gone.”
Light brows winged up, then scrunched just as quickly. “Sam…is that...?” All the color leached out of Dean’s face. “God, no. No man, you didn’t.” He suddenly reached across him. “Feel that? It’s still there Sam. You feel that right?”
Sam shook his head, his eyes filling with tears.
“You can’t feel…? Aw Sam, I’m sorry. I didn’t know you thought you…” Dean’s Adam’s apple bounced. “Here. Look. Do you see?” Gently, Dean brought Sam’s arm up so he could see.
Sam swallowed in relief and started shaking.
Still there.
His entire arm looked like mashed up pulp, but he still had an arm, still had a hand, everything intact. His wrist was swathed in the soaking remains of his sleeve that Dean must have ripped off to use as a makeshift bandage where the cuts must be fairly deep. Not that he could imagine worse than the parts he could see. Blood-tinged water flowed down his fingers dripping into the dirt. He focused on the tiny drops, mesmerized.
“You can’t feel it?”
Sam shook his head against the ground, too overcome to speak.
“Okay, that’s okay. I know it looks bad, Sam. I had to force the barbs down your arm and it took a bunch of skin with it.” Dean’s uncertain pitch wasn’t reassuring. “It will be okay. You are okay. You’re just cold and numb, probably going into shock, that’s all. The bleeding’s almost stopped and I’m going to run and get the car, get blankets, the med kit, anything you need. It’s going to be okay. I will fix this Sam. You believe that right?” Dean’s gaze held his, waiting for an answer.
Sam blinked up at him and spoke wetly. “I believe you.”
“You bet your ass.” Dean’s cupped hand tapped his cheek affectionately before he shifted away. “Don’t go anywhere.” Grinning, he winked.
Sam would have rolled his eyes if he wasn’t at the final dregs of his endurance.
“Hey.” Dean shook him. “Five minutes, Sam. Stay awake. Just give me five minutes and everything will be okay.”
Sam gave him a smile, the only thing he had control of, but it was enough. Dean’s eyes creased with worry, but he nodded and shot off like the wind, leaving Sam on the bank in the grass with the sound of the splashing river passing beyond him..
Sam’s eyes slipped closed, but he immediately forced them back open. Five minutes. It was little enough Dean asked for and Sam was damn well going to give it to him.
FIN
Usual disclaimers apply. Just having fun in Kripke’s sandbox.