SPN FIC - Deluge (Part 1 of 5)
Never say "Never," right?
I'm back. I think I'm back. I hope I'm back. I would love to be back full time, but ... we'll see. For now, this is for charis_kalos , who donated a truly impressive amount of money towards Australian flood relief in exchange for my giving her (and all of you) some fic. She requested brothers, working together, helping flood victims, which certainly seemed do-able. To my delight, when I did a bit of research, I even found an Aussie to blend into the mix.
So here we go: brothers. The Impala. A flood. And things that slither in the night. How long will it take me to finish? I'm thinking a couple of weeks. Hang in there. And try to stay dry.
The kid blinks a couple of times, rainwater sluicing off his head. "We're...shit, man. We're not on high ground."
CHARACTERS: Sam, Dean, various OCs
GENRE: Gen
RATING: PG, for language
SPOILERS: None
LENGTH: Remains to be seen; this part is 3171 words
DELUGE
By Carol Davis
Part 1
Other people count sheep.
Or do they?
It doesn't make a damn bit of difference, Sam thinks, whether they do or whether they don't. What he knows for sure is that it's never worked for him: counting sheep or kittens or bleeding corpses. Or taking slow, deep breaths.
A warm bath and a glass of wine. That used to work for Jess.
Shit.
He pages through the copy of Sports Illustrated somebody left in the room, squinting at the pictures and the larger-font lines of text with the help of the flickering light from the parking lot, but the magazine's months old and he never has given much of a crap about team sports, not since middle school, more than half his life ago. He'd throw it across the room, but that would wake Dean, would likely pop Dean up in bed like a jack-in-the-box, gun in hand, and then Dean would bitch him out for an hour.
Or a day.
Or a week.
When he gropes for the remote and switches on the battered TV, nothing appears onscreen but static. The cable's out, he figures, if it was ever on in the first place. He tries half a dozen channels and gets more of the same nothing, and when he hits the power button again to shut the thing off, the TV makes a disturbing crackle that suggests its life span has come to an abrupt and probably unmourned end.
He pushes the worn, mustard-colored blanket aside and pads to the bathroom, pees, runs a little water in the sink and splashes his face with it, peers at himself in the mirror, shoves his hair away from his forehead.
He can't, won't, try to take a bath, warm or otherwise; the tub's not big enough to provide any decent kind of a soak.
Outside, the storm's picking up.
A long time ago - he was a toddler, he thinks, although he remembers that night pretty clearly - Dad bundled the three of them into a tub in another tiny motel bathroom, cushioned with towels and clothing, sheltered behind a wall of mattresses. He remembers the roar and howl of the wind, remembers being confused about the way Dad held onto the two of them, him and Dean, and kept telling them that everything was okay, that in the morning they'd go get pancakes for breakfast.
This isn't that. This storm. Isn't a tornado.
It's a bitch, though, the wind and the rain. It's been raining here for almost a week now, nothing too far out of the ordinary at first, but gaining strength day by day, according to the locals in the diner where he and Dean stopped for dinner. They passed some debris on the road a few miles from here, a decent-sized limb from an old, rotted tree, a scattering of smaller branches, and what looked like the contents of somebody's trash can, rolled out onto the road. There'll be a lot more debris now, Sam thinks: bigger limbs, a lot of them. Some power lines. People's lawn furniture and plastic recycling bins, maybe pieces of signage, some stray roofing tiles.
It's a wonder the power's still on at the motel.
There's something loose outside, something that thunks and bongs in a fairly steady rhythm. It reminds him of something, but he can't think what.
And the rain.
It's sluicing off the roof like the motel's sitting in a riverbed, like it's part of a gigantic water feature in somebody's yard.
Tornado, he thinks, and sits on the edge of the tub.
No. This isn't that. He's been through that. Been in one, more or less, has seen a couple more from a distance. Drove through the leading edge of a hurricane once, and this isn't that, either. This is just…
Earthquake.
Mudslide.
He was a couple hundred yards from a lightning strike once. It left him with a ringing in his ears that didn't go away for almost a month.
Blizzard.
He could do that. Not sheep; he could count the number of times, the number of different ways, he's seen Mother Nature pitch a fit.
Ice storm.
Hail the size of golf balls.
He's smiling, a little, as he begins to pad back across the gritty carpet toward his bed. Stops when he realizes Dean is watching him.
"What?" Dean says.
"Nothing."
"Time is it?"
"Three. I guess. I don't know." Sam lifts his wrist, peers at his watch in the unhelpful, flickering light from outside. "Ten to four."
He realizes then that, although he would have bet otherwise a few minutes ago, Dean hasn't been sleeping either, that Dean's simply been lying there quietly, eyes closed, maybe listening to the downpour, to the relentless hammering on that very insubstantial roof overhead. The motel's just one storey, a long row of small rooms painted on the outside (for no reason Sam can fathom) to look like a child's choo-choo train. It's not the most bizarre place they've ever stayed at, not by a long shot, but an image of the train being swept off its track - and, yeah, right off a fragile trestle bridge, suspended in midair for a moment before it plunges into the gorge below - leaps into his mind and takes root there, hanging on even as he sits on the edge of his bed and drops his face into his hands.
"Like trying to sleep in a friggin' car wash," Dean says after a minute.
His eyes, and Dean's, go to what's left of the bottle of Jack they picked up after they finished their burgers and pie at the diner. Not enough to change anything. It won't soothe them to sleep, or make this road they're on any smoother.
When Sam picks up the TV remote and begins to toy with it, just for something to do, Dean offers quietly, "Holiday Inn down the road a ways."
"And?"
"Probably got a TV that works."
"I wouldn't count on it. Cable's probably out."
Like they'd ever actually stay at a Holiday Inn.
"Could just go," Dean muses.
"In this?"
Dean shrugs, a small twitch of one shoulder. "It's a challenge." Like "challenge" means "nothing to break a sweat over."
The storm's a long, narrow band running from east to west, according to the weather report they caught late yesterday afternoon. If they head north, or south, they'll drive on out of it in a couple of hours.
If they stay here, they'll be listening to rain hammer on the roof for another full day, maybe a day and a half, with no cable, nothing much to read, no WiFi connection, no way to amuse themselves that doesn't involve talking.
The original idea was to take a couple of days off, relax a little, regroup, put together a couple of possibilities for their next case while they watched some TV, ate, drank a little, followed whatever lead the day provided.
If they stay here - if they follow their original plan - they won't be doing much relaxing.
Drinking's still on the table, though, if they venture out long enough to replace the bottle of Jack. Liquor store's just down the road.
They used to build forts in between the beds, Sam remembers. Used to drape the blankets over the top, and play with Matchbox cars. Toy soldiers. Maybe some plastic cups, if the room had them. A flashlight, if Dad wasn't worried about the batteries getting tapped out.
He wouldn't mind a long, hot shower in a tub that didn't look like a big Petri dish.
Trying to sleep in a comfortable bed.
The Holiday Inn's got a coffee shop. Maybe room service.
Maybe their cable works.
"Let's just go," he says quietly. "Let's go find some dry land."
Dean sits up in bed, covers pooling around him. He cocks his head a little, listens to the drumming on the roof.
"Yeah," he concludes.
It's then that Sam realizes what that thunking and bonging outside reminds him of. It makes him grin, then chuckle.
"What?" Dean frowns.
"Dude."
"What?"
"Uma Thurman's ass."
"What?" Dean says again, and it comes out a little high-pitched.
Sam begins to gather up his clothes, snorting softly, steps into his jeans, pulls his button-up on over his t-shirt. "Dude. Twenty-seven times." He's cackling a little as he mimes someone striking a drum, wiggles his hips a little as he croons, "Hello, boys. You can call me…Poison Ivy."
That's the sound: the big fundraiser.
A guy dressed as some sort of island native, striking a big drum.
Uma Thurman's ass.
Dean sits there staring at him, shoulders tight for no reason Sam can figure except that Dean's too tired to play this game.
"Dude," Sam says. "Seriously, man. You're the only living being on the planet who sat through Batman & Robin twenty-seven times. Clooney owes you, man. The friggin' studio owes you. Uma Thurman owes you."
All he gets out of Dean is a mumbled, "Whatever."
Sam's standing there in his socks when something thumps against the door, a sound that makes both of them turn to look. Nothing to worry about, he figures; the wind blew something against it, one of those plastic chairs from alongside the pool, maybe - but Dean's shot a hand up underneath his pillow and he's got his gun now, plus that expression that says Not in the mood for this.
There's another sound, then a patter of them, knuckles banging the thin wood of the door.
"Hey," a voice says from outside. "HEY. Hello?"
Sam hikes a brow, has a quick, familiar conversation with Dean that doesn't involve words. Dean's final punctuation is to tuck the gun underneath the covers near his right leg, out of sight.
It's the desk clerk, a fat, pimply kid who said his name's Juney, drenched and unhappy, hair and jeans and denim jacket pasted to him by the downpour. He stands there staring at Sam for a second, his jaw flexing like he's working on a gigantic wad of chewing gum. "You -" he says, stops and heaves a sigh.
"It's four o'clock in the morning," Sam tells him.
"Yeah. Well."
Rain blows in past the kid, enough of it to make Sam shudder. It's coming down friggin' sideways outside, and the kid's got his feet planted on the ground a little ways apart, trying to keep himself from being blown away.
"Water's rising," Juney says.
"And?"
The kid blinks a couple of times, rainwater sluicing off his head. "We're…shit, man. We're not on high ground."
They said that on the news: snow melt (a lot of snow; this past winter's been snow, and snow, and some more snow, with a side order of snow), plus all this rain, means a lot of water headed downhill, heading westward, towards the Mighty Mississippi. Minnesota might be the Land of a Thousand Lakes, but southern Pennsylvania's got a million creeks and streams and small rivers, and every one of 'em's filling up with water.
Southwestern Pennsylvania's got a bad history with water.
"You saying 'get out'?" Sam asks, watching one of those white plastic chairs from poolside tumble and roll across the parking lot.
"Yeah," Juney sighs. "The owners'll kick my ass, but I'm saying you better get out. I'm gonna shut the place down."
~~~~~~~~~~
Southwestern Pennsylvania isn't a bleak place, a sad place, any more so than any other specific part of the country. Sam's been here when the sun's shining, and it's beautiful then: lots of greenery, rolling hills, creeks and streams and small lakes.
Wildflowers.
But Flight 93 ended near here. He and Dean passed the memorial yesterday.
And there's the question of all that water.
As if he knows what Sam's thinking, Dean says in a tone that's more pensive than conversational, "That house. Remember that house? Dad showed us. Split right in half by the flood. You could see right inside the rooms, like it was a big dollhouse."
Sam remembers.
The last big flood had been fairly recent then, when he and Dean were little kids. But it's been almost four decades now, and the big ones come on a pretty regular schedule: every four decades. Every forty years, give or take a few, Mother Nature decides to take a mop and a bucket to this part of the country. Decides to wash things clean.
"Yeah," Sam nods. "I do."
The visibility's lousy; they can't see more than fifty feet ahead of the car, if that. The pounding of the rain on the Impala's roof is deafening. Dean tried to drown it out for a while with some AC/DC but gave up a few minutes ago and shut the tape player up with a jab of his index finger. Even without the music, to hear each other, they almost have to shout.
"You good?" Sam asks, loudly.
Dean squints over at him, frowning a little, and Sam knows what he's thinking: Not a good time for that emo shit.
Not that it ever is. But that's not what Sam had in mind. Normally, his brother's at ease behind the wheel, crappy weather conditions notwithstanding. Right now, not so much. Dean's been watching the road nonstop since they left the motel, has kept both hands on the wheel. There's a lot of tension in his hands, and his shoulders, and his face.
They've covered stretches of road that are nothing more than long, deep pools of water. The storm's turned the roadside into torrents of water that churn and bounce over the dirt and weeds and broken bottles and empty cigarette packs. Wherever there's a low spot, the water's digging deeper into the ground, creating whirlpools of dirt and junk. There've been a couple of places where it looked like the force of the water was going to undermine the asphalt. It probably will, if the storm goes on long enough.
It will, Sam thinks. It'll go on long enough.
"Yeah," Dean replies, finally, but it's a bitten-off word, one that says, as much as Dean loves his car, is at home behind the wheel more than anywhere else, he'd rather not be doing this right now, in the middle of what might as well be a hurricane, with sunrise (for what little that will amount to) still a couple of hours off.
They're drenched, the two of them. They only had to run a few yards out in the open, from the door of the motel room to the shelter of the car, but it was enough to soak both of them through to the skin. They tried running the heater, but all that accomplished was to make the inside of the car warm and humid and smelly, like they're riding around inside a clothes dryer, minus the flowery fabric softener sheets.
Holiday Inn, Sam thinks, closing his eyes against the headache that the constant racket on the roof has created.
Dry, comfortable beds. Dry towels.
Room service.
Then he's pitching forward, the car's squealing and trying to stop and he's not, he's flying forward until his arm collides with the dash, sending a bolt of pain up into his shoulder and his neck as the car fishtails on the wet road and skids half-sideways for a good fifty or sixty feet before Dean succeeds in bringing it to a shuddering halt that the car protests by woofing a big burst of stagnant, sour air out of the heating vents.
"The FUCK!" Dean screeches. "WHAT THE FUCK WAS THAT?"
All Sam can do for a good half a minute is mouth things that aren't exactly words, like he's playing clown for a baby, like he's a goddamn mime. It takes a lot of effort to put together the "JESUS, DEAN," he howls at his brother.
"What WAS that?" Dean demands.
"What was what?"
"That - you didn't see that?"
"See what?"
Dean slumps back in the seat, both hands still wrapped, rigor-like, around the wheel, mouth half open, shoulders jumping like he's getting tiny electric shocks.
"What?" Sam asks.
"There was - shit, I don't know. Something."
"You almost killed us over a 'something'."
"It was a big something," Dean grouses.
They sit in the pounding silence for a minute, Dean gripping the wheel, Sam focused on getting his heart to retreat from up between his ears. Finally, Dean says in something near a normal, though wobbly, tone of voice, "Something crossed the road. Big. Fast. Kinda -" And he peers over at Sam. "They got 'gators around here?"
"Alligators?"
"Do they?"
"In Pennsylvania?"
"It looked like a 'gator. A seriously gigantic 'gator."
"An alligator."
"You know. Low to the ground. Slithery. They move pretty fast, right?"
He's serious. He's peering at Sam, looking for a serious answer. About alligators?? Sam thinks. "Not this far north."
"You sure?"
"Yeah," Sam says, although he isn't. Not exactly. Not after everything that's gone on during the last couple of years. These days he's not a hundred percent sure of anything. "Although - I don't know. I guess it could have gotten out of a zoo or something."
"Yeah?"
There's something skeptical in Dean's eyes - something that says he's saying alligator but he's not thinking alligator.
"What?" Sam asks.
It takes a lot to freak Dean out. He's overtired, and having to pay uninterrupted attention to the road for the last forty-five minutes hasn't helped. Still, he's operated under conditions worse than this without putting together the look that's on his face right now.
"Low to the ground," he says. "And…slithery."
"But not…like an eel?"
Dean's right eyebrow twitches.
"Alligator, Sam," he barks. "Does a frickin' eel look like an alligator?"
"So - what?" Sam asks. "You…want to go try to find it?"
Dean jams his eyes shut for a moment, then stares straight ahead, out across the rain-streaked hood of the car toward what little is visible of the road.
"Maybe I imagined it," he says after a minute.
What Dean means is, he wants to believe he imagined it.
"What?" Sam asks again. These days, he's not sure about anything much, but he's pretty sure he doesn't want to know what Dean saw. Not tonight. Not when neither one of them's had a decent night's sleep.
Dean sits there gripping the wheel.
After a while, his hands loosen a little, enough to allow his right index finger to tap lightly on the plastic. Up and down. Up and down. Like he's trying to talk himself into something, or out of it. The finger's still tapping when he turns slightly, just enough to allow him to look Sam full in the face.
Holiday Inn, Sam thinks.
"Thirty feet long," Dean says, his voice almost fully drowned out by the hammering rain. "Whatever it was, the son of a bitch was like thirty feet long. It was out there in the middle of the road and it turned its friggin' head and looked me right in the eye."
Oh, Sam thinks.
"Alligator?" he ventures, after a moment.
"No," Dean says. "Not so much."
Part 2…
I'm back. I think I'm back. I hope I'm back. I would love to be back full time, but ... we'll see. For now, this is for charis_kalos , who donated a truly impressive amount of money towards Australian flood relief in exchange for my giving her (and all of you) some fic. She requested brothers, working together, helping flood victims, which certainly seemed do-able. To my delight, when I did a bit of research, I even found an Aussie to blend into the mix.
So here we go: brothers. The Impala. A flood. And things that slither in the night. How long will it take me to finish? I'm thinking a couple of weeks. Hang in there. And try to stay dry.
The kid blinks a couple of times, rainwater sluicing off his head. "We're...shit, man. We're not on high ground."
CHARACTERS: Sam, Dean, various OCs
GENRE: Gen
RATING: PG, for language
SPOILERS: None
LENGTH: Remains to be seen; this part is 3171 words
DELUGE
By Carol Davis
Part 1
Other people count sheep.
Or do they?
It doesn't make a damn bit of difference, Sam thinks, whether they do or whether they don't. What he knows for sure is that it's never worked for him: counting sheep or kittens or bleeding corpses. Or taking slow, deep breaths.
A warm bath and a glass of wine. That used to work for Jess.
Shit.
He pages through the copy of Sports Illustrated somebody left in the room, squinting at the pictures and the larger-font lines of text with the help of the flickering light from the parking lot, but the magazine's months old and he never has given much of a crap about team sports, not since middle school, more than half his life ago. He'd throw it across the room, but that would wake Dean, would likely pop Dean up in bed like a jack-in-the-box, gun in hand, and then Dean would bitch him out for an hour.
Or a day.
Or a week.
When he gropes for the remote and switches on the battered TV, nothing appears onscreen but static. The cable's out, he figures, if it was ever on in the first place. He tries half a dozen channels and gets more of the same nothing, and when he hits the power button again to shut the thing off, the TV makes a disturbing crackle that suggests its life span has come to an abrupt and probably unmourned end.
He pushes the worn, mustard-colored blanket aside and pads to the bathroom, pees, runs a little water in the sink and splashes his face with it, peers at himself in the mirror, shoves his hair away from his forehead.
He can't, won't, try to take a bath, warm or otherwise; the tub's not big enough to provide any decent kind of a soak.
Outside, the storm's picking up.
A long time ago - he was a toddler, he thinks, although he remembers that night pretty clearly - Dad bundled the three of them into a tub in another tiny motel bathroom, cushioned with towels and clothing, sheltered behind a wall of mattresses. He remembers the roar and howl of the wind, remembers being confused about the way Dad held onto the two of them, him and Dean, and kept telling them that everything was okay, that in the morning they'd go get pancakes for breakfast.
This isn't that. This storm. Isn't a tornado.
It's a bitch, though, the wind and the rain. It's been raining here for almost a week now, nothing too far out of the ordinary at first, but gaining strength day by day, according to the locals in the diner where he and Dean stopped for dinner. They passed some debris on the road a few miles from here, a decent-sized limb from an old, rotted tree, a scattering of smaller branches, and what looked like the contents of somebody's trash can, rolled out onto the road. There'll be a lot more debris now, Sam thinks: bigger limbs, a lot of them. Some power lines. People's lawn furniture and plastic recycling bins, maybe pieces of signage, some stray roofing tiles.
It's a wonder the power's still on at the motel.
There's something loose outside, something that thunks and bongs in a fairly steady rhythm. It reminds him of something, but he can't think what.
And the rain.
It's sluicing off the roof like the motel's sitting in a riverbed, like it's part of a gigantic water feature in somebody's yard.
Tornado, he thinks, and sits on the edge of the tub.
No. This isn't that. He's been through that. Been in one, more or less, has seen a couple more from a distance. Drove through the leading edge of a hurricane once, and this isn't that, either. This is just…
Earthquake.
Mudslide.
He was a couple hundred yards from a lightning strike once. It left him with a ringing in his ears that didn't go away for almost a month.
Blizzard.
He could do that. Not sheep; he could count the number of times, the number of different ways, he's seen Mother Nature pitch a fit.
Ice storm.
Hail the size of golf balls.
He's smiling, a little, as he begins to pad back across the gritty carpet toward his bed. Stops when he realizes Dean is watching him.
"What?" Dean says.
"Nothing."
"Time is it?"
"Three. I guess. I don't know." Sam lifts his wrist, peers at his watch in the unhelpful, flickering light from outside. "Ten to four."
He realizes then that, although he would have bet otherwise a few minutes ago, Dean hasn't been sleeping either, that Dean's simply been lying there quietly, eyes closed, maybe listening to the downpour, to the relentless hammering on that very insubstantial roof overhead. The motel's just one storey, a long row of small rooms painted on the outside (for no reason Sam can fathom) to look like a child's choo-choo train. It's not the most bizarre place they've ever stayed at, not by a long shot, but an image of the train being swept off its track - and, yeah, right off a fragile trestle bridge, suspended in midair for a moment before it plunges into the gorge below - leaps into his mind and takes root there, hanging on even as he sits on the edge of his bed and drops his face into his hands.
"Like trying to sleep in a friggin' car wash," Dean says after a minute.
His eyes, and Dean's, go to what's left of the bottle of Jack they picked up after they finished their burgers and pie at the diner. Not enough to change anything. It won't soothe them to sleep, or make this road they're on any smoother.
When Sam picks up the TV remote and begins to toy with it, just for something to do, Dean offers quietly, "Holiday Inn down the road a ways."
"And?"
"Probably got a TV that works."
"I wouldn't count on it. Cable's probably out."
Like they'd ever actually stay at a Holiday Inn.
"Could just go," Dean muses.
"In this?"
Dean shrugs, a small twitch of one shoulder. "It's a challenge." Like "challenge" means "nothing to break a sweat over."
The storm's a long, narrow band running from east to west, according to the weather report they caught late yesterday afternoon. If they head north, or south, they'll drive on out of it in a couple of hours.
If they stay here, they'll be listening to rain hammer on the roof for another full day, maybe a day and a half, with no cable, nothing much to read, no WiFi connection, no way to amuse themselves that doesn't involve talking.
The original idea was to take a couple of days off, relax a little, regroup, put together a couple of possibilities for their next case while they watched some TV, ate, drank a little, followed whatever lead the day provided.
If they stay here - if they follow their original plan - they won't be doing much relaxing.
Drinking's still on the table, though, if they venture out long enough to replace the bottle of Jack. Liquor store's just down the road.
They used to build forts in between the beds, Sam remembers. Used to drape the blankets over the top, and play with Matchbox cars. Toy soldiers. Maybe some plastic cups, if the room had them. A flashlight, if Dad wasn't worried about the batteries getting tapped out.
He wouldn't mind a long, hot shower in a tub that didn't look like a big Petri dish.
Trying to sleep in a comfortable bed.
The Holiday Inn's got a coffee shop. Maybe room service.
Maybe their cable works.
"Let's just go," he says quietly. "Let's go find some dry land."
Dean sits up in bed, covers pooling around him. He cocks his head a little, listens to the drumming on the roof.
"Yeah," he concludes.
It's then that Sam realizes what that thunking and bonging outside reminds him of. It makes him grin, then chuckle.
"What?" Dean frowns.
"Dude."
"What?"
"Uma Thurman's ass."
"What?" Dean says again, and it comes out a little high-pitched.
Sam begins to gather up his clothes, snorting softly, steps into his jeans, pulls his button-up on over his t-shirt. "Dude. Twenty-seven times." He's cackling a little as he mimes someone striking a drum, wiggles his hips a little as he croons, "Hello, boys. You can call me…Poison Ivy."
That's the sound: the big fundraiser.
A guy dressed as some sort of island native, striking a big drum.
Uma Thurman's ass.
Dean sits there staring at him, shoulders tight for no reason Sam can figure except that Dean's too tired to play this game.
"Dude," Sam says. "Seriously, man. You're the only living being on the planet who sat through Batman & Robin twenty-seven times. Clooney owes you, man. The friggin' studio owes you. Uma Thurman owes you."
All he gets out of Dean is a mumbled, "Whatever."
Sam's standing there in his socks when something thumps against the door, a sound that makes both of them turn to look. Nothing to worry about, he figures; the wind blew something against it, one of those plastic chairs from alongside the pool, maybe - but Dean's shot a hand up underneath his pillow and he's got his gun now, plus that expression that says Not in the mood for this.
There's another sound, then a patter of them, knuckles banging the thin wood of the door.
"Hey," a voice says from outside. "HEY. Hello?"
Sam hikes a brow, has a quick, familiar conversation with Dean that doesn't involve words. Dean's final punctuation is to tuck the gun underneath the covers near his right leg, out of sight.
It's the desk clerk, a fat, pimply kid who said his name's Juney, drenched and unhappy, hair and jeans and denim jacket pasted to him by the downpour. He stands there staring at Sam for a second, his jaw flexing like he's working on a gigantic wad of chewing gum. "You -" he says, stops and heaves a sigh.
"It's four o'clock in the morning," Sam tells him.
"Yeah. Well."
Rain blows in past the kid, enough of it to make Sam shudder. It's coming down friggin' sideways outside, and the kid's got his feet planted on the ground a little ways apart, trying to keep himself from being blown away.
"Water's rising," Juney says.
"And?"
The kid blinks a couple of times, rainwater sluicing off his head. "We're…shit, man. We're not on high ground."
They said that on the news: snow melt (a lot of snow; this past winter's been snow, and snow, and some more snow, with a side order of snow), plus all this rain, means a lot of water headed downhill, heading westward, towards the Mighty Mississippi. Minnesota might be the Land of a Thousand Lakes, but southern Pennsylvania's got a million creeks and streams and small rivers, and every one of 'em's filling up with water.
Southwestern Pennsylvania's got a bad history with water.
"You saying 'get out'?" Sam asks, watching one of those white plastic chairs from poolside tumble and roll across the parking lot.
"Yeah," Juney sighs. "The owners'll kick my ass, but I'm saying you better get out. I'm gonna shut the place down."
~~~~~~~~~~
Southwestern Pennsylvania isn't a bleak place, a sad place, any more so than any other specific part of the country. Sam's been here when the sun's shining, and it's beautiful then: lots of greenery, rolling hills, creeks and streams and small lakes.
Wildflowers.
But Flight 93 ended near here. He and Dean passed the memorial yesterday.
And there's the question of all that water.
As if he knows what Sam's thinking, Dean says in a tone that's more pensive than conversational, "That house. Remember that house? Dad showed us. Split right in half by the flood. You could see right inside the rooms, like it was a big dollhouse."
Sam remembers.
The last big flood had been fairly recent then, when he and Dean were little kids. But it's been almost four decades now, and the big ones come on a pretty regular schedule: every four decades. Every forty years, give or take a few, Mother Nature decides to take a mop and a bucket to this part of the country. Decides to wash things clean.
"Yeah," Sam nods. "I do."
The visibility's lousy; they can't see more than fifty feet ahead of the car, if that. The pounding of the rain on the Impala's roof is deafening. Dean tried to drown it out for a while with some AC/DC but gave up a few minutes ago and shut the tape player up with a jab of his index finger. Even without the music, to hear each other, they almost have to shout.
"You good?" Sam asks, loudly.
Dean squints over at him, frowning a little, and Sam knows what he's thinking: Not a good time for that emo shit.
Not that it ever is. But that's not what Sam had in mind. Normally, his brother's at ease behind the wheel, crappy weather conditions notwithstanding. Right now, not so much. Dean's been watching the road nonstop since they left the motel, has kept both hands on the wheel. There's a lot of tension in his hands, and his shoulders, and his face.
They've covered stretches of road that are nothing more than long, deep pools of water. The storm's turned the roadside into torrents of water that churn and bounce over the dirt and weeds and broken bottles and empty cigarette packs. Wherever there's a low spot, the water's digging deeper into the ground, creating whirlpools of dirt and junk. There've been a couple of places where it looked like the force of the water was going to undermine the asphalt. It probably will, if the storm goes on long enough.
It will, Sam thinks. It'll go on long enough.
"Yeah," Dean replies, finally, but it's a bitten-off word, one that says, as much as Dean loves his car, is at home behind the wheel more than anywhere else, he'd rather not be doing this right now, in the middle of what might as well be a hurricane, with sunrise (for what little that will amount to) still a couple of hours off.
They're drenched, the two of them. They only had to run a few yards out in the open, from the door of the motel room to the shelter of the car, but it was enough to soak both of them through to the skin. They tried running the heater, but all that accomplished was to make the inside of the car warm and humid and smelly, like they're riding around inside a clothes dryer, minus the flowery fabric softener sheets.
Holiday Inn, Sam thinks, closing his eyes against the headache that the constant racket on the roof has created.
Dry, comfortable beds. Dry towels.
Room service.
Then he's pitching forward, the car's squealing and trying to stop and he's not, he's flying forward until his arm collides with the dash, sending a bolt of pain up into his shoulder and his neck as the car fishtails on the wet road and skids half-sideways for a good fifty or sixty feet before Dean succeeds in bringing it to a shuddering halt that the car protests by woofing a big burst of stagnant, sour air out of the heating vents.
"The FUCK!" Dean screeches. "WHAT THE FUCK WAS THAT?"
All Sam can do for a good half a minute is mouth things that aren't exactly words, like he's playing clown for a baby, like he's a goddamn mime. It takes a lot of effort to put together the "JESUS, DEAN," he howls at his brother.
"What WAS that?" Dean demands.
"What was what?"
"That - you didn't see that?"
"See what?"
Dean slumps back in the seat, both hands still wrapped, rigor-like, around the wheel, mouth half open, shoulders jumping like he's getting tiny electric shocks.
"What?" Sam asks.
"There was - shit, I don't know. Something."
"You almost killed us over a 'something'."
"It was a big something," Dean grouses.
They sit in the pounding silence for a minute, Dean gripping the wheel, Sam focused on getting his heart to retreat from up between his ears. Finally, Dean says in something near a normal, though wobbly, tone of voice, "Something crossed the road. Big. Fast. Kinda -" And he peers over at Sam. "They got 'gators around here?"
"Alligators?"
"Do they?"
"In Pennsylvania?"
"It looked like a 'gator. A seriously gigantic 'gator."
"An alligator."
"You know. Low to the ground. Slithery. They move pretty fast, right?"
He's serious. He's peering at Sam, looking for a serious answer. About alligators?? Sam thinks. "Not this far north."
"You sure?"
"Yeah," Sam says, although he isn't. Not exactly. Not after everything that's gone on during the last couple of years. These days he's not a hundred percent sure of anything. "Although - I don't know. I guess it could have gotten out of a zoo or something."
"Yeah?"
There's something skeptical in Dean's eyes - something that says he's saying alligator but he's not thinking alligator.
"What?" Sam asks.
It takes a lot to freak Dean out. He's overtired, and having to pay uninterrupted attention to the road for the last forty-five minutes hasn't helped. Still, he's operated under conditions worse than this without putting together the look that's on his face right now.
"Low to the ground," he says. "And…slithery."
"But not…like an eel?"
Dean's right eyebrow twitches.
"Alligator, Sam," he barks. "Does a frickin' eel look like an alligator?"
"So - what?" Sam asks. "You…want to go try to find it?"
Dean jams his eyes shut for a moment, then stares straight ahead, out across the rain-streaked hood of the car toward what little is visible of the road.
"Maybe I imagined it," he says after a minute.
What Dean means is, he wants to believe he imagined it.
"What?" Sam asks again. These days, he's not sure about anything much, but he's pretty sure he doesn't want to know what Dean saw. Not tonight. Not when neither one of them's had a decent night's sleep.
Dean sits there gripping the wheel.
After a while, his hands loosen a little, enough to allow his right index finger to tap lightly on the plastic. Up and down. Up and down. Like he's trying to talk himself into something, or out of it. The finger's still tapping when he turns slightly, just enough to allow him to look Sam full in the face.
Holiday Inn, Sam thinks.
"Thirty feet long," Dean says, his voice almost fully drowned out by the hammering rain. "Whatever it was, the son of a bitch was like thirty feet long. It was out there in the middle of the road and it turned its friggin' head and looked me right in the eye."
Oh, Sam thinks.
"Alligator?" he ventures, after a moment.
"No," Dean says. "Not so much."
Part 2…