Fic: Last One Out Hits The Lights 1/4
Title: Last One Out Hits The Lights
Fandom: Supernatural
Pairing/Characters: Dean/Castiel, Sam, Bobby, Chuck, Ellen, Jo
Rating: NC-17
Spoilers: Season 4
Word Count: 38,000
Warnings: Zombies, violence, dark themes
Disclaimer: In no way mine, or anything to do with me, I own nothing.
Summary: After they stop a plot to tear open a hole straight to hell, the Winchesters face more trouble when zombies start rising from their graves across the country. Bobby calls all hands on deck and Sam and Dean, along with an angel, a mess of out-numbered hunters, and a very reluctant prophet of the Lord, have to try and save the world. Or go down in flames with it.
AN: Written for the apocabigbang A huge thank you to sarren , who betaed this for me, and made it considerably better. And thank you also to the artists who worked on my story. Artwork for the story at LJ // DW done by cybel and artwork done by newt_slash
Part 1 // Part 2 // Part 3 // Part 4
Dean's never actually sure what wakes him, whether Castiel touches him or whether he just sits there and stares until Dean's conscious. Which isn't really a comforting thought but, hey, they're still working on the whole 'appropriate behaviour around humans' thing. Dean has an uncomfortable suspicion that maybe he just knows Castiel's there. That he's aware of him somehow, under the skin. Even though he's fairly sure Castiel never did anything bad to him there's still that suggestion that the angel changed him somehow.
When he saved him.
When he remade him.
So Dean feels compelled to give him shit for it. Whether that's fair or not. He glares at him now, a shape in the darkness, eyes focused and intent and too close. It's not a fair fight at all when Dean's half asleep so he doesn't even try. He pushes himself up, balanced on one elbow.
"Cas?" It's acknowledgement that he's there and a question at the same time.
"I've discovered something troubling, something I believe you'll wish to see," Castiel says quietly. His voice is low and serious but there's something else underneath, something that sounds uncertain.
Sam shifts in the bed across the room, pushing himself upright with a creaking protest of cheap springs.
"Right now?" Dean asks.
"I think right now would be best." The words are simple enough but Dean thinks there's more than a little impatience there, an edge. Castiel doesn't usually pull that out unless something's the supernatural equivalent of currently on fire.
"Ok." Dean shoves the sheets back. "Let me get some pants."
"It may be dangerous, more dangerous than the things you normally face." Castiel moves back out of the way, when he rises. When he makes a rough noise to tell him he's listening and reaches for his clothes. Dean figures they should be used to a new level of dangerous by now, what with Lucifer especially pissed that he never managed to tear his way out of his gilded cage. He shakes his jeans and starts pulling them on.
"That's not exactly a surprise considering though, right? We're still hanging on the edge of an Apocalypse and all."
Sam's moving quietly too. A crack of joints when he stretches and finds his shirt and jeans where he left them flung over the back of a chair. Castiel waits in the silence while they dress, both making soft grumbling noises and sliding into the rustle of cloth but saying nothing else.
Dean shoves their guns into a bag, not entirely sure what it is they're hunting for, but when he sends Castiel a questioning look he just stares back like he has nothing to give them, so Dean figures, screw it, and takes it all.
Sam's shrugging into his coat and Castiel seems to think that's good enough because he reaches out, reaches up and touches them both before Dean has a chance to protest.
They end up in the cold of an empty street, in a town that could be five miles away or five hundred. Dean takes a moment to blink away his disorientation and to decide whether he's been moved through the world or the world's been moved around him. Damned if it doesn't feel like both and he's going to have to have a conversation with Castel about not doing that in the future unless it's absolutely necessary.
"Where are we?"
"Greensburg, Pennsylvania," Castiel says. Like it doesn't matter that he's just zapped them nearly five hundred miles.
Dean gives him a look.
"Great, so what are we doing here?"
Castiel steps aside, turns his head to look across the darkness of the street.
It's a generic two story house from the outside. It's painted in warm colours, and it feels bright and welcoming. You could have walked past it a thousand times and not thought for a second that anything was going on behind the green front door. Nothing bad anyway, nothing to give you nightmares for the rest of your life.
Judging by Castiel's taut, unhappy expression that's a distinct possibility.
Dean's no stranger to pretty things being rotten underneath but this place looks, honest to God, friendly. Which is suspicious enough that he gets the feeling it's been carefully made to look that way. Maybe even painted up and down with magic so no one looks twice.
"I can't go inside," Castiel says flatly. "There are Enochian warding sigils across the walls and floor that would try and tear me to pieces.
"Bad house then," Dean guesses.
"Very bad," Castiel says seriously.
Dean's seen the sort of mojo that messes with angels and he's not happy in the slightest at the thought of venturing in there. Even Sam is a quiet, cold tower of foreboding next to him. But he doesn't say a word, he stands there waiting, forehead creased a little. Like he's already accepted that inside is exactly where they're going.
"I don't know what's inside," Castiel admits and it's obvious that he hates it. That he hates having no clue what waits for them, no way to properly warn them for what they'll face in there. "But something here is winding taut, demons are being drawn here. The nature of it, whatever it is, is warping the world around it. It's the only reason I was able to spot it, and only then because I was so close. Whatever is happening in that house, whatever it is for, it's going to happen very soon."
"And we don't have any idea what it is?" Sam asks.
Castiel gives one slow headshake.
"Not without further evidence, no."
"We just know that it's bad," Dean offers and if he adds a little sarcastic emphasis to the last word that's perfectly understandable.
Sam shakes his head, though it's more amusement at Dean's succinct summing up of the situation, or maybe their whole damn life.
"It's not like we haven't done bad before, right?" Dean adds, reluctantly, and Sam tips his head to the side in agreement.
Dean's become a freakin' pro at bravado at three in the morning, freezing wind sliding across every exposed piece of skin. He shifts inside his own coat.
"So, no idea at all what‘s going on in there? Not even a guess."
"No," Castiel says quietly, and he doesn't bother to mask his frustration.
Dean exhales roughly.
"What about the people that go in?” Dean raises an eyebrow that he hopes Castiel understands is pretty damn unimpressed, because Castiel's detective skills, really not shining for him today. Dean would have thought his big angel brain would manage to come up with something. From anyone else this would smell far too much like a trap. But Castiel looks genuinely worried, and that's a lot of look for him.
"I have observed no one go in or out," Castiel says, in what he clearly thinks is a helpful way.
Dean raises both his eyebrows and ignores the bad feeling in his gut until it can be useful.
"So we have no idea how many people are in there, or even what they are, or what they're doing?" It's like a whole parade's worth of mystery.
"I said it may be dangerous," Castiel offers.
Dean nods.
"Going in blind, hell yeah, dangerous is one word for it." Because going into the creepy hell house without knowing what they were facing first and how many of them there were. Yeah, that's going to end well.
Castiel shifts until he can catch Dean's eye again, like he thinks not talking directly at him will fail to get his point across. Like Dean's not going to pay attention.
"I have no way to see into the interior of the house. It's been left unseen for far too long already, long enough that the taint of ruin has started to cling to its edges. Someone will notice it soon, but I fear it will already be too late by then."
Jesus, more dire portents of doom. Though Dean's damned if he's going to admit that. If the house was spooky enough to set Castiel's hair on end then Dean's pretty sure there's something truly fucked up going on in there.
Castiel frowns, looking from the house to Dean.
"If I could go in myself I would," he says simply. Too soft to be anything but the truth and Dean thinks maybe whatever's going on in there Castiel doesn't want to send them in. That he thinks maybe this is bad, really bad. Which for an angel - well let’s just say their ability for understatement is new and interesting.
"Ok, stay here, because if we find anything we can't handle in there we're bringing it out, you understand."
Castiel nods. He understands perfectly.
Sam's more than ready at his side, a line of tension that's just waiting for Dean to give the word, to say go.
"Dean," Castiel‘s voice is hard and Dean stops, half turned. The angel's clearly more than unhappy with his own impotence.
"Yeah."
"Be very careful." From anyone else that would be a platitude, concern for the safety of a friend. Coming from Castiel it's a genuine warning, a reminder that there's something in the house that doesn't want angels prying, and has the ability to keep them at bay.
Though Dean has no intention of skipping in there blind like some stupid amateur.
They slide in through next door's garden, hop the fence and make their way to the back door in the dark. Cold foliage brushes the back of Dean's neck and he can hear Sam's soft tread, the almost silent sound of him breathing out flares of warm air behind him.
There's one downstairs light on, and another one upstairs, though Dean can't see anyone moving inside. Sam slips forward while Dean covers the alley and tries the back door.
It's unlocked.
Sam pushes the handle far enough for the door to silently swing open.
They're barely through it when a demon slams into Sam's back and tries to slice his throat open with a kitchen knife. He crashes into the counter under the weight of her, scattering dishes. The only sound she's making is the hoarse, furious rasp-saw of her breathing. Her fingers are clawing at his jacket and shirt and she's using every ounce of her own strength to force the knife up and under Sam's jaw.
There's no time to do anything but put her down.
She ends up on the grubby tiles, a crumpled jumble of thin limbs and long, tangled brown hair. The woman it was wearing stares up at the sky.
"Dean?"
"Yeah," Dean says quietly, making sure Sam knows that he's watching, that he has his back, and then they're moving, spreading out just far enough to cover their own angles. Prepared for more, prepared for any number of demons to appear with intent and black eyes at either door out of the kitchen.
They wait, breathing in the silence
The house is cold, there's no one else in the kitchen, no one in the hall. They slip out further, tiles turn into carpet, dusty and scattered with footprints.
Dean can't hear a thing.
There are six bodies at the bottom of the stairs, piled there like a barrier, like protection, or containment. Eyes glistening white like they've had all the life leeched out of them, limbs arranged in neat lines. Sam comes to a dead stop and doesn't say a single word, but Dean can see his face tense up, mouth a fine tight line and he knows what that feels like, because he feels exactly the same.
Dean pulls his gun up and very carefully steps over the dead bodies. A trail of black ash leads upstairs, a gentle, almost meandering line on the wood. Sam follows him up, feet quiet on the steps, quieter than he should be for his size, Sam knows how to contain himself when he has to, when he needs to.
They separate at the top and, not a handful of seconds later, two doors swing open and they're facing three demons.
Two at the top of the stairs and one deeper in, smeared out in the darkness.
The two demons at the top of the stairs, twitchy and starvation thin, end up on the end of Sam's knife. Because that's what it is now. It's not Ruby's anymore, it's rightfully his.
The third slams Dean into the wall and it’s only when its weight - her weight - is forcing Dean back against the plaster that he realises how thin she is, narrow and brittle under his hands, like she hasn't eaten for years. But she's maniac-strong, black eyes wide, teeth white and wet and shining. Breathing heavy frantic breaths as her fingers grope at his throat, trying to choke him, or rip his head off. Trying to destroy him.
Sam slams the knife into her back and Dean thinks he hears the crack of bone, before she falls, a lifeless tumble of fragile limbs.
He nods a thanks at him, though Sam shakes his head and Dean knows for sure that he feels it too. The sense that something really isn't right.
Not one of the demons tried to leave. Not one of them tried to speak.
Whatever it is they're protecting here, it's worth dying for.
"You getting the feeling like we should have run into more bad guys?" Dean offers over his shoulder.
"Yeah," Sam says tightly.
"Check the room they came from." Dean's voice is quiet but it still feels too loud. Like there's something wrong here, something unnatural. They've seen some bad things, some really bad things. Nothing's ever felt like this. "I'm going down the hall."
Sam frowns but he doesn’t protest, he just nods and heads the other way.
Dean turns the handle on the door that the brittle, thin demon came out of. He goes through with his gun up.
The entire room is red.
Dean slams to a stop at the sheer volume of blood splashed across the walls, running down them in ever thickening trails to pool on the floor. The air is thick with it, heavy and sticky warm. He breathes it in and it lays at the back of his throat, makes him want to gag. He refuses, fights it until his eyes water.
It's too late for the man at the centre of the room, far too late. He's on the table, split open down the middle and still wet, the blood just pouring out of him like oil. It's a good bet that he was the last thing to decorate these walls, to give them their grisly shine. It's hopeless, worse than hopeless, but Dean's boots take him there anyway, leaving prints on the red floor. He lays his fingers against the man's neck. But his skin's already cooling, eyes open and dead as glass.
They're staring, dry and terrified, at the bare bulb above them.
"Sam, in here," Dean calls. The air's warm and horrible in his mouth, it tastes like fresh death. There's been far too much of that in this room. The floorboards creak behind him and he turns around, makes sure it's Sam. He comes through the doorway with his gun up, but it tips down when he gets a good look at where they're standing, at what they're standing in. He steps in carefully, soft wet steps.
"Jesus, what the hell were they doing in here?" He says quietly and judging by the frantic swallowing motion, Sam's discovered the wet taste of blood in the air too.
Dean shakes his head.
"I don't know. I don't want to know. I'm just glad we stopped them." He drops his eyes, kicks at the jars and bottles at his feet. The wisps of what look like burnt fabric and paper. Finished or not, there‘s still a taint here, like something rotten left behind, something Dean can't put a finger on, he just knows it's there. In a way he isn't happy about at all.
Though he's left with the question of whether these people - these demons accomplished whatever it was they were doing before they ended up dead. Whether this is the messily interrupted ritual. Or whether this is the grisly aftermath of whatever they'd been doing.
"You think it's finished?" Sam's thinking Dean’s own thoughts, and that always makes them good thoughts. It always seems to make them right, somehow.
"I hope so," he says fiercely, and means it. God, does he mean it.
"There are no symbols, just -"
Just the blood. Which Sam points out with a look, a brief horrified twist to the corner of his mouth.
"Yeah," Dean says simply. Because he's already looked and there's nothing to suggest this was a spell, or a sacrifice. It's just brutal red destruction. Like something went mad in this room and left it soaking in gore.
Sam frowns at the walls, like he doesn't want to look at any of it.
"I don't think -" His voice cuts off.
Dean's already turning back round the second Sam's face twitches in horrified shock.
"Dean!"
The dead man on the table is half up on one elbow, hand outstretched. Cold white-red fingers creeping their way round Dean's wrist.
Dean doesn't even hesitate. He brings the gun up and shoots him in the forehead.
The dead man's head slams back violently, before slowly returning to its original position, a gory hole bored through it. Sam's boots slap across the floor, thundering over to him.
"Jesus, Dean."
He knows, he fucking knows, because that wide mouth gapes open, gasping and then screaming. A shrill, empty, long dead, wail of sound that has all the hair on the back of his neck standing up - and then Sam's hands are wrapped around the corpse's wrist. Where it's still slippery with blood, trying to pry it free, trying to break its hold where Dean's skin is rapidly going white.
Dean empties two more rounds into its cheek and eye socket, spraying bits of bone and flesh out in an arc, and it still won't die. It won't stop trying to pull itself up, dragging itself closer and screaming that awful scream that isn't anywhere close to human. Dean's heard that scream before, he knows where it comes from, and he wants nothing more than to get away from it. To get away from it right now. Sam's swearing, taking quick, stunned breaths while he pulls and pulls until they're in a rigid sweating standstill of horror, and Dean still can't get his arm free and it won't fucking die.
He can't stop, can't back away from the way the table - the altar is collapsing underneath its own mess. It's yawning open in a rush of red rust, the smell of death and ruin so strong that Dean takes a breath and nearly chokes on it. He spent years with that in his throat and he knows without a doubt that whatever this thing was it was trying to get out of hell.
And if it couldn't get out then it was going to drag Dean back down with it.
"Sam!" His voice comes out tight, veering far too close to the edge of panic.
But Sam's gone, boots skidding across the floor in sticky red noise. He better have a plan, he better have a fucking plan because Dean's not even close to strong enough to get away from this thing on his own, this screaming thing out of hell that's doing its best to dig its fingers all the way in to the bone.
There's a crack from the hallway and Dean's left with one hand on the altar, scrabbling at the red surface, fingers on the bone white corpse that's shifting, changing, stretching to become something longer and sharper and more terrible.
"Dean, move!"
Dean gets a brief flash of some sort of marble statue raised over Sam's head and he leans as far as the grasping fingers will allow.
Sam brings the whole thing down on the creatures skull, hard. One great crash of marble and bone and a great cold-wet splash of blood. The thing shatters apart, bones flying out like human shrapnel to slam against Dean's jacket and the walls.
The body collapses into the hole it had made in one great rush, air sucked down and in. Dean falls back, holding the numb ache of his own forearm.
He has a moment to think that this is going to end badly.
Before the air explodes back out again.
Dean's flung to the floor on that wave, crushed flat there like he's been hit by a sonic boom. The blood is sticky and raw-fresh under his fingers. It soaks through the length of his jeans and the side of his face while he breathes and chokes and stays pinned there while it roars through the room.
He hears the crack of wood and the too-fast smash of glass where whatever the hell it is blows the windows out. The floor vibrates underneath him, sending red droplets against the skin of his face and into his open mouth. But all he can do is clench his eyes shut and grit his teeth. Live in that roar of noise and wonder if it's ever going to stop.
Until it does, everything suddenly just dies. The air goes still and they’re left with nothing but the thick cloying air. The stillness is hot and rank and smells like blood and burning.
"Shit -" Dean pushes himself up onto his elbows, checks over his shoulder, finds the mess of the table/altar, pieces of bone and rock embedded inside it, like some sort of gruesome Philadelphia experiment gone horrible wrong. Then, over that Sam's legs - he shifts his head, finds the rest of his brother.
Sam has an arm flung over his head, hair fallen over his face. He's breathing too loud in the sudden silence.
"Sam?" Dean's voice sounds like it's coming from underwater and he works his jaw a couple of times, trying to get his eardrums to come back. Sam drags himself up, awkward and unsteady once he gets to his feet. Dean pushes himself up too, trying to touch as little of the slippery floor as possible, though, shit, he has enough blood on him that it really isn't going to make much difference.
"You ok?" Sam asks and he pulls a face, as if to suggest his ears aren't working right either.
"I'm just fantastic," Dean says flatly, then takes two steps towards the table. He almost regrets it, because the horrific jumble of man, wood and stone is fused together in a way that looks horrific. It's smoking faintly and there’s the lingering smell of cooked human flesh and burnt wood.
"Jesus," Sam's voice is full of quiet horror.
There's absolutely no question that the thing is dead. Whatever it had been, it's now a mess.
"I think we should get out of here," Dean says flatly.
Sam nods, looking more than relieved. The bright red room now looks like a bombsite. The stairs are a wreck, every window in the house is smashed and the floor is covered in splintered wood.
"That thing shook this place up like an earthquake." Sam sounds quietly interested and at any other time Dean would make fun of his research brain. But he just wants to get the hell out of here.
The back door is leaning ajar and Castiel is a tense shape outside that stiffens impossibly further when he sees them. Where he's been forced to remain outside. Even through the noise and the shaking and the - hell, the destruction of pretty much the whole house. He actually looks, for one brief moment, relieved to see them both. Standing on the threshold, tense inside his coat. Whatever the protections on this house were, they were strong enough to survive it falling apart around them. Build into the foundations, maybe? Which suggested a shit-load of work. Dean wasn't happy about that at all. Who the hell built a house with anti-angel wards hammered into the foundations?
"Dean?"
Castiel catches his arm when he's through the door, fingers just a little too tight to be comfortable, around his bicep.
"Easy, Cas?" Dean says quietly, though he appreciates that flicker of worry. Castiel seems to realise he's still holding him, gives his own hand an almost bewildered look, before very carefully letting him go.
"What did you find inside?"
Dean catches Castiel‘s arm, steers him gently but pointedly away from the house. Because he's not going to be happy until he's far enough away to not be able to smell burning flesh.
"A bunch of starved demons and a line of sacrifices acting as some sort of protection or containment. They were protecting a room full of blood, some ritual where they managed to open up hell through some guy's corpse. Some nasty shit."
Castiel's eyes, for a moment, are sharp and uncertain, a frown tugging between them.
"They looked like they'd been holed up there for a while," Sam adds.
Dean wipes his hand on a clean space on his jeans. Only makes more mess and forces himself to give it up as a losing battle.
"A long while. Something big and fucking vicious was trying to crawl up out of hell and get into a dead body, and it was not happy that we were there to stop it. Started screaming like a bitch. Until we caved its head in."
Castiel frowns, and it's not confusion this time, it's something quietly angry, something that suggests he hadn't been expecting anything quite like that.
He doesn't seem surprised though.
"The power was insufficient," Castiel offers, like that should have been obvious. "It became stuck, half in this world and half outside it."
"You could say that," Dean says. Because he can still hear that screaming wail in his ears and his left hand keeps going to rub the solid numb ache that is his right forearm. He knows too damn well that the bruises he's going to have there are going to be spectacular and they're going to make doing anything for a few days an exercise in annoyance.
"That suggests something much larger than a minor demon."
"But whatever they were trying to do they screwed up, and it didn't get out."
"It would seem so," Castiel answers. "It requires a considerable amount of power to tear open a way into hell, a way that cannot be shut."
"So, what's to stop them from trying again?" Dean asks, staring at the broken front of the house.
"Nothing," Castiel says simply.
The coldness that crawls down the back of Dean's neck takes a long time to slide away.
~~~~~
Castiel leaves them back in their motel room, bruised and covered in smears and streaks of blood from that bright red room. They decide, without words, to just dump everything in the car. To hell with showering, they can wash later. Dean just wants to move, needs to move. Sam seems to feel the same.
The weak early morning sunlight outlines everything they own in orange-yellow while they pack up without words. Dean's fairly certain he's going to head in the opposite direction to that small town house and drive until they find somewhere to stop.
~~~~~
Six Weeks Later
Dean's phone wakes him. A tinny blare of light and sound in the dark. He reaches a hand up and drags it open, pushes it somewhere where he thinks his right ear is.
"Yeah." He knows he doesn’t sound happy but hell it's - he checks the clock - four in the morning.
"You boys both need to get your asses out of bed, right now," Bobby tells him on the other end of the phone and he sounds about as serious as Dean's ever heard him.
Dean shoves himself up, forces himself to be awake for this.
"Why, what is it?"
"What's up is that the dead decided to rise, two hundred miles west of here. A little town called Breckridge woke up and found itself full of damn zombies."
"Jesus," Dean manages.
Dean drags a boot off of the floor and tosses it over at Sam's bed. He catches it in the back and Sam fights his way out of the sheet, hair all over his face.
"Dean, what -"
Dean holds a hand up.
"Who did you call?" he asks.
"I called everybody," Bobby says flatly. "They got a population of 2,000, it's all hands on freakin' deck."
"That's insane," Dean says. Because stuff like this doesn't happen.
"That's an understatement," Bobby says roughly. "I wouldn't make time for breakfast."
"We'll meet you there as soon as we can," Dean tells him.
Bobby hangs up without another word and Dean rubs a hand over his face, then looks at Sam.
"Bobby needs our help, apparently we got a town overrun by zombies."
Sam pauses halfway into his pants.
"You're kidding?"
Dean fishes for his boots under the bed.
"I wish I was."
"How bad is it?" Sam asks with a frown.
"Bad enough that he's called everyone," Dean says flatly and Sam shakes his head in disbelief. Dean knows the feeling. He doesn't think he ever remembers Bobby calling in everyone he knows.
"Where?"
"Breckridge. If we leave now we should get there some time this afternoon."
~~~~~
Breckridge looks almost deserted when they finally roll into town. They've been driving two hours on an empty road slid between one small town and the next, dotted along the way by a handful of dusty gas stations. It's only three o'clock when they get there, but the sky's already a listless miserable grey. Dean's not feeling bad at all about stepping on the gas, while Sam stayed a line of impatient tension in the passenger seat.
They pass two tense looking men holding guns just before the town proper. The tight watchful line of them marking them as hunters and not townsfolk.
Dean can't remember Bobby ever calling everyone in before.
Not ever.
He parks on the main street, shares a quick unhappy look with Sam and then slides out. He doesn't even have to think about, just takes as many guns as he can carry from the trunk and Sam doesn't say a word but does exactly the same.
There are splashes of dried blood on the street, smears along the walls and trails of it in doorways. All of the windows on one side are smashed, a shine of broken glass and splinters of wood on the ground.
The whole town smells like death.
It's not deserted though. Ellen's in front of the church. Dean recognises her well enough, even from two hundred feet away. A line of fierce readiness, hair blowing in the wind. Jo's perched against the steps next to her, shotgun held comfortably against her hip. Two men Dean doesn't recognise are higher up the steps, guarding the doors.
Ellen and Jo both turn at the sound of boots. Ellen jerks her head at Jo, who comes down to meet them.
"Ellen," Dean says in acknowledgement.
Ellen drags him in by the sleeve of his jacket, more to have a look at him and see whether he's broken or not than to hug him. But Dean appreciates the thought. She grunts when he seems to pass whatever test she's given him and lets him go, then she nods at Sam, while Jo slides close enough to form a break from the wind.
Ellen eyes their guns, gives a sharp nod.
"You boys took your damn time." Her voice is rough, but there's more tense relief than genuine accusation there.
"We were two states away. Bobby told us you've got zombie trouble."
"More than trouble," she says harshly. "I'd wager everyone who ever died in this town is walking again today. And they've picked up a fair few new friends today. Rufus and Jackson are over by the bridge, Ben's on the other side of town. You probably saw Anderson when you came in.
"You made a perimeter," Sam says with a nod.
"Damn right we did, we're not letting one of these things out of this town. This is one outbreak that stops right here."
"What about the people who live here?"
Ellen sets her teeth.
"Most of the ones that are still breathing are in the church," she nods her head back up the steps, where the white doors are shut tight.
"Most?" Sam asks.
"We haven't had a chance to properly check the medical centre and the police station and I'm fairly sure the school is crawling. I don't have the manpower to do much more than thin the numbers down. God help us when it gets dark."
"Consider us manpower," Dean says flatly.
"I'm not happy about sending anyone into any of these buildings. But, we're missing a hell of a lot of people. Some of them I'm fairly sure are holed up in the school. There's no way to stop the dead from crawling all over it, too many rooms, too many staircases."
She shakes her head and frowns up the street, as if she can see all the way inside the school from here.
"They're getting in from the basement. There's only one thing stopping me from blowing the whole place to hell." Ellen's mouth tightens, face a mixture of fierce anger and frustrated control. Jo watches her mother but says nothing. "The people that are missing, half of them are kids."
Dean nods.
"So it's a search and rescue mission," Sam says.
"I think we can make it a 'kill as many of them as we can' mission on the side," Dean adds. Ellen nods like that's the best damn answer she's heard all day.
"Tell Henry we're going," Ellen tells Jo. She makes her way up the stairs while they share out the best guns for the job.
When she returns they head up the street together.
The main school building's a mess, broken windows, a scatter of lights on, and there's fire licking over one of the smaller buildings.
A bus has crashed into the back exit and Dean suspects someone did that one purpose because there's a mess of bodies there, some charred, some crushed under the wheels, some in pieces in the collapsed wall.
He thinks he can see one twitching ever so slightly.
The sign says Breckridge Elementary in big letters.
Ellen turns to her daughter.
"Jo, the one thing we're gonna need here is to know we're not going to come out to a mess of the walking dead. The door and this floor are your responsibility."
Jo's mouth tightens like she know she's being given the easy option. But Dean thinks maybe Ellen's gotten it into her head that there are no easy options in this business, that the fact that Jo's here is enough.
She nods, quick and hard, and doesn't protest again.
The powers still on, which is something.
They sweep through the offices, find a scattering of bodies between there and the cafeteria. They’re ripped apart, some with their heads smashed in, a few, strangely clean and untouched. Not all of the dead are rising then. Not everyone comes back.
Most of them are adults, some of them aren't. The smallest is a boy, messy blonde hair; he's wearing a stripy t-shirt - Ellen takes Sam towards the offices. Dean sweeps past and checks the doors that lead back out, there are bags on the stairs, pink and red, one of them has a teddy dangling from a plaited piece of thread. Bright exercise books fall out of the other.
There's blood everywhere.
Ellen turns the lights on, and Sam backs out of the gym, slow and horrified and pulls the door shut behind him. A wordless gesture that says, clear enough, that there're nothing in there to save.
"Check the second building," Dean tells them. "I'm going to check the stairs."
Sam looks at him over Ellen's shoulder, and he clearly doesn't like the idea of them splitting up, but he nods.
Dean heads right when they go left, pushes at the stairwell door.
He steps out as quietly as he can.
The stairs are cold and when he cranes his head up he can't see anything. It only goes up three floors, but he's willing to bet there's roof access up there somewhere too, probably via key.
Though he's damned if he wants to be on the roof right now.
He's just about to pull the door shut when one of the dead lurches into sight from around the stairs. A stiff gaited thing with flat blank eyes, that used to be a middle aged man. It’s heavy and slow but it’s intent as soon as it sees him, as soon as it realises he's alive.
Dean puts a bullet in its head watches it slump to the floor and lay still. Then he listens, carefully, to see if he's drawn anything else's attention.
It's still quiet.
He takes a step and hears a shotgun blast, low and hard, back the way he came. He retreats back into the school, if someone has found something to fire at then that's where he needs to be. So, he heads in that direction.
He sees Ellen first when she kicks open a door.
The sleeve of her jacket is missing and her gun is smoking. She's picked up two passengers, a little boy is loose in her arms, fingers white in Ellen's shirt, and a little girl is clinging to her hand, stumbling along after her, pigtails almost long enough to tangle round her arms.
"They're under the damn floor," Ellen says, fiercely annoyed.
"Steve," the little boy protests. "We lost Steve."
"I don't want to go back," the girl says, voice desperate and shaky. She tugs at Ellen's arm, a jerky instinctive movement. "Please, I don't want to go back."
Ellen runs a hand over her head and shushes her without looking.
"Robert says there's another classroom up there, some people went that way when they attacked."
"Please," the girl's crying quietly now too. "Please, can we go now?"
"Get them outside," Dean says quietly.
"Sam's clearing out another classroom. You be careful, they've been ripping this place apart from below."
Ellen turns the kids towards the entrance
"Don't get in the way of the gun, honey," Ellen says, soft but serious, and Dean fucking hates every piece of shit corpse that ever decided it didn't want to stay dead.
He's making his way back up the hallway when he hears it.
A quiet, frightened little noise that comes from somewhere to his left.
Dean tries the nearest door, finds a storage room all full of shelves. Full of maintenance equipment, brooms, cleaning supplies.
The lowest shelf - he bends down.
There's a girl under the very last shelf, past the metal struts holding the whole thing up, crushed back against the wall, a blur of pink jacket and brown hair in the darkness.
Dean gets down on his belly straight away.
"Hey," he says quietly.
The girl looks back, like he's not there at all.
There's a gunshot from somewhere, somewhere too close.
Dean swears and shuffles forward on the floor, gets just a little closer.
"Come on. You can't stay there, trust me."
She shakes her head, puts her hands over her ears and makes a soft little noise of denial.
God, fucking damn it, Dean mutters under his breath and stretches in just a little further. His jacket snags on a ragged piece of metal and he's too big to fit. The metal barely lets his coat go as it is. The floor around her isn't solid, and the scraping and scratching that he took to be his own jacket and boots on the floor is in fact something underneath them. He doesn't look down, but he does take a quick breath and wriggles a little closer.
"You have to come out from there," he says as quietly as possible.
Because he can't get to her.
There's a gap, just below her pink and white sneakers, close to the wall. Dean watches the floor disintegrate under the push of a bloody crooked hand. She notices straight away. One sharp breath and then she's screaming, feet lashing out at the creeping hand with all the rising hysteria of a child that wants to wake from a nightmare but can't.
Dean watches fingers wrap around her ankle and slowly but steadily pull her towards the crumbling wall.
No way.
No fucking way.
Dean lunges into the gap, metal scraping through leather and cotton to rip painfully into his back, but he's far enough, more than far enough, to grab the collar of the girl's pink jacket and physically haul her out. To drag her away from the dead fingers, pull her all the way into the dim light of the classroom.
She crawls him like an animal trying to get closer and away at the same time.
Cold fingers, fear-clammy, digging into his jacket and the back of his neck. She's making hard noises deep in her throat, somewhere between noiseless screams and sobs.
The moans from the hole under the shelves rise in volume and desperation.
Dean carries the girl to the smashed window
"Jo," he shouts and she's there in an instant, all bright hair and steady gun. Her eyes fly from Dean to the girl he's holding and she reaches her arms out without question.
When Dean tries to hand her over she screams again.
"Come on, honey," Jo says softly. "You're ok now, come on away with me."
The fingers very gradually relax and her weight's gone from Dean's arms as she curls herself around Jo, hiccupping sobs into her blonde hair.
"Where's Sam?" Dean demands
"Three rooms across," Jo tells him. "Mom's getting some people out of the main hall, but there's a class still upstairs -" her mouth goes tight as something smashes and there's a scream from somewhere above.
She folds a hand over the back of the little girl's head.
"Go," she says simply, and Dean doesn't wait to see her leave. He's out into the corridor, boots a soft thud on the ground. He's barely gone ten feet when he hears Sam.
"Sam?"
"Yeah, I'm in here," Sam shouts back, and there's the screech of a desk across the floor.
Dean shoulders his way into the room - Sam's upright, but there's a corpse in the middle of the floor.
A mobile with planets on it spins gently from the ceiling.
By the whiteboard there's a middle-aged man in a dark shirt and corduroy pants. He's very carefully cleaning a graze on the knee of a small boy, who's sniffing in a way that suggests he's very carefully pretending he hasn't been crying.
There's an angry mess of a bite mark on the man's forearm.
Shit.
Fucking shit.
The stranger very carefully puts a band-aid on the boys knee and then lifts him off the desk.
The boy clings to his hand like he has nowhere else to go.
"Anyone else on this floor?" Dean asks.
Sam looks at the teacher for clarification.
"There was Claire, and she had four children with her."
"I've seen a girl in a pink jacket, a boy who told us his name was Robert and a girl with pigtails."
The man nods.
"That's right, Hannah, Robert and Nicole, you're missing Steven. He's umm...small, skinny with blonde hair. He was wearing a striped shirt today."
Dean thinks about the stripy shirt and the small arm he saw reaching out of the jumble of bodies when they first came in, and very carefully doesn't say anything.
"You coming, Andrew." Sam holds his hand out, but the boy looks up, frowns, dirty forehead creased in confusion.
"Andrew, go with Sam," his teacher says quietly.
"Mr Duncan," the boy says quietly and pulls on his hand. Like the kid knows in some sort of strange way that if he goes with Sam he's never going to see him again.
"Go on, he'll take you somewhere safe," Mr Duncan insists.
Andrew very reluctantly lets his teacher go and finds Sam's giant hand instead.
He looks back all the way to the door. Until he disappears from sight.
Mr Duncan carefully packs the first aid kit away with practiced movements without tending to himself.
"It's like in the movies, right?" he asks quietly.
Dean doesn't need to ask what he means.
"Yeah," he says flatly. "Yeah, they got that part right."
Mr Duncan seems to accept this with a deep breath and a nod.
"How long before -" he stops, frowns, like he doesn't want to say it. Maybe doesn't know how to say it.
"Six hours, maybe seven, another twenty minutes ‘til you're walking again."
There's a swallow and a soft breath.
"What can I do?" he asks simply. "Until then." There's a firmness to his voice as if he's decided all this already.
"We're going to the main hall," Dean tells him.
"There are more of those things through there, more -" he winces, like he still doesn't quite believe what he's about to say, "- more zombies."
"There's also more people."
"I hope you're right, I really do," Mr Duncan says quietly. He takes a deep breath. "Now, I'd wager I know this school better than you. So I'll take you across to the main hall."
"Look, Mr Duncan, just because you've -"
"Frank," he says, and there's quiet insistence under the one word. "My name’s Frank."
"Frank," Dean agrees simply, because he can give him that much. "You don't have to come with us."
"I think perhaps I do," he says firmly, and Dean doesn't stop him.
~~~~~
When they reach the main hall it's dark, the lights sparking on the ceiling. Dean avoids the trail of blood that winds down the middle of the floor. He sticks to where it's darker. It's not as quiet here. There are soft shuffling noises, faraway sounds of dead things.
It's a mess, though mostly where chairs and bags and what look like two fire extinguishers had been used to barricade the doors. The whole jumble of it had obviously collapsed in eventually. Or the people inside, at some point, had clawed desperately to get out. He looks at Sam, behind him in the dim glow of a flashlight. Frank Duncan quiet and stiff behind his shoulder. Sam nods at his expression and follows him through the other exit.
The corridor beyond it is brightly lit, brighter on the floor where there's a streak of blood and a scatter of bags and books. Pieces of the doors are spread along the floor too, but it's buckled underneath their boots. It's cracked apart like something's been rolling through it. Like someone did something to it.
"This isn't zombie damage," Dean says quietly. "The buildings looks like something's tried to chew it apart, I'm starting to think whatever started this happened here."
"So, what the hell was it?" Sam asks, checking the door to his right, which is locked tight.
"I don't know." Dean checks the door on the left. "But, whatever it was it's made this town a freakin' nightmare -"
The floor gives an almighty crack and drops out from under his feet, Dean flails with the hand that isn't holding a gun but it's too quick, too sharp, and he plummets down in a shower of wood, plaster and old desks.
"Dean!" Sam shouts.
He hits the floor, a bone-jarring smack that leaves him gasping, wood jabbing into his back and the side of his neck and he takes a second to make sure he's not freakin' dead before he hauls himself painfully out of the rubble.
"God, damn it!" Because he'd maybe thought about taking better care of his body the second time around and his knee's more than on its way to being completely fucked again. Not to mention the damn great tear in his back, and he doesn’t even know how bad that is. Won’t know ‘til the adrenaline drains out.
"Dean, you ok?" Sam shouts down, voice frantic.
He kicks his way free and moves to the middle of the big-ass hole he's created in the floor above him.
"Yeah, Sam, I'm good." He slaps plaster and rust off his jeans then looks around. He's in some sort of old gym, or possibly the remains of a hall - it's got that bombed out look to it that makes it hard to tell.
He looks up, and Sam's peering over the edge, wearing his worried face.
"I guess I'm kind of stuck though," Dean points out. Because Sam's a good seven or eight feet over his head and there's no way he's getting up again without help, and pretty much the only thing down here is rubble.
"Crap," Sam agrees.
"Yeah."
"Stay there, we'll see if we can find something to get you back up."
Dean nods. "That would be a plan."
Sam and Frank disappear, boots smacking across the floor until Dean can't hear them any more.
Then he stares into the dark.
This is not a good place. He kicks some of the rubble away, moves a couple of boards on the off-chance there's something here he can use to get out of the damn hole.
But there's nothing here. It's all rotten, or waterlogged, or ancient, or just useless- there's a very faint hush of sound.
Dean stops shifting things and listens. It comes again, louder this time, closer, a breathless meaningless noise, deep and rough, like it's being dragged over gravel.
Dean holds his breath.
Because he has enough experience to know that's not a survivor.
He pushes the wood away from his foot, takes two steps into the dim length of open space. The light doesn't go far enough for him to see the walls.
It comes again, low - and this time it's definitely a moan.
Maybe it's just one zombie, one zombie wandering around down here, maybe it got stuck, or it fell, or it died in one of the rooms and no one noticed.
One zombie, he can put down one zombie - but the moan now has an echo, and another. Until there's a slow, deep collection of soft, dead noise that seems to hit all the walls at once. A shuffling hush of movement and sound.
Dean can see them now, a slow, swaying mass, stumbling forward in the dark.
"Crap." Because Sam's the one with the ammunition. Dean checks how many bullets he's got left.
Seven.
"You've got to be fucking kidding me," he says under his breath.
Because it's not enough, it's not even close to enough.
"Sam!" he shouts back up through the ceiling. But there's no answer, just the drift of dust through the hole and the faraway slanted lines of sunlight. "Sam!"
The noise from the far end of the hall grows louder; there's intent there now. Dean thinks maybe he should have kept his damn mouth shut for a little bit longer. Because they've clearly heard him, they know he's here now and they're heading his way.
It takes an endless minute for him to pick up movement, just out of the light, an unsteady swaying stumble that says 'zombie' in a way that makes him throw his gun up and force himself to be ready. The ones behind it are faster, obviously fresher, not so unsteady on the rubble. In a few seconds they're going to overtake the first zombie, push past it, knock it off its path and come for Dean.
There's more than seven.
There's a hell of a lot more than seven.
He backs up, looks up into the hole but there's nothing there, there's no one there.
"Shit."
He's not going to wait for them to get close.
He takes a woman in a long blue dress first. She's faster than the rest.
Her head snaps back and she crumples immediately, lands on the wet ground with a thud. The others take no notice of her, stumbling past and over.
The next bullet goes in the large ambling male zombie to the right, too big to ignore for long. Then he takes out the two dead men stumbling towards him on the left. They fall and roll down the slope of wood and brick, coming to rest against the legs of zombies shuffling forward out of the dark. They're still moaning, still making that wet rasping noise that sounds like it's trying to be breathing, or some messed up half-remembered version of it.
It's a noise that makes your skin crawl, there's something so horribly, brutally wrong about it.
He shoots a zombie that makes an abortive lunge for him purely on reflex, though it falls more than four feet from him, still too close though, still far too close. Some of the ones behind it go down under its rolling body, end up on the floor, end up a wave of arms and legs and reaching hands. Where the ones that have been taken to the ground are slowly coming forward.
They're far enough into the light that he can do a rough headcount, but once he gets past twenty it doesn't matter any more.
He's fucked, he so fucked.
He doesn’t exactly have a back-up plan here, there's nothing to burn, nothing to collapse in their way, no way to climb back up.
He shoots a zombie that's gotten too close, watches it fall with a hole in its head and he's got one bullet left.
One bullet left.
And he thinks, for a fraction of a second, of saving it.
He puts it immediately into the brain of a female zombie in a blood-stained skirt suit - watches her crumple, watches the rest of the crowd stumble forward, slack mouthed and glassy eyed. He abandons his gun, hefts a long plank of wood, and slams it into the closest grey face. The impact goes all the way up his arm but the zombie skids sideways, falls to its knees.
He shoves a boot into its chest and sends it rolling down the slope.
The corpses closing in on the other side get smacked too, as hard as he can manage.
The last foot of the plank snaps off, goes clattering across the wall and floor.
A zombie falls, too close to his feet, much too close.
Dean smashes a boot into its face watches dark blood burst out in an arc, spattering the bottom of his boot and the rubble around it. He pins it long enough to slam a piece of wood through its throat, deep enough to leave a splash of red-brown and to stop it moving for good.
Then he swings the wood to the left without looking, takes a zombie mid-reach and flings it back. It falls to its back, lays there for just a second before hauling itself slowly back up.
"Sam!" Dean shouts and he thinks he can be forgiven if there's just the slightest note of panic in his voice. "Goddamn it, Sam, hurry the fuck up."
But, he already knows Sam isn't going to get back in time. The gun's useless and the wood he's holding is rotten and cracking apart. It's not exactly putting the zombies down it's just scattering them and more are piling into the space behind them. In a few minutes he's going to go down under the sheer numbers.
He slams the wood into the slack face of the corpse closest to him, sends it reeling back into the others. It straightens again under the swell of stumbling dead only to fall again before it regains its feet. The others climb forward over it and Dean's backing up, backing up and pushing into the brick behind him. It's freezing through his jacket and the fact that he has something against his back is no fucking consolation at all.
He's going to die.
He's going to die here.
His elbow hits the wall the next time he tries to draw back away from the hands reaching for him. Doesn't get far enough, and fingers, cold, numb and strong as hell, are pulling at his jacket, drawing him down by inches.
"Fuck."
He jams the wood up under its jaw, holds it in place while it skids there, snapping and making hoarse noises, blood running from where it's goring it's own neck open trying to get to him.
Until the plank snaps, one great jerk of splintered wood and Dean thumps into the wall, sliding down it in a shower of plaster and grit.
The rotting open mouth surges for his face -
A hand snatches the back of the zombie's neck, hefts it away from him and sends it flying through the crowd. Zombies tumble down under the impact, left clawing at each other, dragging themselves along the floor.
Dean catches a flash of tan trench coat and then there's a snap and a zombie slams into the wall so hard it doesn't get up again.
Another goes down without a head, dark blood collecting sluggishly in a pool.
Two corpses in business suits are shoved to their knees, and then left motionless with a twist of Castiel's hands.
Then he takes a step forward on the rubble, coat dusty and red at the edges.
"Dean." Castiel reaches a hand down and carefully pulls Dean to his feet.
"Cas," Dean manages. "Jesus, am I glad to see you."
Dead fingers claws for Castiel's hands and legs, trying to drag him back, to pull him down. The zombies seem strangely frustrated in their inability to bite through his skin. Because, yeah, Castiel is a little more durable than him and Dean's so fucking happy about that it's almost embarrassing.
The angel shakes them free, pushes them back, and they're more than capable of coming apart under his hands. Breaking apart when they get close enough for Castiel to catch hold of.
He takes a step, lays a hand on Dean's shoulder and the world -
- moves.
Fandom: Supernatural
Pairing/Characters: Dean/Castiel, Sam, Bobby, Chuck, Ellen, Jo
Rating: NC-17
Spoilers: Season 4
Word Count: 38,000
Warnings: Zombies, violence, dark themes
Disclaimer: In no way mine, or anything to do with me, I own nothing.
Summary: After they stop a plot to tear open a hole straight to hell, the Winchesters face more trouble when zombies start rising from their graves across the country. Bobby calls all hands on deck and Sam and Dean, along with an angel, a mess of out-numbered hunters, and a very reluctant prophet of the Lord, have to try and save the world. Or go down in flames with it.
AN: Written for the apocabigbang A huge thank you to sarren , who betaed this for me, and made it considerably better. And thank you also to the artists who worked on my story. Artwork for the story at LJ // DW done by cybel and artwork done by newt_slash
Part 1 // Part 2 // Part 3 // Part 4
Dean's never actually sure what wakes him, whether Castiel touches him or whether he just sits there and stares until Dean's conscious. Which isn't really a comforting thought but, hey, they're still working on the whole 'appropriate behaviour around humans' thing. Dean has an uncomfortable suspicion that maybe he just knows Castiel's there. That he's aware of him somehow, under the skin. Even though he's fairly sure Castiel never did anything bad to him there's still that suggestion that the angel changed him somehow.
When he saved him.
When he remade him.
So Dean feels compelled to give him shit for it. Whether that's fair or not. He glares at him now, a shape in the darkness, eyes focused and intent and too close. It's not a fair fight at all when Dean's half asleep so he doesn't even try. He pushes himself up, balanced on one elbow.
"Cas?" It's acknowledgement that he's there and a question at the same time.
"I've discovered something troubling, something I believe you'll wish to see," Castiel says quietly. His voice is low and serious but there's something else underneath, something that sounds uncertain.
Sam shifts in the bed across the room, pushing himself upright with a creaking protest of cheap springs.
"Right now?" Dean asks.
"I think right now would be best." The words are simple enough but Dean thinks there's more than a little impatience there, an edge. Castiel doesn't usually pull that out unless something's the supernatural equivalent of currently on fire.
"Ok." Dean shoves the sheets back. "Let me get some pants."
"It may be dangerous, more dangerous than the things you normally face." Castiel moves back out of the way, when he rises. When he makes a rough noise to tell him he's listening and reaches for his clothes. Dean figures they should be used to a new level of dangerous by now, what with Lucifer especially pissed that he never managed to tear his way out of his gilded cage. He shakes his jeans and starts pulling them on.
"That's not exactly a surprise considering though, right? We're still hanging on the edge of an Apocalypse and all."
Sam's moving quietly too. A crack of joints when he stretches and finds his shirt and jeans where he left them flung over the back of a chair. Castiel waits in the silence while they dress, both making soft grumbling noises and sliding into the rustle of cloth but saying nothing else.
Dean shoves their guns into a bag, not entirely sure what it is they're hunting for, but when he sends Castiel a questioning look he just stares back like he has nothing to give them, so Dean figures, screw it, and takes it all.
Sam's shrugging into his coat and Castiel seems to think that's good enough because he reaches out, reaches up and touches them both before Dean has a chance to protest.
They end up in the cold of an empty street, in a town that could be five miles away or five hundred. Dean takes a moment to blink away his disorientation and to decide whether he's been moved through the world or the world's been moved around him. Damned if it doesn't feel like both and he's going to have to have a conversation with Castel about not doing that in the future unless it's absolutely necessary.
"Where are we?"
"Greensburg, Pennsylvania," Castiel says. Like it doesn't matter that he's just zapped them nearly five hundred miles.
Dean gives him a look.
"Great, so what are we doing here?"
Castiel steps aside, turns his head to look across the darkness of the street.
It's a generic two story house from the outside. It's painted in warm colours, and it feels bright and welcoming. You could have walked past it a thousand times and not thought for a second that anything was going on behind the green front door. Nothing bad anyway, nothing to give you nightmares for the rest of your life.
Judging by Castiel's taut, unhappy expression that's a distinct possibility.
Dean's no stranger to pretty things being rotten underneath but this place looks, honest to God, friendly. Which is suspicious enough that he gets the feeling it's been carefully made to look that way. Maybe even painted up and down with magic so no one looks twice.
"I can't go inside," Castiel says flatly. "There are Enochian warding sigils across the walls and floor that would try and tear me to pieces.
"Bad house then," Dean guesses.
"Very bad," Castiel says seriously.
Dean's seen the sort of mojo that messes with angels and he's not happy in the slightest at the thought of venturing in there. Even Sam is a quiet, cold tower of foreboding next to him. But he doesn't say a word, he stands there waiting, forehead creased a little. Like he's already accepted that inside is exactly where they're going.
"I don't know what's inside," Castiel admits and it's obvious that he hates it. That he hates having no clue what waits for them, no way to properly warn them for what they'll face in there. "But something here is winding taut, demons are being drawn here. The nature of it, whatever it is, is warping the world around it. It's the only reason I was able to spot it, and only then because I was so close. Whatever is happening in that house, whatever it is for, it's going to happen very soon."
"And we don't have any idea what it is?" Sam asks.
Castiel gives one slow headshake.
"Not without further evidence, no."
"We just know that it's bad," Dean offers and if he adds a little sarcastic emphasis to the last word that's perfectly understandable.
Sam shakes his head, though it's more amusement at Dean's succinct summing up of the situation, or maybe their whole damn life.
"It's not like we haven't done bad before, right?" Dean adds, reluctantly, and Sam tips his head to the side in agreement.
Dean's become a freakin' pro at bravado at three in the morning, freezing wind sliding across every exposed piece of skin. He shifts inside his own coat.
"So, no idea at all what‘s going on in there? Not even a guess."
"No," Castiel says quietly, and he doesn't bother to mask his frustration.
Dean exhales roughly.
"What about the people that go in?” Dean raises an eyebrow that he hopes Castiel understands is pretty damn unimpressed, because Castiel's detective skills, really not shining for him today. Dean would have thought his big angel brain would manage to come up with something. From anyone else this would smell far too much like a trap. But Castiel looks genuinely worried, and that's a lot of look for him.
"I have observed no one go in or out," Castiel says, in what he clearly thinks is a helpful way.
Dean raises both his eyebrows and ignores the bad feeling in his gut until it can be useful.
"So we have no idea how many people are in there, or even what they are, or what they're doing?" It's like a whole parade's worth of mystery.
"I said it may be dangerous," Castiel offers.
Dean nods.
"Going in blind, hell yeah, dangerous is one word for it." Because going into the creepy hell house without knowing what they were facing first and how many of them there were. Yeah, that's going to end well.
Castiel shifts until he can catch Dean's eye again, like he thinks not talking directly at him will fail to get his point across. Like Dean's not going to pay attention.
"I have no way to see into the interior of the house. It's been left unseen for far too long already, long enough that the taint of ruin has started to cling to its edges. Someone will notice it soon, but I fear it will already be too late by then."
Jesus, more dire portents of doom. Though Dean's damned if he's going to admit that. If the house was spooky enough to set Castiel's hair on end then Dean's pretty sure there's something truly fucked up going on in there.
Castiel frowns, looking from the house to Dean.
"If I could go in myself I would," he says simply. Too soft to be anything but the truth and Dean thinks maybe whatever's going on in there Castiel doesn't want to send them in. That he thinks maybe this is bad, really bad. Which for an angel - well let’s just say their ability for understatement is new and interesting.
"Ok, stay here, because if we find anything we can't handle in there we're bringing it out, you understand."
Castiel nods. He understands perfectly.
Sam's more than ready at his side, a line of tension that's just waiting for Dean to give the word, to say go.
"Dean," Castiel‘s voice is hard and Dean stops, half turned. The angel's clearly more than unhappy with his own impotence.
"Yeah."
"Be very careful." From anyone else that would be a platitude, concern for the safety of a friend. Coming from Castiel it's a genuine warning, a reminder that there's something in the house that doesn't want angels prying, and has the ability to keep them at bay.
Though Dean has no intention of skipping in there blind like some stupid amateur.
They slide in through next door's garden, hop the fence and make their way to the back door in the dark. Cold foliage brushes the back of Dean's neck and he can hear Sam's soft tread, the almost silent sound of him breathing out flares of warm air behind him.
There's one downstairs light on, and another one upstairs, though Dean can't see anyone moving inside. Sam slips forward while Dean covers the alley and tries the back door.
It's unlocked.
Sam pushes the handle far enough for the door to silently swing open.
They're barely through it when a demon slams into Sam's back and tries to slice his throat open with a kitchen knife. He crashes into the counter under the weight of her, scattering dishes. The only sound she's making is the hoarse, furious rasp-saw of her breathing. Her fingers are clawing at his jacket and shirt and she's using every ounce of her own strength to force the knife up and under Sam's jaw.
There's no time to do anything but put her down.
She ends up on the grubby tiles, a crumpled jumble of thin limbs and long, tangled brown hair. The woman it was wearing stares up at the sky.
"Dean?"
"Yeah," Dean says quietly, making sure Sam knows that he's watching, that he has his back, and then they're moving, spreading out just far enough to cover their own angles. Prepared for more, prepared for any number of demons to appear with intent and black eyes at either door out of the kitchen.
They wait, breathing in the silence
The house is cold, there's no one else in the kitchen, no one in the hall. They slip out further, tiles turn into carpet, dusty and scattered with footprints.
Dean can't hear a thing.
There are six bodies at the bottom of the stairs, piled there like a barrier, like protection, or containment. Eyes glistening white like they've had all the life leeched out of them, limbs arranged in neat lines. Sam comes to a dead stop and doesn't say a single word, but Dean can see his face tense up, mouth a fine tight line and he knows what that feels like, because he feels exactly the same.
Dean pulls his gun up and very carefully steps over the dead bodies. A trail of black ash leads upstairs, a gentle, almost meandering line on the wood. Sam follows him up, feet quiet on the steps, quieter than he should be for his size, Sam knows how to contain himself when he has to, when he needs to.
They separate at the top and, not a handful of seconds later, two doors swing open and they're facing three demons.
Two at the top of the stairs and one deeper in, smeared out in the darkness.
The two demons at the top of the stairs, twitchy and starvation thin, end up on the end of Sam's knife. Because that's what it is now. It's not Ruby's anymore, it's rightfully his.
The third slams Dean into the wall and it’s only when its weight - her weight - is forcing Dean back against the plaster that he realises how thin she is, narrow and brittle under his hands, like she hasn't eaten for years. But she's maniac-strong, black eyes wide, teeth white and wet and shining. Breathing heavy frantic breaths as her fingers grope at his throat, trying to choke him, or rip his head off. Trying to destroy him.
Sam slams the knife into her back and Dean thinks he hears the crack of bone, before she falls, a lifeless tumble of fragile limbs.
He nods a thanks at him, though Sam shakes his head and Dean knows for sure that he feels it too. The sense that something really isn't right.
Not one of the demons tried to leave. Not one of them tried to speak.
Whatever it is they're protecting here, it's worth dying for.
"You getting the feeling like we should have run into more bad guys?" Dean offers over his shoulder.
"Yeah," Sam says tightly.
"Check the room they came from." Dean's voice is quiet but it still feels too loud. Like there's something wrong here, something unnatural. They've seen some bad things, some really bad things. Nothing's ever felt like this. "I'm going down the hall."
Sam frowns but he doesn’t protest, he just nods and heads the other way.
Dean turns the handle on the door that the brittle, thin demon came out of. He goes through with his gun up.
The entire room is red.
Dean slams to a stop at the sheer volume of blood splashed across the walls, running down them in ever thickening trails to pool on the floor. The air is thick with it, heavy and sticky warm. He breathes it in and it lays at the back of his throat, makes him want to gag. He refuses, fights it until his eyes water.
It's too late for the man at the centre of the room, far too late. He's on the table, split open down the middle and still wet, the blood just pouring out of him like oil. It's a good bet that he was the last thing to decorate these walls, to give them their grisly shine. It's hopeless, worse than hopeless, but Dean's boots take him there anyway, leaving prints on the red floor. He lays his fingers against the man's neck. But his skin's already cooling, eyes open and dead as glass.
They're staring, dry and terrified, at the bare bulb above them.
"Sam, in here," Dean calls. The air's warm and horrible in his mouth, it tastes like fresh death. There's been far too much of that in this room. The floorboards creak behind him and he turns around, makes sure it's Sam. He comes through the doorway with his gun up, but it tips down when he gets a good look at where they're standing, at what they're standing in. He steps in carefully, soft wet steps.
"Jesus, what the hell were they doing in here?" He says quietly and judging by the frantic swallowing motion, Sam's discovered the wet taste of blood in the air too.
Dean shakes his head.
"I don't know. I don't want to know. I'm just glad we stopped them." He drops his eyes, kicks at the jars and bottles at his feet. The wisps of what look like burnt fabric and paper. Finished or not, there‘s still a taint here, like something rotten left behind, something Dean can't put a finger on, he just knows it's there. In a way he isn't happy about at all.
Though he's left with the question of whether these people - these demons accomplished whatever it was they were doing before they ended up dead. Whether this is the messily interrupted ritual. Or whether this is the grisly aftermath of whatever they'd been doing.
"You think it's finished?" Sam's thinking Dean’s own thoughts, and that always makes them good thoughts. It always seems to make them right, somehow.
"I hope so," he says fiercely, and means it. God, does he mean it.
"There are no symbols, just -"
Just the blood. Which Sam points out with a look, a brief horrified twist to the corner of his mouth.
"Yeah," Dean says simply. Because he's already looked and there's nothing to suggest this was a spell, or a sacrifice. It's just brutal red destruction. Like something went mad in this room and left it soaking in gore.
Sam frowns at the walls, like he doesn't want to look at any of it.
"I don't think -" His voice cuts off.
Dean's already turning back round the second Sam's face twitches in horrified shock.
"Dean!"
The dead man on the table is half up on one elbow, hand outstretched. Cold white-red fingers creeping their way round Dean's wrist.
Dean doesn't even hesitate. He brings the gun up and shoots him in the forehead.
The dead man's head slams back violently, before slowly returning to its original position, a gory hole bored through it. Sam's boots slap across the floor, thundering over to him.
"Jesus, Dean."
He knows, he fucking knows, because that wide mouth gapes open, gasping and then screaming. A shrill, empty, long dead, wail of sound that has all the hair on the back of his neck standing up - and then Sam's hands are wrapped around the corpse's wrist. Where it's still slippery with blood, trying to pry it free, trying to break its hold where Dean's skin is rapidly going white.
Dean empties two more rounds into its cheek and eye socket, spraying bits of bone and flesh out in an arc, and it still won't die. It won't stop trying to pull itself up, dragging itself closer and screaming that awful scream that isn't anywhere close to human. Dean's heard that scream before, he knows where it comes from, and he wants nothing more than to get away from it. To get away from it right now. Sam's swearing, taking quick, stunned breaths while he pulls and pulls until they're in a rigid sweating standstill of horror, and Dean still can't get his arm free and it won't fucking die.
He can't stop, can't back away from the way the table - the altar is collapsing underneath its own mess. It's yawning open in a rush of red rust, the smell of death and ruin so strong that Dean takes a breath and nearly chokes on it. He spent years with that in his throat and he knows without a doubt that whatever this thing was it was trying to get out of hell.
And if it couldn't get out then it was going to drag Dean back down with it.
"Sam!" His voice comes out tight, veering far too close to the edge of panic.
But Sam's gone, boots skidding across the floor in sticky red noise. He better have a plan, he better have a fucking plan because Dean's not even close to strong enough to get away from this thing on his own, this screaming thing out of hell that's doing its best to dig its fingers all the way in to the bone.
There's a crack from the hallway and Dean's left with one hand on the altar, scrabbling at the red surface, fingers on the bone white corpse that's shifting, changing, stretching to become something longer and sharper and more terrible.
"Dean, move!"
Dean gets a brief flash of some sort of marble statue raised over Sam's head and he leans as far as the grasping fingers will allow.
Sam brings the whole thing down on the creatures skull, hard. One great crash of marble and bone and a great cold-wet splash of blood. The thing shatters apart, bones flying out like human shrapnel to slam against Dean's jacket and the walls.
The body collapses into the hole it had made in one great rush, air sucked down and in. Dean falls back, holding the numb ache of his own forearm.
He has a moment to think that this is going to end badly.
Before the air explodes back out again.
Dean's flung to the floor on that wave, crushed flat there like he's been hit by a sonic boom. The blood is sticky and raw-fresh under his fingers. It soaks through the length of his jeans and the side of his face while he breathes and chokes and stays pinned there while it roars through the room.
He hears the crack of wood and the too-fast smash of glass where whatever the hell it is blows the windows out. The floor vibrates underneath him, sending red droplets against the skin of his face and into his open mouth. But all he can do is clench his eyes shut and grit his teeth. Live in that roar of noise and wonder if it's ever going to stop.
Until it does, everything suddenly just dies. The air goes still and they’re left with nothing but the thick cloying air. The stillness is hot and rank and smells like blood and burning.
"Shit -" Dean pushes himself up onto his elbows, checks over his shoulder, finds the mess of the table/altar, pieces of bone and rock embedded inside it, like some sort of gruesome Philadelphia experiment gone horrible wrong. Then, over that Sam's legs - he shifts his head, finds the rest of his brother.
Sam has an arm flung over his head, hair fallen over his face. He's breathing too loud in the sudden silence.
"Sam?" Dean's voice sounds like it's coming from underwater and he works his jaw a couple of times, trying to get his eardrums to come back. Sam drags himself up, awkward and unsteady once he gets to his feet. Dean pushes himself up too, trying to touch as little of the slippery floor as possible, though, shit, he has enough blood on him that it really isn't going to make much difference.
"You ok?" Sam asks and he pulls a face, as if to suggest his ears aren't working right either.
"I'm just fantastic," Dean says flatly, then takes two steps towards the table. He almost regrets it, because the horrific jumble of man, wood and stone is fused together in a way that looks horrific. It's smoking faintly and there’s the lingering smell of cooked human flesh and burnt wood.
"Jesus," Sam's voice is full of quiet horror.
There's absolutely no question that the thing is dead. Whatever it had been, it's now a mess.
"I think we should get out of here," Dean says flatly.
Sam nods, looking more than relieved. The bright red room now looks like a bombsite. The stairs are a wreck, every window in the house is smashed and the floor is covered in splintered wood.
"That thing shook this place up like an earthquake." Sam sounds quietly interested and at any other time Dean would make fun of his research brain. But he just wants to get the hell out of here.
The back door is leaning ajar and Castiel is a tense shape outside that stiffens impossibly further when he sees them. Where he's been forced to remain outside. Even through the noise and the shaking and the - hell, the destruction of pretty much the whole house. He actually looks, for one brief moment, relieved to see them both. Standing on the threshold, tense inside his coat. Whatever the protections on this house were, they were strong enough to survive it falling apart around them. Build into the foundations, maybe? Which suggested a shit-load of work. Dean wasn't happy about that at all. Who the hell built a house with anti-angel wards hammered into the foundations?
"Dean?"
Castiel catches his arm when he's through the door, fingers just a little too tight to be comfortable, around his bicep.
"Easy, Cas?" Dean says quietly, though he appreciates that flicker of worry. Castiel seems to realise he's still holding him, gives his own hand an almost bewildered look, before very carefully letting him go.
"What did you find inside?"
Dean catches Castiel‘s arm, steers him gently but pointedly away from the house. Because he's not going to be happy until he's far enough away to not be able to smell burning flesh.
"A bunch of starved demons and a line of sacrifices acting as some sort of protection or containment. They were protecting a room full of blood, some ritual where they managed to open up hell through some guy's corpse. Some nasty shit."
Castiel's eyes, for a moment, are sharp and uncertain, a frown tugging between them.
"They looked like they'd been holed up there for a while," Sam adds.
Dean wipes his hand on a clean space on his jeans. Only makes more mess and forces himself to give it up as a losing battle.
"A long while. Something big and fucking vicious was trying to crawl up out of hell and get into a dead body, and it was not happy that we were there to stop it. Started screaming like a bitch. Until we caved its head in."
Castiel frowns, and it's not confusion this time, it's something quietly angry, something that suggests he hadn't been expecting anything quite like that.
He doesn't seem surprised though.
"The power was insufficient," Castiel offers, like that should have been obvious. "It became stuck, half in this world and half outside it."
"You could say that," Dean says. Because he can still hear that screaming wail in his ears and his left hand keeps going to rub the solid numb ache that is his right forearm. He knows too damn well that the bruises he's going to have there are going to be spectacular and they're going to make doing anything for a few days an exercise in annoyance.
"That suggests something much larger than a minor demon."
"But whatever they were trying to do they screwed up, and it didn't get out."
"It would seem so," Castiel answers. "It requires a considerable amount of power to tear open a way into hell, a way that cannot be shut."
"So, what's to stop them from trying again?" Dean asks, staring at the broken front of the house.
"Nothing," Castiel says simply.
The coldness that crawls down the back of Dean's neck takes a long time to slide away.
~~~~~
Castiel leaves them back in their motel room, bruised and covered in smears and streaks of blood from that bright red room. They decide, without words, to just dump everything in the car. To hell with showering, they can wash later. Dean just wants to move, needs to move. Sam seems to feel the same.
The weak early morning sunlight outlines everything they own in orange-yellow while they pack up without words. Dean's fairly certain he's going to head in the opposite direction to that small town house and drive until they find somewhere to stop.
~~~~~
Six Weeks Later
Dean's phone wakes him. A tinny blare of light and sound in the dark. He reaches a hand up and drags it open, pushes it somewhere where he thinks his right ear is.
"Yeah." He knows he doesn’t sound happy but hell it's - he checks the clock - four in the morning.
"You boys both need to get your asses out of bed, right now," Bobby tells him on the other end of the phone and he sounds about as serious as Dean's ever heard him.
Dean shoves himself up, forces himself to be awake for this.
"Why, what is it?"
"What's up is that the dead decided to rise, two hundred miles west of here. A little town called Breckridge woke up and found itself full of damn zombies."
"Jesus," Dean manages.
Dean drags a boot off of the floor and tosses it over at Sam's bed. He catches it in the back and Sam fights his way out of the sheet, hair all over his face.
"Dean, what -"
Dean holds a hand up.
"Who did you call?" he asks.
"I called everybody," Bobby says flatly. "They got a population of 2,000, it's all hands on freakin' deck."
"That's insane," Dean says. Because stuff like this doesn't happen.
"That's an understatement," Bobby says roughly. "I wouldn't make time for breakfast."
"We'll meet you there as soon as we can," Dean tells him.
Bobby hangs up without another word and Dean rubs a hand over his face, then looks at Sam.
"Bobby needs our help, apparently we got a town overrun by zombies."
Sam pauses halfway into his pants.
"You're kidding?"
Dean fishes for his boots under the bed.
"I wish I was."
"How bad is it?" Sam asks with a frown.
"Bad enough that he's called everyone," Dean says flatly and Sam shakes his head in disbelief. Dean knows the feeling. He doesn't think he ever remembers Bobby calling in everyone he knows.
"Where?"
"Breckridge. If we leave now we should get there some time this afternoon."
~~~~~
Breckridge looks almost deserted when they finally roll into town. They've been driving two hours on an empty road slid between one small town and the next, dotted along the way by a handful of dusty gas stations. It's only three o'clock when they get there, but the sky's already a listless miserable grey. Dean's not feeling bad at all about stepping on the gas, while Sam stayed a line of impatient tension in the passenger seat.
They pass two tense looking men holding guns just before the town proper. The tight watchful line of them marking them as hunters and not townsfolk.
Dean can't remember Bobby ever calling everyone in before.
Not ever.
He parks on the main street, shares a quick unhappy look with Sam and then slides out. He doesn't even have to think about, just takes as many guns as he can carry from the trunk and Sam doesn't say a word but does exactly the same.
There are splashes of dried blood on the street, smears along the walls and trails of it in doorways. All of the windows on one side are smashed, a shine of broken glass and splinters of wood on the ground.
The whole town smells like death.
It's not deserted though. Ellen's in front of the church. Dean recognises her well enough, even from two hundred feet away. A line of fierce readiness, hair blowing in the wind. Jo's perched against the steps next to her, shotgun held comfortably against her hip. Two men Dean doesn't recognise are higher up the steps, guarding the doors.
Ellen and Jo both turn at the sound of boots. Ellen jerks her head at Jo, who comes down to meet them.
"Ellen," Dean says in acknowledgement.
Ellen drags him in by the sleeve of his jacket, more to have a look at him and see whether he's broken or not than to hug him. But Dean appreciates the thought. She grunts when he seems to pass whatever test she's given him and lets him go, then she nods at Sam, while Jo slides close enough to form a break from the wind.
Ellen eyes their guns, gives a sharp nod.
"You boys took your damn time." Her voice is rough, but there's more tense relief than genuine accusation there.
"We were two states away. Bobby told us you've got zombie trouble."
"More than trouble," she says harshly. "I'd wager everyone who ever died in this town is walking again today. And they've picked up a fair few new friends today. Rufus and Jackson are over by the bridge, Ben's on the other side of town. You probably saw Anderson when you came in.
"You made a perimeter," Sam says with a nod.
"Damn right we did, we're not letting one of these things out of this town. This is one outbreak that stops right here."
"What about the people who live here?"
Ellen sets her teeth.
"Most of the ones that are still breathing are in the church," she nods her head back up the steps, where the white doors are shut tight.
"Most?" Sam asks.
"We haven't had a chance to properly check the medical centre and the police station and I'm fairly sure the school is crawling. I don't have the manpower to do much more than thin the numbers down. God help us when it gets dark."
"Consider us manpower," Dean says flatly.
"I'm not happy about sending anyone into any of these buildings. But, we're missing a hell of a lot of people. Some of them I'm fairly sure are holed up in the school. There's no way to stop the dead from crawling all over it, too many rooms, too many staircases."
She shakes her head and frowns up the street, as if she can see all the way inside the school from here.
"They're getting in from the basement. There's only one thing stopping me from blowing the whole place to hell." Ellen's mouth tightens, face a mixture of fierce anger and frustrated control. Jo watches her mother but says nothing. "The people that are missing, half of them are kids."
Dean nods.
"So it's a search and rescue mission," Sam says.
"I think we can make it a 'kill as many of them as we can' mission on the side," Dean adds. Ellen nods like that's the best damn answer she's heard all day.
"Tell Henry we're going," Ellen tells Jo. She makes her way up the stairs while they share out the best guns for the job.
When she returns they head up the street together.
The main school building's a mess, broken windows, a scatter of lights on, and there's fire licking over one of the smaller buildings.
A bus has crashed into the back exit and Dean suspects someone did that one purpose because there's a mess of bodies there, some charred, some crushed under the wheels, some in pieces in the collapsed wall.
He thinks he can see one twitching ever so slightly.
The sign says Breckridge Elementary in big letters.
Ellen turns to her daughter.
"Jo, the one thing we're gonna need here is to know we're not going to come out to a mess of the walking dead. The door and this floor are your responsibility."
Jo's mouth tightens like she know she's being given the easy option. But Dean thinks maybe Ellen's gotten it into her head that there are no easy options in this business, that the fact that Jo's here is enough.
She nods, quick and hard, and doesn't protest again.
The powers still on, which is something.
They sweep through the offices, find a scattering of bodies between there and the cafeteria. They’re ripped apart, some with their heads smashed in, a few, strangely clean and untouched. Not all of the dead are rising then. Not everyone comes back.
Most of them are adults, some of them aren't. The smallest is a boy, messy blonde hair; he's wearing a stripy t-shirt - Ellen takes Sam towards the offices. Dean sweeps past and checks the doors that lead back out, there are bags on the stairs, pink and red, one of them has a teddy dangling from a plaited piece of thread. Bright exercise books fall out of the other.
There's blood everywhere.
Ellen turns the lights on, and Sam backs out of the gym, slow and horrified and pulls the door shut behind him. A wordless gesture that says, clear enough, that there're nothing in there to save.
"Check the second building," Dean tells them. "I'm going to check the stairs."
Sam looks at him over Ellen's shoulder, and he clearly doesn't like the idea of them splitting up, but he nods.
Dean heads right when they go left, pushes at the stairwell door.
He steps out as quietly as he can.
The stairs are cold and when he cranes his head up he can't see anything. It only goes up three floors, but he's willing to bet there's roof access up there somewhere too, probably via key.
Though he's damned if he wants to be on the roof right now.
He's just about to pull the door shut when one of the dead lurches into sight from around the stairs. A stiff gaited thing with flat blank eyes, that used to be a middle aged man. It’s heavy and slow but it’s intent as soon as it sees him, as soon as it realises he's alive.
Dean puts a bullet in its head watches it slump to the floor and lay still. Then he listens, carefully, to see if he's drawn anything else's attention.
It's still quiet.
He takes a step and hears a shotgun blast, low and hard, back the way he came. He retreats back into the school, if someone has found something to fire at then that's where he needs to be. So, he heads in that direction.
He sees Ellen first when she kicks open a door.
The sleeve of her jacket is missing and her gun is smoking. She's picked up two passengers, a little boy is loose in her arms, fingers white in Ellen's shirt, and a little girl is clinging to her hand, stumbling along after her, pigtails almost long enough to tangle round her arms.
"They're under the damn floor," Ellen says, fiercely annoyed.
"Steve," the little boy protests. "We lost Steve."
"I don't want to go back," the girl says, voice desperate and shaky. She tugs at Ellen's arm, a jerky instinctive movement. "Please, I don't want to go back."
Ellen runs a hand over her head and shushes her without looking.
"Robert says there's another classroom up there, some people went that way when they attacked."
"Please," the girl's crying quietly now too. "Please, can we go now?"
"Get them outside," Dean says quietly.
"Sam's clearing out another classroom. You be careful, they've been ripping this place apart from below."
Ellen turns the kids towards the entrance
"Don't get in the way of the gun, honey," Ellen says, soft but serious, and Dean fucking hates every piece of shit corpse that ever decided it didn't want to stay dead.
He's making his way back up the hallway when he hears it.
A quiet, frightened little noise that comes from somewhere to his left.
Dean tries the nearest door, finds a storage room all full of shelves. Full of maintenance equipment, brooms, cleaning supplies.
The lowest shelf - he bends down.
There's a girl under the very last shelf, past the metal struts holding the whole thing up, crushed back against the wall, a blur of pink jacket and brown hair in the darkness.
Dean gets down on his belly straight away.
"Hey," he says quietly.
The girl looks back, like he's not there at all.
There's a gunshot from somewhere, somewhere too close.
Dean swears and shuffles forward on the floor, gets just a little closer.
"Come on. You can't stay there, trust me."
She shakes her head, puts her hands over her ears and makes a soft little noise of denial.
God, fucking damn it, Dean mutters under his breath and stretches in just a little further. His jacket snags on a ragged piece of metal and he's too big to fit. The metal barely lets his coat go as it is. The floor around her isn't solid, and the scraping and scratching that he took to be his own jacket and boots on the floor is in fact something underneath them. He doesn't look down, but he does take a quick breath and wriggles a little closer.
"You have to come out from there," he says as quietly as possible.
Because he can't get to her.
There's a gap, just below her pink and white sneakers, close to the wall. Dean watches the floor disintegrate under the push of a bloody crooked hand. She notices straight away. One sharp breath and then she's screaming, feet lashing out at the creeping hand with all the rising hysteria of a child that wants to wake from a nightmare but can't.
Dean watches fingers wrap around her ankle and slowly but steadily pull her towards the crumbling wall.
No way.
No fucking way.
Dean lunges into the gap, metal scraping through leather and cotton to rip painfully into his back, but he's far enough, more than far enough, to grab the collar of the girl's pink jacket and physically haul her out. To drag her away from the dead fingers, pull her all the way into the dim light of the classroom.
She crawls him like an animal trying to get closer and away at the same time.
Cold fingers, fear-clammy, digging into his jacket and the back of his neck. She's making hard noises deep in her throat, somewhere between noiseless screams and sobs.
The moans from the hole under the shelves rise in volume and desperation.
Dean carries the girl to the smashed window
"Jo," he shouts and she's there in an instant, all bright hair and steady gun. Her eyes fly from Dean to the girl he's holding and she reaches her arms out without question.
When Dean tries to hand her over she screams again.
"Come on, honey," Jo says softly. "You're ok now, come on away with me."
The fingers very gradually relax and her weight's gone from Dean's arms as she curls herself around Jo, hiccupping sobs into her blonde hair.
"Where's Sam?" Dean demands
"Three rooms across," Jo tells him. "Mom's getting some people out of the main hall, but there's a class still upstairs -" her mouth goes tight as something smashes and there's a scream from somewhere above.
She folds a hand over the back of the little girl's head.
"Go," she says simply, and Dean doesn't wait to see her leave. He's out into the corridor, boots a soft thud on the ground. He's barely gone ten feet when he hears Sam.
"Sam?"
"Yeah, I'm in here," Sam shouts back, and there's the screech of a desk across the floor.
Dean shoulders his way into the room - Sam's upright, but there's a corpse in the middle of the floor.
A mobile with planets on it spins gently from the ceiling.
By the whiteboard there's a middle-aged man in a dark shirt and corduroy pants. He's very carefully cleaning a graze on the knee of a small boy, who's sniffing in a way that suggests he's very carefully pretending he hasn't been crying.
There's an angry mess of a bite mark on the man's forearm.
Shit.
Fucking shit.
The stranger very carefully puts a band-aid on the boys knee and then lifts him off the desk.
The boy clings to his hand like he has nowhere else to go.
"Anyone else on this floor?" Dean asks.
Sam looks at the teacher for clarification.
"There was Claire, and she had four children with her."
"I've seen a girl in a pink jacket, a boy who told us his name was Robert and a girl with pigtails."
The man nods.
"That's right, Hannah, Robert and Nicole, you're missing Steven. He's umm...small, skinny with blonde hair. He was wearing a striped shirt today."
Dean thinks about the stripy shirt and the small arm he saw reaching out of the jumble of bodies when they first came in, and very carefully doesn't say anything.
"You coming, Andrew." Sam holds his hand out, but the boy looks up, frowns, dirty forehead creased in confusion.
"Andrew, go with Sam," his teacher says quietly.
"Mr Duncan," the boy says quietly and pulls on his hand. Like the kid knows in some sort of strange way that if he goes with Sam he's never going to see him again.
"Go on, he'll take you somewhere safe," Mr Duncan insists.
Andrew very reluctantly lets his teacher go and finds Sam's giant hand instead.
He looks back all the way to the door. Until he disappears from sight.
Mr Duncan carefully packs the first aid kit away with practiced movements without tending to himself.
"It's like in the movies, right?" he asks quietly.
Dean doesn't need to ask what he means.
"Yeah," he says flatly. "Yeah, they got that part right."
Mr Duncan seems to accept this with a deep breath and a nod.
"How long before -" he stops, frowns, like he doesn't want to say it. Maybe doesn't know how to say it.
"Six hours, maybe seven, another twenty minutes ‘til you're walking again."
There's a swallow and a soft breath.
"What can I do?" he asks simply. "Until then." There's a firmness to his voice as if he's decided all this already.
"We're going to the main hall," Dean tells him.
"There are more of those things through there, more -" he winces, like he still doesn't quite believe what he's about to say, "- more zombies."
"There's also more people."
"I hope you're right, I really do," Mr Duncan says quietly. He takes a deep breath. "Now, I'd wager I know this school better than you. So I'll take you across to the main hall."
"Look, Mr Duncan, just because you've -"
"Frank," he says, and there's quiet insistence under the one word. "My name’s Frank."
"Frank," Dean agrees simply, because he can give him that much. "You don't have to come with us."
"I think perhaps I do," he says firmly, and Dean doesn't stop him.
~~~~~
When they reach the main hall it's dark, the lights sparking on the ceiling. Dean avoids the trail of blood that winds down the middle of the floor. He sticks to where it's darker. It's not as quiet here. There are soft shuffling noises, faraway sounds of dead things.
It's a mess, though mostly where chairs and bags and what look like two fire extinguishers had been used to barricade the doors. The whole jumble of it had obviously collapsed in eventually. Or the people inside, at some point, had clawed desperately to get out. He looks at Sam, behind him in the dim glow of a flashlight. Frank Duncan quiet and stiff behind his shoulder. Sam nods at his expression and follows him through the other exit.
The corridor beyond it is brightly lit, brighter on the floor where there's a streak of blood and a scatter of bags and books. Pieces of the doors are spread along the floor too, but it's buckled underneath their boots. It's cracked apart like something's been rolling through it. Like someone did something to it.
"This isn't zombie damage," Dean says quietly. "The buildings looks like something's tried to chew it apart, I'm starting to think whatever started this happened here."
"So, what the hell was it?" Sam asks, checking the door to his right, which is locked tight.
"I don't know." Dean checks the door on the left. "But, whatever it was it's made this town a freakin' nightmare -"
The floor gives an almighty crack and drops out from under his feet, Dean flails with the hand that isn't holding a gun but it's too quick, too sharp, and he plummets down in a shower of wood, plaster and old desks.
"Dean!" Sam shouts.
He hits the floor, a bone-jarring smack that leaves him gasping, wood jabbing into his back and the side of his neck and he takes a second to make sure he's not freakin' dead before he hauls himself painfully out of the rubble.
"God, damn it!" Because he'd maybe thought about taking better care of his body the second time around and his knee's more than on its way to being completely fucked again. Not to mention the damn great tear in his back, and he doesn’t even know how bad that is. Won’t know ‘til the adrenaline drains out.
"Dean, you ok?" Sam shouts down, voice frantic.
He kicks his way free and moves to the middle of the big-ass hole he's created in the floor above him.
"Yeah, Sam, I'm good." He slaps plaster and rust off his jeans then looks around. He's in some sort of old gym, or possibly the remains of a hall - it's got that bombed out look to it that makes it hard to tell.
He looks up, and Sam's peering over the edge, wearing his worried face.
"I guess I'm kind of stuck though," Dean points out. Because Sam's a good seven or eight feet over his head and there's no way he's getting up again without help, and pretty much the only thing down here is rubble.
"Crap," Sam agrees.
"Yeah."
"Stay there, we'll see if we can find something to get you back up."
Dean nods. "That would be a plan."
Sam and Frank disappear, boots smacking across the floor until Dean can't hear them any more.
Then he stares into the dark.
This is not a good place. He kicks some of the rubble away, moves a couple of boards on the off-chance there's something here he can use to get out of the damn hole.
But there's nothing here. It's all rotten, or waterlogged, or ancient, or just useless- there's a very faint hush of sound.
Dean stops shifting things and listens. It comes again, louder this time, closer, a breathless meaningless noise, deep and rough, like it's being dragged over gravel.
Dean holds his breath.
Because he has enough experience to know that's not a survivor.
He pushes the wood away from his foot, takes two steps into the dim length of open space. The light doesn't go far enough for him to see the walls.
It comes again, low - and this time it's definitely a moan.
Maybe it's just one zombie, one zombie wandering around down here, maybe it got stuck, or it fell, or it died in one of the rooms and no one noticed.
One zombie, he can put down one zombie - but the moan now has an echo, and another. Until there's a slow, deep collection of soft, dead noise that seems to hit all the walls at once. A shuffling hush of movement and sound.
Dean can see them now, a slow, swaying mass, stumbling forward in the dark.
"Crap." Because Sam's the one with the ammunition. Dean checks how many bullets he's got left.
Seven.
"You've got to be fucking kidding me," he says under his breath.
Because it's not enough, it's not even close to enough.
"Sam!" he shouts back up through the ceiling. But there's no answer, just the drift of dust through the hole and the faraway slanted lines of sunlight. "Sam!"
The noise from the far end of the hall grows louder; there's intent there now. Dean thinks maybe he should have kept his damn mouth shut for a little bit longer. Because they've clearly heard him, they know he's here now and they're heading his way.
It takes an endless minute for him to pick up movement, just out of the light, an unsteady swaying stumble that says 'zombie' in a way that makes him throw his gun up and force himself to be ready. The ones behind it are faster, obviously fresher, not so unsteady on the rubble. In a few seconds they're going to overtake the first zombie, push past it, knock it off its path and come for Dean.
There's more than seven.
There's a hell of a lot more than seven.
He backs up, looks up into the hole but there's nothing there, there's no one there.
"Shit."
He's not going to wait for them to get close.
He takes a woman in a long blue dress first. She's faster than the rest.
Her head snaps back and she crumples immediately, lands on the wet ground with a thud. The others take no notice of her, stumbling past and over.
The next bullet goes in the large ambling male zombie to the right, too big to ignore for long. Then he takes out the two dead men stumbling towards him on the left. They fall and roll down the slope of wood and brick, coming to rest against the legs of zombies shuffling forward out of the dark. They're still moaning, still making that wet rasping noise that sounds like it's trying to be breathing, or some messed up half-remembered version of it.
It's a noise that makes your skin crawl, there's something so horribly, brutally wrong about it.
He shoots a zombie that makes an abortive lunge for him purely on reflex, though it falls more than four feet from him, still too close though, still far too close. Some of the ones behind it go down under its rolling body, end up on the floor, end up a wave of arms and legs and reaching hands. Where the ones that have been taken to the ground are slowly coming forward.
They're far enough into the light that he can do a rough headcount, but once he gets past twenty it doesn't matter any more.
He's fucked, he so fucked.
He doesn’t exactly have a back-up plan here, there's nothing to burn, nothing to collapse in their way, no way to climb back up.
He shoots a zombie that's gotten too close, watches it fall with a hole in its head and he's got one bullet left.
One bullet left.
And he thinks, for a fraction of a second, of saving it.
He puts it immediately into the brain of a female zombie in a blood-stained skirt suit - watches her crumple, watches the rest of the crowd stumble forward, slack mouthed and glassy eyed. He abandons his gun, hefts a long plank of wood, and slams it into the closest grey face. The impact goes all the way up his arm but the zombie skids sideways, falls to its knees.
He shoves a boot into its chest and sends it rolling down the slope.
The corpses closing in on the other side get smacked too, as hard as he can manage.
The last foot of the plank snaps off, goes clattering across the wall and floor.
A zombie falls, too close to his feet, much too close.
Dean smashes a boot into its face watches dark blood burst out in an arc, spattering the bottom of his boot and the rubble around it. He pins it long enough to slam a piece of wood through its throat, deep enough to leave a splash of red-brown and to stop it moving for good.
Then he swings the wood to the left without looking, takes a zombie mid-reach and flings it back. It falls to its back, lays there for just a second before hauling itself slowly back up.
"Sam!" Dean shouts and he thinks he can be forgiven if there's just the slightest note of panic in his voice. "Goddamn it, Sam, hurry the fuck up."
But, he already knows Sam isn't going to get back in time. The gun's useless and the wood he's holding is rotten and cracking apart. It's not exactly putting the zombies down it's just scattering them and more are piling into the space behind them. In a few minutes he's going to go down under the sheer numbers.
He slams the wood into the slack face of the corpse closest to him, sends it reeling back into the others. It straightens again under the swell of stumbling dead only to fall again before it regains its feet. The others climb forward over it and Dean's backing up, backing up and pushing into the brick behind him. It's freezing through his jacket and the fact that he has something against his back is no fucking consolation at all.
He's going to die.
He's going to die here.
His elbow hits the wall the next time he tries to draw back away from the hands reaching for him. Doesn't get far enough, and fingers, cold, numb and strong as hell, are pulling at his jacket, drawing him down by inches.
"Fuck."
He jams the wood up under its jaw, holds it in place while it skids there, snapping and making hoarse noises, blood running from where it's goring it's own neck open trying to get to him.
Until the plank snaps, one great jerk of splintered wood and Dean thumps into the wall, sliding down it in a shower of plaster and grit.
The rotting open mouth surges for his face -
A hand snatches the back of the zombie's neck, hefts it away from him and sends it flying through the crowd. Zombies tumble down under the impact, left clawing at each other, dragging themselves along the floor.
Dean catches a flash of tan trench coat and then there's a snap and a zombie slams into the wall so hard it doesn't get up again.
Another goes down without a head, dark blood collecting sluggishly in a pool.
Two corpses in business suits are shoved to their knees, and then left motionless with a twist of Castiel's hands.
Then he takes a step forward on the rubble, coat dusty and red at the edges.
"Dean." Castiel reaches a hand down and carefully pulls Dean to his feet.
"Cas," Dean manages. "Jesus, am I glad to see you."
Dead fingers claws for Castiel's hands and legs, trying to drag him back, to pull him down. The zombies seem strangely frustrated in their inability to bite through his skin. Because, yeah, Castiel is a little more durable than him and Dean's so fucking happy about that it's almost embarrassing.
The angel shakes them free, pushes them back, and they're more than capable of coming apart under his hands. Breaking apart when they get close enough for Castiel to catch hold of.
He takes a step, lays a hand on Dean's shoulder and the world -
- moves.