Fic: Bringing The Walls Down 1/3
Title: Bringing The Walls Down, 1/3
Fandom: Supernatural/Dr. Horrible
Pairing: Dean/Billy/Sam, Sam/Billy, Dean/Billy, Dean/Sam
Rating: NC-17
Warnings: Incest
Word Count: 20,900
Disclaimer: In no way mine or anything to do with me. I own nothing.
Summary: They had names now, the men in the 1967 Chevy Impala were Sam and Dean Winchester, and they were trying to save the world.
AN: Written for zeitheist 's birthday, it expanded into something a lot bigger than it was supposed to, demanding plot, angst, action/adventure and some general end-of-the-world shenanigans. I really hope that you like it.
It started simply enough, mid-way through April.
It was an observation at first, nothing more. It struck Billy one Thursday night, though there was nothing strange about it, nothing special about it. Maybe it was a little warmer than usual, his fingers were sweaty inside his gloves, the stretch of his goggles hot and tight around his eyes. Hot enough that you couldn't help but end up fidgeting, even in the half-breeze that flowed lazily through the streets at night.
Billy did most of his work at night, slipping past security systems, and second rate security guards, to redistribute the city's wealth and technology for his own ends.
Captain Hammer wasn't fond of the dark, so it was easier to avoid him at night. Though these days Dr. Horrible got the impression that Captain Hammer was avoiding him.
Dr. Horrible knew how to hurt him now.
Tonight he was half way toward his dubious destination when he noticed that it was much quieter out than usual.
The streets were usually at least making a show of foot traffic, around midnight, it was a busy city after all and it didn't stop. There was usually a liberal sprinkling of teenagers, drug dealers, prostitutes, the homeless, and drunken revellers making their way home in the dark. It was a background noise that Billy had long become used to, had learnt how to ignore, or how, in emergencies, to use to his own advantage.
But today he noticed that the streets weren't as full as they should have been.
The people who were out seemed to huddle warily in tightly knit groups, drifting from the dark corners to the sickly glow of streetlights, the bright halos of shop security, and the wide exposed spaces of street corners.
Like they were afraid. Afraid of the dark, of the quiet little spaces, afraid of being alone.
The homeless people especially. A mostly directionless drift of humanity, that Billy never noticed before Penny, or chose not to notice.
But now he was forbidden from ignoring anything that reminded him of Penny.
It was his punishment.
Once he'd noticed it, it became somehow stranger, somehow more obvious. The warmth should have drawn people out, not kept them in. The faces he slipped past shrank away from him. Not in the slow familiar way he was used to, a flicker of recognition that drew them back rather than risk whatever strange anger Dr. Horrible was willing to mete out. No, this was quick, before he got too close, before he could touch them, grab them-
They'd slid from doorways, backed into alleys, and drifted across the street, watching everything. There was the sharp foul taste of mistrust on the air.
It made him watchful himself, made him more careful than usual, more cautious. He was aware that people watching made for more potential witnesses than usual.
But no one followed him, no one watched him melt the locks on the university's science lab, or steal inside. And no one watched him leave with half their equipment.
There wasn't a sound outside but the wind, and the steady low hum of the fluorescent street lights.
Though Billy couldn't help but feel like that sliver of strangeness was following him home.
He stopped on a corner, pushed his goggles up into his hair, and stared into the darkness.
But there was nothing there.
Billy had never been one of the herd, he'd always stood at the edges, railing against the mass's blind ignorance, while at the same time secretly angry and despairing at his inability to have what they had. To be part of the world, in the way he deserved.
It was horribly unfair to be human.
But being on the edges let you notice things.
When he got back to the dark of his basement, and turned on the television, he half expected to find reports of a serial killer on the news. It had felt like the only logical explanation for the cold dread on the street. The way people were looking at each other sideways, as if wondering who'd been slaughtering their neighbours, and why.
But there was nothing, nothing Billy hadn't come to expect from the news, with the same disappointed heaviness that had plagued his entire life.
Instead there was an email from Professor Normal in his inbox. A scatter of short sentences, typed in a hurry. It told him to be careful where he went at night, to avoid enclosed spaces, to watch everything. There was something out there.
But what, he didn't say.
Vague portentous warnings were common enough in the E.L.E but something about the tight paragraph felt clipped, unembellished, serious.
Billy read it again, quietly uneasy.
And that was when it really started.
~~~
He didn't go out for four days. The strange unsettling feeling of emptiness on the streets half-forgotten under a new-found enthusiasm for old projects. He'd been making progress on his disintegrator beam, long left on the shelf due to its massive power consumption needs.
Billy thought maybe he'd found a way to make a smaller power source safely feed back on itself, without overloading and blowing up whoever was trying to handle it...or possibly to blow up anyway in the event of tampering, by forces unknown?
It was a small obstacle, more than manageable for him, given enough enthusiasm, and careful thought. He so often failed to overcome obstacles outside of this place.
Ruthlessness, he had discovered early, was hard work.
Some time, near the beginning, he'd spent a day being Dr. Horrible, watched the world turn in a different way. Cruelty on the inside had always been more pervasive than cruelty on the outside.
He'd come home and taken the coat off, but hadn't managed to feel anything for an hour. Until he was half convinced he'd never manage to feel anything again, until the panic set him to hyperventilating, left him was choking unattractively, messily. Before finally ending the whole episode in a heap, shaking and exhausted.
He hadn't left his lab for a long time after that. Ignoring summons with the flat stubbornness born of honest self preservation.
He'd locked his terrified brain away from the world. Made it work without an agenda, made it bleed out every single one of his fears.
He'd built things in that time that he'd been proud of, things he'd never shared.
Machinery expected nothing of him whether he wore the coat or not.
The small victories of machinery had probably grown to mean too much to him.
He looked up through the blurry beginnings of a migraine, and a horrendously sore throat, to realise days had just melted away.
The room felt too small, hot and claustrophobic.
He should eat something.
But his body protested that it needed sleep more.
~~~
The next morning there was something on the television about student pranks, that had led to a fire, and a riot somewhere in Illinois, he was only half watching over his equipment.
But he'd been long used to tuning out societies many failures.
It took him all afternoon to set up a test lab for the disintegrator beam, some of the shielding was heavy, and the generator took longer to move into the room than he expected without Moist.
He left another message on his phone, because heavy lifting was what henchmen, or assistants, were for. But it stayed unanswered, leaving him to do everything, by himself.
By seven he was unpleasantly sweaty, and his shoulders hurt, and he was impossibly irritated. Also he needed more plastic sheeting. There was going to be a significant splash zone before he worked all the bugs out.
He brushed dust out of his hair and put on different sneakers, lacing them up too tightly and then re-lacing them in a fit of annoyance.
He got three blocks in the darkness, before he realised that there was no one on the street, no one at all.
In that one creepy moment, footsteps gradually slowing to a stop, there was just him, and the empty sidewalks.
Billy's survival instincts told him to very quietly, and quickly, make his way home.
The idea rankled, he didn't like the idea of slinking away. It had been a long time since he'd been willing to retreat while wearing the suit, and never while he'd worn the red, never.
But survival instincts were there to keep you alive.
So he listened to them.
~~~
Billy's phone went off at 10:51am the next morning, and caller ID told him that it was Moist.
He stopped soldering long enough to pull it off of the bench, and open it.
"Where have you been? I've been trying to get in touch with you for the last two days? Not to mention the fact that you said you'd help me yesterday and you-"
Moist interrupted him, and for a second it was so surprising that he couldn't help but stop talking.
"There are ghosts in the mall," Moist said quietly, and Billy was absolutely certain that he'd heard him wrong.
"What?"
"Ghosts, there are ghosts in the mall." Moist laughed, but it was the juddery, faintly disbelieving, adrenaline fuelled, laughter, that sounded like it was teetering on the brink of hysteria.
"What? What are you talking about." Billy got nothing but silence, and then an inhale that sounded like it wanted to escape straight away as a noise that definitely wasn't laughter.
Moist was afraid.
"Just- Just wait, wait, I'll send you a picture, hang on."
The line went dead, but seventeen seconds later Billy's phone beeped.
He'd received an image, which he opened, half expecting something ludicrous, half expecting nothing at all.
It was a grainy picture, taken awkwardly from the wrong angle, but the footage was clear enough.
It made all the hair on Billy's neck stand up.
~~~
Ghosts weren't the only thing that started crawling out of the woodwork
The news reporters on television clearly didn't believe a word they were saying any more.
Billy was smart enough to pick up the frantic eyes behind the fixed smiles, and the smudged fear sweat under carefully applied cover-up. Filling the news with reports of ghosts and monster attacks obviously wasn't part of the agenda. Though how long they could keep up the pretence without it becoming delusional was anyone's guess.
He swivelled his laptop round for a comparison.
A report of a feral, half-man, half-wolf creature attacking a school in Vermont rolled across the bottom of the screen, along with a few grainy videos shot on camera phones of varying quality. The comment section at the bottom filled up exponentionally with every refresh.
It was only the first, alerts to similar attacks popped up steadily throughout the day.
Someone had uploaded a video that showed a poltergeist attack on a family in Maine to YouTube. It already had two hundred thousand hits.
Censoring the whole internet was clearly a more taxing prospect that the airwaves. And if even half of it was true, if even half of it was as real as it looked, then the hysteria was probably understandable.
Though it was unnerving how many people were throwing around the word 'apocalypse.'
Billy would have suspected drugs as an easy explanation for everything, but hallucinations didn't show up on film, and they didn't leave mangled corpses behind.
It was like someone had cracked open the door to hell.
A little investigation threw up a website, much linked by those in the know.
Ghostfacers.
It was shoddily put together, badly scripted, and Dr. Horrible knew rank amateurs when he saw them. They were all enthusiasm and faux seriousness with 'evidence' of dubious origin, since there were no sources sighted. Along with their obvious lack of practical experience.
But a quick trawl through their comments suggested their theories and information were actually sound. If he was willing to believe the steady stream of visitors currently plagued by the dead. Or now no longer plagued by the dead, which seemed to be the point.
The rules seemed simple enough. Ghosts struck with iron would dematerialise, a fairly old piece of lore more commonly referenced where fairies were concerned, but perhaps the metal and its density affect their ability to coalesce in some way?
The time it took the ghosts to become visible and/or able to affect living matter again apparently seemed to vary, depending on their emotional state and their original strength. Salt had the same effect as iron, and ghosts couldn't cross a boundary made of salt. Billy naturally assumed that iron had the same properties? Possibly the reason cemeteries originally had iron fences?
Finally, burning the remains and then salting them destroyed the ghost. In effect killing it permanently? Or perhaps sending it somewhere else? Billy wasn't quite sure how that was supposed to work.
Dr. Horrible would want to experiment further, see how ghosts reacted to sound waves, electromagnetism, advanced excitation of the molecules in the room they were haunting.
But Billy didn't want to go trawling for ghosts. Accepting ghosts, accepting that ghosts were out there, still felt wrong to him, in a way that might go against current evidence but felt sharply, primitively real.
Billy knew all the ways that people could hurt you, but the dead were something entirely different.
He didn't want to think about the dead.
Either way it was very quickly getting to the stage where he couldn't ignore it any more, where he had to say something. Because it was all anyone else was talking about, and to ignore it was going to seem at best, ignorant, and at worst, tragically delusional.
He had to say something, he had to acknowledge it in some way.
He pulled the suit off of the hook on the wall. It was easy to put on now, probably too easy. It used to be all about the theatre, about the way it made him feel, the things he was going to do. It was about what it meant to be this other him, the smarter, ambitious side of himself that faced problems head on, that knew how to be afraid and still get things done. That knew how not to let it show.
But it wasn't like that any more.
Dr. Horrible had become something more, evolved in ways Billy never expected, he was quiet and ruthless and broken in a way Billy thought could never make the world better. Billy had always taken some comfort in his own intelligence, in the fact that he understood how things worked. But in Dr. Horrible's hands that intelligence was almost terrifying. Dr. Horrible had ideas, and a lot of them Billy didn't like very much.
It was about what he was when he forgot to care, and right after Penny's death- right after it happened, every time he'd put on the suit he wasn't- no that was a lie, he couldn't be anything else.
And he'd done terrible things.
Before he'd realised that wasn't what he'd wanted at all.
Billy had taken the suit back.
Dr. Horrible got to make whatever he wanted, but he never got to win.
Not again.
Billy shifted the camera round, dragged the goggles down, he didn't let people see his eyes any more.
He also learned his lesson a long time ago. Don't blog about anything you planned for the future.
He spent an hour talking into the camera, about how humanity didn't deserve to survive, how it had had its chance and proved to be no match for unnatural selection.
Billy played it back afterwards, and realised he meant none of it. It was a rambling, frustrated monologue that sounded half broken and pleading, where it wasn't sneeringly disgusted at the certainty of humanity's eventual violent destruction.
It was some twisted, confusing mixture of both him and Dr. Horrible, and it made no sense at all.
He deleted the file.
That was why he'd stopped doing them live.
There may have been parts of Dr. Horrible he was ashamed of. But there were parts of himself he was ashamed of too.
Instead he left a short, brittle commentary on ghosts, what he'd learned from trawling through the news reports, forms and blogs across the globe. If they could be classed as matter at all, and methods of temporary, and permanent, destruction.
He wasn't happy with it, he sounded strangely flat, irritated at having to accept the metaphysical, also it felt patronising to him...but he eventually put it up anyway.
He couldn't stare at his eyeless face any longer.
~~~
A few days later someone mentioned 'demons' for the first time.
After that it got worse.
~~~
It took two weeks for YouTube to become a minefield of horror stories, videos disappearing at a rate of knots as someone, something tried to stem the flow. But they appeared again just as quickly, different angles, different viewpoints, shots from up close, and across the street, shots while people were running away, while people were falling.
People were dying on the internet while the government tried to pretend it wasn't happening.
All the blogging communities were clogged up so tight they were just a mess of code and 404 pages.
But the posts were all the same. Everyone was afraid, no one knew what to do, no one knew what the hell was happening.
Or, perhaps more importantly, why it was happening?
Billy didn't have the answers to any of their questions.
But the one thing he could do was find some answers of his own.
The research was frustrating. There were many varied and conflicting sources for information on destroying demons. The accepted methods for killing a vampire alone numbered more than a hundred. Werewolves there at least seemed to be a consensus on.
Dr. Horrible would simply work from complete and total destruction and go from there. Whatever could survive being reduced to the wet sludge of its component parts was going to win the planet no matter what.
Which Billy thought was unnecessarily gruesome, but also elegant in its simplistic honesty.
Dr. Horrible would have sketched out a plan for a disintegrator beam, and several high powered lasers. Which seemed only prudent, given the possibility that these things were more widespread than he expected.
Dr. Horrible believed in being prepared.
It was one of the things they could agree on.
He sketched out several, in the event the disintegrator beam didn't work, or jammed he could maybe slice a demon into enough temporary pieces to facilitate some sort of escape.
He had no numbers on the recuperative powers of demons.
Werewolves seemed to be able to regenerate their own skin and musculature within minutes, but he wasn't going to do science on guesswork and hearsay.
He had a feeling if he calculated wrong there wouldn't simply be a beating in it for him, though demonic strength seemed on par with the type he'd experienced from Captain Hammer on numerous occasions.
If he screwed up with this, he'd probably be fed his own intestines.
That didn't scare him as badly as it might have done a year ago.
He was better than he used to be.
Which was going to matter soon, because he'd run out of cables, copper wire and batteries. Not to mention anything else he'd be needing, if he was going to make half his blueprints a reality.
He was going to have to go outside.
~~~
He could almost pretend everything was normal for three blocks. Listening to the wind scatter litter across the street, the soft tread of his own footprints.
Until the wind started dragging smoke across the sky.
Some of the houses were on fire, they burned merrily with no sign that anyone was doing anything about it.
But there was more smoke in the distance, and the very faint sound of faraway sirens.
Though it could just as easily have been screaming.
The store was silent, though Billy in no way assumed that meant it was empty. A trail of packages and boxes had fallen from the shelves, and no one had seen fit to pick them up. Cans of paint leaked slowly on their sides.
In fact Billy had seen no one since he left. The odd drift of movement and lights in windows. Either public stupidity or some sort of lure.
But no people, and he had to wonder if they were listening to their survival instincts, or whether they'd simply already been eaten.
He walked quietly, boots making tiny squeaks on the floor as he eased his way up the aisles.
Billy knew better than to assume the quiet was empty.
And he was right.
The employees were behind the registers, a pile of bodies, all waxy skin and open eyes. The floor underneath them was bright red.
Billy stopped, sucked a breath that caught in the back of his throat, and lodged there. For a second he felt completely numb, wondering what sort of reaction he was supposed to have to something like this.
Because this wasn't a distant video feed of horror, that he could switch off, or look away from. This was real, and red, and close enough to touch.
But maybe there was no reaction for this.
He couldn't look away, disturbingly, horribly, he took two steps. He thought perhaps this was what real evil was. Maybe it wasn't about clever plans and revenge, maybe it wasn't even about machinery, and the need to control people.
Billy thought maybe this was what evil was.
Leaving people like this, a jumble of empty, broken shells, like they meant nothing.
They weren't all employees either, some of the legs wear jeans, and in the far corner a woman in red capri pants stared sightlessly towards the aisles. A young boy, no older than six or seven was tumbled over her, like he was still trying to protect her. Billy couldn't see his eyes but his skin was starkly pale, and there was far too much blood.
No one had been here to save them.
It wasn't right though, there wasn't enough mess, this wasn't the remains of a mess, tossed aside, it wasn't even the careful hoarding of food for later.
The bodies had been stacked here for a reason.
They were a lure.
A grisly tableau designed to stun most people in their tracks, to stop them in horror.
But Billy was not most people, not any more.
He turned in an arc, gun flying up in one movement.
He almost wasn't quick enough.
There was a white/red flash of teeth and wide open mouth before he fired.
Demons apparently expected a lot of things, holy water, salt, terrified screaming.
A sonic gun to the face, not so much.
It packed more of a kick than Billy expected, the blunt edge of the handle slamming into his shoulder hard enough to stop his breath in his chest, while the other end threw out an explosion of sound in one huge wave.
It ripped through the mouth full of teeth, and shredded it into pieces, red spraying outward in an bright arc.
The wave hit the shelves, tore through their contents, and then the metal brackets, flinging them against the walls. The glass in the windows just fell apart.
It left a hole in the outer wall the size of a truck, and set off all the car alarms outside in a lazy discordant mess of sound.
The hissing thing, that Dr. Horrible assumed used to be some sort of parasitical demon, possibly a vampire? was a smear of blood, bone and clothing on the floor. Rapidly spreading around the edges of his black boots.
He pushed his goggles up into his hair, and remembered, belatedly, that he was supposed to be breathing.
He did so, a hoarse, half-startled inhale that tasted like tin.
~~~
When he got back to his own basement Billy put ice on his shoulder and made notes on the sonic gun blue prints.
He thought the power was just about right. Though he'd have to make damn sure there wasn't anyone standing in front of it when he used it.
No one he wanted to keep standing anyway.
After that he turned the computers on, all of them.
Even the ones underneath his whiteboard.
It was part of a set-up that Fake Thomas Jefferson had installed for him, with feeds to CCTV and traffic cameras, and remote access to pretty much anywhere a supervillain might want to draw information. Or so he'd been told.
Fake Thomas Jefferson was very good at being whoever he wanted to be.
Billy wondered if even Bad Horse really knew a thing about him.
The screens and extra hard drives had always stayed dark, he'd never really needed that much information before. It had always been about building things, and getting his message out.
Billy had never needed to really watch the world before.
He turned them all on.
Power wouldn't be a problem.
Power was Billy's specialty.
An hour later he was reading things he wasn't supposed to be reading.
Reading about what was true, and what the government was pretending wasn't.
It was terrifying.
And, apparently, the military were 'unprepared for the nature of the threat.'
Billy wondered if anyone was.
~~~
It got worse, for all that it didn't quite seem real on the flat screens, the video feeds kept sending him updates.
The big catastrophes started cropping up, like cracks in the dam.
Places where they couldn't paper over the horror of it, places where holes opened up in the ground and started spewing fire. Or where buildings just disappeared without a trace.
A black car showed up at two of the disaster zones, not long after the chaos started.
As soon as it was gone the death toll stopped climbing.
Billy wondered if it was government issue, before dismissing it, there was no way in hell they'd drive anything like that.
The videos he found internally were clearer than the ones on the internet.
He was watching more of them than he wanted to, because research only took you so far, and knowing your enemies strengths and weaknesses was one of the most obvious ways to gain an advantage. But watching these things happen wasn't clinical, there was no distance for that. Watching a living breathing human being fighting for their life against something they never had a chance against. Until the person was just so much blood and pieces, sometimes not even still before the things started to eat them.
Billy spent a long time in the bathroom, with his face pressed against the cool of the mirror, trying not to be sick...again.
In the end he put the suit on and made Dr. Horrible watch them instead. He understood how messed up that was, understood that he was only feeding his own psychosis, and he knew he'd still see them at night, while he was sleeping. Because it was all his own head, all his own brain.
But Dr. Horrible could be angry and detached, that was what he was for. That was what he was good at.
And Billy needed him.
~~~
It had been 2am for a long time when Billy eventually gave in and got out of bed.
He wasn't really surprised that he couldn't sleep, he'd spent all day watching nightmares come to life, and he was certain his brain was just waiting for the chance to replay them.
He dragged himself to the computers, to find reports of demons made of fire terrorising a theatre in Beaumont.
Traffic cameras in the area picked up the same car he'd seen before, a long, a sleek line of black parked across the street. Billy checked the dimensions and discovered it was a 1967 Chevy Impala.
Two hours later it was gone, and the fire trucks moved in, turned the hoses on.
The theatre quietly smouldered, but the fire didn't spread.
~~~
He forced himself to stop watching the steady stream of death. At least for long enough to work on his quantum instability gun. Part of him was strangely insistent that he was just denying the inevitable, but the quiet work stopped him feeling hollow for a while.
~~~
On the fourth day he couldn't stay away any longer and instead of drifting to the gleaming line of his newest prototype he drifted back to the computers.
Over breakfast Billy learned that a well-respected priest in Albuquerque had taken half a town hostage, boarded himself up inside a church with forty of his followers.
The reports were calling them cultists, the rumour mill was calling them devil worshippers.
A small, but reliable, source on the internet said they were possessed by demons.
He realised, slightly bewilderingly, which one he believed. He couldn't help but marvel at how quickly your life could turn upside down, and inside out.
The Impala was back as well. It sat quietly on a street corner, looking both strangely out of place, and like it had always been there.
He found the feed from one of the cameras across the street, managed to get a grainy, but readable, view of the licence plate.
He ran it through the system, and discovered that the car belonged to one John Winchester. But the word 'deceased' ran beneath his picture in black text.
He stared at the picture anyway, since it was the only thing there.
Later that day the cult members were stumbling onto the street, and there was a smoking hole where the church used to be.
The networks were calling it a 'savage and devastating' destruction of property.
A steady stream of survivors poured into the hospital.
The Impala left the state.
So it was staying just long enough to destroy the threat, long enough to kill the monsters and pull the people out before moving on?
It was becoming clear that someone out there was trying to hold back the tide of blood.
Whoever they were they didn't stop for money, awards or speeches. They moved on, following the wave across America, stopping every time it peaked, and pushing it back.
But the problem with wave functions, was that there was always more wave underneath.
~~~
Billy tried Moist again, he'd been dialling it for days now with no answer, it kept going to voicemail. The bland disinterested drone that told him nothing.
He was half tempted to try and track the phone, as long as it was on he could find it. But he didn't have the right equipment.
He didn't have the right parts to build the right equipment.
He could probably do it on the network. But, he'd admit, to himself at least, that he didn't want to know. Parts of the city were already no-go areas. Parts of the city were just gone.
He sent an email to professor Normal instead, much as he thought he should work on his own initiative there were demons on the streets. The frustration gnawed at him while his inbox remained empty and silent.
He waited as long as he could, then sent an email directly to the E.L.E.
He waited a long time.
But there was no reply.
The idea that he was the last one left was too ludicrous to contemplate.
It occurred to him, in the darkness of his room later, that he was still on the wrong side.
He stared at the ceiling for a long time.
~~~
The next day he went back to the screens, felt slightly sick at the idea that he was watching the world fall apart.
The black car had become a strange anchor in the chaos.
Billy wanted to know who these people were, these people who knew enough to follow a trail of monsters, to hunt them down and kill them.
He wondered if they were even human, if they had some sort of...powers. Some sort of superpowers that meant they could do this while the world burned.
All the heroes Billy had ever known were self-deluded morons, more interested in their own sense of self-importance than the safety of the general population.
But this person...these people? They clearly cared. There was something complicated in that, something that hurt, in a way that kept drawing Billy back to their quest to save the world. When he'd tried so hard to make the world better, to make it work. Here was someone trying to save it.
Billy followed the car all night, watched it park outside a hospital that, last time he'd checked, was ground zero for an earthquake.
Or something else.
The CCTV in the hospital car park was still working, it was late but he managed to catch two grimy, washed out faces, one average height, the other much taller.
He half-heartedly ran the faces through the system, and then started in surprise when he found a match.
Dean Winchester and Sam Winchester, sons of John Winchester. Wanted for murder, assault, grave robbery, escaping custody, and a variety of other offences running from petty to quite frankly bewildering...desecration of a church?
It seemed like maybe they'd been doing this a while.
But he had names now, the men in the 1967 Chevy Impala were Sam and Dean Winchester, and they were trying to save the world.
~~~
The next day there was nothing on TV but the news, a scrolling mess of footage and interviews looped every few hours, with new stuff occasionally added in. Billy knew because he watched it all day.
It seemed the real world had finally made it from the net to the networks. The lid was off and once everyone was already panicking someone had to tell them to stop. If only so they could delude themselves into thinking everything was ok.
But too much of the news was honest now, no one was pretending it was all a lie any more.
He left it on as background noise, a grim loop of flat, dead voices while he showered, made himself something to eat, and updated his information.
And Billy realised something then, something that the map had been telling him for days.
The Winchesters were losing, the wave was piling up ahead of them like a supernatural tsunami, red smears of ghost activity and violence, crawling and spreading on the map like a virus where they were heading.
Like they were being herded, or chased.
It looked, for all the world like the exterminators were about to be taken out.
For all the world.
Billy stared at the map for a long time.
He'd always wanted to make a difference, and sitting in this basement working on plans for massively destructive weaponry while the world slid into hell was not the way to go about it.
And it occurred to him then that he hadn't just been working on the plans, he'd been building them. In-between the news broadcasts, and the horror, he'd been arming himself for war.
The realisation stole all his breath, and he was left shaking in the dark, coming to terms with the fact that he'd already decided.
That Dr. Horrible had already decided.
The red suit was a little conspicuous. But then that was the point, and, if half the guns worked, it shouldn't matter.
He shut his laptop.
Next Part
Fandom: Supernatural/Dr. Horrible
Pairing: Dean/Billy/Sam, Sam/Billy, Dean/Billy, Dean/Sam
Rating: NC-17
Warnings: Incest
Word Count: 20,900
Disclaimer: In no way mine or anything to do with me. I own nothing.
Summary: They had names now, the men in the 1967 Chevy Impala were Sam and Dean Winchester, and they were trying to save the world.
AN: Written for zeitheist 's birthday, it expanded into something a lot bigger than it was supposed to, demanding plot, angst, action/adventure and some general end-of-the-world shenanigans. I really hope that you like it.
It started simply enough, mid-way through April.
It was an observation at first, nothing more. It struck Billy one Thursday night, though there was nothing strange about it, nothing special about it. Maybe it was a little warmer than usual, his fingers were sweaty inside his gloves, the stretch of his goggles hot and tight around his eyes. Hot enough that you couldn't help but end up fidgeting, even in the half-breeze that flowed lazily through the streets at night.
Billy did most of his work at night, slipping past security systems, and second rate security guards, to redistribute the city's wealth and technology for his own ends.
Captain Hammer wasn't fond of the dark, so it was easier to avoid him at night. Though these days Dr. Horrible got the impression that Captain Hammer was avoiding him.
Dr. Horrible knew how to hurt him now.
Tonight he was half way toward his dubious destination when he noticed that it was much quieter out than usual.
The streets were usually at least making a show of foot traffic, around midnight, it was a busy city after all and it didn't stop. There was usually a liberal sprinkling of teenagers, drug dealers, prostitutes, the homeless, and drunken revellers making their way home in the dark. It was a background noise that Billy had long become used to, had learnt how to ignore, or how, in emergencies, to use to his own advantage.
But today he noticed that the streets weren't as full as they should have been.
The people who were out seemed to huddle warily in tightly knit groups, drifting from the dark corners to the sickly glow of streetlights, the bright halos of shop security, and the wide exposed spaces of street corners.
Like they were afraid. Afraid of the dark, of the quiet little spaces, afraid of being alone.
The homeless people especially. A mostly directionless drift of humanity, that Billy never noticed before Penny, or chose not to notice.
But now he was forbidden from ignoring anything that reminded him of Penny.
It was his punishment.
Once he'd noticed it, it became somehow stranger, somehow more obvious. The warmth should have drawn people out, not kept them in. The faces he slipped past shrank away from him. Not in the slow familiar way he was used to, a flicker of recognition that drew them back rather than risk whatever strange anger Dr. Horrible was willing to mete out. No, this was quick, before he got too close, before he could touch them, grab them-
They'd slid from doorways, backed into alleys, and drifted across the street, watching everything. There was the sharp foul taste of mistrust on the air.
It made him watchful himself, made him more careful than usual, more cautious. He was aware that people watching made for more potential witnesses than usual.
But no one followed him, no one watched him melt the locks on the university's science lab, or steal inside. And no one watched him leave with half their equipment.
There wasn't a sound outside but the wind, and the steady low hum of the fluorescent street lights.
Though Billy couldn't help but feel like that sliver of strangeness was following him home.
He stopped on a corner, pushed his goggles up into his hair, and stared into the darkness.
But there was nothing there.
Billy had never been one of the herd, he'd always stood at the edges, railing against the mass's blind ignorance, while at the same time secretly angry and despairing at his inability to have what they had. To be part of the world, in the way he deserved.
It was horribly unfair to be human.
But being on the edges let you notice things.
When he got back to the dark of his basement, and turned on the television, he half expected to find reports of a serial killer on the news. It had felt like the only logical explanation for the cold dread on the street. The way people were looking at each other sideways, as if wondering who'd been slaughtering their neighbours, and why.
But there was nothing, nothing Billy hadn't come to expect from the news, with the same disappointed heaviness that had plagued his entire life.
Instead there was an email from Professor Normal in his inbox. A scatter of short sentences, typed in a hurry. It told him to be careful where he went at night, to avoid enclosed spaces, to watch everything. There was something out there.
But what, he didn't say.
Vague portentous warnings were common enough in the E.L.E but something about the tight paragraph felt clipped, unembellished, serious.
Billy read it again, quietly uneasy.
And that was when it really started.
~~~
He didn't go out for four days. The strange unsettling feeling of emptiness on the streets half-forgotten under a new-found enthusiasm for old projects. He'd been making progress on his disintegrator beam, long left on the shelf due to its massive power consumption needs.
Billy thought maybe he'd found a way to make a smaller power source safely feed back on itself, without overloading and blowing up whoever was trying to handle it...or possibly to blow up anyway in the event of tampering, by forces unknown?
It was a small obstacle, more than manageable for him, given enough enthusiasm, and careful thought. He so often failed to overcome obstacles outside of this place.
Ruthlessness, he had discovered early, was hard work.
Some time, near the beginning, he'd spent a day being Dr. Horrible, watched the world turn in a different way. Cruelty on the inside had always been more pervasive than cruelty on the outside.
He'd come home and taken the coat off, but hadn't managed to feel anything for an hour. Until he was half convinced he'd never manage to feel anything again, until the panic set him to hyperventilating, left him was choking unattractively, messily. Before finally ending the whole episode in a heap, shaking and exhausted.
He hadn't left his lab for a long time after that. Ignoring summons with the flat stubbornness born of honest self preservation.
He'd locked his terrified brain away from the world. Made it work without an agenda, made it bleed out every single one of his fears.
He'd built things in that time that he'd been proud of, things he'd never shared.
Machinery expected nothing of him whether he wore the coat or not.
The small victories of machinery had probably grown to mean too much to him.
He looked up through the blurry beginnings of a migraine, and a horrendously sore throat, to realise days had just melted away.
The room felt too small, hot and claustrophobic.
He should eat something.
But his body protested that it needed sleep more.
~~~
The next morning there was something on the television about student pranks, that had led to a fire, and a riot somewhere in Illinois, he was only half watching over his equipment.
But he'd been long used to tuning out societies many failures.
It took him all afternoon to set up a test lab for the disintegrator beam, some of the shielding was heavy, and the generator took longer to move into the room than he expected without Moist.
He left another message on his phone, because heavy lifting was what henchmen, or assistants, were for. But it stayed unanswered, leaving him to do everything, by himself.
By seven he was unpleasantly sweaty, and his shoulders hurt, and he was impossibly irritated. Also he needed more plastic sheeting. There was going to be a significant splash zone before he worked all the bugs out.
He brushed dust out of his hair and put on different sneakers, lacing them up too tightly and then re-lacing them in a fit of annoyance.
He got three blocks in the darkness, before he realised that there was no one on the street, no one at all.
In that one creepy moment, footsteps gradually slowing to a stop, there was just him, and the empty sidewalks.
Billy's survival instincts told him to very quietly, and quickly, make his way home.
The idea rankled, he didn't like the idea of slinking away. It had been a long time since he'd been willing to retreat while wearing the suit, and never while he'd worn the red, never.
But survival instincts were there to keep you alive.
So he listened to them.
~~~
Billy's phone went off at 10:51am the next morning, and caller ID told him that it was Moist.
He stopped soldering long enough to pull it off of the bench, and open it.
"Where have you been? I've been trying to get in touch with you for the last two days? Not to mention the fact that you said you'd help me yesterday and you-"
Moist interrupted him, and for a second it was so surprising that he couldn't help but stop talking.
"There are ghosts in the mall," Moist said quietly, and Billy was absolutely certain that he'd heard him wrong.
"What?"
"Ghosts, there are ghosts in the mall." Moist laughed, but it was the juddery, faintly disbelieving, adrenaline fuelled, laughter, that sounded like it was teetering on the brink of hysteria.
"What? What are you talking about." Billy got nothing but silence, and then an inhale that sounded like it wanted to escape straight away as a noise that definitely wasn't laughter.
Moist was afraid.
"Just- Just wait, wait, I'll send you a picture, hang on."
The line went dead, but seventeen seconds later Billy's phone beeped.
He'd received an image, which he opened, half expecting something ludicrous, half expecting nothing at all.
It was a grainy picture, taken awkwardly from the wrong angle, but the footage was clear enough.
It made all the hair on Billy's neck stand up.
~~~
Ghosts weren't the only thing that started crawling out of the woodwork
The news reporters on television clearly didn't believe a word they were saying any more.
Billy was smart enough to pick up the frantic eyes behind the fixed smiles, and the smudged fear sweat under carefully applied cover-up. Filling the news with reports of ghosts and monster attacks obviously wasn't part of the agenda. Though how long they could keep up the pretence without it becoming delusional was anyone's guess.
He swivelled his laptop round for a comparison.
A report of a feral, half-man, half-wolf creature attacking a school in Vermont rolled across the bottom of the screen, along with a few grainy videos shot on camera phones of varying quality. The comment section at the bottom filled up exponentionally with every refresh.
It was only the first, alerts to similar attacks popped up steadily throughout the day.
Someone had uploaded a video that showed a poltergeist attack on a family in Maine to YouTube. It already had two hundred thousand hits.
Censoring the whole internet was clearly a more taxing prospect that the airwaves. And if even half of it was true, if even half of it was as real as it looked, then the hysteria was probably understandable.
Though it was unnerving how many people were throwing around the word 'apocalypse.'
Billy would have suspected drugs as an easy explanation for everything, but hallucinations didn't show up on film, and they didn't leave mangled corpses behind.
It was like someone had cracked open the door to hell.
A little investigation threw up a website, much linked by those in the know.
Ghostfacers.
It was shoddily put together, badly scripted, and Dr. Horrible knew rank amateurs when he saw them. They were all enthusiasm and faux seriousness with 'evidence' of dubious origin, since there were no sources sighted. Along with their obvious lack of practical experience.
But a quick trawl through their comments suggested their theories and information were actually sound. If he was willing to believe the steady stream of visitors currently plagued by the dead. Or now no longer plagued by the dead, which seemed to be the point.
The rules seemed simple enough. Ghosts struck with iron would dematerialise, a fairly old piece of lore more commonly referenced where fairies were concerned, but perhaps the metal and its density affect their ability to coalesce in some way?
The time it took the ghosts to become visible and/or able to affect living matter again apparently seemed to vary, depending on their emotional state and their original strength. Salt had the same effect as iron, and ghosts couldn't cross a boundary made of salt. Billy naturally assumed that iron had the same properties? Possibly the reason cemeteries originally had iron fences?
Finally, burning the remains and then salting them destroyed the ghost. In effect killing it permanently? Or perhaps sending it somewhere else? Billy wasn't quite sure how that was supposed to work.
Dr. Horrible would want to experiment further, see how ghosts reacted to sound waves, electromagnetism, advanced excitation of the molecules in the room they were haunting.
But Billy didn't want to go trawling for ghosts. Accepting ghosts, accepting that ghosts were out there, still felt wrong to him, in a way that might go against current evidence but felt sharply, primitively real.
Billy knew all the ways that people could hurt you, but the dead were something entirely different.
He didn't want to think about the dead.
Either way it was very quickly getting to the stage where he couldn't ignore it any more, where he had to say something. Because it was all anyone else was talking about, and to ignore it was going to seem at best, ignorant, and at worst, tragically delusional.
He had to say something, he had to acknowledge it in some way.
He pulled the suit off of the hook on the wall. It was easy to put on now, probably too easy. It used to be all about the theatre, about the way it made him feel, the things he was going to do. It was about what it meant to be this other him, the smarter, ambitious side of himself that faced problems head on, that knew how to be afraid and still get things done. That knew how not to let it show.
But it wasn't like that any more.
Dr. Horrible had become something more, evolved in ways Billy never expected, he was quiet and ruthless and broken in a way Billy thought could never make the world better. Billy had always taken some comfort in his own intelligence, in the fact that he understood how things worked. But in Dr. Horrible's hands that intelligence was almost terrifying. Dr. Horrible had ideas, and a lot of them Billy didn't like very much.
It was about what he was when he forgot to care, and right after Penny's death- right after it happened, every time he'd put on the suit he wasn't- no that was a lie, he couldn't be anything else.
And he'd done terrible things.
Before he'd realised that wasn't what he'd wanted at all.
Billy had taken the suit back.
Dr. Horrible got to make whatever he wanted, but he never got to win.
Not again.
Billy shifted the camera round, dragged the goggles down, he didn't let people see his eyes any more.
He also learned his lesson a long time ago. Don't blog about anything you planned for the future.
He spent an hour talking into the camera, about how humanity didn't deserve to survive, how it had had its chance and proved to be no match for unnatural selection.
Billy played it back afterwards, and realised he meant none of it. It was a rambling, frustrated monologue that sounded half broken and pleading, where it wasn't sneeringly disgusted at the certainty of humanity's eventual violent destruction.
It was some twisted, confusing mixture of both him and Dr. Horrible, and it made no sense at all.
He deleted the file.
That was why he'd stopped doing them live.
There may have been parts of Dr. Horrible he was ashamed of. But there were parts of himself he was ashamed of too.
Instead he left a short, brittle commentary on ghosts, what he'd learned from trawling through the news reports, forms and blogs across the globe. If they could be classed as matter at all, and methods of temporary, and permanent, destruction.
He wasn't happy with it, he sounded strangely flat, irritated at having to accept the metaphysical, also it felt patronising to him...but he eventually put it up anyway.
He couldn't stare at his eyeless face any longer.
~~~
A few days later someone mentioned 'demons' for the first time.
After that it got worse.
~~~
It took two weeks for YouTube to become a minefield of horror stories, videos disappearing at a rate of knots as someone, something tried to stem the flow. But they appeared again just as quickly, different angles, different viewpoints, shots from up close, and across the street, shots while people were running away, while people were falling.
People were dying on the internet while the government tried to pretend it wasn't happening.
All the blogging communities were clogged up so tight they were just a mess of code and 404 pages.
But the posts were all the same. Everyone was afraid, no one knew what to do, no one knew what the hell was happening.
Or, perhaps more importantly, why it was happening?
Billy didn't have the answers to any of their questions.
But the one thing he could do was find some answers of his own.
The research was frustrating. There were many varied and conflicting sources for information on destroying demons. The accepted methods for killing a vampire alone numbered more than a hundred. Werewolves there at least seemed to be a consensus on.
Dr. Horrible would simply work from complete and total destruction and go from there. Whatever could survive being reduced to the wet sludge of its component parts was going to win the planet no matter what.
Which Billy thought was unnecessarily gruesome, but also elegant in its simplistic honesty.
Dr. Horrible would have sketched out a plan for a disintegrator beam, and several high powered lasers. Which seemed only prudent, given the possibility that these things were more widespread than he expected.
Dr. Horrible believed in being prepared.
It was one of the things they could agree on.
He sketched out several, in the event the disintegrator beam didn't work, or jammed he could maybe slice a demon into enough temporary pieces to facilitate some sort of escape.
He had no numbers on the recuperative powers of demons.
Werewolves seemed to be able to regenerate their own skin and musculature within minutes, but he wasn't going to do science on guesswork and hearsay.
He had a feeling if he calculated wrong there wouldn't simply be a beating in it for him, though demonic strength seemed on par with the type he'd experienced from Captain Hammer on numerous occasions.
If he screwed up with this, he'd probably be fed his own intestines.
That didn't scare him as badly as it might have done a year ago.
He was better than he used to be.
Which was going to matter soon, because he'd run out of cables, copper wire and batteries. Not to mention anything else he'd be needing, if he was going to make half his blueprints a reality.
He was going to have to go outside.
~~~
He could almost pretend everything was normal for three blocks. Listening to the wind scatter litter across the street, the soft tread of his own footprints.
Until the wind started dragging smoke across the sky.
Some of the houses were on fire, they burned merrily with no sign that anyone was doing anything about it.
But there was more smoke in the distance, and the very faint sound of faraway sirens.
Though it could just as easily have been screaming.
The store was silent, though Billy in no way assumed that meant it was empty. A trail of packages and boxes had fallen from the shelves, and no one had seen fit to pick them up. Cans of paint leaked slowly on their sides.
In fact Billy had seen no one since he left. The odd drift of movement and lights in windows. Either public stupidity or some sort of lure.
But no people, and he had to wonder if they were listening to their survival instincts, or whether they'd simply already been eaten.
He walked quietly, boots making tiny squeaks on the floor as he eased his way up the aisles.
Billy knew better than to assume the quiet was empty.
And he was right.
The employees were behind the registers, a pile of bodies, all waxy skin and open eyes. The floor underneath them was bright red.
Billy stopped, sucked a breath that caught in the back of his throat, and lodged there. For a second he felt completely numb, wondering what sort of reaction he was supposed to have to something like this.
Because this wasn't a distant video feed of horror, that he could switch off, or look away from. This was real, and red, and close enough to touch.
But maybe there was no reaction for this.
He couldn't look away, disturbingly, horribly, he took two steps. He thought perhaps this was what real evil was. Maybe it wasn't about clever plans and revenge, maybe it wasn't even about machinery, and the need to control people.
Billy thought maybe this was what evil was.
Leaving people like this, a jumble of empty, broken shells, like they meant nothing.
They weren't all employees either, some of the legs wear jeans, and in the far corner a woman in red capri pants stared sightlessly towards the aisles. A young boy, no older than six or seven was tumbled over her, like he was still trying to protect her. Billy couldn't see his eyes but his skin was starkly pale, and there was far too much blood.
No one had been here to save them.
It wasn't right though, there wasn't enough mess, this wasn't the remains of a mess, tossed aside, it wasn't even the careful hoarding of food for later.
The bodies had been stacked here for a reason.
They were a lure.
A grisly tableau designed to stun most people in their tracks, to stop them in horror.
But Billy was not most people, not any more.
He turned in an arc, gun flying up in one movement.
He almost wasn't quick enough.
There was a white/red flash of teeth and wide open mouth before he fired.
Demons apparently expected a lot of things, holy water, salt, terrified screaming.
A sonic gun to the face, not so much.
It packed more of a kick than Billy expected, the blunt edge of the handle slamming into his shoulder hard enough to stop his breath in his chest, while the other end threw out an explosion of sound in one huge wave.
It ripped through the mouth full of teeth, and shredded it into pieces, red spraying outward in an bright arc.
The wave hit the shelves, tore through their contents, and then the metal brackets, flinging them against the walls. The glass in the windows just fell apart.
It left a hole in the outer wall the size of a truck, and set off all the car alarms outside in a lazy discordant mess of sound.
The hissing thing, that Dr. Horrible assumed used to be some sort of parasitical demon, possibly a vampire? was a smear of blood, bone and clothing on the floor. Rapidly spreading around the edges of his black boots.
He pushed his goggles up into his hair, and remembered, belatedly, that he was supposed to be breathing.
He did so, a hoarse, half-startled inhale that tasted like tin.
~~~
When he got back to his own basement Billy put ice on his shoulder and made notes on the sonic gun blue prints.
He thought the power was just about right. Though he'd have to make damn sure there wasn't anyone standing in front of it when he used it.
No one he wanted to keep standing anyway.
After that he turned the computers on, all of them.
Even the ones underneath his whiteboard.
It was part of a set-up that Fake Thomas Jefferson had installed for him, with feeds to CCTV and traffic cameras, and remote access to pretty much anywhere a supervillain might want to draw information. Or so he'd been told.
Fake Thomas Jefferson was very good at being whoever he wanted to be.
Billy wondered if even Bad Horse really knew a thing about him.
The screens and extra hard drives had always stayed dark, he'd never really needed that much information before. It had always been about building things, and getting his message out.
Billy had never needed to really watch the world before.
He turned them all on.
Power wouldn't be a problem.
Power was Billy's specialty.
An hour later he was reading things he wasn't supposed to be reading.
Reading about what was true, and what the government was pretending wasn't.
It was terrifying.
And, apparently, the military were 'unprepared for the nature of the threat.'
Billy wondered if anyone was.
~~~
It got worse, for all that it didn't quite seem real on the flat screens, the video feeds kept sending him updates.
The big catastrophes started cropping up, like cracks in the dam.
Places where they couldn't paper over the horror of it, places where holes opened up in the ground and started spewing fire. Or where buildings just disappeared without a trace.
A black car showed up at two of the disaster zones, not long after the chaos started.
As soon as it was gone the death toll stopped climbing.
Billy wondered if it was government issue, before dismissing it, there was no way in hell they'd drive anything like that.
The videos he found internally were clearer than the ones on the internet.
He was watching more of them than he wanted to, because research only took you so far, and knowing your enemies strengths and weaknesses was one of the most obvious ways to gain an advantage. But watching these things happen wasn't clinical, there was no distance for that. Watching a living breathing human being fighting for their life against something they never had a chance against. Until the person was just so much blood and pieces, sometimes not even still before the things started to eat them.
Billy spent a long time in the bathroom, with his face pressed against the cool of the mirror, trying not to be sick...again.
In the end he put the suit on and made Dr. Horrible watch them instead. He understood how messed up that was, understood that he was only feeding his own psychosis, and he knew he'd still see them at night, while he was sleeping. Because it was all his own head, all his own brain.
But Dr. Horrible could be angry and detached, that was what he was for. That was what he was good at.
And Billy needed him.
~~~
It had been 2am for a long time when Billy eventually gave in and got out of bed.
He wasn't really surprised that he couldn't sleep, he'd spent all day watching nightmares come to life, and he was certain his brain was just waiting for the chance to replay them.
He dragged himself to the computers, to find reports of demons made of fire terrorising a theatre in Beaumont.
Traffic cameras in the area picked up the same car he'd seen before, a long, a sleek line of black parked across the street. Billy checked the dimensions and discovered it was a 1967 Chevy Impala.
Two hours later it was gone, and the fire trucks moved in, turned the hoses on.
The theatre quietly smouldered, but the fire didn't spread.
~~~
He forced himself to stop watching the steady stream of death. At least for long enough to work on his quantum instability gun. Part of him was strangely insistent that he was just denying the inevitable, but the quiet work stopped him feeling hollow for a while.
~~~
On the fourth day he couldn't stay away any longer and instead of drifting to the gleaming line of his newest prototype he drifted back to the computers.
Over breakfast Billy learned that a well-respected priest in Albuquerque had taken half a town hostage, boarded himself up inside a church with forty of his followers.
The reports were calling them cultists, the rumour mill was calling them devil worshippers.
A small, but reliable, source on the internet said they were possessed by demons.
He realised, slightly bewilderingly, which one he believed. He couldn't help but marvel at how quickly your life could turn upside down, and inside out.
The Impala was back as well. It sat quietly on a street corner, looking both strangely out of place, and like it had always been there.
He found the feed from one of the cameras across the street, managed to get a grainy, but readable, view of the licence plate.
He ran it through the system, and discovered that the car belonged to one John Winchester. But the word 'deceased' ran beneath his picture in black text.
He stared at the picture anyway, since it was the only thing there.
Later that day the cult members were stumbling onto the street, and there was a smoking hole where the church used to be.
The networks were calling it a 'savage and devastating' destruction of property.
A steady stream of survivors poured into the hospital.
The Impala left the state.
So it was staying just long enough to destroy the threat, long enough to kill the monsters and pull the people out before moving on?
It was becoming clear that someone out there was trying to hold back the tide of blood.
Whoever they were they didn't stop for money, awards or speeches. They moved on, following the wave across America, stopping every time it peaked, and pushing it back.
But the problem with wave functions, was that there was always more wave underneath.
~~~
Billy tried Moist again, he'd been dialling it for days now with no answer, it kept going to voicemail. The bland disinterested drone that told him nothing.
He was half tempted to try and track the phone, as long as it was on he could find it. But he didn't have the right equipment.
He didn't have the right parts to build the right equipment.
He could probably do it on the network. But, he'd admit, to himself at least, that he didn't want to know. Parts of the city were already no-go areas. Parts of the city were just gone.
He sent an email to professor Normal instead, much as he thought he should work on his own initiative there were demons on the streets. The frustration gnawed at him while his inbox remained empty and silent.
He waited as long as he could, then sent an email directly to the E.L.E.
He waited a long time.
But there was no reply.
The idea that he was the last one left was too ludicrous to contemplate.
It occurred to him, in the darkness of his room later, that he was still on the wrong side.
He stared at the ceiling for a long time.
~~~
The next day he went back to the screens, felt slightly sick at the idea that he was watching the world fall apart.
The black car had become a strange anchor in the chaos.
Billy wanted to know who these people were, these people who knew enough to follow a trail of monsters, to hunt them down and kill them.
He wondered if they were even human, if they had some sort of...powers. Some sort of superpowers that meant they could do this while the world burned.
All the heroes Billy had ever known were self-deluded morons, more interested in their own sense of self-importance than the safety of the general population.
But this person...these people? They clearly cared. There was something complicated in that, something that hurt, in a way that kept drawing Billy back to their quest to save the world. When he'd tried so hard to make the world better, to make it work. Here was someone trying to save it.
Billy followed the car all night, watched it park outside a hospital that, last time he'd checked, was ground zero for an earthquake.
Or something else.
The CCTV in the hospital car park was still working, it was late but he managed to catch two grimy, washed out faces, one average height, the other much taller.
He half-heartedly ran the faces through the system, and then started in surprise when he found a match.
Dean Winchester and Sam Winchester, sons of John Winchester. Wanted for murder, assault, grave robbery, escaping custody, and a variety of other offences running from petty to quite frankly bewildering...desecration of a church?
It seemed like maybe they'd been doing this a while.
But he had names now, the men in the 1967 Chevy Impala were Sam and Dean Winchester, and they were trying to save the world.
~~~
The next day there was nothing on TV but the news, a scrolling mess of footage and interviews looped every few hours, with new stuff occasionally added in. Billy knew because he watched it all day.
It seemed the real world had finally made it from the net to the networks. The lid was off and once everyone was already panicking someone had to tell them to stop. If only so they could delude themselves into thinking everything was ok.
But too much of the news was honest now, no one was pretending it was all a lie any more.
He left it on as background noise, a grim loop of flat, dead voices while he showered, made himself something to eat, and updated his information.
And Billy realised something then, something that the map had been telling him for days.
The Winchesters were losing, the wave was piling up ahead of them like a supernatural tsunami, red smears of ghost activity and violence, crawling and spreading on the map like a virus where they were heading.
Like they were being herded, or chased.
It looked, for all the world like the exterminators were about to be taken out.
For all the world.
Billy stared at the map for a long time.
He'd always wanted to make a difference, and sitting in this basement working on plans for massively destructive weaponry while the world slid into hell was not the way to go about it.
And it occurred to him then that he hadn't just been working on the plans, he'd been building them. In-between the news broadcasts, and the horror, he'd been arming himself for war.
The realisation stole all his breath, and he was left shaking in the dark, coming to terms with the fact that he'd already decided.
That Dr. Horrible had already decided.
The red suit was a little conspicuous. But then that was the point, and, if half the guns worked, it shouldn't matter.
He shut his laptop.
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