FIC: - Blind Spot - 6/14
Title: - Blind Spot - Chapter 6/14
Author:
pdragon76
Rating: NC-17 (language, whump, sex)
Genre: Gen
Spoilers: AU, set six months after AHBL2
Disclaimer: All things Supernatural belong to Kripke, not me (rinse & repeat).
Summary: Dean’s on a slow burn after a bloody confrontation with an old nemesis. Sam’s got his hands full picking up the pieces. The Crossroads Deal isn’t the only timer ticking. Warnings for language, whump and sex.
A/N: Chapters post Saturdays Dragons Mean Time (DMT). Some liberties have been taken with locations. Apologies to any mortified Oregonians. Mad props to my iron-fisted, velvet-gloved betas.
kimonkey7 - you relentlessly demand more from my writerly self than I am capable of giving, and sometimes you get it. For that, the Dragons is eternally in your debt.
ailleann23 - you question, you prod, you poke, you cheer, you champion, you rock. What more can I say?
Ch 1 Ch 2 Ch 3 Ch 4 Ch 5
- Blind Spot - : Chapter Six
We boil at different degrees.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Meg dragged a chair from the far wall and straddled it backwards in front of Dean, arms folded on the top.
“You know, it’s all sorts of Winchester tragic, really. Come six months time, he actually had a chance at a normal life. I mean, he would have had a chance. Demon uprising notwithstanding. He really might have been happy. Eventually.”
Demons lie. Dean shifted his boots on the floor, gave the warehouse another appraising once over. Way out, Winchester. Find it. “What the fuck would you know, you lying sack of shit.”
“What are you looking for, Dean?”
He drilled her with an arctic glare. “Whattaya think I’m lookin’ for?”
Meg sat up straight, looked affronted. “Temper, temper, Dean. You and your Daddy. Gets you boys into all sorts of trouble. Not that being nice got your brother anywhere.”
Dean was running out of patience. “You know what? You don’t know shit about my brother, bitch.”
Meg put a palm to her chest, blinked. “Dean, it hurts to hear you say that. I don’t know shit about your brother? Oh, honey, you’re killin’ me here.” She cocked her face a little, placed a thoughtful finger against her chin. “Let’s see. Do we wanna talk about the desperately unhappy off-load about big brother in the bus depot?” She clapped her hands, pointed at him. “Or wait. No. I got it. I say we go with the Sam who wanted to pull the trigger on you back in Duluth.”
Dean chuckled, nodded. “That’s good. Nice.”
Meg rocked forward on to the back legs of the chair. “Oh, you laugh. But deep down? You knew there was something wrong with your brother, Dean. And speaking as someone who’s had a front row seat? I did you a favor.” Meg dropped the chair back on to all fours, looked suddenly bored. “That kid had a black pit inside him.”
“You know, you can keep talkin’, but bullshit is bullshit, Meg. And I don’t give a fuck what you think you know about my brother.”
“I know he begged for your life, not his. How’s that bullshit taste?”
The inside of Dean’s mouth was suddenly desert-dry. His wrists twitched against the ties behind the chair, and he thought about wrapping his hands around the smooth skin of her throat. It made his fingers tingle.
It was tidal, this rage. His voice was thick with it. “Your little demon friends are gonna be scraping you up with a fuckin’ spatula when I’m done with you.”
“My little demon friends are going to be drinking your blood in Hell, Dean. Your brother was damaged goods. Guaranteed, the guy would’ve had his hands bloody by year’s end.” Meg sighed. “It would have been fucking beautiful to watch.”
Dean snapped. He wrenched on his bound hands, felt the plastic slice flesh, and had a fleeting, irrational thought: If it costs me my hands to get at her, I can live with that. The pain in his shoulder brought the plan to an involuntary halt and he had to close his eyes, curse down into his lap. When he looked up, he threw it all at her; all the frustration and pain and anger in one shouted question:
“So, why the fuck would you have killed him, then?”
Meg got up and came over to him. Dean fixed eyes on her empty chair, forced the air in and out through his twitching lips. This was beyond anger. This was primal. Darker. He was quaking with it. And he knew the feeling was entirely reciprocated.
“Because it amused me, Dean. That’s why. There’re plenty of other monsters in the world. You just happened to love this one.”
**********************************************************************************************
Marcus Kane had the kind of quiet confidence about him that was the by-product of good breeding and an expensive college education. Dean’s dislike for him was instantaneous, spurred on by the Geek Squad V-neck sweater Captain KickMyAss folded carefully over the back of his chair. In fact, at first glance, his entire wardrobe looked lifted from the Sam Winchester 2004 collection.
Dean wanted to do the guy a favor and squirt him with lighter fluid, send him up now before he sat down and flashed any checkered socks.
Sam - surprise, surprise - could spot a fellow nerd from a thousand yards. When Jo introduced them, he stood obligingly and shook Marcus’s hand so hard the guy winced. Dean conveniently hid his delight in a quiet belch and a polite palm across his lips. He headed off Marcus and his extended hand at the pass with a tight smile and a wave across the table. Sam shot him a disapproving look, clearly demanding a baseline of civility. Dean returned fire with a mouthed What?, bunched his features to indicate the required social grace was beyond him.
Sam shook his head, smiled apologetically at Marcus. “Sorry. My brother’s a bit of an asshole.”
Dean folded his arms on the table in front of him, leaned forward, and gave Marcus the full wattage when he smiled, nose twitching. “Runs in the family.”
Sam raised his eyebrows. “Are you done?” He turned to Marcus. “He does this. Pissing on the furniture, I mean.” Then back to Dean: “You wanna stick your nose up his ass, too?”
Dean turned his head slowly and made the kind of lazy eye contact with his brother that suggested he could keep going all night. If that was what Sam wanted.
“Why don’t you stick it up your ass, Sam?”
Jo slapped the files in the middle of the table between them, eyebrow arching. “So, you’re still rubber and he’s still glue. Good to know. Can we get on with this, before a plague is unleashed and we all die ugly?”
Dean gave Jo and Marcus a reasonably accurate description of the events at River Grove the previous year. He got a little creative around the end, but by the time he was done they were up to speed on everything, barring Sam’s brush with the infected nurse.
“And you guys think this thing out at Timber, this is the same?”
Sam nodded. “It looks likely. Judging from the information Jo’s given us, the stuff you guys pulled together. You got reports here of violent assaults, disappearances en masse. The CDCs jumped on this, but I don’t really think they’ll have a clue what they’ve got and until they do, they’ll keep the quarantine in place and the roadblocks up. You had a few of first infected come through the ER at a medical center here in Portland with the CDC guys, so we’ll check that out, see what they came up with.”
“So, why is this happening again?”
Dean thumbed the edge of the label on his beer, duck billed his lips. He glanced at Sam, then back at Marcus. “Honestly? We don’t know. All the evidence at River Grove disappeared. We never really got to the bottom of it.”
“So do we know the mortality rate on this? Or how long it takes? I mean, the infected wife - how long between when she was infected and point of death?” Marcus was looking a little stunned.
Dean took a swig of his beer. “Take up’s about three hours. We dunno for sure it’s fatal.”
Marcus shook his head, confused. “What do you mean, you don’t know?”
Dean shrugged. “I mean, we dunno. The virus didn’t kill her. I shot her. Everyone else kinda disappeared. So we dunno.”
Marcus executed a horrified double-take in Dean’s direction. “I thought you said you had her contained.”
Dean glanced at Sam before he answered, ignored the reservation he saw in his brother’s eyes. He sniffed, brought his beer to his lips. “We did.” He paused, took a pull while the implications of that settled. “You don’t wanna get shit on those shoes, Marcus, door’s to your left.”
Marcus looked to Jo for his cue, but her attention was elsewhere. Dean turned into her appraising gaze, returned the eye contact with a long, unblinking stare.
“Don’t tell me you’ve spent the last year danglin’ string in front of kittens, Jo.”
She raised her eyebrows. “No,” she said slowly, “I haven’t. Please tell me you haven’t been stepping on them.”
Dean curled a lip at that, almost laughed, and his brother dipped his brow across the table. Sam gave him a miniscule shake of the head: What the fuck is wrong with you?
Dean reached out and grabbed the manila folder from the middle of the table. He slapped it down in front of him, opened it.
“Fine. Screw the cats.” He glanced at Marcus. “Still with us there, buddy?”
Dean waited for Marcus’s wary nod of confirmation, then he clucked his cheek and clapped his hands once, rubbed his palms together. “Okay then.” He looked up at Sam. “I think I got a plan.”
**********************************************************************************************
They split up in the parking lot. Sam wanted to check out the hospital records at the Medical Center, and Dean was eager to give Timber a scout. When Sam suggested he take Jo with him, Dean opened his mouth to protest. Sam yanked him aside and made it perfectly clear it wasn’t up for discussion.
“Unless you wanna come with me and spend a few very boring hours cracking into a hospital database, you’re taking Jo.”
Dean’s face was pinched with annoyance. “Dude, I’ve totally got this. You take ‘em both.”
“No way. You tricked me into this, Dean. I am five different kinds of angry at you right now, so yeah - I’m calling the shots on this one, and we’re playin’ my rules.”
Dean saw the set of his face and changed tack. “Then, they can go play computer geeks, and you come with me. Come on, man. I’m not gonna be babysat by Jo Harvelle. Christ.”
“Yes, you are.” Sam ducked a little to catch Dean’s rolling eyes. “Hey, you’re the one in ultra-stealth mode right now. And since you don’t want to tell them exactly what we’re looking for, makes it a little difficult to send them off on a recon, Dean. Besides, this guy’s a bookworm. Shit hits the fan, he’s gonna splatter. Jo can handle herself in a tight spot, and if I can’t be there to watch your back, she’s my next best option right now. So those are your choices. We all go to the hospital, or you take Jo with you to Timber.”
Dean glared at him long enough to realize Sam’s anger outweighed his own by a good ton or so. He held out his hand.
“Fine, but I’m taking the Impala,” he snapped childishly.
Sam handed over the keys without complaint. “Fine.”
“Fine.”
Marcus was making a tentative approach towards them. “Problem, guys?”
Sam smiled wide, lost the hard, blunt offensive. “No problem. We’re just thinking we can cover some more ground if we maybe split up. Two of us hit the hospital, Jo and Dean head to Timber, take a look around.”
Marcus shrugged, looked back at Jo. She nodded. “Okay. Whatever.”
Sam raised his eyebrows. “How’s your Windows-based espionage?”
Marcus grinned large, looked from Jo back to Sam. “Are you kidding me? You mean, like, breaking into the hospital records? Isn’t that a little…illegal?”
Dean toggled his head, the corner of his lips twitching downward. “No more than the B&E to getcha in there. Sam knows his stuff. You’ll be fine.” He rubbed his hands together. Forced a smile, eyebrows arching in Jo’s direction. “Up for a drive?”
Jo nodded, and Dean could tell from her smile she knew this was grating on him. She threw her keys to Sam, pushed off from the hood of her car. “First gear sticks. You gotta take off in second. Good luck finding reverse.”
Sam snatched the keys out of the air. “Oh, goody.”
Dean narrowed his eyes as she passed him on the way to the Impala, and her grin widened.
Cocky little bitch. He raised an eyebrow at Sam and Marcus as he turned and backed towards the Impala.
“Motel, say…one o’clock? Enough time for ya, Mitnick?”
Sam checked his watch, nodded. “Should be plenty. You’ve had a long day, Dean. Watch your back.”
There was nothing soft about the way he said it, and Dean knew Sam’s calm demeanor was for Jo and Marcus’s benefit alone. Sam was angry, and it was the type of mad that made him clear and intelligent and infuriatingly difficult to argue with. And man, oh man - that Sam never let up.
Dean hated that Sam.
**********************************************************************************************
They didn’t have much in the way of conversation for the first twenty miles. Dean was doing some internal prep work for the verbal ass kicking Sam was going to give him later. Jo seemed content staring out the window, elbow resting on the door frame and a lock of blonde hair in her mouth.
Eventually, Dean’s curiosity won out. “So, how’d you hook up with this Marcus guy?”
Jo blew the hair out of her mouth and shrugged. “Actually? He knows your friend, Bobby. First job I took up here, I needed information on some ruins, so I call home. Mom didn’t know anyone, so she called Bobby. Bobby says Marcus is my go-to guy, so…I got to.”
“Huh.”
“Huh, what?”
“So, you fuckin’ him or what?”
Jo blinked at him. “I am so not answering that.”
Dean chuckled. “I’ll take that as a yes.”
Jo folded her arms, twisted on the seat. “What makes you think I’m fucking him?”
Dean gave her an appraising glance, still highly amused. He turned his attention back to the road. “Oh, yeah. He’s slapping the Harvelle ham.”
“You’re a pig, you know that?” Jo threw out a sharp backhand, caught him in the ribs before he could drop his arm from the wheel to deflect it. He flinched, dipped a little around the blow and caught the grunt in time, but not the grimace.
None of it was lost on Jo.
She didn’t say anything, watched him while he bit his lip and slowly straightened. He gave the windshield a few long-suffering blinks.
“Bounced on a job, huh?” she said finally.
Dean ran a finger under his nose, sniffed, and didn’t respond. He was aware of Jo nodding slowly on the other side of the car.
“So are you gonna tell me what happened?”
“Nope.”
Jo was nodding again. “That bad, huh?”
He didn’t answer.
“I’ll take that as a yes.”
Dean shot her a look that could shear bolts.
She threw her hands up. “Okay. Leaving it. Dropping and backing away.”
They drove in an uncomfortable silence for a while. In the end, Dean let it go.
“So, have you been out here yet?”
“Yeah. Two days ago. I couldn’t get very close, though. There were a lot of people around.”
“Okay, but we know this thing’s run its course, right?”
“Well, they still have the roadblocks up, but they’re saying the situation is-” Jo hung a couple of quotation marks in the air with her fingers. “-resolved.”
“You’re sure.”
“That’s what they’re saying.”
“Yeah, well, what they’re saying and what’s actually happening… If we run into anyone who’s infected-”
“I don’t think so.”
“I don’t wanna get caught off guard. This thing’s messy, Jo.”
“I get that. I just…as far as I can tell, it’s over. My contact at the CDC said they were just holding off on going in there ‘til they knew what they were dealing with.”
He huffed off a laugh at that. “Yeah, right. Well, unless they’re testing for a major demon ass-fucking…”
Jo pointed to the turn off coming up. “Here it is.”
Dean touched the brake, slowed to a crawl as they passed the junction. He ducked a little, stared through the window past Jo. The lights of the roadblock blinked in the distance.
“How far down is that?”
Jo shook her head. “Like, maybe two miles. Not far.”
“And the farmhouse? The one they think it started in. That’s like, another five miles south, yes? Can we cut across on foot through the woods? Is that do-able? It’s just the roadblocks, right?”
“Yeah. I think so.”
Dean pulled the car over onto the shoulder, threw a u-turn back towards the junction. “You got a lot of thinks so’s and maybe’s, Jo.” He shook his head. “I can do without a blind run right now. Anything else I need to know before we do this?” He turned down the road towards the lights.
“I don’t thi-”
“Jo, I swear to God.” Dean’s knuckles whitened on the steering wheel.
“Nope. Nothing else.”
Dean reached across her and punched open the glove box, pulled out the state map and dropped it into her lap.
“Open that up, will ya?”
“Why?”
“Just open it up. Follow my lead.” Jesus. Just do it.
Dean slowed down as they approached the roadblock. He stopped the car completely when a cop stepped up into the headlights, hand out. The officer rounded the hood and tapped on the window. Dean smiled through the glass as he cranked it down.
“Evening there, Officer…” Dean squinted at his badge. “...Duncraig. What’s goin’ on?”
The cop sent the beam of his flashlight across Jo and the map, then back to Dean. “We got a roadblock. Can’t let you through. Where you folks headed?”
Dean used the time he was talking to scout the roadblock, turned his attention back to the Officer as he finished speaking. He had a sudden hankering for his brother. Angry or no, Sam played wingman like a fucking quarterback. He just took the ball and ran, no questions asked.
Jo, on the other hand…
Dean gave the cop an apologetic smile. “Look, honestly? My girlfriend and I are havin’ a bit of an argument here and she’s being this…” he turned and addressed Jo for the next, “...stubborn fucking bitch with the map.” He looked back at the cop, gave him a humorless smile. “Be a pal, tell me how many hundreds of miles I’ve missed the turn off to Buxton by?”
*********************************************************************************************
Sam stopped at a gas station before they hit the hospital, bought a bunch of flowers from the stand near the counter. He handed them to Marcus as he slid back behind the wheel.
Marcus frowned at the flowers, looked back at Sam, his face a question mark.
Sam sniffed off a laugh. “Hospital gift store’ll be closed.”
Marcus was a little slow on the uptake.
Sam pointed to the flowers. “First rule of breaking and entering, Marcus. Leave the balaclava at home.”
Sam called the hospital reception desk from his cell and asked for the oncology ward. He kept the yarn simple; tech working late at the lab, confusion over paperwork. By the time he hung up, he had a legitimate patient name and date of birth in the event they had to do any fast talking.
In the parking lot he killed the engine, turned to Marcus with a smile. “Okay. Hold the flowers where they can see them. Look worried.” He pointed at Marcus’s face. “That’s good. What you’re doing now. Keep your mouth shut, let me do the talking.”
In the end, they didn’t need the flowers or the name. The reception desk was unattended. They crossed the dimmed foyer to the elevators without impediment. Sam was so unaccustomed to this sort of extraordinary stroke of luck that he gave the departmental listing on the wall beside the elevators a friendly thump with his fist as he scanned it.
“Thank you, HR cutbacks,” he muttered, as he dropped a hand to the elevator call button.
**********************************************************************************************
“You carrying?” Dean asked as he opened the trunk.
“I got my knife.”
He held out his hand. “Hand it over.”
Jo frowned at him. “Excuse me?”
“Come on, let’s go. Hand it over.” He lifted the twelve-gauge out of the trunk, felt the weight of it through his ribs and the damaged muscles in his chest. Whatever he’d said to Sam, he’d lied. He wasn’t going to be racking a shotgun tonight. He held it out to Jo in exchange for her knife, but she folded her arms, raised her eyebrows.
“You’re giving me your shotgun?”
Dean couldn’t hold it out any longer. He winced, dropped the butt onto the lip of the trunk and leaned on it.
“Jo, listen to me. I got a couple of busted ribs and my shoulder’s fucked. If we need to use this quick, I can’t.” When she made no move to take it, he kept going. “This virus’s transferred by blood. I’m telling you right now, if you’re close enough to use a knife, you’re too close to use it.” He thrust the gun at her again, face impassive.
He suddenly remembered the initials on the knife she’d shown him in Pennsylvania, understood the reluctance in her face. “It’s just goin’ in trunk. It’ll be safe.”
She handed the knife over reluctantly, took the shotgun. Dean threw the blade in on top of the rest of the gear and fished out a flashlight and a spare clip for the Glock. He pocketed the clip as he closed the lid. Dean stood the flashlight on the trunk while he checked the clip in the Glock. He dipped his left shoulder, grimaced a little as he slipped the gun down the back of his jeans.
It was a fifteen minute hike through the woods in the dark before they came out on the eastern side of the property, about a hundred yards south of the homestead. They followed the fence-line back, cut across the paddock.
Thirty yards from the house, Dean lifted the Glock out of his jeans. He chambered it, brought the muzzle up and covered them the last open stretch across the grass.
He took the porch stairs in two strides and slid to a stop against the wall beside the door, caught his breath. Holy crap, I’m out of shape.
“You okay?” Jo whispered, tugged on the elbow of his jacket.
Dean nodded, closed his eyes. In through the nose, out through the mouth. Jesus. “I’m fine. Just gimme a sec.”
Jo brushed passed, shotgun in hand, and peered through the darkened window beside him. “I can’t see anything,” she said quietly. “I don’t think anyone’s here. I don’t think anyone’s anywhere.”
Dean sized up the door, tried the handle, and then fished his pick out of his jacket.
He wasn’t in any shape to be putting boot to door. Half a minute in, he was wishing for Sam again because truth be told, he possessed neither the patience nor the finesse for speedy tumbler manipulation. Sam had this shit down to a fine art. Like reading, and the rest of the dull as fucking dishwater crap that came with the job.
Behind him, Jo whispered: “Sometime today, Dean?”
Dean twisted, wished he hadn’t. He palmed his protesting ribs and winced. “I’m gonna stab you to death with this pick, Jo.”
When it popped a second later, he looked back at her smugly and turned the handle. See, you stupid bitch? I got it.
She smiled condescendingly, pointed at the door. Pay attention, she mouthed at him as she brought the shotgun up to her shoulder.
“’Kay, straight sweep, one room at a time. You’re gonna move, I need eye contact and a hand signal, so I know about it and I can cover you.” He chopped the air with the side of his hand, demonstrated. “Same goes here. If I’m moving, you’ve got my ass. Understand?”
Jo nodded tightly. Dean clenched his fingers around the stock of his gun, released and tightened them again. He exhaled once, sharply, focused and pointed the Glock at the porch boards as he stood and flattened himself against the wall beside the door. He lifted his knee, angled out a little with his lower leg and hesitated.
“You see anything moving in there that isn’t me, drop it. Got it?”
Jo nodded again, and Dean leaned forward, brought his boot back against the door hard.
**********************************************************************************************
“Oh, my God.” Marcus’s voice was filled with awe. “That took you, what? Ten seconds?”
Sam shrugged the satchel off his shoulder on to the office desk, pulled out his laptop.
“Locks, I’m good with,” he agreed. “If I can get to them before Dean. He usually kicks a boot through them before the pick’s out of my pocket.” He turned on the laptop, shook his head at the screen as it flickered through start-up. “All brawn, no brain,” he muttered.
Marcus sniggered, and Sam had a sudden hypocritical urge to smack the guy in the mouth. That’s my brother you’re laughing at, asshole.
The laptop threw a moody splash of blue up into the room, and Sam twisted; looked at the square of frosted glass on the office door. “This light might be a problem. Keep an eye on the door for me, will ya? You hear anyone coming, gimme a heads up and I’ll kill it.”
Marcus crossed to the door, and Sam spent a few minutes hooking up cables in the dim light afforded by the screen. He played around with the computer system in the office until he had an interface running with the laptop.
The hospital database took a little longer than the door.
“So, you guys do this sort of thing for a living, then?” Marcus glanced through the crack of the door, then back at Sam. He shook his head. “I can’t believe I’m doing this.”
Sam sniffed off a laugh. “It’s not exactly a living, Marcus. Doesn’t pay very well or very often. If you’ve got a day job, I highly recommend keeping it.”
“I work at the university. I’m a Research Assistant. History department.”
Sam’s smile grew wider. “No kidding? How’d you get messed up with Jo Harvelle?”
“I translated some religious texts for a guy named Bobby Singer a couple of years back-”
Sam made a surprised noise. “No shit? Bobby Singer? We just left his place, like three days ago.”
“Yeah, Jo said. I hadn’t spoken to him in about eighteen months, then he calls me out of the blue and says he’s got a friend up here needs a hand with some paperwork and can I help? So I say sure, and next thing I know, Jo’s in my office and my whole world is kind of tipped upside down.”
“Yeah, well. This stuff takes a bit of getting used to, for sure.” Sam squinted up over the laptop. Hang on. “Are we talking about demons or Jo, here?”
Marcus smiled, and the penny dropped.
“Oh. Are you two…?”
“Sort of. Yeah. I think.”
Holy crap. Dean’s gonna have a field day with that. He’s gonna crucify her.
Sam nodded, the corner of his lips twitching downward. “Oh. Okay. I mean, that’s good. Jo’s great.”
“Yeah, she is, huh?” Marcus was silent for a second. “Did she and Dean ever…?”
Sam grimaced. “What? No. God, no. I mean, I’m sure he’s thought about it. Dean’d fuck a cinder block, but…no. Jo’s mom, Ellen? She’s a good friend. They’re both just good friends.”
Marcus nodded. “It’s just…I kinda got the impression your brother didn’t like me very much.”
Sam shrugged. “Yeah, sorry about that. Dean’s not real great at the meet-and-greet. And we’re not really getting along right now either, which probably doesn’t help.” He scratched the side of his nose. “Okay, I think I’m in here. This shouldn’t take long.”
“What are we looking for anyway?”
Sam raised his eyebrows at the screen, picked his words carefully. “Aaaah… medical reports. Patient charts. Test results. Most of the first cases came here so… I don’t know. Anything that’ll clue us in on exactly what this virus is, what they’ve found. We’re at a bit of a disadvantage since the sulfur residue seems to just disappear after a while. It only lasted a few hours in the samples the doctor took back at River Grove.”
Sam ran a search by date, saved everything he could find from the admits between the dates specified. He clicked through the patient charts while he waited for the lab database to trawl through his search parameters. Public hospital. It was taking forever. Chart, after chart, after chart. Deceased, deceased, deceased.
They were all dead.
Why the hell am I not dead?
**********************************************************************************************
Dean had run across his fair share of decomposing bodies in his time. It’d been a while since he lost his lunch over one.
Louisana. Graveyard dig with a monster hangover. Sam puked down the headstone, and then I tossed my cookies over the dead chick in Louisiana.
Point being, he knew a corpse when he smelled one.
“You see it?” He threw the question to Jo as he swept the first room with the flashlight, Glock trained down the beam.
“See what?”
Dean could see her face in the moonlight from the window. She looked like she was going to cry. Or puke. Maybe both.
“Body.”
“No, but I can smell it.” Her voice was unsteady.
“Yeah. Rainforest fresh, huh?” He motioned her down the hallway with the flashlight.
“I think I’m gonna throw up,” she said as she passed him, and Dean shook his head.
“Don’t. Please. You go, I go. Sam gets me every time.” He swallowed, salivary glands on overdrive. Don’t puke. No puking. Mountain breeze. Mountain breeze. Smellin’ a mountain breeze.
The dead guy was in the back bedroom, hosting a gathering of flies. The stench blasted Dean at the door, tickled his gag reflex. He dipped the muzzle of the Glock a little, buried his mouth and nose in the leather at his right shoulder until he got his stomach under control. He gave the body a wide berth, crossed through the room and cleared the closet, then motioned Jo back out and to the left down the hallway.
The rest of the house was empty. In the kitchen, Jo dropped the shotgun down at her side and covered her mouth with her hand.
“Oh, my God.”
Dean hooked his gun in the back of his jeans with a grimace. “I know. I gotta go back and take a look. I think we’re clear here. If you wanna wait outside…”
Jo shook her head. “No, it’s okay. I’ll come.”
Dean undid a couple of his shirt buttons, hoiked the collar up and pressed it against his mouth and nose as he headed down the hallway. He passed the flashlight over the walls, noticed the waist-height, bloody smear that ran the length of the hall.
“Jesus.” Jo said it through her fingers, a few feet behind him.
Dean raised an eyebrow. “Yeah,” he said quietly into his shirt.
Back in the bedroom, he stopped at the doorway and started there with the flashlight. He worked his way in, beam tracking methodically over the walls, floor, furniture. There was blood spatter on every surface, concentrated near the body. A desk in the corner, upturned chair on the floor beside it. When the flashlight bounced off the desk lamp, Dean paused, then crossed to it. He flipped the Maglite barrel in his hand and used the end to flick the switch.
The lamp came on, spilled a paltry yellow glow around the room. Dean spun the flashlight in his hand again, turned it off and pocketed it.
“What if someone sees?” Jo pointed to the window.
Dean squatted beside the body, gripped his shirt a little tighter against his face. He looked up at her. “As opposed to the flashlight?” His voice was muffled by the fabric. “I don’t think it’s gonna make a difference. Just keep an eye on the hallway.”
Whatever had happened to the guy, it had been messy. Dean glanced at the blood spatter on the wall, up on the ceiling, and winced. There was a lot of the stuff sprayed around. Under any other circumstances, Dean would have been tempted to turn him over, but he wasn’t willing to risk touching him.
The smell was starting to get to him again. Tossed in with the bloated, Technicolor visual feast, Dean was having a hard time keeping it together. He twisted a little on the balls of his feet, closed his eyes and breathed against his shoulder.
When he looked back, Jo was staring down at the body, decidedly green in the jaundiced glow of the room.
“Jo, you alright?” Dean barely got the words out, and she was turning away. He heard her puking in the hallway, and it sent him hauling ass up and to the window. When he got there he forgot about leaving prints and threw up the sliding wooden frame with both hands.
He hung over the sill for a while on his forearms, retching into the garden bed below the window. When he tried to pull it together and head back in, the first waft of decomposing dead guy sent him straight out for another round.
Dean waited till he was pretty sure there were only organs left to lose, and made a shaky re-entry into the room. He closed the window, leaned against the sill, ribs and chest throbbing from the violent muscular workout.
He felt like shit. The hand he raked down his face came away wet, and he wiped it down the leg of his jeans. You need some air, Winchester. Move it.
He was passing the body on the floor when it moved. Dean pivoted, hand going for the Glock. He backed up fast, had his finger against the trigger and the muzzle trained on the corpse by time he felt the drywall against his shoulder blades.
The dead guy was still. Dean stared down his arms, fought for control over the adrenal tremor quaking the Glock in his hands. He was breathing hard, his sense of smell momentarily overridden by the immediacy of the threat.
What the fuck..?
He stayed there long enough to realize he’d imagined it. The gun got heavy in his hands, and he could feel the strain of the entire night through his shoulder, his chest, and his ribs. He was suddenly aware of the smell again, and when he dipped his nose to his upper arm seeking relief… the fucking dead guy moved again.
He snapped back to attention, closed his finger on the trigger - CRACK! - stepped forward into the second - CRACK! - then third - CRACK! - shot. There was a thumping in the hallway and he turned, swung the pistol up as Jo came into the room, shotgun leading.
Dean nearly blew her head off. He caught the twitch of his finger against the trigger, turned and dropped the muzzle back to the corpse on the floor.
“Jesus, Dean - what!” Jo’s voice was wild.
Dean didn’t answer. Couldn’t.
You just nearly killed her, you fuckin’ rookie. You just nearly blew her head off.
He was shaking, thought his knees were going to give. The end of the Glock was jumping violently in his hands.
He got the words out on a shuddering breath. “I thought he moved.”
Jo’s voice went up a couple of octaves. “Well, did he?”
Dean’s face scrunched in confusion. “I dunno. No. I don’t think so.”
“Well, you shot him.”
“I know.”
“So did he move or not?”
Dean stepped back, found the wall with his shoulder, leaned against it. He relaxed the Glock, looked over at Jo.
“I think I need to get outta here.”
He could have done without the hike back to the car. Each step jarred and pulsed through his abused shoulder. Every breath was glancing white-hot off his fractured ribs. The gashes in his chest were throbbing, felt tight and aggravated. He thought about the bottle of Vicodin sitting on the bathroom counter back at the motel room, wished he’d had the foresight to bring it with him. When he thought about it, he hadn’t downed any since lunchtime. Twelve hours.
Not your brightest move today, asshole.
He limp-stumbled the last mile to the car on auto-pilot, and when they got there he palmed the hood and puked beside the front tire.
“Dean, where are the keys?” Jo was going through his pockets.
He coughed, spat a stringy mix of spit and bile down between his boots. “What?”
“Look at you. You can’t drive.”
Dean shook his head. “Oh, no. No way.”
She found the keys in the front pocket of his jeans. Dean pushed off from the hood, slapped at her prying fingers.
“Get off me.” He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, snorted back and swallowed a chunk of something unpleasant. Jo tugged the keys loose and Dean said it again: “No way.”
She steered him to the passenger door, opened it. “Get in, you stubborn ass. I promise not to enjoy it.” She kicked at the back of his knee, took the optional out of his seating arrangements. Then she shut the door on him and rounded the hood to the driver side.
“Much,” she added, sliding behind the wheel. She turned the engine over and the Impala rumbled to life. “I promise not to enjoy this much.”
**********************************************************************************************
When they pulled up outside the motel, Jo nudged his arm and sent a throbbing, jarring flash through every damaged part of him. He clenched his teeth, didn’t open his eyes.
“Dean, can you get out?”
Sure. Just gimme about four Vicodin and twenty minutes. “Get Sam.” He’s gonna kill me.
A couple of minutes later, he heard Sam’s palm slap on the Impala’s hood and then the door opened. Dean cracked his heavy lids.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hey.” Absence had done nothing in the way of fostering fondness. Sam’s voice was steely. “What the hell?”
“Dude, please don’t be a shit about this. I just need a Vicodin and a coupla minutes, okay? Please?”
Sam leaned into the car, gripped Dean below the jaw a little harder than was necessary, and glanced at his watch. He passed the back of his free hand across Dean’s forehead, thumbed back his eyelid. Dean bit his teeth together when they started to clatter.
Crap. That’s not good.
He heard the quiet Fuck under Sam’s breath, suddenly felt a change in subject matter was called for. He grabbed blindly at the weather.
“S’it cold? I’m cold. You cold?”
“You’re cold ‘cause you’re in shock,” Sam muttered. He sighed, wiped his nose with the back of his hand, and squinted at Dean. “Dumbass.” He twisted out of the car. “Jo, there’s a bottle of Vicodin in the bathroom, do me a favor, please, and grab it? Some water, too.”
He turned back to Dean. “You hurt anywhere I don’t know about?”
Dean shook his head. “No. I just…we had to hike to the farmhouse and… that Glock, man? S’really heavy.”
Sam screwed up his nose. “Dude, you stink like puke.”
The chuckle hurt, but Dean couldn’t help it. “Hey, Jo started it.” It reminded him of the body in the house, and he looked up sharply at Sam. “There was a corpse in there, Sammy. I mean, it was nasty. They either missed it or, I dunno. We gotta go back out there tomorrow, see what’s what.”
Jo came back with the Vicodin and a bottle of water. Sam tapped three of the pills into his palm and shook his head. “Dude, I’m about to give you a rhino-sized dose of painkiller. The only thing on your agenda tomorrow’s a Vicodin hangover. Open.”
Dean took the pills between his lips, and Sam pressed the water bottle into his right hand.
“You got it?” Sam asked him. Dean nodded.
Jo leaned on the door. “Sam, I’m really sorry. I didn’t realize how bad he was till we got back to the car. I mean, he didn’t seem that bad.”
“Yeah,” Sam said, fixing Dean with a pointed stare, “he’s good at that. It’s not your fault, Jo. I shoulda nixed it. It was a stupid idea.”
Dean fumbled with the water bottle, and Sam snatched it out of his hand. “Jesus Christ, Dean.”
Oh, he is so mad at me. “Sorry,” Dean mumbled, took a sip of the water and downed the pills when Sam tilted the bottle against his lips.
Sam left him in the car for a while. Dean could see him leaning against the hood of the Impala through the windshield, heard him talking to Jo and Marcus. He made out something about the hospital records, but then the conversation got fuzzy, hard to track.
By the time Sam poked his head back into the car and asked him how he was doing, he was feeling well and truly plastered.
“’M’preedy goo.”
“Preedy goo, huh?” Sam seemed to think that was funny, and it was, when Dean got to thinking about it. He chuckled, let his eyes dip shut on the tail end of the laugh. Sam tapped his cheek. “Hey, Dean. Look at me.”
Dean blinked up at him. “Y’am.”
“Okay, you’re toasted. Ready to come inside?”
“Dafta stannup?” The inside of the car was shifting like a tilt-a-whirl.
“Yeah, but it’s okay. I gotcha.”
“You gommee?”
“Yeah, Dean.” Sam grabbed a fistful of his jacket, pulled. “I gotcha.”
**********************************************************************************************
Jo made coffee while Sam dumped Dean on his bed. He flipped his brother’s boots off, peeled his jacket carefully down one arm, then the other, and rolled him into a half-assed recovery position.
He threw a blanket over the whole mess and pressed a palm against Dean’s clammy forehead. “Alright. You okay there?”
Dean flickered a brow, made a slack-jawed, torpid noise that could have been yes, or no, or fluent donkey.
Sam nodded. “You’re okay.” He got up, crossed the motel room to the table where Marcus and Jo were sitting.
Marcus nodded in Dean’s direction. “Shouldn’t we be taking him to a hospital?”
Sam sighed, rubbed his eye. “Yes.” He took the coffee Jo offered, blinked at her. “What happened out there?”
Jo shrugged. “I don’t know. He was fine. We swung past the roadblock, took a look. Parked and hiked out to the farmhouse on Joolimar. Then there was the dead body, I puked, he puked. Then he freaked out and shot the guy.”
Sam shook his head tightly. “W-w-wait. Dean shot who?”
“The dead guy.”
Sam opened his mouth, shut it again. He was tired, clearly not following the conversation. He blinked long, tried again. “Sorry, back it up. Did Dean shoot this guy or was he already dead?”
“No. He was already dead. Trust me. Like, days ago.” Jo screwed her face up, showed him her teeth. “It was gross.”
“Then why did he shoot him?”
Jo let go of her mug, showed Sam both palms. “Don’t look at me. I was puking out on the porch. I hear the gun going off and when I get back in there, he nearly blows my head off, and he’s babbling about the body moving.”
Sam’s face creased in consternation. He swung around and looked at Dean, then back at Jo. “He’s what?”
“He said the body moved.”
Sam’s eyebrows shot up. “Well, did it?”
Jo turned her palms skyward. “I don’t know. I don’t think so. I mean, it couldn’t have, right? Could it?”
Sam chewed his lip. It wasn’t possible. Which means…
Jo shrugged. “Sam, I think he was just... I think he just freaked out. I don’t think it moved.”
…Dean just lost it. Shot a dead body. Great.
“You don’t look very surprised.”
Sam snapped clean of the thought, looked at Marcus. “What?”
He coughed. “I said: you don’t look very surprised.”
Jo was looking at Sam reproachfully. “What exactly happened on your last job, Sam?”
Sam pinched the bridge of his nose, felt like he was going to shatter the coffee mug in his other hand.
“Sam, he pointed a gun at me. If he’s twitchy, I need to know. I deserve to know.”
She was right. He needed to fill her in. He sat down heavily at the table.
“We had a run-in with a demon.”
Jo shrugged. “And?”
“One we’ve got some history with.” Sam said it carefully, eyes on Jo, and she was quick on the uptake. She stiffened visibly.
“What kind of a run-in, Sam?” Jo glanced at Dean. “Was this you? Did you hurt him?” The accusation was plain and raw, and it felt like a slap. Sam knew that forgiveness was just epoxy. If you held broken things up to the light, the cracks were still there. But however natural the leap she had taken, it still stung.
“No,” he said vehemently. “It wasn’t me.”
“So, the demon’s in another body?”
“Her name’s Meg Masters.”
Jo’s eyebrows shot up. “She? Her name is Meg? The demon’s name is Meg?”
Sam let her go, be outraged at the ridiculousness of it. She was entitled.
“Look, Jo, it wasn’t a job. We were running a favor for Bobby, she grabbed Dean while I was doing a pick-up.”
Jo’s face was ashen. “What do you mean, grabbed?”
Sam rubbed his mouth, stared at his coffee mug. He nodded slowly. “I mean messy. She had him about thirty six hours, give or take.” He cleared his throat. “I don’t think she wasted any of them.”
Jo eyes traveled to Dean on the bed. When she looked back at Sam, he could see something stricken in her eyes, and felt a surge of guilty responsibility for it. “So, where is she now?”
Sam wished he had something else to tell her. “I don’t know.”
“That’s not what I wanted to hear, Sam.”
“I know.”
Marcus cleared his throat, held up an inquiring finger. “Um, sorry, who is Meg?”
**********************************************************************************************
It wasn’t Sam. He knew it wasn’t.
But he called it Sam. Didn’t mean to. Right before he felt the second rib go, it came out of him. He wheezed: “Stop, Sam. Please.”
And Sam curled his lip, told him he could go to Hell.
**********************************************************************************************
Sam jerked awake at 4:57am, took a second to figure out it was Dean making the God-awful, spine-grating noise. He rolled out of bed, had enough foresight to slide a hand beneath Dean’s pillow and retrieve the Bowie knife. But apparently, Dean was fine without it. When Sam shook him, he snapped up with perfect hard right and caught Sam square in the temple, sent him backwards onto his ass beside the bed.
Sam slapped a palm to his face. “Fuck… Dean! Wake up!”
He stayed on the carpet, let Dean get his bearings and disentangle himself from the blanket. The college smarts warned against engaging for round two with a disoriented hunter. And even in his sleep, Dean had a decent right hook. Sam’s skull was full of church bells, none of them very harmonic.
“Sam?”
Dean’s voice was stricken, breathless, and his distress dialed up a notch as his socked feet hit the carpet near Sam’s hip.
“Oh, no. Nononono. Did I just hit you?”
Dean dropped to his knees, and then he was prying Sam’s hand away from his face. Sam winced, resisted the wounded, angry urge to press a palm against Dean’s chest and shove him away.
He didn’t mean to.
“I didn’t mean to. I mean, I knew you weren’t - ”
Dean was rambling. Sam could feel the fingers at his brow were shaking.
“Great. Awesome. You’re bleeding.”
Sam pushed his hand away more roughly than he intended to. “I’m fine, leave it.”
Dean backed off, sat against the side of the bed, and dragged a hand down his face. “Jesus Christ.”
The fingers Sam tapped to his eyebrow came away bloody. “Dean, really. It’s okay, I’m fine.”
He rolled onto his knees, climbed to his feet. He wiped at his eye again, crossed to the bathroom and lifted a hand towel from the rail inside the door. Pressed the corner to the cut as he came back across the room.
“Dean, you alright?”
Dean sent a hand through his hair, shook his head as he looked up. He was red-eyed and flushed, still clearly operating under a Vicodin fog.
“I’m sorry, man. I dunno what’s goin’ on with me.”
Sam felt the anger leaching out of him. He reached down a hand. “Come on. Get up.”
It took another Vicodin to get Dean back to sleep. Sam stayed on the side of the bed while the drug smoothed the tension out of his brother, tugged him away from awareness. Then he got up and wrapped a handful of ice from the motel freezer in the towel. He sat at the table in the dark and pressed it against his brow. Tried to dispel the tight, angry grip of the muscles across his back.
Dean slept, slack and still in the same medicated fashion he’d spent those first two days at Bobby’s. Sam anchored at his bedside, the air thick with antiseptic and his own guilty regret. He’d spent those two days second guessing every overly long step he had taken to the warehouse. Waiting for Dean to find his way back to the surface.
Sam shifted his chair, legs dragging on the linoleum, stared at the wall instead. When he heard the first signs of life outside the motel room - people moving, cars starting, the day beginning - he tossed the wet towel over the back of a chair and went back to bed.
He just needs time, he told himself, as he lay there waiting for sleep to come.
They didn’t really have a lot of that.
The tick tick tick of the clock beside Sam’s bed told him so.
**********************************************************************************************
Dean woke in the afternoon with a jackhammer of a headache. When he tried to lever up off his elbow, his entire torso seized violently. He lay back, stared at the ceiling until the cramp in his muscles passed.
“Sam.”
He was alone. Dean picked up the alarm clock beside the bed, brought it close enough to his sleep-puffed eyes to squint a reading off its analogue face. Ten to three. When he replaced it on the bedside table he saw Sam’s note:
Gone to Timber. Back by 5. DON’T GET UP.
He got up. Shuffled to the bathroom and took a piss, came back into the room and sat at the kitchenette table. He pulled one of the texts from the middle of the stack there and flicked through a few pages. Thought about doing some research until he realized he was staring at the same line over and over, still had no clue what he was reading.
Sam had left the hand towel from last night over the back of the chair. Dean scratched his arm, gazed at the bloodied corner of it for a long time. Closed his eyes and shook his head.
A growing nausea sent him back to the motel mattress. He dozed, but after a second jarring transition from warehouse back to motel, he abandoned sleep. Closed his eyes and thought about Shelley’s mouth on his dick instead.
Ten minutes later he was in the bathroom, door locked, jacking off. It hurt nearly as much as it felt good, but for about ten explosive, mind-jamming seconds he didn’t care about Meg, or the deal, or the fact that he was losing his goddamn mind.
Chapter Seven
Author:
pdragon76
Rating: NC-17 (language, whump, sex)
Genre: Gen
Spoilers: AU, set six months after AHBL2
Disclaimer: All things Supernatural belong to Kripke, not me (rinse & repeat).
Summary: Dean’s on a slow burn after a bloody confrontation with an old nemesis. Sam’s got his hands full picking up the pieces. The Crossroads Deal isn’t the only timer ticking. Warnings for language, whump and sex.
A/N: Chapters post Saturdays Dragons Mean Time (DMT). Some liberties have been taken with locations. Apologies to any mortified Oregonians. Mad props to my iron-fisted, velvet-gloved betas.
kimonkey7 - you relentlessly demand more from my writerly self than I am capable of giving, and sometimes you get it. For that, the Dragons is eternally in your debt.
ailleann23 - you question, you prod, you poke, you cheer, you champion, you rock. What more can I say?
Ch 1 Ch 2 Ch 3 Ch 4 Ch 5
- Blind Spot - : Chapter Six
We boil at different degrees.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Meg dragged a chair from the far wall and straddled it backwards in front of Dean, arms folded on the top.
“You know, it’s all sorts of Winchester tragic, really. Come six months time, he actually had a chance at a normal life. I mean, he would have had a chance. Demon uprising notwithstanding. He really might have been happy. Eventually.”
Demons lie. Dean shifted his boots on the floor, gave the warehouse another appraising once over. Way out, Winchester. Find it. “What the fuck would you know, you lying sack of shit.”
“What are you looking for, Dean?”
He drilled her with an arctic glare. “Whattaya think I’m lookin’ for?”
Meg sat up straight, looked affronted. “Temper, temper, Dean. You and your Daddy. Gets you boys into all sorts of trouble. Not that being nice got your brother anywhere.”
Dean was running out of patience. “You know what? You don’t know shit about my brother, bitch.”
Meg put a palm to her chest, blinked. “Dean, it hurts to hear you say that. I don’t know shit about your brother? Oh, honey, you’re killin’ me here.” She cocked her face a little, placed a thoughtful finger against her chin. “Let’s see. Do we wanna talk about the desperately unhappy off-load about big brother in the bus depot?” She clapped her hands, pointed at him. “Or wait. No. I got it. I say we go with the Sam who wanted to pull the trigger on you back in Duluth.”
Dean chuckled, nodded. “That’s good. Nice.”
Meg rocked forward on to the back legs of the chair. “Oh, you laugh. But deep down? You knew there was something wrong with your brother, Dean. And speaking as someone who’s had a front row seat? I did you a favor.” Meg dropped the chair back on to all fours, looked suddenly bored. “That kid had a black pit inside him.”
“You know, you can keep talkin’, but bullshit is bullshit, Meg. And I don’t give a fuck what you think you know about my brother.”
“I know he begged for your life, not his. How’s that bullshit taste?”
The inside of Dean’s mouth was suddenly desert-dry. His wrists twitched against the ties behind the chair, and he thought about wrapping his hands around the smooth skin of her throat. It made his fingers tingle.
It was tidal, this rage. His voice was thick with it. “Your little demon friends are gonna be scraping you up with a fuckin’ spatula when I’m done with you.”
“My little demon friends are going to be drinking your blood in Hell, Dean. Your brother was damaged goods. Guaranteed, the guy would’ve had his hands bloody by year’s end.” Meg sighed. “It would have been fucking beautiful to watch.”
Dean snapped. He wrenched on his bound hands, felt the plastic slice flesh, and had a fleeting, irrational thought: If it costs me my hands to get at her, I can live with that. The pain in his shoulder brought the plan to an involuntary halt and he had to close his eyes, curse down into his lap. When he looked up, he threw it all at her; all the frustration and pain and anger in one shouted question:
“So, why the fuck would you have killed him, then?”
Meg got up and came over to him. Dean fixed eyes on her empty chair, forced the air in and out through his twitching lips. This was beyond anger. This was primal. Darker. He was quaking with it. And he knew the feeling was entirely reciprocated.
“Because it amused me, Dean. That’s why. There’re plenty of other monsters in the world. You just happened to love this one.”
**********************************************************************************************
Marcus Kane had the kind of quiet confidence about him that was the by-product of good breeding and an expensive college education. Dean’s dislike for him was instantaneous, spurred on by the Geek Squad V-neck sweater Captain KickMyAss folded carefully over the back of his chair. In fact, at first glance, his entire wardrobe looked lifted from the Sam Winchester 2004 collection.
Dean wanted to do the guy a favor and squirt him with lighter fluid, send him up now before he sat down and flashed any checkered socks.
Sam - surprise, surprise - could spot a fellow nerd from a thousand yards. When Jo introduced them, he stood obligingly and shook Marcus’s hand so hard the guy winced. Dean conveniently hid his delight in a quiet belch and a polite palm across his lips. He headed off Marcus and his extended hand at the pass with a tight smile and a wave across the table. Sam shot him a disapproving look, clearly demanding a baseline of civility. Dean returned fire with a mouthed What?, bunched his features to indicate the required social grace was beyond him.
Sam shook his head, smiled apologetically at Marcus. “Sorry. My brother’s a bit of an asshole.”
Dean folded his arms on the table in front of him, leaned forward, and gave Marcus the full wattage when he smiled, nose twitching. “Runs in the family.”
Sam raised his eyebrows. “Are you done?” He turned to Marcus. “He does this. Pissing on the furniture, I mean.” Then back to Dean: “You wanna stick your nose up his ass, too?”
Dean turned his head slowly and made the kind of lazy eye contact with his brother that suggested he could keep going all night. If that was what Sam wanted.
“Why don’t you stick it up your ass, Sam?”
Jo slapped the files in the middle of the table between them, eyebrow arching. “So, you’re still rubber and he’s still glue. Good to know. Can we get on with this, before a plague is unleashed and we all die ugly?”
Dean gave Jo and Marcus a reasonably accurate description of the events at River Grove the previous year. He got a little creative around the end, but by the time he was done they were up to speed on everything, barring Sam’s brush with the infected nurse.
“And you guys think this thing out at Timber, this is the same?”
Sam nodded. “It looks likely. Judging from the information Jo’s given us, the stuff you guys pulled together. You got reports here of violent assaults, disappearances en masse. The CDCs jumped on this, but I don’t really think they’ll have a clue what they’ve got and until they do, they’ll keep the quarantine in place and the roadblocks up. You had a few of first infected come through the ER at a medical center here in Portland with the CDC guys, so we’ll check that out, see what they came up with.”
“So, why is this happening again?”
Dean thumbed the edge of the label on his beer, duck billed his lips. He glanced at Sam, then back at Marcus. “Honestly? We don’t know. All the evidence at River Grove disappeared. We never really got to the bottom of it.”
“So do we know the mortality rate on this? Or how long it takes? I mean, the infected wife - how long between when she was infected and point of death?” Marcus was looking a little stunned.
Dean took a swig of his beer. “Take up’s about three hours. We dunno for sure it’s fatal.”
Marcus shook his head, confused. “What do you mean, you don’t know?”
Dean shrugged. “I mean, we dunno. The virus didn’t kill her. I shot her. Everyone else kinda disappeared. So we dunno.”
Marcus executed a horrified double-take in Dean’s direction. “I thought you said you had her contained.”
Dean glanced at Sam before he answered, ignored the reservation he saw in his brother’s eyes. He sniffed, brought his beer to his lips. “We did.” He paused, took a pull while the implications of that settled. “You don’t wanna get shit on those shoes, Marcus, door’s to your left.”
Marcus looked to Jo for his cue, but her attention was elsewhere. Dean turned into her appraising gaze, returned the eye contact with a long, unblinking stare.
“Don’t tell me you’ve spent the last year danglin’ string in front of kittens, Jo.”
She raised her eyebrows. “No,” she said slowly, “I haven’t. Please tell me you haven’t been stepping on them.”
Dean curled a lip at that, almost laughed, and his brother dipped his brow across the table. Sam gave him a miniscule shake of the head: What the fuck is wrong with you?
Dean reached out and grabbed the manila folder from the middle of the table. He slapped it down in front of him, opened it.
“Fine. Screw the cats.” He glanced at Marcus. “Still with us there, buddy?”
Dean waited for Marcus’s wary nod of confirmation, then he clucked his cheek and clapped his hands once, rubbed his palms together. “Okay then.” He looked up at Sam. “I think I got a plan.”
**********************************************************************************************
They split up in the parking lot. Sam wanted to check out the hospital records at the Medical Center, and Dean was eager to give Timber a scout. When Sam suggested he take Jo with him, Dean opened his mouth to protest. Sam yanked him aside and made it perfectly clear it wasn’t up for discussion.
“Unless you wanna come with me and spend a few very boring hours cracking into a hospital database, you’re taking Jo.”
Dean’s face was pinched with annoyance. “Dude, I’ve totally got this. You take ‘em both.”
“No way. You tricked me into this, Dean. I am five different kinds of angry at you right now, so yeah - I’m calling the shots on this one, and we’re playin’ my rules.”
Dean saw the set of his face and changed tack. “Then, they can go play computer geeks, and you come with me. Come on, man. I’m not gonna be babysat by Jo Harvelle. Christ.”
“Yes, you are.” Sam ducked a little to catch Dean’s rolling eyes. “Hey, you’re the one in ultra-stealth mode right now. And since you don’t want to tell them exactly what we’re looking for, makes it a little difficult to send them off on a recon, Dean. Besides, this guy’s a bookworm. Shit hits the fan, he’s gonna splatter. Jo can handle herself in a tight spot, and if I can’t be there to watch your back, she’s my next best option right now. So those are your choices. We all go to the hospital, or you take Jo with you to Timber.”
Dean glared at him long enough to realize Sam’s anger outweighed his own by a good ton or so. He held out his hand.
“Fine, but I’m taking the Impala,” he snapped childishly.
Sam handed over the keys without complaint. “Fine.”
“Fine.”
Marcus was making a tentative approach towards them. “Problem, guys?”
Sam smiled wide, lost the hard, blunt offensive. “No problem. We’re just thinking we can cover some more ground if we maybe split up. Two of us hit the hospital, Jo and Dean head to Timber, take a look around.”
Marcus shrugged, looked back at Jo. She nodded. “Okay. Whatever.”
Sam raised his eyebrows. “How’s your Windows-based espionage?”
Marcus grinned large, looked from Jo back to Sam. “Are you kidding me? You mean, like, breaking into the hospital records? Isn’t that a little…illegal?”
Dean toggled his head, the corner of his lips twitching downward. “No more than the B&E to getcha in there. Sam knows his stuff. You’ll be fine.” He rubbed his hands together. Forced a smile, eyebrows arching in Jo’s direction. “Up for a drive?”
Jo nodded, and Dean could tell from her smile she knew this was grating on him. She threw her keys to Sam, pushed off from the hood of her car. “First gear sticks. You gotta take off in second. Good luck finding reverse.”
Sam snatched the keys out of the air. “Oh, goody.”
Dean narrowed his eyes as she passed him on the way to the Impala, and her grin widened.
Cocky little bitch. He raised an eyebrow at Sam and Marcus as he turned and backed towards the Impala.
“Motel, say…one o’clock? Enough time for ya, Mitnick?”
Sam checked his watch, nodded. “Should be plenty. You’ve had a long day, Dean. Watch your back.”
There was nothing soft about the way he said it, and Dean knew Sam’s calm demeanor was for Jo and Marcus’s benefit alone. Sam was angry, and it was the type of mad that made him clear and intelligent and infuriatingly difficult to argue with. And man, oh man - that Sam never let up.
Dean hated that Sam.
**********************************************************************************************
They didn’t have much in the way of conversation for the first twenty miles. Dean was doing some internal prep work for the verbal ass kicking Sam was going to give him later. Jo seemed content staring out the window, elbow resting on the door frame and a lock of blonde hair in her mouth.
Eventually, Dean’s curiosity won out. “So, how’d you hook up with this Marcus guy?”
Jo blew the hair out of her mouth and shrugged. “Actually? He knows your friend, Bobby. First job I took up here, I needed information on some ruins, so I call home. Mom didn’t know anyone, so she called Bobby. Bobby says Marcus is my go-to guy, so…I got to.”
“Huh.”
“Huh, what?”
“So, you fuckin’ him or what?”
Jo blinked at him. “I am so not answering that.”
Dean chuckled. “I’ll take that as a yes.”
Jo folded her arms, twisted on the seat. “What makes you think I’m fucking him?”
Dean gave her an appraising glance, still highly amused. He turned his attention back to the road. “Oh, yeah. He’s slapping the Harvelle ham.”
“You’re a pig, you know that?” Jo threw out a sharp backhand, caught him in the ribs before he could drop his arm from the wheel to deflect it. He flinched, dipped a little around the blow and caught the grunt in time, but not the grimace.
None of it was lost on Jo.
She didn’t say anything, watched him while he bit his lip and slowly straightened. He gave the windshield a few long-suffering blinks.
“Bounced on a job, huh?” she said finally.
Dean ran a finger under his nose, sniffed, and didn’t respond. He was aware of Jo nodding slowly on the other side of the car.
“So are you gonna tell me what happened?”
“Nope.”
Jo was nodding again. “That bad, huh?”
He didn’t answer.
“I’ll take that as a yes.”
Dean shot her a look that could shear bolts.
She threw her hands up. “Okay. Leaving it. Dropping and backing away.”
They drove in an uncomfortable silence for a while. In the end, Dean let it go.
“So, have you been out here yet?”
“Yeah. Two days ago. I couldn’t get very close, though. There were a lot of people around.”
“Okay, but we know this thing’s run its course, right?”
“Well, they still have the roadblocks up, but they’re saying the situation is-” Jo hung a couple of quotation marks in the air with her fingers. “-resolved.”
“You’re sure.”
“That’s what they’re saying.”
“Yeah, well, what they’re saying and what’s actually happening… If we run into anyone who’s infected-”
“I don’t think so.”
“I don’t wanna get caught off guard. This thing’s messy, Jo.”
“I get that. I just…as far as I can tell, it’s over. My contact at the CDC said they were just holding off on going in there ‘til they knew what they were dealing with.”
He huffed off a laugh at that. “Yeah, right. Well, unless they’re testing for a major demon ass-fucking…”
Jo pointed to the turn off coming up. “Here it is.”
Dean touched the brake, slowed to a crawl as they passed the junction. He ducked a little, stared through the window past Jo. The lights of the roadblock blinked in the distance.
“How far down is that?”
Jo shook her head. “Like, maybe two miles. Not far.”
“And the farmhouse? The one they think it started in. That’s like, another five miles south, yes? Can we cut across on foot through the woods? Is that do-able? It’s just the roadblocks, right?”
“Yeah. I think so.”
Dean pulled the car over onto the shoulder, threw a u-turn back towards the junction. “You got a lot of thinks so’s and maybe’s, Jo.” He shook his head. “I can do without a blind run right now. Anything else I need to know before we do this?” He turned down the road towards the lights.
“I don’t thi-”
“Jo, I swear to God.” Dean’s knuckles whitened on the steering wheel.
“Nope. Nothing else.”
Dean reached across her and punched open the glove box, pulled out the state map and dropped it into her lap.
“Open that up, will ya?”
“Why?”
“Just open it up. Follow my lead.” Jesus. Just do it.
Dean slowed down as they approached the roadblock. He stopped the car completely when a cop stepped up into the headlights, hand out. The officer rounded the hood and tapped on the window. Dean smiled through the glass as he cranked it down.
“Evening there, Officer…” Dean squinted at his badge. “...Duncraig. What’s goin’ on?”
The cop sent the beam of his flashlight across Jo and the map, then back to Dean. “We got a roadblock. Can’t let you through. Where you folks headed?”
Dean used the time he was talking to scout the roadblock, turned his attention back to the Officer as he finished speaking. He had a sudden hankering for his brother. Angry or no, Sam played wingman like a fucking quarterback. He just took the ball and ran, no questions asked.
Jo, on the other hand…
Dean gave the cop an apologetic smile. “Look, honestly? My girlfriend and I are havin’ a bit of an argument here and she’s being this…” he turned and addressed Jo for the next, “...stubborn fucking bitch with the map.” He looked back at the cop, gave him a humorless smile. “Be a pal, tell me how many hundreds of miles I’ve missed the turn off to Buxton by?”
*********************************************************************************************
Sam stopped at a gas station before they hit the hospital, bought a bunch of flowers from the stand near the counter. He handed them to Marcus as he slid back behind the wheel.
Marcus frowned at the flowers, looked back at Sam, his face a question mark.
Sam sniffed off a laugh. “Hospital gift store’ll be closed.”
Marcus was a little slow on the uptake.
Sam pointed to the flowers. “First rule of breaking and entering, Marcus. Leave the balaclava at home.”
Sam called the hospital reception desk from his cell and asked for the oncology ward. He kept the yarn simple; tech working late at the lab, confusion over paperwork. By the time he hung up, he had a legitimate patient name and date of birth in the event they had to do any fast talking.
In the parking lot he killed the engine, turned to Marcus with a smile. “Okay. Hold the flowers where they can see them. Look worried.” He pointed at Marcus’s face. “That’s good. What you’re doing now. Keep your mouth shut, let me do the talking.”
In the end, they didn’t need the flowers or the name. The reception desk was unattended. They crossed the dimmed foyer to the elevators without impediment. Sam was so unaccustomed to this sort of extraordinary stroke of luck that he gave the departmental listing on the wall beside the elevators a friendly thump with his fist as he scanned it.
“Thank you, HR cutbacks,” he muttered, as he dropped a hand to the elevator call button.
**********************************************************************************************
“You carrying?” Dean asked as he opened the trunk.
“I got my knife.”
He held out his hand. “Hand it over.”
Jo frowned at him. “Excuse me?”
“Come on, let’s go. Hand it over.” He lifted the twelve-gauge out of the trunk, felt the weight of it through his ribs and the damaged muscles in his chest. Whatever he’d said to Sam, he’d lied. He wasn’t going to be racking a shotgun tonight. He held it out to Jo in exchange for her knife, but she folded her arms, raised her eyebrows.
“You’re giving me your shotgun?”
Dean couldn’t hold it out any longer. He winced, dropped the butt onto the lip of the trunk and leaned on it.
“Jo, listen to me. I got a couple of busted ribs and my shoulder’s fucked. If we need to use this quick, I can’t.” When she made no move to take it, he kept going. “This virus’s transferred by blood. I’m telling you right now, if you’re close enough to use a knife, you’re too close to use it.” He thrust the gun at her again, face impassive.
He suddenly remembered the initials on the knife she’d shown him in Pennsylvania, understood the reluctance in her face. “It’s just goin’ in trunk. It’ll be safe.”
She handed the knife over reluctantly, took the shotgun. Dean threw the blade in on top of the rest of the gear and fished out a flashlight and a spare clip for the Glock. He pocketed the clip as he closed the lid. Dean stood the flashlight on the trunk while he checked the clip in the Glock. He dipped his left shoulder, grimaced a little as he slipped the gun down the back of his jeans.
It was a fifteen minute hike through the woods in the dark before they came out on the eastern side of the property, about a hundred yards south of the homestead. They followed the fence-line back, cut across the paddock.
Thirty yards from the house, Dean lifted the Glock out of his jeans. He chambered it, brought the muzzle up and covered them the last open stretch across the grass.
He took the porch stairs in two strides and slid to a stop against the wall beside the door, caught his breath. Holy crap, I’m out of shape.
“You okay?” Jo whispered, tugged on the elbow of his jacket.
Dean nodded, closed his eyes. In through the nose, out through the mouth. Jesus. “I’m fine. Just gimme a sec.”
Jo brushed passed, shotgun in hand, and peered through the darkened window beside him. “I can’t see anything,” she said quietly. “I don’t think anyone’s here. I don’t think anyone’s anywhere.”
Dean sized up the door, tried the handle, and then fished his pick out of his jacket.
He wasn’t in any shape to be putting boot to door. Half a minute in, he was wishing for Sam again because truth be told, he possessed neither the patience nor the finesse for speedy tumbler manipulation. Sam had this shit down to a fine art. Like reading, and the rest of the dull as fucking dishwater crap that came with the job.
Behind him, Jo whispered: “Sometime today, Dean?”
Dean twisted, wished he hadn’t. He palmed his protesting ribs and winced. “I’m gonna stab you to death with this pick, Jo.”
When it popped a second later, he looked back at her smugly and turned the handle. See, you stupid bitch? I got it.
She smiled condescendingly, pointed at the door. Pay attention, she mouthed at him as she brought the shotgun up to her shoulder.
“’Kay, straight sweep, one room at a time. You’re gonna move, I need eye contact and a hand signal, so I know about it and I can cover you.” He chopped the air with the side of his hand, demonstrated. “Same goes here. If I’m moving, you’ve got my ass. Understand?”
Jo nodded tightly. Dean clenched his fingers around the stock of his gun, released and tightened them again. He exhaled once, sharply, focused and pointed the Glock at the porch boards as he stood and flattened himself against the wall beside the door. He lifted his knee, angled out a little with his lower leg and hesitated.
“You see anything moving in there that isn’t me, drop it. Got it?”
Jo nodded again, and Dean leaned forward, brought his boot back against the door hard.
**********************************************************************************************
“Oh, my God.” Marcus’s voice was filled with awe. “That took you, what? Ten seconds?”
Sam shrugged the satchel off his shoulder on to the office desk, pulled out his laptop.
“Locks, I’m good with,” he agreed. “If I can get to them before Dean. He usually kicks a boot through them before the pick’s out of my pocket.” He turned on the laptop, shook his head at the screen as it flickered through start-up. “All brawn, no brain,” he muttered.
Marcus sniggered, and Sam had a sudden hypocritical urge to smack the guy in the mouth. That’s my brother you’re laughing at, asshole.
The laptop threw a moody splash of blue up into the room, and Sam twisted; looked at the square of frosted glass on the office door. “This light might be a problem. Keep an eye on the door for me, will ya? You hear anyone coming, gimme a heads up and I’ll kill it.”
Marcus crossed to the door, and Sam spent a few minutes hooking up cables in the dim light afforded by the screen. He played around with the computer system in the office until he had an interface running with the laptop.
The hospital database took a little longer than the door.
“So, you guys do this sort of thing for a living, then?” Marcus glanced through the crack of the door, then back at Sam. He shook his head. “I can’t believe I’m doing this.”
Sam sniffed off a laugh. “It’s not exactly a living, Marcus. Doesn’t pay very well or very often. If you’ve got a day job, I highly recommend keeping it.”
“I work at the university. I’m a Research Assistant. History department.”
Sam’s smile grew wider. “No kidding? How’d you get messed up with Jo Harvelle?”
“I translated some religious texts for a guy named Bobby Singer a couple of years back-”
Sam made a surprised noise. “No shit? Bobby Singer? We just left his place, like three days ago.”
“Yeah, Jo said. I hadn’t spoken to him in about eighteen months, then he calls me out of the blue and says he’s got a friend up here needs a hand with some paperwork and can I help? So I say sure, and next thing I know, Jo’s in my office and my whole world is kind of tipped upside down.”
“Yeah, well. This stuff takes a bit of getting used to, for sure.” Sam squinted up over the laptop. Hang on. “Are we talking about demons or Jo, here?”
Marcus smiled, and the penny dropped.
“Oh. Are you two…?”
“Sort of. Yeah. I think.”
Holy crap. Dean’s gonna have a field day with that. He’s gonna crucify her.
Sam nodded, the corner of his lips twitching downward. “Oh. Okay. I mean, that’s good. Jo’s great.”
“Yeah, she is, huh?” Marcus was silent for a second. “Did she and Dean ever…?”
Sam grimaced. “What? No. God, no. I mean, I’m sure he’s thought about it. Dean’d fuck a cinder block, but…no. Jo’s mom, Ellen? She’s a good friend. They’re both just good friends.”
Marcus nodded. “It’s just…I kinda got the impression your brother didn’t like me very much.”
Sam shrugged. “Yeah, sorry about that. Dean’s not real great at the meet-and-greet. And we’re not really getting along right now either, which probably doesn’t help.” He scratched the side of his nose. “Okay, I think I’m in here. This shouldn’t take long.”
“What are we looking for anyway?”
Sam raised his eyebrows at the screen, picked his words carefully. “Aaaah… medical reports. Patient charts. Test results. Most of the first cases came here so… I don’t know. Anything that’ll clue us in on exactly what this virus is, what they’ve found. We’re at a bit of a disadvantage since the sulfur residue seems to just disappear after a while. It only lasted a few hours in the samples the doctor took back at River Grove.”
Sam ran a search by date, saved everything he could find from the admits between the dates specified. He clicked through the patient charts while he waited for the lab database to trawl through his search parameters. Public hospital. It was taking forever. Chart, after chart, after chart. Deceased, deceased, deceased.
They were all dead.
Why the hell am I not dead?
**********************************************************************************************
Dean had run across his fair share of decomposing bodies in his time. It’d been a while since he lost his lunch over one.
Louisana. Graveyard dig with a monster hangover. Sam puked down the headstone, and then I tossed my cookies over the dead chick in Louisiana.
Point being, he knew a corpse when he smelled one.
“You see it?” He threw the question to Jo as he swept the first room with the flashlight, Glock trained down the beam.
“See what?”
Dean could see her face in the moonlight from the window. She looked like she was going to cry. Or puke. Maybe both.
“Body.”
“No, but I can smell it.” Her voice was unsteady.
“Yeah. Rainforest fresh, huh?” He motioned her down the hallway with the flashlight.
“I think I’m gonna throw up,” she said as she passed him, and Dean shook his head.
“Don’t. Please. You go, I go. Sam gets me every time.” He swallowed, salivary glands on overdrive. Don’t puke. No puking. Mountain breeze. Mountain breeze. Smellin’ a mountain breeze.
The dead guy was in the back bedroom, hosting a gathering of flies. The stench blasted Dean at the door, tickled his gag reflex. He dipped the muzzle of the Glock a little, buried his mouth and nose in the leather at his right shoulder until he got his stomach under control. He gave the body a wide berth, crossed through the room and cleared the closet, then motioned Jo back out and to the left down the hallway.
The rest of the house was empty. In the kitchen, Jo dropped the shotgun down at her side and covered her mouth with her hand.
“Oh, my God.”
Dean hooked his gun in the back of his jeans with a grimace. “I know. I gotta go back and take a look. I think we’re clear here. If you wanna wait outside…”
Jo shook her head. “No, it’s okay. I’ll come.”
Dean undid a couple of his shirt buttons, hoiked the collar up and pressed it against his mouth and nose as he headed down the hallway. He passed the flashlight over the walls, noticed the waist-height, bloody smear that ran the length of the hall.
“Jesus.” Jo said it through her fingers, a few feet behind him.
Dean raised an eyebrow. “Yeah,” he said quietly into his shirt.
Back in the bedroom, he stopped at the doorway and started there with the flashlight. He worked his way in, beam tracking methodically over the walls, floor, furniture. There was blood spatter on every surface, concentrated near the body. A desk in the corner, upturned chair on the floor beside it. When the flashlight bounced off the desk lamp, Dean paused, then crossed to it. He flipped the Maglite barrel in his hand and used the end to flick the switch.
The lamp came on, spilled a paltry yellow glow around the room. Dean spun the flashlight in his hand again, turned it off and pocketed it.
“What if someone sees?” Jo pointed to the window.
Dean squatted beside the body, gripped his shirt a little tighter against his face. He looked up at her. “As opposed to the flashlight?” His voice was muffled by the fabric. “I don’t think it’s gonna make a difference. Just keep an eye on the hallway.”
Whatever had happened to the guy, it had been messy. Dean glanced at the blood spatter on the wall, up on the ceiling, and winced. There was a lot of the stuff sprayed around. Under any other circumstances, Dean would have been tempted to turn him over, but he wasn’t willing to risk touching him.
The smell was starting to get to him again. Tossed in with the bloated, Technicolor visual feast, Dean was having a hard time keeping it together. He twisted a little on the balls of his feet, closed his eyes and breathed against his shoulder.
When he looked back, Jo was staring down at the body, decidedly green in the jaundiced glow of the room.
“Jo, you alright?” Dean barely got the words out, and she was turning away. He heard her puking in the hallway, and it sent him hauling ass up and to the window. When he got there he forgot about leaving prints and threw up the sliding wooden frame with both hands.
He hung over the sill for a while on his forearms, retching into the garden bed below the window. When he tried to pull it together and head back in, the first waft of decomposing dead guy sent him straight out for another round.
Dean waited till he was pretty sure there were only organs left to lose, and made a shaky re-entry into the room. He closed the window, leaned against the sill, ribs and chest throbbing from the violent muscular workout.
He felt like shit. The hand he raked down his face came away wet, and he wiped it down the leg of his jeans. You need some air, Winchester. Move it.
He was passing the body on the floor when it moved. Dean pivoted, hand going for the Glock. He backed up fast, had his finger against the trigger and the muzzle trained on the corpse by time he felt the drywall against his shoulder blades.
The dead guy was still. Dean stared down his arms, fought for control over the adrenal tremor quaking the Glock in his hands. He was breathing hard, his sense of smell momentarily overridden by the immediacy of the threat.
What the fuck..?
He stayed there long enough to realize he’d imagined it. The gun got heavy in his hands, and he could feel the strain of the entire night through his shoulder, his chest, and his ribs. He was suddenly aware of the smell again, and when he dipped his nose to his upper arm seeking relief… the fucking dead guy moved again.
He snapped back to attention, closed his finger on the trigger - CRACK! - stepped forward into the second - CRACK! - then third - CRACK! - shot. There was a thumping in the hallway and he turned, swung the pistol up as Jo came into the room, shotgun leading.
Dean nearly blew her head off. He caught the twitch of his finger against the trigger, turned and dropped the muzzle back to the corpse on the floor.
“Jesus, Dean - what!” Jo’s voice was wild.
Dean didn’t answer. Couldn’t.
You just nearly killed her, you fuckin’ rookie. You just nearly blew her head off.
He was shaking, thought his knees were going to give. The end of the Glock was jumping violently in his hands.
He got the words out on a shuddering breath. “I thought he moved.”
Jo’s voice went up a couple of octaves. “Well, did he?”
Dean’s face scrunched in confusion. “I dunno. No. I don’t think so.”
“Well, you shot him.”
“I know.”
“So did he move or not?”
Dean stepped back, found the wall with his shoulder, leaned against it. He relaxed the Glock, looked over at Jo.
“I think I need to get outta here.”
He could have done without the hike back to the car. Each step jarred and pulsed through his abused shoulder. Every breath was glancing white-hot off his fractured ribs. The gashes in his chest were throbbing, felt tight and aggravated. He thought about the bottle of Vicodin sitting on the bathroom counter back at the motel room, wished he’d had the foresight to bring it with him. When he thought about it, he hadn’t downed any since lunchtime. Twelve hours.
Not your brightest move today, asshole.
He limp-stumbled the last mile to the car on auto-pilot, and when they got there he palmed the hood and puked beside the front tire.
“Dean, where are the keys?” Jo was going through his pockets.
He coughed, spat a stringy mix of spit and bile down between his boots. “What?”
“Look at you. You can’t drive.”
Dean shook his head. “Oh, no. No way.”
She found the keys in the front pocket of his jeans. Dean pushed off from the hood, slapped at her prying fingers.
“Get off me.” He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, snorted back and swallowed a chunk of something unpleasant. Jo tugged the keys loose and Dean said it again: “No way.”
She steered him to the passenger door, opened it. “Get in, you stubborn ass. I promise not to enjoy it.” She kicked at the back of his knee, took the optional out of his seating arrangements. Then she shut the door on him and rounded the hood to the driver side.
“Much,” she added, sliding behind the wheel. She turned the engine over and the Impala rumbled to life. “I promise not to enjoy this much.”
**********************************************************************************************
When they pulled up outside the motel, Jo nudged his arm and sent a throbbing, jarring flash through every damaged part of him. He clenched his teeth, didn’t open his eyes.
“Dean, can you get out?”
Sure. Just gimme about four Vicodin and twenty minutes. “Get Sam.” He’s gonna kill me.
A couple of minutes later, he heard Sam’s palm slap on the Impala’s hood and then the door opened. Dean cracked his heavy lids.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hey.” Absence had done nothing in the way of fostering fondness. Sam’s voice was steely. “What the hell?”
“Dude, please don’t be a shit about this. I just need a Vicodin and a coupla minutes, okay? Please?”
Sam leaned into the car, gripped Dean below the jaw a little harder than was necessary, and glanced at his watch. He passed the back of his free hand across Dean’s forehead, thumbed back his eyelid. Dean bit his teeth together when they started to clatter.
Crap. That’s not good.
He heard the quiet Fuck under Sam’s breath, suddenly felt a change in subject matter was called for. He grabbed blindly at the weather.
“S’it cold? I’m cold. You cold?”
“You’re cold ‘cause you’re in shock,” Sam muttered. He sighed, wiped his nose with the back of his hand, and squinted at Dean. “Dumbass.” He twisted out of the car. “Jo, there’s a bottle of Vicodin in the bathroom, do me a favor, please, and grab it? Some water, too.”
He turned back to Dean. “You hurt anywhere I don’t know about?”
Dean shook his head. “No. I just…we had to hike to the farmhouse and… that Glock, man? S’really heavy.”
Sam screwed up his nose. “Dude, you stink like puke.”
The chuckle hurt, but Dean couldn’t help it. “Hey, Jo started it.” It reminded him of the body in the house, and he looked up sharply at Sam. “There was a corpse in there, Sammy. I mean, it was nasty. They either missed it or, I dunno. We gotta go back out there tomorrow, see what’s what.”
Jo came back with the Vicodin and a bottle of water. Sam tapped three of the pills into his palm and shook his head. “Dude, I’m about to give you a rhino-sized dose of painkiller. The only thing on your agenda tomorrow’s a Vicodin hangover. Open.”
Dean took the pills between his lips, and Sam pressed the water bottle into his right hand.
“You got it?” Sam asked him. Dean nodded.
Jo leaned on the door. “Sam, I’m really sorry. I didn’t realize how bad he was till we got back to the car. I mean, he didn’t seem that bad.”
“Yeah,” Sam said, fixing Dean with a pointed stare, “he’s good at that. It’s not your fault, Jo. I shoulda nixed it. It was a stupid idea.”
Dean fumbled with the water bottle, and Sam snatched it out of his hand. “Jesus Christ, Dean.”
Oh, he is so mad at me. “Sorry,” Dean mumbled, took a sip of the water and downed the pills when Sam tilted the bottle against his lips.
Sam left him in the car for a while. Dean could see him leaning against the hood of the Impala through the windshield, heard him talking to Jo and Marcus. He made out something about the hospital records, but then the conversation got fuzzy, hard to track.
By the time Sam poked his head back into the car and asked him how he was doing, he was feeling well and truly plastered.
“’M’preedy goo.”
“Preedy goo, huh?” Sam seemed to think that was funny, and it was, when Dean got to thinking about it. He chuckled, let his eyes dip shut on the tail end of the laugh. Sam tapped his cheek. “Hey, Dean. Look at me.”
Dean blinked up at him. “Y’am.”
“Okay, you’re toasted. Ready to come inside?”
“Dafta stannup?” The inside of the car was shifting like a tilt-a-whirl.
“Yeah, but it’s okay. I gotcha.”
“You gommee?”
“Yeah, Dean.” Sam grabbed a fistful of his jacket, pulled. “I gotcha.”
**********************************************************************************************
Jo made coffee while Sam dumped Dean on his bed. He flipped his brother’s boots off, peeled his jacket carefully down one arm, then the other, and rolled him into a half-assed recovery position.
He threw a blanket over the whole mess and pressed a palm against Dean’s clammy forehead. “Alright. You okay there?”
Dean flickered a brow, made a slack-jawed, torpid noise that could have been yes, or no, or fluent donkey.
Sam nodded. “You’re okay.” He got up, crossed the motel room to the table where Marcus and Jo were sitting.
Marcus nodded in Dean’s direction. “Shouldn’t we be taking him to a hospital?”
Sam sighed, rubbed his eye. “Yes.” He took the coffee Jo offered, blinked at her. “What happened out there?”
Jo shrugged. “I don’t know. He was fine. We swung past the roadblock, took a look. Parked and hiked out to the farmhouse on Joolimar. Then there was the dead body, I puked, he puked. Then he freaked out and shot the guy.”
Sam shook his head tightly. “W-w-wait. Dean shot who?”
“The dead guy.”
Sam opened his mouth, shut it again. He was tired, clearly not following the conversation. He blinked long, tried again. “Sorry, back it up. Did Dean shoot this guy or was he already dead?”
“No. He was already dead. Trust me. Like, days ago.” Jo screwed her face up, showed him her teeth. “It was gross.”
“Then why did he shoot him?”
Jo let go of her mug, showed Sam both palms. “Don’t look at me. I was puking out on the porch. I hear the gun going off and when I get back in there, he nearly blows my head off, and he’s babbling about the body moving.”
Sam’s face creased in consternation. He swung around and looked at Dean, then back at Jo. “He’s what?”
“He said the body moved.”
Sam’s eyebrows shot up. “Well, did it?”
Jo turned her palms skyward. “I don’t know. I don’t think so. I mean, it couldn’t have, right? Could it?”
Sam chewed his lip. It wasn’t possible. Which means…
Jo shrugged. “Sam, I think he was just... I think he just freaked out. I don’t think it moved.”
…Dean just lost it. Shot a dead body. Great.
“You don’t look very surprised.”
Sam snapped clean of the thought, looked at Marcus. “What?”
He coughed. “I said: you don’t look very surprised.”
Jo was looking at Sam reproachfully. “What exactly happened on your last job, Sam?”
Sam pinched the bridge of his nose, felt like he was going to shatter the coffee mug in his other hand.
“Sam, he pointed a gun at me. If he’s twitchy, I need to know. I deserve to know.”
She was right. He needed to fill her in. He sat down heavily at the table.
“We had a run-in with a demon.”
Jo shrugged. “And?”
“One we’ve got some history with.” Sam said it carefully, eyes on Jo, and she was quick on the uptake. She stiffened visibly.
“What kind of a run-in, Sam?” Jo glanced at Dean. “Was this you? Did you hurt him?” The accusation was plain and raw, and it felt like a slap. Sam knew that forgiveness was just epoxy. If you held broken things up to the light, the cracks were still there. But however natural the leap she had taken, it still stung.
“No,” he said vehemently. “It wasn’t me.”
“So, the demon’s in another body?”
“Her name’s Meg Masters.”
Jo’s eyebrows shot up. “She? Her name is Meg? The demon’s name is Meg?”
Sam let her go, be outraged at the ridiculousness of it. She was entitled.
“Look, Jo, it wasn’t a job. We were running a favor for Bobby, she grabbed Dean while I was doing a pick-up.”
Jo’s face was ashen. “What do you mean, grabbed?”
Sam rubbed his mouth, stared at his coffee mug. He nodded slowly. “I mean messy. She had him about thirty six hours, give or take.” He cleared his throat. “I don’t think she wasted any of them.”
Jo eyes traveled to Dean on the bed. When she looked back at Sam, he could see something stricken in her eyes, and felt a surge of guilty responsibility for it. “So, where is she now?”
Sam wished he had something else to tell her. “I don’t know.”
“That’s not what I wanted to hear, Sam.”
“I know.”
Marcus cleared his throat, held up an inquiring finger. “Um, sorry, who is Meg?”
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It wasn’t Sam. He knew it wasn’t.
But he called it Sam. Didn’t mean to. Right before he felt the second rib go, it came out of him. He wheezed: “Stop, Sam. Please.”
And Sam curled his lip, told him he could go to Hell.
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Sam jerked awake at 4:57am, took a second to figure out it was Dean making the God-awful, spine-grating noise. He rolled out of bed, had enough foresight to slide a hand beneath Dean’s pillow and retrieve the Bowie knife. But apparently, Dean was fine without it. When Sam shook him, he snapped up with perfect hard right and caught Sam square in the temple, sent him backwards onto his ass beside the bed.
Sam slapped a palm to his face. “Fuck… Dean! Wake up!”
He stayed on the carpet, let Dean get his bearings and disentangle himself from the blanket. The college smarts warned against engaging for round two with a disoriented hunter. And even in his sleep, Dean had a decent right hook. Sam’s skull was full of church bells, none of them very harmonic.
“Sam?”
Dean’s voice was stricken, breathless, and his distress dialed up a notch as his socked feet hit the carpet near Sam’s hip.
“Oh, no. Nononono. Did I just hit you?”
Dean dropped to his knees, and then he was prying Sam’s hand away from his face. Sam winced, resisted the wounded, angry urge to press a palm against Dean’s chest and shove him away.
He didn’t mean to.
“I didn’t mean to. I mean, I knew you weren’t - ”
Dean was rambling. Sam could feel the fingers at his brow were shaking.
“Great. Awesome. You’re bleeding.”
Sam pushed his hand away more roughly than he intended to. “I’m fine, leave it.”
Dean backed off, sat against the side of the bed, and dragged a hand down his face. “Jesus Christ.”
The fingers Sam tapped to his eyebrow came away bloody. “Dean, really. It’s okay, I’m fine.”
He rolled onto his knees, climbed to his feet. He wiped at his eye again, crossed to the bathroom and lifted a hand towel from the rail inside the door. Pressed the corner to the cut as he came back across the room.
“Dean, you alright?”
Dean sent a hand through his hair, shook his head as he looked up. He was red-eyed and flushed, still clearly operating under a Vicodin fog.
“I’m sorry, man. I dunno what’s goin’ on with me.”
Sam felt the anger leaching out of him. He reached down a hand. “Come on. Get up.”
It took another Vicodin to get Dean back to sleep. Sam stayed on the side of the bed while the drug smoothed the tension out of his brother, tugged him away from awareness. Then he got up and wrapped a handful of ice from the motel freezer in the towel. He sat at the table in the dark and pressed it against his brow. Tried to dispel the tight, angry grip of the muscles across his back.
Dean slept, slack and still in the same medicated fashion he’d spent those first two days at Bobby’s. Sam anchored at his bedside, the air thick with antiseptic and his own guilty regret. He’d spent those two days second guessing every overly long step he had taken to the warehouse. Waiting for Dean to find his way back to the surface.
Sam shifted his chair, legs dragging on the linoleum, stared at the wall instead. When he heard the first signs of life outside the motel room - people moving, cars starting, the day beginning - he tossed the wet towel over the back of a chair and went back to bed.
He just needs time, he told himself, as he lay there waiting for sleep to come.
They didn’t really have a lot of that.
The tick tick tick of the clock beside Sam’s bed told him so.
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Dean woke in the afternoon with a jackhammer of a headache. When he tried to lever up off his elbow, his entire torso seized violently. He lay back, stared at the ceiling until the cramp in his muscles passed.
“Sam.”
He was alone. Dean picked up the alarm clock beside the bed, brought it close enough to his sleep-puffed eyes to squint a reading off its analogue face. Ten to three. When he replaced it on the bedside table he saw Sam’s note:
Gone to Timber. Back by 5. DON’T GET UP.
He got up. Shuffled to the bathroom and took a piss, came back into the room and sat at the kitchenette table. He pulled one of the texts from the middle of the stack there and flicked through a few pages. Thought about doing some research until he realized he was staring at the same line over and over, still had no clue what he was reading.
Sam had left the hand towel from last night over the back of the chair. Dean scratched his arm, gazed at the bloodied corner of it for a long time. Closed his eyes and shook his head.
A growing nausea sent him back to the motel mattress. He dozed, but after a second jarring transition from warehouse back to motel, he abandoned sleep. Closed his eyes and thought about Shelley’s mouth on his dick instead.
Ten minutes later he was in the bathroom, door locked, jacking off. It hurt nearly as much as it felt good, but for about ten explosive, mind-jamming seconds he didn’t care about Meg, or the deal, or the fact that he was losing his goddamn mind.
Chapter Seven