In His Image: Orders
Previous chapter --- Masterpost --- Next chapter
In which Sam takes on the zombie apocalypse, and Gabriel makes a phone call.
Sam, Gabriel.
order [n]: an authoritative command; the condition in which everything has its correct or appropriate place; a body of people living together by common consent under one rule, usually religious or moral, separated from society at large but bound by common interests and motivations; a fraternal society of knights; to take orders: to be ordained, to enter the ministry of the church.
He took out the bridge.
Then he found out he was too late. So he took out the phone lines as well, and waited for the virus to incubate.
As he stood by the bank of the river, watching the sun arch towards dusk, his cell rang.
“Hey bitch, we got him. And Cas is a scary-ass SOB when he’s riled up. Shut up, you are. Just looking for a place to crash tonight - half the houses around here are abandoned, so shouldn’t take too long.”
Dean’s voice rippled with the lazy smugness of a job completed. Sam felt a moment’s compassion for Castiel, who probably wasn’t really in the mood for dealing with the post-adrenalin cockiness that always kept Dean up late and loud on these nights.
“Okay. Good luck getting him back to Bobby’s tomorrow, then.”
“You okay? How’s things your end?”
“Call back in two hours. I’ll know then.”
“You sure?”
“Dean.”
“Okay, okay, I’m going.”
Sam turned his phone to vibrate and tucked it in against his hip. Then he hoisted the pack of weapons and explosives at his feet and slipped away through the trees, to continue his preparations.
---
His phone vibrated.
“Hey.”
“Hey. You okay?”
“Fine. Cas?”
“Sleeping like a big baby.” There was an undercurrent of something there that Sam suspected he was missing.
“Brady?”
“Foul-mouthed and secure. Keeps trying to rile me up with nasty talk about you at college. Seriously, Sam, how’s your ghost town?”
“Going to be a zombie town. About half an hour, I think.”
“Shit, Sammy.”
“What else was I supposed to do, Dean? Go into town where the sheriff’s still looking for me and tell the pregnant women and the kids under two and everyone else who was too weak for the vaccine to barricade themselves in against their husbands and sisters and children? Get myself arrested before anyone turns?”
“No. No, Sam, of course not. Not your fault, man. Just... shit. The whole town?”
Sam looked at the cheerful, dilapidated little sign next to him, with its little fluorescent light.
“Population 220. I’ve got the ammo. Especially if some of them turn quicker, and... take the others out first.”
Dean swore again, with the shake in his voice that only came when it was Sam’s life or humanity on the line.
“Look, I’m going to take it slow. Pick them off a few at a time and not get drawn out. I scoped out the place already, worked out some boltholes, hid some weapons stashes here and there. Should have a couple of days before anyone else turns up to see what’s going on.”
“Sammy.” He could hear Dean pinching the bridge of his nose. “I should be there. We should be there.”
“Well, you can’t. You need to get Brady to Bobby’s and work out what he knows. Look, ask Bobby if he knows anyone in the area who could swing on by, okay? But I can do this, Dean. I have to.”
“Okay. Just... keep me posted, yeah?”
The grim, efficient detachment of a major job was already settling into Sam’s bones and senses. He could hear it shortening his voice into something clipped and cool.
“Can’t, gotta take down the cell towers. I’ll let you know as soon as I get out of here, though.”
“I’d better see you at Bobby’s on the weekend. I’m not taking on those books by myself.”
Sam faked half a grin, enough for Dean to hear it. “You won’t have to, actually. I sort of browbeat Gabriel into heading there, with the promise of fake photo IDs and credit cards.”
“Great. Because he’s going to be a restful study buddy.”
“I hear ya. Poor Cas and Bobby, with two of you to babysit.”
“Hey!”
“Go, I’m busy. I’ve got a town to blow up.”
---
SW: gabriel?
0000101011: if u insist
SW: sure sound like him to me.
SW: tell me about stonehenge. how’d they manage it?
1001100011: you trying to make my thumbs drop off?
SW: humor me?
0010010100: what’s up, kiddo?
SW: just a nasty job to do. nothing new.
0100010000: fine.
0010110101: you know that story about merlin roping in the giants?
It took two days. The children were the first to turn.
Sam tried, savagely, to be glad about that. The fact that the townspeople were reluctant to shoot even a psychopathically violent kid meant that a lot of adults were killed before they turned. And the fact that the kids were still kids, not supernaturally strong creatures in a child’s body like a demon or something, meant that when the adults finally rallied round and did something about it they managed to overrule them. Lock them up, or gun them down. In the two hours it took for the town to turn completely, almost eighty people died.
All in all, it thinned out the crowd.
Sam watched it all, from a shadowed window in the church’s locked belltower, with three clear paths to escape across the roofs. He had to watch, because he needed to know. They’d had very little chance to observe the Croats three years back, and they didn’t know how far Pestilence had altered the brew.
Random and brainless, he concluded. No ability to work together, no concern about their fellows, little advanced planning. Primarily reactionary. Cannibalistic, and preferring to kill than to bite to turn. Not inclined to bother about working around difficulties like a high fence unless there was an immediate incentive (a sobbing woman) on the other side. Senses a little sharper than human, but not great at distinguishing between sounds - given the choice between the sound of fleeing footsteps and a raven croaking, about half the milling Croats went for each one.
No mass breakouts to head off, then.
The number of Croats began to increase as the night wore on, drifting in from the woods where some people must have fled before their own bodies turned on them. So, drawn to the town, or at least its lights and noise. That was good. Less likely to wander off across the river.
Sam waited for the voracious crowd in the churchyard to grow. Two women had tried to hide in the church, but found the doors locked because it was a Thursday night. Sam had put a merciful bullet through the skull of the closer woman as the Croats dragged the second down, and they hadn’t even raised their heads at the shot, not with fresh struggling meat in front of them, so he’d downed one of them too. Then he’d seen the way the smell and the feeding acted as a magnet to the other Croats, and he’d put down his shotgun, drawn out a grenade, and waited.
He counted fifteen in the pack before he lobbed it, and picked off the three mutilated survivors carefully, by the light of the floodlamps illuminating God’s message on the front door.
This wasn’t a hunt.
He settled back and watched, waiting for the sound and the corpses to draw in more.
His phone vibrated against his hip.
Which... was impossible.
Sam slipped his hand into his pocket, flipped it open, and turned the illumination to its lowest level with a practised thumb before drawing it out, because he couldn’t risk upsetting his night vision.
0111000100: hey. i should work out if i can time hop with passengers. dragging u along would confuse locals hilariously.
So apparently Gabriel wasn’t actually using the phone network, any more than he had been really using the internet. Just the ability of the phone or the computer to receive and transmit.
SW: text dean, tell him u can still reach me even with towers down.
The answering vibration managed to sound irritated.
000010110: what am i, ur local post boy?
0010011110: done.
SW: thx
1000000000: nasty job cant be that bad if uv still got working thumbs & time 4 a coffee break.
Oh look, another angel who’d picked up on sarcasm.
Sam felt a sudden savage impulse of two can play at that game. It was Gabriel and his brothers, after all, who had let (or made) things come to this pass.
SW: in bell tower, watching 24 croats eat the bodies of 15 others. which i just killed.
1011000111: holy hell, kid. who signed you up for this life?
0110001111: ... don’t answer that. rhetorical.
And just like that, Gabriel slipped in under the cold walls that Sam always kept firm between himself and realisation while working a job.
For some reason, it was almost a relief.
Sam sagged back against the wall and watched the Croats - the people, whom he would have to kill, because they were already worse than dead - clustering bloodily below.
1011100101: winchester snr nagging me now. talk about co-dependent.
1001111001: telling him my version of the adventures of sam. needs more strippers. local color.
SW: thx
SW: he’ll appreciate that.
SW: local color, i mean.
0000011110: simple tastes, i like that in a man.
SW: dude. don’t flirt with dean
1111101001: baby, dean & i have flirted since day 1, its our special thing.
SW: ew.
Sam took a moment, in the middle of a massacre, to stop and imagine his brother flirting with any of the other archangels. It was more than sort of inconceivable.
Which led him to realise that, yes, in fact, Gabriel had flirted, and not only with Dean. Not so remarkable in itself - Sam suspected Gabriel could probably flirt with a toaster without turning a hair, because it was kind of his default setting - except that, well, to flirt you had to treat the other party as a person. Even if you insulted them all the time. Right from the start, Gabriel had talked to them like they were people, rather than insects or game pieces, which... was impossible to imagine in any of the other archangels. Almost any other angel.
And yes, okay, his methods of explaining and persuading had left a hell of a lot to be desired, but Sam was pretty sure there’d been a genuine attempt at communication there. Like it mattered not only what they did, but what they thought and chose. Like he’d actually believed they could change the course of things to come.
SW: btw. the passenger thing would be awesome.
0110011011: course it would, its my idea.
0000011001: hey. i have great stories about mid-imperial china?
Also, when he couldn’t just drop them into the middle of an action movie just because he was bored or something, he was surprisingly fun.
A grey drizzle began to mist its way over the stark floodlit scene below.
SW: raincheck? nearly enough here 4 grenade #2.
In the early hours of the morning, Sam bunkered down in a granary just outside the town, after checking that its alarm systems were in order. He didn’t sleep much, but it was enough to see him through at least the next thirty hours before his reactions began to slow.
When the sun rose, he headed back into town by a roundabout route with plenty of cover. He took out two stray Croats along the way, after carefully checking the silencer on his pistol. They were a little overweight, and wore hideous purple spandex, like they’d been going for a nice evening jog when the switch flipped inside them.
He set up a sniper nest on top of the post office.
Not long before nine, he felt the discreet buzz against his thigh.
1101001101: hey. ring dean.
SW: can’t, i knocked out the cell towers yesterday, remember?
0010110110: ring dean. ;)
What the hell. He’d been about to move anyway - this street was quiet.
Castiel picked up on the second ring. “Samuel.” There was something that could almost be a faintly questioning rise at the end.
“Cas! Huh. I didn’t expect that to actually -”
“Sammy?”
“Dude, you know it’s rude to snatch?”
“You’ve got reception? Where are you?”
Sam kept his tone light. “Still here. I think Gabriel patched the signal or something.”
“Huh.” Dean took a moment to process that. “He’s pretty cluey, considering.”
“Guess so. You’re still good over there?”
“Same old. You?”
Sam thought of a teenage girl as two Croats closed in on her, screaming and begging them by name. He’d thought for a moment, as he took them down, that he might have saved someone; but then he’d seen the bite marks on the kid’s forearms and hands, and shot her before she could start begging Sam too.
“Not pretty, but under control. They’re not that bright, so as long as they don’t see me, I’m good.”
He could hear Dean’s frown; but it wasn’t actually all that hard to keep things from Dean, especially over the phone. “Okay, well, you let me know if you need bailing out or something.”
“Yes mother. Ring if you have to - it’s on vibrate, and I promise I won’t pick up if there’s a zombie chewing my neck.”
Dean made a rude noise, and Sam hung up.
Still no movement on the street.
SW: ok, maybe that idea was halfway to awesome.
SW: what did u do?
1000101001: sneaky stuff.
1110111010: signals & radio waves r easy. tiny. just need a delicate hand.
SW: delicate? you? like dropping a piano on dean’s head delicate?
1001011110: no, like twisting what u2 yahoos saw each other doing just enough to annoy u without cluing ur nasty suspicious little minds in delicate. :P
SW: u still owe me a laptop for that.
SW: but supercharged phone will do for now.
---
Sam would have liked to say that it was all a bit of a blur, taking out the town. The face of one dead teenager looking much like another after a while, or one grenade blast too like another to bother with distinctions. Fuzzy around the edges, blurred over with necessity and the knowledge that they weren’t really people.
It wouldn’t have been true, but it would have been nice to be able to say that.
For some reason, the town hall was a favoured Croatoan hang-out, but the supermarket was absolutely deserted. Which suited Sam, as he hadn’t had time to stock up on much in the way of food.
The school, though, was a warren of Croats.
Rather than get trapped in there with them, Sam blew it up.
Explosives, he had stocked up on.
---
0000100011: mission plant-weird-objects-in-pilgrim-shrines-and-persuade-people-they’re-relics: accomplished.
SW: will you focus? we’ve got a damn job to do here, gabriel.
0111000110: speak for yourself. :P
---
He picked over the ruins of the school for anything that wasn’t properly dead, but it was a hot and dusty job, and a dangerous one. There was an inevitable creeping resentment every time he had to stop and climb out of a hole to make sure nothing was sneaking up on him, or had to take five minutes heaving at first one end of a beam then another to check what was underneath. Just one more pair of hands would have made a hell of a difference, but no, Sam Winchester couldn’t get that lucky. And even with heavy gloves on, he had to be careful about every grip he took, everywhere he put his hands. He couldn’t risk any nicks or scratches, any broken skin, just in case anything got too close. Banking on the old immunity as anything other than a desperate backup if things went badly wrong was not on the cards.
One almost did, lying panting and broken behind a collapsed bank of lockers, but still powered by enough rage and hunger to scrabble into a lunge for Sam when he came around the corner almost on top of it. His first bullet went wide and only caught its arm, but it staggered it long enough for Sam to overturn half an aircon unit into its path, then put his second bullet home true.
Of course, maybe Lucifer wouldn’t want a Croatoan vessel, but it would be just their luck for the virus remove the need for consent instead, so, not really an experiment he was in a hurry to make.
Two hours and six dead Croats later (it was probably stupid to feel worse about gunning down little old ladies than middle-aged men), his phone buzzed. Real helpful of it.
“Hey.”
“Sam.” He thought that was Castiel’s grim and blunt voice, but it sounded pretty much like his mildly disapproving voice, his cautiously amused voice, and probably his dancing with glee voice if he had one of those, so it was hard to tell. “I’m afraid Brady is dead.”
Great. Just great.
“Well, there goes our one lead on Famine.” Sam heard the snappish tone in his voice, and reined it in a little, because it was Castiel. “What happened? Did you get anything useful out of him first?”
“We didn’t. I had thought it best to keep even cursory interrogations for a safer space, especially considering how difficult he was likely to be to persuade...” He broke off for a moment, and that was definitely frustration under there, maybe even some guilt. “We were attacked, and your brother was trapped under the car. I let him be my priority, and they killed Brady before I could destroy them.”
“Is he hurt? Are you?”, Sam added, as he belatedly registered the hitch in Castiel’s breathing.
“Minimally. The car requires some minor repairs. Dean says that he will know soon how long it will take to make it roadworthy.”
Another delay. Another failure.
It was probably a marker of the ridiculousness of their lives, if they needed another one, that feeling guilty over not achieving the impossible was becoming a regular thing. For Castiel too now, it seemed.
Sam exhaled against the sudden stifling press of isolation and pointless rage - at the Croats, at the stupid townspeople they had been, at everyone pushing them around or just plain not helping. At Gabriel, flitting cheerfully back and forth between the centuries when the world was sliding down the drain. At Castiel, for punishing Dean’s attempted self-sacrifice with his own and leaving them almost one man down. At all the breaks that they never got, and the dead ends everywhere.
“Okay, well, nothing you could do.” He heard his voice come out curt and clipped, and softening it didn’t seem worth the effort. “I’ve got another day or two here, but I’ll see you at Bobby’s when you get there.”
Castiel just said “Yes,” and hung up.
---
Inside the oiled leather gloves, Sam’s hands itched with sweat and dirt and phantom blood. And his head ached from squinting against the sun, where it glinted off the roofs and the windows of cars, parked incongruously neatly in their driveways.
It would be so very easy to go mad like this. Not the madness of dark power and evil, or the madness of a mind left broken by something too strong to comprehend. Just old-fashioned human too-much-to-handle, tramping the same bloody ground over and over again, with nothing to set against the darkness.
And he couldn’t call Dean. Not when he was like this. Dean would realise, and that would lead... nowhere good.
Sam’s cell purred against his leg, a smug little twitch of warmth and promise.
1001111101: singer says to say he’s sending rufus ur way. should be there tomorrow morning.
1001110000: & that if i get my dirty trickster paws on his kitchen he’ll stick them in the hot oil
1010100101: i feel abused :(
It was like a glimpse into another world, lighter and distant, so faint it was almost illusory next to the scents of blood and dust that seemed to be permanently soaked into his skin.
SW: thx
Sam hesitated, then tried to play the same game, to reach out and touch that world.
SW: dont tell me ur going to have to play nice for a bit?
0100110011: v v tempted to make baseball cap look like little old lady church hat
SW: how close is his shotgun? :P
1101000101: just some fruit+flowers on it?
Sam had a sudden flash of a vision of Bobby’s kitchen, smelling warm and homelike and faintly boozy; Bobby glowering in his wheelchair with a shotgun over his lap; Gabriel with a chair tipped back and his feet on the table, smirking at Bobby with terrifying promise from behind his phone.
It was sort of surreal, but a hell of a lot better than what was around him here.
SW: don’t blame me if you find yourself with future as a colander.
1110111010: racing stripes on the wheelchair? pls?
SW: do u even have houseguest manners?
He wasn’t smiling, but his headache had eased off a bit.
---
There weren’t so many of them anymore, and Sam was confident he would hear them coming, so that night he started slipping into houses, hunting for locked doors that might conceal survivors.
He found a few who had been, but weren’t anymore.
One of them almost brought up the protein bars and half a rockmelon he’d had for lunch. And Sam wasn’t exactly renowned for his weak stomach.
In the morning Dean rang, with an estimate that they should be at Bobby’s by the day after tomorrow and a promise to check back in around noon. There was something wary in his voice when he asked how Sam was doing, like he wasn’t sure that Sam could stay Sam if Dean wasn’t there to eye him off all the time. Sam said as little as possible, and assured Dean that he was doing his job just fine.
---
Sam looked down at the two corpses at his feet, then turned and melted away into the shrubs behind the shopping strip, hand sliding into his hip pocket.
SW: not a colander yet?
1100111001: nope! or a fry. have been reduced to minion of the stairs, tho. seems wheel chairs not so good with ups & downs, who knew
0101001111: & also of the books. these r sum fine books, if i do say so, which i do.
SW: hows that going?
0011110110: nothing yet. except that apparently the welsh think the irish like cows. i mean, really like them. also deer. how do humans sit still 4 hours?
SW: we have this thing called patience. u might have heard of it.
0101110000: how about u, kiddo? how’s who-let-the-zombies-out going?
SW: just killed the last of the kids.
SW: looked about six.
SW: wearing a sesame street necklace.
SW: had just torn out a pregnant woman’s throat when she tried to run for it. I wasn’t in time.
0011101111: fuck.
SW: pretty much.
SW: but hey, bright side, liquor store not looted. apparently croats don’t go on benders.
0111110101: drunk in zombietown sounds like a brilliant plan. :P
SW: i know. :P hey, only 53 zombies to go!
1001110111: keeping count?
SW: at least im a systematic mass murderer.
---
It turned out that the drug store roof was perfect for picking off anyone moving on any of the three surrounding streets. Sam passed most of the morning there. Sight, squeeze, release. All very mechanical.
Most of the Croats were moving rather sluggishly now. But then, they did have full bellies. There was food all over the ground.
---
0111000011: this manuscript has a monkey crapping on a bishop in the margins. v devout psalter.
1110101000: thought: time-travelling monkey symbolises evolution crapping on creationism?
SW: you’re making that up.
1011000010: hey, ur species is way freakier than i could ever be, honeybuns.
SW: i guess.
---
He circled back out of town not long before noon, so that he wouldn’t have to keep his voice down when Dean rang. The last of its deserted houses was just falling away behind him around the slow curve of the road when he felt the call.
“Dean.”
The voice that curled down the line was warm and honey-smooth, all brightness and smirk. “Sorry to disappoint, kiddo.”
“Um,” Sam commented eloquently.
There was an awkward sort of a pause, then Gabriel took off. “So, you sounded like you could use a friendly voice. But Singer’s buried in some book binge, and your brother and mine are probably busy somewhere making mutual unrequited eyes of epic manpain at each other, and I hear there’s a decent sheriff somewhere around here but Singer warned me off her like a lovesick Rottweiler...”
Sam knew, logically, that that voice really should be reminding him of endless Tuesdays and taunts, but somehow, it managed to be too cheerfully brash for that association to stick.
And he hadn’t known Gabriel then.
“... and I think Kali’s hiding somewhere in Sudan and isn’t really friendly by the standards of anyone more delicate than a cave troll, and you’d probably stab Crowley on sight, and any of my other brothers would probably stab you on sight, so. You get me instead.”
“Wow.” Sam felt his mouth curve, and he seated himself against a fence-post, settling into it as if it were a sofa. “You really know how to sell yourself.”
“Five hot girls, two barrels of mead and a sacrificial goat,” came the prompt reply.
“A goat, huh?”
“Hey, don’t knock it, sacrificial goats are a valuable commodity. Very flexible. And do you know how hard it is to get the gilding on all those little ridges of their horns when they’re kicking all over the place?”
“Can’t say I’ve ever tried it.”
Gabriel made a sharp, amused noise. “You’re missing out. Never know when they might come in handy.”
And it was that easy to let the idea of Gabriel, the anonymous, intangible Gabriel of text on a little glowing screen, become cheerful and real against his ear. Almost as real as the brutal valley stretched out between him and the river.
“So, you just rang to talk about goats?”
“Maybe?”
“That’s... really something my day was missing. Thanks.”
“Oh yes, and - get over yourself, Winchester.”
Sam opened his mouth to say something indignant and confused, but Gabriel leaped right over him.
“No more cracks about mass murderers. I mean, come on. I know evil, kid, believe me, and you don’t even ping the radar.”
Sam sighed and pushed his sticky hair off his face, looking back at the scattered glint of afternoon sunlight off roofs between the trees. “Two days ago, all this? Rural Stepford. Milkshakes and skateboards and roses. Now it stinks of rot and I’m still pulling down bodies, and sure, Pestilence and Lucifer had their part, but a hell of a lot of it’s on no one but me.”
“Yeah?” Gabriel drawled, easy and maddening. “So’s it on that lorry driver for not keeping to the speed limit so you could catch him earlier. So’s it on the janitor in the Niveus labs for not accidentally spilling a bucket of water over the test results. You’d be surprised how easy that is to do.”
Sam shook his head, unable to stop himself. “It’s a small town, but that’s still over two hundred people. And I know I should be appalled every time I pull the trigger, but - I’m sometimes I’m just kind of sick of it. Or annoyed at them. Which is a fucking awful thing to think.”
“Sam.” The mockery dropped away like straw and Gabriel’s voice was suddenly harsh and low, vibrating with something very, very old that knocked Sam’s breath from his chest. “I cleared out Sodom and Gomorrah. At least these ones are past caring.”
And Sam had clear forgotten how this guy could turn on a freaking dime.
There was the archangel all at once. There was the ancient, powerful creature who had lived through every year of human history, spoken to Mary and Mohammed and who knows how many others before and since that Sam couldn’t even imagine. Spoken with God, whoever that was, and carried His wrath and joy to earth. This was the creature who had come to Sam in the panic room and burned the demon blood from his veins, and who was treating history like his own personal funfair ride, at least partly for Sam’s amusement.
Sam swallowed past a sudden catch in his throat, and his voice came out weak and raspy. “Yeah, well.” He tried again. “Just. Thanks for sticking around so far. I can’t exactly mention this to Dean, or he’d be signing me up for the twelve-step Just Say No To Archangels Jumping Your Ass plan.”
Gabriel audibly perked up. “Hey, I can help with that. I hear step one is Just Say No To Archangels Jumping Anything But Your Ass.”
And there was the flirting again. Sam stretched out his legs comfortably in the dust and draped one ankle over the other, smirking into the mouthpiece. “Cute. No.”
“See? You’re already past step two. Gotta go, I promised Singer crèpes.”
Sam stopped to stare at his phone, just in case it had turned into a banana or something else that seemed more likely than Gabriel cooking for Bobby. It stayed small and black and plastic-looking.
“... Just so we’re clear? If I get back there and Bobby’s house is a smouldering ruin, I’m holding you responsible.”
“O ye of little faith! Adfer manum tuam et mitte in crèpe meam, et noli esse incredulus sed fidelis.” The Latin rolled off his tongue like a filthy prayer, or possibly the Song of Songs.
“You know it’s kind of fundamentally disturbing to hear you quoting the Bible.”
Jesus. When was the last time he’d heard anyone laugh, really laugh, like they meant it? “How’s about the Qur’an, then?”
“You had a hand in that, didn’t you? Or was that after you left?”
Gabriel made a vaguely discontented noise. “Not long before. I had a chat with the guy and he wrote what he wanted, same as all the others. Raincheck?”
“Raincheck.”
He hung up, then looked at the screen more closely, in the instant before its “call ended” message vanished. Then he checked the recent call register, just to be sure.
It was a real number now. Sam saved it under “G”.
This time when he closed the phone, he was smiling.
---
There was no final dramatic showdown in the town square. Just Sam moving quietly through the convenience store attached to the gas station, and a middle-aged guy who might have had a kind face once, who shaved his right sideburn unevenly, who had “J. D.” tattooed on his right bicep and mud stains on his light cotton pyjama pants.
That was the last one.
---
“Hey, where does a sasquatch learn to press all those little buttons?”
“You’re hilarious, Gabriel.”
“You know it.”
“How has Bobby not killed you yet?”
“Aw, don’t say that. We’re getting along just swimmingly, aren’t we, Bobster?”
Sam heard Bobby growl something in the background that was probably along the lines of “call me that again and I’ll be washing your damn fool mouth out with the garage soap.”
“See? Best of friends,” Gabriel chirped, disturbingly. “How’s Operation Buzzkill?”
The sheer ludicrousness tore half a sick chuckle out of his throat. “You do know how way beyond inappropriate all these nicknames are, right?”
“Made you laugh though, didn’t it?”
“You’re ridiculous.”
“I live to please. Well, not really. Well, not you.”
“Just rang to say I’m pretty sure I got the last of them. I’ll do a final sweep in the morning before Rufus gets here, then get his help salting and burning all the corpses.”
“Hey, Singer. Child wonder here says he’s done.” There was a pause, with Bobby’s faint rumble behind it, then, “Daddy dearest says ‘how the heck are you still alive, kid?’ Lost my Grumpy Old Bugger dictionary somewhere under the fifth copy of Gerald of Wales, but I think that means he’s impressed.”
Sam leaned back against the bonnet of the car he’d appropriated and looked out over the curve of the valley and the rooftops spread out below him, too still and quiet for this time of day, except for the sound of birds. Crows. “I don’t know. Angels are watching over me?”
Gabriel made a rude noise. “Better hope not. Creepy smarmy bastards, they are.”
It eased the bitter taste in his throat, just a little. “Yeah, I might have heard something about that.” He paused, swallowed down bile, and gave in to the impulse that had been itching to him all afternoon, the real impetus behind this call. “Gabriel?”
“Still here.”
“Tell me about Sodom and Gomorrah?”
There was a moment’s silence, then the sound of Gabriel swinging his feet to the ground, the scrape of his chair, and the solid creak-thump of Bobby’s back door. “What do you want to know?”
Just like that.
It started sort of like any one of the history conversations they’d wandered through in text messages over the last few days - Sam questioning, diving off on curious tangents, calling Gabriel on his more obvious bullshitting; Gabriel rambling, colourful and rapid-fire, jumping back and forth across his narrative to drop in sharp comments and sly digs about his characters or Sam. But this time there was more “I,” more times when Gabriel’s voice trailed off for a moment as if he had lost track of which millennium he was in, a darker bite to the flashes of sarcasm.
It hadn’t been about homosexuality. It had been a pattern of behaviour, the gang rape and mugging of anyone who passed through the town, male or female or far too young, over almost fifteen years. And Chamael had been sent to tempt them with his beautiful face, then Gabriel had been sent to enact judgement - or to make an example.
“Those fuckers were past learning.” There was a long pause, like Gabriel wasn’t sure about committing himself to whatever was coming next. “Or, so Dad said.”
Sam just made a soft noise, nothing with words in it, and waited to see if he’d go on. Something about the story resonated inside him. He got the feeling that this was important, this memory: that it had set Gabriel thinking, either at the time, or in reflection centuries afterward.
Gabriel jumped tracks abruptly to make a scathing comment about Lot’s mother-in-law and just what she’d said to one of Chamael’s underlings, a fierce protectiveness running under the words that Sam hadn’t expected of him. That woman, Sam was pretty sure, hadn’t survived.
Then it was something light and silly about a mishap that particular angel had gotten into in second-century Macedon, an observation on the many creative uses of one of the glazes they’d used for pottery around then (which was apparently mildly hallucinogenic before firing), and a sly comment about salt.
It was about ten minutes before Gabriel fell silent for a moment, then started up in a very different register, low and quick with jagged edges. “And they didn’t understand, you know? Just random wrath. They looked at me, pleading for mercy, and they were scared. They weren’t learning to be better people or regretting what they’d done. They weren’t thinking about anything but how fucking terrified they were of what I was about to do to them. And sure, they were to your average petty little guy on the street what a rotting elephant corpse is to a chicken dinner, but I’ll be a flying monkey’s pet parrot if I know whether they were really past changing, every single one of them there, or just... disobedient. Whether Dad had just got sick of them. You just end up thinking... well, what if...”
Gabriel gulped off the end of his sentence and swore quietly, as if his mouth had been given an inch and had shoved a few miles in the back of a really fast getaway car.
If the bites on that teenager’s forearms had been a wild animal, not a Croat. If this one or that one hadn’t been infected, had only attacked him in self-defence, because they thought he was a Croat. If the future that Zachariah had shown Dean had been wrong, and the virus did wear off after a while.
“‘What if I missed something?’” Sam put in quietly.
The breath fell out of Gabriel in a sigh, crackling through the phone. “Something like that.”
Out of all the world, what had Sam done to deserve something like Gabriel saying this to something like him?
The lowest rim of the westering sun settled on the hilltop behind him, and liquid red light drew out the shadows below into long streaks like fingers across the land.
“So.” He cracked the top of the beer he’d liberated from the abandoned liquor store. “Angel of judgement, huh?”
“Yeah, well.” Gabriel’s voice was still kind of muted, but it had a wry sort of inflection to it that sounded more natural than it had two minutes ago. “At least Loki showed them what they’d done. Gave them a chance to change their minds.”
Sam drank to that.
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