Fic: Too long in the Wasteland (spn_summergen)
Here is Oz we've sprung into Spring (and the weather is just gorgeous!). The Northern Hemisphere has fallen into Fall and that's important because it means it's no longer summer and thus the spn_summergen reveals have been posted!
There were so many brilliant entries this year. If you haven't checked them all out yet, do yourself a favour and head over to the comm! I had the good fortune to receive an amazing, inspiring set of prompts from sophiap which really set the muse off and racing! Thank you for such wonderful prompts! And thanks also to Cassiopeia7 and frozen_delight both of whom recc'd the story! Deb, your rec made my day...staying quiet and anonymous was hard! :D
So anyway, here is my entry:
Originally posted by summergen_mod at Too long in the Wasteland
Title: Too long in the wasteland
Author: zara_zee
Recipient: sophiap
Beta: 9tiptoes
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: ~11,000
Warnings: Dean-centric, immortal!MoC!Dean, swearing, violence, attempted assault, hurt!Dean, natural disasters, post-apocalyptic world, suicidal thoughts,[This warning is a spoiler]major character deaths (with a happy ending!)
**Now also up at AO3 -- CLICK HERE**
Prompt: Such a great set of prompts that I really had trouble picking just one. So…I’ve done a sort of hybrid mash-up of a few of them and done some thinking outside the box! I hope it works for you, sophiap.
[Click to see prompts:]Prompt 4: I would LOVE a Sam and/or Dean piece based on James McMurtry's "Too Long in the Wasteland."
Link to Song
With a little bit of:
Prompt 5: Decades or even centuries after they're gone, how are the Winchesters remembered?
And a wee bit of this one too:
Prompt 1:The boys get caught up in the aftermath of a natural or man-made disaster. There's no hunting things involved, but there's sure a lot of saving people. Or needing to be saved themselves?
Summary: The year is 2015 and Sam and Dean’s battle with the Mark of Cain is suddenly overshadowed by a series of catastrophic natural disasters that devastate the planet and irrevocably change life as we know it.
The year is… actually, Dean is damned if he knows. He stopped keeping track of shit like that after Sammy died. He’s just trying to make it through eternity one step at a time, only ever venturing out of the Wasteland to trade, and to listen to the stories people tell themselves about Before.
--
the people in the village
watch their children play
at the sight of a stranger
they call the kids away
just leave that man alone
I hear the mother say
he's been
too long in the wasteland
too long in the wasteland
's what made him that way
--
If he tries really hard, Dean can just about remember when Kansas used to be green.
He stares out at the burnt-brown plains of spiny desert shrub and takes a long drink from his silver hip flask, relishing the way the moonshine burns his throat.
Of course, some parts of Kansas had been golden, rather than green, he muses.
Back in the day, Dean had loved driving down the long stretches of straight black-top, with mile after mile after mile of wheat or corn on either side of the road. Dean tells the iguana about it at length and then looks at the empty space beside him and tries to remember his brother’s face as it was back then. Back then-Before-Sam would sit beside him in Dean’s beautiful sleek black car, reading a map or his research on their latest case, his stupid hair flopping in his face, while Led Zeppelin blasted from the speakers.
Both Sam and Baby are long gone now; Dean rubs at the mark on his arm and sighs.
Baby went first, the victim of rising oil prices and catastrophic climate change.
Dean snorts. He and Sam had been so caught up with angels and demons and the supernatural that they’d been completely blindsided by the Westcoast earthquake and the Eastcoast tsunami that fucked things up big-time in 2015.
Dean takes another swig of ‘shine. He and Sam had spent months trying to figure out which Deity had decided to throw another apocalypse, before finally accepting that there was nothing supernatural going on. The Earth’s plates were simply shifting about, and climate change was starting to have a real impact too.
The weather patterns had already been messed up, but after the ‘quake, the droughts, floods, tornadoes and hurricanes seemed to step things up a notch.
And then the super storms started, months of fierce destructive wind, constant rumbling thunder and skies full of sheet-lightning. But no rain. Hardly ever any rain.
Over the next few decades the heart of America turned into a dustbowl and food and water riots became an everyday occurrence. Law and order broke down fast. Infrastructure failed.
The silver-lining in the whole ‘world’s gone to hell in a hand basket’ scenario is that the mark on Dean’s arm has stopped being a liability and become an asset.
As civilization crumbled and it became a kill or be killed world, Dean flourished. He was in his element, just like he’d been in Purgatory. The mark still whispers inside his skull, still sends inky black tendrils twisting through his mind, but its dark urges are just common sense in what’s become of the world and it doesn’t seem to have the same hold on him anymore.
Sam died in 2056. Dean can say that now without having to go on a bender afterwards. He caught a nasty strain of influenza and he refused to let Cas heal him; he was tired, he said.
Dean told Cas to fuck off after Sam died. He understands why the angel refused to heal Sam against Sam’s wishes, but he was pissed about it for a good fifty years.
The angels are mostly back in heaven nowadays, but Cas still stops by every couple of decades to check on him; to make sure he doesn’t have to throw Dean into the sun or something. Sometimes, when he visits, Dean is civil to him. Sometimes they fight, because Dean needs an outlet and Cas can take it.
Dean takes another long swallow from his flask and pokes at the iguana roasting in his campfire. He prefers squirrel-with iguana you’re forever picking bones out of your teeth-but a big lizard is what his pre-supper hunt managed to catch and he’d rather eat a lizard than one of those disgusting, greasy pig-like things. Occasionally, you get deer out here, which is awesome, but if there are deer around then there are usually cougars and wolves too. Dean hates having to fight for his supper and he hates having to stand guard over his kills to make sure that a sneaky cougar doesn’t steal it while his back’s turned. It’s too time-consuming when he’s on the road.
Dean decides the iguana is done and uses two of his knives to lift it off the spit. He lets it cool on his plate a little before tearing into the hot meat with his fingers and shovelling it down fast. It’s been hours since he last ate and dragging a utility wagon harnessed to his waist through the arid almost-desert of Kansas is hungry-making work.
About ninety years ago, give or take, when the smaller lakes, creeks and waterways had started to dry up and the black soil of Kansas had dried to a rusty brown and blown away, Dean had given serious consideration to leaving the Bunker and heading out to one of the communities that were struggling to survive by one of the bigger bodies of water. He’d come across a few small townships on the banks of the Kansas, the Missouri and the Mississippi in his travels, and there were people clinging to the edges of Lake Waconda too. He’d heard tell that there were some pretty big settlements up around the Great Lakes, but that was a long way to travel by foot.
In the end he chose to stay in Lebanon for a number of reasons.
Firstly, the bunker is well-warded against the supernatural, and supernatural creatures are still a problem.
Secondly, Dean found a whole bunch of spell books that Cuthbert Sinclair had written when he was still Master of Spells, and he’d managed to both hide the bunker from human sight and keep the power and water running using Cuthbert’s magic.
You’d have to be crazy to give up a place with fresh running water and electricity. Electricity means heat, light and refrigeration. It means that if he kills a deer, he can butcher it and freeze parts of it to use later. It means he can cook just by turning a few knobs rather than having to collect wood and build a fire. A constant supply of clean water means life and out in the wastelands of the Midwest, that’s a very big deal.
Also? Dean’s not entirely sure he could survive eternity without steaming hot showers and his fluffy bath robe. Not with his sanity intact anyway. Dean wonders whether his sanity is, in fact, still intact. That’s probably debatable at this point given that he was talking to a roasting iguana earlier. Dean takes another swig of ‘shine. It really has been too long since he was last around people.
“What was I saying?” he asks the iguana’s leg. “Oh that’s right. The bunker.”
Thirdly, he has memory foam in his bedroom, which has been remembering who Dean Winchester is for a couple of hundred years, and which doesn’t get suspicious and accuse him of witchcraft when he doesn’t ever seem to age. See, there’s a reason he hasn’t been into a township for a while. A good one. Not just the fact that on his best day he’s an anti-social asshole who likes to kill. He has to limit his exposure to the regular people so they don’t get suspicious. He learnt the hard way that being run out of town by pitchfork wielding townsfolk isn’t fun.
Dean rubs at the mark again and gets lizard grease all over his arm. He splashes ‘shine on his arm to get rid of it, takes a moment to wistfully miss his nice clean tidy kitchen, and then takes another slurp of the high octane alcohol that is his stock trade item.
Dean has more rooms in the bunker than he needs and he converted several of them to hydroponic growing rooms decades ago. He mostly grows corn, but also tomatoes, potatoes, carrots and beans. Marijuana too, strictly for medicinal purposes. He’s pretty self-sufficient, but there are still things he likes to have, like wheat-flour, salt, dairy and soap, that he doesn’t have the means to cultivate or make himself. So he trades for those items with the moonshine he makes from his corn.
Most recently, he’s been trading with the community over at what used to be Cawker City. Waconda Lake managed to survive the dust storms and the good folk of Cawker (they dropped the ‘city’ several decades back) have managed to keep a small section of Elder State Park healthy and filled with trees. It’s good growing land, which is why Cawker now has a perimeter fence, patrolled by armed guards.
Dean goes and pees on a nearby bush and then cleans up the remnants of his supper. He inventories the bottles of moonshine in his wagon and decides he can afford to drink a little more of his profits. He selects a bottle and tops up his flask. He stows the opened bottle in his duffel bag and then sits back down on his sleeping bag.
Dean’s sleeping bag is a prized possession; insulated and waterproof, he’d bought it from a Dick’s Sporting Goods store in a shopping mall in Georgia, back when there were still Dick’s Sporting Goods stores.
And shopping malls.
And Georgia.
Dean can’t say that his misses malls. He doesn’t miss Georgia all that much either.
It’s quiet out in the Wastelands. There are no crickets and the only bird noise Dean hears is the occasional scream of an eagle hunting. The sun is just starting to set, the sky burnished in bright orange and gold, like the sky’s on fire.
Sunsets are brighter and more vivid since The Collapse. The stars too. Maybe it’s just the loss of all the light pollution. And the loss of actual pollution too. The air sure is a lot cleaner and clearer than it used to be.
Dean sits and stares at the sky, watching as it turns from burnt embers and polished copper to soft pink and indigo. The night sky morphs from a deep inky blue to velvet black and the stars sparkle like chips of crystal.
Dean tips his head back and drinks deeply from his flask. He almost turns to make an offhand remark to Sammy and the next few mouthfuls of ‘shine he has to swallow hard to get past the lump in his throat.
It had been weird watching his baby brother turn into an old man while he remained a constant thirty-six years old. He’d looked through Cuthbert Sinclair’s magic collection to see if he could find a way to keep Sam young, but his brother had gotten grumpy about it.
“Getting old is normal, Dean,” he’d said, pushing his grey hair behind his ear and wagging a gnarled finger at Dean. “I haven’t had a lot of normal in my life. Don’t take this away from me.”
“But you’ll die,” Dean had told him.
“Yeah,” Sam had nodded. “I will,” he’d grinned. “And it won’t be the first time either. At least I know what’s waiting for me, what to expect.”
Dean had embarrassed himself then, his eyes unexpectedly filling with tears. “I don’t wanna do this alone, Sammy.”
Sam’s eyes had darkened and his jaw had tightened and Dean had expected angry words about how he’d done this to himself, going off half-cocked, not bothering to consider the consequences before he’d gone barrelling head-first into taking on the mark.
Instead, Sam gathered him into a hug and told him that he would never stop looking for a way to get rid of the mark.
“Just think of all the resources I’ll have in heaven that I don’t have here,” Sam had said, his eyes gleaming, and Dean had laughed.
Of course, his geek of a brother’s heaven was bound to include a kick-ass library.
Once the flames from Sam’s funeral pyre had burnt out, Dean summoned Death.
“Oh no,” Death had said. “Your brother’s in heaven and this time, he’s staying there. After the number of time’s that boy’s stood me up, I escorted him myself and got him to sign a DNR.”
“Do not resuscitate?”
The look Death had given Dean made him feel like a speck of cosmic dust. “Do not resurrect.”
When Dean had explained that he wasn’t looking to resurrect Sammy, but to join him, he’d expected Death to be pleased; after all, the grimmest of reapers had bitched more than once about the Winchesters screwing with the natural order of things.
He hadn’t expected Death to flat out refuse his request.
Death had explained about the Darkness, the first evil, and how the mark was a lock designed to keep the Darkness contained.
“So I am sorry, Dean,” Death said. “But that mark must stay on your arm. And that means that you can never die.”
Dean had been gutted when Sam left to go to Stanford. The idea that he might have to slug it out through the rest of existence without his brother by his side is…well, let’s just say there’s a reason he started brewing his own moonshine.
Sam is always in the back of Dean’s mind, but back at the bunker he can go days without consciously thinking of his brother, too caught up in his day-to-day routine. It’s different when he’s on the road. He may be travelling on foot, hauling a wagon behind him, and sleeping in a sleeping bag under the stars, but it’s similar enough to crossing the country in his baby and sleeping in shitty motels that he finds himself glancing to the side far too often, expecting to find someone there.
And staring up at the stars is something he and Sammy often did; sitting on Baby’s hood, drinking beer and chatting idly. Just…being brothers.
Dean finishes his flask and goes to bed dizzy and thick-headed. It’s a mistake and he knows it. The Wastelands aren’t safe, but he’s hard to kill and sometimes he just doesn’t give a fuck. The best an attacker can do is turn him into a demon; and then God help them.
+
Dean is suddenly aware; eyelids flying back so fast it hurts as awareness pours in and sensations assail him. He’s cold, his head feels like it’s been sliced open so that squirrels can dance on his brain, and he may possibly puke, if the contents of his stomach can make it past the cotton wool in his mouth. Also, there’s a hand on his ass, but that takes him a beat longer to notice because he was used to waking up in purgatory with Benny’s hands on him, and sleeping outdoors on the cold, hard ground had Dean’s head in the wrong place; the wrong time, just for a moment.
The guy trying to work his way into Dean’s sleeping bag is not Benny. For a start, he doesn’t have any teeth. He stinks too; of blood and shit and rotting flesh.
Dean notices the God-awful stench of him immediately and the gummy mouth when Dean flips the guy off of him and presses his knife against a bony, dirt-encrusted neck.
“Pretty,” the man says, reaching for Dean’s clean-shaven cheek. Dean jerks back out of reach but keeps his knife pressed against the man’s throat. “Too pretty for a Wastelander.”
Dean hears raspy breath and heavy footfalls behind him and he ducks and rolls instinctively. His skin prickles and he feels the breeze of a missed hit; hears a dull thud and a groan. Scavengers always roam in packs and Dean counts five. Three are going through his stock, one is unconscious beside him, having taken the blow that had been aimed at Dean, and the fifth is standing over Dean grinning manically.
“Real pretty,” he nods.
“Well,” Dean says, eyes roaming over wiry, crud-encrusted guy Number Two. He has a beard like rusted steel-wool and slitted eyes the same color. Or maybe everything just looks grey in the pre-dawn light. “It is a low bar,” Dean inclines his head. “I find that basic hygiene helps.” He unzips his sleeping bag all the way and the guy’s eyes widen.
“Smart too,” the guy says. “Not gonna fight us are ya, Pretty Boy? Gonna let us have you.”
Dean laughs, his eyes cold. “Tell you what,” he stands up, stretching, and pops a knot in his back, “you guys leave my stuff alone and back off slowly and I won’t kill you.”
The guy’s eyes bug out, but then his buddies gravitate to his side and his confidence seems to come spluttering back.
They rush him all at once and Dean becomes a whirling dervish of death and destruction, his knife flashing and chopping, stabbing and cutting, as he spins and twists and ducks and weaves. Bodies drop around him and he’s circling warily, wet with sweat and blood, when his original assailant comes ‘round.
He sits up and looks around. “Well fuck,” he peers up at Dean. “What are you, man?”
Dean blinks. He’s pretty sure his eyes aren’t black.
“Get outta here,” he says. Because he’s not a demon.
“Aw hell,” the guy pulls on his long, dirt-matted beard. “Ain’t got a crew no more, may’s well kill me.”
Dean shrugs and the guy sighs. “No mercy? Fine,” he snatches up the bottle of moonshine that he’d been brained with. “But I’m takin’ this with me.”
Dean raises an eyebrow but doesn’t argue and the guy climbs to his feet. He drags his eyes up and down Dean’s body lasciviously and licks at his lips.
“Dude!’ Dean says, because he’s standing in a pile of dead bodies and has the blood of this guy’s friends spattered all over his face and okay, he’s hot, he accepts that, but really?
“You’re older than I thought,” the guy says and Dean has to laugh at that, because the guy has no frigging idea.
“Sorry ‘bout the misunderstanding,” the guy says.
Dean points at the bodies with his knife. “It’s been dealt with.”
The guy nods. “One Wastelander to another? There’s a monster dust storm headin’ this way from the west. It’s a flesh-stripper. You don’t wanna get caught out in it.”
Dean watches him leave and then packs up his camp. It’s almost daybreak and he can’t stay here anymore anyway. It won’t take the cougars long to scent all the fresh blood.
He lost four bottles of ‘shine to the scavengers and Dean is pissed. Going through the dead men’s packs doesn’t net him anything of value to compensate him for the loss.
Later, when it’s light, he peers at the west horizon and sees nothing but dust. That’s not unusual. Dust storms and mini dust-tornadoes are common and ordinarily he wouldn’t have thought anything of it, except that the Scavenger said it was a bad one, so he stares at the distant wall of dust intently for a long time and slowly begins to realize how dense the dust is. It’s swirling too, like there’s a tornado caught up in there somewhere, and every once in a while Dean catches a flash of lightning.
“Shit,” Dean doubles his pace. The Scavenger was right; he doesn’t want to get caught out in that. If he hurries, he might be able to make Cawker by tomorrow afternoon.
+
Cawker is about a mile and a half east of where Cawker City used to be. It runs in between the lake and what was once Highway 24 but is now a fortified wall, over the bridge and into Elder State Park. The Wall has sharpshooters atop it, stationed about half a mile apart, and the Gate is at the western end of the Wall, about a mile east of where the World’s Largest Ball of Twine used to be. No-one’s sure what happened to it, which Dean finds amusing. How do you lose a 20,000 pound ball of twine? Sammy would be gutted.
Dean stops about twenty yards from the Gate, because there’s a gun on him.
“Winchester,” he calls out, “from out North,” he waves a hand in the general direction of Lebanon. “I’m lookin’ to trade.”
“North?” the Gate Guard sounds skeptical. “Ain’t nothin’ out there ‘cept the Wasteland.”
Dean nods. “My family’s got a place out there.”
That earns him a hard stare and he tries his best to look harmless, something he hasn’t been able to pull off convincingly since he was in his twenties. Being covered in blood spatter probably isn’t helping his cause any either.
“Whatcha lookin’ to trade?” the guard says finally.
“I got ‘shine, Mary Jane and information,” Dean says. “I’m interested in salt and soap.”
He and Sam raided every grocery store they could find for salt, back in the day, but that was a long time ago and he’s running dangerously low.
The Wall guard lowers her rifle and harrumphs. “Sure looks like you could use some soap,” she says.
Dean runs a hand across his grimy face. “Had a little trouble with Scavengers on the way here.”
She cocks an eyebrow suspiciously. “And you took them out all by your lonesome, huh?”
Dean decides to go with roguish charm. “Hey now,” he says. “I ain’t just a pretty face you know.”
The guard calls something down to someone on the other side of the Wall and a beat later the Gate begins to crank open slowly. Dean moves toward it and is met by two armed men.
“No weapons inside,” one of them says. “So whatever you’re carrying, you gotta leave it here.”
“No,” Dean says.
The men both frown. “Those are the rules,” one of them says.
Dean nods. “Okay. I’ll set up camp over there. Anyone who wants to trade can come out.”
There’s some back and forth while the men try to convince Dean that coming into their town unarmed is no big deal and Dean continues to staunchly refuse. Eventually they retreat behind the Wall and shut the Gate and Dean moves back a few yards and waits. He will set up camp out here if he has to, but he knows how this usually plays out.
It’s nearly an hour before the Gate creaks open again.
“Mayor wants to see you,” an armed man shouts at him. Not one of the two from before; this guy’s younger. “She says you can bring in one knife, but you have to leave the rest of your weapons at the Gatehouse.”
Dean hands over his Glock, his Taurus, his colt, his sawn-off shot gun, his machete, his bowie knife, his boxed set of throwing knives, his leather pouch of survival and hunting knives, his bush hog kukri and his cleaver. He keeps the demon-killing knife.
They search his stuff anyway to see if he’s held anything back. He hasn’t.
Then they tell him that they’ve got to pat him down. Dean rolls his eyes and assumes the position. They find the mini hunting knife strapped to his ankle and Dean shrugs and tells them that he honestly forgot about that one.
It’s late afternoon and there’s a ghost of a moon in the washed-out blue sky.
Dean thinks the town seems a little more settled, a little more prosperous than the last time he came out here to trade. It’s been a few years.
“Hey,” the Wall guard who he first spoke to calls out and Dean turns around.
“I get off duty at sundown and I’m heading over to Joe’s Bar and Grill if you’re interested in hooking up,” she pauses. “So long as you bathe first.”
Dean stares at her.
“Or not,” she shrugs and turns away.
“Hey wait,” he calls and she half turns. “It’s, uh,” he stops. Really, Dean? You were about to tell her it’d been a long time? “I’m…” he shakes his head and laughs. “I actually used to be good at this,” he runs a hand across his jaw.
A woman just asked him to spend time with her once the sun goes down and he can’t remember how to flirt. It’s like he doesn’t speak the language anymore. Sam would’ve laughed his ass off.
“You’ve been too long in the Wasteland,” the woman says and Dean rubs at the back of his neck and nods his agreement.
“Well,” she smiles. “My name’s Violet. You know where I’ll be if you’re interested.”
They move off down the crushed rock road and Dean can feel his escort staring a hole in the side of his head.
“What?” he turns to the guy.
“Can’t believe you didn’t jump at that,” the guy says.
Dean tries to keep his tone neutral. He asks the guy his name and learns that it’s Billy.
“You grow up here, Billy?” he asks.
“Born and raised,” Billy says proudly.
Dean nods. He could tell this guy tales that would give him nightmares. He could tell him about the slavers that roam the Wastelands, he could explain that Scavengers take their ‘rape and pillage’ motto very literally. He could tell the guy that he’s seen people jumped; that people have tried to jump him; but it’s really not something he wants to talk about and besides, it’s kind of nice that there are still some places in the world where people feel safe. He settles for repeating what Violet had said. “Been too long in the Wasteland, I guess. Takes a while to remember how to be,” Dean searches for the right word; finally settles on, “civil.”
Cawker smells like damp soil and freshly cut grass and Dean’s eyes prick with tears as he thinks about everything that America has lost. Looking around at the township, mainly built from scraps of the old city, he almost expects to see an old-school diner and a gas station. He has to stop and run a trembling hand over his mouth when he spies Joe’s Bar and Grill, because seeing that, it’s almost like waking up from a long nightmare and realizing that the world didn’t really end. The bar wasn’t here last time that Dean was and it looks like they’re doing a good trade. Dean wonders if someone’s set up a still since his last visit, because that would suck.
“Simon brews his own beer,” Billy tells him, in response to Dean’s question.
Simon owns Joe’s Bar and Grill apparently and Billy thinks he’ll be interested in a supply of ‘shine, if it’s any good.
“Best ‘shine in the Midwest,” Dean says with a cocky grin.
Billy gives the expected rejoinder; “It’s the only ‘shine in the Midwest.”
He does concede, though, that Winchester ‘shine must be good stuff, because it only took the town a year to make its way through the stock they bought last time.
“We’re trying to grow grapes over in the Park,” Billy tells him enthusiastically. “Might even get a crop next year if we’re lucky.”
Dean notices that a few of the mail boxes hereabouts have bullet holes in them. “Target practice?” he raises an eyebrow.
Billy looks grim. “Had a couple of Wastelanders come in to trade, a year or so back. They got drunk on Simon’s beer and shot up the town. It’s why we made the no weapons rule.”
+
The mayor is waiting for Dean in her office, sipping lemonade.
There’s something familiar about her, but Dean can’t quite put his finger on it. He figures that he probably just remembers her from last time he was here.
Mayor Trisha Roberts is white and middle-aged with short brown hair and a no-nonsense attitude. She lays down the law, tells Dean what he can and can’t do, where he can and can’t go and explains the town’s barter system. There’s something about her that has Dean sitting straighter and saying ‘yes ma’am, no ma’am, I won’t be no trouble ma’am.’ He decides that he likes Trisha and she seems to like him too because she only charges him one bottle of ‘shine for a two day stay at the Bed ‘n’ Breakfast the town runs for traders. She opens the bottle and pours them both a shot.
Trisha takes a sip and cocks her head sideways. “Not bad,” she raises her glass in toast. “Now, tell me about this information you have to trade.”
They agree that if it pans out, Dean’s information will be worth half a box of bullets for his Taurus, so Dean tells Trisha about the monster dust storm headed their way. She says she’ll send scouts out and have someone stop by to give Dean the bullets if the information proves accurate.
Billy takes Dean to the Bed ‘n’ Breakfast. It’s not much, just an army cot in a small, windowless room, but the door locks, which means he can leave his stuff when he goes over to the bathhouse.
Roxanne and Peter run the bathhouse and they’re not interested in his ‘shine or his marijuana, but they’re happy to accept an IOU. The bathhouse has a licence to pump water straight from the lake into their tubs and Dean is impressed. Outside of the bunker, this is the first time he’s seen water coming out of a tap in nearly one hundred years.
It’s not until Dean is leaning back contentedly in the tub, slowly turning the water dirty pink that he realizes why Mayor Trisha seemed so familiar. She reminds him of Jody Mills.
A sucking wound opens in Dean’s chest, an empty space that used to be filled up by all the people he loved. He aches with the losses he’s suffered, with his loneliness. He feels so displaced. This can’t be real. Maybe a djinn got him? Maybe Sammy is searching for him right now. Maybe if he slits his wrists and lets himself bleed out in the tub he’ll wake up in some warehouse somewhere and the world won’t be limping through the end of days?
Dean can’t say he isn’t tempted. But he promised himself a long time ago that if he was going to do that, he would do it inside the bunker, while sitting in the middle of a devil’s trap.
And deep down he knows this is real. It just seems so surreal sometimes. Like a nightmare he can’t wake up from.
After his bath, Dean shaves again. When it’s just him at the bunker he lets his beard grow, but he shaves it off before he goes out to trade. Scavengers have wild beards and the people of the townships are suspicious of anyone with too much facial hair. In their eyes, being clean-shaven is synonymous with being civilized, of having someplace safe to take proper care of yourself. Dean wouldn’t have gotten through the Gate if he’d looked like a Scavenger.
Once he’s cleaned up, Dean goes to Joe’s Bar and Grill to talk terms with Simon. Dean has brought an opened bottle with him for Simon to taste and the man is impressed. They talk distillation techniques and then Simon gives Dean a bottle of his beer. It’s…drinkable is perhaps the most charitable word Dean can use. It’s very light; if it had been commercially available Before, it would’ve been called something or other ice. Dean can’t believe a couple of Wastelanders got drunk on it.
He tells Simon he should work on producing a more robust flavour and then they get down to business. Simon takes most of Dean’s ‘shine and gives him credit tokens for the Bar, for Wanda McCauley who makes the soap and for the General Store where he can get salt. It’s a good system they’ve got set up. It’s barter, but if the person who wants what you’re selling doesn’t have anything that you want, they can give you a credit token for someone else’s goods.
Dean is able to get all the soap he wants and nowhere near as much salt as he wants, but it’ll do. He could probably head home now, and honestly he’s itching to leave. His ‘being around people’ skills are rusty and he’s feeling twitchy and on edge. But there’s the small matter of the looming monster storm and he could probably do with those bullets too. He settles his debt at the bathhouse and returns to Joe’s Bar and Grill, because the idea of a burger and a beer, even a weak as piss beer, is too tempting to resist.
The burger is good. There’s a real round bun, onion, lettuce, tomato, cheese and ketchup. The only thing missing is bacon.
“Omigod!” he says, around a mouthful of meat and bread, “this is awesome! Best damn burger I’ve had in-” he cuts himself off before he says something he might come to regret, “ever,” he finishes.
Violet slides onto the stool beside him at the bar. “Well look at you,” she says. “Don’t you scrub up good.”
“Back at ya,” he says. Now that her face isn’t hidden by a camouflage helmet and goggles, Dean can see that she’s an attractive woman. She has short dark hair, olive skin and brown eyes. Her cheek bones are sharp and her jaw is square and judging by the challenging sparkle in her eyes, Dean figures she’s probably a lot of fun in bed.
She orders herself a burger and doesn’t try to make small talk, just watches him eat.
When Dean finishes. He pushes his plate away. “Omigod,” he says again.
Violet giggles. “I know, right? Apparently there used to be whole restaurants dedicated to burgers.”
“Yeah,” Dean runs a hand across his mouth. “I, uh, heard about those.”
“Really? I didn’t know Storytellers travelled out into the Wastelands.”
Dean makes up something about listening to a Storyteller when he was trading down in Gliead, on the banks of the Mississippi River.
“I wonder if it was the same one,” Violet muses. “He had messy dark hair and really intense blue eyes,” she sighs. “He had the weirdest stories.”
Dean snorts. “His name wasn’t Castiel was it?”
Violet frowns. “I don’t think so. Hey Simon, you remember that Storyteller from a couple years back? The one who really, really liked your burgers?”
“Who? Jimmy?” Simon says.
Violet says something, but Dean doesn’t hear her because that name? It can’t be a coincidence.
“What stories did he tell?” Dean asks sharply.
“Stories about Before,” Violet’s burger arrives and she takes a bite.
There’s a family eating supper at a table just beside the bar, a thin, nervous-looking mom and two kids, a boy with a bowl-haircut and a girl with her hair tied back in haphazard bunches.
“He told Sam’n’Dean stories,” the girl says, before being hushed by her mom.
Dean nearly chokes on his beer. “What?”
“Sam’n’Dean stories,” the boy echoes his sister. “They lived Before and they didn’t have to walk anywhere, because they had a car called Baby and they rode everywhere on her and hunted monsters.”
The boy’s mom frowns at him. “You leave that man alone, Tommy,” she says. “You know you shouldn’t talk to strangers from the Wasteland.”
Dean does his best not to scowl, because he can’t fault her for looking out for her kids.
“Baby sounded awesome,” the kid says with a sigh.
Dean decides that he likes this kid, so he braves the wrath of mama bear to say, “Baby was definitely awesome. She saved the world, did you know that?”
The kid bounces out of his seat, “Jimmy told that one!” he stumbles over his words in his excitement. “Baby helped Sammy fight off the Devil just long enough to jump into the pit!” The kid frowns. “I didn’t really like that story. It made me cry.”
The lump in Dean’s throat makes it hard to talk. “Me too, kid,” he says.
Mama bear’s looking at him with suspicious eyes, so he turns away and smiles at Violet. “Sounds like the same guy,” he says. Truthfully, he’s not sure whether he’s pissed, amused or moved that Cas has been telling what’s left of the world stories about him and Sam.
“I bet you’ve got some good stories,” Violet says. “Living out there in the Wasteland.”
“No,” Dean meets Violet’s eyes. “No good stories.”
“Will you tell us a story, Mister?” the little girl says.
“No,” her mom says sharply. “You don’t want to hear about The Wasteland.”
“Your mom’s right,” Dean says when the kids start to whine. “It’s just all hard work and dust and things that could kill you out there. But I can tell you a story about Before, if you want?”
Storytelling is the main form of entertainment now and given that Dean is the only person alive who was actually around Before, he’s happy to share the facts. Some of the stories he’s heard about Before have been light on facts and heavy on prejudice and he likes to counter that whenever he can.
So he tells the kids (and the listening adults too) about the earthquake. How the entire San Andreas Fault had ruptured from the Mexico border right up to northern California; the Big One they’d all been waiting for, 8.3 on the Richter scale. He explains that the San Andreas ‘quake triggered another nearby Fault and that the whole west coast trembled and shook for months, which made it really hard to rescue the people who were trapped and injured. Whole cities were taken out by fire too, because of ruptured gas and electricity lines.
Dean has to stop and explain about gas and electricity. Almost everyone in Joe’s Bar and Grill is gathered around listening to him now and he’s starting to feel a little self-conscious. People seem skeptical about electricity. Maybe someplace somewhere still has gas and electricity, but his bunker is the only place he’s seen in the American Midwest that has it.
Dean is still kind of surprised by how quickly civilization broke down. Maybe if it had just been an earthquake things would’ve recovered, but too much happened all at once. Disease broke out in the aftermath of the ‘quake. Cholera, dysentery, haemorrhagic fever and a nasty strain of influenza, all of which killed thousands of the people who’d survived the initial disaster. The CDC quarantined the area and Dean still remembers television footage of desperate refugees trying to flee the isolation zone and being gunned down by soldiers.
He doesn’t tell that part of the story, though, not in front of the kids.
Instead he tells them about the volcano off the coast of Spain that erupted on Thanksgiving Day, only two months after the earthquake. It caused an underwater landslide, which triggered a tsunami so big that it devastated the entire eastern seaboard of the United States. People fleeing disease were gunned down by authorities after that one too.
The kids (and a lot of the adults too) struggle to comprehend that much water; they’ve never seen an ocean and these days it’s a struggle to keep the small bodies of water still left from being soaked up by dust and sand storms.
Dean still remembers sitting in the bunker watching the television coverage of the tsunami. People were recording the distant wall of water on their i-phones and Sam was sitting next to him yelling ‘run you idiots’ at the screen.
He doesn’t tell his audience that part either, because it would all be too hard to explain.
“That was great,” a woman tells him, when Dean wraps up his tale. “So vivid. It’s almost like you were there.”
Dean grins, lips thin and eyes flat. “Thanks,” he says.
Someone buys him a beer which he downs gratefully.
“So,” Violet flicks a hand through her hair and then turns to Dean with a flirtatious smile. “Wanna get outta here?”
Once upon a time that would’ve been Dean’s line. Now though? Now he’s old. He may not look it, but he feels it, right to his core. He doesn’t have a hope in hell of being able to connect with this woman and an orgasm just isn’t worth the effort of having to get that intimate with another human being. Besides, in this post-antibiotic era, swapping body fluids with people is potentially hazardous. He’d hate to earn his second set of black eyes by dying of syphilis or something. Truthfully, he’d rather just jerk off.
The hope that was in Violet’s eyes is rapidly fading, but before Dean can let her down easy, a bell tolls loudly.
“What the hell?” Dean says.
Amid general scrambling, Dean learns that it’s the town’s emergency meeting bell.
“Coupla Scouts just came in the Gate,” he hears a man say. “Runnin’ like they had the Devil hisself on their tails.”
Dean doesn’t bother to tell them that the Devil doesn’t need to run. If he wants you, he just appears beside you.
He guesses his information panned out.
Part Two
There were so many brilliant entries this year. If you haven't checked them all out yet, do yourself a favour and head over to the comm! I had the good fortune to receive an amazing, inspiring set of prompts from sophiap which really set the muse off and racing! Thank you for such wonderful prompts! And thanks also to Cassiopeia7 and frozen_delight both of whom recc'd the story! Deb, your rec made my day...staying quiet and anonymous was hard! :D
So anyway, here is my entry:
Originally posted by summergen_mod at Too long in the Wasteland
Title: Too long in the wasteland
Author: zara_zee
Recipient: sophiap
Beta: 9tiptoes
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: ~11,000
Warnings: Dean-centric, immortal!MoC!Dean, swearing, violence, attempted assault, hurt!Dean, natural disasters, post-apocalyptic world, suicidal thoughts,[This warning is a spoiler]major character deaths (with a happy ending!)
**Now also up at AO3 -- CLICK HERE**
Prompt: Such a great set of prompts that I really had trouble picking just one. So…I’ve done a sort of hybrid mash-up of a few of them and done some thinking outside the box! I hope it works for you, sophiap.
[Click to see prompts:]Prompt 4: I would LOVE a Sam and/or Dean piece based on James McMurtry's "Too Long in the Wasteland."
Link to Song
With a little bit of:
Prompt 5: Decades or even centuries after they're gone, how are the Winchesters remembered?
And a wee bit of this one too:
Prompt 1:The boys get caught up in the aftermath of a natural or man-made disaster. There's no hunting things involved, but there's sure a lot of saving people. Or needing to be saved themselves?
Summary: The year is 2015 and Sam and Dean’s battle with the Mark of Cain is suddenly overshadowed by a series of catastrophic natural disasters that devastate the planet and irrevocably change life as we know it.
The year is… actually, Dean is damned if he knows. He stopped keeping track of shit like that after Sammy died. He’s just trying to make it through eternity one step at a time, only ever venturing out of the Wasteland to trade, and to listen to the stories people tell themselves about Before.
--
the people in the village
watch their children play
at the sight of a stranger
they call the kids away
just leave that man alone
I hear the mother say
he's been
too long in the wasteland
too long in the wasteland
's what made him that way
--
If he tries really hard, Dean can just about remember when Kansas used to be green.
He stares out at the burnt-brown plains of spiny desert shrub and takes a long drink from his silver hip flask, relishing the way the moonshine burns his throat.
Of course, some parts of Kansas had been golden, rather than green, he muses.
Back in the day, Dean had loved driving down the long stretches of straight black-top, with mile after mile after mile of wheat or corn on either side of the road. Dean tells the iguana about it at length and then looks at the empty space beside him and tries to remember his brother’s face as it was back then. Back then-Before-Sam would sit beside him in Dean’s beautiful sleek black car, reading a map or his research on their latest case, his stupid hair flopping in his face, while Led Zeppelin blasted from the speakers.
Both Sam and Baby are long gone now; Dean rubs at the mark on his arm and sighs.
Baby went first, the victim of rising oil prices and catastrophic climate change.
Dean snorts. He and Sam had been so caught up with angels and demons and the supernatural that they’d been completely blindsided by the Westcoast earthquake and the Eastcoast tsunami that fucked things up big-time in 2015.
Dean takes another swig of ‘shine. He and Sam had spent months trying to figure out which Deity had decided to throw another apocalypse, before finally accepting that there was nothing supernatural going on. The Earth’s plates were simply shifting about, and climate change was starting to have a real impact too.
The weather patterns had already been messed up, but after the ‘quake, the droughts, floods, tornadoes and hurricanes seemed to step things up a notch.
And then the super storms started, months of fierce destructive wind, constant rumbling thunder and skies full of sheet-lightning. But no rain. Hardly ever any rain.
Over the next few decades the heart of America turned into a dustbowl and food and water riots became an everyday occurrence. Law and order broke down fast. Infrastructure failed.
The silver-lining in the whole ‘world’s gone to hell in a hand basket’ scenario is that the mark on Dean’s arm has stopped being a liability and become an asset.
As civilization crumbled and it became a kill or be killed world, Dean flourished. He was in his element, just like he’d been in Purgatory. The mark still whispers inside his skull, still sends inky black tendrils twisting through his mind, but its dark urges are just common sense in what’s become of the world and it doesn’t seem to have the same hold on him anymore.
Sam died in 2056. Dean can say that now without having to go on a bender afterwards. He caught a nasty strain of influenza and he refused to let Cas heal him; he was tired, he said.
Dean told Cas to fuck off after Sam died. He understands why the angel refused to heal Sam against Sam’s wishes, but he was pissed about it for a good fifty years.
The angels are mostly back in heaven nowadays, but Cas still stops by every couple of decades to check on him; to make sure he doesn’t have to throw Dean into the sun or something. Sometimes, when he visits, Dean is civil to him. Sometimes they fight, because Dean needs an outlet and Cas can take it.
Dean takes another long swallow from his flask and pokes at the iguana roasting in his campfire. He prefers squirrel-with iguana you’re forever picking bones out of your teeth-but a big lizard is what his pre-supper hunt managed to catch and he’d rather eat a lizard than one of those disgusting, greasy pig-like things. Occasionally, you get deer out here, which is awesome, but if there are deer around then there are usually cougars and wolves too. Dean hates having to fight for his supper and he hates having to stand guard over his kills to make sure that a sneaky cougar doesn’t steal it while his back’s turned. It’s too time-consuming when he’s on the road.
Dean decides the iguana is done and uses two of his knives to lift it off the spit. He lets it cool on his plate a little before tearing into the hot meat with his fingers and shovelling it down fast. It’s been hours since he last ate and dragging a utility wagon harnessed to his waist through the arid almost-desert of Kansas is hungry-making work.
About ninety years ago, give or take, when the smaller lakes, creeks and waterways had started to dry up and the black soil of Kansas had dried to a rusty brown and blown away, Dean had given serious consideration to leaving the Bunker and heading out to one of the communities that were struggling to survive by one of the bigger bodies of water. He’d come across a few small townships on the banks of the Kansas, the Missouri and the Mississippi in his travels, and there were people clinging to the edges of Lake Waconda too. He’d heard tell that there were some pretty big settlements up around the Great Lakes, but that was a long way to travel by foot.
In the end he chose to stay in Lebanon for a number of reasons.
Firstly, the bunker is well-warded against the supernatural, and supernatural creatures are still a problem.
Secondly, Dean found a whole bunch of spell books that Cuthbert Sinclair had written when he was still Master of Spells, and he’d managed to both hide the bunker from human sight and keep the power and water running using Cuthbert’s magic.
You’d have to be crazy to give up a place with fresh running water and electricity. Electricity means heat, light and refrigeration. It means that if he kills a deer, he can butcher it and freeze parts of it to use later. It means he can cook just by turning a few knobs rather than having to collect wood and build a fire. A constant supply of clean water means life and out in the wastelands of the Midwest, that’s a very big deal.
Also? Dean’s not entirely sure he could survive eternity without steaming hot showers and his fluffy bath robe. Not with his sanity intact anyway. Dean wonders whether his sanity is, in fact, still intact. That’s probably debatable at this point given that he was talking to a roasting iguana earlier. Dean takes another swig of ‘shine. It really has been too long since he was last around people.
“What was I saying?” he asks the iguana’s leg. “Oh that’s right. The bunker.”
Thirdly, he has memory foam in his bedroom, which has been remembering who Dean Winchester is for a couple of hundred years, and which doesn’t get suspicious and accuse him of witchcraft when he doesn’t ever seem to age. See, there’s a reason he hasn’t been into a township for a while. A good one. Not just the fact that on his best day he’s an anti-social asshole who likes to kill. He has to limit his exposure to the regular people so they don’t get suspicious. He learnt the hard way that being run out of town by pitchfork wielding townsfolk isn’t fun.
Dean rubs at the mark again and gets lizard grease all over his arm. He splashes ‘shine on his arm to get rid of it, takes a moment to wistfully miss his nice clean tidy kitchen, and then takes another slurp of the high octane alcohol that is his stock trade item.
Dean has more rooms in the bunker than he needs and he converted several of them to hydroponic growing rooms decades ago. He mostly grows corn, but also tomatoes, potatoes, carrots and beans. Marijuana too, strictly for medicinal purposes. He’s pretty self-sufficient, but there are still things he likes to have, like wheat-flour, salt, dairy and soap, that he doesn’t have the means to cultivate or make himself. So he trades for those items with the moonshine he makes from his corn.
Most recently, he’s been trading with the community over at what used to be Cawker City. Waconda Lake managed to survive the dust storms and the good folk of Cawker (they dropped the ‘city’ several decades back) have managed to keep a small section of Elder State Park healthy and filled with trees. It’s good growing land, which is why Cawker now has a perimeter fence, patrolled by armed guards.
Dean goes and pees on a nearby bush and then cleans up the remnants of his supper. He inventories the bottles of moonshine in his wagon and decides he can afford to drink a little more of his profits. He selects a bottle and tops up his flask. He stows the opened bottle in his duffel bag and then sits back down on his sleeping bag.
Dean’s sleeping bag is a prized possession; insulated and waterproof, he’d bought it from a Dick’s Sporting Goods store in a shopping mall in Georgia, back when there were still Dick’s Sporting Goods stores.
And shopping malls.
And Georgia.
Dean can’t say that his misses malls. He doesn’t miss Georgia all that much either.
It’s quiet out in the Wastelands. There are no crickets and the only bird noise Dean hears is the occasional scream of an eagle hunting. The sun is just starting to set, the sky burnished in bright orange and gold, like the sky’s on fire.
Sunsets are brighter and more vivid since The Collapse. The stars too. Maybe it’s just the loss of all the light pollution. And the loss of actual pollution too. The air sure is a lot cleaner and clearer than it used to be.
Dean sits and stares at the sky, watching as it turns from burnt embers and polished copper to soft pink and indigo. The night sky morphs from a deep inky blue to velvet black and the stars sparkle like chips of crystal.
Dean tips his head back and drinks deeply from his flask. He almost turns to make an offhand remark to Sammy and the next few mouthfuls of ‘shine he has to swallow hard to get past the lump in his throat.
It had been weird watching his baby brother turn into an old man while he remained a constant thirty-six years old. He’d looked through Cuthbert Sinclair’s magic collection to see if he could find a way to keep Sam young, but his brother had gotten grumpy about it.
“Getting old is normal, Dean,” he’d said, pushing his grey hair behind his ear and wagging a gnarled finger at Dean. “I haven’t had a lot of normal in my life. Don’t take this away from me.”
“But you’ll die,” Dean had told him.
“Yeah,” Sam had nodded. “I will,” he’d grinned. “And it won’t be the first time either. At least I know what’s waiting for me, what to expect.”
Dean had embarrassed himself then, his eyes unexpectedly filling with tears. “I don’t wanna do this alone, Sammy.”
Sam’s eyes had darkened and his jaw had tightened and Dean had expected angry words about how he’d done this to himself, going off half-cocked, not bothering to consider the consequences before he’d gone barrelling head-first into taking on the mark.
Instead, Sam gathered him into a hug and told him that he would never stop looking for a way to get rid of the mark.
“Just think of all the resources I’ll have in heaven that I don’t have here,” Sam had said, his eyes gleaming, and Dean had laughed.
Of course, his geek of a brother’s heaven was bound to include a kick-ass library.
Once the flames from Sam’s funeral pyre had burnt out, Dean summoned Death.
“Oh no,” Death had said. “Your brother’s in heaven and this time, he’s staying there. After the number of time’s that boy’s stood me up, I escorted him myself and got him to sign a DNR.”
“Do not resuscitate?”
The look Death had given Dean made him feel like a speck of cosmic dust. “Do not resurrect.”
When Dean had explained that he wasn’t looking to resurrect Sammy, but to join him, he’d expected Death to be pleased; after all, the grimmest of reapers had bitched more than once about the Winchesters screwing with the natural order of things.
He hadn’t expected Death to flat out refuse his request.
Death had explained about the Darkness, the first evil, and how the mark was a lock designed to keep the Darkness contained.
“So I am sorry, Dean,” Death said. “But that mark must stay on your arm. And that means that you can never die.”
Dean had been gutted when Sam left to go to Stanford. The idea that he might have to slug it out through the rest of existence without his brother by his side is…well, let’s just say there’s a reason he started brewing his own moonshine.
Sam is always in the back of Dean’s mind, but back at the bunker he can go days without consciously thinking of his brother, too caught up in his day-to-day routine. It’s different when he’s on the road. He may be travelling on foot, hauling a wagon behind him, and sleeping in a sleeping bag under the stars, but it’s similar enough to crossing the country in his baby and sleeping in shitty motels that he finds himself glancing to the side far too often, expecting to find someone there.
And staring up at the stars is something he and Sammy often did; sitting on Baby’s hood, drinking beer and chatting idly. Just…being brothers.
Dean finishes his flask and goes to bed dizzy and thick-headed. It’s a mistake and he knows it. The Wastelands aren’t safe, but he’s hard to kill and sometimes he just doesn’t give a fuck. The best an attacker can do is turn him into a demon; and then God help them.
+
Dean is suddenly aware; eyelids flying back so fast it hurts as awareness pours in and sensations assail him. He’s cold, his head feels like it’s been sliced open so that squirrels can dance on his brain, and he may possibly puke, if the contents of his stomach can make it past the cotton wool in his mouth. Also, there’s a hand on his ass, but that takes him a beat longer to notice because he was used to waking up in purgatory with Benny’s hands on him, and sleeping outdoors on the cold, hard ground had Dean’s head in the wrong place; the wrong time, just for a moment.
The guy trying to work his way into Dean’s sleeping bag is not Benny. For a start, he doesn’t have any teeth. He stinks too; of blood and shit and rotting flesh.
Dean notices the God-awful stench of him immediately and the gummy mouth when Dean flips the guy off of him and presses his knife against a bony, dirt-encrusted neck.
“Pretty,” the man says, reaching for Dean’s clean-shaven cheek. Dean jerks back out of reach but keeps his knife pressed against the man’s throat. “Too pretty for a Wastelander.”
Dean hears raspy breath and heavy footfalls behind him and he ducks and rolls instinctively. His skin prickles and he feels the breeze of a missed hit; hears a dull thud and a groan. Scavengers always roam in packs and Dean counts five. Three are going through his stock, one is unconscious beside him, having taken the blow that had been aimed at Dean, and the fifth is standing over Dean grinning manically.
“Real pretty,” he nods.
“Well,” Dean says, eyes roaming over wiry, crud-encrusted guy Number Two. He has a beard like rusted steel-wool and slitted eyes the same color. Or maybe everything just looks grey in the pre-dawn light. “It is a low bar,” Dean inclines his head. “I find that basic hygiene helps.” He unzips his sleeping bag all the way and the guy’s eyes widen.
“Smart too,” the guy says. “Not gonna fight us are ya, Pretty Boy? Gonna let us have you.”
Dean laughs, his eyes cold. “Tell you what,” he stands up, stretching, and pops a knot in his back, “you guys leave my stuff alone and back off slowly and I won’t kill you.”
The guy’s eyes bug out, but then his buddies gravitate to his side and his confidence seems to come spluttering back.
They rush him all at once and Dean becomes a whirling dervish of death and destruction, his knife flashing and chopping, stabbing and cutting, as he spins and twists and ducks and weaves. Bodies drop around him and he’s circling warily, wet with sweat and blood, when his original assailant comes ‘round.
He sits up and looks around. “Well fuck,” he peers up at Dean. “What are you, man?”
Dean blinks. He’s pretty sure his eyes aren’t black.
“Get outta here,” he says. Because he’s not a demon.
“Aw hell,” the guy pulls on his long, dirt-matted beard. “Ain’t got a crew no more, may’s well kill me.”
Dean shrugs and the guy sighs. “No mercy? Fine,” he snatches up the bottle of moonshine that he’d been brained with. “But I’m takin’ this with me.”
Dean raises an eyebrow but doesn’t argue and the guy climbs to his feet. He drags his eyes up and down Dean’s body lasciviously and licks at his lips.
“Dude!’ Dean says, because he’s standing in a pile of dead bodies and has the blood of this guy’s friends spattered all over his face and okay, he’s hot, he accepts that, but really?
“You’re older than I thought,” the guy says and Dean has to laugh at that, because the guy has no frigging idea.
“Sorry ‘bout the misunderstanding,” the guy says.
Dean points at the bodies with his knife. “It’s been dealt with.”
The guy nods. “One Wastelander to another? There’s a monster dust storm headin’ this way from the west. It’s a flesh-stripper. You don’t wanna get caught out in it.”
Dean watches him leave and then packs up his camp. It’s almost daybreak and he can’t stay here anymore anyway. It won’t take the cougars long to scent all the fresh blood.
He lost four bottles of ‘shine to the scavengers and Dean is pissed. Going through the dead men’s packs doesn’t net him anything of value to compensate him for the loss.
Later, when it’s light, he peers at the west horizon and sees nothing but dust. That’s not unusual. Dust storms and mini dust-tornadoes are common and ordinarily he wouldn’t have thought anything of it, except that the Scavenger said it was a bad one, so he stares at the distant wall of dust intently for a long time and slowly begins to realize how dense the dust is. It’s swirling too, like there’s a tornado caught up in there somewhere, and every once in a while Dean catches a flash of lightning.
“Shit,” Dean doubles his pace. The Scavenger was right; he doesn’t want to get caught out in that. If he hurries, he might be able to make Cawker by tomorrow afternoon.
+
Cawker is about a mile and a half east of where Cawker City used to be. It runs in between the lake and what was once Highway 24 but is now a fortified wall, over the bridge and into Elder State Park. The Wall has sharpshooters atop it, stationed about half a mile apart, and the Gate is at the western end of the Wall, about a mile east of where the World’s Largest Ball of Twine used to be. No-one’s sure what happened to it, which Dean finds amusing. How do you lose a 20,000 pound ball of twine? Sammy would be gutted.
Dean stops about twenty yards from the Gate, because there’s a gun on him.
“Winchester,” he calls out, “from out North,” he waves a hand in the general direction of Lebanon. “I’m lookin’ to trade.”
“North?” the Gate Guard sounds skeptical. “Ain’t nothin’ out there ‘cept the Wasteland.”
Dean nods. “My family’s got a place out there.”
That earns him a hard stare and he tries his best to look harmless, something he hasn’t been able to pull off convincingly since he was in his twenties. Being covered in blood spatter probably isn’t helping his cause any either.
“Whatcha lookin’ to trade?” the guard says finally.
“I got ‘shine, Mary Jane and information,” Dean says. “I’m interested in salt and soap.”
He and Sam raided every grocery store they could find for salt, back in the day, but that was a long time ago and he’s running dangerously low.
The Wall guard lowers her rifle and harrumphs. “Sure looks like you could use some soap,” she says.
Dean runs a hand across his grimy face. “Had a little trouble with Scavengers on the way here.”
She cocks an eyebrow suspiciously. “And you took them out all by your lonesome, huh?”
Dean decides to go with roguish charm. “Hey now,” he says. “I ain’t just a pretty face you know.”
The guard calls something down to someone on the other side of the Wall and a beat later the Gate begins to crank open slowly. Dean moves toward it and is met by two armed men.
“No weapons inside,” one of them says. “So whatever you’re carrying, you gotta leave it here.”
“No,” Dean says.
The men both frown. “Those are the rules,” one of them says.
Dean nods. “Okay. I’ll set up camp over there. Anyone who wants to trade can come out.”
There’s some back and forth while the men try to convince Dean that coming into their town unarmed is no big deal and Dean continues to staunchly refuse. Eventually they retreat behind the Wall and shut the Gate and Dean moves back a few yards and waits. He will set up camp out here if he has to, but he knows how this usually plays out.
It’s nearly an hour before the Gate creaks open again.
“Mayor wants to see you,” an armed man shouts at him. Not one of the two from before; this guy’s younger. “She says you can bring in one knife, but you have to leave the rest of your weapons at the Gatehouse.”
Dean hands over his Glock, his Taurus, his colt, his sawn-off shot gun, his machete, his bowie knife, his boxed set of throwing knives, his leather pouch of survival and hunting knives, his bush hog kukri and his cleaver. He keeps the demon-killing knife.
They search his stuff anyway to see if he’s held anything back. He hasn’t.
Then they tell him that they’ve got to pat him down. Dean rolls his eyes and assumes the position. They find the mini hunting knife strapped to his ankle and Dean shrugs and tells them that he honestly forgot about that one.
It’s late afternoon and there’s a ghost of a moon in the washed-out blue sky.
Dean thinks the town seems a little more settled, a little more prosperous than the last time he came out here to trade. It’s been a few years.
“Hey,” the Wall guard who he first spoke to calls out and Dean turns around.
“I get off duty at sundown and I’m heading over to Joe’s Bar and Grill if you’re interested in hooking up,” she pauses. “So long as you bathe first.”
Dean stares at her.
“Or not,” she shrugs and turns away.
“Hey wait,” he calls and she half turns. “It’s, uh,” he stops. Really, Dean? You were about to tell her it’d been a long time? “I’m…” he shakes his head and laughs. “I actually used to be good at this,” he runs a hand across his jaw.
A woman just asked him to spend time with her once the sun goes down and he can’t remember how to flirt. It’s like he doesn’t speak the language anymore. Sam would’ve laughed his ass off.
“You’ve been too long in the Wasteland,” the woman says and Dean rubs at the back of his neck and nods his agreement.
“Well,” she smiles. “My name’s Violet. You know where I’ll be if you’re interested.”
They move off down the crushed rock road and Dean can feel his escort staring a hole in the side of his head.
“What?” he turns to the guy.
“Can’t believe you didn’t jump at that,” the guy says.
Dean tries to keep his tone neutral. He asks the guy his name and learns that it’s Billy.
“You grow up here, Billy?” he asks.
“Born and raised,” Billy says proudly.
Dean nods. He could tell this guy tales that would give him nightmares. He could tell him about the slavers that roam the Wastelands, he could explain that Scavengers take their ‘rape and pillage’ motto very literally. He could tell the guy that he’s seen people jumped; that people have tried to jump him; but it’s really not something he wants to talk about and besides, it’s kind of nice that there are still some places in the world where people feel safe. He settles for repeating what Violet had said. “Been too long in the Wasteland, I guess. Takes a while to remember how to be,” Dean searches for the right word; finally settles on, “civil.”
Cawker smells like damp soil and freshly cut grass and Dean’s eyes prick with tears as he thinks about everything that America has lost. Looking around at the township, mainly built from scraps of the old city, he almost expects to see an old-school diner and a gas station. He has to stop and run a trembling hand over his mouth when he spies Joe’s Bar and Grill, because seeing that, it’s almost like waking up from a long nightmare and realizing that the world didn’t really end. The bar wasn’t here last time that Dean was and it looks like they’re doing a good trade. Dean wonders if someone’s set up a still since his last visit, because that would suck.
“Simon brews his own beer,” Billy tells him, in response to Dean’s question.
Simon owns Joe’s Bar and Grill apparently and Billy thinks he’ll be interested in a supply of ‘shine, if it’s any good.
“Best ‘shine in the Midwest,” Dean says with a cocky grin.
Billy gives the expected rejoinder; “It’s the only ‘shine in the Midwest.”
He does concede, though, that Winchester ‘shine must be good stuff, because it only took the town a year to make its way through the stock they bought last time.
“We’re trying to grow grapes over in the Park,” Billy tells him enthusiastically. “Might even get a crop next year if we’re lucky.”
Dean notices that a few of the mail boxes hereabouts have bullet holes in them. “Target practice?” he raises an eyebrow.
Billy looks grim. “Had a couple of Wastelanders come in to trade, a year or so back. They got drunk on Simon’s beer and shot up the town. It’s why we made the no weapons rule.”
+
The mayor is waiting for Dean in her office, sipping lemonade.
There’s something familiar about her, but Dean can’t quite put his finger on it. He figures that he probably just remembers her from last time he was here.
Mayor Trisha Roberts is white and middle-aged with short brown hair and a no-nonsense attitude. She lays down the law, tells Dean what he can and can’t do, where he can and can’t go and explains the town’s barter system. There’s something about her that has Dean sitting straighter and saying ‘yes ma’am, no ma’am, I won’t be no trouble ma’am.’ He decides that he likes Trisha and she seems to like him too because she only charges him one bottle of ‘shine for a two day stay at the Bed ‘n’ Breakfast the town runs for traders. She opens the bottle and pours them both a shot.
Trisha takes a sip and cocks her head sideways. “Not bad,” she raises her glass in toast. “Now, tell me about this information you have to trade.”
They agree that if it pans out, Dean’s information will be worth half a box of bullets for his Taurus, so Dean tells Trisha about the monster dust storm headed their way. She says she’ll send scouts out and have someone stop by to give Dean the bullets if the information proves accurate.
Billy takes Dean to the Bed ‘n’ Breakfast. It’s not much, just an army cot in a small, windowless room, but the door locks, which means he can leave his stuff when he goes over to the bathhouse.
Roxanne and Peter run the bathhouse and they’re not interested in his ‘shine or his marijuana, but they’re happy to accept an IOU. The bathhouse has a licence to pump water straight from the lake into their tubs and Dean is impressed. Outside of the bunker, this is the first time he’s seen water coming out of a tap in nearly one hundred years.
It’s not until Dean is leaning back contentedly in the tub, slowly turning the water dirty pink that he realizes why Mayor Trisha seemed so familiar. She reminds him of Jody Mills.
A sucking wound opens in Dean’s chest, an empty space that used to be filled up by all the people he loved. He aches with the losses he’s suffered, with his loneliness. He feels so displaced. This can’t be real. Maybe a djinn got him? Maybe Sammy is searching for him right now. Maybe if he slits his wrists and lets himself bleed out in the tub he’ll wake up in some warehouse somewhere and the world won’t be limping through the end of days?
Dean can’t say he isn’t tempted. But he promised himself a long time ago that if he was going to do that, he would do it inside the bunker, while sitting in the middle of a devil’s trap.
And deep down he knows this is real. It just seems so surreal sometimes. Like a nightmare he can’t wake up from.
After his bath, Dean shaves again. When it’s just him at the bunker he lets his beard grow, but he shaves it off before he goes out to trade. Scavengers have wild beards and the people of the townships are suspicious of anyone with too much facial hair. In their eyes, being clean-shaven is synonymous with being civilized, of having someplace safe to take proper care of yourself. Dean wouldn’t have gotten through the Gate if he’d looked like a Scavenger.
Once he’s cleaned up, Dean goes to Joe’s Bar and Grill to talk terms with Simon. Dean has brought an opened bottle with him for Simon to taste and the man is impressed. They talk distillation techniques and then Simon gives Dean a bottle of his beer. It’s…drinkable is perhaps the most charitable word Dean can use. It’s very light; if it had been commercially available Before, it would’ve been called something or other ice. Dean can’t believe a couple of Wastelanders got drunk on it.
He tells Simon he should work on producing a more robust flavour and then they get down to business. Simon takes most of Dean’s ‘shine and gives him credit tokens for the Bar, for Wanda McCauley who makes the soap and for the General Store where he can get salt. It’s a good system they’ve got set up. It’s barter, but if the person who wants what you’re selling doesn’t have anything that you want, they can give you a credit token for someone else’s goods.
Dean is able to get all the soap he wants and nowhere near as much salt as he wants, but it’ll do. He could probably head home now, and honestly he’s itching to leave. His ‘being around people’ skills are rusty and he’s feeling twitchy and on edge. But there’s the small matter of the looming monster storm and he could probably do with those bullets too. He settles his debt at the bathhouse and returns to Joe’s Bar and Grill, because the idea of a burger and a beer, even a weak as piss beer, is too tempting to resist.
The burger is good. There’s a real round bun, onion, lettuce, tomato, cheese and ketchup. The only thing missing is bacon.
“Omigod!” he says, around a mouthful of meat and bread, “this is awesome! Best damn burger I’ve had in-” he cuts himself off before he says something he might come to regret, “ever,” he finishes.
Violet slides onto the stool beside him at the bar. “Well look at you,” she says. “Don’t you scrub up good.”
“Back at ya,” he says. Now that her face isn’t hidden by a camouflage helmet and goggles, Dean can see that she’s an attractive woman. She has short dark hair, olive skin and brown eyes. Her cheek bones are sharp and her jaw is square and judging by the challenging sparkle in her eyes, Dean figures she’s probably a lot of fun in bed.
She orders herself a burger and doesn’t try to make small talk, just watches him eat.
When Dean finishes. He pushes his plate away. “Omigod,” he says again.
Violet giggles. “I know, right? Apparently there used to be whole restaurants dedicated to burgers.”
“Yeah,” Dean runs a hand across his mouth. “I, uh, heard about those.”
“Really? I didn’t know Storytellers travelled out into the Wastelands.”
Dean makes up something about listening to a Storyteller when he was trading down in Gliead, on the banks of the Mississippi River.
“I wonder if it was the same one,” Violet muses. “He had messy dark hair and really intense blue eyes,” she sighs. “He had the weirdest stories.”
Dean snorts. “His name wasn’t Castiel was it?”
Violet frowns. “I don’t think so. Hey Simon, you remember that Storyteller from a couple years back? The one who really, really liked your burgers?”
“Who? Jimmy?” Simon says.
Violet says something, but Dean doesn’t hear her because that name? It can’t be a coincidence.
“What stories did he tell?” Dean asks sharply.
“Stories about Before,” Violet’s burger arrives and she takes a bite.
There’s a family eating supper at a table just beside the bar, a thin, nervous-looking mom and two kids, a boy with a bowl-haircut and a girl with her hair tied back in haphazard bunches.
“He told Sam’n’Dean stories,” the girl says, before being hushed by her mom.
Dean nearly chokes on his beer. “What?”
“Sam’n’Dean stories,” the boy echoes his sister. “They lived Before and they didn’t have to walk anywhere, because they had a car called Baby and they rode everywhere on her and hunted monsters.”
The boy’s mom frowns at him. “You leave that man alone, Tommy,” she says. “You know you shouldn’t talk to strangers from the Wasteland.”
Dean does his best not to scowl, because he can’t fault her for looking out for her kids.
“Baby sounded awesome,” the kid says with a sigh.
Dean decides that he likes this kid, so he braves the wrath of mama bear to say, “Baby was definitely awesome. She saved the world, did you know that?”
The kid bounces out of his seat, “Jimmy told that one!” he stumbles over his words in his excitement. “Baby helped Sammy fight off the Devil just long enough to jump into the pit!” The kid frowns. “I didn’t really like that story. It made me cry.”
The lump in Dean’s throat makes it hard to talk. “Me too, kid,” he says.
Mama bear’s looking at him with suspicious eyes, so he turns away and smiles at Violet. “Sounds like the same guy,” he says. Truthfully, he’s not sure whether he’s pissed, amused or moved that Cas has been telling what’s left of the world stories about him and Sam.
“I bet you’ve got some good stories,” Violet says. “Living out there in the Wasteland.”
“No,” Dean meets Violet’s eyes. “No good stories.”
“Will you tell us a story, Mister?” the little girl says.
“No,” her mom says sharply. “You don’t want to hear about The Wasteland.”
“Your mom’s right,” Dean says when the kids start to whine. “It’s just all hard work and dust and things that could kill you out there. But I can tell you a story about Before, if you want?”
Storytelling is the main form of entertainment now and given that Dean is the only person alive who was actually around Before, he’s happy to share the facts. Some of the stories he’s heard about Before have been light on facts and heavy on prejudice and he likes to counter that whenever he can.
So he tells the kids (and the listening adults too) about the earthquake. How the entire San Andreas Fault had ruptured from the Mexico border right up to northern California; the Big One they’d all been waiting for, 8.3 on the Richter scale. He explains that the San Andreas ‘quake triggered another nearby Fault and that the whole west coast trembled and shook for months, which made it really hard to rescue the people who were trapped and injured. Whole cities were taken out by fire too, because of ruptured gas and electricity lines.
Dean has to stop and explain about gas and electricity. Almost everyone in Joe’s Bar and Grill is gathered around listening to him now and he’s starting to feel a little self-conscious. People seem skeptical about electricity. Maybe someplace somewhere still has gas and electricity, but his bunker is the only place he’s seen in the American Midwest that has it.
Dean is still kind of surprised by how quickly civilization broke down. Maybe if it had just been an earthquake things would’ve recovered, but too much happened all at once. Disease broke out in the aftermath of the ‘quake. Cholera, dysentery, haemorrhagic fever and a nasty strain of influenza, all of which killed thousands of the people who’d survived the initial disaster. The CDC quarantined the area and Dean still remembers television footage of desperate refugees trying to flee the isolation zone and being gunned down by soldiers.
He doesn’t tell that part of the story, though, not in front of the kids.
Instead he tells them about the volcano off the coast of Spain that erupted on Thanksgiving Day, only two months after the earthquake. It caused an underwater landslide, which triggered a tsunami so big that it devastated the entire eastern seaboard of the United States. People fleeing disease were gunned down by authorities after that one too.
The kids (and a lot of the adults too) struggle to comprehend that much water; they’ve never seen an ocean and these days it’s a struggle to keep the small bodies of water still left from being soaked up by dust and sand storms.
Dean still remembers sitting in the bunker watching the television coverage of the tsunami. People were recording the distant wall of water on their i-phones and Sam was sitting next to him yelling ‘run you idiots’ at the screen.
He doesn’t tell his audience that part either, because it would all be too hard to explain.
“That was great,” a woman tells him, when Dean wraps up his tale. “So vivid. It’s almost like you were there.”
Dean grins, lips thin and eyes flat. “Thanks,” he says.
Someone buys him a beer which he downs gratefully.
“So,” Violet flicks a hand through her hair and then turns to Dean with a flirtatious smile. “Wanna get outta here?”
Once upon a time that would’ve been Dean’s line. Now though? Now he’s old. He may not look it, but he feels it, right to his core. He doesn’t have a hope in hell of being able to connect with this woman and an orgasm just isn’t worth the effort of having to get that intimate with another human being. Besides, in this post-antibiotic era, swapping body fluids with people is potentially hazardous. He’d hate to earn his second set of black eyes by dying of syphilis or something. Truthfully, he’d rather just jerk off.
The hope that was in Violet’s eyes is rapidly fading, but before Dean can let her down easy, a bell tolls loudly.
“What the hell?” Dean says.
Amid general scrambling, Dean learns that it’s the town’s emergency meeting bell.
“Coupla Scouts just came in the Gate,” he hears a man say. “Runnin’ like they had the Devil hisself on their tails.”
Dean doesn’t bother to tell them that the Devil doesn’t need to run. If he wants you, he just appears beside you.
He guesses his information panned out.
Part Two