Chapter 1: Highway to Hell

It was quarter past midnight in Detroit, Michigan and Sam had just dozed off beside Dean in his beloved 1967 Chevrolet Impala. Sam found it a little easier to depart to Dreamland partly because the overwhelming sound of the roaring of the Impala's engine was absent, and partly because they had decapitated a whole nest-full of ghouls minutes ago.

The silence was deafening and Sam was drifting in limbo. Out of nowhere, an earsplitting sound of Highway to Hell broke his sub-conscious flow and he was back in the car, his brother pointing a flashlight directly at his eyes.

"Wakey wakey, little brother!" Dean yelled over the noise.

Sam, with his eyes half-opened, said groggily, "What the hell are you doing?"

Pointing his flashlight back to the newspaper he had in front of him, he replied, "What the hell does it look like I'm doing?"

"Looking for a case?"

"Yathzee!" Dean said, not taking his eyes off the newspaper.

"Come on! Can't we have the night off? We just ganked a bunch of ghouls," he said, closing his eyes.

"How about this for a job?" Dean said excitedly, ignoring Sam's words. "'Local found dead in his house, his body turned inside-out'!"

Dean gave his signature smile. "Sounds like the real deal to me."

"How's that even possible?" Sam said with a contorted look on his face.

"One way to find out."

He threw the newspaper in the back-seat and revved the engine of the car. "It's not even that far. Just fifteen states over."

"Fifteen?"

"What? You wanna hear fifty?"

"I don't care how many states over you take me," Sam said sleepily. "I need my four hours' sleep."

Dean shrugged. Just when he was about to throw the flashlight at the back too, it flickered for a second or two and the radio in the car went berserk. Dean turned the radio off and slowly pulled out his gun as he exchanged a soulful look with Sam. They both knew what that meant – a ghost. Sam took his gun out too and his sleepy mood flew out of the window.

They looked around for the ghost but there was complete silence for what seemed like forever. All of a sudden, Sam saw a figure appear behind Dean which, he was pretty sure, was the ghost.

"Dean, get down!" Sam shouted.

Not wasting a moment, Dean ducked down and in a synchronized motion Sam pulled the trigger. The figure vaporized immediately after getting hit by the bullet. It didn't mean the ghost had died. It meant that it was all the more pissed off.

"What the hell is going on in this town?" Dean said, his eyes wide open.

"Beats me!"

"I thought it was ghoul case! We killed the ghouls!"

"Maybe it's their ghost?" Sam said uncertainly.

"Ghoul-ghost? Now that just sounds stupid." Dean said, eyeing the concrete jungle of Detroit before them. His body filled with horror as he realized what was going on half a block away. He nudged Sam on the ribs, who was looking behind the car for the ghost, and pointed directly ahead of them, his eyes dead-set.

"What the…?"

It was the gang of ghouls they had killed minutes ago. "How did they-" Sam was interrupted by a thunderous noise from above. It was as if something was jumping up and down as hard as they could on the car's roof. The shock of seeing the ghost and the ghouls had yet to settle in, and they were nowhere ready to face what was up on the roof.

"Dean! Drive…fast!" Sam yelled over the noise.

Dean stepped on the gas pedal and the car hurtled through the black-pitch running over some ghouls on its way.

"Faster! The ghouls are following us."

"I'm driving as fast as I can!" Dean shouted angrily.

The good news was that ghouls were extremely slow runners. The bad news was that ghouls were the least of their worries at the moment. Whatever was on the roof of the car was still there, jumping its ass off. Dean made a sharp turn and at that moment whatever it was, fell off the roof and the car ran over it.

"What was that?"

"Don't know, don't care," Dean said, focusing intently on the road ahead.

Another jolt of surprise hit them as they saw another figure on the road, another ghoul possibly, with its arms wide open, trying to block them.

"Alright, hang on Sammy," Dean said, speeding up the vehicle, his eyes flashing with grueling determination.

Just before the car hit the figure, they got a brief glimpse of it. As brief as it was, they were dead sure of what they had just seen. And it wasn't a ghoul.

"Was that a-"

"Vampire?" Sam stole the words out of Dean's mouth as they shared another scared-to-death-look.

"I reiterate…what the hell is going on in this town?"

Just after he said that, a shtriga appeared on the road.

"Oh, come on! Another monster? Is every single son a bitch we've ever hunted going to pay us a visit tonight?"

"Just keep going, Dean!" Sam said in a panicky voice.

"Does it look like I'm stopping?"

Shtrigas, another kind of monsters, aren't that strong a creature, so it wasn't difficult for the '67 Impala to knock it over. But it was a hell of a lot faster than most creatures. "It's following us, Dean," Sam said, looking back. "Step on it!"

"Screw the Shtriga! Is that a werewolf?"

It didn't take much time for Sam to realize that about two hundred meters ahead of them was a fully transformed werewolf.

"Even the lunar cycle isn't right!"

"Gee, Sammy, you think?" Dean said, hoping for a little more than that. "We won't be able to knock that bastard down. It's too strong. What do we do?"

It was only about a hundred meters away now, and it was getting closer by the moment. They had to think quickly. Then it hit him. "We injure it," Sam said after a moment's thought. "We shoot it. Where are the silver bullets?"

One dose of silver would either temporarily paralyze or kill the werewolf, and many other monsters, depending on the part of its body where the silver hit them. Genius, Dean thought, pulling his pistol out of his pocket.

"Here," Dean said as he passed Sam the pistol.

"Alright. You keep driving, I'll shoot it, and you run it over."

Dean nodded. He speeded up the car while Sam stuck half his body out of the car and aimed at the werewolf. He knew that his timing had to be exact, that he and Dean would have to, in a sense, have telepathic connection. If he were to shoot too late, they would crash right into the werewolf, and if he were to shoot too early, the werewolf would have enough time to recover from the wound, at least temporarily. The werewolf was getting closer much faster than Sam had expected probably because the werewolf was rampaging towards them too. Sam would have to rely entirely on his instincts. He'd had this sort of practice for years, thanks to his father who raised them like warriors; and more often than not, he'd wished for a different life, a normal apple-pie life, with a girlfriend, college, children, grand-children…

Little bit closer, a voice in his head said, shoving him back to reality. Little bit more…closer…closer…now! Said the voice just before the car hit it, and he pulled the trigger just at the right moment. Yes! Sam told himself. The bullet hit the creature on its left thigh and it splintered for a moment.

That was all they needed, the werewolf injured for just a moment; dead would have been better but injured was just as good. Then it was simply a matter of ramming it with the vehicle.

They breathed a sigh of relief after they passed the werewolf. Meanwhile, the shtriga, the vampire and somehow the "slow-running ghouls" were still following them. And they seemed to be a lot faster than the last ones they'd seen.

"They're still on our asses, Dean."

"Shoot them!" Dean said, not taking his eyes off the road, just in case something else appeared to stop them again.

Dean kept driving while Sam turned around, aimed at the vampire and shot it. The bullet hit it right on its head and it fell flat on the ground. He shot down the ghouls one by one and the only monster still left standing was the shtriga. Shtrigas were normally immune to silver, but since he had no other option, he shot it. As expected, the bullet didn't affect it. It was still running towards them, a lot faster than the four-decade-old car.

After that, something happened that churned Sam's stomach to pieces. The ghouls and the vampire that Sam had just shot got back up and they started running towards them.

"Dean, they won't die," Sam bellowed, with a scared look on his face.

"We've got bigger things to worry about right now," Dean pointed straight ahead.

And indeed it was big. It was a chupacabra…and a huge one; or maybe not a chupacabra at all; it was too huge to be one! It was the size of a medium-sized building! What the hell is that? Dean thought to himself.

"Silver hurts chupacabras, right?" Sam asked.

"It should," Dean replied. "But we're living in a world where ghouls can run and are immune to silver…so I don't know…"

"Good enough for me." Again, he stuck half his body out of the car and this time without wasting any time at all, he started shooting it because he wasn't even hundred percent sure that it was a chupacabra. They hadn't ever seen one this big.

And their worst fear came true. The silver didn't affect the creature at all. Normally, even a touch of silver would burn its flesh but now it was almost like it was wearing a 'silver-proof jacket…made of chupacabra skin.'

They had no choice but to stop the car. If they were to hit the thing, the car would get totaled and they would have an uninjured but a seriously pissed off giant-chupacabra on their tails.

"What do we do? What do we do?"

"I don't know!" Dean said incredulously.

"The ghouls, the vamp and the shtriga…." Sam turned around, and his face showed utter terror.

"What?" Dean turned back too.

It wasn't only a gang of ghouls, a vampire and a shtriga anymore. It was a gang of ghouls, vampires (plural!), shtrigas (plural!), wendigos, the werewolf fully recovered from the silver bullet (Since when does that happen? Dean asked himself), changelings, Daevas, and as far as they could tell, the entire monster army on Earth, only stronger because their weaknesses weren't what they used to be. It was as if every single monster that existed had gathered at Michigan specifically to kill them.

There was no way out. A chupacabra-giant blocking their way ahead and another army blocking their way behind them, they were locked inside an Iron Maiden clad in monsters instead of steel.

"What's the plan?"

"If we go down, we go down swinging! That's the plan," Dean said, reloading his gun, his eyes reflecting fear but alacrity at the same time.

He was right. There was no other choice. They both knew their end of the job. They looked at each other, took a deep breath and Sam reloaded his gun.

"You take the big thing, I'll take the army," he said.

Dean nodded. And a second later, they were out of the Impala, a garrison of angry monsters on one side, and a pissed-off gigantic monster they'd never seen on the other. Finally, the brothers were out in the open, their guns blazing, and the resonating sound of Highway to Hell still in their heads knowing that they may well be on their highway to hell….