Notes: This story takes place between the episodes "Summer Reading Program" and "Dana" in Welcome to Night Vale, and between seasons 8 and 9 of Supernatural.
At this point in time Cecil's relationship with Carlos is still relatively new (them having only been dating for roughly two weeks, maybe longer, given that "First Date" precedes "Summer Reading Program"), and Dana is still an intern not yet trapped in the Dog Park.
Assuming that season 9 continues immediately where season 8 left off, Sam is out of hospice, possessed by "Ezekiel", and the brothers have yet to make contact with Castiel. Also, Crowley is still stashed in the Impala's trunk. Poor Crowley.
More or less, consider this story an unanticipated "detour" while the Winchesters are returning to Lebanon, Kansas, from New York following the Fall of the angels. Though considering Sam and Dean have been on the road their whole lives and pretty much know the roads like the backs of their own hands, you'd probably wonder how they manage to overshoot badly enough to find themselves in the deserts of the southwest instead of in Kansas.
Night Vale has its ways.
Sam coughed into a napkin. It wasn't a dry, wheezing cough. It was a thick, wet cough. The napkin pinched in his large hand was a fast-food napkin, the kind that felt less like soft tissue and more like thin paper. Sam shifted his legs, moving to sit up straighter, with a road map sitting in his lap. He stared intently at the large accordion sheet, which bore veins of different colors: blue, purple, red, and brown. These veins scrawled over the whole crisp surface. Roads and rivers and contour lines all came together to create a single image, but the image was slipping out of focus. Sam rubbed his eyes, blinked them, and tried to make sense of what he was seeing, but when the red and blue lines decidedly popped up from the page in a 3D presentation, he tipped his head back and gave up. He closed his eyes for a few minutes, listening to the radio.
Music was playing. It was nothing like the usual stuff Dean would listen to, he noticed. Whatever it was, there were no lyrics, just music. It sounded like tango music. Sam was almost concerned that Dean hadn't yet changed the station, but he wasn't complaining. He'd heard enough Metallica and AC/DC to last a lifetime. For a minutes he kept his eyes closed, and was almost to sink into a light doze. He could still hear the radio, but it was fading in and out of consciousness. The darkness of his eyelids was lightened from black to a dark red. It was very bright out today.
"-Welcome back, listeners. This just in: A strange, black vehicle has appeared in our midst. We do not know where it has come from, but it appears to be moving toward us at rapid speed. We do not know why the vehicle is here, what it wants, who it belongs to, or if this is the black vehicle mentioned in the ancient prophecies as the first sign of the End Times-"
Sam's eyes popped open. He sat forward, staring at the Impala's dashboard, a crinkle in his brows. The weird program emanating from the speakers continued to drawl. It sounded like a news broadcast, voiced by a man who, moments later, called himself "Cecil". Judging by his voice, "Cecil" sounded like he should be a sight for sore eyes in person. His voice had that kind of intonation. It was a strong, yet fluid baritone. But the more Sam listened to the broadcast, the less sense it made. The man was talking about the sky raining corn chips and sour cream, for God's sake. Why was Dean even listening to this crap? He hated stations like this.
Dean was focused on the road ahead of them. He was leaning forward in his seat bit, clearly not relaxed. Sam gave his brother a strange glance, but it went unrequited. Instead, the younger brother picked up the map, and this time he found it much easier to read. His eyes traced the straight stretch of Route 800. They were somewhere on that stretch, he was pretty sure, because he saw no signs of the road deviating any time soon. Sam looked out over the expanse of desert around them. There was absolutely nothing in sight. Just planes of cracked, sun-dried ground, aside from the conga line of traffic they were participating in. Far off in the distance, Sam could see a terrestrial ledge of the same sandy earth crusting the horizon. It kind of bothered Sam, knowing that they were nowhere near civilization.
"Dean, are you sure you didn't pass the exit already?" Sam questioned, glancing at the driver. "I mean, we've been driving for miles, and I don't see anything coming up any time soon."
There was no response from Dean. Only the man named "Cecil" continued talking. Sam glanced at his hyper-focused brother again.
"Dean?"
Still no response. After waiting for a minute, Sam reached for the electronic console and shut off the radio.
"Dean."
Dean flinched, as if someone had pinched him right out of a dream.
"Huh-?" he blinked, before looking at Sam. "What?"
"Dude, you were totally spaced out. You okay?"
Dean blinked again, before shaking his shoulders a bit, as if trying to shimmy off a jacket. "Yeah- yeah, I'm fine, Sam." With one hand on the wheel, he stroked down his face, stubble lightly scratching his palm.
"What the heck were you even listening to?" Sam asked.
"What do you mean?" Dean looked at him quizzically, "Led Zeppelin." He huffed, before looking straight back ahead, "Sheesh, how many times have I played 'Ramble On' already, and you still don't know your Zeppelin?" He shook his head, lower lip curling a tad in expressive pity, "That's sad."
"Dean, you weren't playing Zeppelin," Sam responded with a hint of vexation in his tone. "You had the radio on."
"No I didn't."
"Yeah, you did."
"—What the hell-?"
The Impala was suddenly decelerating. Sam went rigid.
"Dean, what are you doing-? Hey, speed up! You're gonna cause an accident!"
That's when Sam noticed it.
He looked around, and he didn't see any other cars around them. They were all alone on the interstate. Sam could have sworn that a Corolla had been tailing them for the past five miles. A tractor trailer had roared past them on the passing lane. A yellow Beetle had zipped by after it. They had been following a Honda Pilot. But now there were no cars. It was as if the other cars had vanished into thin air. Become nonexistent.
"What the hell...?" Sam echoed.
The Impala braked to a complete stop and Sam spied what had caught Dean's attention. It was a mass. An iridescent mass. That was the only thing that it could be described as. Dean didn't hesitate to leave the car, and Sam followed his lead. Both of their faces clearly displayed their confusion. Dean stooped before the mass, awed by how it shimmered in different colors under the hot sunlight. He went to touch it, but then it moved and the boys wrenched back. The mass wiggled a bit, animating. They watched the sagging mass almost pick itself up, before tracing a circle on the pavement, leaving behind a strange residue as it went. The boys realized that the mass was growing through the pavement.
"Oh god. What is that thing?"
"I don't know, Sam," Dean said, unable to take his eyes off of it. But if he didn't know any better, he would say it looked like a tongue.
After Dean had decided to stick the thing with a crowbar, it oozed a thick phlegm-colored slime. A rancid odor instantly permeated the air, and Sam nearly hurled on the spot. Dean turned away himself, feeling his stomach churn in repulsion.
"Guh–" The older brother gagged, and he could feel bile licking at the back of his throat. He curled up on his stomach, kneeling on the pavement. He could feel the asphalt burning holes in his jeans. He was practically kneeling on a frying pan. "...Ugh..." Never in his life had he smelled anything so putrid. And that was saying something, considering that he and Sam experienced more than their share of bloodshed, cretin slime, and rotted corpses. Dean heard his brother retching a good twenty feet away off the side of the road. Just hearing it nearly made Dean hurl himself. He pinched his nose shut, got up and fled for the Impala. Sam joined him, wiping his mouth with his hands. Dean did nothing to disguise the disgust he felt when seeing that, and Sam just looked at him. Dean artlessly threw more napkins at his brother. Sam snatched them up and cleaned his hands. He didn't know what to do with the soiled napkins. He didn't want to keep holding them, and he knew that Dean would pitch a fit if he let them touch his upholstery. Sam saw no better choice than to roll down his window and toss them out. They were biodegradable anyway–
The brothers groaned when the ghastly odor flooded the Impala, and Dean keyed the ignition. His tires peeled, and he swerved around the dying fleshy thing, wanting to put it far, far behind them.
"...Where is everybody?" Dean asked after a minute, looking up and down the lanes.
"I don't know," was the only answer the younger brother could offer. Up ahead, the boys spotted shimmering lights in the distance. Headlights? But among them were shadows. They raced along the horizon like speed demons, kicking up dust as they went. Neither Sam nor Dean could explain it as anything more than a trick of the intense southwestern heat. The lights were coming closer. But to the Winchesters' dismay, they found the road was absolutely covered in prismatic fleshy masses like the first one they had found about a mile or so back.
"Oh, hell no," Dean groaned, and cut the wheel. He was not going to drive through those things and get slime all over his car, up in his axles, forget it. The Impala swung a one-eighty, crossing the sandy median. The vehicle rocked uneasily on its axles as it crossing the gravelly ground, and Dean's thoughts momentarily flickered to Crowley. It almost made him smile, imagining the demon's discomfort in the trunk. Almost. The closest to a smile he got was a twitch of the corner of his lips. The car climbed back up onto the parallel stretch of pavement, and the brothers were quickly on their way back how they came. The Winchesters couldn't begin to understand what was going on here, but a new sight left them bewildered.
Sam's eyes were wide.
"Uh, Dean?"
"Yeah?" Dean replied, hypnotized by this bizarre sight. He couldn't remove his eyes even for a second, almost out of fear that if he did, everything would vanish.
"Are you seeing what I'm seeing-?"
"Oh, I'm seeing something..." For a moment, Dean thought he was going crazy, but there was no doubt about it; this was real.
They could swear on any holy tome that they hadn't passed any towns just before. They had been in the middle of nowhere. They would have definitely noticed this town sooner because there had been nothing to hide it. Since there wasn't any traffic on the highway, there was nothing that stopped them from stopping completely to survey the landscape.
Coming up almost immediately was the exit they had been looking for. Together they stared at was what undoubtedly an exit ramp, tagged "EXIT 120 B" by a large, reflective green sign. At the bottom of the ramp was a lonely road that passed underneath Route 800 when bearing left, and when tracing it to the right with their eyes, they saw a large cluster of buildings maybe a mile out into the wilderness. None of the buildings seemed to exceed four stories. The distribution of the buildings was almost haphazard. They weren't jam-packed together, but this town was bordering on being aptly called a metropolis in its own right. The buildings thinned out from the center. There were houses scattered on the outskirts of the town. Some of them were neatly packed into suburban communities, but then there were tangles of weeds, bushes and cacti that mingled with the rest to create an almost destitute atmosphere. Closer to the interstate, they could see the lonely road become not-so-lonely. The road branched out into locales like trailer parks and junkyards. Campers were parked out under the merciless sun, baking the inhabitants inside, who were combating the heat with fans upon fans and other cooling systems. Dean cringed slightly when he spotted a rusted out skeleton of an unfortunate classic, half buried nose-first in the sand, succumbing to its fate. It was waiting to be buried and rediscovered by archaeologists in the unforeseeable future. The older Winchester hated to even think of what might someday become of his Baby. Rest in peace, old timer.
After gawking for a sufficient amount of time, Dean pulled onto the ramp, and the Impala glided on the smooth decline, but unfortunately not without crushing a rainbow-y mass before Dean could swerve. The older Winchester groaned, and Sam cringed at the squelching sound. Dean braked at the end of the ramp.
"Well, I guess we're here," Dean told Sam warily, looking around. The Winchesters already had a bad feeling about this place. Unless they could find some source of reassurance here, they wouldn't be able to rid themselves of these unsettling premonitions. Dean flicked up his blinker, and bore right. The Impala swung wide, and the engine puttered as the vehicle made for the heart of the town.
An eye with a crescent pupil was ever-watching.
Neither of the brothers, in passing, noticed the large periwinkle sign, embossed in a royal purple to spell in a fanciful font. The symbols came together to convey a clear message. It glowed with humble hospitality, and all at once, the message menaced.
"Welcome To Night Vale."
For those you you who have bookmarked my story to follow it, I sincerely apologize for the year-long wait. I lost my spark for this story, and upon re-reading it, I found myself discontent with my writing. So I took another stab at it~ Thank you for reading.