The night was uneventful and quiet, the walls of the store creaked with damage but Dean didn't want to have to move until the morning, so he let Sam sleep.
Weak morning light filtered through the debris and picked its way over the rubble towards the sleeping boys, exposing burnt bodies and belongings and making the shards of glass sparkle.
Stan stirred, pushing his makeshift blanket to the end of the freezer cabinet and crawled out onto the sooty floor. He shook his brother, leaving a black handprint on the blue sweater Dean was wearing.
"We have to get going," Sam said, reaching behind him to pull out the sweaters. His hair was ruffled and greasy, his eyes bloodshot.
They left the crumbling store, crouching down to minimize the risk of being seen. Behind an abandoned minivan they listened to the sound of their own breathing until they heard dogs bark far off in the distance, but nothing that indicated people were near. Car horns blared on the freeway and to their far left there was screaming. There was almost always screaming.
An old newspaper was curled around a pipe on the bottom of the van. The headline was obvious and painful. 'War escalates, virus out of control'.
Sam peeled it off and scrunched it into a ball.
To think that just a few months ago they'd had a life. Now they had no father and their half-siblings were dead. They could do without the reminder. The war had come from nowhere, the government put all their resources into modifying chemicals and nuclear weapons until it was decided that biological warfare was the only answer to the problem. The virus they released attacked the stomach and lungs and killed within days, the symptoms only showing hours before the death so that it had maximum contamination time. Riots ran wild on the streets and whole towns were burnt down. The government was dropping napalm in the streets trying to contain the disease they'd created. Sam and Dean's father had been on the coast of England when he'd died at the height of the war. Dean had to take care of their five year old half-sister, Lilith, and then when their half-brother Adam's mother became sick, they had to take care of him as well.
Infants were most susceptible to the virus and it had killed Adam within days. Lilith had been killed in the fire that destroyed her school, because Dean was late collecting her. The next day the world erupted into panic, and everyone left alive ran, away from everywhere trying to find some fictional haven.
Everyone was running. People would stop at nothing to survive, murders, thefts and arson became commonplace.
Two kids on their own were vulnerable and easy target. They'd had to lie low anywhere they could, hiding out and looting abandoned property just to feed themselves. Now they had to move on, anyone could have seen them by now. Sam looked at Dean, who turned his gaze to face the ground. He wasn't in a position to be having a meaningful conversation at that moment.
"We gotta move," Dean set off in a crouched run across the gas station lot, his brother close behind him. The grassy bank on the side of the freeway was littered with bodies and debris and to their left, cars and lorries were piled together against the crash barrier. Sam's feet ached as they headed towards the city, each step feeling like his muscles were bruising.
"Keep going, we're almost at the city,"
The city came into view. Skyscrapers half sunk over, fires still blazing in the streets, a crane was embedded in a building, the metal groaning in protest. All the way down road into the city bodies lay strewn in between vehicles and discarded containers. There was no safe place in the city.
"What do we do now?" Sam whispered, shrinking back over the incline.
"We head in a different direction,"
