Thanks for the enthusiastic response. To answer a general question, yes I'll be updating it very quickly. I'll probably have the third chapter up by tonight and the rest tomorrow. I just have to reformat the story from how it was originally printed. Thanks!
I own nothing, reviews craved.
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Chapter 2
The first thing Sam became aware of was pain. His back was killing him even worse than before. There were already new bruises forming on top of the old ones from the demon tossing him around. Worse, the muscles had stiffened up, making it hard to move. There was something hard and sharp-edged poking him in the stomach, too.
The next thing was the water. It was everywhere, on the ground, in his nose, soaking through his clothes and his hair. More was hitting him. Was he in the shower? That didn't make sense. He didn't wear clothes in the shower. Of course, he didn't lie down in the shower, either. Unless he counted that one time a ghost had tried to drown him—
Sam shook off his wandering thoughts, coughing as water found its way into his mouth and throat. His eyes blinked open slowly. All he could see was floor and water splashing wildly, hitting so hard, it was bouncing off the concrete.
Floor. Concrete. Water. It was raining. He had to be outside. Had he passed out? No, the vortex. That's right. Sam had been in that basement, trying to find a way to stop the "storm," or whatever it was. But, how had he ended up outside?
Coughing again as the water splashed into his face, Sam pushed himself over with one hand, rolling onto his side. He was clutching the Colt in his other hand, tight against his belly; that was what was poking him. Already soaked, he pushed himself all the way over and dropped onto his back. His back felt better pressed against the hard, flat floor. It felt like he'd been asleep for days, but that couldn't be right, either. He hadn't had a full night's sleep in…well, in a year.
Dragging his free hand up to cover his eyes, Sam chanced a look upward. The sky was dark, a blanket of black clouds blotting out all light. Rain was pelting down, like before, only without the hailstones, thankfully. Lightning arced every few minutes, sometimes so close, Sam had to shield his eyes. Thunder rolled continuously.
Okay, where the hell am I?
Sam pushed himself into a sitting position, fighting off vertigo, and covered his face as best he could with his free hand to block the rain. Besides the concrete floor he was sitting on, there were walls surrounding him. It took a second to click, but they were the same walls as the basement he'd been in…there was just no house above it anymore. He was facing the door where he'd entered, and could see the stairs beyond in the next area. The ceiling, and the bodies of the slaughtered family that had hung from it, were gone.
Sam twisted around to look behind him, seeing the vortex still crackling with energy near one of the still-intact walls. It wasn't pulling at him this time, or warping the air around it. Sam did note, though, that it was now spinning counterclockwise, the opposite direction as before. He wondered what that meant, if anything. The body of the demon he'd fought wasn't there.
Had the vortex somehow destroyed the house? That would make sense; since it had been sucking everything into itself, maybe the entire house had been pulled in except for these few walls. But, if that was so, how had he stayed out of it? He remembered being dragged toward it. How was he not dead?
Sam shook his groggy head. He wasn't going to figure anything out sitting there, shivering in the rain. He forced himself to stand, groaning as his stiff limbs stretched out. He looked down, scanning the floor. The Colt and the canteen of holy water were all that had survived, apparently. His weapons bag was gone. And the—
Wait a minute. The circular symbol was still on the floor, too, but…it had changed. It was faded, a much paler color, and the characters surrounding the pentagram were backwards. Not just inverted, but completely opposite, like a mirror image. He had no idea what the symbol or the vortex was, so he had no way of knowing what it all meant.
He needed help. Taking cover under a wrecked shelf, Sam fished out his cell phone, praying it wasn't waterlogged. He'd bought a protective case for it a few months back, while on a hunt for a water sprite, and the purchase was now paying off. The phone worked fine. He dialed Bobby's number, but then frowned. There was no signal.
In and of itself, that didn't mean much, since his proximity to the storm and the weirdo vortex might have disrupted the phone's operation, but still it bothered him. Sam didn't ask Bobby for much these days, but the older hunter was the only friend he had, really, and being cut off like this gave him chills that had nothing to do with being drenched. He pocketed the phone and decided to try again outside. Sam cautiously moved into the outer area of the basement, and proceeded up the battered stairway.
The rest of the house was little more than debris. A field of wood, brick, and glass made it look as if the place had been bombed. Picking his way across the piles of rubble took too long, so he cut across and out into the side yard. There, under the trees, he had some cover from the rain at least. Sam headed down the hill toward the road where he'd parked.
He made it halfway down the hill before it registered with his dazed brain. The car wasn't where he'd left it. He glanced from side to side, double checking. The Impala was nowhere to be seen. Sam's mouth dropped open. No, no, no…
He did not just let Dean's baby get taken. Besides, the demon he'd fought was dead, it wouldn't have—
He broke into a jog and looked up and down the street once he was clear of the trees and bushes. Nothing. The Impala was gone. Along with the weapons, the first aid supplies, the laptop, his clothes…the bullets for the Colt. Reflexively, Sam checked the Colt, confirming there were five bullets left in the revolver.
Something kept drawing his eyes to the right, but it took a moment to sink in. The town. From where he was standing, he had a decent view of the edge of Gatlinburg, down the road—and downhill—from the house. But, there was something very wrong. No lights.
The town was dark, no streetlights, no signs, nothing in the windows, and it was unusually still. He glanced up at the roiling storm clouds, wondering if maybe the lightning had knocked out electricity, but even then there would be cars moving on the roads. Instead, there was nothing. No sign of life at all.
Frowning, Sam turned and checked the other side of the road. It proceeded farther up the mountain, but so far as Sam knew, it only led over the hills and on to the Blue Ridge Parkway; there were no more houses in that direction. He turned back, and froze when he glanced at the mountaintops above the town.
Demons. Two of them, in their natural form, swirling in and out of rain clouds that were only slightly lighter in color, making the black, smoke-like creatures stand out. It was the only reason Sam had seen them at all. This couldn't be good. Demons, in his experience, rarely traveled freely unless they weren't worried about being spotted, and it was still fairly early in the day, despite the gloomy weather. He wondered if the demons had anything to do with the power outage and the house he'd been under being destroyed.
Sam suppressed a surge of fear. He needed Bobby's help to figure out what the demons had been doing here, but his phone was still down, and now the Impala was missing. He'd have to head down into town and try to find a phone. Maybe find out what was going on there, too. Sam pulled his jacket tighter around himself, and started walking, sticking just inside the tree line to stay out of sight and get at least a little cover from the pouring rain.
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The walk down was slow and miserable. Keeping under the trees kept Sam from being seen, but it was also much rougher than walking on the road. Roots, underbrush and mud hindered his progress. It took a little over half an hour to reach the outskirts of Gatlinburg.
Worse, his dizziness had developed into a major headache, and his back was killing him. All he wanted to do was hole up somewhere, pop some painkillers, and pass out for a little while. But that wasn't an option. He needed to find a phone and make some calls. Maybe get a drink.
Sam's feeling of dread grew as he reached the first intersection inside the town. There wasn't a soul on the streets or the sidewalks. The shops were all dark, not even an emergency light on anywhere. There were cars parked here and there, almost like normal, but all were empty. Trash flitted down the streets, driven by rain and wind. Weeds poked through cracks in the pavement and sidewalks. Odd.
What struck Sam most of all, though, was the silence. Aside from the thunder and wind, there wasn't a manmade sound to be heard. Not even a dog or wild animal. It was as if all life in the town had simply been extinguished.
Sam clenched his teeth and made for a pay phone. After glancing around to be sure he was alone, he left his hiding spot alongside a souvenir shop and sprinted across the street to a phone mounted beside a bike rack.
He picked it up, but there was no dial tone. Growling in frustration, Sam slammed the receiver down and darted for cover beneath a shadowy restaurant awning.
If those two demons he saw weren't in town, they were still in the area, and his only weapons were a little holy water and the Colt. Not a good situation. Sam scanned the gloomy line of stores and restaurants, stopping at the next intersection. A mom-and-pop convenience store. Surely they'd sell salt, maybe something made of iron he could use. Better than nothing.
Sam moved quickly and quietly, glancing around corners carefully before crossing side streets. The stillness was eerie, and more than a little unnerving. There had to be someone left. No disaster killed everybody.
He finally made it to the next intersection, crossed the road in a sprint, and dropped behind a busted newspaper box, Colt in hand. His eyes settled on a telephone pole directly in front of the store, and his blood ran cold. Engraved in the wood of the pole, in block letters, was one word.
CROATOAN.
He bit back a curse. Just like Rivergrove. Had Gatlinburg been hit with the same demonic virus he and Dean had encountered in Oregon? This didn't make sense, though. Everything had been fine when he briefly passed through on the way to the house. That virus had taken hours to take hold, days to kill everyone in town. How long was I out?
Sam shook his head. He was getting nowhere fast. He needed to regroup. He eyed the broken newspaper machine and grabbed a paper out through the open front. Tucking it under his arm, he rose and slipped through the open door of the convenience store. He flipped the light switches by the door, but nothing happened.
Fortunately, though it lacked electricity, the place had a little of everything else Sam needed. A few cartons of salt, flashlights and some batteries, several bottles of water, a roadmap, some non-perishable food, painkillers, and a few other necessities all went into a trash bag. Sam made sure he wasn't being followed, then made for the back of the store, Colt in hand.
There was a small break room and office behind the register, which Sam ducked into. He locked the door and poured down salt lines to seal it off along with the vents and windows. Feeling secure, if not all that safe, Sam placed his makeshift duffel on a table and dug out one of the flashlights.
The room was just large enough for the table, small desk, safe, and television it contained. Sam tried the TV, more on reflex than anything else, since he didn't expect anything with all the power off. The only light was the faint gray glow from the shuttered window. Frowning, he sank into a metal folding chair and pressed his back against it. The pain wasn't much better than it had been during the long walk into town, and he popped a few painkillers out of one of the packages he'd collected. Fortunately, the medicine wasn't strong enough to knock him out. He couldn't afford to fall asleep just yet, not until he knew the extent of what was going on.
Sam picked up one of the flashlights and the paper. At least he'd be able to see what had happened in the past few days. It was unusually thin, lacking many of the usual sections, which was strange, even for a local edition. Unfolding it and intending to look at the date, Sam's eyes were instead drawn immediately to the first headline.
THE END IS AT HAND, SAY RELIGIOUS GROUPS
Sam grunted. Not happy news.
The article below was choppy and unedited, as if the printers had been publishing as quickly as they could. Reports of people going crazy in record numbers, horrific murders, riots, fires, mass disappearances, populations fleeing to the mountains and Midwest, away from the major cities, martial law being declared. It was unbelievable.
Sam was stunned. He thought of the demons he'd seen in the sky on the way in. Had the demon army finally somehow gotten their war machine going? Lilith, the demon he and Dean had fought just prior to— Sam's mind shied away from Dean's death even now.
They'd neutralized Lilith, at least temporarily. Sam and Bobby had been keeping an eye out for signs, but she hadn't re-emerged in the past year. Therefore, the demon army still had no leader…that Sam knew of. Besides, even if the demons had rallied together, how could they have launched such a devastating attack on the world in such a short time? He flipped back to the first page, searching the bylines for the date.
June 14, 2012
Sam just blinked for a moment, his mind not processing. He read it again, then aloud. He knew he'd been losing track of time a lot since Dean—
No. That was impossible. It was late May 2009. He glanced at his watch, which had stopped. That wasn't a surprise; supernatural activity often stopped clocks. But the last date was what interested him. His watch, at least, agreed with him.
May 20, 2009
Sam looked back at the paper, which still insisted he was three years into the future. Impossible.
Wasn't it?
The vortex. A time portal? Yesterday, had he been asked, Sam would have said there was no such thing. He'd never run across a demon that could manufacture a time warp.
The Trickster could do it—had, in fact, to Sam—but Sam hadn't seen the troublesome demigod since, and it had no reason to be going after him again. Sam filed that away, but didn't completely dismiss the possibility. In the meantime, though, he could only deal with what he knew for sure.
Assuming all this wasn't one of the Trickster's illusions, it seemed a demon had opened a portal, to the future, an alternate universe, something. Sam needed to find a way back to where he belonged.
If that was even possible.
With the Impala gone, along with everything he owned, he had to find help. Bobby seemed to be the only choice.
As messed up as it was, all the landmarks and details of Gatlinburg seemed correct—save the ruins and overgrowth—compared to what he remembered about the drive through town earlier that day. Sam frowned. If it really was earlier today.
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Sam adjusted the backpack he'd liberated from one of the knickknack shops littering the main road through town, and crept down the street as quickly as was safe. The cheap garbage bag from the convenience store he'd used as a carryall hadn't lasted long. Sam tried to ignore the image of Hannah Montana smiling at him from the front of the bag.
Dean would never let him live it down. Sam smiled, forgetting for a moment that Dean would never see it.
Except, Dean wasn't there. He shook his head. That hadn't happened in a while. For months after Dean's death, he had caught himself wondering what Dean would think or what he would say when Sam told him something. That kind of thing was supposed to be helpful, a way of maintaining your connection to a lost loved one. To Sam, though, it just reopened the wound every time.
God, I need a drink.
He forced the morose line of thought aside and focused on the task at hand. After figuring out what he needed to do, Sam had waited until nightfall—such as it was, since the sun had never come out from behind the storm clouds, so he'd just waited until it was at its gloomiest—before leaving the convenience store's back room. It had taken a little while, but he'd found a car stowed away in a garage, nice and safe from the weather, and used the meager auto-shop lessons Dean had taught him to get the car ready to move again.
He'd already found some gas, lined the floorboards and windows with salt, and even painted devil's traps on the roof and trunk. All Sam needed now were some new sparkplugs and a new battery for the engine.
The local hardware store was easy to find, and he had the items he needed in minutes. Keeping the Colt out in front, he proceeded back out onto the sidewalk. He dared not use his flashlight, and was navigating by the flashes of lightning that still crashed around the area. Keeping an eye out for demons or other dangers was more than a little nerve-wracking in that environment.
The store wasn't too far from the two-car garage where he'd found the car. The one-story house attached was empty, and no sign of the owners remained beyond a few dark bloodstains. Sam made it back to his new ride and unloaded his supplies in less than half an hour. Here, with the door closed, he was safe enough to use his flashlight and make a little noise while working.
Time was impossible to tell here, but his internal count put it at around midnight when he was finished. Presuming, of course, the sun still rose and set at the same time as it was supposed to behind those thick clouds. All Sam had to go by was the glow along the horizon when he was walking down from the house he'd woken up in.
At last, he was done with the engine. Dean's lessons had paid off. He started to close the hood but paused, a thought occurring to him. One more thing.
He grabbed a screwdriver and a few other tools, and opened the headlight covers. He unscrewed the bulbs, replaced the covers, then carefully repeated the process on each of the marker lights along the sides and the taillights. The eye-level brake light in the rear windshield wouldn't open, so he simply smashed that one. He was taking a huge risk driving out into the open where any demon or creature could see him, so Sam might as well take the precaution of driving without lights. The risk of hitting something on the storm-darkened roads was less significant than the risk of getting spotted.
Besides, he had the unnerving feeling that there may not be anyone else on the road to hit, darkness or no darkness. Placing the borrowed toolbox in the back seat, Sam walked forward and raised the garage door, careful to look outside before turning back to the vehicle. This one had more legroom than the Impala, but he gladly would have traded it in to have Dean's car back.
Sam dropped into the car and proceeded to hot-wire the ignition. He didn't breathe again until the long-unused engine turned over and the car started. With a sigh of relief, he put the car in gear and pulled slowly out onto the road. So far, so good.
Rechecking the map, he chose a route that would lead him west, toward South Dakota and, hopefully, Bobby. Sam paused, glancing at the empty passenger seat, and stared for a long moment. Sam would have thought he'd be used to it by now.
God, more than monsters and demons and crazy time-twisting vortexes…he hated driving alone.
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Without stopping, it was usually about a twenty-hour drive from eastern Tennessee to South Dakota. This time, however, it took that long just to travel halfway. Fortunately, the heavy thunderstorms had cleared up about an hour out from the mountains, and he was able to navigate by the light of a full moon.
Sam stuck to back roads until he cleared Gatlinburg to avoid the inevitable traffic jams that always resulted from mass panic and evacuations. If the newspaper he'd read was accurate, most of the cities would be like that, so Sam adjusted his route accordingly. He used the Interstates when he could and veered onto the less-traveled country roads to get around the congested cities.
That was his theory, anyway. In actuality, the back roads weren't much better. Obviously, others had thought the same way as Sam when the various calamities had hit, and Sam found himself having to backtrack to get around roadblocks, pileups, and hundreds of abandoned cars on many of the roads.
In many places, thick veils of fog hung low to the ground. It gave him a modicum of cover, if not comfort, since it made navigating with no lights even harder. He tried Bobby a few times on his cell, but still couldn't get a signal.
Dawn broke over the eerily still landscape, and that was when Sam started seeing more ominous sights than just empty cars. On a mostly deserted stretch of I-24 outside Clarksville, he ran across a dozen or more wrecked and blood-soaked cars blocking the road. He was able to drive around on the shoulder, but when he glanced off the road, Sam saw why they'd been abandoned. Twenty corpses hung from trees in a grove about ten feet from the roadside, all of them in crucifixion poses. The bodies were little more than bones and tattered clothing, so they'd been there for quite some time.
He stared in shock for a few long moments, then shook himself and glanced over the rest of the scene. From the looks of it, these people had been dragged from their cars and just slaughtered. There were a few signs of a struggle, but if demons had done this, Sam knew the people hadn't stood a chance. Unwillingly, his eyes moved back to the corpses.
To say it was unnerving was an understatement. Sam reflexively checked his mirrors and looked around, fear and paranoia making him anxious. Had he run across this with Dean, or Bobby, and under normal circumstances, he would have gotten out and tried to determine what had done this and why. But he was alone, and the world was feeling a little upside down right then.
Sam didn't stay long enough to investigate.
Some twenty-two hours into his journey, Sam was finally approaching St. Louis and the Mississippi River. Not the best time he'd ever made traveling. Added to that, the monotony of keeping an eye out for any airborne demons and road obstructions was taking its toll, and he was bleary-eyed and more than ready to sleep.
Against his better judgment, Sam gave in to the urge to rest and found a secluded bridge to park under. Satisfied he was out of sight, he double-checked the lines of salt that safeguarded the interior of the car, switched off the engine, and slid down in the seat out of sight. The backpack made a halfway decent pillow, as it turned out.
It was nearly ten o'clock at night. He'd sleep for an hour or so, and then resume his journey. He just hoped nothing found him while he rested.
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The bridge was one of the old iron truss types, similar to a railroad bridge. He noticed protection symbols painted on the outermost supports, ensuring no demon could cross.
He drove the car across slowly, keeping an eye out for anyone or anything. The only structures nearby were the remains of a small gas station and a derelict water tower.
He was about halfway across the span when a flash of light caught his eye. He barely had time to register that it came from the top of the water tower before a blinding agony pierced his chest—
Sam bolted awake, gasping for air. Frantically, he ran his hand over his chest, searching for a bullet wound, but found nothing.
"What the hell was that?" he muttered quietly. Sam brought his breathing under control and pushed himself up on the seat. The remnants of the vision played through in his mind, punctuated by the throb of a splitting headache. He hadn't had a vision in a while...a few months, at least. His psychic abilities had only reemerged just before Dean's death, and weren't nearly as pronounced as they'd been when the Yellow-Eyed Demon's activities were triggering them.
Sam thought he recognized the bridge he had seen, but couldn't place it. It was certainly not along the route he was taking to Bobby's. But, seeing himself get shot… He didn't know what that meant. Was there someone else alive somewhere?
He couldn't decide if that was good news or not. Rubbing absently at the spot where he'd been hit in his vision, Sam decided it probably wasn't.
Glancing out the windows, he was relieved to note he still seemed to be alone on the road. The moon was out again, casting an eerie glow along the landscape. Sam couldn't quite tell what time it was. He guessed it was after midnight.
Cursing silently to himself for sleeping longer than he'd planned, Sam cranked the car and left the cover of the overpass. He needed to get to Bobby's.
TBC
