For What It's Worth
Part III
Dean glanced at his watch, sighed a Sam-sized sigh and rubbed his eyes. It was entirely possible he'd managed to forget exactly how boring driving through the night could be, especially when he wasn't the one behind the wheel. Which was precisely why he was always the one behind the wheel. But not this time. Fucking Sam and his conditions. Little brother might cave every now and then, but he didn't do so easily, and certainly not without feeling like he still got his way. "Wish I'd been payin' more attention when you guys were talking about how far this damn house was."
There was no radio signal left to pick up and the CD player in the Jeep was jacked to the point of being useless even if he did have CDs in his possession, and Sam didn't seem all that keen on conversing with his big brother at the moment, as grumpy and sullen in the driver's seat as he was when he was twenty-two. The cold, deliberate silence was making for a ride that was excruciatingly uncomfortable in every imaginable way. Even the Jeep was too quiet for Dean's liking, engine a hair too small and lacking the aggressive yet reassuring growl of the Impala. There was no telling anymore when there would be cause for off-roading or rappelling or any number of issues or obstacles that had never before factored into their relatively simple life of hunting spirits and demons, and as he and the others had loaded up assorted yet coordinated gear into the pair of tall, mud-splattered SUVs better suited to the unpredictable landscape beyond the bunker, he had spared a glance back at his discarded girl where she'd been covered and stashed away into a dark corner for the better part of a year.
Maybe next time, baby, he'd thought, vainly, all the while knowing she might never see the outside world again. And for that, she might have been the luckiest of them all. Only the faintest bit of polished black metal could be glimpsed beneath a rumpled corner of the hideous blue tarp, and every fiber of Dean's being had wanted to cross the crowded expanse of the dim garage and tuck her in tightly, but he didn't, knowing how important it was to keep his head in the game if he wanted to keep playing.
Sam huffed out one of his trademark unamused laughs, breaking Dean out of his reverie. He didn't take his eyes off the dark road but jerked his chin a little. "Well, you're the one who wanted to come."
"Yeah, whatever," Dean mumbled. He propped his arm on the ledge of the car door and tried to stretch out his sore left leg as discreetly as possible, the limb not happy with the hours already spent cramped and stiff. To better hide his wince from his eagle-eyed brother, he forcefully redirected his gaze out of the window to his right, only to earn himself another face full of what had happened since the last time he was outside of the bunker.
Dean had become personally and intimately familiar with the damage and destruction that now painted the surface of…well, everything. Destruction that was a direct consequence of the choices he and his brother had made, and the decisions they couldn't ever take back. After everything, he should hardly have found himself shocked by how far and wide it stretched. Even so, the few parts inside himself that hadn't yet been torn and broken since the world succumbed to the Darkness and her obsessed pets painfully cracked as the Jeep moved further through the barren gray landscape, seemingly swallowed by it.
Dead. A simple thought, and the only one that came to mind as Dean's eyes roamed the broken ground, felled trees and collapsed cityscape. He should have been dead, too. He knew that, as surely as he knew there was something familiar about this particular former cityscape. He straightened in his seat and frowned, eyes trained on the crumbled skeleton of a small downtown-esque skyline that tugged at something weak and fragile he'd locked away a long, long time ago.
And then Dean saw it approaching on their right, the rusty, off-kilter interstate exit sign for Cicero, and all of the oxygen seemed to be sucked out of the vehicle, a giant vacuum stealing his ability to breathe or think with anything resembling clarity.
If he'd known the route to Upland was going to take them past this place, he maybe wouldn't have fought like he did to come along. This wasn't a sight he needed to see or an assumption he needed to make, and it hit him with the force of a brick wall, a full-body blow that paralyzed him where he sat, breath caught in his throat, heart frozen in his chest, and left leg twinging like it was being twisted and shattered all over again.
He wasn't sure how many more times he could get up from the mat and keep swingin.' He wasn't sure how many more times he could possibly be expected to.
Dean stared at the sign as the Jeep passed, and he wondered if she made it out, if she and the kid were scared but safe in the company of other hunters taking in uninfected survivors like they were. Knew better, looking at the ravaged scenery, the veritable hellscape laid out around them. The life in the city was gone, an obvious emptiness. No one got out of there.
She must have been terrified, without a clue what was going on. He'd taught her how to shoot, and how to go to ground. How to ward the house against at least a dozen things. She wasn't helpless, or stupid, and they might have stood a chance, if he hadn't made Cas –
"Dean."
Sam's voice had a touch of calm, careful urgency to it, had lost the edge of tension and annoyance from earlier. Because unlike Dean he always had his head in the game, and he was calling his brother back to the present, back to the task at hand.
Dean swallowed, tearing his eyes from the wasted scene passing by and planting them instead on the dusty dashboard, seeking out a crack in the plastic instead of granting Sam the connection he's searching for. "Yeah."
"Look…I know what you're thinking, man, and just…just don't. Okay?"
"We did this, Sam." Dean ignored him and spoke steadily, quietly. A statement of fact which couldn't be refuted. "And we can pussyfoot around it all you want, but we…we killed these people."
The Jeep slowed noticeably as Sam took the next exit ramp, almost like he was trying to put the metaphorical brakes on the conversation as well as the vehicle, but he didn't respond. He didn't launch either an argument, or a reassurance. And, hell, how could he?
Yeah. Dean returned his elbow to the door, putting more distance between himself and his brother, leaning into the contact with a surface as hard as he wished he could be. "So I guess we're done speculating, huh?"
Sam followed his big brother's lead just like he did when they were younger. "Speculating what?"
"Whether or not the world would have been better off without us."
Dean's words rendered his brother speechless, without argument, once more. So at least there was one thing he was still good at.
Despite what he'd said before, he didn't blame Sam. Not anymore, at least. He used to, sometimes, when the wounds were fresh, when he was alone and feeling it and the whiskey hit him just right. Why didn't you do like I asked and let it GO, Sammy? Why did you have to dig and dig? We would've been done, and none of this would have happened.
Sam suddenly swerved to the left to avoid the wide trunk of a tree that had fallen and blocked the road, tires digging into the loose mix of gravel and dirt as they dipped off of the pavement and the side of Dean's head snapped roughly against the window as his elbow slipped from its perch.
When Sam righted the Jeep the road was just GONE.
Gone without warning or ceremony or Sam seeing the drop-off in time to do any more than spit a heartfelt "Jesus" and execute a clumsy, frantic stomp on the brakes, bringing the vehicle to a sudden, jerky stop at an angle across the seemingly chewed upon road, front passenger-side tire mere feet from the edge of the unnatural cliff face.
Dean had the church bells ringing in his head but that was always when his self-preservation was at its strongest, and he instinctively leaned forward and to the left, bracing a hand on the dash and blinking hard as he peered through the wide windshield at the view of destruction before them, eyes dipping to the drop-off on his concerningly immediate right. "Son of a…"
A yawning trench stretched as far as he can see, on either side of the road, cutting through field and cityscape alike. It looked horrifyingly as though something massive and malevolent, something capable of unimaginable destruction, had come down from the sky and taken a swipe at the earth. Just reached down and scooped away structures both manmade and natural, and any human or animal life that had been its path, leaving behind a sense of hopeless ruin.
"Dean." Sam's unease was palpable, so much so that it might as well have been occupying the space in the cabin between them. His eyes were wide and horrified as he took in the sights surrounding them. "Are we…I mean, can you tell if we're safe here?" Sam was hesitant in his inquiry, but he'd been a part of this devastated, jacked-up world for exactly as long as Dean had, and while that wasn't something you ever really get used to, it wasn't the views of a desolate, wrecked world, not even the possible presence of the Hollow Men that were making him nervous.
Dean's inexplicable ability to sense when they or any of the infected were near had proven to be of use in the past, and it was most definitely the only reason Sam finally consented to letting him come along, but that didn't mean his little brother felt comfortable with it, not with the thought that Dean had any sort of connection to the sinister beings that could create scenes like this very one just because. Strange, maybe, considering all of the whackado abilities Sam had in the past, himself.
Dean was pretty sure he knew immediately that they were in the clear, as he didn't feel the biting, bitter and all-encompassing cold that the Hollow Men or the infected brought with them. But all the same, he took a second, sending his eyes on a cautious circuit of the landscape and stalling, so as not to scare Sam with exactly how easily the answer came to him. He nodded, a quick dip of his chin. "We're good."
Still, Sam took his sweet time in returning the motion, swallowing roughly as his head bobbed like a buoy in choppy waters. "Okay." He reached immediately to pop open the door of the Jeep, and didn't protest as Dean followed him out to assist in categorizing the exact level of Fucked in which they'd just found themselves.
He'd thought the little corner of the bunker he'd carved out for himself was quiet, but there was the deliberate silence of self-imposed solitude, and then there was the absolute, unquestionable stillness that was the notable absence of life. And between the two, a canyon cut as wide as this one.
He knew this was the world now, he knew it and they'd spent the past several hours traveling through it, but it was still a shock to the system to be faced with it all over again, really faced with it and standing in the middle of a canvas of destruction that stretched as far as his straining eyes could manage to take in. Dean absorbed each perceived loss of life as a separate blow, sucked in a harsh, painful breath like felt a little like dying in itself.
"Dean?"
Sam's tone of voice was a rarely heard one of quiet distress, one survivor to another, and Dean couldn't quite process the full weight of what his brother was asking of him. He shook his head, wincing and ghosting fingertips over his pounding, hot-feeling though thankfully intact temple, and stepped gingerly around the nose of the Jeep, palming the warm hood as he warily watched the compromised ground beneath his boots.
Sam motioned for Colin and Jackson in the second idling Jeep to stay where they were for the moment, while they assessed the situation and figured out their next move.
Dean crouched carefully near the edge, which wasn't quite as straight or violent a drop as he'd initially thought, nor was it a distance that wasn't traversable to reach the other side. He wavered a bit on the balls of his feet, was forced to drop fingertips to the dirt to brace himself. There were options, he could see that now; swaths of rocky terrain to carry them to the floor of the crevasse and across the divide. The damage wasn't new and the ground seemed to be sturdy, should hold the weight of the vehicles on the descent. He felt Sam come up behind him.
"Any ideas?"
Run like hell, and don't look back. Dean squinted, rocked back on his heels and brushed the dirt from his hand across the thigh of his jeans. "Gonna take some off-roading, that's for damn sure, but we should be able to get across."
Sam didn't answer, narrowed eyes searching the drop-off.
Dean straightened, bumped his brother with an elbow and forced a smile. "If you're scared, I can drive."
Sam threw the gearshift into 'park' outside a stretch of tall, rusted wrought iron fencing, but didn't move to take the keys from the ignition. He tapped the steering wheel, a quick succession of fingertips that had always been the sign of a winding pitch, of a looming conversation of a somewhat serious nature. "Hey, Dean, hold up a sec."
Dean froze, fingers wrapped around the door handle and left leg aching, screaming its protest at not yet being permitted to flex and move around freely. His eyes darted all over, passed over the tall fence beyond the dirty windshield, possibly the sturdiest structure they'd come across in hours and most likely dosed with salt and marked with all manner of protective warding. His watch told him the sun should have been more than visible by now, but an eerie, possibly permanent cloud cover continued to mar the sky overhead. "What is it?"
Sam ignored him for a moment, cranked the window and leaned out to wave for the others to make their way up to the chapter house before settling back against his seat with a sigh. He didn't look at Dean as he spoke. "You're limping."
Dean blinked, but felt a cold sweat break out on his palm where it was gripping the rough plastic of the handle. He used to be a lot better about these things, concealing aches and pains from his brother. Back when he was a better salesman, back when Sam was still buying what he was selling. "I'm really not," he protested, with an attempt at an easy grin. "I'm pretty sure I'm just sitting here. You know, wasting time on a very important mission."
Sam rotated to face him, perching a stiff wrist atop the cracked, weathered steering wheel. "You're damn right this is an important mission, Dean, and you were limping when you got in the car, and it was worse when we stopped before." He shook his head. "I'm not other people, man. I know what you went through, and I don't care what you said back at the bunker. You've been fidgeting the entire drive like your leg's bothering you."
"I've been sitting in this crap heap for the last twelve hours, Sam. What do you expect? Everything's bothering me." When Sam remained both unmoved and unamused, Dean put his shoulder blade against the door and dropped his gaze to his hands. "You're bothering me," he muttered.
Sam rolled his eyes. "Be straight with me, man. No more lies, and no more jokes." He pursed his lips. "Can you do this?"
Dean quirked an eyebrow. "What, walk into a house and walk back? Yeah, I think I'll find a way to manage."
"You can hang back. Sound the alarm from here."
"By what, Sam? Shouting real loud? Drawing any infected straight to us?"
Sam leaned over, popped the glove box and pulled out a pair of walkie-talkies, offered one to Dean with raised eyebrows.
Dean glared. "Hell no, Sam. I'm not staying behind in the car like I'm friggin' five." Never once had to, and he had no intention of breaking that streak.
Sam replaced the walkies in the glove box and slammed the compartment shut. He sat back against the seat and sighed, not the seething one or even the exasperated one, but the new, patient and controlled one he'd had ever since Dean got laid up. "You shouldn't be here." Said as a general statement of dissatisfied fact.
At least he'd had the courtesy to wait for Jackson and the jackass to make their way out of earshot this time before starting again in with all this shit. Dean exhaled roughly, and a phantom pain ricocheted through his ribcage. He turned the reflexive wince that cut across his face into a sour look that would rival a vintage expression of his brother's. "Look, Sam, if you're just gonna bitch – "
"I'm not." Sam sighed again, definitely the exasperated one this time. It was almost a familiar comfort to hear it. "Really. I just had to say it one more time, see if you'd gotten any more sense in your head since we left the bunker."
Dean cocked his head, feigned considering but was already reaching once more for the door handle. "Doesn't look like it."
Sam nodded, squared his jaw. And – okay – he might have turned the corner all the way back to pissed by this point, and he wasn't putting sugar on it. "Okay, then." He left the keys jutting out of the ignition, standard protocol, because there was never the guarantee that the driver would be one of the ones who made it back.
They made short work of the walk to the house, Dean's leg griping and grumbling the entire way as he struggled to keep up with Sam's long told-you-so strides. By the time they met up with the others about fifty yards out, he couldn't argue the sweat that had broken out at his temples and could only hope the shadows of the lingering unnatural darkness were enough to cover his increasing discomfort on a relatively cool day.
Sam cast a cursory glance around the property, eyes and flashlight beam passing over the former chapter house and current waste of space, then turned to Colin and nodded once. "Watch the perimeter."
The former soldier was clearly unhappy drawing guard dog duty, and glared at Dean as they passed, muttered, "Freak," under his breath.
Like he wouldn't give his gimpy left leg not to have this odd connection with the Hollow Men or anything else that had been touched but the Darkness. Sam shot Colin a very specific look but Dean didn't rise to the bait, not verbally, at least. He simply returned the sentiment with a grin and a wink.
"Sam, no one's given this place a thought since long before the Darkness was let out," he observed as they stepped onto the wide porch, steps bending and creaking under the weight. He squinted up at the sunken, sprawling Victorian, its paint chipped, peeling and faded to shades of gray that perfectly matched the sky above, and bit down hard against the words he wanted to say. Since long before we let the Darkness out.
Dean covered his unease with a low whistle. Every window looked blown out, frames cracked and splintered without a trace of glass left to be found. A tree seemed to have grown straight up through the roof of the porch and died that way, thick gnarled branches clinging to rotted gutters and climbing a crumbing brick chimney.
"Yeah, well, the Men of Letters haven't exactly been around, have they?" Peering in through a large gap in the western-facing front of the house that was presumably a picture window once offering beautiful sunset views, Sam spoke in a hushed tone, like someone or something might have been listening in on the exchange.
"I'm just sayin', if Magnus hid something here…I mean, Sam, it looks like a goddamned bomb went off. There isn't even any furniture left in this place."
Sam reached out with his left hand, tested the large, ornately carved knob, and the front door creaked and folded open into the dark house. He turned back, met the eyes of Dean and Jackson in turn and motioned them both inside.
Sam was in the zone, face set as he sent his flashlight beam searching the rubble of the large but otherwise empty first floor. He stepped gingerly around a pile of broken glass and shifted a fallen roof beam aside with his boot, and Dean squinted up at the matching hole in the ceiling. "Jackson, you stay down here. Dean, upstairs with me."
Dean rolled his eyes as he followed his little brother's orders and cautiously climbed the wide staircase, wary of the sturdiness, or lack thereof, of each riser. "Sam," he persisted, grimacing as he collected a palm full of dust and grime from the banister. He contemplated wiping the mess on the back of Sam's jacket but settled for a swipe down the thigh of his own jeans. "There's nothing left here, man."
Dean felt he only slightly deserved the deliberate lack of attention his brother was paying him. Sam didn't even spare him a glance as he surveyed the long hallway at the top of the staircase, walls lighter in patches where artwork once hung and branches of that big-ass tree outside invading the second story through empty windowpanes. He paused for just a moment, then wordlessly took two hard rights and disappeared into a room off of the hall.
Dean shook his head and hurried to follow the stubborn son a bitch, forgot to watch where he was putting his feet and his weaker leg came up just a step short of its intended landing zone, caught in a warped floorboard on the threshold and pitched him sideways into the doorframe.
Fantastic, he thought. Then, OW. Dean straightened and rubbed his shoulder, sneering down at the traitorous spot in the hardwood. He raised his gaze to confirm Sam hadn't caught this latest display of his seemingly perpetual weakness, but frowned and whipped it back immediately to the floor. He cocked his head as his tired but well-trained eyes zeroed in on something foreign caught between the boards.
Dean dropped swiftly to one knee and tucked his flashlight under an armpit, then dragged his switchblade from his back pocket. He stuck the knife between the slats and pried the loose board free. It came off roughly in his hand, rocking him back on his heels. Well, I'll be damned. Again. "Hey, Sam – "
"No." Across the room, Sam shook his head stubbornly as he trailed the beam of his flashlight along the grimy crown molding overhead. "No, it has to be here somewhere. We didn't come all this way just to – "
"SAM."
"WHAT?"
Dean raised his eyebrows at his brother, held the board aloft and pointed to the gap he'd uncovered in the hardwood.
Sam's eyes widened and he rushed to crouch next to Dean. He carefully worked the folded scrap of paper free and blew away a bit of dust, then inspected the writing in the glow of their two flashlights, silently moving his lips as he read the overly swirly, familiar-looking scrawls.
He turned to Dean with a dropped jaw. "This whole damn house, and you just happen to TRIP over the exact piece of paper we're looking for in the first room we try?"
So maybe he had caught the show, after all. "I know. I'm awesome." Dean grinned, gave Sam's shoulder a gentle shove. "Told you that you need me."
Sam jerked his head, shaking his hair from his eyes as he slowly straightened, still staring at the bit of yellowed paper. "This is…Dean, if this spell works, do you know what this means?"
"No, not really. So how about we get it back to the bunker and then…" Dean's attention and eyes were drawn away to roam the empty room and he reached out to grip his brother's sleeve. But whether he was holding Sam back or keeping him close, he couldn't honestly say. "Sam, hold up."
"What?"
"Shut up." He heard it again, a muffled thump from somewhere downstairs, and Jackson had been part of the group long enough to know to immediately claim such a sound if he was the one making it. "We're not alone."
The color fell out of Sam's face and he spun, eyes landing on any doorway or window available to escape from. He quickly tucked the spell away into an inside pocket of his jacket and his knuckles whitened as they curled around the grip of his pistol. A weapon that was as handy as any against the infected but would prove absolutely ineffectual against the Hollow Men, but there was just no shaking decades-ingrained instinct. "It is the – "
"No," Dean was just as quick to correct, fingers tightening around his own gun. He was sure of that, as sure as he'd been at that impasse on the way here. It wasn't…wasn't her lapdogs crawling the perimeter of the house, but that didn't mean there wasn't a threat nearby. "But just…shh." Dean threw a stiff hand at his brother, waving at the floor and signaling him to get down.
Sam did so, then jerked his head at the open window across the room. Dean wasn't exactly looking forward to a second-story drop, but if it turned out to be their only means of egress, then he and his worthless leg would just have to make do.
He nodded, forgetting for a moment to keep his eyes on the door and instead instinctively, protectively watched his little brother's six as Sam inched his way to the window in the far wall. Forgetting that Sam hadn't been the one who'd needed looking after lately.
There was just no mistaking the soft click of a safety being thumbed off, mere inches behind him. And, yeah, this one was pretty obviously on Dean.
To be continued...
