Sam, Grace, and Jack drove into town to find the streets empty. Shop doors were left open, bags of groceries littering the sidewalks in front of them. Cars idled in the middle of the road, one of them wrapped around a telephone pole. The local park was empty, sand castles halfway built and soccer balls lying still in the middle of the field. One other car was still running - the Impala. Dean hopped out, pocketing his keys as the others turned to face him. Grace jogged over to give him a hug, immediately noticing the bloody handprint on his shoulder. Her heart sank as she realized what must have happened. She took his hand, the others catching up. "I couldn't save anybody. Billie -"
Dean interrupted his brother. "It wasn't Billie. It was Chuck." His voice was hollow as he spoke, Grace knowing that something must have really been wrong.
"Where's Cas?" Jack wondered, looking into the Impala. "Dean?"
"Dean?"
Grace looked to her husband, then turned back to the others, slowly shaking her head. "I don't think he's coming."
"He saved me," Dean finally managed. "Billie was after us, and he summoned the Empty. He'd made a deal with it. It took her, and it took him. Cas - Cas is gone."
Sam nodded, Grace squeezing his hand and suggesting they go into the diner they had parked in front of. Everyone could use at least a drink of water, if not something stronger. "Everyone's gone," Grace sighed, pointing out the television screen. It had been showing a football game, but the field was empty, the ball abandoned.
"This is my fault," Sam sighed, pacing between the tables. "I thought we could do this another way, and now everyone's gone."
"We have to fight like we've always fought," Grace insisted, pouring him a drink from behind the bar. "There's no one to stop us now. We just have to figure out how to summon the Empty and… bring everyone back ourselves." You're going to have to be the one to make a deal with it. Bring everyone else back, and it can have you. It was never about you. It was always supposed to be the boys. "Then it can finally rest."
"Let's get fueled up and head back to the bunker," Dean suggested, suddenly restless. "We can figure something out there. Friendly territory, without Chuck."
"Gracie?" Dean stood in the kitchen doorway, watching her make a cup of tea as he leaned on the doorframe. He spoke softly, trying not to surprise her.
"Yeah?" Grace set her spoon down, sugar still swirling into her tea. She turned to see how thoroughly exhausted he was, stress and anger and sadness lining his face. With a weary smile, she came to give him a hug. "What's up? Do you feel like talking?"
Dean shook his head. "Not now. I think I'm going to go for a walk. I just wanted to let you know, in case you went to find me and I was gone." It was a warning she anticipated hearing often. Any time they couldn't find each other, they would be worried, assuming they too were dissolving into thin air.
"Okay. I'll be here. I'm going to… there's no way I can sleep, so I think I'm going to lock myself in my office and figure out how we can keep going. We're going to need to figure out how to live off of what's out there." She held onto him, sensing that there was a lot he wasn't telling her. So she spoke first. "Dean, I love you."
"I love you too, Gracie." His voice was hollow, like his mind was a million miles away. With good reason, of course. All of them had good reason to be distracted. He kissed the top of her head, leaving her alone in the kitchen.
Grace took her cup of tea, speed walking over to her room to grab a pair of shoes. As soon as she heard the bunker door close, she sprinted to follow. Sam and Dean stood outside, waiting under a streetlight in the silence. There were no crickets anymore, no bullfrogs, no mosquitoes, no lightning bugs. The world was quiet. Grace crept forward until she was as close as she dared to get, hiding in a bush to listen in as the streetlight began to flicker. "We surrender, alright?" Chuck appeared in front of them, Grace's breath catching in her throat.
"Take us. Bring them back," Sam offered. "You get the ending you want."
"Hmm, nah," Chuck shrugged. "That's all a little too late. And a little too little. You're going to rot here. Picture it, the two of you and your little lapdog Jack, rotting away on this planet, knowing it's this way because you wouldn't take a knee. Everyone gone. Eternal shame, suffering, and loneliness. It's deep. That's sophisticated. That's a page-turner."
"Oh come on -" Chuck vanished before Dean managed another sentence.
Back in the bunker, Grace followed up on her word. She went back for her cup of tea, locking herself in her office and printing out a map of the area. They were going to need to get groceries from somewhere. They would eventually need medicine, gas, parts for the car. All sorts of things. They were going to need to figure out how to live with just the four of them on the planet.
Grace was up all night, trying to do the complicated math of figuring out how best to collect and store a lot of things from a lot of grocery stores nearby, but not too nearby so they could make emergency supply runs without having to drive very far. The first thing she settled on was turning the morgue freezers back on so they had more built-in storage space. Just as she was about to get up to find the file on them, she heard a noise in the hall. Someone else was still awake.
Opening the door to her office, she found Sam, a cup of coffee in his hand. "Hey. How's the work going?"
"Fine," she shrugged. "We've got a lot to do to get the bunker in shape to store all sorts of things. We're going to have to turn the morgue freezers on. I want to get Bobby's old truck up and running again so we can get a ton of supplies. If we stock up now, if all four of us head to different towns with supply lists, we can keep this place well-stocked. We're also going to need to work on the house so we can have a place when we need it, if something happens and we can't get down here. I also want to hit hospitals and medical centers. I've got a list of basics going already, but we'll need more. We've also got to start learning medicine, more than we know now. There'll come a day when basic sutures aren't going to cut it."
Sam sighed, listening patiently. He could tell that Grace had been up all night. To be fair, he hadn't slept very well either. She was trying to distract herself from thinking about how the whole world had vanished, about Chuck, about everything. "Why don't we start with breakfast," he suggested. "Then we can sort everything else out. First we should eat something. One foot in front of the other, right?"
The two of them turned down the hall, stopping dead in the war room. "Dean?" Grace set her cup on one of the tables, dropping to her knees and shaking his shoulder. He was passed out on the floor, surrounded by bottles. "Dean?"
"What?" he mumbled, sitting up in pain. "Gracie, what time is it?" Relief washed over her as she realized he was alright, just pretty out of it.
"It's nearly eight in the morning," Sam answered, looking at his watch. "Have you been here all night?"
"Yeah." One look in her eyes and even in his hungover state he was able to tell that, "You didn't make it to bed either."
"I've been working." She stood, offering him her hand. "Now I'm going to make breakfast. C'mon, I'll throw some bacon on the stove for you. Eggs or pancakes?"
"Uh, guys?" Jack stepped into the room, still in his pajamas. From the dark circles under his eyes, he hadn't slept well either. "There's something out there. I sense something - a presence. Something or someone else is out there, alive."
Breakfast had to wait. They couldn't even stop to pick anything up. No fast food anymore. When they got hungry, they stopped at a gas station, Grace and Jack going to collect supplies from the convenience store. They filled a bag with snacks, taking everything in the hot case that they could carry. Thousands of cases just like that would go rotten as all of civilization stopped. Better capitalize on them now.
"We're all ready out here," Sam said, the bell over the door chiming as he walked in. "Dean found a dog. If Chuck missed her, he could've missed people too. We might not be alone."
The three of them went back out to the Impala, only to find no dog in sight. Dean simply shook his head. "He's taking them as he finds them, picking up the leftovers. Nothing we find is going to last long."
Leftovers. The word stuck in Grace's head as they drove. Eventually she and Sam swapped seats, Grace taking over navigation duties while Sam fell asleep in the back of the car. "How are you doing?" Dean asked, looking over at her as she settled in and unfolded a map. "Has it hit you yet? That the entire world fits in this car? Cuz it's pretty weird for me."
"Something you said earlier - Chuck's cleaning up the loose ends. There are a few things he missed when he took everyone, like that dog you found. What if he forgot people too? As soon as he knows we found them, they're as good as dead. And if he's watching us, he'd know right away. I don't think we should be trying to find anyone, for their own safety. We're too dangerous. We're marked."
"We can't just not help them," Dean said, turning back to the road. "There aren't a lot of people out there with the kinds of skills we've got. Odds are whoever's left won't know how to survive on their own."
Grace was quiet for a minute, watching the empty highway. "If he's vanishing things in stages, or he's watching us, what if I'm next? He wants you and Sam to rot away in pain, and… he'll take as much away from you as he can. Dean, what if I'm next? What if -"
"No." He reached out and took her hand, giving it a comforting squeeze. "He's not going to take you. He wants to punish us, but he'd have to take everything. He can't punish one of us by vanishing the other, or else he wouldn't be punishing both of us. He's going for pain now. You're not going to be next, because he wants to watch us suffer. You, me, Sam, Jack. He wants to watch us rot on an empty planet. You may not have rebelled against him like we did, but you helped us the whole time. He wants to watch you suffer too. No matter how bad that sounds, it's better than the alternative."
"We're going to figure this out. Once we have the bunker stocked up and stabilized, we can start working on a way to bring them back. Or decoding Death's book. Or something," she offered. "We've got all the time in the world."
"Let's go investigate Jack's hunch first. Then we can get to all of that."
