IV.
The highway is eerily quiet when the foursome hit the road. Although it is pitch black out, it's still technically late afternoon and the roads are typically busier. Jack and Eddie chatter in the rear seat, getting acquainted with each other. They're pretty content to find out they're cousins, more or less.
Dean glances in rearview and smiles. He's happy the kid found someone to relate to, but the smile fades quickly. Echoing from the back of Dean's mind, he remembers Jack is his mother's killer. Dean isn't ready to forgive that yet. Hell, he's not even sure that he can.
If Sam is feeling the same way, Dean can't tell. Sam's face is blank, keeping his eyes on the road ahead. Busying himself, Sam points out obstacles while the wonder twins in the back take turns using their powers to brush the occasional zombie out of the impala's way.
"...I think your heads are cool. I dunno why Cass thinks they're ugly." Jack flings away a recently dead person. It's hard to tell if they died before or after the current apocalypse started.
"It's not his fault, really." Eddie shrugs. "Angels have been programmed to be demon's exact opposite for eons. So for Cass to find an archangel's bastard, which is sin in and of itself, and for that offspring to carry a wild demon streak… I'm actually just happy his head didn't explode." She chuckles.
"But Cass loves me even though I'm Lucifer's son. Isn't that just as bad, if not worse?" Jack looks perplexed.
"Yeah, but Cass has loved you since before you were born. I'm nobody to him." Eddie pulls back one corner of her mouth derisively.
Desiccated cadavers dressed as mid-1800's pioneers shamble across the road. Eddie moves these dead, but they easily crumble into a dusty pile of body parts.
"Think they died of dysentery or trying to ford their wagon across the river?" Dean chuckles at himself.
"I don't get it." Jack scrunches up his nose, confusion spreading on his face.
"It's from a game called Oregon Tr--you know what? Nevermind. It's not funny if I have to explain the joke." Dean sighs.
"I'm guessing they were attacked by Pawnee natives." Sam says bluntly.
"What's that mean?" Jack is once again puzzled.
"He means, the settlers Eddie just dusted were probably running away from those guys!" Dean points at a tribe of several hundred deceased natives entering the reach of the headlights. The Pawnee's whooping war cries only intensify the spookiness of their skeletons dressed in rotting buckskin as they wave primitive weapons in the air.
"Oh snap!" Eddie throws a protective force field around the impala seconds before they're all struck by a volley of arrows.
"Great job, Eddie!" Dean yells, driving aggressively through the field of bodies. "Keep it up!" He cheers, as the zombies bounce harmlessly off Eddie's shield.
"Easy for you to say! I'm not a snow plow, Dean!" The strain evident on Eddie's face. "The main reason I rode is because I'm running low on juice, remember?!"
An idea sparks on Jack's face. Slapping Eddie on the shoulder, he zings a bolt of energy into her frame.
"HOLY SH--!!!!" Eddie yells. Her force field expands into a bomb, disintegrating all the living dead in the close proximity.
Blinded by the flash, Dean nails the brakes sending the impala to a screeching stop. Eddie quickly scrambles out of the car then paces behind the tail lights, hands on her hips. Jack follows her.
"Dude! You gotta warn me before you try something like that!" Eddie shouts at Jack.
"I'm sorry! I thought I could help!" Jack says sheepishly.
"It's fine, really." Eddie softens, regretting her initial harshness. "I just wasn't expecting it, but it really did help."
Sam and Dean amble out of the impala after them.
"Are you alright, Eddie?" Sam asks sincerely.
"Yeah, I'm great! Actually, I could probably use a cigarette after that!" Eddie suggestively waggles her brows and laughs.
"What's that mean?" Jack asks, tilting his head with a curious frown.
"Tell you later, kid!" Dean chuckles, almost patting Jack on the shoulder until an afterthought makes him refrain.
"We still gotta catch up to Cass, remember?" Dean says holding up his phone with the GPS still pulled up. Glancing at the screen again, Dean looks surprised. "Oh, we're already here!"
They stand quietly, listening for the alleged ruckus Cass brought them to. Initially, only the impala's rumbling engine fills the air but they soon discern faint screams a few hundred yards ahead. Dean and Sam rush to get back in their seats when they're all suddenly transported to the war zone. The Winchesters grab at their stomachs, a bit queasy.
"It was faster just to bring us all here." Jack shrugs shamelessly.
"But all the weapons were in the impala!" Dean growls.
"Oh, you're right." Jack blinks, and the impala appears on top a bush.
"Work on your parking, will ya!" Dean gripes, running to open the trunk. "I'm sorry Baby, he doesn't know what he's doing…" Dean tells the impala before putting a bandolero over his head and grabbing a shotgun.
Sam smirks. "Really, Dean? A bandolero?"
"Hey man, it's armageddon and if it's my time, I'm going out like Butch Cassidy!" Dean smiles and cocks the weapon.
"Fair enough!" Sam says, then straps on pistol belt with a pair of holsters. The belt itself, loaded with a row of ammunition.
"And you made fun of my bandolero!" Dean teases before turning to run headlong into the fray.
The zombies are swarming the civilians, but the townies are doing a great job of beating back the dead. Most of their weapons are improvised but one stetson wearing, heavyset, longhaired, knucklehead in the middle of the melee yells "I'M RICK GRIMES, BITCH!" Before firing his handgun at the mob of corpses.
Sam smiles and looks at Dean. Dean shakes his head and says, "God bless you, rednecks."
It's a flurry of projectiles, blunt force weapons flailing through the air, and people yelling. At one point, Dean and Sam are back to back, firing headshots square into their targets. Cass uses his angel blade to methodically stab foes.
"Thanks for joining!" Cass calls to his friends over the din.
"Wouldn't miss it!" Sam calls back.
The fighting surrounds the men, so it's easy to stay by the impala and switch out spent weapons. After his pistols are exhausted, Sam switches to a rifle with a bayonet. In close range combat, Sam uses both the rifle butt and the bayonet to destroy the walking corpses while still taking shots at mid range targets. Dean switches to a baseball bat, then a machete, and finally a 9mm handgun when his muscles get fatigued from swinging weapons.
Jack thrashes the zombies with an axe, only disarming or crippling them at first. Their relentlessness surprises him. A civilian sees Jack's struggle and yells, "You gotta aim for the head!!"
With doomsday happening around them, there's no point in disguising powers now. Dropping the axe, Jack merrily uses a variety of telekinetic power moves to destroy brains, behead, or otherwise disable the horde. Eddie is content to point her thumbs and index fingers into psychic finger guns and yell "pew-pew!" to fire at the undead masses. Jack pauses in the middle of the fracas to admire his family, both old and new found. Despite the circumstances he's more than happy to be here, killing monsters, saving people; the family business.
"WATCH OUT MY DUDE!" Eddie pulls Jack towards her, then fires her finger guns at three deaders who almost caught Jack from behind.
"Thanks!" Jack says. He wasn't really worried, but it's nice she cares.
"Anytime, fam." Eddie winks at him, getting right back into the fight without missing a beat.
After several more hard fought moments, the living triumph over the dead but the victory is tense. The normies approach cautiously; they could get behind a couple of heavily armed Kansas boys joining the fight, or even the businessman who appeared out of nowhere to stab zombies with a giant silver knife. But a girl using finger guns and a boy with jedi-esque force powers is too much for their minds to handle.
"KILL ALL THE MONSTERS!!!" The overweight, mullet having, Rick Grimes wannabe hollers, stirring the crowd to turn on the pair of archangel offspring. Dean, Sam, and Cass quickly step into the middle.
"Hey, hey, HEY!! Everybody needs to calm down!!!" Sam yells to the horde, spreading his arms to hold them back.
"We can't stop until we've eliminated all threats!" The ring leader cries again. He cocks his gun and takes a step closer.
Dean shoots the stetson off the man's head. Now everyone can see the hat was hiding a bare scalp surrounded by a horseshoe of hair. Apparently the wannabe was overcompensating for his hairlessness up top by growing the length out back.
"Look here, fat, bald, Billy Ray Cyrus!" Dean calls out sharply, a wisp of smoke lingering at the tip of his gun barrel. "Firstly, I didn't have to miss, I chose to. Secondly, the dead are LITERALLY walking right now! And for some reason you've got a problem with who's saving your 'nightmare in the front, hell in the back' haircut having ass?!"
Some of the survivors giggle until fat Billy Ray shoots a stern look to silence them.
"Well, how do we know they don't wanna kill us?" He asks while taking his stetson back from a cronie who fetched it. Straightening the cowboy hat back on his head, everyone can see through the bullet hole how close Dean was to cracking the mullet.
"Because if they wanted to kill you, you would already be dead!" Sam steps up to the mullet man now, easily a whole head taller. The mullet gets intimidated and backs down.
"Whatever. You're just wasting our time." Mullet man scoffs before calling over his shoulder to his group. "Let's move on! I'm sure there's more people who need saving from the deadheads!"
"It would behoove you to read the book of revelations!" Cass addresses the rabble. A few of them pause to consider his words. Cass continues, "The darkness, quakes, and rising dead were only the beginning. Floods are next!"
"Yeah, yeah! Quit trying to scare us!" The mullet waves off the solid advice but one of his compatriots hisses.
"What if he's right though? Nothing about today ever seemed possible, but here we are!"
"Don't worry about it! If it does come to pass, you and I both have glitter finish Bass Trackers we can hop into if need be." The mullet says reassuringly, departing his group.
"This is not a threat, it's a warning!" Cass calls fleetingly to them. "The dead will cease to walk but that only means the next stage is coming!" But his words fall on deaf ears.
"Wow." Sam shakes his head in disbelief.
"Well, you can't fix stupid!" Dean mutters while tossing his weapons back into the trunk of the impala. Used bullet casings crunch under Dean's feet. He's surprised by how much ammo they burned through.
"Hey kid, you gonna get Baby off this bush or what?" Dean asks Jack.
"Oh! Right, yes!" Jack bats an eye and repositions the impala onto flat ground. He also may or may not have waxed her and shampooed the interior, all to regain Dean's favor.
Jack may be naive, but he's not insensitive. He knows he's hurt Dean the most, so now Jack will do almost anything to make things better between them.
Entering the driver's seat, Dean raises an eyebrow, presses his lips together, glances around and takes a small sniff. After a thoughtful pause, he makes the tiniest nod of approval. Jack will take whatever he can get as he climbs in the impala with Sam.
Sam turns around to look in the back. "Is Cass coming or not?"
Eddie had almost stepped in but stops to look around. She spies Cass walking amongst the bodies, checking to make sure they're all dead.
"You know what? Let me go squash this. Wait for me, please." She says, closing the door then walking out to Cass.
Cass has his back to Eddie, and turns only his head over his shoulder to ask her, "Do you know the pizza man?"
Eddie is confused. "What the hell are you talking about?!"
"Nevermind." Cass grumbles, returning his focus to the bodies on the ground.
Eddie reaches out to stop him. "Hold up. I want to know why you have such a problem with me. Or at the very least, put whatever this is behind us so we can work on the bigger picture here."
Cass sighs and turns around. "It's your aura."
Eddie snorts. "Well, sorry buddy! I can't do anything to change it!"
"No, it's that…" Cass looks around to find the right words to explain. "It's the way your aura upsets me."
Eddie juts her head forward with a tilt and raises a brow. "Sorry, I guess? I still can't do anything about it."
"Listen. It's not you personally. The way your energy grates against mine... Just reminds me of someone else. Someone I lost." Cass meets Eddie's eyes, searching for understanding.
"Oh." Eddie says calmly, not getting it. "OOHHH" She says again when it hits her.
"I'm sorry for your loss. I feel that, I really do. But I, more importantly, we--" She gestures at everyone in the impala. "--all need you to stop holding it against me that I'm not somebody else!"
"You're right." Cass admits. "I apologize. My past feelings shouldn't have any bearing against you. And I shouldn't let how I feel, interfere with the task at hand."
"Awesome." Eddie is relieved. "So are you gonna ride back with us or just flap on over?"
"I'll fly back. Give myself a moment to clear my head before we regroup." Cass takes off without waiting for acknowledgment from Eddie.
Eddie returns to the impala and slides in next to Jack. The engine had already been idling, but now Dean puts her in drive to head back for the bunker.
"Got everything settled?" Sam asks.
"I hope so. Apparently he had his feathers in a twist because I didn't know the 'pizza man' and he said he'd have to get over it." Eddie shrugs.
Sam and Dean swap glances at each other. It's been a long while since Cass brought up the pizza man. While it was a funny memory, now they're really stymied as what that has to do with Cass being so annoyed with Eddie. Dean raises both brows in a question and Sam shrugs his shoulders in a silent response.
Back at the bunker, three mystery vehicles await the Winchesters. A grumpy old man steps out first.
"Took you idgits long enough to get back here." Bobby grumbles while moving stiffly.
"Hey there, bitches!" Charlie smirks, exiting the second vehicle.
"Well now that we're all here, why don't we go inside and I'll put on some tea?" A crisp Scottish womans voice asks as Rowena steps from the passenger side of Charlie's vehicle.
"A cuppa with this motley crew of misfits and scoundrels?" Ketch's English accent joins the group as he chuckles and exits the last vehicle. "That would be fantastic."