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It was early, full light, but not far enough into the new day for most people to have stirred themselves to venturing out of doors. The motel parking lot was quiet, populated only by a congregation of wild birds on the business of foraging while they could before the bustle of human traffic arrived to force them to the higher ground provided by trees and rain gutters.
The door to room 15 flew open with a bang. Sam burst out of the room at a run. The feathered scavengers took to the air around him in a flurry of beating wings as he plowed through their midst.
"Damn it, Sam!" Dean's voice bellowed from the room behind him. Seconds later the Elder Winchester brother was out the door, struggling to jam one arm into a twisted shirt sleeve as he gave chase. He was the more fit of the two, allowing him to chew up Sam's head start in short order. He gave up on the sleeve. The lose half of the shirt flapped behind him as he ran. Just as Sam reached the car, Dean, desperate not to let his quarry escape, judged himself near enough and launched himself forward, pouncing like a cougar.
The impact of the flying tackle slammed Sam up against the front fender, pinning him between the hard metal and his brother's onslaught. The deep grunt forced out of him evidenced that he had felt the blow, but Sam had no intention of surrendering his prize. Dean's arms flayed around Sam's torso on either side in an effort to make a grab at his heisted keys, which Sam managed to keep just out of reach due to his longer limbs.
Trying to escape, Sam hoisted himself up, hoping he could scramble across the hood and reach the driver's seat. Dean, however, hellbent on getting his key ring back, attached himself tenaciously to his fleeing brother. Arms and legs got tangled up as the battle raged across the hood of the old classic that thankfully had built tough enough to withstand the impressive combined weight of two overgrown adolescents.
"Dean, stop it!" Sam huffed, twisting around, trying to throw his brother off of him. "It's my turn." he insisted in a voice gritty from the excursion.
"Nope," Dean grunted as he tried to struggle within reach of his keys and keep Sam pinned down at the same time, "changed my mind. I can do thaaahh...fuu…!"
Sam had bucked up under Dean's weight in and effort to break free. The motion took them past the tipping point. Gravity entered as a third participant in the tussle sending them rolling together off of the hood and onto the pavement.
Dean got the worst of it, landing first. Barely a second after the world stopped spinning around him Sam's full weight dropped on his chest sending the air rushing from his lungs in a hard gasp.
Sam recovered first. He leapt to his feet. With a triumphant grin he bolted for the driver's side door. Dean scrambled up with a groan. Broken back and cracked ribs aside, he was getting his damned car keys back, if it killed the both of them. He started around the cars front end but Sam was already pulling the driver's door open, so he doubled back, heading for the passenger side.
"Sam, I'm warning you," he growled an unfinished threat as he yanked the door open and stormed into the vehicle a dangerous sort of look in his eye.
Sam didn't say anything, just flashed a "whatchya gonna do about it" expression borrowed from the days of being ordered out of his newly teen aged brother's room. Making sure to look Dean right in the eye, he slotted the key.
"Turn that key and you're a dead man," Dean warned, "I swear to god, Sam." It wasn't hard to figure out where this was heading and Dean was not playing, not with what lay in the balance.
"Sorry, big brother," Sam happily informed him, "but they're your rules. Driver picks the music." He fished into his shirt pocket for his i-pod, relieved to discover it hadn't tumbled out during the unplanned free for all. He anticipated Dean's reaction, ready to fully relish the sweet satisfaction of the moment of revenge, but oddly Dean didn't seem to have a response.
"Oh don't sulk," Sam jeered, glancing up from the device in his hand. Dean wasn't just quiet, he was still. It wasn't at all unusual for a classic rebuild or pretty girl to grab Dean's attention and make him momentarily forget about the existence of the rest of the world. Sam was long since used to it. This wasn't that though. Dean was still like someone had pressed the pause button on reality.
"Dean?" Sam spoke, voice tinged with confusion and concern, "What the hell?"
"Exactly the opposite actually," Sam jumped startled by the voice. He whipped around to discover the backseat occupied by a middle aged, middle management type.
"Who the hell are you?" Sam barked, trying to get a handle on odd turn of events, "What's going on?"
"You're a smart boy, Sam." the stranger observed, his calm demeanor setting a marked contrast to Sam's freaked out agitation, "If you think about it, I'm sure you'll find out that you already know."
The words sparked a hazy image that flashed through his mind, like a bit of a barely remembered dream, or a sudden movement on the edge of perception that left you wondering just what it was you had seen.
There'd been a kid, he remembered, right around Little John's age, but a girl.
He hadn't known where he was.
Was she lost? She'd probably been lost.
He was lost, or at very least, misplaced.
He'd been trying to help her. Disjointed tendrils slowly entwined in his head, weaving around each other and forming into a completed tapestry, a forgotten story.
He'd wanted to help, assumed her to be another victim of whoever it was that had abducted Andy and himself. He'd called out to her. She'd turned.
Her face…Sam's body jerked in involuntary spasm at the memory. It had been a horrific thing, just human enough to provide a sickening parody of humanity, with sunken eyes and twisted features. Sam closed his eyes and shook his head, reluctant to hold the image in his mind even now.
She'd rushed at him, as is for a hug, her movements jerky and unnatural, a choppy, worn piece of reel to reel footage, stepping into the real world in 3D. The pain had been overpowering, blocking out any ability to think, any awareness of a world beyond the feeling of her aberrantly long nails, talons really, slicing through the soft flesh below his ribs, carving their way to the vital parts beneath. He could actually feel each individual one as it cut its own path to his insides. Just before it all went black, there had been laughter, malicious and childlike, as she'd squeezed at his guts like clay, gleefully ripping chunks of them out.
His eyes opened, "Am I dead?" he asked. It felt strange, how casually he could say the words.
"Got it in one," the stranger confirmed.
"So this is…" he found himself unable to finish. It was too absurd, too far beyond anything he'd ever been taught to think of as normal.
"Heaven, yes," the stranger supplied, "Well, more accurately, it's your Heaven, not so much Heaven as a whole." He glanced over to where Dean still sat freeze framed, "Although, from your file, I'd have expected you'd have higher standards. But hey, we don't interfere with content as long as it doesn't violate the standard TOS. If this is how you want to spend eternity, that's entirely your own problem."
Sam struggled to get his brain to accept what was happening, "So if this is Heaven, than are you…" Again he just couldn't seem to make himself finish.
"An angel," the visitor confirmed, tired of waiting, "Name's Zachariah. You know, when I was briefed for this meeting, I got the impression that you could speak in full sentences."
Sam gaped at him. His thoughts divided themselves between struggling to grasp what was happening and wondering if there was a standard protocol for when an angel dropped in unexpected on one's personal Heaven. Was he supposed to offer a cup of coffee? A tour of the place? Sacrifice a bull maybe? He had no clue.
"Don't bother," Zachariah said, even though Sam hadn't actually voiced any of his rambling thoughts, "we're not staying. There's something you need to see."
It seemed to Sam like there should have been a flash, or a ripple or something, some Hollywood worthy special effects that heralded the use of angelic power, but there wasn't. They were just now standing in the middle of an empty street with no more fanfare than a sound of beating wings, like all the individual thumps and thrums of the flock Sam had disturbed earlier had combined together into one larger sound. He stumbled a bit, his body catching up with having gone directly from seated to standing.
Sam surveyed his new surroundings. He would have known that something wasn't right even without the boarded up windows, abandoned vehicles and loose debris littering the area. While all the set dressing for a dystopian drama was present it was something else, some distortion in the very essence of the place that no movie had ever captured that made him shudder without knowing why. It was quiet, in a way cities were never meant to be, and there was a sense of being watched by something that lurked just beyond perception, just waiting for a chance to rush up on a turned back.
"Where are we?" Sam asked once he could make words come.
"Hard to recognize, isn't it?" Zachariah observed. His mood was hard to pin down. It was either a subtle empathy for whatever tragedy had befallen this place or a disinterested indifference.
Sam scanned the crumbling husks of the surrounding buildings, a sick sort of tickle growing in the pit of his stomach as his ability to deny what he knew gradually slipped away from him. "This is Lawrence, isn't it?" he asked, already knowing the answer as he forced the words out. Saying it out loud somehow made it real.
"It was." Zachariah confirmed, his voice breathy and bored.
Sam whirled on him, "Well what happened?" he demanded, "What about my brother, my parents? Are they all right?" He stepped closer to the angel, no idea what he could possibly do, but rising emotions of fear and anger spurring him forward into some undetermined and likely ill-advised action.
Zachariah stood his ground, unconcerned about the human's threatening approach. Stymied, Sam halted his advance and swung his gaze over his surroundings, trying to get his bearings, ready to tear off in towards home just as soon as he could sort out which direction that would be.
"Calm down," Zachariah instructed, "you can't do anything. Think of this as a live video feed, non-interactive."
Sam was losing his patience with the malleable quality that his reality had taken on and the one piece at a time method with which the angel was dolling out the information. "Is this real?" he inquired, wanting real answers, "I mean, did whatever this is really happen?"
"Not yet," Zachariah admitted, "This is a live feed, but we routed it through a sort of temporal peep hole. This is what will happen if we don't stop it."
"We?" Sam asked, confused but also relieved that the angel's answers seemed to be losing some of their cryptic, minimal data spin, "you mean like, you and me, we?"
The angel seemed somewhat amused by the presumption, "No, this is a much bigger collaborative effort than that, but you're a very important cog in the machinery." Clearly he expected Sam to be impressed with that last bit.
"Me?" Sam couldn't quite get his mind to accept what he was hearing. Twenty minutes ago he'd been wrestling Dean over his right to a fair share of the driving, and now everything had followed Alice down the rabbit hole. "Why me? What can I do? I'm nobody special, just some average guy from small town, America."
Zachariah looked him in the eye. "You're wrong, Sam." he said seriously. "You are so much more. Remember this?" with a snap of the angel's fingers they were in a dark field. Through the dark Sam could make out the familiar shape of the Impala, the silhouettes of himself and Dean perched on the hood.
"People get caught up in things they can't control, in a system they don't understand. They need to be saved because they can't save themselves. I want to be the guy that can help." he heard the other him say.
"Did you mean that?" Zachariah asked, "Is that still what you want, or would you rather go back to that never ending buddy comedy that you've confused with paradice?"
"But I still don't...what can I even do?" Sam babbled. He could accept that he was dead. He could even accept that this was Heaven, complete with angels. Sam Winchester, savior of the world, um yeah, sorry, that one was going to take a little longer.
"I know your religious upbringing was pretty much non-existant thanks to your mother's paranoia, but you have heard of Michael, right?" Zachariah asked.
"The Archangel?"
Zachariah's expression looked pained, "No, the guy in the bathroom," he remarked with heavy sarcasm. "Forget it," he continued when Sam only looked perplexed, "after your time, yes the Archangel. He cast Lucifer down before and he'll do so again, but this time he can't do it without your help. You are chosen." He puncuated the declartion with a finger poke to Sam's chest.
"Chosen how? Why?" Sam wanted to know.
"Who knows," Zachariah shrugged, "God does love an underdog, and this time around turns out you're the pick of the litter. Step up, play your part, the horsemen never ride, the world keeps spinning."
"And what would my part be?" Sam challenged, "You've been pretty elusive about that so far."
Zachariah waved his hand and a sort of a doorway opened up, just existing, hanging there in nothing. Through the opening Sam could glimpse a portion of what seemed to be a high end office. "Step into my office, young Winchester," Zachariah prompted him, "and we'll begin the negotiations. I'm confident we can reach an agreement that's going to make us both very happy."
Sam hesitated, instinctively looking back over his shoulder, even though what lay behind him currently had no relation to where he'd been recently. "What about my brother?" he asked, "Does he know I'm gone, or does he just stay frozen, paused, whatever it is?"
The angel sighed, annoyed with how frustratingly slow humans could be, even the bright ones. "That wasn't your brother, Sam, "he explained, "just a manifestation of your memories of him. Your family's fine, and as long as you do your job, they'll stay that way. As for Dean, the real Dean, well let's just say that right now, he's exactly where he's supposed to be."