Seven

Other than a few unintelligent murmurs, Dean remained silent until Sam reached the motel parking lot. Wheezing through cracked and stinging lips, Sam moved in slow, plodding steps, concentrating only on moving one foot in front of the other, lest he too, faint with Dean in his arms. When Sam passed from the sandy desert plain to the gravel-speckled motel lot, his back muscles were curling inward, causing him to hunch forward over his brother's prone body. His shirt was clinging to his wet body, and his muscles trembled with fatigue, but he refused to release Dean until they were safe.

Sam staggered up to his motel room, and the motel owner, who had been sweeping sand off the porches, looked up in horror, mouth gaping open. He immediately dropped his broom with a sharp clatter on the wooden planks and hurried over, his gnarled hand flipping through the assortment of keys he pulled from his pocket. If the blood pounding through Sam's head had not been so loud, he would have heard the short prayer the man uttered, and then his words of, "Not again."

Instead, Sam said nothing while the older man unlocked the room door to allow him to enter and lay Dean on one of the beds. Sam went back to the Impala, parked outside the building, and produced one of their duffel bags holding a first aid kit. He moved past the motel owner, who stood silent witness in the doorway and watched as Sam began to clean the dried blood off Dean's skin. With every smear of blood that was removed, a new bruise emerged that only increased Sam's rising worry and fright. There was a dark blush following the line of Dean's cheekbone, one of his eyes was swollen shut in a macabre tinge of purple and black, and an assortment of other bruises were dotted across his body.

It was vital, too, that the holes in Dean's chest were cleaned and disinfected as soon as possible before they became infected. Sam managed to splash an antibacterial liquid onto a thick wad of gauze and wipe it on the weeping wounds, but when he went to get the crude needle and thread, his hands shook so badly that he was unable to put the thread through the eye of the needle.

"Let me do that."

Sam looked behind him to see the motel owner, a short, stocky man with neatly clipped gray hair shuffling forward on stiff joints. He handed Sam a perspiring bottle of water and sat down on the other side of Dean's body, across from Sam. "You just relax and drink that. Don't pass out on me, all right? I can handle him, but two of you gone? I'm no miracle worker."

"I can—" Sam began in protest.

"You're barely there yourself," the man argued, making a motion to Sam's quaking body. "I don't think your brother would want you sticking needles in his chest when you're shakin' worse than grass in the wind. He's lost enough blood. Won't do 'im any good to puncture an artery, huh?" Before Sam could continue with objections, the owner took the needle and thread from him, wiped at Dean's oozing sores with a bottle of rubbing alcohol and began to stitch the flayed skin together. The side of Dean's face that was not gruesomely bruised twitched, only a light ripple of movement beneath his skin, but he remained silent.

"How did you…" Sam began, but his question died on his lips. Although he remained positioned next to Dean to clearly see what the motel owner was doing, he drank the cold water greedily, unable to fight off his primal need of thirst, allowing the liquid to dribble over his parched lips and drip off the end of his chin. He wiped his mouth off with the back of his hand, prepared to repeat his words, when his answer came before he could speak again.

"Fought in two wars. I've done enough quick first aid in my time. Besides," the motel owner continued, as he dipped the needle beneath the jagged skin again, "this one's a bit personal for me."

"What do you mean?"

The man looked up at him from underneath hooded and heavy eyes, and the needle froze in the air above Dean's gently rising chest, pointing with a silver tipped omen of the past. After a moment, the needle looped down again, and the man said, "I know what did this to your brother."

Sam squeezed Dean's shoulder and waited cautiously.

"I don't know the name for them, no, I don't, but I know that they're a nasty bunch. Reptiles, big ones at that. And they came for your brother in the middle of the night, and that story you were tellin' the police about robbers or whatever? I know it's as much hogwash as you do. Am I correct?"

When Sam nodded in reply, he realized that his lips were frozen and tongue too thick to speak.

"That's what I thought. Now, I'm goin' to finish stitching up your brother here if you want to go into the bathroom and get me some more washcloths, you can get the rest of that blood off 'im before it dries. After he's cleaned up and restin', what do you say that the two of us have a talk?"

"I won't leave. We'll have to talk here. I'm not going to leave him."

The motel owner nodded in response, biting his peeling lower lip before he answered, "All right. I can work with that." He rose to his feet and moved towards the doorway. "I'll be back in just a moment."

Though hesitant to leave Dean's side even for a moment, Sam got the washcloths and ran them under warm water before bringing them out to Dean and wiping away the remainder of the blood. Although Dean's wounds were disinfected with rubbing alcohol and stitched together to form a crude pattern of twisted black thread against his smooth skin, Sam still fretted. He cut off Dean's bloody shirt and threw it away, before covering his older brother in a thin motel sheet. Gently, he propped Dean against an array of blue-flowered dotted pillows. Sam sat at the foot of Dean's mattress, and the motel owner positioned himself across from him on the other bed that Sam would later claim as his for the evening.

During the time that Sam was finishing Dean's care, the owner had left and returned with a bottle of tequila and two plastic cups. "Don't know if you're a drinkin' man, but after seeing this all again, I could use some. You want a cup?"

Sam nodded weakly and accepted the drink, trying to remember the last time he had used alcohol to ease away his pain. Yet, when he was handed the half full cup, he drank the contents in one carelessly smooth motion in defiance of his overwhelming emotions that gnawed on his nerves and brain. He twisted his face when the cool liquid turned hot down the back of his throat.

The motel owner pursed his cracking lips and crinkled his tanned forehead in worry before he spoke. "Let me make something clear: Your brother isn't the first one they've gotten. He's just the first one that's survived. You have to remember that. No one else has ever lived."

"What do you mean?"

"I've been 'ere all my life." The old man looked down into the bottom of his cup, searching for the strength to continue in the warm alcohol. "And these sort of…things…they come and they go. Nobody really talks 'bout it, though, 'cause nobody wants to admit to it. You see? If they don't talk about it, it don't really make it real for them. But, you know, they all know what it is. This is the first time, though, that this has happened in over a decade. I really thought it was over, but I guess I was mistaken.

"There have, over the years, been children found in the desert with wounds exactly like your brother's. The same, deep puncture wounds on the same side of the chest and the tearin' around the heart, as if the creatures that did this to them were tryin' to get to that organ itself. But, they've all been dead by the time they were found. Your brother, like I said, is the only one I've ever seen alive."

"How long has this been going on?"

He shrugged, a careless gesture resulting from the desensitization that years of pain brought. "It's always been there. I can't think of when it started, really. I get down on my knees and pray to God every morning. Do I know when I started doin' that? No sir, and I don't know how long God's been there listenin' to me. Just like with these things. They've always been there. Like the desert. Just watchin'."

"How do I stop them? There must be a way to stop them."

The owner gave a shifting glance through his eyes, surrounded by wrinkles and worry. "You must be more than one kind of crazy, because you don't stop them. You just scare them off long enough to survive to the next day."

When Sam opened his mouth to speak again, the other man stopped him. "Let me tell you a story, 'kay? 'Bout twenty, twenty-five years ago, I was married to a wonderful woman. She had a daughter from 'nother marriage, and I loved them both so much. The daughter could 'ave been mine, I loved 'er so much. We lived not too far from here, all three of us together.

"One night, late, there's screaming comin' from our daughter's room. We, my wife and me, get there in time to see the girl gettin' carried out the window by something we can't see. By the time we get to the window, she's gone and whatever the hell took 'er's gone as well.

"So, we send the p'lice out after her. We've got them lookin' for…" The old man waved his callused hand in a bored fashion. "Days? Weeks? I don't remember. Long time, though. Police say we can keep searching, but it was pretty hopeless for ev'rybody. My wife didn't talk to me much, just looked out the window lot, talkin' to 'er daughter that wasn't there anymore. Now, I loved that little girl, and I searched every inch of the desert for 'er that I could get to, but I didn't know what else to do.

"Well, long after the girl disappeared, something attacks my wife in the middle of the night just like your brother was 'ttacked. My wife is screaming from our bedroom—I was asleep on the couch, fell 'sleep with the newspaper in my lap. I grab my shotgun and run into the bedroom. Shot at whatever the 'ell it was and scared it off. My wife had some scratches, bleedin' pretty bad, but not death like or nothin'.

"The next day—I'll never forget this as long as I live—I went out for my usual walk in the desert and found the girl, our daughter in the sand. Her chest was ripped open like your brother's here, all a mess. Bitten up by those monsters like your brother, but she didn't have any pulse or nothin'. She was dead."

The motel owner sighed, wiping a hand across his bristled face, and he glanced from Dean's damaged body to the bottle of tequila he had placed on the floor. Yet, Sam could see in his eyes that he was standing over his step-daughter's dead body again even if he was sitting in a room twenty years past. In a shaking voice, the old man continued, "So I carried 'er back. Laid 'er on the bed and wrapped 'er up all nice. But, I had to break the news to my wife." He paused, and Sam didn't ask him to clarify what reaction his wife must have had to the news of her only child's death. "She committed suicide two days after the official funeral was held. Slit 'er wrists in the bathtub and wrote a note that said, 'Baby, I'm sorry' to 'er daughter and another to me that asked to be buried with 'er girl."

An awkward silence fell over the room, and Sam looked into his cup where a bead of the tequila curled around the bottom edge. He suddenly felt guilty for Dean's life where so many others had fallen. "I'm sorry," he finally said. "I know what it's like to lose somebody you care about."

The motel owner nodded in a jerky motion, as if he was agreeing with Sam's response instead of accepting his offer of sympathy.

"I have to stop them, though," Sam continued. "I won't let anymore people be killed like this. It's not right. I can't believe people have let it go on."

"Boy, I don't know much, but I know one thing: Let it go. Let us be. You can stay long as you like, but leave and don't look back. It's not any different than dealin' with half the shit other people do. We just pray for it not to happen, and when it does, we pray and cry a little bit harder. That's all."

"But, you're talking about something that hunts humans—"

"I know what we're talking about. I know that these monsters are of superior intelligence than any other animal. I know, I know. We're not people to them…we're…"

"Prey."

"Yes."

When another long pause fell over the room, the old man rose to his feet, joints popping in his knees when he stood, and he moved towards the opened door leading out to the desert. His form cast a long shadow across the room, and the top of his shadowed head touched Sam's feet. The man had said all that he needed to, had provided all the warnings, and he could speak no longer without the burning pain unfurling in his heart.

Sam looked down at his hands, dry, callused fingers interlocked and dangling loosely between his knees, before he lifted his head and spoke. "Do you think he'll live?"

Dean had not moved on the bed, and even though there was a shallow lift of his chest to prove that he breathed at all, his skin was still ghastly pale and lips tinged blue. With the black stitching running across his torso and white bandages dotting his skin, he resembled a corpse more than a living body.

Sam wondered if he would live through the night.

At the doorway, the motel owner turned upon hearing Sam's question and looked over his shoulder, with thick, gray eyebrows raised in questioning. "What was that?" he asked.

"Do you think he'll live?" Sam repeated, attempting to control the crack of fear for his brother's death out of his voice.

"Do you want him to?"

Sam looked confused that the man would be asking such a question, and he shook his head, batting away hot tears in the corners of his eyes. Dean's life wavered so dangerously intimate with death. "Of course. More than anything."

"Then he will."