(Dean Winchester)
Oh, man, I'm suffering from hellhound remorse. Not because I called 'em but because now I'm payin' the price. How can something so awesomely awesome be so painful? Oh yeah, because it's evil. My scars feel like they're being done over, this time with a red hot fireplace poker and I'm brought to my knees pulling Sam down with me and I grind out a pain filled curse. Sam tries to tell me to leave him, to save myself, but as I look around I know that it not an option. I curse again because the crowd is getting bigger and closer and if they had hay rakes, lederhosen and torches it'd be just like in the movie Frankenstein.
"Come on Sammy!" I shout and pull him up by his arm just in time to see a truck barreling down the street towards us. Great, I think, a demon hit and run but the truck slides to a stop and Santiago jumps out. He pushes me and Sammy around to the passenger side and shoves us into the cab and we're out of Armadillo Infantes like a bat outta hell, Iago's tow, a battered 1949 Mercury, swinging back and forth wildly on the hook in back.
Sam keeps his face turned toward me and Santiago seems to have no desire to look at either of us. I start to thank him but he stops me. He says he doesn't know if what he's doing is right; only that he feels compelled to do it.
An hour later Santiago's tow truck labors mightily as he drives up one of the drainage ditches that pass for roads in the mountains and, coming up over a rise, I can see a small, run down cabin tucked into the mountainside, fairly well protected on three of its four sides by solid rock. It's a hunting cabin and has been used as a hideout for bandits for years and I can picture the bad guys riding in on horses, fresh from robbing a bank. Iago tells me that it's used by drug smugglers now and that, because his cousins are all pretty much locked up in jail for the time being, we should be okay here until he comes back with food and news.
Promising to come back as soon he can, Sam and I stand in front of the cabin. I watch as the truck heads back down the ditch and marvel that the Merc's still attached then lead Sam, who's doing a pretty good impression of a zombie, inside. As far as hovels go, this one is pretty small, filthy and infested so the vermin we bring in with us should feel right at home.
At least its got a hand pump that still works so we have water and there's kerosene for the two glass lamps on the fireplace mantel and lye soap. If I were McGuyver I could probably make a bomb but, in the meantime, we'll starve to death because the cupboards are bare. No food, not even a finger bone for a hellhound. I do find a fairly new first aid kit and instructions in Spanish for treating a bullet wound.
I'm feeling better. My pain is all but gone but I can see that Sam's miserable and hasn't said a word since leaving town. I sit him down in a rickety old chair while I check out the old cast iron wood burning cook stove. I can see that its been turned into a roach/rodent motel but the little buggers will scurry away as soon as I find enough wood to fire it up.
Searching around outside in the fading light I find a store of wood between the side of the cabin and the mountain and soon water's heating for the tin bathtub that's been stored in the rafters since Moses was a baby. But first things first. I drag the small table across the room and park it next to Sammy then grab an old metal bowl and the kerosene. I know I have to tackle the fly blown holes in his face, clean them out and bandage him up until we can get to a proper hospital or to Castiel and I tell him what I'm gonna do and he wants to know why bother because I'm gonna help him die, right?
"A deal's a deal," I say but for now I tell him to just sit still and, if it's any consolation, this is gonna hurt the maggots more than him but it's still gonna hurt like a bitch. I pour some of the kerosene into the bowl and pull what the box says is a nasal aspirator from the first aid kit. It's a rubber bulb thingy and it sucks up the kerosene from the bowl. Holding Sam's head at an angle, I shoot the stuff into his eye sockets and he screams bloody murder.
Now maggots score pretty high on my gross-o-meter but these little squishies did a hell of a job cleaning out Sam's sockets and preventing any infection and I salute them as they float around in the bowl, then pitch the whole mess out the door. Sam's shaking and sweat's pouring down is face and he's a mess and I tell him that before I can kill him, he needs a bath and some rest and my plan is, once I get him laid out on one of the cots, I'm gonna tell him a bedtime story about the angel who's gonna restore his eyesight...or else.
Once he's in the tub, and I'm washing my brother's disgusting hair, I flash back to when we were kids and tell him, "You know, I used to do this for you when you were a baby," and he smiles but it's one of those tight little smiles you get when you tell someone, who's a million miles away, something that means absolutely nothing in their grand scheme of things. "You used to get wicked cradle crap," I finish and he laughs, a real laugh that's been stuffed so far down inside of him for so long that it probably hurt coming out. Things haven't been funny in a really long time.
"That's cap," he tells me and relaxes a little more as I scrub away the filth and it's all true. I used to stand on a chair and bathe the goob in the sink, scrubbing his little noggin with Johnson's No More Tears while he splashed water everywhere and I wonder, as they roll down my cheeks, if he can hear my tears dropping into the water?