AND FEBRUARY WAS SO LONG

Chapter Eight

"They froze up so quickly, the keys and their owner."
-Dar Williams, "February"

It's a normal-enough motel. One of the cheap kind you find a dime a dozen, just off the exit ramps of Interstates. This one has a distinctively southern feel to it: a handful of rusty pick-ups parked outside the rooms, filthy work boots discarded on doorsteps. A couple of the doors are open, lazily, with the sounds of TV and conversation and boisterous laughter spilling out, so it must be summer. This must be one of those motels where people stay longer than a night or two. It's just as run-down as its single-night-stay counterparts, but it feels a little more solid, a little more homey. Like the waitress at the diner across the street probably knows everybody's first names and how they take their coffee.

A lot of the rooms, though, are closed, and locked, curtains drawn over their windows.

Sam has a key.

It's attached to a ridiculous plastic tag that identifies it as belonging to the Winchester Motel, which is freaky but might just be a coincidence. There are a couple of Winchester Motels and Winchester Motor Lodges scattered here and there across the country. Sam remembers staying at the Winchester Inn and laughing with Dean about their reputations preceding them.

But Dean isn't here.

And the key is heavy, like iron instead of the cheap nickel-plated kind you'd get at the hardware store. It feels important. Too important to just be a coincidence. The name on the tag dangling from the key – Sam knows it's talking about him and his family.

He's supposed to open one of the rooms.

He starts on the ground floor, a Winchester favorite, for quick getaways. A few of the doors are open, but as he passes them, the people inside grow quiet, and although he trains his eyes straight ahead, he can feel them looking at him. Staring.

He chances a glance into one room and recognizes the people he sees. They died on a hunt last summer. Campers in the forest, killed by a werewolf. He swallows hard and walks a little faster, bare feet slipping on worn-smooth concrete.

The door at the end of the row is closed and locked, and there is no light on beyond the window. As he approaches, he hears somebody screaming inside, and he shivers, but forces himself to place the key in the lock anyhow. It was sunny only a moment ago, but now the clouds have rolled in, and he feels like it's going to be dark very soon.

He twists the key, but meets resistance. The room won't open. There is still somebody screaming, but he scampers away, toward the next door. He wants to stop and save somebody, but Dean's not here to tell him what he should do, and Dad's not here to kick the door down, and he doesn't know how to save anybody with only his own two hands, empty but for this key.

This is what helpless feels like.

Sam tries door after door, listening first, and hearing something different in every room. Banging and crashing in one. The worst kind of laughter in another. His key doesn't open any of these doors, and he doesn't dare knock. When he finds the right door, it will open. This much he knows, even while the dread in his stomach convinces him that he doesn't know very much, that he should run away and hide.

He can't hide. This is his job. He has to be the one to open the door.

Sam climbs to the second floor, a Winchester favorite, for limited access from the outside. Again, a few of the doors are open, and the people inside – all familiar – all dead – fall silent with his passing. Outside, the darkness is almost complete, and although not an hour ago it was summer, a sluggish snow has begun to fall, flakes small, too cold to stick. His feet on the concrete are freezing and he wishes for shoes. He wishes for a lot of things.

From behind the first locked door Sam reaches, he hears growling. The second, gunfire. He does not want to enter any of these rooms, and although it makes him feel like a coward, he is glad when the doors don't open on these sounds. He wants to be brave, to be strong, like his brother and his father. But his cold feet move slower with every step. He is scared. He is a kid. He doesn't want any of these awful doors to open.

Finally, there is only one door left. Sam knows he should hurry, but he can't seem to make himself move any faster. In his wake, all the rooms are cold and quiet. The snow is falling thicker. There is no trace now of the sun.

With a shaking hand, Sam guides the heavy iron key toward the lock. He listens, but there is no sound inside the room. He twists the knob, knowing the door is going to open. It swings inward with a slow sigh, letting the snow onto the carpet.

Sam steps across the threshold. It's so dark inside the room, he doesn't know what to make of it. He expected to be attacked the moment the door opened, but nothing is happening. The TV is on, but it doesn't look right. It's too close to the beds, just a little out of place. He doesn't think a standard power cord should be able to reach the wall socket from there, but on the TV, a man is out in the woods, in blaze orange and camo, leaning low over a rifle. As Sam watches, the man turns and looks directly at the camera. The screen casts a dim blue light across the empty beds.

The beds! Sam's eyes are drawn to them. They're neatly made. They have not been slept in. As he starts to shake, Sam realizes he recognizes the duffels left out on the beds. They belong to his dad and his brother. His dad and his brother were here!

But they're not, now. He's too late. He's moved too slowly.

In the time it takes Sam to panic – and at this point, that isn't very long – he hears a familiar car's engine outside. The Impala! Maybe he can catch up to his family after all. Sam whirls and darts out onto the snow-covered walkway, ready to run down to the parking lot –

– and his eyes fall on the taillights shrinking down the road, casting red light in their wake. In their garish glow, he can see two dead bodies discarded on the snow.

Familiar bodies.

Sam starts to shake. Grief grips him, twists his stomach and his heart in two clenched fists. He hears a scream tear from his throat – disbelief, anger, denial. Despair. He runs toward the stairs, slipping and sliding, bare feet lacking purchase. He grabs the handrail and lets his feet skid down two or three steps at a time, only his hands and his abdominal muscles keeping him upright.

At the foot of the stairs, Sam flings himself toward the last place he saw his family, lying dead on the parking lot –

When, BAM! Like somebody has flipped a switch, Sam is standing in a sunny, hot parking lot – no bodies, dead or otherwise, anywhere to be seen. He spins to look back at the motel and sees that the doors have restored themselves to their original settings. Some open, some closed. People laughing and relaxing inside.

Sam gulps and lets his gaze travel back up the stairs and down the row, to the final door, the one that should have housed his family, if he hadn't let them die. When he finds the door, it's standing open. There's a child framed in it, a little girl, maybe seven. She's got long brown hair and freckles. She doesn't look like she belongs. Despite the distance, she locks eyes with Sam and shakes her head.

Then she slams the door and Sam wakes up.

Light.

Sam has to get out of the dark right now. He needs light. He needs safe. He needs warm.

He cannot leave his brother alone. This much he knows.

Dean's still asleep, arms locked around Sam like the safety bar on a carnival ride. Sam shrugs and wriggles until he's free of his brother's grip, then pokes Dean in the shoulder. Once, twice, with no reaction.

"Dean!"

He can hear an odd sound that turns out to be his own breaths, wheezing in terror, high and strange. He can feel each quick beat of his heart, can feel tremors racing through his limbs. His eyes water. He tastes the tang of fear, feels its numbing effect on his body. He is more frightened than is warranted, even by his nightmare.

He grabs two handfuls of Dean's shirt, shakes. "Dean! Wake up!"

Sam looks over his shoulder at the door. At the light beneath it. He can see it out there, the light, the safety. He can see how easy it would be to leave his brother asleep, to run into the light right now with nobody trying to stop him –

But in his head he hears the whisper of the motel door in his dream, opening on an empty room. He shivers. Wipes impatiently at tears that have shaken loose with all his shivering.

"Dean … Please …"

Dean makes a small noise, and Sam falls on him, shaking, nudging, slapping. "Wake up, wake up!" He's terrified. He doesn't know if Dean's just asleep, or if something's wrong, and he is still cloaked thickly in terror from the dream. He needs to be someplace light right now, but he cannot leave Dean alone and unprotected.

Just when Sam's about to start crying for real, the door to the shed bangs open behind him.

"Sammy! Shit fire, we thought you was gone!"

Sam spins to face a dim and flickering flashlight, and a man in a ball cap silhouetted against the fog. Beside him looms another shadow. Tall and strong. Dad! Bobby!

Now Dean isn't alone!

Without sparing so much as a word for the grown-ups, Sam darts between them. Dean is safe now. Dean has been found.

At last, Sam is free to escape into the beautiful rainbows of light that are singing safety from the fog.

To be continued ...