Sam woke up with sand in his mouth. He was fairly certain he hadn't put it there himself.
For a muddled moment, he thought maybe he was so dehydrated, so wicked thirsty, his spit had dried up and turned to grit. But that was stupid, wasn't it? He couldn't be sure; his brain wasn't firing on all cylinders. It hurt like hell just to think, and Sam knew Hell.
There was a buzzing by his left ear, and under his nose was the pungent smell of fruit that'd been left out in the sun too long. Apples. Nope, peaches. Sam distantly recollected picking peaches, putting them in a pillowcase until it drooped heavy and strained at the seams. His mouth would have watered if it could've worked up the moisture. Wasn't that last week? No, had to be today; he could still smell the peaches. Close by. And there was the buzzing again, the tickle of flies at his face, attracted by the stink of spoiling fruit.
Sam cracked his eyes open. The sun hovered fat, hot and low on the horizon. Setting, not rising, he suspected. The light was too golden. Morning light was cool; dusk was red and yellow and violet, turning to Prussian blue. The color of bruises. Sam knew bruises, too. He could feel a particularly spectacular one pulsing at his temple.
He dragged his knuckles through the dirt and tried to push up. The other arm wasn't cooperating because he'd been lying on it and the limb had fallen asleep. Now it was beginning to burn with pins and needles. His skin burned, too. Somewhere along the line he'd lost his shirt and when his shoulder blades compressed, when he moved to stand, the flesh pinched tight and raw, making him hiss. To add insult to injury, the wind kicked up sharp and cool, sending gooseflesh over his stinging back.
He got his knees under himself, muscles rubbery, pausing for the world to quit pitching. He lumbered upright and planted his feet; even then, remaining vertical was a matter of abject tenacity. He locked his knees and swallowed back the familiar momentary wave of nausea that followed 'teleportation'. Nerdy terminology, but he didn't know what else to call it or what had actually happened, but clearly he was not in Utah anymore. Well, not in the abandoned orchard that had been Utah.
Desert expanded in all directions, an eternity of arid earth and stone ghosting into oncoming night at the edges of his vision. Great monolithic juts of wind-worn rock dotted the landscape like tombstones.
"Dean," he choked out. Sam spat onto the ground and repeated his brother's name, louder, stronger. But he knew he was alone, save a pair of turkey vultures that looked up from picking at a sack of what Sam presumed were the peaches. The birds glared at him with beady, baleful eyes. He was the stranger in their land; how nice of him to bring them a gift.
"Shit. Get lost." Sam stumbled forward and swept his arms wide, cringing as the skin pulled. He might need those peaches to stay alive and the vultures could go eat carrion for all he cared. They launched away, kicking up more dust.
Sam dropped to his knees and began salvaging what he could of the fruit. It was then he realized the pillowcase was actually his t-shirt, and he remembered knotting the bottom to make a catch-all. But the shirt was going to have to be a shirt now; the sun was fast disappearing and this was desert: the parched air held no moisture and therefore, no heat. He was already starting to shiver and the sunburn didn't help. He shook out the filthy t-shirt and carefully slipped it over his shoulders, dooming himself to stink like over-ripe fruit for the foreseeable future.
As it turned out, most of the peaches were ruined anyway. What little the birds hadn't consumed was either teeming with flies, covered in dirt, or pulverized beyond edibility. Sam brushed off what he could and ate, then and there. It helped settle his stomach, despite the grind of sand between his teeth and the hollow worry of Dean's absence.
With patience, his thoughts began to organize and clear, though he still felt like a wrung-out sponge. He took stock of his resources, which wasn't a particularly heartening exercise. No matter which direction he turned, his cell phone registered nothing. No service.
No kidding.
He had a Bic lighter, a money clip with a sad thin layer of folded bills pinched in its jaws, the paperback he'd been reading—The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest—tucked into a back pocket, a Swiss Army knife, a Smartphone that didn't seem particularly smart at this moment, and a small plastic pill bottle of salt. At least he had plenty of things to burn and a corkscrew, just in case he happened upon a nice bottle of merlot.
Sam started walking. If he couldn't find Dean, he had to find shelter. The unforgiving earth produced equally ruthless vegetation, and it only took one false step into a copse of squat cactus to remind him to watch his footing more carefully. The spines needled through his socks and forced him to stop and pick them out for a good ten minutes. It wasn't like he was in a hurry to get somewhere, since he didn't know where he was going, but all the unanswered questions stuck in his craw and made him compulsively push forward, into the new and unknown.
After what had to be several miles of the same vista, Sam concluded there was nothing new and unknown. Or if there was, it was well hidden. The piercing silence was a vast thing, almost alien to modern man. No ambient traffic sounds or thrum of humanity or jet trails in the sky. The moon couldn't get any fuller, and it lit the landscape with cruel brilliance. Sam treaded a course from rock formation to rock formation. He climbed up on a massive boulder to get a better view of the land and call again for Dean, and at one point, swore he saw something glowing on the horizon. He prayed it was a town or a camp, not just wishful thinking tricking his eyes into seeing things that weren't there. He'd had quite enough of hallucinating in this lifetime. Though, after Lucifer's running commentary on every fucking aspect of Sam's tragic existence, the quiet of the desert was practically a vacuum, unsettling in the opposite way.
The stars drifted overhead, indicating Sam was heading north. His feet were beginning to drag, catching on corners of rocks, scrubby tufts of flora and sometimes, thin air. He had long since passed the point of hunger—now it was just a dull, bilious ache in his middle—but he was desperately thirsty. And God, he was cold. Something howled far off in the aether, and while Sam wanted it to be a wolf, he couldn't call it that with much certainty. The sound was too human. He'd read somewhere that coyote or fox could sound human, but he also knew monsters could too. Wendigo were especially crafty mimics, and don't even get him started on skinwalkers.
The third time he nearly face-planted into the earth, Sam decided to call it a night before he knocked out his own front teeth. He headed toward a substantial outcropping of stones and when he got close, he was guardedly encouraged to find a gap in the cleavage of two giant boulders and through that gap, a cave. It was deep and narrow, and he just barely fit through the opening without leaving some of his blistered skin behind.
The cave widened into a larger passage, though still too low for Sam to stand upright. He kept his hand to one wall, creeping forward as the thinnest ribbon of moonlight trickled through the dark. It was cramped and dotted with bats, but it was shelter and it finally dead-ended into a bulbous space almost six feet tall, ten feet wide. It would have to suffice as Sam's dive motel for what remained of the night.
He pulled out his phone and flipped on the handy flashlight app. The device provided enough light to ensure he wasn't sharing the cave with dangerous critters and allowed him to start a small fire with Chapter One of The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest and a small collection of dead plant material. Once the chill had been chased away, Sam's camp was almost cozy. Guano notwithstanding.
It was so damned quiet. The small fire managed to crackle and spit occasionally, but silence overwhelmed it and not even the echoes off the cave walls stood a chance. Sam felt smothered and dizzy and his nose stung from the unvented smoke. He settled carefully against one wall, at a smooth spot, struggling in vain to find comfort. Exhaustion tugged at his eyelids but he managed to set the alarm on his watch. Five hours rest, and then he had to keep moving while it was cool.
He wondered about Dean, where he was, if he was making his way through the desert too. If he was still in Utah, bedded down for the night in a derelict house, staring at the walls, sleepless. If he'd found a liquor store the Leviathan hadn't touched and was drunk into oblivion.
Mostly, he just missed him. And wondered.