Sam awoke to the sound of Dean working on the car in his shirt sleeves. Smearing brake oil on his jeans, Dean drank most of a water bottle and poured the rest over his hair, his wet dog shake framed against a sky choked with color. The hood slammed shut. The trunk opened and Dean knelt behind Sam with a first-aid kit. "Roll over sunshine, you ain't getting infected on my watch."
Groggily, Sam rolled onto his stomach, and Dean's hands were warm in the cool morning air when he brushed Sam's hair out of the way.
"Hey, Dean, did you dream last night?" Sam asked. Sam had; it had been as if it had picked up where the vision left off, with the two of them driving out of Las Vegas and the city being obliterated in their rear-view. They'd had to drive north, going by the map that the Army had given them showing routes around broken roads and bridges, and had been picked up in Utah by a helicopter that flew them over breathtaking views of the new mountains that had sprung up. Dean had been a silent presence beside him the whole time, gazing out to see the towering slabs of rock unfold beneath them.
He'd had other dreams too, dreams that he couldn't even put words to. Gargantuan shapes moving out of the sea, unearthly languages being spoken in his ear. The taste of fear in his mouth.
Dean tore open an alcohol swab. "Nope." he lied.
On the edge of sleep, Dean had thought back to the Men of Letters transcript and had a herky-jerky black and white dream like a silent film reel, sailors coming home from an uncharted shore, their islander brides pale and lithe with eyes set a little too far apart to be considered beautiful. A seaside church. A woman on a bloody altar, a monster, a queen, and the longer you touched her the more your identity circled down the drain until you were only left with her name.
He'd tried saying it. It tasted like sour pennies.
He'd awoke in a cold sweat from that one, and lept to mundane tasks to scrub the woman from his mind. Sam's hair had stuck to the bloody stitches, and he cleaned it best he could. "What about you?"
Sam lay still as Dean worked on him. "The mountains. The old maps were right; the western U.S. was flat before. The bomb changed everything. The roads, the bridges, so many towns were destroyed. I think we flew over the Rockies when they were brand-new."
"The Rockies..." Dean said to himself, humming the snatch end of 'Big Rock Candy Mountain' as he cracked open another water bottle and wet a clean rag and daubed at the stitches. In his dreams, the President turned a map toward them on an antique desk, pinching the center of America as if he'd caught a spider underneath. A spider so big you had to crush the world around it.
The sun rose, pencil-thin shadows stretching from the stones, the kind of cowboy backdrop Dean had spent his childhood memorizing. What else had been substituted? He tossed the bloody bandages in a plastic bag and slapped Sam's shoulder, happy for something solid. "Let's grab some road food. There's a stop fifty miles out, they got a special on waffles and trucker showers."
"A shower sounds good," Sam said, climbing to his knees and brushing the worst of the grit off his front. He helped Dean gather up their supplies from the night before, and he shook out the blanket before folding it up.
The air was warm by the time they got on the road, and Sam rolled down the windows and let it blow through his hair. Dean sang along to one of his tapes beside him. This was so familiar that it grounded Sam, made the strangeness of last night feel faint and far away, left in the dirt where they'd slept.
Later, clean and full with a plastic bag of junk food in the seat between them, Sam said, "Fort Cloud. Do you remember anything about it? I don't."
Dean turned down the volume, left elbow stretched over the open window. "Honestly all I can remember for sure is the way in, this corrugated steel storm drain that had no business being in a desert."
The opening chords of 'Go Go Godzilla' started playing, and Dean ejected the tape. "I never liked their later stuff."
The landscape went from cattle fields to salt flats, thorn trees bending in dust devils ten stories high until the air was so white Dean had to slow the car and roll up the window. Flipping through the box for an Eric Clapton mix, Dean asked, "You dream about that church at all? The one of us in the drawing?"
Sam shuffled through the hazy images of his dreams, looking for a church. After a moment, he shook his head. "No." Then he added, "Not yet." This wasn't over, he knew. The floodgates had opened last night, and he had no doubt that there would be more where that came from. He shuddered, even as he looked forward to piecing together the puzzle.
"You know, I think I almost understood the language, back then. Maybe because of the psychic thing," Sam said, gesturing toward his head. "In my dreams, I heard them speaking, and it was like... like it was right on the tip of my tongue. And it was like they were talking to me, not just talking. Trying to communicate with me.
He concentrated, sifting through the dregs of the dream, and a thought occurred to him. "I wonder if… I wonder if they wanted me, too? Like Azazel did, to lead an army?"
Dean watched his reflection, the dust storm filling the windshield like a dead TV channel. If the perfect woman existed she was a cold one. A dark one. Black eyes with a touch of cinder and a hunger that would eat the whole world if it could.
Dean laughed and shook the dream away. "And what would the Devil say if you brought Little Mermaid to prom? "
Sam barked a laugh. "I think he'd say I belonged to him. Would have said." If he'd allied with the other side, he wondered who would have won. If the end of the world came and went, would Lucifer have ever had the chance to break free, or would he be stuck in the Cage for eternity? "It hurts my head sometimes, seeing double like this."
Dean's mouth twisted a little at belonged, but he swiped his face before Sam could catch it.