For What It's Worth

Part IV

For a split-second, he honestly thought it was some sort of coup, that Colin was looking to prove him right and that he really was as big an asshole as Dean had been saying; that the son of a bitch walked straight up to them thinking he was going to take command of their operation by the barrel of his Glock. But when Dean slowly rotated to investigate the sound, he found himself eye-to-narrowed-eye with a petite, strikingly featured woman with the business end of her own Glock aimed right at his face.

"Hey, there," she greeted drily, dark eyes narrowed in a severe expression that let Dean know she wasn't afraid to pull the trigger. She lifted her chin at his 1911, a shank of dark, side-swept bangs to rival Sam's falling away from her forehead. "I wanna see any weapons on the floor, now."

Sam held up a hand as he turned to face the addition in the room. He complied quickly but stiffly, crouching to set his Beretta soundlessly against the dusty floor. Dean rolled his eyes and follows suit, adding his own gun to the pile. They moved in tandem to straighten but she stopped them with a scoff.

"Keep going." She wasn't fooled, knew they were carrying more than the handguns; their second sign that, should they all manage to walk out of there in one piece, this woman was someone that could prove a useful addition to the Merry Band of the Not-Yet-Dead. The first, of course, being the way she got the drop on them, which wasn't something either of them was likely to live down any time soon. You know, assuming they could talk their way out of being shot here, because she had a look in her eyes that Dean recognized and himself carried. They certainly wouldn't be the first ones to die by her hand.

Dean met Sam's concerned, pointed gaze and raised his eyebrows. Wordlessly, they removed a total of five blades between them, and Sam, always going above and beyond, saw fit to drop the lock pick as well.

When he'd drawn himself to his full height, hands raised non-threateningly but with one last knife still pressed comfortingly against his ribs beneath the cover of his shirt, Dean went with his gut and jerked his chin at the woman. Or, specifically, at her gun. "You got a lot of experience using that thing?"

Her left eyes twitched, and her grip on the pistol tightened. "Enough."

"So you know what's out there?" Dean gestured toward the broken window, feeling a chilly breeze work its way into the room as he did. He waited for her nod. "Then you have to know we've got out shit together a little more than – "

"Than the infected?" She barked a rough sound, her lip twitching upward. "Maybe." The aim of her gun had yet to waver in the slightest. This standoff might have been a lot of things, but it was not her first rodeo. "You'd be surprised what I've seen people do," she said, confirming his suspicions. "Infected or not."

So she knows about the infected. Clearly thinking the same thing, Sam met Dean's eyes and gave a barely perceptible nod, the go-ahead to keep talking. Because if there was one thing Dean had always had on his side, it was his ability to talk down the crazies, with a few exceptions. He studied the woman, and there was something…familiar about her, an eerie sensation Dean was really growing sick of as this long day wore on.

She didn't seem to appreciate the look, pressed her lips together and raised the gun likes she meant to do something with it.

Sam surged forward a step and Dean stuck one hand out towards her and one back at his brother. "Hey, okay, hold on – "

She jerked her head in the negative, dark bangs shifting against her forehead and revealing a swipe of something on her cheek that could have been either dirt or blood long dried. "No, I don't think I will."

"Just hold on a damn minute!" Dean snapped his fingers, pointed at her as it came to him. "Risa."

Sam looked incredulously between his brother and the gun-wielding woman across the room. "Wait – you know her?"

"Sort of?" Dean winced as it all came back, flooding his senses like he'd been dunked in a tank of ice water.

"Croatoan virus, right? That's their endgame?"

"It's efficient, it's incurable, and it's scary as hell. Turns people into monsters. Started hitting the major cities about two years ago. World really went in the crapper after that."

Some of the details may have changed, but again he had to think, what was the point? They only traded one end for another, world in the crapper either way. Story of his goddamned life. And, God, he was a dick. Still, hadn't seemed to hurt his chances of gettin' laid. Much. "We mighta had a, uh, connection?"

Sam groaned. "Just tell me something, Dean. Is this the first one-night stand you've had point a gun at your head?"

"Would you believe me if I said yes?"

Sam cocked his head. "Nope."

"Hey!" she barked. "Assholes! I have the gun, so why don't you talk to me and not about me?"

Dean brought his hands up close to his head. "Right, okay, Risa – it's Risa, right?"

Lips pressed tightly together, her jaw twitched a wordless confirmation, and Dean could see the fear ratcheting up in her dark eyes, stepping to the front of the line. "I've never seen you before in my life."

"Yeah, because we saved the world!" Dean couldn't help but exclaim.

"Saved?" Risa stepped forward, putting herself between them and their weapons. She smiled, something tight and wounded and disbelieving. Something incredibly afraid. "There is something wrong with you."

"There's nothing wrong with us – "

"No." Her eyes narrowed as they searched Dean's pale, drawn face. "No, there's something wrong with you."

Sam rotated, raised his eyebrows and gave Dean a pissy, pinched, I-told-you-so look.

"There was," Dean conceded, "I was…sick, or whatever – but, look, I'm okay, really. Not infected. Never was." He glanced at Sam and swallowed roughly, let the lie slide out unimpeded. "Neither of us."

Risa's finger tightened around the trigger as she inhaled sharply. "Yeah, I've heard that one."

Dean huffed. He reached up and hooked a finger in the collar of his t-shirt, dragged it away and tilted his neck. "Lady, do I LOOK infected to you?"

"You really want me to answer that?"

And at the end of the day, yeah, Dean figured he couldn't really fault her for the assumption. He knew he looked like shit, knew he was barely keeping his feet and was leaning badly on his left leg at that point, looking sick and sweating something fierce from the strain of simply standing. Of being awake, and he was just as disgusted with himself as she looked to be.

Suddenly, there was sound and a flurry of movement downstairs, thumps and noises of struggle as someone decided enough is enough, and those left to stand guard for both sides collided brutally.

Dean had a brief window of perfect clarity, a moment of time stood still where he met Risa's eyes and read the fear there, and he understood that her self-preservative reflex was pretty much the same as his – violence, swift and brutal and without stopping for questions, simply clearing the path towards escape.

That's how they survived.

But the scuffle downstairs was also distraction enough for Sam, and they were all moving, but odds were always that one of the three wouldn't be quite quick enough.

Dean's vision tunneled down to the gun barrel in his face. To the flash of the muzzle, and all sound fell away save the crack of the shot.

Whoever the hell she was, she was tough and she knew it, and more importantly she wanted them to know it. But she'd spooked, and telegraphed her shot. Badly.

Even so, he knew he was too slow; knew that Dean was hit, because as soon as his fingertips brushed jacket sleeve his brother was thrown from his grasp by the punch of the bullet, knocked backwards to the floor, hard, and when Sam spared that frightened glance behind him there was blood…everywhere.

The both of them had a penchant for dying, but Dean had a habit of making an excruciatingly slow process of it. Leaving his might-be-should-be-won't-be final mark on the world a bloodied, broken mess of a man who fought to the last breath. So, in a twisted way he'd never admit to another breathing soul, for those first few seconds Sam wasn't sure he got his brother out of the path of a swiftly delivered fatal hit, it almost seemed a mercy.

But his ears perked to the thunk of the bullet striking the wall behind him, and Dean, who was always full of surprises and very much alive, jerked with a startled, pained intake of air. His boots scraped and his fingers curled senselessly against the dusty, blood-splattered floorboards for a long moment before his right hand raised dazedly to cup the gory side of his head.

Save his brain, everything inside of Sam was screaming at him to run to Dean's side, but that agonized gasp was gonna have to be enough for now. He lurched forward, away from his brother, to snatch his gun from the floor. Once it was firmly in hand he spared both a glance and the nose of his Beretta in the direction of the shooter, Risa, and something about the lethal combination did well to pin her in place. Whatever distraction the melee happening downstairs had provided, it was over now.

Sam found himself not really giving a shit who won, only that this woman had just shot his brother. He jerked his chin at her piece. "Drop it. Now."

She was smart enough to have realized the full extent of her mistake by that point and silently complied, flicked the safety and stooped to set her Glock on the floor just as she'd ordered them to only moments before. She startled a bit as she straightened, eyes wide and trained on Sam, probably expecting him to drop her where she stood.

And maybe he should have. But Dean was breathing and sort of moving, and knew her somehow, apparently. She was a good shot with some idea of what the hell was going on out there, and even in the utter shit heap of a moment Sam could appreciate the value in that. He nodded his satisfaction with her raised, empty hands and the guilty-as-fuck expression on her face. "Don't fucking move," he spat.

"Copy that," she conceded softly. Her lips worked like there was something else she had to say but Sam decided she and her excuses could go fuck themselves for all he cared, and he stepped back to crouch swiftly next to his brother.

Even now, even after the Darkness, after the Hollow Men and everything they did to him, Dean didn't quite know how to lie down and be beat, and he was trying to push himself upright on bloody hands that were leaving tracks along the dirty hardwood.

He thought he was done and Sam knew that. He knew his big brother thought he didn't have a damn thing left in him that could continue on or was even worth fighting for but he was wrong. Because Dean's pupils were shot, were all over the damn place and so was his awareness but he was still fighting, right in front of the one person who would never give up on him even when he'd given up on himself.

To literal HELL with the Hollow Men, because that is why Sam had conceded to let his brother come along. No other reason, because he couldn't think of anything else that mattered.

Sam gripped his brother firmly by the wrist and hauled him into a seated position, drawing a choked, pained sound from the man. Though he knew he should, he refused to make inspection of the wound his priority, pushed practices and lectures and field triage to the side for the moment and grasped Dean's bloody chin, forcing the line of that stunned gaze to match up with his own eyes. He was injured and it was bad – bullet to the goddamn head bad – and Sam needed to secure some degree of cognizance from his big brother, needed to know he was okay and that what little movement he'd managed thus far was more than a body reflexively acknowledging pain. Needed to know Dean's hamster wheel was still spinning behind those glassy eyes.

Lost in a world of sensory overload and buried beneath what had to be a mountain of pain, Dean recoiled at his touch, and then once more when he was able to focus somewhat and found his brother right in his face, almost like he'd forgotten Sam was there.

"Hey," Sam encouraged with a tight smile, slipping his hand through the trail of bright blood streaking Dean's face to grip the back of his neck and give him a shake that was gentle and mindful while still hopefully communicating, we're on the clock here, bro.

Dean's slick, grimy fingers rose shakily and sought out the oozing trench splitting his temple. Sam was quick to discourage the idea, guiding his brother's hand back to the relative safely of his lap, where it was less likely to fester a life-threatening infection while they were hundreds of miles away from help. Dean's wide eyes locked on his own blood-coated fingers, then rose to meet Sam's concerned gaze, plainly holding the question he was afraid to ask, assuming he was even capable of words at the moment.

"It's really not that…" Sam gulped around the lie. The very sight of the furrow the bullet had carved turned his stomach with both its location and implications, but he clamped it down, forced the steadiest, most confident grin he could muster to soften what had to be the single most asinine thing he'd ever asked. "You okay?"

Dean frowned, fingers still twitching to inspect the wound, and he took too long to respond, not like he couldn't form the words, thank God, but more like he couldn't hear Sam well, if it all. But he took his cue from the concerned look on his brother's face and nodded.

And that in itself was enough of a cue for Sam, who bounced on the balls of his feet and wrested an individually wrapped gauze pad from an inside pocket of his coat. He pressed the pack into Dean's cleanish left hand and finally whipped his full attention back to the woman, who maybe should have taken off when she had the chance. He lifted the lid off of the boiling pot inside. "What the fuck was that?!"

She rocked back a step as though physically struck by the force of his shout as it echoed across the room and Sam had half a mind to follow it up with an actual physical strike. She gaped wordlessly, eyes dancing around the dark, empty space, resting for a moment on Dean, who hadn't moved from his seated position on the floor, one leg drawn up, dazed and blood-covered and holding that gauze like he couldn't possibly have been expected to know what to do with it.

He remembered her now, or, hearing about her, at least. And as whiskey-soaked and physically specific as that description may have been, now that he was meeting her, Sam couldn't say he was entirely surprised. Any woman who could look his brother in the eye while shooting him in the head was pretty much exactly Dean's type.

She looked to be around Dean's age, though it was difficult to say and couldn't matter less. The few people they crossed paths with these days all looked like they'd been through the wringer, like they'd been chewed up and spit out the other side of a world taking the red eye to complete annihilation. Which was, to say, not completely off the mark.

Even so, there was no explanation this once-yet-never-known Risa could drum up here that could possibly justify what had just transpired, and Sam no longer cared to hear her try. He was suddenly struck by exactly how horribly, stupidly far they'd traveled from the bunker, and dropped once more into a crouch at his brother's side. He tore the gauze free of the plastic and left the packaging in a twisted heap beside his leg, guided Dean's hand up to the side of his head.

Dean blinked hard then, as pressure was applied to the wound, and it was slower in coming than Sam would have liked, the barely audible and first coherent thing he said being, "D'you shoot her?"

Sam's eyes darted to Risa across the dim room, holding up her hands and looking anxious, like she wasn't convinced he might not still do so. "No."

Dean nodded, squeezing his eyes shut as he surfed an obvious wave of pain and was hardly keeping his balance while doing so. "Good." Eyes still closed, his head bobbed in a way Sam very much recognized, like he couldn't quite decide if he needed to puke and wasn't sure he could hold it back if he did. He paled and started to fall backward but Sam reacted quickly, moved to grip him by the collar and slowed his descent back to the floor.

"Here, let me – "

"Don't fucking move," Sam snapped again, without even granting Risa the benefit of eye contact, his voice low and dangerous as the fingers twisted in the collar of his brother's jacket tensed.

Still, he caught the motion in his periphery as she shrunk back and nodded once, tightly, her lips pressed into a thin, pale line.

Dean's wounded body had only a short window of time in which it was going to get its way, and even Dean knew that. His eyes worked themselves open once more, and a blood-streaked hand flapped up lazily to slap at Sam's fist on his chest, gripping tighter after contact was established and he did little more than climb his brother at that point, pawing at his arms and dragging himself back into a somewhat upright position while swiping his blood all over Sam's sleeves.

Sam executed a hasty self-inventory but wasn't sure he had anything better on his person to properly staunch such a degree of blood flow. The gauze pad he'd already handed over had been discarded onto the dirty, certainly germ and bacteria-riddled floor, and he wasn't letting it anywhere near Dean's head. As a general rule, head wounds bled like a sonuvabitch, but knowing that didn't make looking at it any easier, and this was a nasty graze.

Sam hissed as he inspected the wound, forced the downward twist of his lips into a wry grin as Dean blinked up at him. "So, do I even have to say 'I told you so'? Or was the bullet enough?"

"Bitch," Dean breathed, maneuvering himself into more or less back into a seated position, bowed over Sam's arm and focusing on a pattern of deep, deliberate inhales and exhales, and Sam was pretty damn positive at that point that he was about to cop it directly into his lap.

Then Dean sucked in a sharp breath and his fingers stiffened around Sam's upper arm in a way that he really wished he didn't recognize, a way that had his own insides running cold by association. The man's fingers were icy, radiating chilly daggers of shock that dug painfully into Sam's flesh through layers of heavy fabric and freezing his blood where it sat in his veins.

"Sam." A hoarse whisper, like Dean had screamed his voice away, and there was no mistaking the warning in that single word.

In fact, it was a warning so obvious that Sam caught additional movement out of the corner of his eye: Risa shifting her weight uneasily and inching toward the large window.

"Get down," he hissed, harsh but not loudly enough to be heard outside of this room.

She complied instantly, hitting the deck soundlessly and reaching out to secure her Glock. Sam didn't stop her, flicking off both of the flashlights and plunging the room into further darkness. They were all in the same fight now, with at least one wounded between them. It was a horrible thought, but his brother was his priority, and he had to give the others up for lost at that point. They'd already been quiet for far too long, and he was without any means of warning them what was coming.

Sam turned his attention back to Dean, who'd gone a shade of white not readily found in nature, eyelids fluttering like he was coming and going and his body wouldn't let him off the hook and choose one for him. The look wracked some fragile and long-forgotten part of Sam, but he pushed it aside and forced his insides to steel, gripped his brother tightly by the lapels of his jacket and gave Dean a shake that had his eyes blowing wide open.

Dean understood immediately, because if he'd ever been anything, it was something stronger than he thought he was. "Yeah," he rasped. "It's not…not them, Sammy."

"Not who?" Risa whispered, inching her way closer to where they were huddled.

Damn if he hadn't forgotten she was even there. "Believe me," Sam returned quietly, keeping one hand on Dean's arm to steady him where he sat. "If you don't know, then you don't wanna."

"Then who is it?"

"Infected," Dean grated, wincing and smacking at Sam's hand, though he made no move to pull himself to his feet.

Risa's head whipped back to the window, then to the doorway, visibly torn. "It's not just me," she said, like it wasn't obvious, like she was admitting some sin. "I had another – "

"You can't," Sam said, simply, because she looked like she was set to run, and that ship had sailed. She wouldn't accomplish anything but alerting the infected to their whereabouts even quicker. It wasn't that he was necessarily unwilling to sacrifice her, but he was unwilling to risk further harm to his already wounded brother if he had a chance to avoid it. "Dean," he pressed urgently, turning back to said wounded brother. "How close are they?"

Dean grimaced, lines deepening around his eyes as he tried to come up with the right answer. He shook his head until he seemed to completely throw off his equilibrium and began to list to the side.

Sam adjusted his hold, one hand on Dean's shoulder and the other gripping the back of his neck to steady him. If possible, his skin had grown even colder to the touch, like palming some tacky ice sculpture instead of a living person.

"I dunno, Sammy," Dean finally said softly, dejected, as though he was conceding defeat. His eyes dropped closed like he'd exhausted himself, at least for the moment.

Sam frowned, feeling fractionally responsible for the strain Dean had put on himself, the way he'd pushed the man for answers, and he moved immediately to rectify that. "S'okay, Dean." You don't have to do everything, jerk. He gently tipped his brother toward Risa and she caught him gingerly, propped him up against herself like she was afraid to actually touch him. "Watch him," he snapped. "And don't, you know, shoot him anymore."

Sam moved in an awkward crouch to the window and straightened enough to peek over the sill. A breeze lightly tossed his hair as he immediately spotted movement at the end of the yard, just past the fence in the tree line beyond the vehicles. They hadn't spotted the sun in weeks, months, years, but it was still there, and a soft gray glow filtered through the cloud cover and silhouetted the shapes approaching the house, shapes that were clearly people, but shuffling stiffly and awkwardly. Four, maybe five. Not his people, that was for sure.

Shit.

Dean had been right before, when he was lobbing every argument in his considerable arsenal in an effort to come along; the infected had never gotten this close to one of their groups before he'd been able to sound the alarm.

Sam's eyes darted nervously to his big brother, crumbled in a boneless way in the arms of the maybe-stranger who had shot him, to the jagged, oozing tear in the side of Dean's head. He hadn't been able to sound the alarm, not with this degree of injury, and not in enough time for them to get the hell out of Dodge.

It was much too late for whys and what ifs, and Sam shifted his focus to getting his brother back on his feet. He dropped silently to the other side of Dean and put a hand at his elbow, rousing his attention. He smiled tightly, hoping it looked the least bit encouraging. "Can you stand?"

Dean glared, the resolve in his eyes somewhat dampened by the sheer volume of blood covering his head, face and neck. But if they were going to survive this, if they were going to walk out of this house the same way they walked in, then he didn't have much choice in the matter.

Sam nodded at Risa, and they gripped Dean under each arm and hauled him quickly to his feet. Risa, seemingly unsure about exactly how much of her help was wanted and for damn good reason, stepped away but Sam kept a steadying hand at the ready, fully expecting his brother to need the assist to remain upright. Seeing as he had just been shot in the fucking head.

But Dean was one stubborn son of a bitch. He swallowed a few times, white-faced and sweating as he visibly flirted once more with the need to vomit. He came out on top of this battle, a bit of color returning to his cheeks as the ghostly white pallor leached out of his complexion. He raised his eyes to Sam and nodded stiffly.

"Can you shoot?" There was an edge in Sam's words, and while he didn't intend the hostility to slip out he couldn't necessarily disagree with it. He didn't want Dean out there, and had told him that.

"Well enough," Dean rasped, the corner of his mouth curving upward.

Steering him closer to the wall and slapping a loaded weapon back into Dean's unsteady hand, Sam was anything but amused. This was more than target practice in the bunker, more than a big brother trying to downplay both his obvious physical and perceived internal weaknesses. "Dean."

Dean slid the magazine out of the 1911, rapped it against the grip to seat the bullets and winced as his wounded head disagreed with the harsh metallic tap. He didn't look at Sam as he said, "I guess we're about to find out."

As much as he appreciated his brother's honesty, the words weren't exactly encouraging. Sam rolled his eyes, left Dean standing mostly under his own steam against the wall and returned his attention to Risa. "You left a man downstairs?"

She nodded hesitantly in the affirmative. "We watched you come in."

Squatting, probably, Sam figured. Or scavenging, looking for supplies, but nothing of the importance or significance for which they came looking. She would've taken off with their weapons after she shot them dead, cleaned out their pockets like any good vulture, but hadn't given Sam reason to believe she had any inkling what this place used to be.

Dean was watching them from where he was propped in the corner, visibly struggling to follow the path of the conversation. Sam would have felt a lot more comfortable taking this inevitable confrontation on the offensive, but not with his brother having to put so much effort into holding up his own damn head.

He pushed forward with his line of quiet questioning, trusting Dean to alert them both as the infected drew nearer. "Is it just the two of you here?"

Risa nodded again, her dark eyes heavy with the knowledge – and with the experience – that if they weren't already in the house, and if her man wasn't already dead, he was probably something much worse. "There aren't a lot of us left." Based on the sadness edging her words, she may have already lost someone who meant something.

Who hasn't? "There isn't a lot of anyone left," Sam returned, not meaning to sound harsh, but not caring if he did. He crossed the room to the window and peered through the open spot in the wall, squinted as his eyes traveled the extent of the barren yard outside the house. The approaching infected he'd spotted before were nowhere to be seen. Neither was Colin, and that included a body. "Our man's gone."

Dean's head whipped over, his expression startled and concerned, because he'd had his differences with the guy but that didn't mean he wasn't a friend. Didn't mean Dean wanted to see him dead.

Risa frowned, noting the strangeness of Sam's phrasing. "Gone?"

"Yeah." Sam drew back from the window and made meaningful eye contact with Dean, who shook his head like he had water in his ears. It was likely he'd already been able to give as much warning as he would be able to. "Not dead. At least, I don't think." Sam turned back, squinted out at the dark yard and shook his head. "I can't…"

Risa swallowed and her complexion blanched. She looked suddenly terrified, an intense wash of fear that came only from some really bad experiences and last had her pulling the trigger of a gun aimed at his brother. "What is it, then? Collectors?"

"What's that?" Dean spoke up, his voice low and laced with pain.

Risa's eyes ticked toward him, and there was some degree of remorse mixed in with the fear coating her features. "It's our name for the ones that take people, the people that never come back." She looked back to Sam, seemingly full up of staring at Dean's blood-drenched face and neck, of studying her handiwork. "Why, what do you call them?"

Sam gave a slight, exasperated shake of his head, letting his gaze drift back out of the open window. He didn't have time for this, none of them did. "We don't call them anything. There's us and there's them. Infected is infected."

And Colin was gone, infected or dead, or he would have found them in the house by now. Dean was right; the guy had been kind of a dick the past few weeks, but no one deserved that. Same went for Jackson, a real good kid whom Sam could only assume had suffered a similar fate. And he knew full well it wouldn't matter if the head wound was what prevented Dean from sensing the infected before they managed to get so close, his brother would shoulder the guilt of two more lost. Would retreat back in on himself and privately, silently bear the weight of two more bodies.

If they weren't lucky, and they had been infected, then their lost friends might yet find the three of them hiding in the house.

"They'll bottleneck in the doorway," Dean said suddenly, like he was reading Sam's mind, and putting forth buckets of effort into every word. He pushed away from the wall and his left leg visibly buckled, but he bit his lip and locked the limb into place, standing straight without assistance. One of these days, maybe, Sam would stop finding himself surprised by what his big brother was capable of. "We can take them out, one at a time. Quick and clean."

Sam nodded. "And if they're our friends?"

"Friend's kind of a strong word, don'tcha think?" a much younger Dean replied in Sam's head, with a smirk. The snarky, easy-going big brother Sam missed but could hardly remember anymore, because he hadn't existed in years.

An almighty splintering of wood cracked up from the first floor, a sure sign that they were no longer alone in the house. Dean wasn't smirking, or cracking jokes. Not anymore. His face was thin and pale and hard, the expression given even more gravity by the gory blood still spilling slowly, but alarmingly enough, from his head wound. He raised his gun. "Then we'll be doing them a favor."

They retrieved the forfeited knives from the floor and scattered, taking up defensive posts around the room. Risa slid into place across from Sam like she'd done this before, tucked into the corner on the other side of the doorway.

"Gotta say, I'm not exactly in love with this plan, Dean," Sam said in a harsh whisper.

Dean raised his eyebrows in acknowledgement, and took aim at the doorway from across the room. Farther from the action, but out in the open.

With the infected, some things were still rooted deeply in their once-human brains. Some things they remembered, strange things you wouldn't expect, like driving a car. But at the same time, they were a lot like rabid dogs and it got worse the longer they'd been afflicted, until they finally burned out and fell down dead. They succumbed to something of a herd mentality, and would always take the quickest route to their intended victim. Not necessarily the easiest or the most obvious one.

They completely bypassed the open, unobstructed doorway as they attacked, breaking straight through a weak spot in the wall only a foot to Sam's right.

To be concluded in Part V...