A/N: Hey peeps, so I had a plan, but then 2020 said "fuck you" to me again and I got injured. Starting to do a bit better now, but the part relevant to writing this story is that I am one-handed for at least three more weeks. I'm getting stuff done, but I'm very slow. i.e. this a/n has already taken nearly ten minutes. I'm posting the first part of chapter 5 because I hate having left you with Dean missing (if I were reading I'd be getting annoyed by now, lol). So, call it a chap. 5 teaser and I'll do my best and get something more up asap. If I can figure out what exactly I was trying to say between the one finger typing mess on my current pages that is.
Thanks for sticking with me. Wish I could bake a pie for you all. :)
Chapter 5
When Dean came to he wasn't convinced he'd actually opened his eyes, the dark was so complete. Disoriented, he tried to remember where he was and how he got there.
"Sam?" he whispered, something about the dark, and how close it was, demanded quiet. He flashed to awakening in his coffin, gulping a couple of breaths before regaining control. There was something solid against his back and he lay on his left side. He registered pain in that left side, and shifted slightly, reaching out before him with his right hand expecting to encounter another wall. He felt nothing. Idjit! Bobby's voice chided him and he fumbled in his jacket pocket for his lighter. He lit it with one click and what he saw in the flickering light helped him calm down. But only a little.
He was alone in a nearly round earthen room, the walls were coarse mud bricks set so there was a low bench along the bottom of the walls. He shifted, sitting up, and his left side protested. He looked down, his jeans were scuffed and there was a long tear down the side of the left leg rimmed with dark splotches and there was a dark patch on the earthen floor beneath him. Awesome. Gingerly he stood and as he did warm blood traced tracks down his shin from somewhere just above his knee. He held the zippo up illuminating nearly the entire room. The floor was packed earth, and a few muddy spots spoke to the recent rain. He held the lighter up and saw that small, rough-hewn, knotty logs made up the ceiling, the ends weaving around the top of the walls. The room was maybe ten or twelve feet across and only an inch or two above his head. Sam would probably have to duck in here, which only served to underscore that he was alone.
There was no door, just earthen brick walls. Standing now he could see an irregular rectangular outline of faint light in the ceiling across the room. Limping heavily Dean went to stand under the taut shafts of light. There was a kind of trap door between some shortened beams and a flap covering the hole. The flap was tightly woven branches, stray twigs sticking out here and there. So that's how he got in here. He reached up, trying to push it up, see if there was a way out. But almost immediately he hit resistance. He dug between the branches with his fingers and opened up a slightly wider hole. The light was dim as it came in. It looked like early morning, and it had been nearly dawn when he blacked out. And it felt like he'd been out a while. So make that early evening. Dean stood quietly for a moment, eyes closed, swaying slightly with his weight only on his right leg. This didn't make a lot of sense. He tried to think of how he'd ended up here, but didn't remember anything beyond following the tracks well beyond the highway then something heavy hitting him from behind, hard. And tumbling over and down onto rocks and rough ground, grappling with something huge and hot and black as night. Then a sharp pain at his temple, and everything went dark. He probed the side of his head with careful fingers, hissing involuntarily when he encountered a sticky wet, tender knot just above the hairline. Yeah, he was ninety-five percent sure that at least a few hours had passed.
He reached up again, managing to break out a few pieces of the brittle wood at the edge of the door. It was enough to see rock high above him instead of sky. One handed he pulled at the frame around the door flap, it seemed pretty sturdy and he thought it would be worth trying to lift himself out, but first he'd better look at his leg. He couldn't put much weight on it and the warm wetness down his shin was worrying. He broke away a few more brittle twigs and a long spar off one side of a log. He shuffled back to the wall, sitting on the bench, piling the twigs and splinters in a pile and igniting the dry wood easily with the zippo. He pocketed the lighter again, planning to save the fluid by trying to keep the little fire going.
He could still feel the blood crawling sluggishly down his leg and he slapped at his pockets taking inventory. Everything was there except his flashlight and shotgun. He couldn't remember what happened to them, but knew it was a good bet he'd lost them when he'd tumbled. He did have his lighter, the jack knife from his back pocket, car keys in one front pocket, cell in the other. He flipped it open, but wasn't surprised to see the legend "No Signal" across the screen. He pulled a bandanna and flask from an inside jacket pocket. It seemed he hadn't been searched and relieved of his belongings. His hidden items were intact, as well, he could feel the boot knife against one ankle and the lock pics against the other.
He ripped his pant leg a little more and took a good look at the cut just above his knee. It was deep and jagged and full of sandy dirt. But it was the steady bleeding that worried him. He opened the flask and took a good swallow of the whiskey, then poured a little on the cut, grunting in pain. He was definitely going to need stitches. But that wouldn't be happening soon. He ripped a strip of fabric from his wrecked jeans folded it into a pad and wrapped the bandana around to secure it to his leg, hissing loudly as he pulled and tied it as tight as he could. Then he sat back against the wall, eyes closed, beating back the pain in his mind. He was going to have to figure out how to get out of here, and soon.