Fic: Like Luggage of Some Departed Traveller; One

[britomart_is]

Master Post

Prologue | One | Two | Three | Four | Five | Six






ONE: DEAN

The lone working taillight on the semi truck ahead of Dean glows a dull red through the haze. When that red eye gets too dim, Dean lets his foot fall heavy on the gas. It wouldn't take much to lose sight of the truck a car-length ahead of him - just a momentary lapse to fiddle with the heat or grab a handful of peanuts from the two-pound bag slumped like a sullen teenager on the passenger seat - and once separated, Dean doesn't like their odds of finding each other again. He'd drive right off the road.

Rainier blew its top three days ago and still it rains choking ash, gritty, corrosive, paint-job destroying, engine-fouling ash. The car radio's playing a steady stream of hits: the best of KUOW Ninety-four point nine, all-static-all-the-time. Cell reception's faring no better. The only reason the trucker ahead of Dean is driving slightly less blind is 'cause the dude's got a GPS mounted to the dash, keeping up an intermittent signal through the cloud.

Maybe the long days of driving are getting to Dean, because despite the fine silt swirling in through the vents, coating everything in the car with dust, sneaking up his nostrils and grating harsh and silicate in his lungs, he finds the insulated little world beneath the ash cloud perversely comforting. Like being wrapped in a woolly blanket gone soft with age. Like the quiet after a fresh powdery snowfall. Dean will think these things, and then he'll glance up at the choked yellow sky above them, and he'll draw a little closer behind the truck on the road.

Dean's been driving for eleven hours straight, now. He's beginning to blink an awful lot. The rumble strips sneak beneath the wheels a time or two, their thunder sending him jolting awake, back ramrod straight, eyes wide. When he drifts so far out of his lane that the screech of branches scraping along the passenger side wakes him, Dean realizes that something's going to have to give. As soon as the cloud dissipates enough that Dean can see around the next bend, he double-taps a goodbye on the horn to the trucker and pulls over to the side of the road.

Dean's still a full day's drive from Palo Alto. He can feel the inertia, all his tender nervous innards speeding down the highway toward California. Torn right on out of his stopped body, his body that requires sleep. Dean's been compromising with twenty-minute microsleeps, just long enough to wake up groggier than he was before. He needs a few hours on this roadside or he won't make it to California at all.

A few hours.

Back in a Coeur d'Alene high school gymnasium, about three hours before Dean set out on the road to Palo Alto, a woman had been infected right in front of him and Dad. She'd grasped futilely with torn-up hands on her son's neck, helpless against that distinctive, bright arterial red that looks like inevitability. Even with two of them, there was no stopping her from trying to save the boy. The kid was fourteen and had an angry red pimple on his chin that had probably seemed like a major problem when he discovered it in the mirror that morning . He was lucky. He bled to death in minutes, went out of this world while still himself. It was the best the kid could have hoped for.

Dad tied the woman to a folding metal chair, and they watched her turn with a stop-watch running. It took twenty-seven minutes from the time her son's chest stopped rising to the time she began straining at the ropes, teeth bared.

So a few hours is more than enough time. It's time enough for shock to set in, pale and cold and shivering misery. Plenty of time for a body to empty of blood, glug glug glug. Plenty of time for a wound to go septic.

And it's time - more than enough time - for the infection to take you.

It's not like demon possession, where you chant a few words and if you got in before the demon got a real joyride, the person just might survive. The infection doesn't just take root in you. It has to hollow you out first in order to fit. It will eat its way through intricate feathering bronchi and capillaries, juicy kidneys and vulnerable brain and marrow. It'll gobble up your tendency to fidget, the names you picked out for your future children, your fondness for stray mutts and the memory of the hiccup you couldn't hold back after your nervous first kiss. The infection will never be sated, because it is hunger itself. Hunger as transmissible disease. A hunger of the blood.

That's not the worst part, though. The infection will eat and eat and eat, and when it's made itself a comfy nest in what used to be your personhood, it will stop. It has no malice; it won't destroy you completely. It will leave whatever is left of you, sparking and sputtering, incomplete. Knowing that parts of you are gone and not even remembering what they felt like.

A few hours is enough time for all that. And Dean is going to spend those hours sleeping.

Coeur d'Alene seems like a month ago, but it was only a day. A day ago, Dad had been arm's length away instead of speeding off on some fool's errand to Colorado, nothing but an "I'll be in touch, look after your brother" serving as a goodbye. A day ago, Sam's voicemail was still picking up.

Dean tries one last time even though he knows what he will hear. He hits two on speed dial. The line crackles, barely audible through the remains of the ash cloud, and he watches the single bar of reception with his heart in his throat.

"The number you have dialed is no long-" Dean hangs up.

How can he sleep? How is he supposed to sleep?

Dean sleeps.

When they were kids, they were already too travel-seasoned to play the license plate game, so they created their own variants. The truck game was Sammy's favorite from ages six to eight. They raced to the finish line, the winner the first to spot a tanker full of milk, corn syrup, corrosive contents, a flatbed with a port-o-potty in the back, a truck with case after case of chickens stacked all on top of each other. A horse trailer. An RV flying an American flag from the antenna. Pinup-girl mudflaps. A bumper sticker more than two election cycles old. Sammy never won because Dean kept changing the rules.

Dean creates his own game on the drive to Palo Alto to keep himself from chewing through his lip or breaking his fingers on the steering wheel. I'll bet Sammy finally cut his hair, he decides. I bet he grew it out and wears it in a ponytail -- California finally got to him. I'll bet Sammy has a scrawny pube-beard, valiantly trying to grow facial hair.

I'll bet Sammy still cracks his knuckles when he's nervous. I'll bet Sammy still goes totally motionless like a nervous prey animal whenever a sex scene comes on during a movie 'cause he's trying to hide how easy he gets a boner from it.

Dean chews on his lip and watches the mile markers like a hawk. I'll bet Sammy's got loads of friends, he thinks. I'll bet Sammy's. He's. I'll bet they love him. They oughta fuckin' love him there.

I'll bet Sammy's already saved himself, Dean thinks, and he fumbles for a peanut from the bag. He cracks the shell, chews. I'll bet he didn't need us. Dean eats the other peanut from the shell. I'll bet he drives a Toyota motherfucking Celica with a pine-scented cardboard tree.

Dean passes mile marker ninety-two. He stops playing games and drives.

Once he's over the state line into California, counter-intuitively driving toward the epicenter, Dean's forced onto the old two-lane highways - too old and obsolete to have overpasses, and thus too low-tech to have collapsed spectacularly during the quake. The cracked pavement jostles the suspension.

Just north of Yreka, an empty police cruiser blocks most of the road. Its lights whirl, lighting up the treetops, glaring off the street signs, red blue red blue. There's no one in sight. The lights will shine till the battery runs out of juice, and then it will just be a dead car.

Smoke is still rising from Red Bluff, but in Gridley the Wal-Mart is not only lit up and quietly bustling, but an attendant with a blue vest and smiley-face pin stands at the front door. All L'Oreal products are Two-for-One and there are free churros with purchase in the food court. Dean suddenly craves a churro, convinces himself for the five seconds it takes to pass Wal-Mart that a good older brother would bring a churro when he fetches Sam. His stomach rumbles. He passes on by. He eats a peanut.

Parents with dusty bolt-action rifles that they're holding entirely wrong escort their children, herded close, down the sidewalks, and the school buses are full of small surgical-masked faces. This week they're afraid to breathe the air, last week they were afraid to drink the water. Next week maybe the parents will realize that they're more likely to be killed by their own children gone feral.

Dean nearly gets himself shot at the Santa Clara county line when he sneaks up on a platoon of armed-to-the-teeth National Guardsmen. He only sneaks up because the soldiers, to a man, are facing the other direction. They have no reason to anticipate that anyone would be trying to get in to the county.

Dean says that his son, his little toddler son, is with the babysitter in Palo Alto. Please, he says. He needs to find his son. The soldiers let him pass.

Eleven miles out from Palo Alto, he passes a smoke-darkened 76 sign advertising gas at eleven bucks per gallon of watered-down unleaded. Ten yards back from the sign, which still stands tall, rubble and melted steel are still burning hot. It could've been burning for days.

Three miles out from Palo Alto, an ambulatory figure of indeterminate age and sex and well-being staggers into the road from the right shoulder as the car approaches. Dean skirts around it without slowing down because he has places to be and the figure is neither tall nor brown-haired. He spares a glance out the passenger window and sees the blood on its chin. It might not be dead yet, he can't tell.

He doesn't check the mirror to see if it's following him down the road. Three miles. Three miles at thirty miles an hour. Dean is six minutes away from Palo Alto. He drives a little faster.

Back in Coeur d'Alene, Dean had signed into the Stanford network with his dummy administrator account, Mr. Leonard Zeppelin, listed as Residential Defenestrator. But it turns out Sam's still a paranoid bastard no matter how normal, and his address on file leads Dean to a Hostess factory with flaking paint in San Jose, trucks still pulled up to the loading docks and doors hanging open. Dean cackles.

Dizzy with the unexpected bounty, Dean stuffs his pockets with Ho Hos and Sno Balls, and adds a couple strawberry cupcakes for Sam 'cause the freak always liked the orange ones best. There are no orange ones here so Dean goes for the next best, and he tries not to think about the symbolism of that. He quickly unwraps and eats a Ding Dong.

Dean tries calling Dad and, predictably, gets voicemail. Dean's reduced to triangulating from the last known location of Sam's cell phone (before it went dead, Dean's brain helpfully reminds him, dead) and finds himself picking his way on foot down a quiet residential street in Mountain View, walking a cautious radius around the burned-out hulks of cars and the occasional corpse. It's pitch black, the day wasted on a wild goose chase and non-perishable pastries.

Dean drops to a squat in front of the first two bodies he finds, slumped against each other like they fell asleep. He squints. There's blood under their fingernails and between their teeth, bullet holes in their chests. Infected when they died. Good to know.

Something metal clangs nearby. Dean scans the street with his flashlight and finds nothing. He has to clamber over a curl of downed chain-link fencing to continue down the block.

He's closing in on the red-Sharpie X on the map he's clutching so tightly it crumples. The X designates the last place Sam's cell phone picked up a desperate voice mail. Dean's steps slow, then stop as he examines his surroundings.

He's slowed to a crawl these last few blocks. Been forced to leave the car behind to fight his way through this fucking junkyard. Tread on a nice old carpet of decomposing bodies. Dean squints down the block at his destination and tries to remember the word for those medieval cage things, the metal ones they hung up at the gates as a warning. Giblets? Gibbets.

If Dean were a Croat with a hankering for some tasty brains, he doesn't think he'd keep going this direction, surrounded by fallen predecessors. He thinks he'd get hungry and turn back, save his energy.

It's too perfect. Someone built this labyrinth - someone who really knew his stuff.

A smile widens on Dean's face like a sunrise. "Attaboy."

As he wends his way through jagged metal and rotting flesh, Dean's suffused with pride. He finds himself noting Sam's handiwork, admiring a clean headshot on a bloody-toothed body slumped against the curb.

The epicenter of the downed infected lies in front of a peach-colored stucco building with fragrant hibiscus out front. A closer look yields a semi-circle of red plastic gas canisters ringed around the vulnerable main entryway, ready to blow with a single rifle shot.

Well. This is it.

The ceiling is white and popcorn-textured, the kind full of asbestos.

Sam is turned away, saying something that refuses to form into words in Dean's mind. He gestures emphatically, knocking over a camping lantern and sending the only light in the room into disconcerting, asymmetrical angles. Sam becomes a silhouette. A potted palm becomes a claw. Dean groans. He opens his eyes again and Sam is kneeling next to the couch, his concerned face just inches away.

"Hey, Dean." Sam's smile is the same as it was. Dean lets his eyes flutter shut, and swear to God it wasn't even meant to get Sam palming his face with a hushed, "Hey, hey, Dean." Sam's hands are warm.

"You don't have a pube beard," Dean says, and Sam frowns and runs a hand over Dean's scalp, checks for brain-muddling dents in Dean's skull and just finds his brother.

"Sorry," Sam says. "We heard you come through the window and thought you were, you know."

We, Dean thinks, and swings his gaze around. The blonde who tried to beat in Dean's head with a baseball bat is perched on the coffee table looking contrite.

"Hi," she says. She's wearing a Smurf t-shirt and striped cotton panties.

Sam clears his throat. "Dean, meet Jessica." His other hand rests on Dean's knee. "My wife."

Concussion, Dean thinks, I have a concussion. He stops making an effort to hang onto the dizzying lamp-lit room and passes out again, head dropping heavy into Sam's hands.

Dean wakes up stretched flat on his back, calves cramping, throbbing head still cradled somewhere soft. A purr resonates in his bones: he's in the car.

He's in the car.

He's in the car and he's not conscious, which means -

Dean cracks an eye open. Sam's driving. Dean peers up at the driver's seat and can see the cowlick at the nape of Sam's neck. Neat little swirl like a galaxy.

The thighs beneath his head are clad in worn-soft pajama pants with Curious George on them. Blonde curls brush his face when the girl leans forward to speak softly to Sam. Dean tunes out the chatter about names he doesn't know and listens to the crashing-wave rhythm of Sam's speech.

Jessica smells like dryer sheets and gunpowder. Affecting a sleepy twisting frown, Dean shifts in her lap so he's facing in toward her body.

He's nearly drifting off again, comfy and lazy, when they go over either a speed bump or a dead body in the road. Regardless, it jostles them all, and Dean barely keeps from throwing a hand out to restrain himself.

He needn't have bothered. Sam turns down the radio.

"By the way." Dean can hear the laugh hiding in Sam's throat. "My brother's been awake for about five minutes."

Dean opens his eyes and Jessica's staring down at him. From the enviable vantage point of her lap, he flashes his most winning grin. "Hi," he says, making no move to get up.

He tries to keep his expression from faltering when she studies him for a long, uncomfortable moment. "Off," she says, and shoves at his shoulder.

Dean sits up and immediately feels claustrophobic in the back seat. He rolls a shoulder till it crackles, contorts till he can feel a pop-pop-pop all the way up his spine. "Where we headed?"

"Away," Sam says. "You led a trail of those things right to our doorstep. Thanks for that."

"You barricaded yourself in with bodies," Dean says. "Forgive me for giving away your carefully disguised hiding place."

"It's the principle of the thing," Sam says. "There's brains on the carpet."

"Maybe they're your landlord's brains," Dean said. "You get a good look at the Croat?"

Sam barks the beginning of a laugh, then tamps it down, mouth twitching. Dean immediately forms the goal of making Sam laugh out loud at something extremely distasteful in the next twenty-four hours. "That what they're calling them?" Sam asks.

"Yup," Dean says. "Not a lot of news out here, huh?" He examines the changes wrought on the car during his unconsciousness. The footwells are full of gear packed in labeled plastic tubs. A first aid kit. Bungee cord. Duct tape. Gallon-jugs of water. Unopened boxes of .227 rounds. Carrot-cake flavored Clif bars. Something that claims to be dehydrated beef stroganoff. "Cleaned out the pantry?"

A hint of pink rises to the skin at the back of Sam's neck. "Mountain Hardwear left the security system down when they evacuated." He shrugs defensively, glances back over his shoulder. "It was going to waste."

It's a pretty incredible haul they've got. Sophisticated. Nutrition-minded. Carefully planned.

Dean fingers the crinkly cellophane of the cakes in his coat pocket and, cheeks burning, makes a mental note to dispose of them discreetly the next time they stop. He pulls his hands from his pockets and claps them down on the vinyl of the front seat. "All right," he says. "If I'm awake I'm driving."

Sam makes Dean walk a straight line and touch his nose with his fingertip before Sam'll let him behind the wheel. Dean punches him in the shoulder and something crazy in him makes him want to sweep a leg behind Sam's knees and take him down to the pavement. Hit him till he's wearing Dean's colors on his face, bruise-purple and and abraded red. Wrap a hand around Sam's neck and feel his larynx, grab onto his voice.

He doesn't.

Dean's supposed to be calling Dad once he's collected Sammy to establish a meeting spot. His cell phone makes a sad noise when he turns it on. No signal. Nearly out of battery.

"Cell towers are all knocked out," Sam says. "Well, them and everything else that takes electricity."

Dean points them toward Colorado and navigates the dark streets. Dead streetlamps loom like lightning-struck trees. The darkened stoplights seem to stare from every intersection.

They're on a crumbling paved road through fields of orange poppies when Sam catches Dean's eye in the rear view mirror. "Hey," Sam whispers from the back seat. Jessica's mouth hangs a little open where she's sleeping against Sam's shoulder. Sammy always used to drool on Dean during long car trips. Dean wonders if Sam's -- if Sam's wife does the same. Sam's just looking at Dean, eyes running over him till Dean shifts in his seat. Sam opens his mouth, closes it. He dangles a hand over the front seat, finger brushing Dean's sleeve. "Sorry our stuff's taking up the whole car."

"Well," Dean says. "Far be it from me to separate you from your My Little Pony collection. Tried it once when you were twelve. No-go."

Sam rolls his eyes and that's just so, so Sam-like. Dean wants to noogie him, and maybe hit him a little. Just enough to make Sam shove him back. Dean wants to get Sam in a headlock and not let him go. Sam glances ruefully at the boxes in the footwells. "We were stuck in the apartment forever with nothing to do but shoot Croats out the window and use the label-maker till it ran out of tape. We might have gotten a little carried away with the, uh, provisions side of things."

A question has been bothering Dean. "What were you doing hanging around there anyway? 'Stead of heading for the nearest government bunker. Letting yourself get cornered just because you don't want to lose your security deposit, really?"

Sam seems ready to respond, then visibly changes gears between one breath and the next. "How do you even know what a security deposit is?"

"Headboard meets plaster, ask me how," Dean says. "Don't change the subject."

In the mirror, Sam looks at Dean like he's very, very stupid. "We were waiting for you," Sam says.

The stupidity of that should probably piss him off, because Dean and Dad could've both been dead. They could've been infected. They could've been on a hunt on the other side of the country. They haven't seen Sam in five years and they hardly went out on the best of terms, so they could've just counted on Sam taking care of himself and not cared enough to come make sure of it. And meanwhile Sam's just cooling his heels in the eye of the storm, shooting attackers with a sniper rifle out the bedroom window, amassing supplies and waiting, just on the strength of his belief that Dean will come and get him.

Really, Dean should be pissed.

Dean swallows, throat tight. He maneuvers around a motionless school bus in the road. It has its stop signs out: do not pass. He's already gone a few seconds too long without responding, there's nothing he can say now that won't be weird. "Hey, you want a cupcake?"

The arch of Sam's eyebrow approaches the upper atmosphere.

"They're the pink ones."

"Yeah," Sam says, nodding slowly with a steady considering look at Dean that makes Dean shift uncomfortably. Then Sam thrusts out an imperious opened hand. "Gimme."

Dean produces the cupcakes in their plastic wrapper from his coat pocket. Sam opens them with exaggerated delicacy, sending concerned glances at Jessica with every crinkle from the packaging. Sam takes a bite of the first cupcake and pauses with eyes fluttered shut before chewing and swallowing. He greedily licks a pink crumb from the corner of his mouth.

Sam doesn't think Dean's watching him in the mirror. Dean knows. That little smile of Sam's is secret. It isn't for anyone else and Sam wouldn't share it on purpose.

Maybe Sam's forgotten the way Dean watches him.

Dean shifts his attention back to the fields of poppies and lupines, and listens to the quiet sounds of Sam happily demolishing a packet of snack cakes.

Sam leaves the empty wrapper on the back window ledge, undoubtedly spilling crumbs of frosting that'll melt in the daylight. Caught in the air coming out of the vents, the plastic flutters, weak and transparent on nervous wings.

"So." Dean can't seem to let a good thing just be, he must have picked that up from Sam. "Wife?"

Sam's eyes flick to the woman sleeping against his side with a warmth that Dean's never seen aimed at someone else. "Yeah." Dean's been watching Sam's hands. He wears a wedding ring. Dean's little brother wears a wedding ring. "Been almost a year."

Dean's still got volcanic ash lodged in his throat from Rainier. He coughs. "Shotgun wedding?"

Sam's face darkens and whoa, okay, backing up a conversational step or two, hands in the air. "Been married a year, been together almost five." He's sitting very straight, arms spread along the top of the back seat. Taking up so much goddamn space in Dean's car. Sam's everywhere. "We wanted to do it before grad school took over our lives."

"Big wedding?" Oh god, oh god, it comes out of Dean's mouth, all sharp and petty, before he can stop it. He should've kept his cool, dropped a sexual innuendo.

Sam licks his lips and doesn't have the decency to look angry. "If I'd've invited you, would you have come?"

Dean scoffs wordlessly.

Sam carefully extracts himself from Jessica and leans against the front seat again, much too far into Dean's personal space. His index finger traces the leather of Dean's jacket collar. His voice is soft and deliberate, and the thing that a lot of poor suckers don't get about Sam is what a cruel motherfucker he can be. "Would you have been my best man, Dean?" Sam draws out the hiss of best unbearably. "Stood up at the altar with me in a tux?" He flicks at Dean's collar. "Would you have given a toast at the reception, told everyone a funny story about your little brother? What story would you have told them?"

The skin behind Dean's ear grows warm and damp from Sam's close breath. They're driving rough and jarring over rubble now, no choice but to go right over when it blocks the street, and the sleeping woman in the back seat is going to wake up any second. We are experiencing unexpected turbulence, Dean thinks.

When Dean doesn't answer, Sam rearranges himself with his arm around his wife's shoulders. "Didn't think so," Sam says, and Sam has the goddamn nerve to look like he's the one who just got verbally stabbed to death with an icepick.

Jessica wakes up and goddamnit, Sam always did know how to get the last word in.

If there were a way to get to Colorado without passing through some of the most brutal wilderness in the country, they'd take it.

They get a crackling signal on the short-wave in the trunk and learn that down south, the Border Patrol's pretty much shooting everything that moves. The north is ash-choked and there are tremors running through Seattle, sending coffee sloshing in its cups and some viaduct collapsing. There's no battle left to fight in California. Dean can't shoot an earthquake. He can't stab a disease that spreads like chlamydia at a frat party, can't drown a creeping infection with holy water, though not for lack of trying. They head for the passes in the Sierras even though it's October and they'll be unmaintained. Half the Park Service is on furlough and the other half fled for their lives long ago.

Their first effort is to cut through the thick swathes of National Forests, keep to the service roads and drive in shifts so they don't have to stop. About half an hour in, Sam rolls down his window and peers out intently. Dean keeps an eye on him in the rear view. Fifteen minutes later, Sam says, "Stop. Stop the car."

Dean's hindbrain catches Sam's urgency and he stops before he even consciously registers Sam's order. The brakes protest.

Sam clambers out and tells Jess, "Stay here." She follows him.

Dean gets out and something compels him to guide the door shut carefully, not let it slam. Dean looks behind him, then looks again. There's nothing there. He puts his back to the car, unnerved. "Sammy?

"Listen," Sam says.

Dean listens. He tries to listen and he'd think he'd gone deaf if he couldn't hear the familiar rhythm of Sam's breathing. Middle of the forest and he can't hear a thing.

Sam crouches over a dead bird at the side of the road. It looks natural enough, a windshield casualty, but there's something --

"No flies," Sam says. His fingers twitch nervously. "No maggots." He's got a hand on Jess's shoulder as he steps both her and Dean back toward the car, presses them on ahead of him. "I think we should go." He's staring off into the green-shadowed north, the tangle of ferns and nettles just off the road and the towering trunks beyond them.

Dean looks over his shoulder. Looks to the north. "Sam. Hey, Sammy." He catches Sam's elbow. "Hold on. I've just gotta." He steps away from the car and bumps into Jess, who's watching the trees.

Dean's toes are at the edge of the pavement, boot ready to come down on the soft dirt beyond it, when crackling interrupts him. His gaze snaps down the road and catches on Sam, moving without hesitation. He's half a dozen paces off the roadway and headed north, wallowing in brambles. As Dean watches a thorny arm of blackberry catches Sam's cheek, scrapes across the skin.

Jessica's already sprinting down the road, and Dean deliberately backs up, makes sure he's got both feet firmly on the pavement before he follows. By the time he reaches them, Jessica's got her arms locked around Sam's neck and shoulder, ready to drag him back, but she's motionless, eyes searching between the tree trunks deeper into the forest. Dean locks his eyes onto them and doesn't look at anything else. He pulls them both by their collars back to the road, cursing when he catches a lash of nettle across his forearm and a snapping branch nearly takes his eye out. All three stagger drunkenly when they hit asphalt.

Dean has to rear up a second time to give chase when Sam takes off scrambling on hands and knees, makes it back to the edge of the underbrush. Dean hauls him back and wraps both arms and legs around Sam while he thrashes, tries to break free. He bucks and twists. Sam's gotten stronger since he's been gone.

A small, feminine hand lands on Sam's forehead. Sam calms at Jessica's touch. He relaxes into Dean's hold, but Dean doesn't let go till he's sure. Sam blinks rapidly and shakes his head. "Fuck," he says shakily.

"I think," Jessica says, "that we should go around the forest." Her eyes are carefully averted from the northern woods.

Before they can get back in the car, rustling in the underbrush on the other side of the road drops them all into wary silence. The sound comes in fits and starts: whisper of ferns, quiet. Crackle of twigs, quiet. Dean's got his gun out and focused on where whatever's making the noise will emerge. His finger spasms on the trigger guard in surprise when a glassy-eyed deer emerges, low to the ground.

The deer drags itself onto the road with a low animal moan, scraping its belly along the pavement. Its fine skin is abraded, burrs and mud matting its hair. A hind leg trails behind it, useless and flashing a hint of bone.

Dean's stomach churns as he watches the deer make its slow, agonizing progress across the road. He swallows and looks up, makes sure to catch the eye of each of the other two. None of them are looking into the forest anymore. Jessica slides quietly into the back seat. Dean wants to get them turned around and headed back out the way they came before they have to watch the deer disappear into the green to the north.

Sam holds his hand out for Dean's gun. Nervous, maybe, wanting some protection. Dean trusts him. He gets back in the driver's seat.

The thunderous bang in the quiet forest snaps Dean's eyes up to the rear view mirror. Sam gets in back and shuts the door. A brown shape slumps just at the edge of the trees, inching painfully north no more.

It's not that Dean doesn't like Jess, it's just that he doesn't like Jess. They're inching their way south along damaged roads. Four times they're forced to turn back and detour, until Jess suggests that they abandon the Impala, hike through the wreckage, and hot-wire a car on the other side. Dean sees Sam shaking his head vehemently in the rear-view mirror, and he drives on without comment, clenching his teeth.

They cut over to the 58, park in an underpass, and clamber up the dusty hill to the highway. A SmartCar lies overturned like a helpless turtle at the bottom of the slope. On the freeway, sedans and station wagons rest bumper to bumper, silent. Somewhere in the far-off distance a car alarm wails. Some of the cars sit empty and some of them are tombs. "All right," Dean says. "Let's just get this done and get out of here." He tosses a length of tubing to Sam, who catches it and then fumbles to hold on to the gas can Dean thrusts into his arms. "You know what to do, man. The Missus can come with me, I'll show her the ropes."

Jess's mouth is an unimpressed straight line. Dean's learned that now - Jess. For fuck's sake, Dean knows Sam's wife's nickname and he's not happy about it.

Dean picks a car with no bodies in it because, forget her delicate sensibilities, Dean doesn't want to crouch down next to a hermetically-sealed Subaru full of dead folks. It's downright … off-putting, is what it is. "Just pay attention, all right?" He pries open the gas cap and threads the tube down into the tank. He gets down on the ground so gravity will do its work and grimaces in anticipation. "It's not rocket science, but it can poison you, so there's an art to it."

Dean feels more self-conscious than he should, knowing she's watching him. He takes a long pull, darts away as fast as he can but still gets a foul mouthful, a taste that sends his hardwired survival instincts into reeling, alarm-clanging flight mode. He jerks back and retches even as he quickly positions the gas can under the tube.

Jess is watching him with an eyebrow raised. "Should I be taking notes?"

Dean wants to be the good guy here and just be happy for his little brother, he really does, but it's tough when she just isn't good enough for Sam. The flow of gasoline slowly fizzles out to a slow drip. Dean re-caps the tank so nothing explodes unnecessarily, though - Dean pauses a moment as he screws the cap back on the gas can - there are worse ideas than finding a way to cremate the dead highway.

Further on down the way, he can hear Sam's retching noises and he smiles. "Okay." Dean claps his hands together and hoists the translucent red can, eyes the shadowy sloshing of the liquid. It's only half-full. He casts an eye around.

"That one probably has a pretty big gas tank," Jess says, pointing at a hulking gold Escalade as if she knows exactly what Dean was thinking.

"Yeah," Dean says, nodding slowly. Through the tinted windows, he can see silhouettes in the front seat, and a child seat in the back that might be empty. It might. "Yeah, but we don't have to - there are others."

The line of Jess's jaw is sharp, defined. There are half-moons of dirt under her fingernails. "We're vulnerable while we're up here. I'd rather not waste time, how about you?"

They go for the Escalade. It isn't pretty.

There's an object inside, leaning up against the driver's-side window, that used to be a brunette woman. Thirty-something, so far as Dean can tell. She looks like she's very, very tired. So tired she's sagging on her bones like overripe fruit. There's blood all down her chin and shirtfront, a violent eruption.

Dean fiddles with the tank. It has an anti-siphoning barrier that takes a couple jabs of a tire iron to disable. He threads the tube in. "We should see about getting that vaccine thing. We're going through some pretty hard-hit areas."

"There isn't a vaccine," Jess says absently. "It's a crock of shit. There's no treating it, period." Dean's crouched down on the ground sucking at the tube, but Jess is looking into the back of the car, where the infant seat is. It's a fucking stupid thing to do. Dean stays sitting on the ground so he won't be tempted to look, even out of the corner of his eye.

"Oh, yeah?"

"Yeah," Jess says. She turns to look at him, and then she looks a little too long. A little too consideringly. "You never even wondered, did you? It didn't occur to you?"

Dean scrapes his boot along the asphalt. Wonder isn't Dean's favorite verb. "What?"

"Where my family is," Jess says. Dean starts, mouth open, but she holds up a hand. "There isn't any kind of treatment for hemoemesis," Jess says. "They just say that so people with symptoms, contagious people, will come in to the checkpoints." The flow of gas has flowed to a drip, drip, drip. The pavement bites into Dean's hands. "They won't even release the bodies," Jess says.

She meets Dean's eyes and Dean gets scared there for a second. He gets scared because sure, he's lost his mom, he's lost friends and fellow soldiers in the never-ending battle against weird motherfucking shit. But the way Jess is looking at him, it sends his stomach into somersaults. It makes him swing his head around instinctively, check on Sam's location and verify that he's spitting irritably a hundred yards away, trying to get the gasoline taste out of his mouth.

"They incinerate them," Jess says firmly. She doesn't look away. "Hazardous-" She twists the cap back onto the gas tank. "Waste." She heaves up the gas can, and Dean can see it's straining her arm, she doesn't have the muscle for it, but he doesn't try to take it away. "But you didn't wonder about them."

Sam's trailing behind, his barely-audible curses reaching them on the breeze. Dean gave him the leaky gas can. They reach the car and Dean silently helps Jess wrestle the gas can into the trunk. It's not the greatest idea, carrying around a stockpile of highly-flammable liquid. But they're short on options. Either they stock up on gas or they bust into the nearest Macy's and steal themselves some roller skates.

Jess glances back at Sam, and Dean gets the sense that she's timing how long they've got till he reaches them. "I knew it was you," she says. "Back at the apartment."

Dean hadn't noticed that Jess is almost as tall as he is, and he isn't thrilled now that he's realized it. "That makes me feel so much better," he says. "Thanks. I'm glad you were beating the shit out of me on purpose."

"Once Sam stopped me," she says, and for the first time since their first prickly, brittle introductions, her gaze is earnest, no hint of hostility. "The look on his face-" She cuts herself off. "I knew, just from the way he'd always talked about you. You were the only person who could put that look on his face." She places a hand square in the center of Dean's chest and pushes, too forcefully to be fully joking. "For five years I've been hearing about Sam's big brother who hung the moon, okay? But all I know is that you didn't call, you didn't write, you didn't even come crash on our couch uninvited and drink all our beer. So I'd like it." She glances to the side. Sam is getting near earshot now. "I'd really like it if you were everything he thinks you are. I don't want him to be wrong." The pressure of her hand digs the edges of Dean's amulet sharply into his chest."He missed you."

Sam reaches them pink-faced, sweaty and panting. "Everything go okay?" He looks hopefully between them, like they're friends he's just set up on a blind date.

"Yeah," Dean says. It's harder to hate someone when they clearly have an adequate understanding of the fact that Sam is the most important person in the entire world. Dean pats the gas can in the trunk. "Jess here's a pro already."

Sam beams, goofy and open-mouthed as he catches his breath. They fuel up the car and leave the highway behind.

They bed down in a bonafide camp site down the road from a truck stop, with a potable water tap and primitive metal grills. Dean wishes they had a pack of burgers to cook. Maybe he could go into the woods and kill a … a … an elk or something. Dean kills lots of things, he could totally kill an elk. And then he could make Sam gut and dress it, just to see the look on his face.

They dine on dehydrated spaghetti instead, washed down with a little too much of the beer they found two towns back, thoroughly skunked from being left in the sun. Sam's in a good mood, gets pink and quick to laugh after two foul beers on a too-empty stomach. He's fumbles cheerfully when he puts out the fire, kicks old ash over the embers. Sam's all hands when he's like this, gets physically affectionate in a way that he rarely is. Rarely was, Dean supposes, it's not like he knows this version of Sam. Sam sneaks his nose beneath the curtain of Jess's air to whisper in her ear with a silly little smile. He claps a hand on Dean's shoulder, smacks Dean in the knee, flicks him in the side of the face when he teases Sam. It's a good night and Dean passes out hard when he hits the blankets in the back seat.

It's ass o'clock in the middle of the night and Dean wakes up ready to burst. He awkwardly maneuvers himself upright because he'd rather pass a kidney stone than accidentally piss in the car.

He unfurls from the back seat and tries to be quiet when he opens the door, because Sam and Jess's tent (really, a tent, which apparently saw heavy rotation at freakin' Yosemite when they were in college) is pitched just yards away.

Dean pisses against a tree with a smile, but when he gets back to the car and glances at the tent, the satisfied grin drops right off his face. The tent door is unzipped and hanging loose. It's probably nothing. It's nothing. Sam will just be stretched out with his face buried in the pillow, limbs splayed to take up nearly the whole tent. And Jess has just stepped out to go pee behind a discreet shrub, and stupidly didn't zip up the tent, because how can she be good enough for Sam if she's letting him get mosquito bites? So yeah, it's probably that, because if it isn't nothing then it's something and Dean didn't notice the tent hanging open when he first got out of the car and he's wasted whole minutes when he should've been searching for where the grizzly bear or wendigo or killer with a hockey mask dragged them off to.

Dean shifts the flap of the rain fly aside. The tent is empty.

Stupid, stupid, stupid.

Dean's steps stutter first in one direction, then another, his pulse fluttering with urgency. He doesn't want to waste another moment by going the wrong way, but he doesn't know where they've been taken.

He doesn't have to languish in uncertainty for long. He hears Sam groan, long and low, and in seconds Dean's across the campground and moving through the trees with gun in hand.

He comes to a clearing surrounded by towering pines. The protected little circle of meadow is bathed in silver moonlight, and it's scattered with picnic tables.

Dean's gun droops in his hand. He steadies himself against a pine tree with the other. His racing heart doesn't slow down.

Sam and Jess have got an unzipped sleeping bag spread across the picnic table nearest Dean. Jess lies flat on her back, moonlit and pale and exuberantly naked, like she's frolicking around the garden of Eden without a care in the world.

Sam's half-hidden between Jess's drawn-up knees. Dean can see the top of Sam's head in the cradle of Jess's legs, can see Sam's big hands gripping her hips firmly while he works. The broad expanse of Sam's shoulders presses against the backs of her thighs.

Dean can hear the sounds that Sam's mouth makes, and his muffled contented vocalizations. It does strange things to Dean's head that he now knows that Sam makes the same happy little noises when he's going down on a woman that he does when he's getting a hard, bruising shoulder rub when he's wound tight and aching after a rough hunt.

Dean watches the way Jess hitches up her lower body to meet Sam's mouth, to shove at him shamelessly. He watches the rise and fall of her chest, her small but frankly magnificent breasts, when her breath quickens.

She fumbles at Sam's head, musses his hair. "Sam. Sam."

Sam reluctantly shifts his attention from the task at hand. When Sam licks his lips, Dean can't stop himself from mirroring the movement.

Sam moves up her body with a controlled strength that Dean knows well, hovering just far enough above her to tease, not to touch. They kiss for a long time, until Jess goes for Sam's belt. Sam turns his face a little to the side and pants, tries to find her mouth again periodically but mostly fails, his own mouth hanging open.

When she shoves Sam's pants down around his thighs, Dean should be laughing at Sam's bare ass, pale and vulnerable, a punch line in the dim light, but Dean isn't laughing. Jess gets Sam's flannel unbuttoned and half-off when she seems to grow impatient, leaves him with only one strong arm exposed. They're fit together like pieces of a puzzle and Jess is reaching down low between them, Dean cranes his neck but he can't see, he can't see -

Jess lets out a small, hurt sound when Sam presses forward, a sound that slides into a long sigh. Her eyes are shut, a satisfied smile on her face, and oh Jesus, Dean thinks. That is the look Sam's girl has when she's feeling Sam's cock inside her and clearly enjoying it quite a lot. Dean can't unknow the sight of it.

This would be an appropriate juncture ('And it wasn't before?' Deans mind asks him hysterically) for Dean to leave, to go back to the car instead of watching Sam fucking his wife.

Dean stays long enough to watch Sam finish, groaning out his release with an out-flung hand splintering the edge of the picnic table. He leaves when Sam moves back into the V between Jess's legs, palms her ass and tips her up to his mouth.

Dean scrunches miserably into the back seat, suddenly resenting its inadequacy, irrationally angry that he can't stretch out. If he could stretch out, he could sleep instead of tossing and turning.

In the morning, Sam and Jess are affectionate and handsy over the small fire they get going to cook up oatmeal and instant coffee. Dean watches-doesn't-watch as Sam sneaks a kiss against Jess's cheek, brushes his nose against her ear.

Dean drinks too much of the coffee and has the jitters all day, hands shaking, irritable and light-headed.

Jess's aim is atrocious. Dean finds that vindicating. He holds tight on to that fact when Sam's spending hours trying to teach her, attention totally focused on her. Dean shuffles his feet, picks at a hangnail, opens the hood and makes purposeful noises with the engine. He pauses with grease on his hands, remembering how slowly Sam learned. How much time Dean dedicated to teaching him. He jumps and hits his head on the raised hood when Sam taps him on the shoulder. Dean curses while Sam stifles a grin.

"Getting some important repairs done?" Sam asks with a straight face.

Dean grits his teeth and the next time Sam says they should take a break, get some practice for Jess, Dean wordlessly pulls over next to an abandoned barn and points to the broad side. "That should do you."

Sam glares but leads her away with the .22, the most forgiving recoil. Dean turns his back to dig through the once-organized bins of supplies, and they're halfway to the barn when Dean hears Jess's indignant, "Hey!" Dean grabs the last chocolate-chip Clif bar and grins as he tears the wrapper open with his teeth.

The picnic table isn't an isolated incident. Like Dean can't unknow Jess's fulfilled face when Sam's buried deep in her, like he can't unknow the full-body shudder that marks Sam's climax, he can't not notice when the happy couple are not-so-subtly sneaking some alone time.

Jess blows Sam against a tree, and Dean nearly gives himself away tripping over a root backing up suddenly when Jess slides a finger into Sam's ass.

Dean's not sure if he should be scandalized or deeply proud of his late-bloomer little brother when he comes back early from scouting the damaged road ahead and finds that Sam has bent Jess over the hood of the car. Dean cuts half-moons into the flesh of his palms as he keeps his eyes locked on the way Sam's hands maneuver her hips, lift her and push her and drag her back onto his cock. Sam bites at the nape of Jess's neck, and the thing is, the thing is -

Dean's not even hard. There's a knot in his throat and his lips are thin, tense. He has to high-tail it back down the road and breathe deeply, doubled over with his hands on the concrete median to support him.

They really need to just find Dad. Then, they can drop Sam and Jess somewhere safe to keep on with their disgustingly perfect life together so that Dad and Dean can figure out what to do about this whole the-world-is-possibly-maybe-ending issue. Dean can go fix what's happening to the world and just be permanently ruined.

He hadn't thought it could get worse than Sam leaving that first time, but Sam being here is an uncontrolled kind of hurt. It'll wreck him when Sam leaves again, he can already tell. It will just straight-up erase any possibility of Dean being a functional human being who has relationships with other people, but he won't survive Sam staying.

They pass through a forest of wind mills spread across the barren brown hills, still hypnotically churning their white arms, the generated energy going who-knows where. Out here, the land's so desolate they can dedicate acres and acres to a wind farm. No one wants this land. No one's building McMansions out here and commuting to the city. It's too expensive to pipe water out here and it's not like the area's going to generate tourist dollars.

They pass through ghost towns with downed power lines and darkened, well-kept ranch houses. Feral dogs pad through the streets, fighting over scraps. A labradoodle with a red collar curls in a ball on the side of a dry fountain in the town square, tail wagging as it chews tooth marks into a disarticulated femur.

Sam's behind the wheel when they pass a sign for Shady Hills Retirement Community, which Dean thinks totally sounds like the name of a cemetery, way out in the ass end of nowhere. Down the road Dean sees a large, institutional-looking building and a scattering of cottages. Sam steers around a small bicycle tipped over in the road, spokes spinning slightly in the breeze. A dead Croat with a bullet hole between its eyes sprawls on its back like it's finding shapes in the clouds. Up ahead, a tall figure is walking back into town with a small, limp form in its arms. Even as Dean's saying, "Sam, don't," Dean's idiot brother is slowing to a stop next to the man with the dead child in his arms. There's no question that the child is dead; the blood pouring down the front of his Lakers t-shirt would prove it if his pallor didn't. The ragged crescent of a bite made with blunt human teeth smiles at them from the child's neck.

The man turns to regard the car, his back bowed under the weight of his burden. He's wearing coveralls, a plastic name tag, and blood. HANK, the name tag says. The dead child's arms dangle. The engine idles noisily. Hank's chapped lips thin and flatten out, then relax into careful neutrality. "Ought to keep on moving," he says. "Town's sick."

"Croatoan?" Jess asks out the barely-cracked window.

Hank shakes his head and the child's arms swing slightly. "Not yet," he says. "That one came from somewhere else." He doesn't look behind him at the dead Croat. He squints into the setting sun and his movement turns into nodding, agreeing with God knows what. "Ought to keep going."

"Keep driving, Sam." There's no reason Dean couldn't say it loud and clear but he lets it slip from between unmoving lips. Maybe it's out of respect. Blood is streaming down the man's sleeve, wetting the denim, and Dean would just bet that he has a bite mark of his own to show off.

"Can we help?" Sam asks.

Hank hitches the body in his arms higher, muscles trembling. He's still nodding into the sunset. "Yeah," he says suddenly. He looks back at the car and then, of all times, his eyes well up. "Yeah, you can help."

The sickness is no longer sweeping through this little outpost. It's finished. Hemoemesis leaves the healthy adults still standing, and this was a refuge for the infirm. Hank identifies himself as the groundskeeper. "Where are all the other staff?" Jess asks.

"They ran," Hank says. He sets the dead boy down and picks up a shovel. His hands are blistered.

"But you stayed," Jess says. "You didn't leave them."

Hank plunges the blade of the shovel into the turf. "Looks like it didn't make much difference to them."

The well-kept lawn in front of the nursing home is pocked with holes. Lots of holes. Individual and six feet deep. Meticulous, no corners cut. An unholy stench comes from the plain, utilitarian building.

Sam and Jess share a shovel, trading off. Dean sees Jess's hands blister and bleed, but she doesn't say anything, so he doesn't either. Dean grips his own shovel and digs steadily for hours.

When the empty holes are deep enough and waiting to be filled, Dean stands next to Hank. "So you know about Croatoan. You know it comes next."

The man nods, watching Sam and Jess coming out the back door of the nursing home, carrying between them a body wrapped in a sheet, its fingertips and toes sticking out. "If you're traveling, reckon you've seen it happen before." He catches Dean's gaze. "Won't be long, will it?" Dean's not sure if he sounds afraid or wistful.

"Under a day. Couple hours, probably." Dean says. "Most people wouldn't spend 'em this way." He gestures to the once-elegant lawn. It looks like a battlefield pocked by bombs.

"I said I'd stay to take care of them." Hank steps away to tuck a sheet over bare toes. "If I haven't got much time left, I'm not going to make the last thing I do be breaking a promise." He surveys the rows of sheeted bundles.

When they bury the boy, Hank steps forward and Dean thinks he's going to say a few words. "He loved that bike," Hank says. "I told him not to wander off."

There's one hole left empty after they bury the boy.

"We can wait," Dean says quietly. "We'll stay."

Hank nods shortly. Jess's mouth opens, a question in her eyes, and Sam mercifully pulls her away, speaks quietly into her ear. Dean watches her face, beautifully transparent in a way Sam has never been with his quiet rages and private raptures.

The man turns after the mosquitoes emerge to hover in a cloud around them, but he never gets to see the fireflies come out.

The remaining three shovel by the glow of the lightning bugs as they fill in the last grave, and the bugs dance around them as they get back on the road, disregarding the endless rows of empty beds they could sleep in tonight.

Even the tips of the looming, overgrown saguaros are scorched brown. The air shimmers over the brittle, dry scrub on either side of the road. The car coughs and rattles for five miles as Dean pleads with her, coaxes, seduces, pulls out every weapon in his arsenal that he'd use on a human woman. Despite his best efforts, his baby grumbles quietly and stops entirely. Dean glides on over to the side of the road and stumbles out of the car on unsteady legs. When Sam follows him out, crowds too close into his space under the hood, Dean jabs a finger at Sam's chest and snarls. "You just had to move to fuckin' California."

Sam backs off with hands in the air, a prim look on his face. "That's right, I moved out here because I knew we were going to go driving through the desert in the middle of the fucking - the apocalyptic climate change and I just. Wanted. To fuck with you." Sam's cheeks are pink. He never took the heat well; he'd always sweated and huffed and got embarrassed that he couldn't bear it better.

Six hours later the sun's just past its peak and the thermometer built into Dean's compass is reading a hundred and twenty-two. Three battered re-used water bottles have gone into the radiator and the other two have been split between the three of them. There's one bottle left, either to pour into the radiator or their throats. Dean's eyes hurt from the dryness, and he hunches over the engine, drops his head and breathes shallowly. He slants glances at Sam pacing in the road. Sam's shirt is soaked through, clinging to him, and his hair clings in wet curls to the back of his neck. Jess is stretched in the back seat, insisting it's cooler in the shade even as the black metal box heats up in the sun.

Three hours later and the last bottle of water is sitting untouched. Maybe, maybe if they wait, and if it cools down over the night, and if they spend the last of their water on the engine, they'll be able to get moving again. And if the heat doesn't let up, if the car doesn't respond to this last-ditch effort like it hasn't responded to any of the others, they'll be miles from anywhere without either transportation or water.

It's pitch black. They gather around the engine in silence. Dean twists the cap off the bottle and pours all but the dregs in the engine. He takes a sip of what remains. Sam and Jess finish it off. "Okay," Dean says softly, like he's trying not to awaken a sleeping animal.

Dean slides into the driver's seat and twists the key in the ignition. She starts up with a quiet rumble, like nothing was wrong in the first place. "Fuck," Dean says for no reason. "Fuck!" His hands wander over the steering wheel, refusing to settle. "Right. This part's gonna suck." The engine's just going to poop out on them again if they don't help it vent off some heat, so with gritted teeth, Dean rolls the windows down and turns the heat on as high as it'll go, all that super-heated air blasting away from the engine and right into his face. Leaving the engine running, Dean clambers back out and starts digging through the trunk for the map, flashlight between his teeth. "Okay, okay, here." He taps a finger on a gray line snaking through Death Valley National Park. "There's a service road out of the park if we just keep going this way."

"We're in the Mojave." Sam's face is screwed up, ugly and tight. His fists are clenched. He shoulders Dean out of the way, grabs the flashlight right from Dean's teeth.

"It's Death Valley, you stupid fuck." Dean works his aching jaw. He finds his own hands are fists. He grabs for the flashlight and Sam holds it out of his reach.

Dean throws the first punch.

Sam gets Dean on his stomach, cheek gritting into the pavement, while Dean tries to work a leg free to kick Sam in the balls. Sam's rank and sweaty and soaking the back of Dean's shirt and it's disgusting, Dean can't stand it for another second so he unseats Sam, gets a glancing blow in that snaps Sam's head sharply to the left before Dean notices the taillights retreating down the road.

By the time Sam and Dean catch up to the car, stopped and idling a few hundred yards away, they're both doubled over and breathing heavy, supporting themselves on any part of the car they can find.

"What the fuck," Dean says, throwing the driver's side door open.

Jess's hands are tight on the wheel. "We're in between the Mojave and Death Valley," she says carefully, licking chapped lips. "Stuck in the middle." Jess breathes out a long sigh. "And I think we all need to get some water. Okay?" Her eyes are wet and shining, but to her credit, she's keeping it together.

"Yeah," Dean says, and he's staggered a couple steps back before he can stop his sway. "Shit." Dean hasn't fallen, and he realizes it's because Sam's caught him, Sam's holding him up. Sam continues to soak Dean's shirt. Sam's shivering, and Dean suddenly can't stop laughing at that. He looks helplessly at the car, brightly moonlit under the clear desert sky. "I can't drive," he says, wheezing. He laughs again. "I'll fucking wreck her." Sam's in no better shape. Dean fixes a stern look at Jess even as Sam tries to herd Dean into the back seat, protecting his head from the door frame like a fucking cop making an arrest. "Do not crash my car," Dean says.

"I won't," Jess says, and she actually looks serious. Dean wants to hug her.

"Don't crash my car," he says again from his vantage point slumped against Sam in the back.

"I won't, Dean," Jess says. Shadowy cactuses blur past. The blasting hot air makes it feel like there's a storm inside the car, a desert whirlwind.

Dean wakes up with a jolt, sits up straight, jostling the sleeping Sam draped all over him and provoking a groan. "My car," Dean says.

Jess turns in the front seat. She reaches back over the front seat, bottle of murky water in hand. "The car's all right," she says.

Dean drinks, grimacing through the taste of iodine. He surveys their surroundings - the stunted tree shading the car, the creek half-heartedly trickling through the dry earth a few paces away. He realizes the hand not holding the bottle is carding through Sam's hair, which is crackly and stiff with salty sweat. Jess is watching him in the rear view. "Thanks," he says, surprising himself.

"No problem," Jess says.

Dean watches the specks of river dirt dancing in the water while Sam grumbles himself awake, his morning twitches pressed up against Dean's side.

At first they think it's light pollution. They're camped in the foothills of Mt. Charleston with a panoramic view of Las Vegas, and it's a testament to the resilience and perhaps misplaced priorities of humanity that the city's still lit up like a Christmas tree with boxy but brilliant hotels, glowing pyramids and castles and globes, bright marquees and even roller coasters decked out in lights. It began as a dark clear night.

But the light from the sky grows brighter and brighter, stretching out across the desert in a shimmering green wave until it's so powerful that Dean can clearly see the smear of dirt on Sam's cheek. The aurora is flecked with streaks of pale blue like Dean has never seen in photos.

"My God," Sam breathes.

Just when it's bright enough to read by, there's a fizz and a crackle audible even from up here in the hills. The flats below are suddenly crisscrossed with a fiery grid as electricity races visibly down the power lines. A series of electrical transformers explodes, pop-pop-pop.

With a gentle, declining hum, the lights go out. All of them.

The hair on the back of Dean's neck stands up when he looks down at the dark city, now lit only by the eerie green light in the sky.

He reaches for Sam's arm and gets a static shock. He hisses and snaps his hand away.

The aurora's visible in the morning, faded to a pale red. The lights are still out in Vegas. When Dean checks his compass, it spins indecisively like a drunk sorority girl trying to find her keys.




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