Fic: Like Luggage of Some Departed Traveller; Four
Master Post
Prologue | One | Two | Three | Four | Five | Six
Jess wakes up to auditory hallucinations. That's what she thinks until the deafening thwack-thwack-thwack is joined by a dark shape darting across the bit of sky framed by the tent's mesh window. She tears out of the tent, hops a low wooden fence, and sprints across an over-grazed field waving her arms. The starving, staggering dairy cows shy away nervously.
The spindly helicopter buzzes ahead faster than she can run. The eardrum-shattering noise begins to fade. Jess's breath punches out of her, and she folds in half, breathing heavily. A cesspool, the accumulated waste of dozens of cows, chokes her with its stench. She can see where dying, desperate cows have wandered into the pool and drowned. They're bloated, floating.
Jess's ears are still ringing. Wind whips her hair against her closed eyelids, and she looks up.
The helicopter is hovering on the other side of the field, carefully angling itself so its blades won't hit the dirt as it touches down. A dying cow sits folded on its legs, not moving away. Jess doesn't think it can get up. It drops its head to rest on the muddy ground with a look of bovine resignation.
The men who pile out of the helicopter awkwardly wield automatic weapons through the bulk of their haz-mat suits. Jess is so tired that even though she tries to bite her lip, the giggles burst through anyway. She glimpses herself in the shine of their visors and thinks who's that madwoman?
A middle-aged man with an officer's posture and a kind face recklessly pulls the hood of his suit down. "Ma'am, I've got to ask what the hell are you doing out here in your condition, pardon my french?"
"Please help him," she says. "Thank you. Thank you. Please."
The soldiers nearly put a bullet in Dean's brain when they see him, and it takes her an agonizing stretch of minutes to convince them that his condition's down to a gunshot and not the hemoemesis virus.
Once Dean's loaded onto a stretcher and secured with long velcro strips, Jess goes loose and giddy with relief. She feels high, and she straps on the surgical mask they toss her without complaint.
The flight is short; painfully so, actually, knowing that help was this close while Dean lay dying.
She gets a good view of the sprawling medical center's grounds when they're swinging wide to land on the helipad on the roof. The once-maintained stretch of lawn is burned to a crisp in the summer sun, the sprinklers presumably diverted to better uses. The first few floors of windows are boarded up. Hastily-erected barricades and fencing topped with razor wire circle the compound, and Jess thinks that if she were a Midwestern soccer mom trying to get in to get a tooth pulled, she'd be a little intimidated. Vast tents, like the kind they put up over the outdoor luncheon at Stanford graduation, cover the parking lots.
Nurses swarm the helicopter as soon as it touches down. Dean's eyes snap open when they jostle his gurney. His eyes go wide. "What?" His arms curl up to his chest in what, if he weren't half-dead and strapped to the gurney, would be a fighting stance. "What - get offa me!"
Jess pushes nurses aside and places herself squarely in Dean's line of vision. "It's okay, Dean."
"Tryin'a take you?" he asks with slurred concern. "Don' worry, not gonna, uh. Not gonna let anything."
"I'm safe now," she says. "You did good, you kept me safe. Now you can let them help you."
Dean's brow creases. "'Kay?"
"I'm fine. I'm great. I'm more than okay." She closes her hand around his and his fingers twitch uncertainly. "You're the one with the gunshot wound."
Dean cranes his neck to look down at his belly and seems surprised to see the stained bandages there. "Ow."
Someone's taking Dean's blood pressure and someone else is making him flinch and curse by sticking an IV in his hand, and suddenly the sleepless days catch up with Jess and she can barely stay on her feet.
Before they let them down off the roof, a latex-gloved doctor with a no-nonsense expression pulls up their eyelids to look at the whites of their eyes. She looks at their teeth, their fingernails. Draws vials of blood. She asks a series of increasingly personal questions that Jess suspects are some kind of cognitive test, but she answers with believable lies because it's none of the doctor's damn business who the witnesses were at her marriage (for the record, it was the county clerk's unpaid intern and the paletero from outside who afterward treated them to ice cream bars -- mango and arroz con leche.) Dean and Jess seem to pass muster, because the medical personnel take off at an urgent jog with Dean's gurney, and Jess is ushered to a vinyl chair and handed a stack of intake forms and a ballpoint pen that's almost out of ink, leaving ghostly traces when she writes.
"Doctor Zavala will be up to see you soon," says a skinny nurse in burgundy scrubs. His hooked nose makes him look like a friendly parrot. "She's with a patient."
"Sleep," Jess says. "Just let me sleep first. Then I'll get checked out and I'll shower, but can I just. Wake me when there's news on Dean?" She doesn't like not being there with him in the ER.
Friendly Parrot hesitates. "We're really supposed to do an exam at intake," he says.
She smiles hopefully at him, the way she once smiled at a tall boy with brown hair from across the courtyard. Apparently even filthy, exhausted and pregnant she's still got it, because within minutes Friendly Parrot is showing her into a quiet room. She has about two minutes to marvel at the crisp white sheets and the gently humming fluorescent lights before she passes out cold.
"Miss." Her eyes open. Friendly Parrot crouches at her bedside. "Your husband's out of surgery if you'd like to visit him."
Husband. Jess has been so busy trying to keep Dean alive that it's been a while since she felt like a twenty four year-old widow. She twists her hands together. The cogs and gears in Jess's brain tick slowly till they connect husband to Dean. Right. "Yeah," she says, and shakes her head to clear it. "Yeah, bring me to him."
They've cut out a chunk of Dean's skin, everything that was already dead. He looks like some strange new bionic creature constructed partially of bandages and tape, but there's a pinch of color back on his cheeks.
Jess touches his jaw, his knuckles. It seems almost impossible that Dean's alive when she's spent days watching him die, and she sits down suddenly on the edge of his bed, clutching the sheets to keep from tipping to the floor.
"Whoa," Friendly Parrot says. "Okay, I think it's time to get you checked out."
Jess likes going to the gyno about as much as she likes any other activity involving cold KY, a speculum, and a stranger with gloves staring at her lady business with a swab and a purposeful look. But after months of cross-country trekking without so much as a prenatal vitamin or a blood pressure reading to tell her she's all right, she's practically beaming at the sight of the stirrups.
Dr. Zavala is a youngish woman with aggressively curly hair and an ink stain on her coat pocket. She fills Jess in on the hospital's situation while she works, which is pleasantly distracting. The facility, which used to be a university medical center, is currently, "A little NIH, little CDC, a healthy dose of the Public Health Service Corps, but technically we're all answering to Homeland Security." The doctor glances at the closed door.
When Jess asks how on earth the hospital's running on electricity, Zavala just says wryly, "The military budget has been prioritized."
Apparently Jess missed the memo that the country's been under martial law for months, perhaps in part because the transition to martial law has been … rocky, to say the least. Turns out that when you have a highly contagious virus prone to turning healthy young men into ruthless, blood-crazed killing machines, a really good way of propagating that virus is to stick all your healthy young men in the same place at the same time and arm them to the teeth. The barracks at Fort Lewis turned overnight, with the first infected attack coming sometime after lights-out and the last unafflicted human dropping from blood loss by 0500. If the plague hadn't spread outside the continent before, it certainly did once an infected aircraft carrier drifted into international waters and was intercepted.
"Since it only happened once, I'm not too worried about the bleeding," the doctor says, "but of course let me know immediately if it happens again. This might be a little cold." She draws a swirl of freezing-cold goop onto Jess's belly.
"Gah," Jess says as the doctor smears the gel out evenly and picks up the transducer. "Are you sure?" she says, eying the ultrasound and suddenly very nervous. Jess has been on her own, on her own and trying not to get cholera and trying not to get shot, and she doesn't know the first thing about pregnancy and she could've really hurt it. She could've messed it up. "I didn't do something wrong?"
Doctor Zavala smiles gently. "Everything looks just fine. Your body's tougher than you'd think." She flicks on the ultrasound and looks at the screen, hmmms. Jess watches her face intently. The doctor glances over, does a double-take at Jess's face, and smiles. "Breathe," she says.
Jess gulps an inhale and realizes she's been holding her breath. "Is everything normal?"
Zavala swings the screen to face her. "See for yourself."
Jess stares at the abstract swirl of light and dark, seeing only an indistinct shape that looks like a kidney bean. She blinks, tilts her head to the side, and part of the bean resolves itself into a profile.
Pareidolia, Jess thinks dizzily. Human brains are so damn good at recognizing faces that we see them everywhere, see a man on the moon and the Virgin Mary on toast. We fool ourselves. Pareidolia.
Zavala taps the screen with the hand not holding the transducer. "Strong heartbeat." Jess watches the little hiccup of movement, like a ripple in a tidepool. "Looks like you guessed pretty well at the date of conception. I'd put you at about twenty-two weeks."
More than the heartbeat, Jess can't stop looking at its nose. A funny little peak. The fetus itself might be a curled-up little bean, comfy and cushioned, but that nose is the nose it's going to have for the rest of its life. Holy shit, Jess thinks, you're going to be a person.
"Do you want to know the sex?" the doctor asks, and Jess hesitates at that. She fixes her gaze on a poster over the sink that outlines, in three clearly explained steps, how to wash your hands for maximum sanitation.
She misses Sam with a sudden, fierce longing that takes her back to the early days of his disappearance, when she lay awake making promises in her head, half-believing that some higher power would hear her and agree to give Sam back if she swore to be a better person every day for the rest of her life. He should be here for this, and with a sinking darkness Jess foresees every milestone she'll have to mark without him - he won't hold her hand in labor, he won't be there for the first birthday or the first step. Some day she'll have to try to explain to this kid who its father was in impotent, inadequate words, and the child won't love Sam the way she does because it'll never know him.
"Sometimes if the parents aren't sure," Zavala says, "we'll give them a sealed envelope with the answer inside. That way you can open it when the time is right."
Jess nods, voice stolen. "Yes, that," she gets out.
The doctor taps a key and leaves to grab the printouts, and Jess is lying dazed on the exam table when the door whines open.
"That was fast," she says.
"Ms. Moore, I have a few questions for you."
Jess drops her feet from the stirrups, slams her knees together, and sits up so fast she's breathless. An older man in khaki slacks and shirt, with stars on his collar, shuts the door behind him. "What the fuck," Jess says. "What the actual fuck?"
"You should have been interviewed as soon as you arrived," the military man says. His uniform has a vaguely nautical look. "The nurse who diverted you from the appropriate procedures has been reassigned to a different area of the compound."
Every inch of Jess's skin goosebumps up and she's suddenly aware of how cold it is, how flimsy her medical gown is. She reaches behind her to clasp the edges of the fabric, hold them together. "You can interview me when I'm done in here." She points to the door. "Please," she says, voice crisp and clinging to the edge of politeness.
The man doesn't move away from the one door out of the room. "Have you been exposed to the hemoemesis virus?"
Jess shakes her head in disbelief. "Yes," she says, "everyone has."
"Have you yourself shown symptoms of the hemoemesis virus?"
"Are you high?"
"Have you had blood-to-blood contact with a Croatoan carrier?"
"I think you'd be able to tell."
"Has your partner?"
"No."
"How did your partner obtain his injuries?" the man asks. Jess eyes the precise lines of his uniform and the dull buffed shine of his shoes.
"He was shot," she says cautiously.
"By whom?"
"A guy."
"Were you or your partner engaged in criminal activity at the time he was shot?"
"No," Jess says. "Is this an interrogation?"
"You walked into my home, young lady," he says, gesturing out the window at the expanse of the compound. "Before you sit yourself down at the dinner table I'm gonna have an accounting of who you are."
"Strictly speaking," Jess says, "we didn't walk in here. Your men jumped out of a chopper and pointed big guns at us."
"It's my understanding that without this facility's medical intervention, your partner would be dead," the man says. Jess pauses for a long moment because that almost seems like a threat, but that's nuts. There's no reason why it should be.
All this guy needs, Jess thinks, is some mirrored aviators. The evil Terminator kind, better than a black hat in an old Western.
The door swings open again, and Doctor Zavala starts and nearly drops her papers when she sees the intruder. Jess looks forward to seeing him unceremoniously kicked out and chastised for barging into an exam room. "Oh," the doctor says. "Admiral." She looks uncertainly between the admiral and Jess. "If you're all done here …" she trails off.
The admiral gives Jess a considering look, then nods and reaches for the door. "I've got everything I need."
"Who is that douchebag?" Jess says once she's heard quick, measured footsteps proceed down the hallway.
"Rear Admiral Wallace," Zavala says. "Deputy Surgeon General and official douchebag in charge of this place." She looks Jess straight in the eye. "There's a reason why the military doesn't usually have oversight of private medical care," she says, "because they suck at it. But these are not usual times."
The doctor whips out one scary-ass needle for the amniocentesis, just for a final confirmation that Jess hasn't inadvertently done something horrifically damaging by failing to eat her leafy greens while on the road. Jess grimaces and wishes Dean were here and conscious so she could be squeezing his hand.
The doc sends Jess off with a regimen of vitamins, a sealed envelope with the baby's sex written inside, and an honest-to-god lollipop that Jess pockets to give to Dean.
Dean's groggy and demanding when he wakes up, bitching till he gets solid food and switched from morphine to dilaudid, because apparently she should've known that morphine makes him confused and maudlin. Sam would've known, she translates. She gives him the cherry lollipop and he sulks for an hour while he sucks on it, then spits out the stick perfectly cheerful. "Think they've got a real shower in this place?"
It's been a week of showering twice-daily and eating vast quantities of pudding cups when Doctor Zavala walks into Jess's room with the amnio results in her hands and Wallace following behind her. He leans against the wall by the door and crosses his arms. To Jess's amusement, she sees a pair of mirrored aviators tucked in his shirt pocket.
"Do you have any blood disorders in your family?" Zavala asks, looking at the papers on her clipboard. She's lacking her usual bedside manner, talking like the admiral.
"Um. I think my mom was anemic," Jess says.
"Do you use any needle drugs?"
"What? No."
"Was your previous profession in an agricultural or industrial field?"
Jess breathes a pale wisp of a laugh. "I'm a grad student. I write papers about free markets."
"Is the man you came here with your husband?"
"Excuse me?"
"Is the man you came here with your husband?" Zavala repeats in an even tone.
"Yes," Jess says quickly. "What's this all about?"
"Is the man you came here with the biological father of this pregnancy?"
"That's a very personal question," Jess says. Something seizes in her chest. "Is there something wrong? Did the amnio show something?"
"Everything is perfectly fine," Zavala says, without an ounce of the warm reassurance she showed in her office. The admiral shifts by the door, recrosses his arms in the other direction.
"Have either you or the biological father had blood-to-blood contact with a Croatoan carrier?"
"What the hell?" Jess's voice is too loud, a caricature of faked confidence. "You're freaking me out."
"Answer the question," the admiral says from the doorway.
"No." Jess thinks she just might stick to one-word answers from now on. "No."
Zavala and the admiral leave after a few more questions without hauling Jess off in handcuffs, but when she gets up after a nap to go visit Dean and stretch her legs, there's a guard stationed outside her door, looking horrifically bored.
The guard sits up straight when he sees her. "Restricted area, Miss."
"What is?"
"This is."
Jess looks around. "My room is a restricted area?"
"Yes, Ma'am."
Jess curls her toes in her hospital slippers. "So really I'm restricted, is what you're saying."
"You yourself can move freely, Miss," the soldier says. "But exiting the restricted area requires prior authorization."
Jess stares at the guard and wants to hit him with a logic stick.
Three days later the easily-bored young guard is back on shift, a pad of Mad-Libs on his lap, and when Jess hears faint snoring filtering in from the hallway, she tightens the tie of the hospital robe and readies herself to slip out the door.
Before she can, she hears the nearly-silent pad of footsteps and the quiet sound of the door shutting. Dean leans against the door, quietly catching his breath. He's in bare feet, a white tee and pastel-striped hospital pajamas that do good things for his legs and ass. Wait, Jess thinks, did I really just think that?
"Hi," Dean says, eyes wide. His pupils are dilated, and he sways a little. They've still got him on the good stuff, then.
"What are you doing here?"
Dean rolls his eyes and nudges her back toward the bed, all stupid and protective. "I haven't seen you in three days," he says, "I was fucking worried, all right?"
"They won't let me out of the room," she says. She grabs his wrist, runs a finger over the pale skin of his inner elbow. It's bruised with needle sites. "Pick up a heroin habit while I was gone?"
Dean grimaces and tilt the arm for her inspection. "They keep jabbing me for blood tests," he says. "Been asking some weird questions, too," he adds, so casually that if she weren't clued in, she thinks it wouldn't scare her.
"Yeah," she says. "Had a few of those myself."
Dean licks his lips, glances out the tiny glass window in the door. "I've been sneaking out for five minutes whenever I can get 'em," he says. "Don't think they're watching me as much 'cause they think I'm too drugged up." He twists his wrist in her grasp, grabs her hand. "I need to show you what I found," he says."
Footsteps echo in the corridor. "Shit." Jess looks around the room. There's a tiny cabinet that could maybe fit Dean's torso, and a set of privacy curtains pushed against the wall that end two feet up from the ground. There's a rustle of fabric and when she looks up Dean's gone. "Where -"
"Shhhh," she hears from under the bed.
Jess settles back under the sheets and tugs her robe into sleepy disarray. "You're going to catch hell if they catch you sleeping," she hears from the hallway, and the guard's muffled response. Jess grumbles groggily when a turquoise-scrubbed nurse checks over her chart, checks her blood pressure, and leaves again on squeaky white shoes, leaving the chart - tsk, tsk - hooked inside the door where Jess can access it, which she's pretty sure is expressly prohibited.
Dean slides out from under the bed with a dust bunny clinging persistently to his shoulder. She brushes it off. "Come on," he says.
"Wait." She grabs her own chart, eyes moving quickly. Height and - ugh, weight - and blood pressure readings and blood sugar and O2 sats and a note about maternal exposure to industrial chemicals or agricultural products. She narrows her eyes at the doctor's nearly illegible handwriting. Amino acids, cysteine and methionine, and an underlined note that says sulfur levels. It's not as revealing as she'd hoped, until her eyes fall on a small note at the bottom of the page. Blood anomaly present only in fetal samples, maternal normal. "What the fuck," she says, but Dean is pulling her towards the door. The guard outside has recommenced his gentle snoring.
Dean leads her toward the north wing of the hospital on quiet feet, ducking into empty rooms whenever they hear footsteps. Jess just hopes that since the staff assume she's well-guarded in her room, it'll take them a while to notice she's gone.
They arrive at a thick door with a sign saying, 7 North: Psychiatric. Jess eyes the keypad on the wall and raises an eyebrow. "How're you planning to get in there?"
Dean gives her a tired grin and pulls the door handle, which swings open easy as nothing. "I'm crafty," he says. Jess gets a quick glimpse of the taped-down latch bolt before he's tugging her in front of an isolation room with a not-fucking-around lock and a small window.
Jess peers in. Friendly Parrot is curled on the floor. "Oh my God," she says. "He was my nurse when I first got here."
Apparently the rooms aren't sound-proofed, because Friendly Parrot's head snaps around at her voice. "Hey," he says. "Hey, hey, I remember you. Let me out."
"Stay back," Dean says, and when his hand falls on her shoulder she realizes he's talking to her.
"Come on," Friendly Parrot says, face filling the tiny square of window. "I helped you out. Let me out of here."
"Ignore him," Dean says, and Friendly Parrot fixes his eyes on Dean.
A silent moment passes, then another, and then Friendly Parrot launches himself against the door, howling. "Let me out, bitch!" The door shudders under bone-breaking force. She hears a scrabbling along the doorframe, at the lock, and when Friendly Parrot smacks a hand against the reinforced glass of the window, his nails are broken and his fingers bloody. His shouts turn wordless as he continues to hurl his body against the door, probably cracking a few ribs in his desperation to get to them.
"It was a scalpel slip." Zavala's standing at the far end of the hallway looking perfectly calm. "He was assisting the dissection of a Croatoan carrier."
"What are you going to do with him?" Jess asks, wondering if Zavala's already called security on them.
"That's not really him, you know," Zavala says.
"When they were cutting into the Croat," Dean says, eyes narrowed, "was it dead?"
The doctor's gaze runs down the clipboard in her hands, as if she's entirely engrossed in her patient notes. "The leadership at this facility are tasked with eradicating the Croatoan virus, and they are very committed to illuminating how it came to exist." She chews on her pen cap. "For the average, healthy person, I would call this hospital the safest place west of the Mississippi. But given the keen interest that this institution is forced to take in blood-borne diseases, I would consider this a very, very dangerous place for anyone whose medical condition would … draw unwanted attention."
Jess catches and holds her breath.
"I, of course, am just a doctor," Zavala says. "My job is to care for patients. So I'm going to go over here," she says, turning her back and walking over to a cart, "and draw up a sedative for my former employee."
Dean, who's been tugging at Jess's arm more and more insistently, finally wraps both arms around her waist and lifts her. Friendly Parrot is still battering himself against the door. "Wait," Jess calls back to the doctor. "What was his name?"
The doctor pauses, syringe in hand and back still turned. "Danny."
In the corridor outside the psych unit, Dean mutters to himself like a madman as he traces a finger over the fire-safety map of the facility. Jess groans when he drags her into a stairwell and she glances over the railing, sees how far down they have to go. She's breathless by the time they hit the musty-smelling basement.
Their first stop is in a vast room of wire cages, like the storage facility in Jess's old apartment. They sidetrack for just long enough to follow the one set of footsteps in the dust, leading them straight to where their packs sit wrapped in clear plastic sheeting.
Then it's on to the old steam tunnels beneath the building, where Jess is sure she's inhaling all kinds of toxic mold spores, and her feet slip on the concrete, slimy from dripping pipes. The dark, claustrophobic tunnels spit them out through a pair of heavy storm cellar doors at the edge of the property, near a humming generator.
"No more electric lights," Jess sighs.
"No more showers," Dean says. He wobbles on his feet and Jess is horrified to realize that Dean's competence, his intent focus on escaping, have led her to forget that he's hurt, badly, and drugged to the gills. She makes a promise to herself that she won't make that mistake again.
"Come on," she says. She grabs him by the elbow. They dig their boots from their packs, and Jess casts one last wistful glance back at the light shining through the windows.
Run and hide is the rule of the day. They sleep under a tractor-trailer, in a roadside chapel, and beneath the drive-through awning of a Burger King, woken periodically by the rumble of helicopters overhead. Soon the ominous metal insects appear only in the distance, and then there are no more of them at all. Maybe they've run far enough - really run, till both their legs are cramping and they're short-tempered from fear.
The rattle of Dean's vial of painkillers gets smaller and smaller, even when he begins snapping the pills in half and waiting to take them till the pain is bad enough to slow him down.
"Distract me," Dean says. They've broken in the windows of a looming Ikea and curled up in one of the model bedrooms on a leaf-patterned bedspread. Their dim camping lantern makes hulking, shadowy creatures of all the other furniture. Dean's been out of pills for three days, and his shivering reminds Jess unpleasantly of sleepless nights in a tent that smelled of rotting meat. There's a stuffed toy rat from the children's section that's perfect for Dean to bite down on when it gets too bad. Dean makes a wordless noise through the plush rat's midsection.
Jess twists her ring on her finger and examines the stripe of pale skin underneath. "I wanted to do a big wedding," she says. She fiddles with a plastic peony from the decorating section. "Go up in the mountains, wear a fluffy white dress and flowers in my hair." She considers the peony. "I think mostly I just wanted to throw a huge fucking party so I could get everyone I'd ever known in the same room and tell them how much I loved him."
Dean's chewing on the toy rat with a cold sweat on his forehead. He nods go on.
"And he went along with it, you know, gave me everything I wanted, talked about venues we could afford and how we should have a bunch of different cakes so we wouldn't have to choose." She realizes her hand is in Dean's hair, fingers massaging gently while he shakes. "And I asked him to give me his half of the guest list and he kept putting it off and putting it off and I started getting nervous 'cause I thought he was getting cold feet. Um. And then he gave me his list and, well, I'd already put down all our mutual friends. So he gives me this slip of paper with his sophomore year roommate and his law school adviser written on it. And God, the look on his face. He was so - so humiliated just giving me this slip of paper with two names on it." She pauses, because Dean's gone still and silent. "And they weren't even the two he would've really wanted to be there," she says.
The curtains in the fake window waft in a draft.
"So then it's a Saturday morning and we'd been out late the night before, right? So Sam's sleeping like a log, and I sneak out and get coffee and those stupid sugary pastries he's so into. I wake him up and I tell him the county clerk's office opens for business in half an hour and it's a bit of a trek on CalTrain. And he eats his chocolate croissant and brushes his teeth and puts on a clean t-shirt and forgets to comb his hair, and we go." She smiles. "I did get to have flowers in my hair. Hibiscus from the yard. He picked it on the way out."
She tugs at the tail of the rat in Dean's mouth, forgotten now. He's let his jaw go lax as he listens.
"On the way back Sam told the whole train car that we just got married. Stopped a couple people on the platform when we got off, too."
Dean spits out the rat. "And then you went home and fucked like bunnies?"
"Pretty much," Jess smiles. "Our landlord came and knocked on our door a couple days after that 'cause we hadn't left the apartment and he thought we'd been murdered."
"That's my boy," Dean says.
Later they're digging into a bag of rock hard Swedish Fish, the red kind 'cause Dean swears the multi-colored ones taste like weird Scandinavian fruits. The stale candy sticks to Jess's teeth.
"So what happened there?" Dean gestures broadly at Jess's round stomach. "Not like Sam to go scuba diving without a wetsuit." Then he looks at her sternly. "Right? Taught him better than that."
The heat in Jess's cheeks spreads all the way down her neck. "Normally." She studies the little candy scales on the fish in her hand. "And then the world sort of ended and it was hard to be" - she searches for the right word - "careful."
Dean crumples the empty Swedish Fish bag and tries an overhand toss into the trash. He misses by a mile and folds in on himself, clutching his injured side. "He was pretty happy, huh," Dean says.
"Yeah," Jess says. She gets up and paces the aisle. She braces her hands against a particleboard armoire. Hibiscus in her hair and a husband she loved to the point of stupidity and the family they were going to have together. Those are the things she used to have. She's finding it hard to breathe. "Dean," she chokes out.
"Yeah, I know," Dean says, and she believes him.
"Sam," she says, and Dean says, "Me too."
"Oh, Jesus," she says. "Oh fuck."
Dean stands up slowly and carefully. His eyes meet hers wearily, and it occurs to Jess that Dean is disappointed that he survived his injuries. "Wanna go break vases?" He asks.
Jess works her way down a shelf of delicate glass cylinders named things like Blommig and Stjälk. Together they create a snowy landscape of shimmering glass on the concrete floor, blocking the way between them and the section full of potted plants. A few robust cacti are still looking green.
That night, when the lantern is turned out, Jess pulls the leafy bedspread closer around her shoulders, blocking out the cold drafts. "I think he's dead."
She feels Dean nod through the mattress.
"Dean, I think he's really dead."
A nod again.
She thinks he's fallen asleep when she hears a quiet, "What am I supposed to do?"
She shakes her head into the mattress.
Jess feels Dean shivering till he falls into an uneasy sleep. He never makes a sound. She reaches out and touches his wet face, trails her fingers to his mouth. He's biting down on the toy rat with jaw-cracking force. He's gut-shot and heart-shot and nothing's going to kill that pain.
The thunder precedes the rain by minutes. Wind whips the straps on their packs, sending the nylon slapping at their arms and legs. Soaked to the skin townies are scurrying all in one direction. Jess meets Dean's gaze. He shrugs. They follow the crowd through a metal door and wind through a labyrinth of corridors, pressing toward the center of the building.
It's dark as sin in the elementary school hallway, and they can only see the lightning flashes in the cracks around the doors. Hail beats down on the roof, rattatat rattatat. Flashlight beams dot the ceiling and walls, flitting over faces and bodies and nervous clenched hands, making the packed-in crowd seem more like a herd of cattle than it already is. The light glances off cheery paper cutouts of yellow ducks pinned to the bulletin boards. Somewhere, a baby is crying.
The hail grows to a deafening assault, till it seems surely the roof will cave in. When the rain of ice quiets, the wind takes its place. It buffets the walls, moans through the cracks. Sometimes with a great crash, some piece of debris outside will collide with the building. There's nothing to do but sit as the storm worsens.
"It was my fault," Dean says, a disembodied voice in the darkness, leaning close to be heard. It's dim as a cloistered confessional, noisy as a foxhole taking mortar fire. Some things can only be said at times like this, when your words could be imagined, could be heard wrong, can't be said to have existed in the same way other words do, ones that are said on sunny street corners.
"It was nobody's fault," she says, although she's lying because she's always been able to feel where Sam is and he went to get water and he didn't come back and he didn't come back and he didn't come back some more, and she didn't even notice till she needed to wash the rabbit guts off her hands, and he is never coming back.
"No, shut up," he says hurriedly, "I'm trying to tell you -"
"Fuck you," she says irritably, "don't tell me to shut up -"
"I kissed him," Dean says.
Jess shuts up and listens to the storm. A flashlight beam from the far end of the hallway illuminates a poster on the wall that solicits entries for the annual Science Fair. Its headline is outlined in glitter glue.
"I kissed him," Dean says. "I made him leave."
Jess curls her fingers against the dirty linoleum floor, and they slide right over it. There's nothing for her to hold onto but herself, so she wraps her hands around her knees and squeezes till her kneecaps shift. "In the orchard?"
"In the - " Dean pauses for a long moment. "Fuck, Jess, no. No. I wouldn't. Hell, he wouldn't." She feels his hand on her boot, touching the laces. He begins to undo them. "He was eighteen."
A flash of lightning briefly lights up the shape of Dean's ear and the messy spikes of his hair.
"It was a really good summer," he says, and his voice is warm. "And Sam seemed so chilled out. It wasn't - nothing happened. It wasn't like that. But the hunts were quiet and we squatted in this little house in Mississippi for a couple months and the weather was hot as the boiler room in hell. The heat rose straight up to the bedrooms upstairs so by the middle of the night Sam was always sneaking into my little room down next to the kitchen, tiptoeing in. I was slinging popcorn at the drive-in to bring in some dough, buy the groceries while Dad was out of town. Sam'd come visit and when I got done we'd go up on the roof of the concession shack and watch whatever crap they were playing. Smelled like fake butter, and Sam was so fucking spoiled always getting me to sneak him a free slushie, so his mouth was like. Permanently blue that summer."
Jess can imagine the smile on Dean's face even if she can't see it.
"Think that was the happiest I'd ever seen him, and he's like, you know what he's like when he's happy, you know, it makes you stupid, it makes you just want to keep him that way forever. So we're up on the roof and Sam's stained his mouth completely blue, and Bruce Campbell's up onscreen sawing off his shotgun with his own chainsaw arm, and Sam grins and says groovy, and I was just so stupid I kissed him, and Jess, I swear he kissed me back. He lay back on the roof and kissed me back." Dean's reached the bottom of her bootlaces. He tugs them tight and begins lacing them back up in a neat tight double helix. "And I thought we were, um, gonna be together forever." His hands pause on the laces. "Yeah."
Jess knows what it's like to look forward to a lifetime with Sam and to have that future snatched away: she'd thought she'd be there to see whether Sam turned into a crotchety old man or a kindly one, whether his hair went gray or fell out, whether he stayed a voracious reader, whether he spoiled his kids rotten or inherited his dad's military discipline.
Dean starts up on her bootlaces again. "Dad got home the next day, and Sam was all sweaty and nervous and I thought it was 'cause he was afraid of getting found out, that Dad would somehow know what we did. And then he said he was going away to college." Dean finishes her laces and ties a tight double knot. He hooks a finger into one of the loops. "Dad gave him an ultimatum, which is a stupid fucking idea with Sam and he knew that, and Dad stormed out and Sam, um. Well, we fought," he says and fails to elaborate. "And he left." Jess flexes her foot against the tight laces, feels pins and needles. "When he walked out the door he was wearing a t-shirt out of the laundry bag, still had a blue-raspberry slushie stain on the collar. That's how quick it was."
Something rolling and deep is reverberating in the hallway, something big that's about to give way. The gymnasium roof, maybe, metal rippled in the wind. Jess breathes out steadily, the way she does to get rid of side-stitches when she's running. "I know."
"What?"
"I mean I know," she says. "He told me."
"What?" Dean says, voice tight with the same lethal control that keeps his gun hand steady.
"I don't think he remembered afterward," she says quickly. "Actually, I know he didn't remember. He was pretty drunk."
"Why would he do that?" Dean asks.
As long as she'd known Sam, he always had a taste for blue slushies, even though they stained his teeth. "I don't know," she says, "you'd have to ask him," and Dean says, "Fuck."
The noise of thundering metal heightens to a shriek and then gives way. Later, when they blink their way out into the post-storm gray, they find the school gymnasium neatly decapitated. The corrugated metal roof's blown off and across the street, draped over a convenience store. Jess walks on her too-tight bootlaces till she feels the heat of a blister developing.
Jess's belly grows round and obvious. She's always ravenous and she dreams like she's creating new worlds in her sleep.
Sometimes she's straddling Sam in their creaky bed, crushing hibiscus into the sheets. Sometimes she's giggling and following him down a crowded hallway at some stupid undergraduate party, and he's shushing her and pulling her into a closet and when she gets in and the door swings shut, she feels all around in the darkness with her hands, finding coats and hangers and a vacuum but Sam's disappeared. Dean grabs her hand and tugs her and they sprint down a deserted Las Vegas street, trying to outrun a thump-thumping helicopter in the aurora-lit darkness. She crouches over a reeking gas station toilet and vomits blood, telling Dean to stay away before he gets infected too, and after hours of heaving she stands up and her stomach is flat and taut, the sickness purged from her body. Crickets sing as Sam sits alone at a campfire, warm flicker softening his tired features, embers popping and sending up showers of sparks. Night of the Living Dead plays on the big screen and tinny dialogue filters out from car speakers on the ground and Sam and Dean roll and wrestle on top of the concession stand while teenagers buy cotton candy underneath them and electric lights glitter on a hillside.
When she wakes up with liquid heat between her legs, it's just one more instance of her body betraying her. She shifts uncomfortably and tells her hormones to calm the fuck down. They never listen.
In the town of Hare Gulch even the Croats have starved to death, and a military convoy gathers dust on the road. Dean rummages in the back of a truck, and Jess laughs aloud when he emerges with an AK-47 over his shoulder and a triumphant swagger.
The afternoon heats up till its so humid you could carve out a spoonful of air and eat it. Jess only manages to keep putting one foot in front of the other by turning off her brain. She fixes her eyes on the ridiculous gun strapped to the back of Dean's pack with bungee cord. She nearly bumps into him when he slows suddenly.
They're at the edge of a cornfield that's still managing to grow untended. Stalks sway unevenly in the absence of any kind of breeze. "Check out the locals." He nods to where scarecrows droop at intervals throughout the sprawling fields. "Let's introduce ourselves." He grins wide and wickedly.
The scarecrow smiles vacantly. Jess blows out a breath and wishes she could wipe the stinging sweat out of her eyes. It's also dripping down the small of her back and between her breasts. She stares longingly at her water bottle where it rests on a rusted-out pickup truck surrounded by cornstalks, but returns her focus to the sagging scarecrow. "We're gonna obliterate 'em. This isn't a fair fight."
"Come on," Dean says from right behind her. He reaches around to nudge her forearm. "What comes next?"
Jess cants the magazine forward, then pulls it smoothly back in the well till it snaps into place. She pulls the charging handle to charge the bolt and chamber a round, then makes a questioning noise.
"Good." Dean brushes her shoulder as he reaches to thumb the selector to semi-automatic. "Let's start small."
Her single round cracks like a lightning strike and reduces the scarecrow's head to a spray of straw, dry wisps floating slowly down to the soil. "Holy fuck." She cackles. "Holy fuck!"
"Fun, right?" She feels Dean's smile against her cheek.
"Let's go again," she says.
"All right," Dean says. "No guts, no glory. You're gonna try full automatic now." He clicks it over, then nudges her arm. "Where's the recoil gonna hit you right now?"
She glances down, adjusts her stance to keep from breaking her own collarbone. "Got it?"
"Got it." He reaches up to cover her ears.
The gun shoves her hard against Dean's body behind her. The scarecrow disappears in a puff of dust. The stake it was tied to cracks in half and topples.
"Wow," she says, and Dean's laugh rumbles behind her.
"Of course, it's not the most practical weapon," he's saying, and she hears a twig snap.
The Croat's skin hangs hungrily on its bones, and the length of sharpened rebar clutched in its hand must have been moments from piercing Dean's back when Jess whirled them around. Dean jolts in surprise behind her.
In shock, her hand jams down hard on the AK's selector and it slips into semi-auto, and that's the only reason she isn't splattered with exploding entrails when the Croat goes down at close range.
Dean's hands are steel on either side of her ribcage. His chest expands against her back as he breathes heavily.
A hawk swoops low over the cornfield looking for mice. It bats its wings and even that hint of breeze cools the sweat Jess worked up during the shooting lesson.
Dean's hands slowly release her sides, leaving his loosely curled fingers barely grazing her breasts. "Nice shot," Dean says, choked. He begins walking her backward toward the flat-tired pickup with their water and packs. His ass hits the bumper and she turns to face him.
Jess is inescapably aware of Dean's eyes on her. His gaze roams over her tits, the curve of her stomach, the grime and gun oil striping her forearms. Carefully, she flicks the AK to safety and reaches past Dean to settle it in the well where the windshield wipers lie gathering dust.
Dean licks his lips. "This is a bad idea."
"You'd know bad ideas." Jess bows her back so his hands slide forward to her breasts, instinctively curving to fit. "You wanted to fuck your brother."
"Shut up," Dean says, and his hands go tight on her. "Don't you talk about me and Sam. Stop."
"Make me," she says, and Dean grabs her by the waist and pushes her against the door so hard the truck rocks on its suspension. Her breath punches out of her and she gives him a smile full of teeth. "I bet he -"
Dean shuts her up with his mouth on hers.
Jess squirms against him and grabs at him, hitches a leg over his thigh and threads her fingers through his hair. She kisses him like she'd throw herself off a bridge: with commitment.
Dean pulls her hair, using it to tilt her head back so he can bite at her neck. His hand comes back to support her ass, letting her get her other leg up around his waist. He groans when she tugs at the short spikes of his hair in return. "Off," he's saying, pulling at the hem of her shirt, "off, off, off." She's blind for a moment when she pulls it up and off over her head. Dean drops his head to her breasts, sucks at where they overflow the cups of her bra. "Gonna," he's mumbling, "I'm gonna."
"Yeah?" she says. She reaches for the buttons of his plaid overshirt. "I don't think you will, I don't think you have the -"
Dean smacks her hands away from his clothing and goes for the button on her jeans. She toes her boots off behind his back, and he pulls her jeans down till they're awkwardly hanging from one foot, then abandons them, already having access to everything he wants.
He hooks an index finger in the waist of her panties, snaps the elastic lightly. "I think," he says, finger sliding slowly along that top hem, "I think you're already wet for me. Right, sweetheart? I bet that's what I'm gonna find down here." He traces his finger along the leg of her panties, along her inner thigh, then rests it lightly right over the center of her, where she's just beginning to soak through the cotton. Dean presses, then, with a cupped hand, rolls his palm against her till her panties are sliding in her wetness and he's felt every bit of her. "That's right," he chuckles in her ear.
Jess drops her head back against the truck. "Lot of talking," she says. "You actually know what to do once you've got a woman?"
The corner of Dean's mouth cants up in a mean little angle. His big rough thumb pushes her panties to the side and then two fingers are sliding into her, thick and slick and unceremonious, till she feels his knuckles at her entrance. She's so wet he sinks in easily. Jess's eyes slam shut. The sounds of rustling corn and Dean's breath are suddenly heightened.
Dean fucks her slowly with his fingers, breath hot against her neck, face hidden. She squirms on his hand and pushes down, hitting his shoulders with closed fists, but he won't speed up. As he teases her, she progressively loses control of the muscles in her legs, which don't want to stay clamped tight around his waist - they want to spread wide for him. She slips when her legs spasm and he has to catch her, force her harder against the truck with his body weight. The roundness of her stomach gets in the way and he can't let go of her ass to touch her with both hands and she wants him deeper. Dean's thumb brushes her clit and she hits him, kicks him as best she can. "Do it," she says. "Dean, just fucking do it."
He presses his face hard against her shoulder, then pulls away, leaving her empty and letting her feet drop down to the ground. His fingers leave a trail of her slick shining on the truck's battered chrome door handle, and he bends her over the front seat with a hand on the back of her neck, pushing her down.
Jess feels new, cool air when he drops her panties to her ankles and she clutches the upholstery in anticipation, but at first Dean just barely dips the tip of a finger back into her, like he's busy taking in the view. She twists to look behind her and he pushes her head back down.
His hands go away and she hears the sound of his zipper. She can hear his hand on his dick, skin on skin. His breaths come heavy. "You want it?"
"I want it," Jess says, "give it to me," and gasps when Dean sinks into her all at once, thick and hard and unforgiving. Jess digs her fingers into the seat's upholstery as her spine arches and flexes. "Like that," she says, "Like that, please."
Dean gives it to her steady and thorough and deep, sending the suspension creaking and shaking. She tries to shove back against him and he grabs her hips tight, holds her in place and refuses to pick up the pace till she sobs. Her hands scramble against the dashboard and the seat, trying to catch hold of something elusive and intangible. Nothing she does breaks Dean's control until she accidentally beats a hand down on the center of the steering wheel. The truck's horn emits a deafening rusty croak, sending a flurry of curious crows squawking indignantly into the air. Dean shakes against her back and when hearing returns to her ringing ears, she hears his laughter. She stifles her own giggle against the seat, pats a hand backward and finds his shaking shoulder.
"Oh my God," he says, and his laughter peters out against her bare shoulder blades. Jess rolls her hips experimentally, and Dean makes a low noise in his throat. He echoes her motion, rolling lazily on forward, still plastered to her back, and he groans again. He works a hand beneath her, gets his fingers between her legs and makes her melt.
She sighs an oh, and something tips Dean over the edge, makes him hitch his hips up into her unsteadily, thumping and sliding till his muscles seize up and she realizes he's coming inside her. He pulls out before he's done, leaves a sticky streak on her thigh and flips her on the seat. He's barely dropped to his knees and gotten his mouth on her when she comes, breath hitching and legs draped over his shoulders.
"Jesus," she says, and opens her eyes. A crow perched on the hood of the truck tilts its head at her inquisitively. She cracks up. "Oh my god, let's get out of here."
Dean crawls up her body from between her legs, takes a good close look at her face. "Hmm," he says, approving of whatever he sees there, and catches her hand to pull her out of the front seat, keeping her from stumbling on the jeans and panties still clinging to her left foot.
This is the kind of thing, Jess thinks, that could get really awkward if they just avoid talking about it and never do it again and let it become a sordid secret.
Jess doesn't feel like talking about it, so that evening when they've kicked ashes over the cooling remains of their campfire and zipped up the tent, she pushes Dean back against his sleeping bag and licks a wet stripe up his cock while his hands clutch and release in her hair.
She dreams about Dean's face twisting in pain, his hand clawing awkwardly to try to pull the length of sharpened rebar from his back, Jess too slow and fumbling with the gun. She wakes up gasping with Dean's fingers pushing their way into her mouth, and she sucks his fingers in the pale morning light.
The lantern light fills the tent with a warm yellow glow. "Oh God," Jess says. She rolls her head on her neck in slow circles. She's already come once and she's tingling all the way out to her fingers, comfy and content like she's just finished devouring a warm meal after a long day's journey. She feels like her body is floating somewhere above the tent, tethered only by the rhythm between her legs. It smells like sweaty man and campfire smoke, and Jess don't even care, she just wants this feeling to go on and on. She pushes her hips up to get more cock inside her and says, "Sam - "
The glorious golden rhythm stutters and stops. Jess cracks her eyes open one at a time, biting her lip. Dean's arms shake a little as he braces himself above her, trying not to put weight on her stomach. His bullet wound looks like a red star, a simmering supernova.
"Sorry," she begins, and he cuts her off with a shallow thrust. She squirms.
"It's okay," he says. He looks up through the mesh tent panel. Moths are fluttering outside, trying to get in to the light. "Believe me, I get it." But the moment's broken.
"You can pretend if you want," Jess whispers to his bicep, gaze cast down and away.
When she flicks her eyes up Dean's staring at her, obviously catching her meaning without difficulty. He shifts a little within her, sliding deeper. She's seen Dean when he's had nothing but oatmeal to eat for five days straight, but she's never seen him this hungry.
Dean puts her on her hands and knees and fucks her like he's never going to get the chance again. Words tumble out of him on whispers and grunts, meaningless and out of context, interspersed with Sam's name.
Jess shuts her eyes and tunes him out, listens only to the slap of his body against hers. She feels the synthetic of the sleeping bag sliding beneath her knees and tries to remember being happily married and striding toward a bright future. In her mind's eye she sees Sam's body taking shape behind her: the slope of his shoulders and the tangles in his hair. He takes her slow and hard and deep, and she shivers her way to orgasm with his name on her tongue.
Jess comes back to earth with Dean shoving inside her and stilling. "Sammy," he pants into her ear.
Dean pulls out and they clean up. Dean puts his hand on the lantern and catches her eye. "Thanks," he says, and switches it off.
The moths disperse, spell broken.
Jess is scraping burned rice out of the bottom of their one pot when the nervous fluttering in her stomach starts up again.
"Hey, Dean," she says. "Come over here." He puts down the Ruger and approaches with hands covered in gun oil. She pulls his palm to her belly anyway, layers her own hand on top. "Wait," she says. "Just wait."
The strange internal butterfly-flutter returns. Dean's eyes widen. "Is that - "
"Yeah," she says. The baby's feet drum inside her like it knows it has an audience.
Dean stares at his hand, mouth slightly open, looking utterly gobsmacked. The baby kicks him like it has an important point to make. Dean's eyes snap up to her and he smiles so bright it's blinding. "I felt it. Do you feel that?"
Jess rolls her eyes. "Yeah, Dean. I feel it."
Dean plasters a second hand to her stomach, leaving dark greasy palm-prints. He bends down closer and jumps a little at each kick, grin widening each time. "That's the coolest thing I've ever …"
He trails off and she realizes he's staring at her, now. "What?"
"Dude, you're totally making a person." He looks at her like she's a superhero.
Jess makes a face. "Don't call me 'dude.'"
Dean cradles her face between his hands and kisses her, tilting her into a slow, intimate meeting of mouths. He's never been so gentle, never even tried. He drops a hand to the small of her back to support her and begins pressing kisses against her neck. He reaches her breasts and lets his head rest there. Jess curves a hand around the back of his skull.
Jess never would have pegged Dean for a guy who wanted kids - it never really crossed her mind, since his lifestyle was notably low on acceptable Show-and-Tell subjects and high on choking hazards - but seeing him now, she thinks she's been sort of an idiot. Dean wants a family. When has he ever wanted anything else?
"I wish Sam was here," Dean mumbles. He pulls back to address her belly directly. He clears his throat. "Hey, kiddo. This is Dean. Look, your dad was - he was really awesome, okay?" Dean smiles, fond and sad. "You really shoulda met him. Um. I'm sorry. You deserve a real family. But you're gonna be great."
"Dean," Jess says, feeling a roiling tangle inside her now that isn't from the baby. "You're, um." She looks away at the pine forest and blinks furiously. "You're my family, now. You're all I've got. And I know it's asking a lot," she rushes ahead, "and I'm not asking you to - I mean, only if you want -"
"No," Dean says, quiet and clear. His hand finds its familiar place on her stomach. The baby somersaults like it's saying hello. "No," he says hoarsely. "I want-"
That's all she can get out of Dean, I want, but she gets it, she does. She can see the yearning in Dean's eyes, transparent and heartbreaking.
"Would you-" Dean cuts himself off again. Jess kisses the angle of his jaw, and he shudders. She runs a hand up under his shirt, feels how warm and solid he is. And she's lonely, god she's lonely. She went from married and in love to devastated in the time it took to gut a rabbit. Dean gasps out on oh god as her hand wanders. He catches it but doesn't pull it out from under his shirt. "If it's a boy," he says, and that's not where she was expecting that train of thought to go at all. "Sam?"
Oh. Oh.
Somehow Jess doesn't feel compelled to recoil away from Dean. "Yeah," she says, licking dry lips. "If it's a boy, we'll call him Sam."
Dean kisses her fiercely then, like he's been refusing himself before with his iron-clad restraint.
"Wait," Jess says, pulling away and pressing at his chest. "What if it's a girl?"
Dean's mouth quirks up at the corners. "Oh, definitely Samantha." His gaze wanders over her face and the spark of amusement in his eyes grows. "You've got a little," he says, and gestures on his own face. Jess wipes a finger over her cheekbone and it comes back charcoal-dark. She realizes she's coated with gun grease from forehead to navel.
"Lost cause," she says, and Dean puts his hands back on her.
They work their way slowly northeast. Jess practices throwing a fixed-blade knife and gives up on making her own snares in disgust. Dean dotes on her, having animated conversations with her increasingly prominent belly. They find a stash of cloth diapers in the daycare of a cobwebbed church in Nazarene Falls, and throw out an extra bag of rock salt to make room in their packs.
The deciduous forest whispers its leaves all around them, but the clearing is windless and warm. They're sleeping outside the tent tonight, risking the mosquitoes to see the stars. From the evenness of his breathing, Dean's asleep. Jess watches the embers smolder and, occasionally reviving, glow bright in the remains of their fire. A wisp of white smoke trails into the clear sky.
Jess may be watching the fire, but she's listening to the forest. Carefully. Something has been moving through the vegetation for some time, and while that's no surprise in the middle of a thriving woodland, it's not the sound of an animal crashing through brush. She hears the supple snap of a young sapling and then hears its shaking leaves hushed - like someone has grabbed them. The approach is deliberately quiet, and it's making a beeline for the clearing.
Jess glances towards the white smoke rising from the embers. She's lifting her head from Dean's chest and about to try to wake him when he catches her wrist. "Shhhh," he breathes. He nods: he's heard the quiet, steady progress through the forest, too. He nods to the handgun tucked, safety on, under the backpack at their feet. Trying not to make a sound, Jess gets it out and gets ready, crouching over Dean.
It's a shadow against the trunks of the paper birches, it's huge, and it's far too close. When Jess sees the glint of eyes, she decides to give their visitor something to think about. The shot rings out and the shadow reels back into the darkness.
"Fuck," the shadow says incredulously. "You shot me." A large round flashlight beam clicks on and blinds Jess when it finds her face. Every inch of skin on her body is goosebumped. She can't move, even to pull the trigger again. Dean, beneath her, pushes at her with both hands trying to twist to see, but they're at the disadvantage here, caught in the light. The beam latches onto Jess's face again, and the voice turns admiring. "And you have incredible aim."
Dean's frantic fumbling finally locates their flashlight and aims it at the shadowy voice like the light itself is a weapon.
Sam's eyes are locked onto Jess. The hand clapped over the bullet graze on his shoulder flexes and loosens. "You look beautiful," Sam says breathlessly, flashlight beam traveling slowly over her whole body. He swings the light over to Dean and he breaks into a grin. "And you have no idea how good it is to see your face."
Dean drops his flashlight. It rolls, illuminating flashes of the treetops, blinding them all by turns.
next
Prologue | One | Two | Three | Four | Five | Six
Jess wakes up to auditory hallucinations. That's what she thinks until the deafening thwack-thwack-thwack is joined by a dark shape darting across the bit of sky framed by the tent's mesh window. She tears out of the tent, hops a low wooden fence, and sprints across an over-grazed field waving her arms. The starving, staggering dairy cows shy away nervously.
The spindly helicopter buzzes ahead faster than she can run. The eardrum-shattering noise begins to fade. Jess's breath punches out of her, and she folds in half, breathing heavily. A cesspool, the accumulated waste of dozens of cows, chokes her with its stench. She can see where dying, desperate cows have wandered into the pool and drowned. They're bloated, floating.
Jess's ears are still ringing. Wind whips her hair against her closed eyelids, and she looks up.
The helicopter is hovering on the other side of the field, carefully angling itself so its blades won't hit the dirt as it touches down. A dying cow sits folded on its legs, not moving away. Jess doesn't think it can get up. It drops its head to rest on the muddy ground with a look of bovine resignation.
The men who pile out of the helicopter awkwardly wield automatic weapons through the bulk of their haz-mat suits. Jess is so tired that even though she tries to bite her lip, the giggles burst through anyway. She glimpses herself in the shine of their visors and thinks who's that madwoman?
A middle-aged man with an officer's posture and a kind face recklessly pulls the hood of his suit down. "Ma'am, I've got to ask what the hell are you doing out here in your condition, pardon my french?"
"Please help him," she says. "Thank you. Thank you. Please."
The soldiers nearly put a bullet in Dean's brain when they see him, and it takes her an agonizing stretch of minutes to convince them that his condition's down to a gunshot and not the hemoemesis virus.
Once Dean's loaded onto a stretcher and secured with long velcro strips, Jess goes loose and giddy with relief. She feels high, and she straps on the surgical mask they toss her without complaint.
The flight is short; painfully so, actually, knowing that help was this close while Dean lay dying.
She gets a good view of the sprawling medical center's grounds when they're swinging wide to land on the helipad on the roof. The once-maintained stretch of lawn is burned to a crisp in the summer sun, the sprinklers presumably diverted to better uses. The first few floors of windows are boarded up. Hastily-erected barricades and fencing topped with razor wire circle the compound, and Jess thinks that if she were a Midwestern soccer mom trying to get in to get a tooth pulled, she'd be a little intimidated. Vast tents, like the kind they put up over the outdoor luncheon at Stanford graduation, cover the parking lots.
Nurses swarm the helicopter as soon as it touches down. Dean's eyes snap open when they jostle his gurney. His eyes go wide. "What?" His arms curl up to his chest in what, if he weren't half-dead and strapped to the gurney, would be a fighting stance. "What - get offa me!"
Jess pushes nurses aside and places herself squarely in Dean's line of vision. "It's okay, Dean."
"Tryin'a take you?" he asks with slurred concern. "Don' worry, not gonna, uh. Not gonna let anything."
"I'm safe now," she says. "You did good, you kept me safe. Now you can let them help you."
Dean's brow creases. "'Kay?"
"I'm fine. I'm great. I'm more than okay." She closes her hand around his and his fingers twitch uncertainly. "You're the one with the gunshot wound."
Dean cranes his neck to look down at his belly and seems surprised to see the stained bandages there. "Ow."
Someone's taking Dean's blood pressure and someone else is making him flinch and curse by sticking an IV in his hand, and suddenly the sleepless days catch up with Jess and she can barely stay on her feet.
Before they let them down off the roof, a latex-gloved doctor with a no-nonsense expression pulls up their eyelids to look at the whites of their eyes. She looks at their teeth, their fingernails. Draws vials of blood. She asks a series of increasingly personal questions that Jess suspects are some kind of cognitive test, but she answers with believable lies because it's none of the doctor's damn business who the witnesses were at her marriage (for the record, it was the county clerk's unpaid intern and the paletero from outside who afterward treated them to ice cream bars -- mango and arroz con leche.) Dean and Jess seem to pass muster, because the medical personnel take off at an urgent jog with Dean's gurney, and Jess is ushered to a vinyl chair and handed a stack of intake forms and a ballpoint pen that's almost out of ink, leaving ghostly traces when she writes.
"Doctor Zavala will be up to see you soon," says a skinny nurse in burgundy scrubs. His hooked nose makes him look like a friendly parrot. "She's with a patient."
"Sleep," Jess says. "Just let me sleep first. Then I'll get checked out and I'll shower, but can I just. Wake me when there's news on Dean?" She doesn't like not being there with him in the ER.
Friendly Parrot hesitates. "We're really supposed to do an exam at intake," he says.
She smiles hopefully at him, the way she once smiled at a tall boy with brown hair from across the courtyard. Apparently even filthy, exhausted and pregnant she's still got it, because within minutes Friendly Parrot is showing her into a quiet room. She has about two minutes to marvel at the crisp white sheets and the gently humming fluorescent lights before she passes out cold.
"Miss." Her eyes open. Friendly Parrot crouches at her bedside. "Your husband's out of surgery if you'd like to visit him."
Husband. Jess has been so busy trying to keep Dean alive that it's been a while since she felt like a twenty four year-old widow. She twists her hands together. The cogs and gears in Jess's brain tick slowly till they connect husband to Dean. Right. "Yeah," she says, and shakes her head to clear it. "Yeah, bring me to him."
They've cut out a chunk of Dean's skin, everything that was already dead. He looks like some strange new bionic creature constructed partially of bandages and tape, but there's a pinch of color back on his cheeks.
Jess touches his jaw, his knuckles. It seems almost impossible that Dean's alive when she's spent days watching him die, and she sits down suddenly on the edge of his bed, clutching the sheets to keep from tipping to the floor.
"Whoa," Friendly Parrot says. "Okay, I think it's time to get you checked out."
Jess likes going to the gyno about as much as she likes any other activity involving cold KY, a speculum, and a stranger with gloves staring at her lady business with a swab and a purposeful look. But after months of cross-country trekking without so much as a prenatal vitamin or a blood pressure reading to tell her she's all right, she's practically beaming at the sight of the stirrups.
Dr. Zavala is a youngish woman with aggressively curly hair and an ink stain on her coat pocket. She fills Jess in on the hospital's situation while she works, which is pleasantly distracting. The facility, which used to be a university medical center, is currently, "A little NIH, little CDC, a healthy dose of the Public Health Service Corps, but technically we're all answering to Homeland Security." The doctor glances at the closed door.
When Jess asks how on earth the hospital's running on electricity, Zavala just says wryly, "The military budget has been prioritized."
Apparently Jess missed the memo that the country's been under martial law for months, perhaps in part because the transition to martial law has been … rocky, to say the least. Turns out that when you have a highly contagious virus prone to turning healthy young men into ruthless, blood-crazed killing machines, a really good way of propagating that virus is to stick all your healthy young men in the same place at the same time and arm them to the teeth. The barracks at Fort Lewis turned overnight, with the first infected attack coming sometime after lights-out and the last unafflicted human dropping from blood loss by 0500. If the plague hadn't spread outside the continent before, it certainly did once an infected aircraft carrier drifted into international waters and was intercepted.
"Since it only happened once, I'm not too worried about the bleeding," the doctor says, "but of course let me know immediately if it happens again. This might be a little cold." She draws a swirl of freezing-cold goop onto Jess's belly.
"Gah," Jess says as the doctor smears the gel out evenly and picks up the transducer. "Are you sure?" she says, eying the ultrasound and suddenly very nervous. Jess has been on her own, on her own and trying not to get cholera and trying not to get shot, and she doesn't know the first thing about pregnancy and she could've really hurt it. She could've messed it up. "I didn't do something wrong?"
Doctor Zavala smiles gently. "Everything looks just fine. Your body's tougher than you'd think." She flicks on the ultrasound and looks at the screen, hmmms. Jess watches her face intently. The doctor glances over, does a double-take at Jess's face, and smiles. "Breathe," she says.
Jess gulps an inhale and realizes she's been holding her breath. "Is everything normal?"
Zavala swings the screen to face her. "See for yourself."
Jess stares at the abstract swirl of light and dark, seeing only an indistinct shape that looks like a kidney bean. She blinks, tilts her head to the side, and part of the bean resolves itself into a profile.
Pareidolia, Jess thinks dizzily. Human brains are so damn good at recognizing faces that we see them everywhere, see a man on the moon and the Virgin Mary on toast. We fool ourselves. Pareidolia.
Zavala taps the screen with the hand not holding the transducer. "Strong heartbeat." Jess watches the little hiccup of movement, like a ripple in a tidepool. "Looks like you guessed pretty well at the date of conception. I'd put you at about twenty-two weeks."
More than the heartbeat, Jess can't stop looking at its nose. A funny little peak. The fetus itself might be a curled-up little bean, comfy and cushioned, but that nose is the nose it's going to have for the rest of its life. Holy shit, Jess thinks, you're going to be a person.
"Do you want to know the sex?" the doctor asks, and Jess hesitates at that. She fixes her gaze on a poster over the sink that outlines, in three clearly explained steps, how to wash your hands for maximum sanitation.
She misses Sam with a sudden, fierce longing that takes her back to the early days of his disappearance, when she lay awake making promises in her head, half-believing that some higher power would hear her and agree to give Sam back if she swore to be a better person every day for the rest of her life. He should be here for this, and with a sinking darkness Jess foresees every milestone she'll have to mark without him - he won't hold her hand in labor, he won't be there for the first birthday or the first step. Some day she'll have to try to explain to this kid who its father was in impotent, inadequate words, and the child won't love Sam the way she does because it'll never know him.
"Sometimes if the parents aren't sure," Zavala says, "we'll give them a sealed envelope with the answer inside. That way you can open it when the time is right."
Jess nods, voice stolen. "Yes, that," she gets out.
The doctor taps a key and leaves to grab the printouts, and Jess is lying dazed on the exam table when the door whines open.
"That was fast," she says.
"Ms. Moore, I have a few questions for you."
Jess drops her feet from the stirrups, slams her knees together, and sits up so fast she's breathless. An older man in khaki slacks and shirt, with stars on his collar, shuts the door behind him. "What the fuck," Jess says. "What the actual fuck?"
"You should have been interviewed as soon as you arrived," the military man says. His uniform has a vaguely nautical look. "The nurse who diverted you from the appropriate procedures has been reassigned to a different area of the compound."
Every inch of Jess's skin goosebumps up and she's suddenly aware of how cold it is, how flimsy her medical gown is. She reaches behind her to clasp the edges of the fabric, hold them together. "You can interview me when I'm done in here." She points to the door. "Please," she says, voice crisp and clinging to the edge of politeness.
The man doesn't move away from the one door out of the room. "Have you been exposed to the hemoemesis virus?"
Jess shakes her head in disbelief. "Yes," she says, "everyone has."
"Have you yourself shown symptoms of the hemoemesis virus?"
"Are you high?"
"Have you had blood-to-blood contact with a Croatoan carrier?"
"I think you'd be able to tell."
"Has your partner?"
"No."
"How did your partner obtain his injuries?" the man asks. Jess eyes the precise lines of his uniform and the dull buffed shine of his shoes.
"He was shot," she says cautiously.
"By whom?"
"A guy."
"Were you or your partner engaged in criminal activity at the time he was shot?"
"No," Jess says. "Is this an interrogation?"
"You walked into my home, young lady," he says, gesturing out the window at the expanse of the compound. "Before you sit yourself down at the dinner table I'm gonna have an accounting of who you are."
"Strictly speaking," Jess says, "we didn't walk in here. Your men jumped out of a chopper and pointed big guns at us."
"It's my understanding that without this facility's medical intervention, your partner would be dead," the man says. Jess pauses for a long moment because that almost seems like a threat, but that's nuts. There's no reason why it should be.
All this guy needs, Jess thinks, is some mirrored aviators. The evil Terminator kind, better than a black hat in an old Western.
The door swings open again, and Doctor Zavala starts and nearly drops her papers when she sees the intruder. Jess looks forward to seeing him unceremoniously kicked out and chastised for barging into an exam room. "Oh," the doctor says. "Admiral." She looks uncertainly between the admiral and Jess. "If you're all done here …" she trails off.
The admiral gives Jess a considering look, then nods and reaches for the door. "I've got everything I need."
"Who is that douchebag?" Jess says once she's heard quick, measured footsteps proceed down the hallway.
"Rear Admiral Wallace," Zavala says. "Deputy Surgeon General and official douchebag in charge of this place." She looks Jess straight in the eye. "There's a reason why the military doesn't usually have oversight of private medical care," she says, "because they suck at it. But these are not usual times."
The doctor whips out one scary-ass needle for the amniocentesis, just for a final confirmation that Jess hasn't inadvertently done something horrifically damaging by failing to eat her leafy greens while on the road. Jess grimaces and wishes Dean were here and conscious so she could be squeezing his hand.
The doc sends Jess off with a regimen of vitamins, a sealed envelope with the baby's sex written inside, and an honest-to-god lollipop that Jess pockets to give to Dean.
Dean's groggy and demanding when he wakes up, bitching till he gets solid food and switched from morphine to dilaudid, because apparently she should've known that morphine makes him confused and maudlin. Sam would've known, she translates. She gives him the cherry lollipop and he sulks for an hour while he sucks on it, then spits out the stick perfectly cheerful. "Think they've got a real shower in this place?"
It's been a week of showering twice-daily and eating vast quantities of pudding cups when Doctor Zavala walks into Jess's room with the amnio results in her hands and Wallace following behind her. He leans against the wall by the door and crosses his arms. To Jess's amusement, she sees a pair of mirrored aviators tucked in his shirt pocket.
"Do you have any blood disorders in your family?" Zavala asks, looking at the papers on her clipboard. She's lacking her usual bedside manner, talking like the admiral.
"Um. I think my mom was anemic," Jess says.
"Do you use any needle drugs?"
"What? No."
"Was your previous profession in an agricultural or industrial field?"
Jess breathes a pale wisp of a laugh. "I'm a grad student. I write papers about free markets."
"Is the man you came here with your husband?"
"Excuse me?"
"Is the man you came here with your husband?" Zavala repeats in an even tone.
"Yes," Jess says quickly. "What's this all about?"
"Is the man you came here with the biological father of this pregnancy?"
"That's a very personal question," Jess says. Something seizes in her chest. "Is there something wrong? Did the amnio show something?"
"Everything is perfectly fine," Zavala says, without an ounce of the warm reassurance she showed in her office. The admiral shifts by the door, recrosses his arms in the other direction.
"Have either you or the biological father had blood-to-blood contact with a Croatoan carrier?"
"What the hell?" Jess's voice is too loud, a caricature of faked confidence. "You're freaking me out."
"Answer the question," the admiral says from the doorway.
"No." Jess thinks she just might stick to one-word answers from now on. "No."
Zavala and the admiral leave after a few more questions without hauling Jess off in handcuffs, but when she gets up after a nap to go visit Dean and stretch her legs, there's a guard stationed outside her door, looking horrifically bored.
The guard sits up straight when he sees her. "Restricted area, Miss."
"What is?"
"This is."
Jess looks around. "My room is a restricted area?"
"Yes, Ma'am."
Jess curls her toes in her hospital slippers. "So really I'm restricted, is what you're saying."
"You yourself can move freely, Miss," the soldier says. "But exiting the restricted area requires prior authorization."
Jess stares at the guard and wants to hit him with a logic stick.
Three days later the easily-bored young guard is back on shift, a pad of Mad-Libs on his lap, and when Jess hears faint snoring filtering in from the hallway, she tightens the tie of the hospital robe and readies herself to slip out the door.
Before she can, she hears the nearly-silent pad of footsteps and the quiet sound of the door shutting. Dean leans against the door, quietly catching his breath. He's in bare feet, a white tee and pastel-striped hospital pajamas that do good things for his legs and ass. Wait, Jess thinks, did I really just think that?
"Hi," Dean says, eyes wide. His pupils are dilated, and he sways a little. They've still got him on the good stuff, then.
"What are you doing here?"
Dean rolls his eyes and nudges her back toward the bed, all stupid and protective. "I haven't seen you in three days," he says, "I was fucking worried, all right?"
"They won't let me out of the room," she says. She grabs his wrist, runs a finger over the pale skin of his inner elbow. It's bruised with needle sites. "Pick up a heroin habit while I was gone?"
Dean grimaces and tilt the arm for her inspection. "They keep jabbing me for blood tests," he says. "Been asking some weird questions, too," he adds, so casually that if she weren't clued in, she thinks it wouldn't scare her.
"Yeah," she says. "Had a few of those myself."
Dean licks his lips, glances out the tiny glass window in the door. "I've been sneaking out for five minutes whenever I can get 'em," he says. "Don't think they're watching me as much 'cause they think I'm too drugged up." He twists his wrist in her grasp, grabs her hand. "I need to show you what I found," he says."
Footsteps echo in the corridor. "Shit." Jess looks around the room. There's a tiny cabinet that could maybe fit Dean's torso, and a set of privacy curtains pushed against the wall that end two feet up from the ground. There's a rustle of fabric and when she looks up Dean's gone. "Where -"
"Shhhh," she hears from under the bed.
Jess settles back under the sheets and tugs her robe into sleepy disarray. "You're going to catch hell if they catch you sleeping," she hears from the hallway, and the guard's muffled response. Jess grumbles groggily when a turquoise-scrubbed nurse checks over her chart, checks her blood pressure, and leaves again on squeaky white shoes, leaving the chart - tsk, tsk - hooked inside the door where Jess can access it, which she's pretty sure is expressly prohibited.
Dean slides out from under the bed with a dust bunny clinging persistently to his shoulder. She brushes it off. "Come on," he says.
"Wait." She grabs her own chart, eyes moving quickly. Height and - ugh, weight - and blood pressure readings and blood sugar and O2 sats and a note about maternal exposure to industrial chemicals or agricultural products. She narrows her eyes at the doctor's nearly illegible handwriting. Amino acids, cysteine and methionine, and an underlined note that says sulfur levels. It's not as revealing as she'd hoped, until her eyes fall on a small note at the bottom of the page. Blood anomaly present only in fetal samples, maternal normal. "What the fuck," she says, but Dean is pulling her towards the door. The guard outside has recommenced his gentle snoring.
Dean leads her toward the north wing of the hospital on quiet feet, ducking into empty rooms whenever they hear footsteps. Jess just hopes that since the staff assume she's well-guarded in her room, it'll take them a while to notice she's gone.
They arrive at a thick door with a sign saying, 7 North: Psychiatric. Jess eyes the keypad on the wall and raises an eyebrow. "How're you planning to get in there?"
Dean gives her a tired grin and pulls the door handle, which swings open easy as nothing. "I'm crafty," he says. Jess gets a quick glimpse of the taped-down latch bolt before he's tugging her in front of an isolation room with a not-fucking-around lock and a small window.
Jess peers in. Friendly Parrot is curled on the floor. "Oh my God," she says. "He was my nurse when I first got here."
Apparently the rooms aren't sound-proofed, because Friendly Parrot's head snaps around at her voice. "Hey," he says. "Hey, hey, I remember you. Let me out."
"Stay back," Dean says, and when his hand falls on her shoulder she realizes he's talking to her.
"Come on," Friendly Parrot says, face filling the tiny square of window. "I helped you out. Let me out of here."
"Ignore him," Dean says, and Friendly Parrot fixes his eyes on Dean.
A silent moment passes, then another, and then Friendly Parrot launches himself against the door, howling. "Let me out, bitch!" The door shudders under bone-breaking force. She hears a scrabbling along the doorframe, at the lock, and when Friendly Parrot smacks a hand against the reinforced glass of the window, his nails are broken and his fingers bloody. His shouts turn wordless as he continues to hurl his body against the door, probably cracking a few ribs in his desperation to get to them.
"It was a scalpel slip." Zavala's standing at the far end of the hallway looking perfectly calm. "He was assisting the dissection of a Croatoan carrier."
"What are you going to do with him?" Jess asks, wondering if Zavala's already called security on them.
"That's not really him, you know," Zavala says.
"When they were cutting into the Croat," Dean says, eyes narrowed, "was it dead?"
The doctor's gaze runs down the clipboard in her hands, as if she's entirely engrossed in her patient notes. "The leadership at this facility are tasked with eradicating the Croatoan virus, and they are very committed to illuminating how it came to exist." She chews on her pen cap. "For the average, healthy person, I would call this hospital the safest place west of the Mississippi. But given the keen interest that this institution is forced to take in blood-borne diseases, I would consider this a very, very dangerous place for anyone whose medical condition would … draw unwanted attention."
Jess catches and holds her breath.
"I, of course, am just a doctor," Zavala says. "My job is to care for patients. So I'm going to go over here," she says, turning her back and walking over to a cart, "and draw up a sedative for my former employee."
Dean, who's been tugging at Jess's arm more and more insistently, finally wraps both arms around her waist and lifts her. Friendly Parrot is still battering himself against the door. "Wait," Jess calls back to the doctor. "What was his name?"
The doctor pauses, syringe in hand and back still turned. "Danny."
In the corridor outside the psych unit, Dean mutters to himself like a madman as he traces a finger over the fire-safety map of the facility. Jess groans when he drags her into a stairwell and she glances over the railing, sees how far down they have to go. She's breathless by the time they hit the musty-smelling basement.
Their first stop is in a vast room of wire cages, like the storage facility in Jess's old apartment. They sidetrack for just long enough to follow the one set of footsteps in the dust, leading them straight to where their packs sit wrapped in clear plastic sheeting.
Then it's on to the old steam tunnels beneath the building, where Jess is sure she's inhaling all kinds of toxic mold spores, and her feet slip on the concrete, slimy from dripping pipes. The dark, claustrophobic tunnels spit them out through a pair of heavy storm cellar doors at the edge of the property, near a humming generator.
"No more electric lights," Jess sighs.
"No more showers," Dean says. He wobbles on his feet and Jess is horrified to realize that Dean's competence, his intent focus on escaping, have led her to forget that he's hurt, badly, and drugged to the gills. She makes a promise to herself that she won't make that mistake again.
"Come on," she says. She grabs him by the elbow. They dig their boots from their packs, and Jess casts one last wistful glance back at the light shining through the windows.
Run and hide is the rule of the day. They sleep under a tractor-trailer, in a roadside chapel, and beneath the drive-through awning of a Burger King, woken periodically by the rumble of helicopters overhead. Soon the ominous metal insects appear only in the distance, and then there are no more of them at all. Maybe they've run far enough - really run, till both their legs are cramping and they're short-tempered from fear.
The rattle of Dean's vial of painkillers gets smaller and smaller, even when he begins snapping the pills in half and waiting to take them till the pain is bad enough to slow him down.
"Distract me," Dean says. They've broken in the windows of a looming Ikea and curled up in one of the model bedrooms on a leaf-patterned bedspread. Their dim camping lantern makes hulking, shadowy creatures of all the other furniture. Dean's been out of pills for three days, and his shivering reminds Jess unpleasantly of sleepless nights in a tent that smelled of rotting meat. There's a stuffed toy rat from the children's section that's perfect for Dean to bite down on when it gets too bad. Dean makes a wordless noise through the plush rat's midsection.
Jess twists her ring on her finger and examines the stripe of pale skin underneath. "I wanted to do a big wedding," she says. She fiddles with a plastic peony from the decorating section. "Go up in the mountains, wear a fluffy white dress and flowers in my hair." She considers the peony. "I think mostly I just wanted to throw a huge fucking party so I could get everyone I'd ever known in the same room and tell them how much I loved him."
Dean's chewing on the toy rat with a cold sweat on his forehead. He nods go on.
"And he went along with it, you know, gave me everything I wanted, talked about venues we could afford and how we should have a bunch of different cakes so we wouldn't have to choose." She realizes her hand is in Dean's hair, fingers massaging gently while he shakes. "And I asked him to give me his half of the guest list and he kept putting it off and putting it off and I started getting nervous 'cause I thought he was getting cold feet. Um. And then he gave me his list and, well, I'd already put down all our mutual friends. So he gives me this slip of paper with his sophomore year roommate and his law school adviser written on it. And God, the look on his face. He was so - so humiliated just giving me this slip of paper with two names on it." She pauses, because Dean's gone still and silent. "And they weren't even the two he would've really wanted to be there," she says.
The curtains in the fake window waft in a draft.
"So then it's a Saturday morning and we'd been out late the night before, right? So Sam's sleeping like a log, and I sneak out and get coffee and those stupid sugary pastries he's so into. I wake him up and I tell him the county clerk's office opens for business in half an hour and it's a bit of a trek on CalTrain. And he eats his chocolate croissant and brushes his teeth and puts on a clean t-shirt and forgets to comb his hair, and we go." She smiles. "I did get to have flowers in my hair. Hibiscus from the yard. He picked it on the way out."
She tugs at the tail of the rat in Dean's mouth, forgotten now. He's let his jaw go lax as he listens.
"On the way back Sam told the whole train car that we just got married. Stopped a couple people on the platform when we got off, too."
Dean spits out the rat. "And then you went home and fucked like bunnies?"
"Pretty much," Jess smiles. "Our landlord came and knocked on our door a couple days after that 'cause we hadn't left the apartment and he thought we'd been murdered."
"That's my boy," Dean says.
Later they're digging into a bag of rock hard Swedish Fish, the red kind 'cause Dean swears the multi-colored ones taste like weird Scandinavian fruits. The stale candy sticks to Jess's teeth.
"So what happened there?" Dean gestures broadly at Jess's round stomach. "Not like Sam to go scuba diving without a wetsuit." Then he looks at her sternly. "Right? Taught him better than that."
The heat in Jess's cheeks spreads all the way down her neck. "Normally." She studies the little candy scales on the fish in her hand. "And then the world sort of ended and it was hard to be" - she searches for the right word - "careful."
Dean crumples the empty Swedish Fish bag and tries an overhand toss into the trash. He misses by a mile and folds in on himself, clutching his injured side. "He was pretty happy, huh," Dean says.
"Yeah," Jess says. She gets up and paces the aisle. She braces her hands against a particleboard armoire. Hibiscus in her hair and a husband she loved to the point of stupidity and the family they were going to have together. Those are the things she used to have. She's finding it hard to breathe. "Dean," she chokes out.
"Yeah, I know," Dean says, and she believes him.
"Sam," she says, and Dean says, "Me too."
"Oh, Jesus," she says. "Oh fuck."
Dean stands up slowly and carefully. His eyes meet hers wearily, and it occurs to Jess that Dean is disappointed that he survived his injuries. "Wanna go break vases?" He asks.
Jess works her way down a shelf of delicate glass cylinders named things like Blommig and Stjälk. Together they create a snowy landscape of shimmering glass on the concrete floor, blocking the way between them and the section full of potted plants. A few robust cacti are still looking green.
That night, when the lantern is turned out, Jess pulls the leafy bedspread closer around her shoulders, blocking out the cold drafts. "I think he's dead."
She feels Dean nod through the mattress.
"Dean, I think he's really dead."
A nod again.
She thinks he's fallen asleep when she hears a quiet, "What am I supposed to do?"
She shakes her head into the mattress.
Jess feels Dean shivering till he falls into an uneasy sleep. He never makes a sound. She reaches out and touches his wet face, trails her fingers to his mouth. He's biting down on the toy rat with jaw-cracking force. He's gut-shot and heart-shot and nothing's going to kill that pain.
The thunder precedes the rain by minutes. Wind whips the straps on their packs, sending the nylon slapping at their arms and legs. Soaked to the skin townies are scurrying all in one direction. Jess meets Dean's gaze. He shrugs. They follow the crowd through a metal door and wind through a labyrinth of corridors, pressing toward the center of the building.
It's dark as sin in the elementary school hallway, and they can only see the lightning flashes in the cracks around the doors. Hail beats down on the roof, rattatat rattatat. Flashlight beams dot the ceiling and walls, flitting over faces and bodies and nervous clenched hands, making the packed-in crowd seem more like a herd of cattle than it already is. The light glances off cheery paper cutouts of yellow ducks pinned to the bulletin boards. Somewhere, a baby is crying.
The hail grows to a deafening assault, till it seems surely the roof will cave in. When the rain of ice quiets, the wind takes its place. It buffets the walls, moans through the cracks. Sometimes with a great crash, some piece of debris outside will collide with the building. There's nothing to do but sit as the storm worsens.
"It was my fault," Dean says, a disembodied voice in the darkness, leaning close to be heard. It's dim as a cloistered confessional, noisy as a foxhole taking mortar fire. Some things can only be said at times like this, when your words could be imagined, could be heard wrong, can't be said to have existed in the same way other words do, ones that are said on sunny street corners.
"It was nobody's fault," she says, although she's lying because she's always been able to feel where Sam is and he went to get water and he didn't come back and he didn't come back and he didn't come back some more, and she didn't even notice till she needed to wash the rabbit guts off her hands, and he is never coming back.
"No, shut up," he says hurriedly, "I'm trying to tell you -"
"Fuck you," she says irritably, "don't tell me to shut up -"
"I kissed him," Dean says.
Jess shuts up and listens to the storm. A flashlight beam from the far end of the hallway illuminates a poster on the wall that solicits entries for the annual Science Fair. Its headline is outlined in glitter glue.
"I kissed him," Dean says. "I made him leave."
Jess curls her fingers against the dirty linoleum floor, and they slide right over it. There's nothing for her to hold onto but herself, so she wraps her hands around her knees and squeezes till her kneecaps shift. "In the orchard?"
"In the - " Dean pauses for a long moment. "Fuck, Jess, no. No. I wouldn't. Hell, he wouldn't." She feels his hand on her boot, touching the laces. He begins to undo them. "He was eighteen."
A flash of lightning briefly lights up the shape of Dean's ear and the messy spikes of his hair.
"It was a really good summer," he says, and his voice is warm. "And Sam seemed so chilled out. It wasn't - nothing happened. It wasn't like that. But the hunts were quiet and we squatted in this little house in Mississippi for a couple months and the weather was hot as the boiler room in hell. The heat rose straight up to the bedrooms upstairs so by the middle of the night Sam was always sneaking into my little room down next to the kitchen, tiptoeing in. I was slinging popcorn at the drive-in to bring in some dough, buy the groceries while Dad was out of town. Sam'd come visit and when I got done we'd go up on the roof of the concession shack and watch whatever crap they were playing. Smelled like fake butter, and Sam was so fucking spoiled always getting me to sneak him a free slushie, so his mouth was like. Permanently blue that summer."
Jess can imagine the smile on Dean's face even if she can't see it.
"Think that was the happiest I'd ever seen him, and he's like, you know what he's like when he's happy, you know, it makes you stupid, it makes you just want to keep him that way forever. So we're up on the roof and Sam's stained his mouth completely blue, and Bruce Campbell's up onscreen sawing off his shotgun with his own chainsaw arm, and Sam grins and says groovy, and I was just so stupid I kissed him, and Jess, I swear he kissed me back. He lay back on the roof and kissed me back." Dean's reached the bottom of her bootlaces. He tugs them tight and begins lacing them back up in a neat tight double helix. "And I thought we were, um, gonna be together forever." His hands pause on the laces. "Yeah."
Jess knows what it's like to look forward to a lifetime with Sam and to have that future snatched away: she'd thought she'd be there to see whether Sam turned into a crotchety old man or a kindly one, whether his hair went gray or fell out, whether he stayed a voracious reader, whether he spoiled his kids rotten or inherited his dad's military discipline.
Dean starts up on her bootlaces again. "Dad got home the next day, and Sam was all sweaty and nervous and I thought it was 'cause he was afraid of getting found out, that Dad would somehow know what we did. And then he said he was going away to college." Dean finishes her laces and ties a tight double knot. He hooks a finger into one of the loops. "Dad gave him an ultimatum, which is a stupid fucking idea with Sam and he knew that, and Dad stormed out and Sam, um. Well, we fought," he says and fails to elaborate. "And he left." Jess flexes her foot against the tight laces, feels pins and needles. "When he walked out the door he was wearing a t-shirt out of the laundry bag, still had a blue-raspberry slushie stain on the collar. That's how quick it was."
Something rolling and deep is reverberating in the hallway, something big that's about to give way. The gymnasium roof, maybe, metal rippled in the wind. Jess breathes out steadily, the way she does to get rid of side-stitches when she's running. "I know."
"What?"
"I mean I know," she says. "He told me."
"What?" Dean says, voice tight with the same lethal control that keeps his gun hand steady.
"I don't think he remembered afterward," she says quickly. "Actually, I know he didn't remember. He was pretty drunk."
"Why would he do that?" Dean asks.
As long as she'd known Sam, he always had a taste for blue slushies, even though they stained his teeth. "I don't know," she says, "you'd have to ask him," and Dean says, "Fuck."
The noise of thundering metal heightens to a shriek and then gives way. Later, when they blink their way out into the post-storm gray, they find the school gymnasium neatly decapitated. The corrugated metal roof's blown off and across the street, draped over a convenience store. Jess walks on her too-tight bootlaces till she feels the heat of a blister developing.
Jess's belly grows round and obvious. She's always ravenous and she dreams like she's creating new worlds in her sleep.
Sometimes she's straddling Sam in their creaky bed, crushing hibiscus into the sheets. Sometimes she's giggling and following him down a crowded hallway at some stupid undergraduate party, and he's shushing her and pulling her into a closet and when she gets in and the door swings shut, she feels all around in the darkness with her hands, finding coats and hangers and a vacuum but Sam's disappeared. Dean grabs her hand and tugs her and they sprint down a deserted Las Vegas street, trying to outrun a thump-thumping helicopter in the aurora-lit darkness. She crouches over a reeking gas station toilet and vomits blood, telling Dean to stay away before he gets infected too, and after hours of heaving she stands up and her stomach is flat and taut, the sickness purged from her body. Crickets sing as Sam sits alone at a campfire, warm flicker softening his tired features, embers popping and sending up showers of sparks. Night of the Living Dead plays on the big screen and tinny dialogue filters out from car speakers on the ground and Sam and Dean roll and wrestle on top of the concession stand while teenagers buy cotton candy underneath them and electric lights glitter on a hillside.
When she wakes up with liquid heat between her legs, it's just one more instance of her body betraying her. She shifts uncomfortably and tells her hormones to calm the fuck down. They never listen.
In the town of Hare Gulch even the Croats have starved to death, and a military convoy gathers dust on the road. Dean rummages in the back of a truck, and Jess laughs aloud when he emerges with an AK-47 over his shoulder and a triumphant swagger.
The afternoon heats up till its so humid you could carve out a spoonful of air and eat it. Jess only manages to keep putting one foot in front of the other by turning off her brain. She fixes her eyes on the ridiculous gun strapped to the back of Dean's pack with bungee cord. She nearly bumps into him when he slows suddenly.
They're at the edge of a cornfield that's still managing to grow untended. Stalks sway unevenly in the absence of any kind of breeze. "Check out the locals." He nods to where scarecrows droop at intervals throughout the sprawling fields. "Let's introduce ourselves." He grins wide and wickedly.
The scarecrow smiles vacantly. Jess blows out a breath and wishes she could wipe the stinging sweat out of her eyes. It's also dripping down the small of her back and between her breasts. She stares longingly at her water bottle where it rests on a rusted-out pickup truck surrounded by cornstalks, but returns her focus to the sagging scarecrow. "We're gonna obliterate 'em. This isn't a fair fight."
"Come on," Dean says from right behind her. He reaches around to nudge her forearm. "What comes next?"
Jess cants the magazine forward, then pulls it smoothly back in the well till it snaps into place. She pulls the charging handle to charge the bolt and chamber a round, then makes a questioning noise.
"Good." Dean brushes her shoulder as he reaches to thumb the selector to semi-automatic. "Let's start small."
Her single round cracks like a lightning strike and reduces the scarecrow's head to a spray of straw, dry wisps floating slowly down to the soil. "Holy fuck." She cackles. "Holy fuck!"
"Fun, right?" She feels Dean's smile against her cheek.
"Let's go again," she says.
"All right," Dean says. "No guts, no glory. You're gonna try full automatic now." He clicks it over, then nudges her arm. "Where's the recoil gonna hit you right now?"
She glances down, adjusts her stance to keep from breaking her own collarbone. "Got it?"
"Got it." He reaches up to cover her ears.
The gun shoves her hard against Dean's body behind her. The scarecrow disappears in a puff of dust. The stake it was tied to cracks in half and topples.
"Wow," she says, and Dean's laugh rumbles behind her.
"Of course, it's not the most practical weapon," he's saying, and she hears a twig snap.
The Croat's skin hangs hungrily on its bones, and the length of sharpened rebar clutched in its hand must have been moments from piercing Dean's back when Jess whirled them around. Dean jolts in surprise behind her.
In shock, her hand jams down hard on the AK's selector and it slips into semi-auto, and that's the only reason she isn't splattered with exploding entrails when the Croat goes down at close range.
Dean's hands are steel on either side of her ribcage. His chest expands against her back as he breathes heavily.
A hawk swoops low over the cornfield looking for mice. It bats its wings and even that hint of breeze cools the sweat Jess worked up during the shooting lesson.
Dean's hands slowly release her sides, leaving his loosely curled fingers barely grazing her breasts. "Nice shot," Dean says, choked. He begins walking her backward toward the flat-tired pickup with their water and packs. His ass hits the bumper and she turns to face him.
Jess is inescapably aware of Dean's eyes on her. His gaze roams over her tits, the curve of her stomach, the grime and gun oil striping her forearms. Carefully, she flicks the AK to safety and reaches past Dean to settle it in the well where the windshield wipers lie gathering dust.
Dean licks his lips. "This is a bad idea."
"You'd know bad ideas." Jess bows her back so his hands slide forward to her breasts, instinctively curving to fit. "You wanted to fuck your brother."
"Shut up," Dean says, and his hands go tight on her. "Don't you talk about me and Sam. Stop."
"Make me," she says, and Dean grabs her by the waist and pushes her against the door so hard the truck rocks on its suspension. Her breath punches out of her and she gives him a smile full of teeth. "I bet he -"
Dean shuts her up with his mouth on hers.
Jess squirms against him and grabs at him, hitches a leg over his thigh and threads her fingers through his hair. She kisses him like she'd throw herself off a bridge: with commitment.
Dean pulls her hair, using it to tilt her head back so he can bite at her neck. His hand comes back to support her ass, letting her get her other leg up around his waist. He groans when she tugs at the short spikes of his hair in return. "Off," he's saying, pulling at the hem of her shirt, "off, off, off." She's blind for a moment when she pulls it up and off over her head. Dean drops his head to her breasts, sucks at where they overflow the cups of her bra. "Gonna," he's mumbling, "I'm gonna."
"Yeah?" she says. She reaches for the buttons of his plaid overshirt. "I don't think you will, I don't think you have the -"
Dean smacks her hands away from his clothing and goes for the button on her jeans. She toes her boots off behind his back, and he pulls her jeans down till they're awkwardly hanging from one foot, then abandons them, already having access to everything he wants.
He hooks an index finger in the waist of her panties, snaps the elastic lightly. "I think," he says, finger sliding slowly along that top hem, "I think you're already wet for me. Right, sweetheart? I bet that's what I'm gonna find down here." He traces his finger along the leg of her panties, along her inner thigh, then rests it lightly right over the center of her, where she's just beginning to soak through the cotton. Dean presses, then, with a cupped hand, rolls his palm against her till her panties are sliding in her wetness and he's felt every bit of her. "That's right," he chuckles in her ear.
Jess drops her head back against the truck. "Lot of talking," she says. "You actually know what to do once you've got a woman?"
The corner of Dean's mouth cants up in a mean little angle. His big rough thumb pushes her panties to the side and then two fingers are sliding into her, thick and slick and unceremonious, till she feels his knuckles at her entrance. She's so wet he sinks in easily. Jess's eyes slam shut. The sounds of rustling corn and Dean's breath are suddenly heightened.
Dean fucks her slowly with his fingers, breath hot against her neck, face hidden. She squirms on his hand and pushes down, hitting his shoulders with closed fists, but he won't speed up. As he teases her, she progressively loses control of the muscles in her legs, which don't want to stay clamped tight around his waist - they want to spread wide for him. She slips when her legs spasm and he has to catch her, force her harder against the truck with his body weight. The roundness of her stomach gets in the way and he can't let go of her ass to touch her with both hands and she wants him deeper. Dean's thumb brushes her clit and she hits him, kicks him as best she can. "Do it," she says. "Dean, just fucking do it."
He presses his face hard against her shoulder, then pulls away, leaving her empty and letting her feet drop down to the ground. His fingers leave a trail of her slick shining on the truck's battered chrome door handle, and he bends her over the front seat with a hand on the back of her neck, pushing her down.
Jess feels new, cool air when he drops her panties to her ankles and she clutches the upholstery in anticipation, but at first Dean just barely dips the tip of a finger back into her, like he's busy taking in the view. She twists to look behind her and he pushes her head back down.
His hands go away and she hears the sound of his zipper. She can hear his hand on his dick, skin on skin. His breaths come heavy. "You want it?"
"I want it," Jess says, "give it to me," and gasps when Dean sinks into her all at once, thick and hard and unforgiving. Jess digs her fingers into the seat's upholstery as her spine arches and flexes. "Like that," she says, "Like that, please."
Dean gives it to her steady and thorough and deep, sending the suspension creaking and shaking. She tries to shove back against him and he grabs her hips tight, holds her in place and refuses to pick up the pace till she sobs. Her hands scramble against the dashboard and the seat, trying to catch hold of something elusive and intangible. Nothing she does breaks Dean's control until she accidentally beats a hand down on the center of the steering wheel. The truck's horn emits a deafening rusty croak, sending a flurry of curious crows squawking indignantly into the air. Dean shakes against her back and when hearing returns to her ringing ears, she hears his laughter. She stifles her own giggle against the seat, pats a hand backward and finds his shaking shoulder.
"Oh my God," he says, and his laughter peters out against her bare shoulder blades. Jess rolls her hips experimentally, and Dean makes a low noise in his throat. He echoes her motion, rolling lazily on forward, still plastered to her back, and he groans again. He works a hand beneath her, gets his fingers between her legs and makes her melt.
She sighs an oh, and something tips Dean over the edge, makes him hitch his hips up into her unsteadily, thumping and sliding till his muscles seize up and she realizes he's coming inside her. He pulls out before he's done, leaves a sticky streak on her thigh and flips her on the seat. He's barely dropped to his knees and gotten his mouth on her when she comes, breath hitching and legs draped over his shoulders.
"Jesus," she says, and opens her eyes. A crow perched on the hood of the truck tilts its head at her inquisitively. She cracks up. "Oh my god, let's get out of here."
Dean crawls up her body from between her legs, takes a good close look at her face. "Hmm," he says, approving of whatever he sees there, and catches her hand to pull her out of the front seat, keeping her from stumbling on the jeans and panties still clinging to her left foot.
This is the kind of thing, Jess thinks, that could get really awkward if they just avoid talking about it and never do it again and let it become a sordid secret.
Jess doesn't feel like talking about it, so that evening when they've kicked ashes over the cooling remains of their campfire and zipped up the tent, she pushes Dean back against his sleeping bag and licks a wet stripe up his cock while his hands clutch and release in her hair.
She dreams about Dean's face twisting in pain, his hand clawing awkwardly to try to pull the length of sharpened rebar from his back, Jess too slow and fumbling with the gun. She wakes up gasping with Dean's fingers pushing their way into her mouth, and she sucks his fingers in the pale morning light.
The lantern light fills the tent with a warm yellow glow. "Oh God," Jess says. She rolls her head on her neck in slow circles. She's already come once and she's tingling all the way out to her fingers, comfy and content like she's just finished devouring a warm meal after a long day's journey. She feels like her body is floating somewhere above the tent, tethered only by the rhythm between her legs. It smells like sweaty man and campfire smoke, and Jess don't even care, she just wants this feeling to go on and on. She pushes her hips up to get more cock inside her and says, "Sam - "
The glorious golden rhythm stutters and stops. Jess cracks her eyes open one at a time, biting her lip. Dean's arms shake a little as he braces himself above her, trying not to put weight on her stomach. His bullet wound looks like a red star, a simmering supernova.
"Sorry," she begins, and he cuts her off with a shallow thrust. She squirms.
"It's okay," he says. He looks up through the mesh tent panel. Moths are fluttering outside, trying to get in to the light. "Believe me, I get it." But the moment's broken.
"You can pretend if you want," Jess whispers to his bicep, gaze cast down and away.
When she flicks her eyes up Dean's staring at her, obviously catching her meaning without difficulty. He shifts a little within her, sliding deeper. She's seen Dean when he's had nothing but oatmeal to eat for five days straight, but she's never seen him this hungry.
Dean puts her on her hands and knees and fucks her like he's never going to get the chance again. Words tumble out of him on whispers and grunts, meaningless and out of context, interspersed with Sam's name.
Jess shuts her eyes and tunes him out, listens only to the slap of his body against hers. She feels the synthetic of the sleeping bag sliding beneath her knees and tries to remember being happily married and striding toward a bright future. In her mind's eye she sees Sam's body taking shape behind her: the slope of his shoulders and the tangles in his hair. He takes her slow and hard and deep, and she shivers her way to orgasm with his name on her tongue.
Jess comes back to earth with Dean shoving inside her and stilling. "Sammy," he pants into her ear.
Dean pulls out and they clean up. Dean puts his hand on the lantern and catches her eye. "Thanks," he says, and switches it off.
The moths disperse, spell broken.
Jess is scraping burned rice out of the bottom of their one pot when the nervous fluttering in her stomach starts up again.
"Hey, Dean," she says. "Come over here." He puts down the Ruger and approaches with hands covered in gun oil. She pulls his palm to her belly anyway, layers her own hand on top. "Wait," she says. "Just wait."
The strange internal butterfly-flutter returns. Dean's eyes widen. "Is that - "
"Yeah," she says. The baby's feet drum inside her like it knows it has an audience.
Dean stares at his hand, mouth slightly open, looking utterly gobsmacked. The baby kicks him like it has an important point to make. Dean's eyes snap up to her and he smiles so bright it's blinding. "I felt it. Do you feel that?"
Jess rolls her eyes. "Yeah, Dean. I feel it."
Dean plasters a second hand to her stomach, leaving dark greasy palm-prints. He bends down closer and jumps a little at each kick, grin widening each time. "That's the coolest thing I've ever …"
He trails off and she realizes he's staring at her, now. "What?"
"Dude, you're totally making a person." He looks at her like she's a superhero.
Jess makes a face. "Don't call me 'dude.'"
Dean cradles her face between his hands and kisses her, tilting her into a slow, intimate meeting of mouths. He's never been so gentle, never even tried. He drops a hand to the small of her back to support her and begins pressing kisses against her neck. He reaches her breasts and lets his head rest there. Jess curves a hand around the back of his skull.
Jess never would have pegged Dean for a guy who wanted kids - it never really crossed her mind, since his lifestyle was notably low on acceptable Show-and-Tell subjects and high on choking hazards - but seeing him now, she thinks she's been sort of an idiot. Dean wants a family. When has he ever wanted anything else?
"I wish Sam was here," Dean mumbles. He pulls back to address her belly directly. He clears his throat. "Hey, kiddo. This is Dean. Look, your dad was - he was really awesome, okay?" Dean smiles, fond and sad. "You really shoulda met him. Um. I'm sorry. You deserve a real family. But you're gonna be great."
"Dean," Jess says, feeling a roiling tangle inside her now that isn't from the baby. "You're, um." She looks away at the pine forest and blinks furiously. "You're my family, now. You're all I've got. And I know it's asking a lot," she rushes ahead, "and I'm not asking you to - I mean, only if you want -"
"No," Dean says, quiet and clear. His hand finds its familiar place on her stomach. The baby somersaults like it's saying hello. "No," he says hoarsely. "I want-"
That's all she can get out of Dean, I want, but she gets it, she does. She can see the yearning in Dean's eyes, transparent and heartbreaking.
"Would you-" Dean cuts himself off again. Jess kisses the angle of his jaw, and he shudders. She runs a hand up under his shirt, feels how warm and solid he is. And she's lonely, god she's lonely. She went from married and in love to devastated in the time it took to gut a rabbit. Dean gasps out on oh god as her hand wanders. He catches it but doesn't pull it out from under his shirt. "If it's a boy," he says, and that's not where she was expecting that train of thought to go at all. "Sam?"
Oh. Oh.
Somehow Jess doesn't feel compelled to recoil away from Dean. "Yeah," she says, licking dry lips. "If it's a boy, we'll call him Sam."
Dean kisses her fiercely then, like he's been refusing himself before with his iron-clad restraint.
"Wait," Jess says, pulling away and pressing at his chest. "What if it's a girl?"
Dean's mouth quirks up at the corners. "Oh, definitely Samantha." His gaze wanders over her face and the spark of amusement in his eyes grows. "You've got a little," he says, and gestures on his own face. Jess wipes a finger over her cheekbone and it comes back charcoal-dark. She realizes she's coated with gun grease from forehead to navel.
"Lost cause," she says, and Dean puts his hands back on her.
They work their way slowly northeast. Jess practices throwing a fixed-blade knife and gives up on making her own snares in disgust. Dean dotes on her, having animated conversations with her increasingly prominent belly. They find a stash of cloth diapers in the daycare of a cobwebbed church in Nazarene Falls, and throw out an extra bag of rock salt to make room in their packs.
The deciduous forest whispers its leaves all around them, but the clearing is windless and warm. They're sleeping outside the tent tonight, risking the mosquitoes to see the stars. From the evenness of his breathing, Dean's asleep. Jess watches the embers smolder and, occasionally reviving, glow bright in the remains of their fire. A wisp of white smoke trails into the clear sky.
Jess may be watching the fire, but she's listening to the forest. Carefully. Something has been moving through the vegetation for some time, and while that's no surprise in the middle of a thriving woodland, it's not the sound of an animal crashing through brush. She hears the supple snap of a young sapling and then hears its shaking leaves hushed - like someone has grabbed them. The approach is deliberately quiet, and it's making a beeline for the clearing.
Jess glances towards the white smoke rising from the embers. She's lifting her head from Dean's chest and about to try to wake him when he catches her wrist. "Shhhh," he breathes. He nods: he's heard the quiet, steady progress through the forest, too. He nods to the handgun tucked, safety on, under the backpack at their feet. Trying not to make a sound, Jess gets it out and gets ready, crouching over Dean.
It's a shadow against the trunks of the paper birches, it's huge, and it's far too close. When Jess sees the glint of eyes, she decides to give their visitor something to think about. The shot rings out and the shadow reels back into the darkness.
"Fuck," the shadow says incredulously. "You shot me." A large round flashlight beam clicks on and blinds Jess when it finds her face. Every inch of skin on her body is goosebumped. She can't move, even to pull the trigger again. Dean, beneath her, pushes at her with both hands trying to twist to see, but they're at the disadvantage here, caught in the light. The beam latches onto Jess's face again, and the voice turns admiring. "And you have incredible aim."
Dean's frantic fumbling finally locates their flashlight and aims it at the shadowy voice like the light itself is a weapon.
Sam's eyes are locked onto Jess. The hand clapped over the bullet graze on his shoulder flexes and loosens. "You look beautiful," Sam says breathlessly, flashlight beam traveling slowly over her whole body. He swings the light over to Dean and he breaks into a grin. "And you have no idea how good it is to see your face."
Dean drops his flashlight. It rolls, illuminating flashes of the treetops, blinding them all by turns.
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