Fic: Last One Out Hits The Lights 2/4
Part 1 // Part 2 // Part 3 // Part 4
They take the survivors back to the church. Full dark's barely an hour away and that's no time to take on a town overrun with zombies. Besides, it's not like they have to worry about the population knowing any more. There are more than a hundred people packed inside, with that combination of restlessness and stillness that genuine fear brings to a large group of people.
Dean can hear crying from more than one direction.
Some of the people are looking at them, in that uncertain, disbelieving sort of way. On any other day Dean thinks being introduced as monster hunters would be cause for most of these people to start laughing their asses off.
He fucking wishes they were laughing now.
Jo's crouched down with one of the kids, cleaning smears of red-brown off his cheek with the sleeve of her shirt. Dean can see her smiling through the curve of her hair; it's soft and real and careful. She's speaking slowly and too quiet to hear, other hand carefully pushing hair off the boy's face.
He loses that unnatural stiffness while Dean watches, lets her rub at the edge of his face a little harder while she keeps talking to him.
Dean thinks maybe once you know the monsters are real all the soft words in the world won't make a hell of a lot of difference. But Jo's still willing to try. There's a whole world of fierce inside that girl that Dean thinks maybe Ellen helped hone to a fine edge.
You're born into this life and you never leave. No matter how much people might want you to.
Sam's at the front of the church, where they've taken the wounded and the people who might be infected. He's talking to a tall man in a dark stained jacket that Dean thinks maybe he recognises. But he can't put a name to the face. Frank's there too, a quiet, sad shape and this is fucked up, this is all fucked up.
Dean turns when someone touches his shoulder and he finds himself face to face with Ellen.
She looks serious and watchful. Though she's relaxed for now. Relaxed enough that Dean thinks maybe they're not going to be surrounded by the shambling hordes any time soon. Or angry townsfolk.
She's lost her ruined jacket and shotgun. Though Dean wouldn’t take any bets on her being unarmed. There's still a very faint line of blood across the edge of her cheek.
"How many did we get?" he asks her.
"I lost count and we've taken more than a hundred with fire. But there are no more wandering the streets, and the guys on watch out there all checked in. None of the dead have made it out of town." She sighs and rests her hip against the pew he's standing next to. "But we've still got a hell of a lot of houses to check and there are still dead bodies on the street. Too much for us to clean up, too much to burn."
Dean frowns, because it's never been a whole town before, never a whole damn town.
"There's no hiding this," Ellen says quietly. "Near on two hundred people saw their town overrun by the dead today, their families and friends slaughtered. Bobby says it looks wrong out there and he can't say for sure that this sort of thing won't happen again, maybe soon."
He knows what's she's saying. That whether they manage to clear this up or not might not matter.
"Jesus," Dean says simply. Because if he'd ever held on to some vague hope that the apocalypse was going to be stopped before the whole world started to notice, or worse, start sliding into the dark, then that seems a hell of a lot more like a pipe dream now.
"What happened to the school?" he asks instead.
"The whole thing pretty much collapsed a little while after your angel teleported you out of there."
Dean's not entirely sure how to take the whole 'your angel' thing. Though Ellen sounds more amused than disbelieving. And it's not like Cas has been doing anything to make it not true, hovering silently at Dean's shoulder as though he might, at any moment, need rescuing from zombies again.
"He does that sometimes," Dean says. He thinks he means it to sound unnerved but it comes out as really stupidly grateful instead.
Ellen flashes him a half smile.
"He doesn't look like he minds none."
Dean turns his head where she's looking and finds Castiel working his way through the church towards him with his own special sort of purpose.
"Dean," he says. Once he's close enough. That firm insistent voice, like he always has something terribly important to say. But Castiel turns to face Ellen instead, and his expression is completely unreadable.
"There are no more survivors," he says quietly and Ellen gives one firm nod.
"Thank you, Cas."
She takes her shotgun up to the front of the church. Dean assumes she's going to give the news to the people there, tense and waiting. Dean knows those faces well enough. The people waiting for their friends, family, loved ones, to make it to safety. To be brought to safety.
He doesn't want to watch them get the bad news.
He turns to face Castiel instead.
"Hey, you ok?"
"I am," Castiel says simply. "Though I've made no progress on finding a source for this contagion."
"It has to be magic though, right? You don't get a couple a hundred people rising from their graves and laying siege to a town for no damn reason."
Castiel frowns.
"It's not a single spell, as such. It's more like the trailing edges of a larger spell that has spilled where it wasn't meant to go. Though I'm having difficulty tracing it back to a source. Which is...disturbing. Usually there's some suggestion of where the magic is leaking from. But this is simply rot, death appearing as if from nowhere."
Dean doesn't like the sound of that at all. He makes it sound like the world's just going bad, like fruit left out on the sun.
"And now it's just gone?"
"It's no longer strong enough to affect things as it did."
"So you think this was what, the backlash from some huge spell?"
"It's possible, I'm uncertain." Castiel doesn’t look happy about being uncertain. In fact he looks about as troubled as Dean's ever seem him, frown deep and heavy.
"I'm really glad you pulled me out of there," Dean says. He doesn't give a damn how grateful he sounds. Because he'd come so damn close to ending up in a zombie's stomach.
"I'm only sorry I couldn't come sooner," Castiel says quietly.
Dean lifts a hand, smacks it into Castiel's shoulder, holds it there for a long second. The curve of bone and muscle is strangely reassuring.
"Hey man, I figure just in time is good enough, more than good enough. I don't think I've ever been that happy to see anyone in my life. Being eaten by zombies, that's not exactly a way I'd like to go."
"If I'd realised how much danger you were in -"
"I've been doing this for a long time - well, ok, not this, not a town overrun by zombies. But the rest of it, the nearly getting killed."
Castiel's face shifts, just a little, into something that looks like frustration.
"Nevertheless, this was a situation you couldn't be prepared for."
"I don't think anyone was prepared for this," Dean points out, because, Jesus, half the damn town's dead. Maybe more than half. Ellen would know better than him. Ellen's the one that's been trying to find out who's missing, who's dead and who's a walking corpse. Dean's happy enough to kill them. He just doesn't want to know who they were. He'd be happy if he never had to know who they were.
The crowd of people parts to let Sam through. Granted, Sam's big enough that making his way through is just a matter of walking and everyone else getting out of his way. Dean's always more than a little bit amused that the difference between Sam's business mode and his civilian mode is pretty much politeness and body confidence. Like he trusts himself to wrestle a monster out of a window but not to walk down a busy street without smacking into people.
He's shutting his phone, sliding it back into his pocket.
"Bobby says we might have another one," Sam says quietly. Dean knows Sam far too well, because he sees the tightness, the half dozen emotions, all covered by the need to get everyone the information as quickly as possible. Dean's moving before he's finished explaining, before he even gets to the where and the when, Castiel trailing behind him. He's like silent shadow, and Dean doesn't even have to ask if he's coming with them.
"Ellen," he calls.
She turns from where she's talking to one of the other hunters. A quiet, round man in his fifties that Dean vaguely remembers from earlier. Roger - Robert?
"We have to go. Bobby says we might have another one."
She catches his eye and she looks tired, more than tired, she looks worried for them.
"You call if you need us," she says firmly, and Dean knows without doubt that she'd come.
"We will," he says. But he's pretty sure he'd have to have his whole boot down a zombie's throat before he's making that call.
"You boys take care of yourselves," Ellen says with a nod. It's not just words. It's a command, and one that she clearly expects them to follow. "And take care of each other."
~~~~~
It gets worse. It gets a hell of a lot worse.
They're not just saving people they're saving whole towns. Following the wave and trying to get ahead of it. Trying to find the source of it. They're burning the dead to make sure. Outbreaks drift steadily across the Midwest, each harder to put down than the last.
Until the dead are a steady wave. Not even every single hunter Bobby knows are enough to stem the tide.
Until there's not even any question about the world noticing.
The dead are in the cities now.
~~~~~
"- to stay in your homes, do not attempt to reach loved ones out of state, do not attempt to travel. If you have a medical emergency -"
Bobby makes a rough noise of irritation, then reaches over and flips the TV off.
"They're going to get more people killed," he says fiercely. "They don't have the first goddamn idea about how to deal with a plague of the walking dead."
"You can always go up to the networks and tell them," Dean points out from the table, where he's cleaning both the shotguns.
"'Bout as much chance of getting them to give out some sensible advice as I have of you listening to it for once."
Dean grunts and flips the cloth he's holding round.
"I'm still alive, aren't I?"
"By the skin of your damn teeth, boy, with no little thanks to that angel you've got in your pocket."
Dean pulls a face.
"He's not in my pocket," he grumbles.
Bobby grunts instead of answering.
Sam drifts in somewhere behind him, trailing Castiel. Like the angel's genetically incapable of sitting still. Or at least giving his body a rest. Not that it needs a rest. It doesn't have any passengers any more. It's just him in there since he got exploded and then put back together again. So maybe he's free to run it into the ground killing zombies now. Who the hell knows.
Sam dumps the bag he's holding on the table. A box of bandages tumbles out of it.
"Any luck?" he asks.
Bobby makes a disgusted noise.
"I'm damned if I can find the source of it." He drops the book he's holding on the table. "Near as I can see is someone managed to leave some sort of time-release on the after-effects of a death-powered ritual of some kind. So they're a mile away with whatever they wanted before hell breaks loose. Though God knows how they're doing it, or why."
"Is something like that even possible?" Dean asks.
Bobby shrugs and makes his 'hell if I know' face.
"Ask the angel."
Dean looks over at where Castiel is curiously paging through one of Bobby's darker and more mysterious texts.
"Cas?"
Castiel frowns.
"Theoretically yes, for someone powerful enough, time is malleable in such a way. Though it would, by necessity, put a strain on the space around it."
"Something we could look for?" Dean asks.
Castiel frowns. "Something that I would notice, were we close enough."
"So, not a big damn flashing sign, then?" Dean says bitterly.
"Unfortunately not."
"How close is close?" Sam asks. He's leaning against the sink behind Bobby.
"Close," Castiel says. "And I fear we don't have time for any sort of search. The death magic is expanding in both strength, and the area it affects."
"There's no other way to find out where it's coming from?"
Castiel shakes his head.
"It's simply an echo which ripples out in a way which cannot be predicted."
"Like a beaded necklace," Sam says quickly. "The string breaks, the beads scatter all over the place. You find one bead, you've got no way of knowing where the necklace broke."
Dean looks at him like he's mad.
"That's a surprisingly accurate description of my difficulty," Castiel says quietly.
"Angels can go through time though, right? Can't you just pop back and see where the damn string broke?" Dean offers.
"Manipulation and observation of time through many dimensions is not quite as simple as that."
"That's a no?" Bobby says flatly, sounding as irritated as Dean feels.
"I'm sorry."
Dean waves the cloth he's holding.
"Hell, it's not your fault. It's not like you're not doing everything else you can. You're probably the only reason we're not all zombie food already."
"It's getting worse out there," Sam points out, all frown under his ludicrous hair.
Dean grunts. "Don't think I haven't noticed."
"I just feel like we should be doing something," Sam says, pushing for something, voice tight with barely restrained frustration.
"We can't be in two places at once, Sam, we can only deal with what's right in front of us," Dean reminds him. Because, much as he hates it, it's a fact.
"That isn't good enough Dean."
"Don't you think I don't know that," he snaps. "You think I don't see it every time we go outside? I'm doing the best that I can, the only way I know how to do it."
Sam deflates, anger falling into an expression of quiet misery. He rubs a hand over his face.
"I know, I know, God, sorry. It's just, this is insane."
Dean grits his teeth and nods jerkily.
"Tell me about it," he says fiercely. "We have dead in the freakin' streets and we can't even get close to why, or how. A few more weeks and we're going to have more dead than alive out there, and God help us then. We need to get ahead of this thing."
"How the hell are we going to do that? We don't have a clue how to predict where these things are coming from," Sam reminds him.
Dean throws the cloth down on the table.
"I know someone who might."
~~~~~
Castiel doesn't look happy about whatever Dean's telling him. His face is hard and there's a frown hovering on the edge of it. Like he's about to protest. Like he's about to tell Dean that whatever he's planning is 'unwise.' Sam thinks maybe one day he'll learn how much that makes absolutely no difference. The crazier a plan is, the more Dean seems to like it.
Though they've had some pretty crazy plans come off for them in the past.
Dean says something, something brief and soft, and the expression he's wearing now - Sam doesn't see that one much anymore. Castiel's face stops looking quite so hard, falls into something confused, but resigned. It's like a ritual between them, one they haven't needed very long to perfect.
The angel nods once, slowly, and Dean exhales something like relief and claps him on the shoulder.
Sam has to huff out a laugh, because it figures that even in the middle of the world going to hell Dean Winchester is putting that expression on the face of an angel. That one Castiel's wearing now. Like he isn't entirely sure how he lost the argument, and that isn't happy about it.
Dean says something else, something that comes with a nod and Castiel follows it with one of his own, unhappy but firm.
Sam looks away when Dean turns around, straightens his legs out in the car and tries to get comfortable, pretends he wasn't watching.
The car rocks when Dean slides into it. He exhales and starts it, expression unhappy but determined.
Sam doesn't say a word when they pull out. He'll let Dean deal with whatever crap he needs to for twenty miles or so. Music just a fraction too loud.
~~~~~
Chuck's house is dark.
The curtains are all drawn, wet paper strewn across the floor in crumpled, haphazard piles.
Sam has a horrible feeling they're not going to find anything here. That the place is as empty as a million other homes.
Dean looks like he's expecting something worse.
Sam doesn't blame him. The streets outside are full of wandering people and there's smoke coming from somewhere. This place is too close to the city. There are too many people making too much noise. All it takes is one zombie straying their way here and people start panicking, start screaming. The infection spreads and they're in their own little hell on earth.
But the house isn't empty.
"Dean," Sam says sharply.
Chuck's slumped over his desk, ragdoll-loose, and for one horrible second Sam thinks he's dead. Until he gets close enough to smell him, the sharp flare of alcohol, so strong it might as well have been poured over everything.
"Jesus, Chuck."
He doesn't look like he's waking up any time soon, and Sam changes his mind, thinks that maybe alcohol poisoning is an option after all. He checks the side of his neck just to be sure.
Then he looks up at Dean, but Dean's not looking at him, he's watching the printer.
The printer that's quietly but patiently flashing a 'no paper' sign, like it ran out a long while ago.
Dean holds his gun to one side and fishes the last page off of the top of the stack. Sam watches his eyes read it, watches his face go tense and hard, it's not a good expression, not even close to it.
Sam doesn't even want to think about the sort of thing that could leave Chuck in this sort of state. Collapsed over his desk in a pile of wrecked paper and denial.
"Jesus Christ," Dean says quietly. There's no mockery in his voice, just air and surprise and that tight, hard anger that sways just as quietly into tight-eyed refusal to accept the inevitable.
Sam tenses.
"What? Dean?" Dean swivels the page and hands it across the room.
Sam catches it, tiny spatters of ink lettering in haphazard paragraphs that seem to have just been shoved apart, whenever the previous one got too big.
He reads it.
Then has to take a breath, fingers going tight on the crumpled paper.
It's a page of rambling but descriptive gore on a horribly massive scale. A whole city drowning under a wave of slaughter. A whole city eating itself. People aren't just rising from their graves here, they're rising everywhere, and it's going to get worse.
Sam shakes his head, because he can't believe it, he doesn't want to believe it.
"Wake him up," Dean says fiercely and there isn't a whole lot of good feeling in his voice.
Sam wants to protest that it's not Chuck's fault. That he didn't cause this, probably couldn't have stopped this. But he doesn't, he just takes a breath, exhales roughly, and sinks to a crouch beside the desk.
"Chuck." Sam lays a hand on the out-flung length of his arm and shakes it. Which gets absolutely no response. He digs his fingers in and shakes a little harder. "Chuck."
Chuck makes a low, ragged noise of complaint, like rejoining the world is completely unacceptable.
Sam shakes him one more time, feels the way muscle twitches in his grip, like it's trying to slither away.
Then Chuck drags himself abruptly upright in a crackle of paper and protesting joints. He looks at them both, groans misery and rubs both hands over his face, shoving his hair into demented tufts.
"It's that bad already, huh?"
~~~~~
Dean tosses the papers on the desk, and Chuck watches them scatter across the untidy surface.
"You didn't think it was maybe a good idea to tell someone about this," he says furiously.
"I'm pretty sure no one wants to know they're living in a zombie apocalypse," Chuck says thickly, then clutches his head, like everything he's managed to block out with alcohol and sleep is stabbing its way back in. Only this time brighter and more painful. "I was just letting them do their thing."
"There are freakin' zombies in the street," Dean snaps. "I think we've officially gone past letting humanity go about their business."
Sam makes a face, a face that he hopes says he thinks Chuck had already noticed that. But Chuck is running his hands through his hair like he's not quite sure where he is, or why everyone is shouting.
Dean thrusts the pages at him.
"You wrote this. You know exactly what's happening out there."
Chuck makes a thin noise, shakes his head.
"Chuck!"
Chuck winces like Dean's voice saws straight through his head.
"Yes, ok, I do, believe me, I absolutely do, and this -" Chuck smacks the paper Dean's holding, sends two pages skittering down onto the carpet. "This isn't even close to what's happening out there. Do you have any idea what it's like to have a head full of that? To not be able to sleep until it's written down, until I have almost literally vomited it up like acid, so I can just be fucking unconscious for a while."
Dean sighs, and forces his anger back down. He has to work at it, he really has to fucking work.
"I didn't sign up to write the end of the world," Chuck tells them miserably
"Well, tough shit, 'cause it looks like you're writing it anyway."
Chuck makes a noise in his throat and pulls his glasses off of the desk, shoves them on his face and starts tearing the pages off the desk.
"You want it, fine." He shoves the whole pile of it at Dean. "Take it."
Most of it skids to the floor in a shower of paper.
"It's all pretty much the same anyway, the scenery may change but everyone dies the same way." Chuck's face crumples into something desperate.
"You're coming with us," Dean tells him.
"Oh God, why?" Chuck says faintly, and Dean looks at him like he's mad, because really, staying here with the zombies and getting eaten while in a drunken stupor. That's not exactly the smartest choice to make.
"Because we need you, there's pretty much no other way we're going to know what's going on."
"And exactly how much help am I supposed to be? I know how you guys live remember, you don't drive away from the devastation, you drive towards it, Christ. Besides, I'm fairly sure the walking dead are already outside."
Dean fishes in the back of his jeans.
"Here." Dean hands over the gun, butt first.
Chuck flinches like Dean's just offered him a dead thing.
"No," he shakes his head, voice harsh and panicked. "Jesus, no, what are you doing handing me a gun? I have no idea how to shoot stuff."
Dean frowns.
"You have to have done research, for the books?"
"Sure, research, I found out how much they weighed, the sort of damage they could do, what rounds they took. I never actually went out and killed anything, nothing that was actively trying to kill me back."
He cringes away from both the weapon and Dean's expression, shaking his head again. Dean's torn between his rule about never giving anyone a gun if they don't know how to use it and the fact that they were outnumbered, seriously fucking outnumbered, and someone else needed to be carrying a gun around here.
"We're going to need all the people we can get out there." Dean can't help but be annoyed and Chuck throws him a look back.
"People who have experience shooting things, sure," Chuck says, voice still too fast. "I can't shoot a zombie in the head, I'll be lucky if I can shoot a zombie full stop. In fact I'm fairly sure I'm more likely to shoot myself, so no, ok, just no."
Dean shakes his head and withdraws the gun, shoves it back in his pants. Then he catches the back of Chuck's jacket and hauls him towards the door.
"Fine, then don't get in the way and don't get eaten."
Sam stops long enough to gather up every piece of paper with writing on it and stuff it into his bag.
"Don't get eaten, yes, thank you, that's a handy tip, Jesus." Chuck lifts a hand, looks like he's a second away from twisting his way out of Dean's grip. But he seems to stop himself. Instead he lets Dean half haul and half steer him outside.
It's freezing and still early enough that the world's just a dusty grey, but there's still noise in the distance, the sound of shouting and car alarms. The sharp smell of smoke on the wind.
Chuck eyeballs the car like someone who seems to think he's being taken to his execution, then sighs and reluctantly tugs open the door.
"We can leave you here for the zombies if you'd rather?" Dean drawls, because seriously, what is it with people and their lacklustre reaction to being rescued today?
Sam's already inside, bag shoved down by his ridiculously long legs, and Dean can already see buildings on fire in the distance. Sam swivels round in his seat, says something to Chuck which has him furiously shaking his head, and Dean officially doesn't care any more.
He shoves the keys in the ignition, ignores the pathetic noise Chuck makes.
He's silent in the back for a long time.
Sam eventually turns round to check he's ok, but even Sam's reassuring face doesn't seem make a dent in Chuck's miserable silence.
"Chuck, seriously, is there anything you know that might help us?"
Chuck rubs his hands over his face.
"It was all typed out. It's all in there somewhere." He gestures at Sam's bag. "Some time after two in the morning it was just words, I couldn’t take it in any more. He squeezes his hands together in his lap, one slow repetitive movement, but he doesn't offer anything else and Sam doesn't push.
Dean stares out the windshield at the road, eyes flicking to the mirror every so often, face tight.
"Of all the ways I wouldn't want the world to end." Chuck says suddenly and rubs at his forehead. Dean scowls at him in the mirror.
"The world isn't ending," he says fiercely, and even Sam, who's supposed to be on his side, is quiet and tight lipped. "Jesus, it's not."
The smell of burning hangs on the wind when they pass the sign that tells them they're leaving town.
Dean swears and rolls the windows up.
"People in zombie movies always make the mistake of trying to survive behind fortifications, and they always end up overrun by the undead."
"This isn't a movie," Sam points out, and Chuck glares at him.
"Obviously, but it's the same principle. God, it's...zombies. They don't eat or sleep, or get cold, or tired. They just wait, for as long as it takes, to get to the food supply."
"Which would be us," Sam provides. Dean kind of wants to smack him for encouraging him.
"That would be us," Chuck agrees. "Jesus..." his voice trails off on some sort of quiet hysterical noise that Dean suspects might very well end up turning into actual hysteria if they're not careful.
Dean can't help muttering something about 'not being food' under his breath, but everyone's apparently ignoring him in favour of untangling movie lore from real life bullshit. Which he has some experience with, because there's a hell of a lot the movies got wrong.
"Maybe we should -" Sam stops, like he's not sure if he should continue.
"You do realise I know exactly what you're talking about when you're not talking," Chuck reminds them.
Sam looks guilty. Dean just glares at him in the mirror.
"I already know how fucked things are, thank you very much," Chuck says thinly. "I'm in the back of the Impala." He rubs at his forehead with the edge of his hand. "I know how a day usually goes for you two and trust me I'm really not happy about being part of the story."
"It's not a story," Dean snaps, because God damn it, sometimes he thinks Chuck needs reminding.
"Don't you think I don't know that by now? Don't you think I haven't spent an entire week learning all the different ways a human being can be torn to pieces? I'm pretty sure I don't want to sleep any more, but being awake isn't much better."
Dean wants to ask if he was just going to wait in his house with a collection of cheap booze for when the living dead shoved in his door and made their way inside. But he doesn't. He thinks maybe that's just too fucking cruel.
Or maybe he just has a horrible feeling the answer will be yes.
~~~~~
They get back to Bobby's at noon two days later.
After having to make their way round numerous checkpoints in the road, some military, some set up by ragged bands of locals. All of them too twitchy, or just too stiff with shock or horror to entirely trust.
Several towns they pass through - too many they pass through - just smell like rotting flesh and death. Knowing how bad things were getting was one thing. But seeing it for themselves, the slow creep of it. It'd been a long time since Dean felt this out of his depth. Since he'd felt this frustrated, this unable to do anything. Even with the threat of an apocalypse there's always been something they could do, some way they could fix things. Somewhere to go. This feels more like a natural disaster. Like a slow, unstoppable natural disaster and he hates it.
He fucking hates it.
Bobby's picked up three new hunters. They're out on the porch when they drive up.
Dean recognises Hove. He's about ten years older than him. Tall and thin with a face that's sharp and nasty, though Dean knows that's a lie. He can't remember him even raising his voice. He's more of a watch and wait, then calmly and quietly slit its throat while its laughing, kind of hunter.
The second man is smaller, more solid. Wearing a coat that's too small for him and squinting unhappily in the bright light. Dean doesn't know him.
The third, Matthew, is older and greyer. He's leaving when they get there, taking a blue truck west towards the smell of death.
He nods as he passes, though Dean only remembers seeing him once before, maybe twice.
Wherever he's going, Dean doesn't envy him.
Chuck sighs in the back but gets out when Dean tosses his bag at him. Sam's been quiet for a while. Where he's folded, strangely still and intent in the passenger seat, with Chuck's printed pages.
Half of Dean wants to know exactly what's in there, half of him wants them to stay exactly where they are. Half of him never wants to read them again. Hell, that's three halves, but he doesn't even care.
It's different reading stuff when it's true.
"Bobby." Dean smacks Chuck on the back, taking him one stumbling step forward. He makes a small unhappy noise. "Chuck."
Chuck looks briefly confused about whether to hold out a hand. But he settles for hugging his bag to his chest like it's a small child, or possibly a shield.
"Bobby Singer," Chuck says carefully. The corner of his mouth rises in what looks more like a wince than a smile. Shit, yeah, Dean sometimes forgets exactly how much Chuck knows about them, all of them. He's mostly been irritated about that so far and this is maybe the first time he's thought about from Chuck's perspective. Hell, if it's weird for them what must it be like for him? To have not only his fake characters, but his whole damn world view split open and made real between one year and the next.
Bobby grunts something that veers close to 'what have you been telling people about me' and Dean decides he's just going to go with that for now. He can explain everything later.
"Your angel's out back," Bobby says quietly. "Go and tell him you're back for God's sake. I was sick of that expression he's been wearing two days ago."
Dean huffs amusement and tosses his bag at Sam. Who makes a face at him but juggles it up with his own and physically steers Chuck inside after the rest of them.
Dean heads off to find the angel.
Castiel's not exactly hard to spot. He's standing still and straight among the dusty wrecks. But he manages a sort of quiet purpose anyway.
He sees Dean and relaxes, just a little, as if he didn't quite believe Bobby and needed to see Dean for himself.
"Hey, Cas."
"You found Chuck." It's somewhere between statement and question. Cas never did get the hang of small talk. Or maybe he just doesn't see the point of it.
"Yeah, we've got Chuck. He wasn't exactly happy about coming with us though."
"You honestly believe he'll see something that will lead us to the source of this?"
Dean nods, one sharp movement, because he has to believe that.
"He's not just seeing us any more. He's seeing all of it. The whole great walking dead mess of it. Like he's become some sort of -"
"Prophet of the end times," Castiel says quietly.
Dean frowns at him.
"Dude, don't say that, it's creepy when you say it."
Castiel looks away, like he's honestly apologetic for making the whole thing sound like zombie Armageddon.
"Still, if he's seeing what's to come and not just you, that is something to be concerned about."
"I'm still in the 'we're going to stop it from happening' camp, if you were wondering," Dean points out. He's damned if it doesn't come out as some sort of accusation, though. Because what is it with pessimistic angels, anyway?
Castiel looks back. He looks like he wants to speak, maybe to tell Dean that it is happening, right now. But he doesn’t, instead he tilts his head, like he's seeing something Dean can't.
"If it's possible, I have faith that you will."
"It's possible," Dean insists. Clearly they just don't teach optimism in angel school.
"I was waiting for you to return. I intend to continue my search for information that may aid us."
"You're leaving?" Dean knows he sounds disappointed. He was kind of hoping Cas would stick around for a while. Especially now they have Chuck.
Castiel nods.
"I believe I can be more use to you gathering information."
Dean nods but he can't help the brief, unhappy thought that Castiel is abandoning him - them.
"So, I get to worry about you, now?"
Castiel's expression softens, just a little.
"I will not take unnecessary risks."
Dean grunts, because he damn well better not.
"How long will you be gone?"
"I'm uncertain, perhaps a few days. You'll still be here?"
Dean thinks there's more worry under there than certainty.
"Yeah, I'll be here. With Bobby and Sam and Hove and the other guy."
"Edgar," Castiel provides, like he's just the fountain of all knowledge. Dean should call him on that, considering the amount of times he frustrates him with his non-answers.
"Just be careful," Dean says instead.
Castiel looks at him, one focused, strange look, and then he nods and he's gone, just gone.
"I hate when you do that," Dean complains to the empty yard.
~~~~~
Tiredness finally sends him upstairs at just gone midnight. He doesn't even bother to turn on the lights. Sam and Chuck disappeared with all the untidy printed paper and Sam's spare laptop hours ago. So they're either asleep or Chuck's forcing more horrors out onto the screen.
Dean lies in bed for twenty minutes. The low dark that's somewhere between too late and too early outlines everything in grey. But sleep's not even a possibility in the distance.
Everything has taken on a cold sinister edge.
There's a low droning creak outside like something's moving in the wind. He can hear Bobby talking to Hove and Edgar downstairs, low murmurs that don't quite make words. Just a slow wash of tension and sound.
Dean swears and kicks his way free of the sheets swings up and digs cold feet into his boots. He might as well do something other than lay there and go mad inside his own thoughts. His own thoughts aren't exactly a comfortable place at any time, let alone at night while the world is being overtaken by the freakin' undead.
They probably hear him across the floorboards, they definitely hear him head downstairs. They look up when he enters the kitchen and Bobby hands him a mug that steams. He grunts appreciation and takes it, finds it hot enough to suggest Bobby poured just after he got out of bed.
"If you're not sleeping, you're making yourself useful," Bobby tells him after the second burning swallow. He tips his head towards the table. Where there's a map laid out and a scribbled mess of phone messages, calls for help, information on cities that are completely overtaken and pieces of military communication.
Someone's been half-way through it already. There's tight, scratchy handwriting against paper and an empty coffee cup holding the edge of the map down.
Dean grunts and drops into a chair, picks up a red pen.
"Why is there a damn great red line there?" Dean asks roughly, wondering for one brief horrible moment if they're actually losing parts of the country to the dead.
"The military's in charge there now, can't get in any more," Hove provides. "Hope to God their perimeter is good - that's a big population. Lots of people close together, less ground for the dead to travel."
"I heard they're using tanks in Arizona," Edgar adds. He's staring into his own coffee like there might be a message from God in there.
"I'd say the world is well and truly past the point of no return when we need to use tanks to mow down zombies," Dean decides.
"Don't knock it if it works," Hove says flatly, and Bobby grunts like he agrees or approves. Or possibly just to tell them they're all girls who talk too much. Dean kind of likes not knowing the difference sometimes. He should tell Bobby it gives him an air of mystery, just to get that sour, unimpressed face.
He's about to mention exactly what he'd do with access to high powered weaponry when there's a low quiet crack somewhere outside. There's a moment of stillness and then they quickly make their way to the windows, only stopping long enough to pick up guns and ammunition.
Dean shifts the curtain aside and stares out into the darkness. He's looking for movement more than anything else. The dead don't worry much about being stealthy. The dead don't care if they're seen.
But he can't see anything. Just the cold, weak darkness and the low curves and juts of metal outside.
They all wait where they are for a second in complete silence.
There's another low sound, the shuffling thud of something falling against wood.
Bobby's expression is tight, hard. The two hunters behind him are quiet and still, hands firm on their guns.
"Go get your brother," Bobby says calmly. Dean's already halfway to the stairs, taking them two at a time, not worrying about the low thud of his boots.
He shoves the other door upstairs open. Sam's already awake, like he's been living on that same knife edge of vibrating uncertainty as Dean.
"Trouble," Dean says simply, and Sam's already up and halfway into his jeans, pulling the shotgun off of the dresser.
"Where?"
"Downstairs, I think they're outside -" Dean cuts his eyes sideways to the shoved open camp bed across the room, where Chuck is a sprawled out shape in the darkness. "Bring Chuck."
He dips back into his room long enough to haul out the bag there and heads back downstairs.
Bobby's by the window now, Edgar by the door. Hove is calmly and quietly loading guns at the table.
"Are they out there?"
"Damn right they are." Bobby manages to sound personally offended by the fact.
"How many?"
"Many," Hove says simply.
Edgar makes a noise which gives the impression he finds the idea of holding a house against zombies irritating. Like he'd had better plans for the night.
The sound of boots on stairs ends with Sam by the door and Chuck still halfway down, looking afraid and confused. Clothes and hair crumpled on one side
"What -"
Sam holds up a hand and Chuck shuts up.
There's another quiet thud from outside and Dean shoots Bobby a look. A look Bobby knows him well enough to read.
Sam slides across to take one window, Dean the other. Chuck hovers behind Sam, and doesn't protest, or even say a word when Sam dumps the bag with what Dean assumes is the extra ammunition in it into his hands.
The moans start less than minute after that. Quiet and low, but the careful droning is coming closer. The shuffle-thud of feet on grass and gravel. The drag of limbs against wood and steel.
A minute after that there's the soft drag-push of fingers on the door, as if to test whether it's open or shut, to test whether it's soft. Whether they can press their way inside.
Dean's fingers curl round the shotgun.
They're all taut, focused on the door. And Dean's pretty sure they're all resisting the urge to fling it open and shoot the hell out of anything, out of everything on the other side.
They're so focused there that they almost miss the quick angry thud of flesh against wood at the other end of the house.
"You two get the back," Bobby snaps.
Dean's already heading that way, Sam a step behind.
The lock on the back door goes when they're two thirds of the way there.
It slams open and the doorway is instantly filled with a mass of reaching arms and dark, wet, open mouths. Stumbling into the kitchen in a thick stream, smelling like dirt and sewage and rank, old blood.
Dean unloads the shotgun into the space and Sam takes out the stragglers with quick neat headshots, dropping them back outside as fast as they can come in.
The shotgun comes up empty just as Sam heaves the door shut with his own body weight.
Sam gasps when the door shakes instantly, as if there's more, always more to put down. Lending their weight, their need to get inside to the mass.
"Dean!"
The back door is quickly splintering under the pressure, tiny pieces of wood showering out and Sam's body shudders where he's using it to keep it shut. Sam's pretty damn hefty but the dead are fucking strong.
Why the hell are the dead always so strong?
Dean thrusts the shotgun at Chuck who's appeared out of nowhere, shaking his head and making low horrified noises.
"Reload that," he commands
"Oh, Jesus Christ," Chuck says, all rough panic and hysteria. But he's on his knees on the floor in a scatter of shells with some vague idea of what he's doing. Dean hauls the Glock off the table and adds his weight to Sam's at the back door.
Dean fires through the gap the next time it jolts in its frame. There's a thud and for a second the pushing at the door is less heavy than before.
"Do we know how many are out there?"
"Enough," Sam says.
Dean refuses to believe that they're surrounded. There's is absolutely no way they've left themselves surrounded by zombies. That's a worst case scenario and that's bullshit.
Bobby's house is fortified for pretty much anything. But there's no way Dean's getting himself trapped in here with vastly increasing numbers of the dead slowly making their way towards the house. Leaving themselves sealed in the panic room downstairs only to be slowly crushed by the sheer numbers, or starving to death in the dark.
That's not going to happen.
The wood cracks under pushing fingers and Dean jams the barrel of the gun through a hole again and fires twice.
The pressure lets up and Sam's dragging the table over with his leg, dragging it far enough that Dean can catch it, and they sway away for just long enough to haul it up and over, dishes and books cascading off to crash into the floor. The wood slams against the door, crushing fingers and parts of faces, shoving them back from where they'd been trying to force himself through the tiny gaps.
They move to the refrigerator and just pull the whole thing down with an almighty crash.
"What in the hell are you boys doing in there?" Bobby yells.
"Making one hell of a mess," Dean shouts back. But the door is pretty much shut now. It shakes in tiny little judders, fingers still picking at it, but it's going to hold for a while.
Chuck thrusts Dean's shotgun back into his hand, and Sam grabs him on the way past as they make their way back to the front door.
Bobby, Edgar and Hove are having pretty much the same problem as them. Bobby is shoved against the handle and Hove is holding the whole thing shut with his shoulders, boots skid-sliding on the floor. Edgar is leant sideways against the window trying to get a good look outside. Only the big windows at the front of the house are shuddering too, great thuds of force as body after body presses and pushes and bangs there. It's only the crush of so many of them that prevents one of them from getting a good swing and smashing the glass to pieces.
"We have to get out of here," Dean says.
"No shit," Bobby snaps back.
The front door thuds sharply, splinters, reaching hands clawing there and at the windows. With the relentless perseverance of something that has all the time in the world and all the unflagging stamina of the dead.
Though Dean's not stupid, he realises that for them to get out they're going to have to get through however many zombies are currently milling round the damn house, sliding between the old wrecks out there. If he'd known this was going to happen he would have parked a lot closer to the house.
The banging on the windows is a constant 'thump, thump' of pressure now, loud and threatening, and Dean's pretty sure the glass is about an inch away from giving.
"Sam."
Sam's dragging one of the smaller bookcases over, intending to shove it against the window, get some sort of barricade going. And Dean's not happy about that, not happy about having to keep themselves inside, at getting freakin' trapped in here, but he's moving to help anyway. Because the first thing you learn is 'don't fucking die.'
That's when the glass on the left window breaks, smashes inwards in one burst of force and pressure. The gap instantly filled by reaching arms and torn dead faces.
Dean fires the shotgun and the dead reaching there stumble and jerk with the impact, flesh spraying out. Some of them fall back to be crushed under the feet and knees and reaching hands of the others.
Dean fires again, hits an arm and a face, taking skin and teeth. The zombie halfway through the window jolts backwards into the bodies behind it, then slumps forward and starts reaching again, half its jaw gone.
Bobby's first shot takes it high in the forehead and it falls, wide smeared-out eyes and dead flesh. It doesn't move again. Though more dead crawl over it, fingers clawing at the floor and the curtains, and the edges of the walls.
"Move!" Sam shouts, and then he lets the bookcase go.
It smashes into the clambering zombies, throwing them back. There's the dry crunch of boots on glass and then all of them press into the book-laden shelves, shoving it in tighter. Grasping fingers crushed against wood.
Bobby's still yelling to get themselves away from the other window when the glass there breaks too. It just shatters apart and the reaching hands fall against them and into them - Edgar's closest. Still trying to reload his gun, he's caught by a dozen hands, fingers digging into him, pulling, grasping.
He has a hand out, digs it in Chuck's jacket and Chuck reaches out on instinct, trying to pull Edgar away from them. But they're all over him. He's too close to too many teeth and Edgar just comes apart under that much force. There's blood everywhere, fingers and teeth dragging him away, dragging him to pieces. He's pulled out through the windows so violently that the fingers he still has curled in Chuck's shirt catch him and pull him down. Chuck ends up in a sprawl on the floor, red spattered over his hands and the side of his face. More than close enough to the reaching hands for his inhale to be a sharp sound of horror.
Sam catches the back of his jacket and hauls him bodily out of the way.
"Oh Jesus, oh Jesus Christ." Chuck's boots are still slithering on the slick redness that's splashed all over the floor.
Sam gets a hand under his arm, pulling him back and Sam's shooting before Dean's got his own gun up, putting the stumbling, shambling hoard down one, then two at a time.
"Everyone get the hell down," Hove says sharply, and he's sliding forward with something clutched in his fist.
Hove has a goddamn grenade.
"We're going to be running straight after that goes off," Sam tells Chuck. Then puts a hand on his head and shoves it down.
Then the whole world explodes.
Dean has his mouth open and his ears are still ringing like hell, but he's up with the others, out through the mess where the window used to be with his gun up.
The yard is a red mess of broken zombies and the shambling dusty mess that were behind the front line. Plugged with wood and metal but still upright. They stagger forward and Bobby uses the shotgun with extreme prejudice to get them out of the way.
The car's where Dean left it and they take out twenty zombies on the way, making damn sure they're dead before stepping round their greying, broken bodies.
"Sam, get Chuck in the car."
Bobby and Hove are heading for Bobby's truck, faster than the zombies can cut them off, and Dean has no doubt that once inside it Bobby is just going to run the fuckers down.
Dean makes damn sure he has enough time to get in with nothing within reaching distance, and when the car jumps into life he doesn't waste time on doing anything but getting the hell out of there.
~~~~~
They drive for three hours, Sam painting Edgar's blood across the passenger seat. While Chuck stays almost completely silent in the back. Save for the rough, too fast edge of every breath and the occasional soft noise somewhere between horror and hysteria. Dean shoots him a look in the mirror but he doesn't break. He sits there, miserable and hunched up and spotted with red.
Bobby and Hove follow behind in Bobby's truck, lights cutting through the dark and shining in through the window on every long, straight stretch of road
Dean reminds himself that it could have been worse, could have been so much worse.
They stop when he can't drive any more. They stop in a nameless town, outside a two storey house. The front door yawns open, everything of value long gone. They claim the house as a temporary home. Quietly tromping through the almost cheerful, carefully decorated rooms.
It's not 'til Dean makes it to the bathroom that he discovers the blood splashed up his cheek, too bright and real to be zombie gore. They were all close to Edgar when he died. He washes it off and makes his way back downstairs.
Bobby's in the kitchen, drinking coffee that's forty percent something else entirely. Chuck is at the table too, frowning into his own mug like it might be poison.
Sam's a tall, quiet shape in the doorway. Like he's not quite sure how to be useful.
Hove is smoking on the porch, the bright, harsh smell of it drifting inside.
Bobby gives him a look, a look he understands. Though he's too tired, too bone tired to wonder at whether agreeing with it is a good idea or not.
Dean drags himself upstairs
To sleep, once again, in the cold sheets of a stranger's bed.
~~~~~
Sam ends up in one of the armchairs in the living room. Bag spread open on the floor next to him, trailing red-spotted paper on the carpet.
He's too tired to sleep and his shoulder aches and he wants to believe they've driven far enough to be safe.
But he's a Winchester and he knows better.
Chuck's fallen asleep on one of the broken couches, arm folded under his head. There's still a barely dry streak of blood up his neck. But Sam's not going to wake him up to wash it off. Not going to even though Chuck will complain, horrified, about it tomorrow. He looks away from it, doesn't want to remember the surprised look on Edgar's face. That one brief moment before confusion became realisation, before there was blood everywhere.
Jesus, Chuck needs his sleep, maybe more than any of them. Sam's grateful, so damn grateful, that, unlike Chuck, he's too exhausted to dream at the moment. He's too exhausted to see anything but blackness when he closes his eyes. Between one run to safety and the next.
They're using up all their bullets while the dead just keep streaming across the world. An endless supply of meat to put them into. It doesn't even seem to matter any more that these were people. Not just people, but someone's loved ones. People who cared, people who laughed and went out and watched TV and kissed.
Sam can't, he can't see them like that any more. God, he wouldn't want to.
These things are just dead flesh now, jerked back into motion long after whoever they'd originally been had gone.
A hand comes down on Sam's shoulder, warm and strong. He looks up and finds Bobby, expression tired but fierce.
"He ok?" Bobby tips his head towards Chuck, a small untidy tangle among the couch cushions.
Sam sighs.
"I'm not entirely sure. Chuck tends to be - he tends to be loud and expressive about whatever's going on, so I don't think we'll know 'til he wakes up. But I think he'll be ok. I don't know if I would, having to see all of this, over and over. Having to write it all down."
"Being a prophet does seem like a shitty job at the end of the world," Bobby growls. He squeezes Sam's shoulder and then lets his hand slide away.
Sam should protest, he should protest that it's not the end of the world, but he just - doesn't.
It feels like a betrayal.
"Has he seen anything yet?"
Sam shakes his head.
"Nothing that can help us. Nothing that isn't just slaughter, cities falling, the power going out." Sam throws up a hand, as if to try and convey how pointless it all is. How Chuck feels like a failure because he can't do a single thing to make this stop.
Bobby grunts.
"Anyone else going through his visions? He ain't exactly looking for the details."
"Dean and Cas were going through them," Sam says quietly. He'd been helping at first but he just couldn't - he couldn't do it any more.
Bobby makes a rough noise.
"Where is the angel, anyway?"
Sam shakes his head.
"I don't know, off doing angel things."
~~~~~
Dean's phone goes at three in the morning. It takes him less than two rings to have it open and pressed to his ear.
"Where are you?" Castiel's voice is quick, as close to panic as the angel ever gets. That firm unhappy impatience that sounds almost wounded. Dean thinks maybe he got to Bobby's place and found it torn apart, found the blood everywhere; the scatter of cartridges and the rank smell of blood and gunpowder.
Dean rubs at his eye with the heel of his hands and tries to remember the number of the house. They'd pushed inside in the dark without looking, without caring, too busy shutting the doors behind them.
"Dean?"
He tells him, tells him as best as he remembers and Castiel doesn't even hang up, he's just there, standing at the foot of the bed.
Dean flips the phone shut.
"What happened," Castiel demands. Dean doesn't think he's ever heard Castiel demand anything before.
"Zombies happened," Dean says roughly and shoves himself to a sit.
Castiel looks at him, taking in the blood scattered across his shoulders, the nicks from broken glass and the long scrape up one arm where he got too close to the wood climbing out of a grenade hole in the side of Bobby's house.
"You should have called," Castiel says flatly. Honestly angry with him.
"I can't call you every time I get in trouble, every time I don't think I can handle whatever it is I'm fighting. I can't do the job that way, and you have better things to do than checking in on me every five minutes."
"I have nothing better to do than make sure you're safe," Castiel says, quiet but firm. Then frowns, as if maybe he wasn't expecting to say that.
Dean ignores the way it surprises him, the way it makes something clench in his chest.
"I'm pretty sure no one's going to be safe until we stop this thing," he points out roughly.
He's not throwing it back in Castiel's face, just reminding him, desperately, that they're fighting for the whole world here. Because Dean knows where that narrow focus leaves you. What it leaves you doing. What it makes you.
"You are not just anyone, Dean," Castiel says, voice hard.
Dean looks at him and Castiel sighs, gently, almost unnoticeable in the dark.
"Thanks," he says quietly. Because he's fairly sure this isn't just about him being Michael's vessel.
Castiel looks strangely uncertain all of a sudden in the darkness standing over him. When he's exhausted and messed all to hell.
"Cas," he starts, then doesn’t know what he was even going to say.
"I'll wait downstairs for you -"
"No," Dean shoves the sheets aside, reaches for his jeans.
"I'm awake. I might as well take advantage of it."
Cas stays while he shoves his way into his pants and finds a shirt.
Dean gets the feeling Castiel isn't going to leave again.
They take the survivors back to the church. Full dark's barely an hour away and that's no time to take on a town overrun with zombies. Besides, it's not like they have to worry about the population knowing any more. There are more than a hundred people packed inside, with that combination of restlessness and stillness that genuine fear brings to a large group of people.
Dean can hear crying from more than one direction.
Some of the people are looking at them, in that uncertain, disbelieving sort of way. On any other day Dean thinks being introduced as monster hunters would be cause for most of these people to start laughing their asses off.
He fucking wishes they were laughing now.
Jo's crouched down with one of the kids, cleaning smears of red-brown off his cheek with the sleeve of her shirt. Dean can see her smiling through the curve of her hair; it's soft and real and careful. She's speaking slowly and too quiet to hear, other hand carefully pushing hair off the boy's face.
He loses that unnatural stiffness while Dean watches, lets her rub at the edge of his face a little harder while she keeps talking to him.
Dean thinks maybe once you know the monsters are real all the soft words in the world won't make a hell of a lot of difference. But Jo's still willing to try. There's a whole world of fierce inside that girl that Dean thinks maybe Ellen helped hone to a fine edge.
You're born into this life and you never leave. No matter how much people might want you to.
Sam's at the front of the church, where they've taken the wounded and the people who might be infected. He's talking to a tall man in a dark stained jacket that Dean thinks maybe he recognises. But he can't put a name to the face. Frank's there too, a quiet, sad shape and this is fucked up, this is all fucked up.
Dean turns when someone touches his shoulder and he finds himself face to face with Ellen.
She looks serious and watchful. Though she's relaxed for now. Relaxed enough that Dean thinks maybe they're not going to be surrounded by the shambling hordes any time soon. Or angry townsfolk.
She's lost her ruined jacket and shotgun. Though Dean wouldn’t take any bets on her being unarmed. There's still a very faint line of blood across the edge of her cheek.
"How many did we get?" he asks her.
"I lost count and we've taken more than a hundred with fire. But there are no more wandering the streets, and the guys on watch out there all checked in. None of the dead have made it out of town." She sighs and rests her hip against the pew he's standing next to. "But we've still got a hell of a lot of houses to check and there are still dead bodies on the street. Too much for us to clean up, too much to burn."
Dean frowns, because it's never been a whole town before, never a whole damn town.
"There's no hiding this," Ellen says quietly. "Near on two hundred people saw their town overrun by the dead today, their families and friends slaughtered. Bobby says it looks wrong out there and he can't say for sure that this sort of thing won't happen again, maybe soon."
He knows what's she's saying. That whether they manage to clear this up or not might not matter.
"Jesus," Dean says simply. Because if he'd ever held on to some vague hope that the apocalypse was going to be stopped before the whole world started to notice, or worse, start sliding into the dark, then that seems a hell of a lot more like a pipe dream now.
"What happened to the school?" he asks instead.
"The whole thing pretty much collapsed a little while after your angel teleported you out of there."
Dean's not entirely sure how to take the whole 'your angel' thing. Though Ellen sounds more amused than disbelieving. And it's not like Cas has been doing anything to make it not true, hovering silently at Dean's shoulder as though he might, at any moment, need rescuing from zombies again.
"He does that sometimes," Dean says. He thinks he means it to sound unnerved but it comes out as really stupidly grateful instead.
Ellen flashes him a half smile.
"He doesn't look like he minds none."
Dean turns his head where she's looking and finds Castiel working his way through the church towards him with his own special sort of purpose.
"Dean," he says. Once he's close enough. That firm insistent voice, like he always has something terribly important to say. But Castiel turns to face Ellen instead, and his expression is completely unreadable.
"There are no more survivors," he says quietly and Ellen gives one firm nod.
"Thank you, Cas."
She takes her shotgun up to the front of the church. Dean assumes she's going to give the news to the people there, tense and waiting. Dean knows those faces well enough. The people waiting for their friends, family, loved ones, to make it to safety. To be brought to safety.
He doesn't want to watch them get the bad news.
He turns to face Castiel instead.
"Hey, you ok?"
"I am," Castiel says simply. "Though I've made no progress on finding a source for this contagion."
"It has to be magic though, right? You don't get a couple a hundred people rising from their graves and laying siege to a town for no damn reason."
Castiel frowns.
"It's not a single spell, as such. It's more like the trailing edges of a larger spell that has spilled where it wasn't meant to go. Though I'm having difficulty tracing it back to a source. Which is...disturbing. Usually there's some suggestion of where the magic is leaking from. But this is simply rot, death appearing as if from nowhere."
Dean doesn't like the sound of that at all. He makes it sound like the world's just going bad, like fruit left out on the sun.
"And now it's just gone?"
"It's no longer strong enough to affect things as it did."
"So you think this was what, the backlash from some huge spell?"
"It's possible, I'm uncertain." Castiel doesn’t look happy about being uncertain. In fact he looks about as troubled as Dean's ever seem him, frown deep and heavy.
"I'm really glad you pulled me out of there," Dean says. He doesn't give a damn how grateful he sounds. Because he'd come so damn close to ending up in a zombie's stomach.
"I'm only sorry I couldn't come sooner," Castiel says quietly.
Dean lifts a hand, smacks it into Castiel's shoulder, holds it there for a long second. The curve of bone and muscle is strangely reassuring.
"Hey man, I figure just in time is good enough, more than good enough. I don't think I've ever been that happy to see anyone in my life. Being eaten by zombies, that's not exactly a way I'd like to go."
"If I'd realised how much danger you were in -"
"I've been doing this for a long time - well, ok, not this, not a town overrun by zombies. But the rest of it, the nearly getting killed."
Castiel's face shifts, just a little, into something that looks like frustration.
"Nevertheless, this was a situation you couldn't be prepared for."
"I don't think anyone was prepared for this," Dean points out, because, Jesus, half the damn town's dead. Maybe more than half. Ellen would know better than him. Ellen's the one that's been trying to find out who's missing, who's dead and who's a walking corpse. Dean's happy enough to kill them. He just doesn't want to know who they were. He'd be happy if he never had to know who they were.
The crowd of people parts to let Sam through. Granted, Sam's big enough that making his way through is just a matter of walking and everyone else getting out of his way. Dean's always more than a little bit amused that the difference between Sam's business mode and his civilian mode is pretty much politeness and body confidence. Like he trusts himself to wrestle a monster out of a window but not to walk down a busy street without smacking into people.
He's shutting his phone, sliding it back into his pocket.
"Bobby says we might have another one," Sam says quietly. Dean knows Sam far too well, because he sees the tightness, the half dozen emotions, all covered by the need to get everyone the information as quickly as possible. Dean's moving before he's finished explaining, before he even gets to the where and the when, Castiel trailing behind him. He's like silent shadow, and Dean doesn't even have to ask if he's coming with them.
"Ellen," he calls.
She turns from where she's talking to one of the other hunters. A quiet, round man in his fifties that Dean vaguely remembers from earlier. Roger - Robert?
"We have to go. Bobby says we might have another one."
She catches his eye and she looks tired, more than tired, she looks worried for them.
"You call if you need us," she says firmly, and Dean knows without doubt that she'd come.
"We will," he says. But he's pretty sure he'd have to have his whole boot down a zombie's throat before he's making that call.
"You boys take care of yourselves," Ellen says with a nod. It's not just words. It's a command, and one that she clearly expects them to follow. "And take care of each other."
~~~~~
It gets worse. It gets a hell of a lot worse.
They're not just saving people they're saving whole towns. Following the wave and trying to get ahead of it. Trying to find the source of it. They're burning the dead to make sure. Outbreaks drift steadily across the Midwest, each harder to put down than the last.
Until the dead are a steady wave. Not even every single hunter Bobby knows are enough to stem the tide.
Until there's not even any question about the world noticing.
The dead are in the cities now.
~~~~~
"- to stay in your homes, do not attempt to reach loved ones out of state, do not attempt to travel. If you have a medical emergency -"
Bobby makes a rough noise of irritation, then reaches over and flips the TV off.
"They're going to get more people killed," he says fiercely. "They don't have the first goddamn idea about how to deal with a plague of the walking dead."
"You can always go up to the networks and tell them," Dean points out from the table, where he's cleaning both the shotguns.
"'Bout as much chance of getting them to give out some sensible advice as I have of you listening to it for once."
Dean grunts and flips the cloth he's holding round.
"I'm still alive, aren't I?"
"By the skin of your damn teeth, boy, with no little thanks to that angel you've got in your pocket."
Dean pulls a face.
"He's not in my pocket," he grumbles.
Bobby grunts instead of answering.
Sam drifts in somewhere behind him, trailing Castiel. Like the angel's genetically incapable of sitting still. Or at least giving his body a rest. Not that it needs a rest. It doesn't have any passengers any more. It's just him in there since he got exploded and then put back together again. So maybe he's free to run it into the ground killing zombies now. Who the hell knows.
Sam dumps the bag he's holding on the table. A box of bandages tumbles out of it.
"Any luck?" he asks.
Bobby makes a disgusted noise.
"I'm damned if I can find the source of it." He drops the book he's holding on the table. "Near as I can see is someone managed to leave some sort of time-release on the after-effects of a death-powered ritual of some kind. So they're a mile away with whatever they wanted before hell breaks loose. Though God knows how they're doing it, or why."
"Is something like that even possible?" Dean asks.
Bobby shrugs and makes his 'hell if I know' face.
"Ask the angel."
Dean looks over at where Castiel is curiously paging through one of Bobby's darker and more mysterious texts.
"Cas?"
Castiel frowns.
"Theoretically yes, for someone powerful enough, time is malleable in such a way. Though it would, by necessity, put a strain on the space around it."
"Something we could look for?" Dean asks.
Castiel frowns. "Something that I would notice, were we close enough."
"So, not a big damn flashing sign, then?" Dean says bitterly.
"Unfortunately not."
"How close is close?" Sam asks. He's leaning against the sink behind Bobby.
"Close," Castiel says. "And I fear we don't have time for any sort of search. The death magic is expanding in both strength, and the area it affects."
"There's no other way to find out where it's coming from?"
Castiel shakes his head.
"It's simply an echo which ripples out in a way which cannot be predicted."
"Like a beaded necklace," Sam says quickly. "The string breaks, the beads scatter all over the place. You find one bead, you've got no way of knowing where the necklace broke."
Dean looks at him like he's mad.
"That's a surprisingly accurate description of my difficulty," Castiel says quietly.
"Angels can go through time though, right? Can't you just pop back and see where the damn string broke?" Dean offers.
"Manipulation and observation of time through many dimensions is not quite as simple as that."
"That's a no?" Bobby says flatly, sounding as irritated as Dean feels.
"I'm sorry."
Dean waves the cloth he's holding.
"Hell, it's not your fault. It's not like you're not doing everything else you can. You're probably the only reason we're not all zombie food already."
"It's getting worse out there," Sam points out, all frown under his ludicrous hair.
Dean grunts. "Don't think I haven't noticed."
"I just feel like we should be doing something," Sam says, pushing for something, voice tight with barely restrained frustration.
"We can't be in two places at once, Sam, we can only deal with what's right in front of us," Dean reminds him. Because, much as he hates it, it's a fact.
"That isn't good enough Dean."
"Don't you think I don't know that," he snaps. "You think I don't see it every time we go outside? I'm doing the best that I can, the only way I know how to do it."
Sam deflates, anger falling into an expression of quiet misery. He rubs a hand over his face.
"I know, I know, God, sorry. It's just, this is insane."
Dean grits his teeth and nods jerkily.
"Tell me about it," he says fiercely. "We have dead in the freakin' streets and we can't even get close to why, or how. A few more weeks and we're going to have more dead than alive out there, and God help us then. We need to get ahead of this thing."
"How the hell are we going to do that? We don't have a clue how to predict where these things are coming from," Sam reminds him.
Dean throws the cloth down on the table.
"I know someone who might."
~~~~~
Castiel doesn't look happy about whatever Dean's telling him. His face is hard and there's a frown hovering on the edge of it. Like he's about to protest. Like he's about to tell Dean that whatever he's planning is 'unwise.' Sam thinks maybe one day he'll learn how much that makes absolutely no difference. The crazier a plan is, the more Dean seems to like it.
Though they've had some pretty crazy plans come off for them in the past.
Dean says something, something brief and soft, and the expression he's wearing now - Sam doesn't see that one much anymore. Castiel's face stops looking quite so hard, falls into something confused, but resigned. It's like a ritual between them, one they haven't needed very long to perfect.
The angel nods once, slowly, and Dean exhales something like relief and claps him on the shoulder.
Sam has to huff out a laugh, because it figures that even in the middle of the world going to hell Dean Winchester is putting that expression on the face of an angel. That one Castiel's wearing now. Like he isn't entirely sure how he lost the argument, and that isn't happy about it.
Dean says something else, something that comes with a nod and Castiel follows it with one of his own, unhappy but firm.
Sam looks away when Dean turns around, straightens his legs out in the car and tries to get comfortable, pretends he wasn't watching.
The car rocks when Dean slides into it. He exhales and starts it, expression unhappy but determined.
Sam doesn't say a word when they pull out. He'll let Dean deal with whatever crap he needs to for twenty miles or so. Music just a fraction too loud.
~~~~~
Chuck's house is dark.
The curtains are all drawn, wet paper strewn across the floor in crumpled, haphazard piles.
Sam has a horrible feeling they're not going to find anything here. That the place is as empty as a million other homes.
Dean looks like he's expecting something worse.
Sam doesn't blame him. The streets outside are full of wandering people and there's smoke coming from somewhere. This place is too close to the city. There are too many people making too much noise. All it takes is one zombie straying their way here and people start panicking, start screaming. The infection spreads and they're in their own little hell on earth.
But the house isn't empty.
"Dean," Sam says sharply.
Chuck's slumped over his desk, ragdoll-loose, and for one horrible second Sam thinks he's dead. Until he gets close enough to smell him, the sharp flare of alcohol, so strong it might as well have been poured over everything.
"Jesus, Chuck."
He doesn't look like he's waking up any time soon, and Sam changes his mind, thinks that maybe alcohol poisoning is an option after all. He checks the side of his neck just to be sure.
Then he looks up at Dean, but Dean's not looking at him, he's watching the printer.
The printer that's quietly but patiently flashing a 'no paper' sign, like it ran out a long while ago.
Dean holds his gun to one side and fishes the last page off of the top of the stack. Sam watches his eyes read it, watches his face go tense and hard, it's not a good expression, not even close to it.
Sam doesn't even want to think about the sort of thing that could leave Chuck in this sort of state. Collapsed over his desk in a pile of wrecked paper and denial.
"Jesus Christ," Dean says quietly. There's no mockery in his voice, just air and surprise and that tight, hard anger that sways just as quietly into tight-eyed refusal to accept the inevitable.
Sam tenses.
"What? Dean?" Dean swivels the page and hands it across the room.
Sam catches it, tiny spatters of ink lettering in haphazard paragraphs that seem to have just been shoved apart, whenever the previous one got too big.
He reads it.
Then has to take a breath, fingers going tight on the crumpled paper.
It's a page of rambling but descriptive gore on a horribly massive scale. A whole city drowning under a wave of slaughter. A whole city eating itself. People aren't just rising from their graves here, they're rising everywhere, and it's going to get worse.
Sam shakes his head, because he can't believe it, he doesn't want to believe it.
"Wake him up," Dean says fiercely and there isn't a whole lot of good feeling in his voice.
Sam wants to protest that it's not Chuck's fault. That he didn't cause this, probably couldn't have stopped this. But he doesn't, he just takes a breath, exhales roughly, and sinks to a crouch beside the desk.
"Chuck." Sam lays a hand on the out-flung length of his arm and shakes it. Which gets absolutely no response. He digs his fingers in and shakes a little harder. "Chuck."
Chuck makes a low, ragged noise of complaint, like rejoining the world is completely unacceptable.
Sam shakes him one more time, feels the way muscle twitches in his grip, like it's trying to slither away.
Then Chuck drags himself abruptly upright in a crackle of paper and protesting joints. He looks at them both, groans misery and rubs both hands over his face, shoving his hair into demented tufts.
"It's that bad already, huh?"
~~~~~
Dean tosses the papers on the desk, and Chuck watches them scatter across the untidy surface.
"You didn't think it was maybe a good idea to tell someone about this," he says furiously.
"I'm pretty sure no one wants to know they're living in a zombie apocalypse," Chuck says thickly, then clutches his head, like everything he's managed to block out with alcohol and sleep is stabbing its way back in. Only this time brighter and more painful. "I was just letting them do their thing."
"There are freakin' zombies in the street," Dean snaps. "I think we've officially gone past letting humanity go about their business."
Sam makes a face, a face that he hopes says he thinks Chuck had already noticed that. But Chuck is running his hands through his hair like he's not quite sure where he is, or why everyone is shouting.
Dean thrusts the pages at him.
"You wrote this. You know exactly what's happening out there."
Chuck makes a thin noise, shakes his head.
"Chuck!"
Chuck winces like Dean's voice saws straight through his head.
"Yes, ok, I do, believe me, I absolutely do, and this -" Chuck smacks the paper Dean's holding, sends two pages skittering down onto the carpet. "This isn't even close to what's happening out there. Do you have any idea what it's like to have a head full of that? To not be able to sleep until it's written down, until I have almost literally vomited it up like acid, so I can just be fucking unconscious for a while."
Dean sighs, and forces his anger back down. He has to work at it, he really has to fucking work.
"I didn't sign up to write the end of the world," Chuck tells them miserably
"Well, tough shit, 'cause it looks like you're writing it anyway."
Chuck makes a noise in his throat and pulls his glasses off of the desk, shoves them on his face and starts tearing the pages off the desk.
"You want it, fine." He shoves the whole pile of it at Dean. "Take it."
Most of it skids to the floor in a shower of paper.
"It's all pretty much the same anyway, the scenery may change but everyone dies the same way." Chuck's face crumples into something desperate.
"You're coming with us," Dean tells him.
"Oh God, why?" Chuck says faintly, and Dean looks at him like he's mad, because really, staying here with the zombies and getting eaten while in a drunken stupor. That's not exactly the smartest choice to make.
"Because we need you, there's pretty much no other way we're going to know what's going on."
"And exactly how much help am I supposed to be? I know how you guys live remember, you don't drive away from the devastation, you drive towards it, Christ. Besides, I'm fairly sure the walking dead are already outside."
Dean fishes in the back of his jeans.
"Here." Dean hands over the gun, butt first.
Chuck flinches like Dean's just offered him a dead thing.
"No," he shakes his head, voice harsh and panicked. "Jesus, no, what are you doing handing me a gun? I have no idea how to shoot stuff."
Dean frowns.
"You have to have done research, for the books?"
"Sure, research, I found out how much they weighed, the sort of damage they could do, what rounds they took. I never actually went out and killed anything, nothing that was actively trying to kill me back."
He cringes away from both the weapon and Dean's expression, shaking his head again. Dean's torn between his rule about never giving anyone a gun if they don't know how to use it and the fact that they were outnumbered, seriously fucking outnumbered, and someone else needed to be carrying a gun around here.
"We're going to need all the people we can get out there." Dean can't help but be annoyed and Chuck throws him a look back.
"People who have experience shooting things, sure," Chuck says, voice still too fast. "I can't shoot a zombie in the head, I'll be lucky if I can shoot a zombie full stop. In fact I'm fairly sure I'm more likely to shoot myself, so no, ok, just no."
Dean shakes his head and withdraws the gun, shoves it back in his pants. Then he catches the back of Chuck's jacket and hauls him towards the door.
"Fine, then don't get in the way and don't get eaten."
Sam stops long enough to gather up every piece of paper with writing on it and stuff it into his bag.
"Don't get eaten, yes, thank you, that's a handy tip, Jesus." Chuck lifts a hand, looks like he's a second away from twisting his way out of Dean's grip. But he seems to stop himself. Instead he lets Dean half haul and half steer him outside.
It's freezing and still early enough that the world's just a dusty grey, but there's still noise in the distance, the sound of shouting and car alarms. The sharp smell of smoke on the wind.
Chuck eyeballs the car like someone who seems to think he's being taken to his execution, then sighs and reluctantly tugs open the door.
"We can leave you here for the zombies if you'd rather?" Dean drawls, because seriously, what is it with people and their lacklustre reaction to being rescued today?
Sam's already inside, bag shoved down by his ridiculously long legs, and Dean can already see buildings on fire in the distance. Sam swivels round in his seat, says something to Chuck which has him furiously shaking his head, and Dean officially doesn't care any more.
He shoves the keys in the ignition, ignores the pathetic noise Chuck makes.
He's silent in the back for a long time.
Sam eventually turns round to check he's ok, but even Sam's reassuring face doesn't seem make a dent in Chuck's miserable silence.
"Chuck, seriously, is there anything you know that might help us?"
Chuck rubs his hands over his face.
"It was all typed out. It's all in there somewhere." He gestures at Sam's bag. "Some time after two in the morning it was just words, I couldn’t take it in any more. He squeezes his hands together in his lap, one slow repetitive movement, but he doesn't offer anything else and Sam doesn't push.
Dean stares out the windshield at the road, eyes flicking to the mirror every so often, face tight.
"Of all the ways I wouldn't want the world to end." Chuck says suddenly and rubs at his forehead. Dean scowls at him in the mirror.
"The world isn't ending," he says fiercely, and even Sam, who's supposed to be on his side, is quiet and tight lipped. "Jesus, it's not."
The smell of burning hangs on the wind when they pass the sign that tells them they're leaving town.
Dean swears and rolls the windows up.
"People in zombie movies always make the mistake of trying to survive behind fortifications, and they always end up overrun by the undead."
"This isn't a movie," Sam points out, and Chuck glares at him.
"Obviously, but it's the same principle. God, it's...zombies. They don't eat or sleep, or get cold, or tired. They just wait, for as long as it takes, to get to the food supply."
"Which would be us," Sam provides. Dean kind of wants to smack him for encouraging him.
"That would be us," Chuck agrees. "Jesus..." his voice trails off on some sort of quiet hysterical noise that Dean suspects might very well end up turning into actual hysteria if they're not careful.
Dean can't help muttering something about 'not being food' under his breath, but everyone's apparently ignoring him in favour of untangling movie lore from real life bullshit. Which he has some experience with, because there's a hell of a lot the movies got wrong.
"Maybe we should -" Sam stops, like he's not sure if he should continue.
"You do realise I know exactly what you're talking about when you're not talking," Chuck reminds them.
Sam looks guilty. Dean just glares at him in the mirror.
"I already know how fucked things are, thank you very much," Chuck says thinly. "I'm in the back of the Impala." He rubs at his forehead with the edge of his hand. "I know how a day usually goes for you two and trust me I'm really not happy about being part of the story."
"It's not a story," Dean snaps, because God damn it, sometimes he thinks Chuck needs reminding.
"Don't you think I don't know that by now? Don't you think I haven't spent an entire week learning all the different ways a human being can be torn to pieces? I'm pretty sure I don't want to sleep any more, but being awake isn't much better."
Dean wants to ask if he was just going to wait in his house with a collection of cheap booze for when the living dead shoved in his door and made their way inside. But he doesn't. He thinks maybe that's just too fucking cruel.
Or maybe he just has a horrible feeling the answer will be yes.
~~~~~
They get back to Bobby's at noon two days later.
After having to make their way round numerous checkpoints in the road, some military, some set up by ragged bands of locals. All of them too twitchy, or just too stiff with shock or horror to entirely trust.
Several towns they pass through - too many they pass through - just smell like rotting flesh and death. Knowing how bad things were getting was one thing. But seeing it for themselves, the slow creep of it. It'd been a long time since Dean felt this out of his depth. Since he'd felt this frustrated, this unable to do anything. Even with the threat of an apocalypse there's always been something they could do, some way they could fix things. Somewhere to go. This feels more like a natural disaster. Like a slow, unstoppable natural disaster and he hates it.
He fucking hates it.
Bobby's picked up three new hunters. They're out on the porch when they drive up.
Dean recognises Hove. He's about ten years older than him. Tall and thin with a face that's sharp and nasty, though Dean knows that's a lie. He can't remember him even raising his voice. He's more of a watch and wait, then calmly and quietly slit its throat while its laughing, kind of hunter.
The second man is smaller, more solid. Wearing a coat that's too small for him and squinting unhappily in the bright light. Dean doesn't know him.
The third, Matthew, is older and greyer. He's leaving when they get there, taking a blue truck west towards the smell of death.
He nods as he passes, though Dean only remembers seeing him once before, maybe twice.
Wherever he's going, Dean doesn't envy him.
Chuck sighs in the back but gets out when Dean tosses his bag at him. Sam's been quiet for a while. Where he's folded, strangely still and intent in the passenger seat, with Chuck's printed pages.
Half of Dean wants to know exactly what's in there, half of him wants them to stay exactly where they are. Half of him never wants to read them again. Hell, that's three halves, but he doesn't even care.
It's different reading stuff when it's true.
"Bobby." Dean smacks Chuck on the back, taking him one stumbling step forward. He makes a small unhappy noise. "Chuck."
Chuck looks briefly confused about whether to hold out a hand. But he settles for hugging his bag to his chest like it's a small child, or possibly a shield.
"Bobby Singer," Chuck says carefully. The corner of his mouth rises in what looks more like a wince than a smile. Shit, yeah, Dean sometimes forgets exactly how much Chuck knows about them, all of them. He's mostly been irritated about that so far and this is maybe the first time he's thought about from Chuck's perspective. Hell, if it's weird for them what must it be like for him? To have not only his fake characters, but his whole damn world view split open and made real between one year and the next.
Bobby grunts something that veers close to 'what have you been telling people about me' and Dean decides he's just going to go with that for now. He can explain everything later.
"Your angel's out back," Bobby says quietly. "Go and tell him you're back for God's sake. I was sick of that expression he's been wearing two days ago."
Dean huffs amusement and tosses his bag at Sam. Who makes a face at him but juggles it up with his own and physically steers Chuck inside after the rest of them.
Dean heads off to find the angel.
Castiel's not exactly hard to spot. He's standing still and straight among the dusty wrecks. But he manages a sort of quiet purpose anyway.
He sees Dean and relaxes, just a little, as if he didn't quite believe Bobby and needed to see Dean for himself.
"Hey, Cas."
"You found Chuck." It's somewhere between statement and question. Cas never did get the hang of small talk. Or maybe he just doesn't see the point of it.
"Yeah, we've got Chuck. He wasn't exactly happy about coming with us though."
"You honestly believe he'll see something that will lead us to the source of this?"
Dean nods, one sharp movement, because he has to believe that.
"He's not just seeing us any more. He's seeing all of it. The whole great walking dead mess of it. Like he's become some sort of -"
"Prophet of the end times," Castiel says quietly.
Dean frowns at him.
"Dude, don't say that, it's creepy when you say it."
Castiel looks away, like he's honestly apologetic for making the whole thing sound like zombie Armageddon.
"Still, if he's seeing what's to come and not just you, that is something to be concerned about."
"I'm still in the 'we're going to stop it from happening' camp, if you were wondering," Dean points out. He's damned if it doesn't come out as some sort of accusation, though. Because what is it with pessimistic angels, anyway?
Castiel looks back. He looks like he wants to speak, maybe to tell Dean that it is happening, right now. But he doesn’t, instead he tilts his head, like he's seeing something Dean can't.
"If it's possible, I have faith that you will."
"It's possible," Dean insists. Clearly they just don't teach optimism in angel school.
"I was waiting for you to return. I intend to continue my search for information that may aid us."
"You're leaving?" Dean knows he sounds disappointed. He was kind of hoping Cas would stick around for a while. Especially now they have Chuck.
Castiel nods.
"I believe I can be more use to you gathering information."
Dean nods but he can't help the brief, unhappy thought that Castiel is abandoning him - them.
"So, I get to worry about you, now?"
Castiel's expression softens, just a little.
"I will not take unnecessary risks."
Dean grunts, because he damn well better not.
"How long will you be gone?"
"I'm uncertain, perhaps a few days. You'll still be here?"
Dean thinks there's more worry under there than certainty.
"Yeah, I'll be here. With Bobby and Sam and Hove and the other guy."
"Edgar," Castiel provides, like he's just the fountain of all knowledge. Dean should call him on that, considering the amount of times he frustrates him with his non-answers.
"Just be careful," Dean says instead.
Castiel looks at him, one focused, strange look, and then he nods and he's gone, just gone.
"I hate when you do that," Dean complains to the empty yard.
~~~~~
Tiredness finally sends him upstairs at just gone midnight. He doesn't even bother to turn on the lights. Sam and Chuck disappeared with all the untidy printed paper and Sam's spare laptop hours ago. So they're either asleep or Chuck's forcing more horrors out onto the screen.
Dean lies in bed for twenty minutes. The low dark that's somewhere between too late and too early outlines everything in grey. But sleep's not even a possibility in the distance.
Everything has taken on a cold sinister edge.
There's a low droning creak outside like something's moving in the wind. He can hear Bobby talking to Hove and Edgar downstairs, low murmurs that don't quite make words. Just a slow wash of tension and sound.
Dean swears and kicks his way free of the sheets swings up and digs cold feet into his boots. He might as well do something other than lay there and go mad inside his own thoughts. His own thoughts aren't exactly a comfortable place at any time, let alone at night while the world is being overtaken by the freakin' undead.
They probably hear him across the floorboards, they definitely hear him head downstairs. They look up when he enters the kitchen and Bobby hands him a mug that steams. He grunts appreciation and takes it, finds it hot enough to suggest Bobby poured just after he got out of bed.
"If you're not sleeping, you're making yourself useful," Bobby tells him after the second burning swallow. He tips his head towards the table. Where there's a map laid out and a scribbled mess of phone messages, calls for help, information on cities that are completely overtaken and pieces of military communication.
Someone's been half-way through it already. There's tight, scratchy handwriting against paper and an empty coffee cup holding the edge of the map down.
Dean grunts and drops into a chair, picks up a red pen.
"Why is there a damn great red line there?" Dean asks roughly, wondering for one brief horrible moment if they're actually losing parts of the country to the dead.
"The military's in charge there now, can't get in any more," Hove provides. "Hope to God their perimeter is good - that's a big population. Lots of people close together, less ground for the dead to travel."
"I heard they're using tanks in Arizona," Edgar adds. He's staring into his own coffee like there might be a message from God in there.
"I'd say the world is well and truly past the point of no return when we need to use tanks to mow down zombies," Dean decides.
"Don't knock it if it works," Hove says flatly, and Bobby grunts like he agrees or approves. Or possibly just to tell them they're all girls who talk too much. Dean kind of likes not knowing the difference sometimes. He should tell Bobby it gives him an air of mystery, just to get that sour, unimpressed face.
He's about to mention exactly what he'd do with access to high powered weaponry when there's a low quiet crack somewhere outside. There's a moment of stillness and then they quickly make their way to the windows, only stopping long enough to pick up guns and ammunition.
Dean shifts the curtain aside and stares out into the darkness. He's looking for movement more than anything else. The dead don't worry much about being stealthy. The dead don't care if they're seen.
But he can't see anything. Just the cold, weak darkness and the low curves and juts of metal outside.
They all wait where they are for a second in complete silence.
There's another low sound, the shuffling thud of something falling against wood.
Bobby's expression is tight, hard. The two hunters behind him are quiet and still, hands firm on their guns.
"Go get your brother," Bobby says calmly. Dean's already halfway to the stairs, taking them two at a time, not worrying about the low thud of his boots.
He shoves the other door upstairs open. Sam's already awake, like he's been living on that same knife edge of vibrating uncertainty as Dean.
"Trouble," Dean says simply, and Sam's already up and halfway into his jeans, pulling the shotgun off of the dresser.
"Where?"
"Downstairs, I think they're outside -" Dean cuts his eyes sideways to the shoved open camp bed across the room, where Chuck is a sprawled out shape in the darkness. "Bring Chuck."
He dips back into his room long enough to haul out the bag there and heads back downstairs.
Bobby's by the window now, Edgar by the door. Hove is calmly and quietly loading guns at the table.
"Are they out there?"
"Damn right they are." Bobby manages to sound personally offended by the fact.
"How many?"
"Many," Hove says simply.
Edgar makes a noise which gives the impression he finds the idea of holding a house against zombies irritating. Like he'd had better plans for the night.
The sound of boots on stairs ends with Sam by the door and Chuck still halfway down, looking afraid and confused. Clothes and hair crumpled on one side
"What -"
Sam holds up a hand and Chuck shuts up.
There's another quiet thud from outside and Dean shoots Bobby a look. A look Bobby knows him well enough to read.
Sam slides across to take one window, Dean the other. Chuck hovers behind Sam, and doesn't protest, or even say a word when Sam dumps the bag with what Dean assumes is the extra ammunition in it into his hands.
The moans start less than minute after that. Quiet and low, but the careful droning is coming closer. The shuffle-thud of feet on grass and gravel. The drag of limbs against wood and steel.
A minute after that there's the soft drag-push of fingers on the door, as if to test whether it's open or shut, to test whether it's soft. Whether they can press their way inside.
Dean's fingers curl round the shotgun.
They're all taut, focused on the door. And Dean's pretty sure they're all resisting the urge to fling it open and shoot the hell out of anything, out of everything on the other side.
They're so focused there that they almost miss the quick angry thud of flesh against wood at the other end of the house.
"You two get the back," Bobby snaps.
Dean's already heading that way, Sam a step behind.
The lock on the back door goes when they're two thirds of the way there.
It slams open and the doorway is instantly filled with a mass of reaching arms and dark, wet, open mouths. Stumbling into the kitchen in a thick stream, smelling like dirt and sewage and rank, old blood.
Dean unloads the shotgun into the space and Sam takes out the stragglers with quick neat headshots, dropping them back outside as fast as they can come in.
The shotgun comes up empty just as Sam heaves the door shut with his own body weight.
Sam gasps when the door shakes instantly, as if there's more, always more to put down. Lending their weight, their need to get inside to the mass.
"Dean!"
The back door is quickly splintering under the pressure, tiny pieces of wood showering out and Sam's body shudders where he's using it to keep it shut. Sam's pretty damn hefty but the dead are fucking strong.
Why the hell are the dead always so strong?
Dean thrusts the shotgun at Chuck who's appeared out of nowhere, shaking his head and making low horrified noises.
"Reload that," he commands
"Oh, Jesus Christ," Chuck says, all rough panic and hysteria. But he's on his knees on the floor in a scatter of shells with some vague idea of what he's doing. Dean hauls the Glock off the table and adds his weight to Sam's at the back door.
Dean fires through the gap the next time it jolts in its frame. There's a thud and for a second the pushing at the door is less heavy than before.
"Do we know how many are out there?"
"Enough," Sam says.
Dean refuses to believe that they're surrounded. There's is absolutely no way they've left themselves surrounded by zombies. That's a worst case scenario and that's bullshit.
Bobby's house is fortified for pretty much anything. But there's no way Dean's getting himself trapped in here with vastly increasing numbers of the dead slowly making their way towards the house. Leaving themselves sealed in the panic room downstairs only to be slowly crushed by the sheer numbers, or starving to death in the dark.
That's not going to happen.
The wood cracks under pushing fingers and Dean jams the barrel of the gun through a hole again and fires twice.
The pressure lets up and Sam's dragging the table over with his leg, dragging it far enough that Dean can catch it, and they sway away for just long enough to haul it up and over, dishes and books cascading off to crash into the floor. The wood slams against the door, crushing fingers and parts of faces, shoving them back from where they'd been trying to force himself through the tiny gaps.
They move to the refrigerator and just pull the whole thing down with an almighty crash.
"What in the hell are you boys doing in there?" Bobby yells.
"Making one hell of a mess," Dean shouts back. But the door is pretty much shut now. It shakes in tiny little judders, fingers still picking at it, but it's going to hold for a while.
Chuck thrusts Dean's shotgun back into his hand, and Sam grabs him on the way past as they make their way back to the front door.
Bobby, Edgar and Hove are having pretty much the same problem as them. Bobby is shoved against the handle and Hove is holding the whole thing shut with his shoulders, boots skid-sliding on the floor. Edgar is leant sideways against the window trying to get a good look outside. Only the big windows at the front of the house are shuddering too, great thuds of force as body after body presses and pushes and bangs there. It's only the crush of so many of them that prevents one of them from getting a good swing and smashing the glass to pieces.
"We have to get out of here," Dean says.
"No shit," Bobby snaps back.
The front door thuds sharply, splinters, reaching hands clawing there and at the windows. With the relentless perseverance of something that has all the time in the world and all the unflagging stamina of the dead.
Though Dean's not stupid, he realises that for them to get out they're going to have to get through however many zombies are currently milling round the damn house, sliding between the old wrecks out there. If he'd known this was going to happen he would have parked a lot closer to the house.
The banging on the windows is a constant 'thump, thump' of pressure now, loud and threatening, and Dean's pretty sure the glass is about an inch away from giving.
"Sam."
Sam's dragging one of the smaller bookcases over, intending to shove it against the window, get some sort of barricade going. And Dean's not happy about that, not happy about having to keep themselves inside, at getting freakin' trapped in here, but he's moving to help anyway. Because the first thing you learn is 'don't fucking die.'
That's when the glass on the left window breaks, smashes inwards in one burst of force and pressure. The gap instantly filled by reaching arms and torn dead faces.
Dean fires the shotgun and the dead reaching there stumble and jerk with the impact, flesh spraying out. Some of them fall back to be crushed under the feet and knees and reaching hands of the others.
Dean fires again, hits an arm and a face, taking skin and teeth. The zombie halfway through the window jolts backwards into the bodies behind it, then slumps forward and starts reaching again, half its jaw gone.
Bobby's first shot takes it high in the forehead and it falls, wide smeared-out eyes and dead flesh. It doesn't move again. Though more dead crawl over it, fingers clawing at the floor and the curtains, and the edges of the walls.
"Move!" Sam shouts, and then he lets the bookcase go.
It smashes into the clambering zombies, throwing them back. There's the dry crunch of boots on glass and then all of them press into the book-laden shelves, shoving it in tighter. Grasping fingers crushed against wood.
Bobby's still yelling to get themselves away from the other window when the glass there breaks too. It just shatters apart and the reaching hands fall against them and into them - Edgar's closest. Still trying to reload his gun, he's caught by a dozen hands, fingers digging into him, pulling, grasping.
He has a hand out, digs it in Chuck's jacket and Chuck reaches out on instinct, trying to pull Edgar away from them. But they're all over him. He's too close to too many teeth and Edgar just comes apart under that much force. There's blood everywhere, fingers and teeth dragging him away, dragging him to pieces. He's pulled out through the windows so violently that the fingers he still has curled in Chuck's shirt catch him and pull him down. Chuck ends up in a sprawl on the floor, red spattered over his hands and the side of his face. More than close enough to the reaching hands for his inhale to be a sharp sound of horror.
Sam catches the back of his jacket and hauls him bodily out of the way.
"Oh Jesus, oh Jesus Christ." Chuck's boots are still slithering on the slick redness that's splashed all over the floor.
Sam gets a hand under his arm, pulling him back and Sam's shooting before Dean's got his own gun up, putting the stumbling, shambling hoard down one, then two at a time.
"Everyone get the hell down," Hove says sharply, and he's sliding forward with something clutched in his fist.
Hove has a goddamn grenade.
"We're going to be running straight after that goes off," Sam tells Chuck. Then puts a hand on his head and shoves it down.
Then the whole world explodes.
Dean has his mouth open and his ears are still ringing like hell, but he's up with the others, out through the mess where the window used to be with his gun up.
The yard is a red mess of broken zombies and the shambling dusty mess that were behind the front line. Plugged with wood and metal but still upright. They stagger forward and Bobby uses the shotgun with extreme prejudice to get them out of the way.
The car's where Dean left it and they take out twenty zombies on the way, making damn sure they're dead before stepping round their greying, broken bodies.
"Sam, get Chuck in the car."
Bobby and Hove are heading for Bobby's truck, faster than the zombies can cut them off, and Dean has no doubt that once inside it Bobby is just going to run the fuckers down.
Dean makes damn sure he has enough time to get in with nothing within reaching distance, and when the car jumps into life he doesn't waste time on doing anything but getting the hell out of there.
~~~~~
They drive for three hours, Sam painting Edgar's blood across the passenger seat. While Chuck stays almost completely silent in the back. Save for the rough, too fast edge of every breath and the occasional soft noise somewhere between horror and hysteria. Dean shoots him a look in the mirror but he doesn't break. He sits there, miserable and hunched up and spotted with red.
Bobby and Hove follow behind in Bobby's truck, lights cutting through the dark and shining in through the window on every long, straight stretch of road
Dean reminds himself that it could have been worse, could have been so much worse.
They stop when he can't drive any more. They stop in a nameless town, outside a two storey house. The front door yawns open, everything of value long gone. They claim the house as a temporary home. Quietly tromping through the almost cheerful, carefully decorated rooms.
It's not 'til Dean makes it to the bathroom that he discovers the blood splashed up his cheek, too bright and real to be zombie gore. They were all close to Edgar when he died. He washes it off and makes his way back downstairs.
Bobby's in the kitchen, drinking coffee that's forty percent something else entirely. Chuck is at the table too, frowning into his own mug like it might be poison.
Sam's a tall, quiet shape in the doorway. Like he's not quite sure how to be useful.
Hove is smoking on the porch, the bright, harsh smell of it drifting inside.
Bobby gives him a look, a look he understands. Though he's too tired, too bone tired to wonder at whether agreeing with it is a good idea or not.
Dean drags himself upstairs
To sleep, once again, in the cold sheets of a stranger's bed.
~~~~~
Sam ends up in one of the armchairs in the living room. Bag spread open on the floor next to him, trailing red-spotted paper on the carpet.
He's too tired to sleep and his shoulder aches and he wants to believe they've driven far enough to be safe.
But he's a Winchester and he knows better.
Chuck's fallen asleep on one of the broken couches, arm folded under his head. There's still a barely dry streak of blood up his neck. But Sam's not going to wake him up to wash it off. Not going to even though Chuck will complain, horrified, about it tomorrow. He looks away from it, doesn't want to remember the surprised look on Edgar's face. That one brief moment before confusion became realisation, before there was blood everywhere.
Jesus, Chuck needs his sleep, maybe more than any of them. Sam's grateful, so damn grateful, that, unlike Chuck, he's too exhausted to dream at the moment. He's too exhausted to see anything but blackness when he closes his eyes. Between one run to safety and the next.
They're using up all their bullets while the dead just keep streaming across the world. An endless supply of meat to put them into. It doesn't even seem to matter any more that these were people. Not just people, but someone's loved ones. People who cared, people who laughed and went out and watched TV and kissed.
Sam can't, he can't see them like that any more. God, he wouldn't want to.
These things are just dead flesh now, jerked back into motion long after whoever they'd originally been had gone.
A hand comes down on Sam's shoulder, warm and strong. He looks up and finds Bobby, expression tired but fierce.
"He ok?" Bobby tips his head towards Chuck, a small untidy tangle among the couch cushions.
Sam sighs.
"I'm not entirely sure. Chuck tends to be - he tends to be loud and expressive about whatever's going on, so I don't think we'll know 'til he wakes up. But I think he'll be ok. I don't know if I would, having to see all of this, over and over. Having to write it all down."
"Being a prophet does seem like a shitty job at the end of the world," Bobby growls. He squeezes Sam's shoulder and then lets his hand slide away.
Sam should protest, he should protest that it's not the end of the world, but he just - doesn't.
It feels like a betrayal.
"Has he seen anything yet?"
Sam shakes his head.
"Nothing that can help us. Nothing that isn't just slaughter, cities falling, the power going out." Sam throws up a hand, as if to try and convey how pointless it all is. How Chuck feels like a failure because he can't do a single thing to make this stop.
Bobby grunts.
"Anyone else going through his visions? He ain't exactly looking for the details."
"Dean and Cas were going through them," Sam says quietly. He'd been helping at first but he just couldn't - he couldn't do it any more.
Bobby makes a rough noise.
"Where is the angel, anyway?"
Sam shakes his head.
"I don't know, off doing angel things."
~~~~~
Dean's phone goes at three in the morning. It takes him less than two rings to have it open and pressed to his ear.
"Where are you?" Castiel's voice is quick, as close to panic as the angel ever gets. That firm unhappy impatience that sounds almost wounded. Dean thinks maybe he got to Bobby's place and found it torn apart, found the blood everywhere; the scatter of cartridges and the rank smell of blood and gunpowder.
Dean rubs at his eye with the heel of his hands and tries to remember the number of the house. They'd pushed inside in the dark without looking, without caring, too busy shutting the doors behind them.
"Dean?"
He tells him, tells him as best as he remembers and Castiel doesn't even hang up, he's just there, standing at the foot of the bed.
Dean flips the phone shut.
"What happened," Castiel demands. Dean doesn't think he's ever heard Castiel demand anything before.
"Zombies happened," Dean says roughly and shoves himself to a sit.
Castiel looks at him, taking in the blood scattered across his shoulders, the nicks from broken glass and the long scrape up one arm where he got too close to the wood climbing out of a grenade hole in the side of Bobby's house.
"You should have called," Castiel says flatly. Honestly angry with him.
"I can't call you every time I get in trouble, every time I don't think I can handle whatever it is I'm fighting. I can't do the job that way, and you have better things to do than checking in on me every five minutes."
"I have nothing better to do than make sure you're safe," Castiel says, quiet but firm. Then frowns, as if maybe he wasn't expecting to say that.
Dean ignores the way it surprises him, the way it makes something clench in his chest.
"I'm pretty sure no one's going to be safe until we stop this thing," he points out roughly.
He's not throwing it back in Castiel's face, just reminding him, desperately, that they're fighting for the whole world here. Because Dean knows where that narrow focus leaves you. What it leaves you doing. What it makes you.
"You are not just anyone, Dean," Castiel says, voice hard.
Dean looks at him and Castiel sighs, gently, almost unnoticeable in the dark.
"Thanks," he says quietly. Because he's fairly sure this isn't just about him being Michael's vessel.
Castiel looks strangely uncertain all of a sudden in the darkness standing over him. When he's exhausted and messed all to hell.
"Cas," he starts, then doesn’t know what he was even going to say.
"I'll wait downstairs for you -"
"No," Dean shoves the sheets aside, reaches for his jeans.
"I'm awake. I might as well take advantage of it."
Cas stays while he shoves his way into his pants and finds a shirt.
Dean gets the feeling Castiel isn't going to leave again.