fic#23 - gen by brandywine421
More gen fic!
Title - Idioteque
Pairing - Gen
Rating - R for language. Not smutty - just mildly grotesque with harsh language - so whatever that is.
Note - Title is a Radiohead song. All quotes and details are taken from Max Brooks’ book: The Zombie Survival Guide.
Author - ???
Idioteque
A local family remained imprisoned in their home for at least twelve days while the savage creatures scratched and clawed fruitlessly at their bolted doors and windows. After we dispatched the filth and rescued the family, their manner looked near to insane. From what we could gather, the wails of the beasts, day after day, night after night, proved to be a merciless form of torture.
140-41 A.D., Thamugadi, Numidia (Algeria)
“What kind of zombies are they? Why are there so many?”
Dean forced his brother’s voice to the back of his mind - he had to focus.
“Dean! We have to get out of here, what are you doing?”
“How many rounds you got left?” Dean asked, patting down his pockets and trying to ignore the shuffling on the porch - the nails scratching at the windows - the moans echoing through the farmhouse.
“What? Dean - “
“Shut up and listen to me -” Dean started, as he walked through the house, stomping his boots to distract himself from the noise and searching for supplies and weak spots. “There are at least forty zombies out there and unless you have at least 40 shells hidden in those oversized jeans of yours, we aren’t going anywhere - we can’t fight 40 zombies on our own…”
Sam was saying something behind him, but Dean was too busy trying to figure out where the people, who had boarded up all the windows from the inside, had gone.
A family had lived here - evidenced by pictures on the walls in slanted frames of a round bearded man and a boy and a girl - all in matching overalls.
He jumped when Sam put his hand on his shoulder. “Dean. What are we going to do?”
“Stay here, make sure they don’t get in - board up any open spots you find with whatever you can - I’m going upstairs,” Dean said.
Sam didn’t question his orders, he actually straightened up at Dean’s command. But, then again, Dean didn’t have time to worry about a power struggle - there were fucking zombies everywhere and this empty house was sealed too tight to be deserted for no good reason.
“Salt, Dean?” Sam called as he reached the top of the stairs.
“The zombies don’t care how we taste, Sammy - fuck the salt.”
Sam checked the perimeter of all the rooms, searching his brain for what he knew about zombies.
The only zombies he could remember from his Dad’s journal were all controlled by necromancers or some sort of voodoo spell - but this was different.
He could tell, by the way Dean had switched into survival mode as soon as he’d spotted the first zombie running after the Impala, as they limped up the gravel road with the flat tire.
Their Dad had sent them the coordinates, but he hadn’t told them what to expect. Not that that was unusual.
Zombies were unusual. Dean’s reaction was unusual.
He pulled out his phone and saw that he had one bar of service and one bars of battery.
Fuck.
He couldn’t hear Dean’s footsteps upstairs, because of the persistent scraping against the windows and walls from the zombies trying to get inside. He dialed his Dad.
The static was distracting, but the zombies were still louder.
“Sam? Sam, where are you?”
“Where you sent us - Dad - there are zombies, we’re trapped, we have to bunker down,” Sam said, not moving, for fear of losing the tenuous signal.
“I’ll be there as fast as I can - stay put…”
“Dad - what are we dealing with?” Sam asked, raising his voice as the bodies outside began pounding on the outside wall of the house closest to him. They had damned good hearing for dead people.
“The zombies are everywhere, Sam…it may take me a while - but I’ll come for you, just stay there, son…”
The line went dead
Everywhere? He had to tell Dean. He did a quick walkthrough of the bottom floor of the house, before taking the stairs two at a time.
“Trash bags,” Dean stated, meeting him at the top and almost startling him back down the stairs.
“What?”
“Trash bags. And gloves if we got ‘em.” Dean raised his eyes to meet Sam’s and he forgot all about telling him that the zombies were ‘everywhere’ and went to get the bags.
Dean didn’t get like this often - when he became cold and completely controlled, it usually meant that things were out of control.
“Stay here,” Dean told Sam, when he returned with the box of black garbage bags and floppy yellow rubber gloves. The sound of the zombie’s clawing on the outer walls was like nails on a chalkboard - it was already echoing in his head.
“Hell no - Dean, tell me what’s going on.” Sam said, waving his yellow gloved hand at him.
Dean didn’t want Sam to see what was in the bedroom. But, he didn’t really want to go back in there alone. He pulled on the gloves and used his knife to cut slits in one of the trash bags, before putting his arms through the sides and his head through the bottom. “There are three decomposing bodies in the master bedroom with a dead zombie,” Dean said, not looking up as he made a poncho for Sam and held it out.
“What do you think happened?” Sam asked and Dean realized Sam wasn’t looking him in the face, either. They were both fucking scared.
“There’s a burned trellis on the ground outside. I think the family barricaded themselves up here and one of the zombies climbed the trellis. They’re too decomposed to see if they were bitten but…”
“What?”
“The family was killed by single gunshot wounds to the head, if the stains and bullets in the wall are any sign. Maybe the zombie bit them and they…took care of themselves instead of waiting to turn,” Dean said.
“What are we going to do?” Sam asked, looking at him now.
“We’re going to wrap their bodies in plastic and throw them out the window. The only way to kill a zombie is by destroying their brain, like a headshot, so when the fuckers go to attack the bodies, we should be able to pick off a few of them and maybe improve our odds a little,” Dean added. But, he didn’t think their odds were going to get much better.
“Should we burn them?” Sam asked after a beat.
“I don’t want to risk the house catching on fire.” There was an unspoken ‘yet’ that he didn’t want Sam to hear behind his words.
The man had burned the trellis to keep the zombies outside and Dean had already factored in the wooden staircase if the bottom floor became unsecured.
“Okay,” Sam said, wearing the garbage bag.
“It’s…gross, Sam. But we need to get the bodies out of the house,” Dean warned.
“I won’t puke,” Sam promised, waiting until Dean turned around to add, “At least not in front of you.”
Sam took another gulp of air as Dean started duct-taping closed the master bedroom’s door.
The air in the house was stale - but anything was better than the stifling odor of decomposition that had been in the master bedroom.
He’d seen rotted bodies before, but he’d never had to handle them, other than salting and burning open graves.
But the kids…they were kids. With holes in their flaking skulls.
Dean had paused long enough to murmur last rites over the three bodies, before they wrapped them in sheets and systematically heaved them out of the window and into the backyard below.
The zombies were animalistic, swarming the corpses and tearing the flesh and moaning.
The stench was too much for them to stay long enough to shoot and Sam knew that Dean didn’t want to waste bullets until they took inventory.
This was bad. Real bad. He could see it in his brother’s eyes and he’d heard it in his father’s words. He could tell that his dad had made a mistake sending them here.
Sam leaned back against the wall and watched as Dean finished sealing the room. “What do you think we’re in the middle of?”
Dean dragged his now glove-free hand over his mouth and looked up at him. “What do those kids on TV call it…oh yeah, the apocalypse,” he said, snapping his fingers like the word had escaped him.
“I’m being serious. What kind of necromancer could do this?”
“If a necromancer did this - things got way out of control. They usually animate corpses for a purpose and those fuckers downstairs are not under anybody’s control. They’re…infected with something. There’s nothing supernatural about those zombies, Sam.”
“Then what?”
“We’ll have plenty of time to pool our knowledge later, Sam, let’s get this house buttoned down first,” Dean said, something flashing in his eyes, which put a stop to Sam’s questions.
Sam was a little relieved. He wasn’t sure if he wanted to know the answer to the question, if the answer was something Dean didn’t know.
They decided to set up camp in the boy’s room at the top of the stairs. There was only one bed, which they pushed against the wall and then laid out the guns they’d collected, along with the boxes of ammunition.
The window in this room opened out onto a small ledge of rooftop and, with the trellis destroyed, Dean was reasonably sure that the zombies couldn’t scale the walls. It was a good position and they could set the small cookstove outside to boil water and still see the driveway leading up from the road, the crippled Impala painfully out of reach.
He wasn’t drinking the water from the old-fashioned tap in the kitchen. He wasn’t sure why the water was working, when nothing else was - but he wasn’t questioning the small blessings.
Cassie had started sending him the articles a few months earlier. She monitored the AP releases and, now that she believed that his work was real, she had taken to keeping in touch by sending him things she thought were suspicious.
There was something spreading across the world - not just the US - but all over, where whole towns were wiped out by the ‘zombie flu’. At least that’s what he called it in his head when he scanned the articles.
It wasn’t supernatural, at least according to his friend at the CDC, whom he’d called after the last article. It was too widespread. They had identified a virus that infected the brain tissue through the bloodstream.
Why would he mention it to Sam? It wasn’t like they had time to watch the 6 o’clock news between hunts.
And now they were here, smack dab in the middle of an epidemic, and he’d missed the proverbial boat, having ignored the e-mailed harbingers.
“Okay, we’ve got enough for the night, and it’s not like we can’t go downstairs if we need things, now can we turn off the red alert and talk about this?” Sam asked, his voice slightly-raised above the howls of the undead surrounding the house, attracted by the bodies of the homeowners and the resulting frenzy.
“Yeah,” Dean said, taking in Sam’s spoils from the kitchen. Enough canned goods and juice to get them through a month at least, just in what Sam had brought upstairs in his trips back and forth, while Dean had been nailing extra boards on all the windows and over the sealed room’s door.
“What are we going to do?” Sam asked, sitting down on the single empty spot on the bed.
“We’re going to wait them out. We’re in the middle of nowhere and they’ll eventually starve to death,” Dean lied.
It only took a moment for Sam to give him that ‘I know you’re full of shit’ look.
“I don’t know, Sam.”
“You know something, and you’re scared, but I need to know what we’re in the middle of,” Sam said, his voice shaking slightly.
“It’s a disease. At least I think it is. I’ve been reading about it, there’ve been outbreaks in Africa and Asia for a few weeks, at least. Sporadic and contained, but…it’s not our kind of a gig, so I never thought…we’d run into it in the middle of fucking Oklahoma.”
“Then, why not just tell me that? Does everything have to be so cryptic with you?” Sam asked.
Dean gave him the finger and started to organize the canned goods by food group.
“What are you doing? You OCD now?” Dean glared at him and Sam’s face flashed with apology. “Okay, got it - not funny.”
“We’re going to be here a while, I just want to get things…set up. I need to think,” he said. “I need to know what we have and what we don’t have - it’s like those tests Dad used to give us,” Dean explained.
“Where he’d leave us in the woods with a knife and a box of matches? We’re in a house, Dean…”
“With an army of flesh-hungry zombies surrounding us, no cell service and a busted car. We’ve got six boxes of bullets that don’t fit into any of our guns and the last people who were here shot themselves in the head to keep from being contaminated. It’s not fucking holy water and Latin that’s going to save our asses this time,” Dean snapped, not able to think with Sam bitching and the zombies…scratching - god, the scratching was going to drive him nuts - but he had to do something he knew how to do and he’d trained for this, the end of the world -
“Dean. Chill out,” Sam barked, breaking through his mental rant. “I know this is big.”
He sat down on the hardwood floor and held a can of potatoes in his lap. “Hungry?”
“Sure.”
Sam decided not to tell Dean about the call to their father. Dean was winding himself up tighter and tighter as the sun went down and Sam didn’t want to get his hopes up.
Sam didn’t have high hopes, after Dean’s confession about the disease.
Zombies they could handle. But not disease. Hell, he wasn’t even entirely sure they’d been vaccinated properly, as often as they’d moved around. He didn’t remember ever getting a physical by a legitimate doctor until college. The only doctors he remembered from his youth were from emergency room visits, and usually had to do with the setting of bones or the stemming of internal bleeding, since their father had taken care of the minor injuries--the sprains, the cuts, the stitches…
“Gin,” Dean muttered, tossing the cards into the center of the bed.
“You have the attention span of a gnat,” Sam replied, gathering the cards up and shuffling them absently.
“Two people card games never held my attention.”
“What does hold your attention?” Sam asked.
“Chicks,” Dean replied, leaning his head back against the wall. Sam started to say something, but Dean spoke again. “I think that’s it. Just chicks.”
“I learn more about you every day,” Sam joked.
“I’m bored. What do we usually talk about?” Dean asked, suddenly.
“Hunting and killing things. Where to eat. Who’s paying for gas,” Sam replied.
“Fine. Deal the cards.”
Sam fell asleep around midnight and Dean let him have the bed, moving to sit on the beanbag chair by the window, so he could study the landscape in the moonlight.
People always said weird shit happened during a full moon. Dean knew that weird shit always happened, but he’d definitely remember this night.
He was grateful for Sam’s soft snoring. The sound usually grated on his nerves, but he’d never mentioned it, knowing that Sam’s rest was much more precious than his nerves. But, tonight they served as a nice focal point for his ears to compete with the snarls and cries of the zombies below the window.
A cluster of them were fighting over something by the rusted tractor. A bone, he saw finally, short and splintered.
A child’s bone.
He wondered if the kids had cried when their father shot them. Or if they closed their eyes and prayed for the bullet.
He wondered if he could eat a bullet.
Sam snorted, rubbed his nose and resumed his chorus.
He’d been in some tight spots before, especially when he’d hunted alone. As much as he acted like he’d been the perfect hunter without Sammy dragging him down - he’d barely scraped by at first, lacking his brother’s and his father’s backup.
But, as bad as it got, he’d never considered eating a bullet. There was always a back exit - an incantation, an enchanted gun, a hot chick with a stake - always a way out.
Zombies scratching away at the walls like rats. He didn’t want to be cheese.
“That one’s slow - pick him off next,” Sam pointed.
Dean had searched the attic while Sam made coffee and fried spam on the small kerosene stove and found a rifle that could use some of the shells in their stash. They were utilizing the daylight to eliminate some of the zombies.
Not that they were making a dent, but it was killing time.
Dean’s hands were steady and he was a better shot than Sam remembered.. Most of their recent shooting had been done at point blank range. This was more like the target practices of their youth.
The white-haired zombie straggling along behind the weaving group of the undead, who were wandering around the front yard, recoiled as Sam registered the shot - his head exploding in a flourish, before his body slumped to the ground and was overtaken by the easily excitable pack.
“Your turn,” Dean said, emptying the chamber and reloading the rifle, before giving up his position so Sam could have a turn.
He knew it didn’t matter now, not after all they’d been through, but Sam wanted to impress Dean. He’d learned a lot from his brother and his father and, even though he was rusty with his ‘pansy college days,’ as Dean called them, their lessons had saved his ass more times than they’d slowed him down. Dean might not be able to order the right wine with dinner, but he could nail a zombie at 200 yards.
Sam zeroed in on what probably used to be a woman. Her nose was missing - her face a gaping moaning hole already, but he focused the sights on her forehead, slowing his breathing and squeezing the trigger as he inhaled.
“Bullseye, baby - nice one!” Dean grinned. “Go again - I thought you were a waste of bullets, but damn, that was a pretty shot!”
Sam rolled his eyes and reloaded the rifle.
They ran out of bullets for the rifle on the fourth day, left only with the useless pistols and a crossbow, with 4 wilted wooden arrows that Dean doubted would fire straight under any circumstance.
Sam was coping fine, as far as he could tell. He was engrossed in one of the old man’s mystery novels with a fireman on the cover and Dean was trying to get into the book he’d found, but he couldn’t stomach all the flowery language and skipped to the end, before he’d even finished the prologue.
“What are you doing?” Sam asked, when he switched on the flashlight.
“Going to take a leak. Take a whore’s bath and get some shuteye since you’re on duty tonight,” Dean replied, stretching and rolling his shoulders as he got up.
He just needed to do something.
“Leave the door cracked a little,” Sam called after him.
Since Dean wanted to be able to hear Sam if he called, he didn’t need to be told twice.
He put the stopper in the sink and scooped the boiled ‘sterile’ water from the tub, until he had enough for his purposes, and then stripped down, before wiping himself down with the cold water.
They used the antibacterial waterless soap for their hands when they cooked, but he used the bar of soap tonight, soaping up slightly, before rubbing his skin red to try and get off the coating of grime, which he felt had settled on him over the stifling hours spent in the room.
He could still hear the zombies yowling and scratching - it was like a buzz in his brain and he wished he could wash out his ears.
He just wanted to listen to something else, besides death. He couldn’t even hum Metallica now - all memory of tunes and melodies scratched out of his head.
Sam found the board games on the sixth day. He was tired and bored and brought the games into the room half-heartedly hoping that Dean would stop fidgeting and relax.
Dean could spend 12 hours in a car without getting out - but six days locked in a house was taking a toll on them both.
Sam was pissy and tired of dealing with his brooding brother.
Connect Four ended before it started, the pieces going to a checker game instead, which lasted until the sun went down and ended with a draw after a 28 game tournament.
Sam won the last can of peaches in a cutthroat game of Monopoly that ended in Dean hurling his tiny silver game piece out the window in a huff, before grumbling that he ‘hated the thimble’.
Sam shared the peaches and tried to ignore the way Dean’s hands shook when he scooped out the fruit. They were going to get through this, thimble or not.
“You remember that chick, Sally? The one who helped you with your science project in that crap town…”
“Topeka?” Sam prompted from the window, where he was keeping watch with his newest book-this one sporting a soldier on the cover.
“Yeah,” Dean said. Exactly. “I did her.”
“You did not!” Sam scolded.
“Yup. In the back of Old Man Jenkins’ pickup--behind his silo. Damn, she was hot,” Dean remembered.
“She was my science mentor - she was in…”
“12th grade, getting extra-curricular for her teacher’s degree. She had a mouth like a hooker, I swear - best head I ever got was from Sally Evans.”
“Evanson,” Sam corrected.
“Whatever,” Dean muttered, thinking of Sally’s curly blonde hair and pink lips. “She had on a black bra - and girls back then didn’t wear black underwear, unless they were into kink.”
“Dean - shut up, please.”
He kept his eyes closed and tried to remember what Sally had sounded like. But all he heard were the whimpers and groans of the starving zombies.
Sam woke up and immediately remembered where he was. Day nine in their farmhouse hell.
His feet were hanging off the small bed and the room smelled like sardines. He’d told Dean to eat them in the hall, but the smell must’ve followed him inside.
He glanced around and saw that the sun was down and he automatically scanned the room for his brother.
He sat up, when he didn’t find him right away in the dim room.
Then he saw him, sitting in the furthest corner from the window, with his hands over his ears and his knees pulled to his chest, as he leaned his head against the wall.
“Dean?” Sam called, standing up and ignoring the pop of his stiff joints.
Dean shook his head slightly, as if trying to shake off his voice.
“Dean, what’s wrong?”
“Shh,” Dean whispered, not opening his eyes.
Sam crouched beside him, his panic flaring. “Why are we whispering?”
“I don’t want to hear them anymore…scratching and crying…I can’t take it…” Dean said, leaning forward and clenching his fists over his ears tighter.
“Okay…okay, Dean, I’ll distract you - so you won’t even hear them,” Sam said, focusing on the spoken problem - if they knew what they were dealing with, they could deal - he could totally handle this.
He pulled Dean’s fingers forcefully away from his ears, ignoring the blood under his nails from where he’d apparently been clawing at his ears and he laced his fingers with Dean’s fist - wincing inwardly at his grip.
He’d seen Dean like this only once before--a snakebite fever out in Arizona - so he focused on keeping him from harming himself in his strange delirium.
Sam knew that if they lived through this, Dean would tease him forever. Hell, it would give Dean incentive to keep them alive just so he could talk about it.
But Dean didn’t want to hear the zombies’ wails and scratching for a while and Sam knew something that could be louder.
“I hear the train a-coming, it’s rolling around the bend and I ain’t seen the sunshine since I don’t know when - I’m stuck in Folsom Prison and time keeps dragging on…but that train keeps a rolling on down to San Antone…”
Dean stopped fighting him, his fingers relaxing, when Sam sang out the last few words. He waited for a second before continuing. “When I was just a baby, my mama told me, ‘Son, always be a good boy, don’t ever play with guns’ - but I shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die. When I hear that whistle blowing, I hang my head and cry…”
Dean threw his head back then and started to laugh, deep and genuine.
“It wasn’t that bad,” Sam muttered, but he couldn’t hide his relief.
“I’m freaking out and you break out the Johnny Cash…oh, god, we’re going to die here and it’s all your fault,” Dean said, laughing as he threw his arms around Sam and embraced him roughly.
“Sorry, I didn’t think Metallica was appropriate to the moment,” Sam snorted.
Dean released him, wiping his face of tears through his choking laughter. “Oh fuck, man…Johnny Cash?”
“Dude, I’m totally a bass - you’re the one who was always singing soprano at Pastor Jim’s on Sundays,” Sam replied.
“Oh, you did not just say that - dude, my voice was changing!” Dean protested, but his eyes were still flashing with amusement.
“Whatever - you made that old lady cry with your rendition of Amazing Grace,” Sam said, infected by Dean’s hysteria against his will.
“I can’t help it if Jesus spoke to her through my vocal talent,” Dean replied.
They were both laughing now and Sam felt his panic dissipating as he caught his breath.
Dean was leaning against the wall, but he was clearly lucid and alert now. “So. Johnny Cash, huh?”
“It worked, didn’t it?”
After a long silence, Dean struck a match and lit the small lantern. “How’s the rest of it go?”
“I always thought it would be a succubus.”
Sam blinked from his doze at his brother’s soft words. “Excuse me?”
“I thought a succubus would be the way I would die. In the throws of passion or just kissing a hot chick. Never thought it’d be like this.”
“We aren’t going to die here, Dean,” Sam said but the words were hollow. Day ten. They were out of kerosene and neither of them would drink the water without boiling it first. They still had canned fruit juice but it wasn’t going to last forever.
“You think succubi are hot?” Dean continued. “In the stories, they always sound hot.”
“Dean,” Sam started.
“I didn’t want to go out like this…hell, Sammy, you always give me shit about following Dad’s orders unquestioningly and I dragged you right into the middle of this hell without even knowing what we were getting into,” he continued. “Now we’re both going to die here…and I haven’t gotten laid in over two weeks…”
Sam pushed himself stiffly to his feet and walked over to where Dean was lying on the cot. “You know this is a total chick flick moment.”
“It would be a chick flick moment if I was propositioning you - which I’m not -I‘m just…sorry. For all this. For everything,” Dean said, his green eyes dull of the familiar snark.
They’d been here ten days and Sam had accepted that his father wasn’t coming. There had been so many times that he’d wanted to give Dean that ray of hope that their dad would come for them, but he’d held his tongue. If John Winchester was coming, he’d have already come. Most likely, he was dead too.
“Succubi? Is that the plural?” Sam asked sitting down on the bed beside Dean.
“I think so. I left my dictionary in the Impala,” Dean replied blankly.
“’Succubusses’ doesn’t sound right,” Sam said.
“I saved two bullets,” Dean stated. He didn’t look at Sam but he didn’t have to.
“What do you think about corn for dinner?” Sam replied after a beat.
“I hate corn.”
“It’s either corn or green beans.”
“I hate green beans.”
“We won’t need the bullets, Dean. You were right, we’re not going out like this. We haven’t gotten this far just to die of zombie flu,” Sam said softly.
“Come here,” Dean called from the hall, motioning for Sam to leave the window for a moment.
“What’s up?” Sam asked, his tired eyes laced with concern.
“Listen,” Dean urged, pulling him toward the sealed room.
Sam couldn’t hear anything over the clawing and wails of the dead, and he doubted that Dean heard anything either. His brother was losing it. “Dean, there’s nothing in there,” Sam said.
“I know that - it’s just - all we’ve heard for days is zombies, but there’s something different…I can hear it - just listen…” Dean pleaded.
Sam considered his brother carefully. They were both tired and strained from the ten days in the house, but Dean genuinely seemed to believe what he was saying. He imitated Dean and leaned his head against the door.
And heard it. Faint, but definitely, well, not a zombie. Zombies didn’t rumble.
“What do you think it is?” Sam asked.
“We can’t see that direction. What if there’s a road or something back there?” Dean asked. He looked at Sam and dragged a hand across his face. “I don’t know, Sam, it could be the motherfucking Langoliers for all I know, hell - I don’t know anything right now ‘cause I can’t hear myself think - but it’s something.”
“The roof - we won’t have to open this door if we climb out to get a better look,” Sam said.
Dean’s eyes lit up. “Yeah, Sammy, that’s a good idea.”
Sam would have been flattered if he hadn’t thought about how ‘off’ Dean was from the days of isolation. Dean would already be on the roof if he wasn’t so distracted.
They hurried back to the room and Dean climbed out first, standing on the small outcrop where the stove was set up and looked up at the higher eave of the roof.
“Give me a boost,” he said once Sam was outside.
It took a little acrobatics, but after several minutes they were standing on the slanted roof and could see in all directions.
And they could hear the rumbling. And now, it sounded like…popping.
The zombies heard it too, and despite Sam and Dean being on the roof in plain view, the zombies were high-tailing it toward the sound.
“What the fuck,” Sam whispered. Dean smacked him on the back and nearly made him lose his balance. When Sam turned to scold him, Dean was smiling. “What the fuck, Dean?”
“Something’s coming, Sam - and I don’t think zombies can drive,” Dean said.
Sam snorted and returned his gaze to where the zombies were limping and staggering up the hill.
Then he saw it.
A truck. An armored truck.
“Is that…” Dean muttered.
“It’s a truck, Dean,” Sam said.
Dean started to say something, but stopped short as they watched the zombies rushing the army vehicle. They could see the men half-exposed on top with guns now, knocking the bodies off their feet with impressive accuracy
The big truck continued its approach, circling the house in a wide lazy loop as the zombies chased after them mindlessly. The truck finally slowed to a stop by the Impala.
“That’s Dad,” Dean said suddenly.
“What?”
“He’s checking on the car,” Dean said in disbelief. “We’re starving up here and he’s checking on the car.”
Dean wanted Sam to climb into the armored truck first but his brother was insistent that Dean go and he honestly didn’t think he could last another minute in this room.
The gunshots were steady and reassuring as he peered down from the roof to the vehicle that was their cavalry. The men firing that had raised the ladder were wearing face shields and body armor.
“Here goes everything,” he muttered, turning to face Sam as he lowered himself to the first rung.
“I’m right behind you, Dean,” Sam said shakily, glancing at the ground below with the sparse zombies crawling and staggering toward the sound of the engine.
Dean took a deep breath and climbed down.
When the sunlight disappeared through the tiny hatch he saw the two snipers’ lower bodies where they were standing on small raised platforms.
“Dean…” His Dad’s arms crushed him into a hug.
“Dad…”
“Sammy’s okay? You okay?” John asked before embracing Sam as he planted his feet on the floor.
“What took you so long?” Dean replied when his father’s eyes landed on him again.
Sam’s arm looped around his shoulders and he tried to relax. He knew he was shaking but he hoped that the idling engine would hide it a little longer - until he could stop hearing the moans and the clawing…
“Sit down - we’ve got a long ride ahead of us,” his Dad said.
They sat down on the metal bench and fastened the seat belts before the snipers lowered the ladder and closed the upper hatches. The truck lurched forward and Dean listened to Sammy’s voice in his ear and pretended that he didn’t hear anything else.
***
POLL!!!
Poll guess the author!!!
Title - Idioteque
Pairing - Gen
Rating - R for language. Not smutty - just mildly grotesque with harsh language - so whatever that is.
Note - Title is a Radiohead song. All quotes and details are taken from Max Brooks’ book: The Zombie Survival Guide.
Author - ???
Idioteque
A local family remained imprisoned in their home for at least twelve days while the savage creatures scratched and clawed fruitlessly at their bolted doors and windows. After we dispatched the filth and rescued the family, their manner looked near to insane. From what we could gather, the wails of the beasts, day after day, night after night, proved to be a merciless form of torture.
140-41 A.D., Thamugadi, Numidia (Algeria)
“What kind of zombies are they? Why are there so many?”
Dean forced his brother’s voice to the back of his mind - he had to focus.
“Dean! We have to get out of here, what are you doing?”
“How many rounds you got left?” Dean asked, patting down his pockets and trying to ignore the shuffling on the porch - the nails scratching at the windows - the moans echoing through the farmhouse.
“What? Dean - “
“Shut up and listen to me -” Dean started, as he walked through the house, stomping his boots to distract himself from the noise and searching for supplies and weak spots. “There are at least forty zombies out there and unless you have at least 40 shells hidden in those oversized jeans of yours, we aren’t going anywhere - we can’t fight 40 zombies on our own…”
Sam was saying something behind him, but Dean was too busy trying to figure out where the people, who had boarded up all the windows from the inside, had gone.
A family had lived here - evidenced by pictures on the walls in slanted frames of a round bearded man and a boy and a girl - all in matching overalls.
He jumped when Sam put his hand on his shoulder. “Dean. What are we going to do?”
“Stay here, make sure they don’t get in - board up any open spots you find with whatever you can - I’m going upstairs,” Dean said.
Sam didn’t question his orders, he actually straightened up at Dean’s command. But, then again, Dean didn’t have time to worry about a power struggle - there were fucking zombies everywhere and this empty house was sealed too tight to be deserted for no good reason.
“Salt, Dean?” Sam called as he reached the top of the stairs.
“The zombies don’t care how we taste, Sammy - fuck the salt.”
Sam checked the perimeter of all the rooms, searching his brain for what he knew about zombies.
The only zombies he could remember from his Dad’s journal were all controlled by necromancers or some sort of voodoo spell - but this was different.
He could tell, by the way Dean had switched into survival mode as soon as he’d spotted the first zombie running after the Impala, as they limped up the gravel road with the flat tire.
Their Dad had sent them the coordinates, but he hadn’t told them what to expect. Not that that was unusual.
Zombies were unusual. Dean’s reaction was unusual.
He pulled out his phone and saw that he had one bar of service and one bars of battery.
Fuck.
He couldn’t hear Dean’s footsteps upstairs, because of the persistent scraping against the windows and walls from the zombies trying to get inside. He dialed his Dad.
The static was distracting, but the zombies were still louder.
“Sam? Sam, where are you?”
“Where you sent us - Dad - there are zombies, we’re trapped, we have to bunker down,” Sam said, not moving, for fear of losing the tenuous signal.
“I’ll be there as fast as I can - stay put…”
“Dad - what are we dealing with?” Sam asked, raising his voice as the bodies outside began pounding on the outside wall of the house closest to him. They had damned good hearing for dead people.
“The zombies are everywhere, Sam…it may take me a while - but I’ll come for you, just stay there, son…”
The line went dead
Everywhere? He had to tell Dean. He did a quick walkthrough of the bottom floor of the house, before taking the stairs two at a time.
“Trash bags,” Dean stated, meeting him at the top and almost startling him back down the stairs.
“What?”
“Trash bags. And gloves if we got ‘em.” Dean raised his eyes to meet Sam’s and he forgot all about telling him that the zombies were ‘everywhere’ and went to get the bags.
Dean didn’t get like this often - when he became cold and completely controlled, it usually meant that things were out of control.
“Stay here,” Dean told Sam, when he returned with the box of black garbage bags and floppy yellow rubber gloves. The sound of the zombie’s clawing on the outer walls was like nails on a chalkboard - it was already echoing in his head.
“Hell no - Dean, tell me what’s going on.” Sam said, waving his yellow gloved hand at him.
Dean didn’t want Sam to see what was in the bedroom. But, he didn’t really want to go back in there alone. He pulled on the gloves and used his knife to cut slits in one of the trash bags, before putting his arms through the sides and his head through the bottom. “There are three decomposing bodies in the master bedroom with a dead zombie,” Dean said, not looking up as he made a poncho for Sam and held it out.
“What do you think happened?” Sam asked and Dean realized Sam wasn’t looking him in the face, either. They were both fucking scared.
“There’s a burned trellis on the ground outside. I think the family barricaded themselves up here and one of the zombies climbed the trellis. They’re too decomposed to see if they were bitten but…”
“What?”
“The family was killed by single gunshot wounds to the head, if the stains and bullets in the wall are any sign. Maybe the zombie bit them and they…took care of themselves instead of waiting to turn,” Dean said.
“What are we going to do?” Sam asked, looking at him now.
“We’re going to wrap their bodies in plastic and throw them out the window. The only way to kill a zombie is by destroying their brain, like a headshot, so when the fuckers go to attack the bodies, we should be able to pick off a few of them and maybe improve our odds a little,” Dean added. But, he didn’t think their odds were going to get much better.
“Should we burn them?” Sam asked after a beat.
“I don’t want to risk the house catching on fire.” There was an unspoken ‘yet’ that he didn’t want Sam to hear behind his words.
The man had burned the trellis to keep the zombies outside and Dean had already factored in the wooden staircase if the bottom floor became unsecured.
“Okay,” Sam said, wearing the garbage bag.
“It’s…gross, Sam. But we need to get the bodies out of the house,” Dean warned.
“I won’t puke,” Sam promised, waiting until Dean turned around to add, “At least not in front of you.”
Sam took another gulp of air as Dean started duct-taping closed the master bedroom’s door.
The air in the house was stale - but anything was better than the stifling odor of decomposition that had been in the master bedroom.
He’d seen rotted bodies before, but he’d never had to handle them, other than salting and burning open graves.
But the kids…they were kids. With holes in their flaking skulls.
Dean had paused long enough to murmur last rites over the three bodies, before they wrapped them in sheets and systematically heaved them out of the window and into the backyard below.
The zombies were animalistic, swarming the corpses and tearing the flesh and moaning.
The stench was too much for them to stay long enough to shoot and Sam knew that Dean didn’t want to waste bullets until they took inventory.
This was bad. Real bad. He could see it in his brother’s eyes and he’d heard it in his father’s words. He could tell that his dad had made a mistake sending them here.
Sam leaned back against the wall and watched as Dean finished sealing the room. “What do you think we’re in the middle of?”
Dean dragged his now glove-free hand over his mouth and looked up at him. “What do those kids on TV call it…oh yeah, the apocalypse,” he said, snapping his fingers like the word had escaped him.
“I’m being serious. What kind of necromancer could do this?”
“If a necromancer did this - things got way out of control. They usually animate corpses for a purpose and those fuckers downstairs are not under anybody’s control. They’re…infected with something. There’s nothing supernatural about those zombies, Sam.”
“Then what?”
“We’ll have plenty of time to pool our knowledge later, Sam, let’s get this house buttoned down first,” Dean said, something flashing in his eyes, which put a stop to Sam’s questions.
Sam was a little relieved. He wasn’t sure if he wanted to know the answer to the question, if the answer was something Dean didn’t know.
They decided to set up camp in the boy’s room at the top of the stairs. There was only one bed, which they pushed against the wall and then laid out the guns they’d collected, along with the boxes of ammunition.
The window in this room opened out onto a small ledge of rooftop and, with the trellis destroyed, Dean was reasonably sure that the zombies couldn’t scale the walls. It was a good position and they could set the small cookstove outside to boil water and still see the driveway leading up from the road, the crippled Impala painfully out of reach.
He wasn’t drinking the water from the old-fashioned tap in the kitchen. He wasn’t sure why the water was working, when nothing else was - but he wasn’t questioning the small blessings.
Cassie had started sending him the articles a few months earlier. She monitored the AP releases and, now that she believed that his work was real, she had taken to keeping in touch by sending him things she thought were suspicious.
There was something spreading across the world - not just the US - but all over, where whole towns were wiped out by the ‘zombie flu’. At least that’s what he called it in his head when he scanned the articles.
It wasn’t supernatural, at least according to his friend at the CDC, whom he’d called after the last article. It was too widespread. They had identified a virus that infected the brain tissue through the bloodstream.
Why would he mention it to Sam? It wasn’t like they had time to watch the 6 o’clock news between hunts.
And now they were here, smack dab in the middle of an epidemic, and he’d missed the proverbial boat, having ignored the e-mailed harbingers.
“Okay, we’ve got enough for the night, and it’s not like we can’t go downstairs if we need things, now can we turn off the red alert and talk about this?” Sam asked, his voice slightly-raised above the howls of the undead surrounding the house, attracted by the bodies of the homeowners and the resulting frenzy.
“Yeah,” Dean said, taking in Sam’s spoils from the kitchen. Enough canned goods and juice to get them through a month at least, just in what Sam had brought upstairs in his trips back and forth, while Dean had been nailing extra boards on all the windows and over the sealed room’s door.
“What are we going to do?” Sam asked, sitting down on the single empty spot on the bed.
“We’re going to wait them out. We’re in the middle of nowhere and they’ll eventually starve to death,” Dean lied.
It only took a moment for Sam to give him that ‘I know you’re full of shit’ look.
“I don’t know, Sam.”
“You know something, and you’re scared, but I need to know what we’re in the middle of,” Sam said, his voice shaking slightly.
“It’s a disease. At least I think it is. I’ve been reading about it, there’ve been outbreaks in Africa and Asia for a few weeks, at least. Sporadic and contained, but…it’s not our kind of a gig, so I never thought…we’d run into it in the middle of fucking Oklahoma.”
“Then, why not just tell me that? Does everything have to be so cryptic with you?” Sam asked.
Dean gave him the finger and started to organize the canned goods by food group.
“What are you doing? You OCD now?” Dean glared at him and Sam’s face flashed with apology. “Okay, got it - not funny.”
“We’re going to be here a while, I just want to get things…set up. I need to think,” he said. “I need to know what we have and what we don’t have - it’s like those tests Dad used to give us,” Dean explained.
“Where he’d leave us in the woods with a knife and a box of matches? We’re in a house, Dean…”
“With an army of flesh-hungry zombies surrounding us, no cell service and a busted car. We’ve got six boxes of bullets that don’t fit into any of our guns and the last people who were here shot themselves in the head to keep from being contaminated. It’s not fucking holy water and Latin that’s going to save our asses this time,” Dean snapped, not able to think with Sam bitching and the zombies…scratching - god, the scratching was going to drive him nuts - but he had to do something he knew how to do and he’d trained for this, the end of the world -
“Dean. Chill out,” Sam barked, breaking through his mental rant. “I know this is big.”
He sat down on the hardwood floor and held a can of potatoes in his lap. “Hungry?”
“Sure.”
Sam decided not to tell Dean about the call to their father. Dean was winding himself up tighter and tighter as the sun went down and Sam didn’t want to get his hopes up.
Sam didn’t have high hopes, after Dean’s confession about the disease.
Zombies they could handle. But not disease. Hell, he wasn’t even entirely sure they’d been vaccinated properly, as often as they’d moved around. He didn’t remember ever getting a physical by a legitimate doctor until college. The only doctors he remembered from his youth were from emergency room visits, and usually had to do with the setting of bones or the stemming of internal bleeding, since their father had taken care of the minor injuries--the sprains, the cuts, the stitches…
“Gin,” Dean muttered, tossing the cards into the center of the bed.
“You have the attention span of a gnat,” Sam replied, gathering the cards up and shuffling them absently.
“Two people card games never held my attention.”
“What does hold your attention?” Sam asked.
“Chicks,” Dean replied, leaning his head back against the wall. Sam started to say something, but Dean spoke again. “I think that’s it. Just chicks.”
“I learn more about you every day,” Sam joked.
“I’m bored. What do we usually talk about?” Dean asked, suddenly.
“Hunting and killing things. Where to eat. Who’s paying for gas,” Sam replied.
“Fine. Deal the cards.”
Sam fell asleep around midnight and Dean let him have the bed, moving to sit on the beanbag chair by the window, so he could study the landscape in the moonlight.
People always said weird shit happened during a full moon. Dean knew that weird shit always happened, but he’d definitely remember this night.
He was grateful for Sam’s soft snoring. The sound usually grated on his nerves, but he’d never mentioned it, knowing that Sam’s rest was much more precious than his nerves. But, tonight they served as a nice focal point for his ears to compete with the snarls and cries of the zombies below the window.
A cluster of them were fighting over something by the rusted tractor. A bone, he saw finally, short and splintered.
A child’s bone.
He wondered if the kids had cried when their father shot them. Or if they closed their eyes and prayed for the bullet.
He wondered if he could eat a bullet.
Sam snorted, rubbed his nose and resumed his chorus.
He’d been in some tight spots before, especially when he’d hunted alone. As much as he acted like he’d been the perfect hunter without Sammy dragging him down - he’d barely scraped by at first, lacking his brother’s and his father’s backup.
But, as bad as it got, he’d never considered eating a bullet. There was always a back exit - an incantation, an enchanted gun, a hot chick with a stake - always a way out.
Zombies scratching away at the walls like rats. He didn’t want to be cheese.
“That one’s slow - pick him off next,” Sam pointed.
Dean had searched the attic while Sam made coffee and fried spam on the small kerosene stove and found a rifle that could use some of the shells in their stash. They were utilizing the daylight to eliminate some of the zombies.
Not that they were making a dent, but it was killing time.
Dean’s hands were steady and he was a better shot than Sam remembered.. Most of their recent shooting had been done at point blank range. This was more like the target practices of their youth.
The white-haired zombie straggling along behind the weaving group of the undead, who were wandering around the front yard, recoiled as Sam registered the shot - his head exploding in a flourish, before his body slumped to the ground and was overtaken by the easily excitable pack.
“Your turn,” Dean said, emptying the chamber and reloading the rifle, before giving up his position so Sam could have a turn.
He knew it didn’t matter now, not after all they’d been through, but Sam wanted to impress Dean. He’d learned a lot from his brother and his father and, even though he was rusty with his ‘pansy college days,’ as Dean called them, their lessons had saved his ass more times than they’d slowed him down. Dean might not be able to order the right wine with dinner, but he could nail a zombie at 200 yards.
Sam zeroed in on what probably used to be a woman. Her nose was missing - her face a gaping moaning hole already, but he focused the sights on her forehead, slowing his breathing and squeezing the trigger as he inhaled.
“Bullseye, baby - nice one!” Dean grinned. “Go again - I thought you were a waste of bullets, but damn, that was a pretty shot!”
Sam rolled his eyes and reloaded the rifle.
They ran out of bullets for the rifle on the fourth day, left only with the useless pistols and a crossbow, with 4 wilted wooden arrows that Dean doubted would fire straight under any circumstance.
Sam was coping fine, as far as he could tell. He was engrossed in one of the old man’s mystery novels with a fireman on the cover and Dean was trying to get into the book he’d found, but he couldn’t stomach all the flowery language and skipped to the end, before he’d even finished the prologue.
“What are you doing?” Sam asked, when he switched on the flashlight.
“Going to take a leak. Take a whore’s bath and get some shuteye since you’re on duty tonight,” Dean replied, stretching and rolling his shoulders as he got up.
He just needed to do something.
“Leave the door cracked a little,” Sam called after him.
Since Dean wanted to be able to hear Sam if he called, he didn’t need to be told twice.
He put the stopper in the sink and scooped the boiled ‘sterile’ water from the tub, until he had enough for his purposes, and then stripped down, before wiping himself down with the cold water.
They used the antibacterial waterless soap for their hands when they cooked, but he used the bar of soap tonight, soaping up slightly, before rubbing his skin red to try and get off the coating of grime, which he felt had settled on him over the stifling hours spent in the room.
He could still hear the zombies yowling and scratching - it was like a buzz in his brain and he wished he could wash out his ears.
He just wanted to listen to something else, besides death. He couldn’t even hum Metallica now - all memory of tunes and melodies scratched out of his head.
Sam found the board games on the sixth day. He was tired and bored and brought the games into the room half-heartedly hoping that Dean would stop fidgeting and relax.
Dean could spend 12 hours in a car without getting out - but six days locked in a house was taking a toll on them both.
Sam was pissy and tired of dealing with his brooding brother.
Connect Four ended before it started, the pieces going to a checker game instead, which lasted until the sun went down and ended with a draw after a 28 game tournament.
Sam won the last can of peaches in a cutthroat game of Monopoly that ended in Dean hurling his tiny silver game piece out the window in a huff, before grumbling that he ‘hated the thimble’.
Sam shared the peaches and tried to ignore the way Dean’s hands shook when he scooped out the fruit. They were going to get through this, thimble or not.
“You remember that chick, Sally? The one who helped you with your science project in that crap town…”
“Topeka?” Sam prompted from the window, where he was keeping watch with his newest book-this one sporting a soldier on the cover.
“Yeah,” Dean said. Exactly. “I did her.”
“You did not!” Sam scolded.
“Yup. In the back of Old Man Jenkins’ pickup--behind his silo. Damn, she was hot,” Dean remembered.
“She was my science mentor - she was in…”
“12th grade, getting extra-curricular for her teacher’s degree. She had a mouth like a hooker, I swear - best head I ever got was from Sally Evans.”
“Evanson,” Sam corrected.
“Whatever,” Dean muttered, thinking of Sally’s curly blonde hair and pink lips. “She had on a black bra - and girls back then didn’t wear black underwear, unless they were into kink.”
“Dean - shut up, please.”
He kept his eyes closed and tried to remember what Sally had sounded like. But all he heard were the whimpers and groans of the starving zombies.
Sam woke up and immediately remembered where he was. Day nine in their farmhouse hell.
His feet were hanging off the small bed and the room smelled like sardines. He’d told Dean to eat them in the hall, but the smell must’ve followed him inside.
He glanced around and saw that the sun was down and he automatically scanned the room for his brother.
He sat up, when he didn’t find him right away in the dim room.
Then he saw him, sitting in the furthest corner from the window, with his hands over his ears and his knees pulled to his chest, as he leaned his head against the wall.
“Dean?” Sam called, standing up and ignoring the pop of his stiff joints.
Dean shook his head slightly, as if trying to shake off his voice.
“Dean, what’s wrong?”
“Shh,” Dean whispered, not opening his eyes.
Sam crouched beside him, his panic flaring. “Why are we whispering?”
“I don’t want to hear them anymore…scratching and crying…I can’t take it…” Dean said, leaning forward and clenching his fists over his ears tighter.
“Okay…okay, Dean, I’ll distract you - so you won’t even hear them,” Sam said, focusing on the spoken problem - if they knew what they were dealing with, they could deal - he could totally handle this.
He pulled Dean’s fingers forcefully away from his ears, ignoring the blood under his nails from where he’d apparently been clawing at his ears and he laced his fingers with Dean’s fist - wincing inwardly at his grip.
He’d seen Dean like this only once before--a snakebite fever out in Arizona - so he focused on keeping him from harming himself in his strange delirium.
Sam knew that if they lived through this, Dean would tease him forever. Hell, it would give Dean incentive to keep them alive just so he could talk about it.
But Dean didn’t want to hear the zombies’ wails and scratching for a while and Sam knew something that could be louder.
“I hear the train a-coming, it’s rolling around the bend and I ain’t seen the sunshine since I don’t know when - I’m stuck in Folsom Prison and time keeps dragging on…but that train keeps a rolling on down to San Antone…”
Dean stopped fighting him, his fingers relaxing, when Sam sang out the last few words. He waited for a second before continuing. “When I was just a baby, my mama told me, ‘Son, always be a good boy, don’t ever play with guns’ - but I shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die. When I hear that whistle blowing, I hang my head and cry…”
Dean threw his head back then and started to laugh, deep and genuine.
“It wasn’t that bad,” Sam muttered, but he couldn’t hide his relief.
“I’m freaking out and you break out the Johnny Cash…oh, god, we’re going to die here and it’s all your fault,” Dean said, laughing as he threw his arms around Sam and embraced him roughly.
“Sorry, I didn’t think Metallica was appropriate to the moment,” Sam snorted.
Dean released him, wiping his face of tears through his choking laughter. “Oh fuck, man…Johnny Cash?”
“Dude, I’m totally a bass - you’re the one who was always singing soprano at Pastor Jim’s on Sundays,” Sam replied.
“Oh, you did not just say that - dude, my voice was changing!” Dean protested, but his eyes were still flashing with amusement.
“Whatever - you made that old lady cry with your rendition of Amazing Grace,” Sam said, infected by Dean’s hysteria against his will.
“I can’t help it if Jesus spoke to her through my vocal talent,” Dean replied.
They were both laughing now and Sam felt his panic dissipating as he caught his breath.
Dean was leaning against the wall, but he was clearly lucid and alert now. “So. Johnny Cash, huh?”
“It worked, didn’t it?”
After a long silence, Dean struck a match and lit the small lantern. “How’s the rest of it go?”
“I always thought it would be a succubus.”
Sam blinked from his doze at his brother’s soft words. “Excuse me?”
“I thought a succubus would be the way I would die. In the throws of passion or just kissing a hot chick. Never thought it’d be like this.”
“We aren’t going to die here, Dean,” Sam said but the words were hollow. Day ten. They were out of kerosene and neither of them would drink the water without boiling it first. They still had canned fruit juice but it wasn’t going to last forever.
“You think succubi are hot?” Dean continued. “In the stories, they always sound hot.”
“Dean,” Sam started.
“I didn’t want to go out like this…hell, Sammy, you always give me shit about following Dad’s orders unquestioningly and I dragged you right into the middle of this hell without even knowing what we were getting into,” he continued. “Now we’re both going to die here…and I haven’t gotten laid in over two weeks…”
Sam pushed himself stiffly to his feet and walked over to where Dean was lying on the cot. “You know this is a total chick flick moment.”
“It would be a chick flick moment if I was propositioning you - which I’m not -I‘m just…sorry. For all this. For everything,” Dean said, his green eyes dull of the familiar snark.
They’d been here ten days and Sam had accepted that his father wasn’t coming. There had been so many times that he’d wanted to give Dean that ray of hope that their dad would come for them, but he’d held his tongue. If John Winchester was coming, he’d have already come. Most likely, he was dead too.
“Succubi? Is that the plural?” Sam asked sitting down on the bed beside Dean.
“I think so. I left my dictionary in the Impala,” Dean replied blankly.
“’Succubusses’ doesn’t sound right,” Sam said.
“I saved two bullets,” Dean stated. He didn’t look at Sam but he didn’t have to.
“What do you think about corn for dinner?” Sam replied after a beat.
“I hate corn.”
“It’s either corn or green beans.”
“I hate green beans.”
“We won’t need the bullets, Dean. You were right, we’re not going out like this. We haven’t gotten this far just to die of zombie flu,” Sam said softly.
“Come here,” Dean called from the hall, motioning for Sam to leave the window for a moment.
“What’s up?” Sam asked, his tired eyes laced with concern.
“Listen,” Dean urged, pulling him toward the sealed room.
Sam couldn’t hear anything over the clawing and wails of the dead, and he doubted that Dean heard anything either. His brother was losing it. “Dean, there’s nothing in there,” Sam said.
“I know that - it’s just - all we’ve heard for days is zombies, but there’s something different…I can hear it - just listen…” Dean pleaded.
Sam considered his brother carefully. They were both tired and strained from the ten days in the house, but Dean genuinely seemed to believe what he was saying. He imitated Dean and leaned his head against the door.
And heard it. Faint, but definitely, well, not a zombie. Zombies didn’t rumble.
“What do you think it is?” Sam asked.
“We can’t see that direction. What if there’s a road or something back there?” Dean asked. He looked at Sam and dragged a hand across his face. “I don’t know, Sam, it could be the motherfucking Langoliers for all I know, hell - I don’t know anything right now ‘cause I can’t hear myself think - but it’s something.”
“The roof - we won’t have to open this door if we climb out to get a better look,” Sam said.
Dean’s eyes lit up. “Yeah, Sammy, that’s a good idea.”
Sam would have been flattered if he hadn’t thought about how ‘off’ Dean was from the days of isolation. Dean would already be on the roof if he wasn’t so distracted.
They hurried back to the room and Dean climbed out first, standing on the small outcrop where the stove was set up and looked up at the higher eave of the roof.
“Give me a boost,” he said once Sam was outside.
It took a little acrobatics, but after several minutes they were standing on the slanted roof and could see in all directions.
And they could hear the rumbling. And now, it sounded like…popping.
The zombies heard it too, and despite Sam and Dean being on the roof in plain view, the zombies were high-tailing it toward the sound.
“What the fuck,” Sam whispered. Dean smacked him on the back and nearly made him lose his balance. When Sam turned to scold him, Dean was smiling. “What the fuck, Dean?”
“Something’s coming, Sam - and I don’t think zombies can drive,” Dean said.
Sam snorted and returned his gaze to where the zombies were limping and staggering up the hill.
Then he saw it.
A truck. An armored truck.
“Is that…” Dean muttered.
“It’s a truck, Dean,” Sam said.
Dean started to say something, but stopped short as they watched the zombies rushing the army vehicle. They could see the men half-exposed on top with guns now, knocking the bodies off their feet with impressive accuracy
The big truck continued its approach, circling the house in a wide lazy loop as the zombies chased after them mindlessly. The truck finally slowed to a stop by the Impala.
“That’s Dad,” Dean said suddenly.
“What?”
“He’s checking on the car,” Dean said in disbelief. “We’re starving up here and he’s checking on the car.”
Dean wanted Sam to climb into the armored truck first but his brother was insistent that Dean go and he honestly didn’t think he could last another minute in this room.
The gunshots were steady and reassuring as he peered down from the roof to the vehicle that was their cavalry. The men firing that had raised the ladder were wearing face shields and body armor.
“Here goes everything,” he muttered, turning to face Sam as he lowered himself to the first rung.
“I’m right behind you, Dean,” Sam said shakily, glancing at the ground below with the sparse zombies crawling and staggering toward the sound of the engine.
Dean took a deep breath and climbed down.
When the sunlight disappeared through the tiny hatch he saw the two snipers’ lower bodies where they were standing on small raised platforms.
“Dean…” His Dad’s arms crushed him into a hug.
“Dad…”
“Sammy’s okay? You okay?” John asked before embracing Sam as he planted his feet on the floor.
“What took you so long?” Dean replied when his father’s eyes landed on him again.
Sam’s arm looped around his shoulders and he tried to relax. He knew he was shaking but he hoped that the idling engine would hide it a little longer - until he could stop hearing the moans and the clawing…
“Sit down - we’ve got a long ride ahead of us,” his Dad said.
They sat down on the metal bench and fastened the seat belts before the snipers lowered the ladder and closed the upper hatches. The truck lurched forward and Dean listened to Sammy’s voice in his ear and pretended that he didn’t hear anything else.
***
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