Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

He didn't sleep, had never slept. Couldn't remember ever closing his eyes, only an eternity of unbroken, staring consciousness. Then suddenly this new thing, the sensation of waking up from a long-forgotten, oblivious darkness that must have been sleep.

After that, he slept, or thought he slept, most of the time. Each waking was too much like returning to that state of endless wakefulness and every time he woke up he wondered if he'd sleep again or if that had been the last time.

When he did wake, he would find a dim room or it might have been that he couldn't see. There was someone with him but he could never see her clearly and while he could hear her voice and even understand the words he couldn't piece them together. He never said anything to her. He had stopped speaking so long ago that to take it up again seemed unnatural and dangerous. Like losing some last, precious thing that he'd carefully hidden and tended. He didn't speak when she spoke to him or when she touched him. He thought that he wept once and she sat beside him and wiped his eyes and even then he said nothing to her. It was all new and he trusted none of it.

He became able to understand what she was saying and once she told him that he was getting better and only then did he want to talk to her, to tell her there was no getting better from what he was and so he knew she was a liar. But he held his silence and slept when he could and woke to find these new things unchanged.

Finally she came to him and she wasn't smiling or speaking softly, there was terror in her face and this at last was something not new.

"Get up, get up!" she whispered and pulled him to his feet and led him down a flight of stairs in the stifling dark.

"Take this," she said and put something in his hand and his fingers curled around it as if they remembered its shape on their own and when he looked down he saw a gun in his hand and this was also something he understood.

"Run," she said. "Don't look back. Just run."

There was a terrible pounding crash above them and she turned him around and pushed him to a flight of narrow stairs or a ladder that led to an open doorway or hatch. And then suddenly there was something else new, the feeling of warm night air on his face and the sight of stars above.

"Run!" the woman said and then he was running through something that felt like dry grass or brambles, running in his bare feet and he could hear the woman behind him and others in pursuit of them both.

There were shots and she went down behind him and some ancient impulse made him wheel around and try to get her on her feet.

"Get out of here!" she hissed. "Run, hide, go!"

She went limp in his arms, her eyes staring up at the dark sky. He could hear them coming through the dry grass. He dropped the woman's body and set out at a dead run across the field. He heard three shots and felt a flat, sharp blow on his side and the pain that followed was no new thing at all.

He still ran and was amazed that he ran when he knew there was nowhere to run. He reached a dark stand of trees and he fell to his knees and put his back against a trunk and as he was raising the gun the woman had given him there was a roaring explosion and a bright orange gout of flame. He saw a house burning in the distance and the fields he'd run through were on fire. The heat was intense and he couldn't breathe. He heard something screaming and that also was not new.

He thought they would come for him but no one came. His side was bleeding and very painful but he knew that he wouldn't die because he was already dead, dead and damned. And yet he got to his feet and set the burning landscape behind him though he had no idea of where there was to go.

* * *

Like every morning Buddy went down to the river and like every morning July was kneeling there, his eyes closed and his hands clasped in prayer and all seven feet of his handmade cross leaning against his shoulder like the holy pole with which he planned to vault himself to heaven.

"Mornin, preacher."

July paid him no mind so Buddy stuck his hands in his pockets and looked off up the wide track of the river. It was shaping up to be a low, hot day and the water was leadenly reflecting the clouds rolling in above it. At his feet, July shifted his knees in the levee's yellow dirt. Buddy grinned.

"That ain't the Jordan, y'know," he said. "It's the Mississippi. Don't know if the results is the same."

July opened one eye and looked up at Buddy from underneath the brim of his white hat.

"I know what river that is. Lived next to it all my life, didn't I?"

"You sure did and for most of it you was just plain old July Scales from down the road till you went and got the Jesus fever on me. I sure do miss our poker games, July."

"I got better things to do with my time than sit around and play the devil's cardgames with you."

"I'll bet Ol Scratch has got better things to do hisself than worry about two old men shufflin cards."

July made a snorting sound that struck Buddy as more than a little unchristian and went back to his prayer. Buddy looked up the river again. Far in the distance, almost of a color with the gray sky, he could now see a column of smoke rising into the clouds.

"Something's burnin upriver," he said. "Looks like the devil was keepin hisself pretty busy last night after all."

July didn't open his eyes. "Everything's gonna burn soon. As was foretold in The Book."

"Seems that way, don't it? Say, when's that Jesus gettin here, July? Somethin holdin him up?"

"He which testifieth these things saith surely I come quickly."

"He got a strange notion a quick."

"Amen!" July shouted. "Even so, come Lord Jesus!"

"Okay, July," Buddy said. "You keep sayin it, maybe it'll happen."

Buddy walked past July and set off down the dirt road. He didn't know why he came here every morning to have this same old exchange but it would have felt wrong to him if he didn't. There were so few folks left that he knew, so few folks left, period. This stretch of the Delta had never been crowded but after the last flood it had emptied out of damn near everyone. Buddy didn't know where they'd all gone. Jackson maybe, some over the border to Memphis. Things weren't much better in those places from what he heard, in fact they were probably worse. At least out here he still had the house he'd lived in for some forty years and his walks by the river and even old July, crazy as he'd gotten. Buddy teased him but could see how the past few years would drive anyone to religion. Times like these, it helped to believe in something.

What was that about the four horsemen? Buddy ticked them off in his head. War, famine, death, one more. Pestilence. He always forgot that one, hard as that was to believe since it was everywhere these days. Buddy didn't even know where the nearest private hospital was anymore and even if he did he didn't have the papers to get in. A hell of thing, after he'd served his country he couldn't even get into a hospital. But it was like that all over now, things breaking down everywhere and so fast. Four horsemen, bearing down.

His old Army-issue .45 banged on his skinny hip. He felt like a damn fool walking around with that thing but even an old man could be bothered with and there were people out there willing to do it for nothing more than a few chuckles. Lord knows he didn't have anything to steal. Hell, even July kept a shotgun in the house though he was just crazy enough to come out here every day with no defense but his faith. Though Buddy was willing to bet he could have made fancy use of that cross in a pinch.

The fire in the distance was still burning, looked like maybe up by Rena Lara. He didn't know what was up there to burn anymore, probably it was just something had set itself afire and there was no one to put it out. These were some hard times, to be sure. Folks talked about the Depression and about the oil crisis and about September 11 and said we got through all that, we'll get through this, but Buddy thought this might be it. It sure did look like those end times July was always talking about and meanwhile Jesus was taking his sweet old time setting it to rights. Buddy was glad he was an old man, didn't have much farther to go.

Buddy came to a place where the ground sloughed off to the river and he stopped to look out over the water. There were old iron bars across the road here, the remains of some Tennessee Valley Authority drainage project. The bars were flaked with orange rust and the weeds were coming up high around it. There was not so much as a breath of wind and the river rolled on, smooth and oily under the low summer sky. Buddy crossed over the bars and looked down to the banks of the river and saw the body lying there.

The peculiar thing about a dead body was how still it was. There wasn't anything in the world with less life in it, not even a log or a rock. Buddy stood on the drain pipes and knew the body below him was not dead, though it was not moving at all. It didn't have that stillness of death about it.

There were all sorts of people on the road these days and Buddy didn't know what sort of person this was. He might have been a drunk or a dope fiend or someone escaped from the authorities. They'd brought back the chain gangs and maybe this man had dodged off of one of them, though it didn't seem likely with the tracking collars they wore now. Didn't need any bloodhound to find such a man, just had to activate his collar and he'd go down with about three thousand volts in him. Then plug his code into a computer and he'd light up on the map just like a tourist attraction.

Buddy hung over the edge of the bank so he could get a better look at the man lying facedown near the water. He must have fallen off the road and down to the bank unless he'd come up from the river itself. His eyes went to the smoke upriver and he wondered if this man knew anything about that.

For a second he considered scrambling his old bones down there all by himself and then sense took over and he hauled himself up and headed back to where he'd left July kneeling in the yellow dirt waiting for Jesus.

"July," he huffed. "July."

"Get thee behind me, Satan."

"July, there's a man down by the river."

"Maybe it's the devil come for your old heathen soul."

"No, July, I think he's hurt. He's just lyin there."

July opened his eyes and looked up, pushing his hat back on his head. "He's dead. Washed up by the river."

"No, he ain't. I'm pretty sure of it. He's sick or he's hurt. I think he needs help."

"There's a wide white space between what you think and what you know. Where would such a man have come from? No place around here to walk from. Did you see a car?"

"No car, no."

"Then you think he swam the river?"

"Damnit, July, I don't know. Come down with me and take a look."

"I ain't finished my daily devotions."

"I've just about had it with your daily devotions. There's a real live person down there needs some help and you sit there and talk to me about prayin. I don't see the hand a Jesus comin to help that poor soul. I don't see nobody but us. We gonna let someone die in the mud like that? What in the hell would Jesus do?"

July looked up at him. He grasped his white cross and pulled himself up on it.

"You are a blaspheming savage, Buddy Lennox, and you'll account for it on the Day of Judgment."

"I suppose I will but maybe I'll get special dispensation for my good intentions."

July muttered something about what the road to hell was paved with and stalked off in the direction from which Buddy had come.

* * *

July used his cross like a staff, picking his way down the bank. Buddy followed him, feeling old and rickety. If the man had fallen off the road he'd taken a hell of a tumble. They stopped a few feet away from him. He wasn't moving. His right arm was bent under him and his left hand was stretched out, scraped and bleeding. He had blood on his shirt and soaked through the fabric on his left leg. He didn't have any shoes on and his feet were bloody.

"That man is dead," July said and the man raised his head and looked at them.

He didn't seem afraid of them and there was no plea for help in his face. As if he'd been lying there expecting them to come along. For a long moment the three of them just stared at each other.

Buddy took a step towards him and the man pulled his right arm from underneath himself and along with it a big silver semi-automatic, like the ones the hired militias carried. July put a hand on Buddy's arm and Buddy stepped back.

The man made an attempt to aim but he didn't seem to have the strength to hold up the gun and he let his arm fall to the ground. He put his head down and then looked up again, half-propped on his forearms.

"We're here to help you. You ain't gonna shoot us, are you?"

"Why don't you let go of the gun?" July added.

The man said nothing. He stared at them and Buddy could hear his quick, shallow breathing and could see that he was shivering.

"I don't think he's gonna shoot no one," Buddy whispered to July. "I don't think he could lift that thing again."

"Gun like that he could shoot us both dead before we even knew what hit us."

"You're a damn coward, July Scales, for all your sermonizing. Why in the hell're you so keen on savin your old ass anyway?"

"May be old but it's mine. Don't need it perforated."

"Damnit," Buddy said. He shook off July's hand and marched over to the man, his feet sucking in the mud. He bent down and took the gun out of the man's hand and he put up no resistance as if he'd been expecting this too. Buddy shoved the gun down the back of his jeans and put a hand on the man's shoulder. The man didn't look at him.

"I don't know what your story is, but you need some help. I don't think neither me or John the Baptist over there's gonna be able to carry you up outta here. You think you can walk a little, make it to the road?"

The man didn't say anything and Buddy wondered if he was deaf. He let his eyes skate over the man's body. He had lain there long enough to bloody the ground beneath him and there were flies in the blood, there were flies crawling on his bloody clothing.

He leaned over and said softly, "If we leave you out here you're gonna die."

The man heard that. He turned his head and looked at Buddy and smiled with such bitterness that it shook Buddy and scared him and for the first time he wondered what he'd gotten himself into.

* * *

Buddy had an old truck, an '87 Chevy pickup that he kept in the barn. He had gas for it in a canister down in the cellar. He left July at the riverbank with the injured man and trotted back to his house. The day was growing close and very hot, although there was still no sun.

The gas canister was half full and he put as much of it in the tank as he thought he'd need without having to siphon it back out again. He climbed in the cab and sat there and thought for a second and then went back in the house and pulled a blanket off the sofa and got back in the truck with it.

The old truck spluttered with disuse and cut out on him twice. Buddy turned the key in the ignition and gently tapped the gas pedal, trying not to flood the line.

"Come on sweetheart," he whispered. "Come on."

The Chevy finally coughed into life and Buddy felt a surprising exhilaration. He'd enjoyed driving when he was young. Hell, he'd enjoyed driving up until three years ago or so.

When he got back to the levee, he saw July kneeling beside the man. His head was on the ground now and his eyes were closed. Buddy scrambled down the bank holding onto little rocks and roots that jutted out of the earth.

"How's he doin?"

"He's sorta in and out."

"He say anything?"

"Not a word." July lowered his voice. "I lifted up his shirt there. It's real bloody but it looks like he's been shot. Buddy, this boy can't walk. How're we gonna get him up to the truck? "

"Well, you pray for a miracle," Buddy said. He hunkered down across from July and put his hand on the man's shoulder, shaking him a little. His eyes snapped open.

"This is where we're gonna need your help. It's not too far and we'll try to be quick about it."

They got him up on his knees and then they got him up on his feet. He didn't say anything or holler or make any sound at all besides gasping for breath. He seemed like someone following orders. Buddy wondered if maybe he was from the militia but he didn't act like it. They were little more than hired bullies with heavy firepower and one of them would probably have been crying for his momma by now.

They'd taken a few steps, their arms wrapped around the man's waist and his arms over their shoulders, when he suddenly stopped. Buddy looked at him. He was staring at something beyond them and Buddy followed his sightline to where July had left his white cross propped up against the dirt bank. Buddy looked back at the man. His face was shadowed by confusion. Buddy was sweating and the man's blood was soaking into him.

"You religious?" Buddy asked gently, coaxing the man into moving again. "That's a good thing. July here, he's got all sorts a prayers for you."

July wheezed.

* * *

The man made it up the bank but his knees were buckling by the time they got him to the truck. Buddy spread the blanket out in the truckbed and they laid the man down on it and Buddy wrapped him up.

"Snug as a bug," he said. The man stared half-lidded at the heavy sky.

It was ten minutes back to Buddy's house and for the first five neither he nor July said anything. Finally July said, "Spooky, how quiet he is."

"Guess he don't feel up for a chat."

"Somethin ain't right about this."

"Somethin ain't right with a lot of things these days."

They didn't say anything for the rest of the drive.

* * *

July was the bigger of the two of them and he was able to carry the man into Buddy's house over his shoulder. They put him down in the small bedroom off the kitchen. He was still awake but he was gray-white and when Buddy put a hand on his forehead his skin was damp and cool. He went into the kitchen to get some water and July followed him.

"He's in shock, I think," Buddy said. "That's probably why he can't talk."

"What're you fixin to do?"

Buddy thought about this. Now that he had the man in the house, he didn't clearly know what he'd planned to do.

"Where do you think he come from?"

"I don't know," Buddy said. "He must of walked from somewhere. Or maybe someone shoved him out of a car or somethin."

"Someone shot that boy. Maybe they're gonna come lookin for him. Or maybe he shot someone first. You think about that?"

Buddy reached around and pulled the gun from the back of his jeans. It was a big thing, a real hand-cannon. He didn't even know how many rounds were in that clip.

"Maybe so but I don't think he's gonna be any trouble to anyone right now."

He set the gun down on the kitchen table and looked at July.

"The Bible says whatever you do for the least of em, you do it for Jesus. Don't it? What do you think we oughta do for Jesus in there?"

July ran a hand over his sweaty face. He looked old and scared.

"He's lost a lot of blood from the looks of it. No chance of gettin him to a hospital, is there?"

"I couldn't get myself into a hospital, much less some stranger. You know that."

"I know it," July said. "How much of your field training do you remember? Enough to dig a bullet out of someone?"

"Maybe there ain't no bullet. Maybe it went straight through. Hell, July, you worked in a hospital for forty years."

"I did laundry in a hospital for forty years. Didn't pick up too many surgery skills."

Buddy and July looked at each other.

"I sure wish he'd say something," July said. "Anything at all."

By early afternoon the sky had darkened with heavy thunderheads. The old glass ceiling fixture in the bedroom didn't work and the room was greenish dim and stifling. Buddy had gotten the man to drink some water and he'd thrown up the first half a glass but kept down the rest. After that he'd passed into a doze. He still hadn't said anything. He hadn't even so much as shifted since they'd laid him down.

They got a table lamp from the living room and plugged it in. The man turned his face away from the light but didn't open his eyes. Buddy and July stood by the side of the bed. Buddy had a bowl of hot water in his arms. July was holding a stack of Buddy's threadbare washcloths and towels and a pair of steel kitchen scissors.

"Maybe you oughta say a prayer," Buddy said.

July looked dry-mouthed. He settled for crossing himself and Buddy followed suit. Couldn't hurt.

Buddy leaned over the man and gently pushed up his shirt. It had been white but now it was tie-dyed with blood and rivermud. The shirt was stuck to him and Buddy had to tug on it. He looked up at the man's face but he hadn't opened his eyes.

"Give me a washcloth."

July handed him a washcloth as crisply as a registered nurse. Buddy wet it and wrung it out and started wiping away the scale of blood that was dried onto him.

"I don't see no exit wound," he said.

"What's that?"

"What's what?"

"On his belly," July said. "What's that?"

Buddy pushed the shirt up to the man's chest.

"Holy mother of God," he said.

Deeply grooved wounds ran the length of the man's torso, covering his abdomen. They were healed, but seemed recent and they looked as if they'd been stitched up by someone who'd been careful but not skilled with a needle. There was a patternlike nature to them that made Buddy think of tractorlines or rakemarks.

"Maybe he's a veteran," July said.

"I don't know of any weapons that could do something like this. Unless they got whole new bombs I don't know about."

Buddy brushed the back of his fingers over the stitches and felt the man twitch. He pulled his hand away and looked up and the man was awake, looking at him. Buddy smiled.

"Looks like you've been through hell."

The man rolled his eyes up and stared at the ceiling the way he'd stared at the sky in the back of the truck.

"I'm gonna have to get this shirt off you," Buddy said. "I'm gonna cut it off if that's all right. So you don't have to raise your arms or sit up or nothin."

He didn't wait for an answer because he'd figured out by now that there wasn't going to be one. July handed him the scissors and Buddy cut slowly through the shirt up to the neck. He folded open the two sides of the cut shirt. The wounds on the man's chest were even deeper and uglier, especially over his heart. Buddy could see the torn remnants of some tattoo, a star or sunburst maybe, impossible to tell. He had a silver pendant around his neck that looked like a Catholic saint's medal.

"We're gonna turn you over, okay?"

With July's help Buddy turned the man onto his side. He peeled the shirt off him and threw it on the floor. There were more of those stitched wounds on his back, almost as bad as on the front. There was a lot of blood and a fresh bullet hole on his lower left side. The skin around it was blackly bruised and swollen. Buddy cleaned him off and they rolled him onto his back with a clean towel underneath him.

"You're gonna be just fine," Buddy said.

"Just fine," July added. The man didn't look at them.

Buddy went into the bathroom and started pulling things out of his medicine cabinet. Hydrogen peroxide, iodine. He had a first aid kit under the sink and there were gauze bandages and antibiotic ointment in there.

"You got any of those pills in your house?" he asked July. "From when you hurt your hip?"

"If I could find em they'd be three, four years old."

"Well, go find em. There's a bullet in that boy and I'm not keen on diggin around in him while he's wide awake. Doubt he'd appreciate it either."

"Buddy," July said.

"What?"

"You ever done anything like this before?"

"No. But I saw worse than that in Vietnam. I wasn't a medic but I patched up a few guys. Doin it here ain't worse than doin it in the jungle."

"Maybe we just oughta call the police before we start carvin' him up."

Buddy shook his head.

"I can't remember the last time I saw counties around here. I don't think we've even got a sheriff no more. It'd be militia that'd make it out here first and you know what they're like. We'd probably get arrested for harborin a vagrant and God knows what'd happen to that boy. Probably take him out back and shoot him or haul him off to the lockup which'd be as good as killing him."

July nodded and looked at Buddy gravely. "He's probably gonna die anyway. You know that, right?"

"Yessir, well. We can at least make it easy on him."

"You may get through those pearly gates yet, Buddy."

"Just go get those pearly pills. Take my truck, it'll be faster. And July?"

"Yeah?

"Bring your shotgun."

When July left, Buddy went into the back bedroom. The room was very hot and stinking of blood and river water and the man had fallen asleep again or passed out. He was shivering and Buddy pulled the covers up and over him. He paused and leaned over the man and studied the medal around his neck. St. Michael the Archangel. It was shiny and looked very new. Buddy had been raised a Methodist and didn't know much about saints. Carefully, he picked up the medal and studied it on his fingertips. Couldn't make out much but it looked to be an angel standing on a dragon or serpent. Seemed like something July would appreciate.

* * *

By the time July returned it had turned black outside and started thundering. Buddy brought another light into the bedroom. They gave the man two of July's pills and Buddy had to hold him up while he swallowed them. He was weaker than he'd been in the morning and his eyes were drifting. Buddy wondered again if the man had come from whatever was burning up by Rena Lara. If he had, he'd walked more than twenty miles in the dark while so badly injured. He thought about putting this off until tomorrow to let the man rest a little then decided against it.

He went into the bathroom and washed his hands. He poured iodine on them and let them air dry. When he came back into the bedroom the man's eyes were open but unfocused. July had turned him onto his stomach. Buddy got down beside the bed.

"I don't know how much punch those pills had left so this is probably gonna hurt. I'll do the best I can and you, you don't gotta keep quiet, you know. You go ahead and scream your head off if you want. You let those profanities fly, no one's gonna hold it against you."

Buddy only had one thing to probe the wound and that was a pair of long, needle-nosed pliers. He'd sterilized them with a Bic lighter and then poured iodine on them to be sure. He leaned over the man's back and the bullethole looked so much smaller than those pliers and the thought of going in there with them made him feel sick. A first flash of lightning lit up the room and Buddy startled.

"You okay?" July asked.

"Yeah."

"Don't go gettin jumpy on me."

Buddy put his left hand flat around the wound. He took a deep breath and looked at July. July nodded at him.

Buddy went in with the pliers and the man stiffened and hissed. Dark blood welled up out of the wound and the pliers caught and tore at its edges and the man bucked underneath him. His hands were in white-knuckle fists and July tried to take one of them in his own but he pulled it away and twisted it in the bedsheet. Outside the thunder tolled.

He hit the bullet about two inches in. Lord help me, he thought and clamped down on the pliers. His hands were sweating. He wanted to pull the bullet out quickly but knew he would lose it if he did. He pulled it out as slow as he could, feeling it ripple and slide against torn flesh. Lord help me, Buddy thought again. The man was breathing hard through his teeth. The bullet finally came loose with a wet, sucking pop. It looked like a 10-millimeter brass round. Buddy threw it and the pliers on the bed and closed his eyes and wiped his sweating hands on his shirt.

"Hallelujah," July said.

"Don't start the chorus yet."

Buddy held the wound open and flooded it with water, then iodine. The man shuddered and July put a hand between his shoulder blades. "Almost done," he said. A sheet of rain slapped the window.

Buddy packed the wound with gauze and laid a pad over it and taped it in place. They pulled the bloody towel out from underneath him and replaced it with a clean one and then rolled him over onto his back. His eyes were half-closed and running with tears. Buddy wiped his face.

"Damn it," he said. "You're a tough customer. I'd of been screamin bloody murder. July here would of wet himself."

"Almost did just watchin," July said.

"That's the worst of it. You get some rest now." He ran a hand through the man's sweat-drenched hair. "Okay, son?"

The man's eyes focused on Buddy and for a brief moment Buddy saw that same flicker of confusion that he'd seen when the man had caught sight of July's cross. Like he'd encountered something he couldn't understand or had never seen before. He opened his mouth as if to say something at last but a crash of thunder shook the house and a gust of wind slammed it and the lights went out and cast all three of them into the dark.

* * *

They could take his sight if they wanted and take his voice and sometimes they took both and left him in a mute darkness where he could still hear them and still feel everything they did to him and couldn't even cry out against it. They would give him his voice when they wanted to hear him scream or when they wanted him to talk and when he realized what they wanted he refused to give it to them. He didn't fight them and he didn't speak and they hated him all the more for it.

Then they made him talk. They laid him open and made him tell them everything, every secret, every shame, every fear, every love. They made him tell it all until he couldn't bear the sound of his own voice or the sense of them gorging themselves on everything he had tried to hold onto. They left him with nothing to himself and then they told him how they were going to use what they'd wrung from him and they left him alone to scream in the dark until he gave up his voice forever.

When he woke up in the woman's house after somehow being asleep for the first time in eternity, he thought it was a trick and when the woman was gone and he found himself on the road in the night with blood soaking through his clothing he was sure it was some game of theirs. When the two men found him he had no strength or desire to fight them and he waited for them to show what they really were and take whatever they wanted though he had nothing left to give.

Later he was lying in a room lit by some pale flickering light and he could hear rain on the roof and could feel his own body in a way that he hadn't before, not just pain but a physical, real presence of himself. He began to imagine that this was no deception and that he had been here before. Before that sleepless, haunted eternity he had been alive and somehow he was again.

* * *

Around midnight Buddy finally went to lie down. The rain had not let up and he began to worry about flooding. He and July were two old men with nothing but a quarter-century old truck and half a canister of gas between them, and now they had a gravely injured stranger in their company. He didn't know what they would do if they had to evacuate but he was too exhausted to think about it for long.

Some time later July woke him up. The electricity was still out and he was standing over Buddy with a candle. Buddy looked at the old alarm clock next to his bed and saw that it was almost three in the morning.

"What is it?"

"Our boy's not doin too good. He's burnin up. "

"Oh, lord," Buddy said. He got up and padded downstairs in his bare feet, July lighting the way.

There was an oil lamp burning in the back bedroom and Buddy held it to the man's face and saw that he was flushed with fever.

"I hope those antibiotics are still good," he said to July. "They're even older'n your pain pills."

"I'll go get somethin to cool him off with."

"All right. There's some kitchen towels under the sink."

Buddy sat down on the edge of the bed. He took the man's hot hand between his own. After they'd patched him up they had finished cleaning all the blood and river off of him and Buddy had realized that the man was younger than he'd first supposed. He wouldn't have put him at more than thirty. They'd found more of those stitched-up wounds on his leg when they'd changed him into clean clothes and his apparent youth seemed even more striking against all the injuries he bore.

July came back with wet towels and wiped the man's face and neck. They lifted him and got him to drink some water and then lowered him back down. He never opened his eyes.

"I don't know what else to do," Buddy said. "I think maybe we just need to pray for him. July?"

July cleared his throat and Buddy looked up at him.

"I mostly just know the Revelation and the angry prophets, Buddy. I don't think none of them fits."

"Oh, July Scales," he said gently. "I don't believe that. Let's have some of that old time religion."

"Well," July said. "I suppose I can think of somethin."

He sat down on the other side of the bed. He took the man's other hand in his own and took a deep breath.

"The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures. He leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul. He leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for His name's sake. Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil..."

The man's eyes slid open and he looked at July. July stopped.

"Go on," Buddy said.

"I shall fear no evil, for thou art with me. Thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me."

July continued the psalm and the man watched him the whole time. Buddy felt the man faintly returning his grip. When July finished the room fell breathlessly silent.

"Son?" Buddy said. The man rolled his head on the pillow. "Son, what's your name?"

The man just gazed at him and Buddy was sure he wasn't going to answer. He patted the man's hand.

"That's all right, you don't have to..."

"Dean," he said. His eyes slipped closed. "Dean Winchester."

Chapter Text

Three members of the Mississippi Patriots Militia were the first responders to the fire near Rena Lara, although by the time they arrived there was little left to respond to. The house had burned to its foundation, leaving behind nothing but a chimney and gaping cellarhole and the surrounding fields had been high-summer dry and had kindled like straw. The fire had spread into the woods and probably would have taken out half of Coahoma County if the rain hadn't come. When the militia arrived the charred ruin was still smoldering and the sludge of wet ash on the ground was as thick and hot as tar. Judging from the size of the foundation, the house had been a big one but there was not even one doorknob left for the taking and Corporal Frank DiRita was not happy. This was a backwoods shitshow and it sure wasn't what he'd signed on for.

In the field they found three bodies burnt to black.

"This don't make no sense," DiRita said. "The house is on fire, how'd they burn up out here?"

"Maybe they was on fire when they run out," Private Larry Eula said. "Run out, fall down on the grass tryin to put theyselves out, grass is dry, they goes up like firewood."

"Hey, Harlan," DiRita called. "What're you thinking?"

Corporal Roy Harlan was standing over the third body, the one they'd found farthest from the house and DiRita didn't really expect him to answer. Harlan wasn't much on conversation. He'd joined up with the outfit in Clarksdale just a few days ago and the whole time he'd been giving DiRita a serious fucking case of the creeps. Most of the guys who joined the militia did it for pay, plunder and pussy and then you had spooky fuckers like Harlan who let all the fake military shit go to their heads. Nobody even knew where the hell he'd come from, one day he was just there.

"The owner of this house was a woman named Catherine Parsons," Harlan said without turning around. "This house was built in 1905 when the Parsons family moved here after the fire in Yazoo City. They said that fire was set by a witch, did you know that?"

DiRita and Eula looked at each other.

"Well, no Harlan, I didn't know that."

Harlan looked over his shoulder. "You don't know much about the great state of Mississippi, do you?"

"I'm from Florida," DiRita said. "I just go where the company tells me to go, Harlan. Same as you."

"This is Catherine Parsons' body," Harlan said.

"She a witch?" Eula said grinning. "That how come she burned the house down?"

DiRita smirked. "Yeah, Harlan, was she a witch?"

Harlan turned back to the body. He looked at it and then he lifted his foot and stomped down on Catherine Parsons' charred skull. It pulverized beneath his field boot and what was left of Catherine Parsons' skin flaked off like parchment. DiRita and Eula jumped in surprise and Harlan did it two more times and was fixing for a third when DiRita called out to him.

"Hey, Harlan man, what the fuck?"

Harlan turned around. He was red in the face and breathing hard as if that sorry pile of black bones had enraged him.

"What's your fuckin problem?"

"Yeah, Harlan," Eula said. "Why're you kickin the ol gal?"

Harlan stared at them. They stared back. The fire must have driven away all the birds and bugs because it was deathly quiet.

"We need to search these woods for survivors."

"Survivors?" DiRita said. "Hell, we found three bodies already. How many people were shacking up in that house?"

"Catherine Parsons was harboring a fugitive."

"Well, you got two more bodies over there. One of those crispy critters is probably your fugitive."

"Those men gave their lives in service to their country."

"We didn't have militia boys out here last night. I'd've known about it."

"I didn't say they were militia."

"Well what in the hell were they?"

"Private contractors."

"How come you know about this?" DiRita said. "We never heard nothin about it."

"They don't tell you everything."

"And they tell you?"

"More than you."

DiRita stared at Harlan. "You're fuckin crazy and this is a fuckin shitshow. I'm callin HQ in Clarksdale. Ask them about these fugitives before I go runnin through the woods with your crazy ass."

DiRita turned and started loping through the boot-sucking tar towards the Hummer. There was a sharp crack and DiRita was on the ground with a big hole in the back of his head. Eula took two stumbling steps back and was shot before he could say a word. He lay in the black muck with his arms outstretched. Harlan holstered his firearm.

"Fucking useless crackers," he said.

* * *

After Dean told them his name he asked them where he was and Buddy told him. Then July asked him if there was anyone they could call for him and he didn't answer for such a long time they thought he was asleep until he said he had a brother. That was the last thing he said that made any sense and by noon Buddy thought they were going to lose him. They had him on Tylenol and Buddy's old antibiotics and they put wet sheets over him and Buddy gave him ice chips like they'd given his wife in the hospice where she'd died but the fever wasn't coming down and Buddy thought maybe the boy had just been in too bad of a shape to begin with. All those stitched-up wounds and getting shot and losing so much blood and walking barefoot from God knows where until he was raw up to his ankles. It was enough to stir pity in the heart of the devil himself.

"There's that public hospital in Memphis," July said. "Think the truck'd make it up there?"

"She probably would but public ain't free."

July shrugged. "I got a little saved up."

"You hold onto your penny jar," Buddy said. "There's no point in goin up there just to get turned away. I heard they got quite a wait."

"And we'd have to drive all the way back here with that boy burnin up like he is."

"Yep, and there's still the matter of who shot him and why. There'd be a whole lotta questions to answer before anyone'd even take a look at him."

Buddy looked out the kitchen window. The yellow curtains hanging there were the ones his wife had picked out many years before. Outside the sun was baking the dirt lot behind the house. The chrome bumper of his truck winked out from the barn's darkness.

"I got a strange feelin about this," July said quietly.

"Strange how?"

"Well...I can't really say. Like, how come he was so quiet yesterday? He hardly even made a sound when you was pullin that bullet outta him, it was like...like he was used to that sorta thing. And all those stitches, I never saw anyone tore up like that. And then this mornin while you was in here makin coffee and I was settin back there with him he just starts rattlin off in some foreign language. I'm not sure but I think it was Latin. Church Latin, like them Robicheaux kids used to know."

"There's no accountin for what people say when they're that sick."

"Maybe so but it seems to me like this could be a sign of sorts. Like in the Bible there's always prophets or angels showin up at someone's door only no one knows that's what they are and it's only the person who's chosen for it that takes em in. You see what I'm sayin?"

"July, I don't have clue one what you're sayin."

"I'm sayin maybe we was chosen to make sure that boy doesn't die."

Buddy looked across at July. On the table between them was the gun he'd taken from Dean. Buddy picked it up and waved it at July.

"Your prophets and angels? They're usually packin one a these?"

"Well, angels ain't all harp-pickin. There's warrior angels too. He's got one right around his neck, St. Michael, he who trod Satan under his foot. We're livin in strange times, Buddy. There's bound to be signs and wonders."

Buddy thought about the awful smile Dean had given him when he'd said he was going to die and about all those terrible wounds on him and the way he'd looked at July's cross, the way he'd listened to July saying the psalm. There was something about him that didn't sit right. Maybe not prophets or angels, but something.

"If that boy gets up and starts tap dancin I'll believe in wonders," Buddy said. "Till then maybe you oughta wear a wider-brimmed hat when you do your devotions. Sun's baked your brain."

* * *

It wasn't tap dancing to be sure but the fever did break that evening. Buddy had no thermometer but the back of his hand on Dean's forehead revealed the closest thing to a normal temperature since they'd found him. He was deeply asleep and Buddy put a fresh blanket over him and let him rest. He felt weak with relief. The thought of burying the boy had filled him with an old man's horror of death and July's words had been weighing heavily on his mind though he'd never admit it. If July ever thought Buddy had come over to his side of the Jordan he'd hear about it for the rest of his days.

* * *

Harlan's job would have been easier if it hadn't rained the day after the fire. There would have been a scent to follow, even better there probably would have been blood. It would have led him right to the fugitive wherever he was holed up. Days of the world's time had gone by since they knew that he'd escaped, something that was not supposed to have happened, was not allowed under any rule. He had made his deal and they had called it in, simple and fair as that. These things were immutable.

Harlan didn't know the two who had gotten to Parsons' house first but they had clearly met with more than they had expected. He knew that the fugitive had gotten away and was living. His body was not in the woods or anywhere else because if he had been back among the dead, Harlan would have known. All of them would have known.

* * *

Dean opened his eyes onto a room pale with early morning light. Above him was a ceiling darkly waterstained in places and a milky light fixture with dead insects collected in its glass bowl. He turned his head to the left and saw a window with a yellowed pull shade. A sound of birds. The window propped open with a ruler. To the right was an open door and more daylight beyond.

He sat halfway up and was checked by the pain in his back. He put his hand over the bandaged wound as if that would keep the pain down and eased himself all the way up. He moved his legs off the bed and winced when he set his feet on the floor.

The whole procedure took him a good ten minutes. There was a full glass of water on the nightstand and he was ragingly thirsty but he drank it slowly to make sure it would stay down. He put the glass back on the nightstand and sat there with his head bowed and took long, slow breaths to manage the pain.

He remembered being told he was in Mississippi. He remembered a long, harrowing walk in the dark and he remembered the fire and the woman telling him to run before she died and remembered her taking care of him for some indeterminate time before that. And before that he knew that he'd been Dean Winchester and that his brother had watched him die. Everything between dying and waking up in the woman's house was very, very dark and while he knew where he had been and could have said so, his living self had no words with which to describe it because such language had never been invented and so his living mind was already blacking it out.

He rubbed the back of his neck and his fingers caught on the chain there. He followed it around to the front and looked at the saint's medal on his fingertips. He had no idea where it had come from but he knew he hadn't had it before he died.

He stood up and walked to the door. He was wearing a clean but very worn t-shirt and pajama bottoms in a similar state. His feet hurt almost as badly as his back and he took small steps and paused in the doorway to catch his breath. It was morning-cool in the house but he was sweating.

There was no one in the kitchen and he seemed to be the only person awake. The kitchen was of a size typical of old houses in the country and furnished with a cracking vinyl dinette and ancient appliances that reminded him of Bobby Singer's kitchen. His entire afterlife was becoming a black hole in his memory but he could remember the trucklike chug of Bobby's shitty refrigerator and that was fine with him.

Through the kitchen was a short hallway with a bathroom at the end of it. He went in and shut the door. He switched on the light and a fluorescent bar buzzed into life above the medicine cabinet and he turned and looked at himself in the mirror.

It was his own face and yet it wasn't, not anymore. He wondered if anyone who'd known him would be able to see that. Maybe Sam. Definitely Sam. There was no one physical change that he could identify and yet it was all changed, all different. His eyes dropped down to the open neck of his t-shirt and he could see the scars there and he pushed the shirt off his shoulder and looked at the wounds that had killed him. He wondered who had stitched him back together after he'd died. Probably Sam. Definitely Sam. He looked back at his altered face in the mirror. He had died. He had gone to hell. He'd been brought back. Everything seemed to shift beneath him and he sat down hard and painfully on the toilet lid and put his forehead on the cool porcelain edge of the sink. He thought he was going to pass out but something tore up out of him instead and then he was crying, real living tears though whether they were of grief or gratitude he couldn't tell.

* * *

Buddy made Dean a soft-boiled egg and two pieces of toast for breakfast but refused to make him any coffee, giving him glass after glass of watery grape drink-mix instead. Buddy and July sat there and watched him eat like two kids feeding a stray cat.

They asked him if he wanted to try and get in touch with the brother he'd mentioned and he answered honestly that he didn't know where his brother was. It pressed on Dean that Sam wasn't there and that Sam was nowhere in his recent memories. Sam hadn't been at the woman's house either and yet someone had gotten him out of hell and if not Sam then who?

For the first time Dean looked at the calendar on the refrigerator. He'd seen it before but hadn't paid attention to it and he set down his glass and stood up and went over to it. He looked at it for a long time before turning back to the old men.

"It's 2012?" he said and they nodded and looked at each other.

"2012?" he asked again.

"All year," Buddy said.

Four years? Dean thought. Four years?

He must have turned some sick color because Buddy came over and put a hand on his arm.

"You maybe shouldn't be up. Yesterday at this time we didn't think you were gonna make it."

"Four years?" he said to no one in particular.

"Why don't you go have a lie-down?"

"Do you have a computer?" Dean asked. He glanced around the kitchen. "Scratch that. Do you have a television?"

"It don't work. I never got that digital thing they was peddlin a few years ago."

Oh God, Dean thought. I've crash-landed with Pa and Pa Kettle.

"What...look, this is going to sound crazy but...have things been...different?"

"Different like how?"

"Like, strange. Have strange things been happening in the past four years? Like things no one can explain?"

"Just bad times," Buddy said soothingly. "Same as always."

"As in they closed the plant bad times, or as in plague of locusts bad times?"

Buddy didn't say anything. It was July, still at the kitchen table, who spoke.

"Sorta like that last bit," he said.

Dean stared at July. It was quiet enough to hear a fly buzzing in the windowscreen.

"I have to go," Dean said. He pulled away from Buddy. "I have to go."

"Go where?"

"I don't know. I need to find my brother. Do you have..."

He wanted to ask them if they had any clothes he could wear or a car he could borrow and then realized he might as well ask them for a goddamn time machine because he'd lost four years and what in God's name had happened during that time and where the hell was Sam?

"Dean?" Buddy asked. He sounded very far away.

Dean wiped a hand over his face. He took a step back.

"I'm fine," he said though he wasn't. "I'm..."

He was falling and he heard Buddy say his name again and heard July's chair scraping over the linoleum floor and that was that.

* * *

Dean was half-awake by the time they got him back into bed but he was deathly pale and wordless and when Buddy told him that he needed to take it slow he only nodded and closed his eyes.

"Where's he been," July asked in the kitchen, "That he don't know what year it is?"

Buddy had nothing to say.

* * *

Buddy woke in the night from some troubling dream and he sat up in bed and felt the dream clinging to him and couldn't shake it off. He was thirsty and he wanted some of that purple drink in the icebox and when he went downstairs he saw someone silhouetted in the pale square of backdoor window.

"July?" he said.

"Shhh," Dean said. "Don't turn on the light."

"What're you doin up? You need to stay in bed."

"There's something outside the house."

"There's all kind of critters outside at night."

Buddy wondered if Dean was feverish again. He came and stood beside him and looked out into the yard. He saw nothing except moonlight on the dirt and glinting off the Chevy's bumper in the barn.

Then he saw some black shape detach itself from the darkness of the barn as if the shadows themselves had taken on form. It slunk around the front of the truck with a creeping purposefulness and was absorbed back into the blackness.

"What was that, a dog?"

"I don't think so," Dean said.

July's shotgun was standing up by the door where he'd left it. Dean took it and held it up to the faint light and breeched it open and took out a shell and turned it over in his hand. He put it back into the shotgun and breeched it shut and handed it to Buddy.

"You hold onto that. Where's the gun I had on me?"

Buddy felt a faint flush creep onto his face. He hadn't told Dean about the gun. He'd put it up on the wardrobe in his bedroom and had hoped Dean didn't remember it. He'd be happy to give it back to him when he was sure that Dean was all right in the head and today hadn't made him too confident of it.

"I know you found me with a gun, Buddy, I need to see it."

"Dean, it's just some old dog."

"Well then no harm no foul, right? Can I see the gun?"

Buddy went upstairs. July was standing in the hallway and asked him what was going on.

"I don't know," Buddy said. "There's somethin in the barn."

"Somethin like what?"

"I don't know that either."

"Why're you carryin my shotgun?"

"You ask too many goddamn questions, July."

He got the gun down from the top of the wardrobe without turning on the light and went downstairs with July trailing after him. Dean held out his hand and Buddy gave him the gun and Dean released the magazine and popped one of the rounds out into his hand where it gleamed silvery in the moonlight. He loaded it back into the magazine and slid that back into the gun.

"You got a flashlight or something?"

"Are you goin out in the barn?"

"Yeah. You guys stay here."

"The hell I am. It's my barn."

"I mean it," Dean said. "You stay here."

Dean had gotten halfway across the yard before Buddy swore under his breath and went after him. It was hot and very still. There was not a breath of air and Buddy could not hear any sound of insect or night creature. As if his ears had been packed with cotton. Dean was walking lightly on his bandaged feet. He hardly made a sound but he must have heard Buddy behind him because he turned around and motioned at Buddy to go back and then something was charging at him out of the barn.

Buddy had lived in Mississippi all his life and figured he knew everything in it that flew or swam or crept about but he'd never seen anything like this. It was like a dog but much bigger than a dog and blacker than hell's cellar with eyes as red and fiery as a coal stove and its mouth full of dripping teeth. Buddy would grasp these things later because what he saw in the moonlight was nothing but a black shape, hideously fast, and then Dean was on the ground and it was on top of him. It had been years since Buddy had been hunting but he sighted the shotgun and unloaded both barrels into the thing and nothing seemed to happen and then Buddy heard two more shots and a howl like nothing he'd ever heard on this earth.

Dean was up on one knee with his hand pressed to the wound in his back and when Buddy and July got to him he was saying, "Shit, shit," to himself as if the pain was a bigger shock than whatever he'd just killed. Buddy thought about all those stitched wounds that Dean had and he spared a glance at the thing while they were helping him up and saw it had long yellow claws curved like boar tusks.

"We need to burn that," Dean said.

"Sure, sure," Buddy said, because burning something like that sounded like the best idea anyone had ever had. By then they'd made it to the back porch steps and Buddy realized he could hear night sounds again as if a shadow had passed over the place and was gone.

* * *

Dean had bled through the bandage on his back and Buddy offered him two pain pills but he turned them down and sat at the kitchen table with his head pressed into his forearm while Buddy pulled sodden gauze out of the hole in his back and cleaned it out and packed it and rebandaged it. Dean felt like puking by the end of it and must have looked it because Buddy brought him a glass of water and put the orange pillbottle next to it.

Dean shook his head. "I have to go. Do you have any clothes I can wear?"

"Dean, you can't hardly walk. Where're you gonna go?"

"I can't explain."

"Well, I sure wish you would because this is all makin less and less sense to me."

"My momma used to tell stories about things like that," July said suddenly. "She'd say not to go near crossroads at night and stay away from bridges and the like because that was where you'd find em. Black shucks, that was what she called em. Never thought I'd see one with my own eyes. Was either that or a damn hellhound."

"It wasn't a hellhound," Dean said but held back from adding that one of those wouldn't have been taken out by a couple of silver bullets. He drank the water and saw Buddy and July glance at each other.

"There was some folks breedin pitbulls for dog-fightin here a few years ago and I'll bet that thing is just one of the ones that got away. Don't make it any less hair-raisin but hell..."

"Buddy," Dean said. "I have to go."

Buddy looked at him and opened his mouth to say something and then there was a sound of a vehicle pulling up in front of the house, something with a deep, heavy engine. The engine cut off but the sound of it seemed still to vibrate in the house. It was just past four in the morning.

"Who in the hell could that be?" Buddy said and Dean wondered if he knew that he was whispering.

The fluorescent circle in the ceiling flickered once, then again. Dean looked up at it. He could hear someone climbing the front porch steps. The light flickered and buzzed. The doorbell rang and the old-fashioned bell key rattled the house as if chains were being drawn around it.

Buddy stood up and Dean grabbed his arm.

"Do you have any salt?"

"Salt? There's salt right on the table there..."

"No no no, lots of it. Like road salt, bags of it?"

The doorbell shrieked again and Dean tightened his grip on Buddy's arm.

"Dean, what's the matter with you?"

"Doors and windows. You've got to salt the doors and windows or they're gonna get in."

"No one's gettin in this house without my say-so. You stay right here." He hefted July's shotgun and nodded at July. "You come with me. Two old men're better'n one."

Buddy and July left Dean in the kitchen. He got up and turned off the light. He got the gun off the kitchen table though if he was right about what was at the door silver bullets wouldn't do much more than the little birdshot shells in July's shotgun. He stepped out of the kitchen and into the hallway. The hallway opened off into the front room. Buddy switched on the porchlight and opened the door and Dean could see what was at the door and knew that Buddy and July could not. He spun around and pressed his back to the wall before it could see him and stood there with his heart hammering and sweat running down his neck and tracking along the silver chain he wore.

"Boyd Lennox?"

"Sir?"

"Corporal Harlan of the Mississippi Patriots Militia, Clarksdale Brigade. I need to search your house."

"It's awful late, sir."

"Will you put down your firearm and step aside, Mr. Lennox?"

"I know you don't need a warrant no more but maybe you could do the courtesy of tellin me what this is about?"

"There's an escaped prisoner in the area. He murdered five people in Rena Lara including two other members of the MPM."

"There ain't nobody here but the two of us," July said.

"I need to see that for myself."

"At four in the mornin?" Buddy asked.

"This is official militia business. You'll step aside now, Mr. Lennox."

"I ain't lettin some rented cop in my house."

"Let him in," Dean said. "Before he shoots you."

Buddy and July turned and stared at him. Harlan smiled, the face beneath his human skin running and changing and Dean pushed Buddy out of the way and threw a pitcher of water in Harlan's face, a pitcher of water with the St. Michael's medal in it and Harlan howled and bent double with his hands over his smoking face.

Dean grabbed the shotgun out of Buddy's hands and brought the stock down hard on the back of Harlan's head.

"What are you doin?" Buddy said. "He's militia!"

"No he isn't," Dean said. Harlan was getting up and Dean hit him with the shotgun again and the wooden stock shivered and split from the blow and Harlan snarled and Dean grabbed him by the back of the collar and dragged him into the house.

"Get his gun!" Dean said and thought it was July who reached down and pulled it from its holster and then Harlan lunged at Dean's legs and brought him down hard to the floor.

The pain that erupted in Dean's gunshot wound knocked all the air out of him but he turned on his hip and kicked Harlan in the face and then got up and ran and Harlan scrabbled after him as Dean had known he would. He made it into the kitchen with Harlan right on his heels and then Dean turned and Harlan stopped and looked down and looked up at Dean.

"Fuck," he said.

Dean leaned against the kitchen sink and caught his breath and smiled because he hadn't forgotten how to draw a Devil's Trap and there was a crude but effective one on Buddy's linoleum floor, done in black marker and Harlan was right in the middle of it. Behind him Buddy and July stood in the kitchen doorway and July was holding Harlan's big militia-issue firearm and staring at the markings on the floor and Buddy was staring at Dean. Dean's smile faded and he shook his head and looked away and then Harlan opened his mouth and howled enough to shake the house and the fluorescent halo in the ceiling flared white-hot and burst into glassine dust.

* * *

Buddy had seen some things in his day. He'd been to war. He'd seen young men get blown into bloody rags and try to get up and run. He'd watched his wife die slow, eaten up by cancer. He'd seen people executed right in the streets of his own country by militia. He'd never seen anything like this.

The soldier who'd called himself Harlan was stuck in the middle of a circle of symbols drawn in the marker Buddy'd had hanging from a string on the refrigerator door. His face was burnt though it didn't seem that Dean had thrown anything stronger than water at him. Some of it had splashed on Buddy and that's all it had been, water. Dean drew up a chair and sat down facing Harlan and Buddy could see fresh blood slicking the back of his shirt.

"Don't go near him," Dean said. "Don't get anywhere inside that circle."

Buddy lit a match. His hands were shaking. There was an oil lamp on top of the refrigerator and he lit that and put it on the kitchen table. Harlan looked at him and for a second Buddy thought the man's eyes had gone black as a rat's but that must have been a trick of the light.

"You look like shit," Harlan said to Dean.

"Looked in the mirror lately?"

"You can see me?"

"Yeah, I can see you. The real you."

"You're fresh out. Veil's still thin, isn't it?"

Dean stared at him and said nothing. His gun was on the kitchen table and he picked it up and shot Harlan through the right knee. Buddy jumped. He saw July against the refrigerator put his hand over his heart. Harlan fell down. Dean stood up.

"That won't kill you but it's silver and it's gotta hurt like hell."

"You would know."

"How did you find me?"

"We can smell you."

"How did I get out?"

"Satan shat you out of his asshole."

"Where's my brother?"

"He's dead," Harlan said and Dean froze.

"You're lying."

"Why would I lie? Nothing's ever worse than the truth. Didn't you learn that's what hell is?"

"Where is my brother?"

"He's in heaven, fucking your mother while your father fucks him."

"Dean?" Buddy said quietly.

"Oh, you're on first-name basis with this thing?" Harlan said and Buddy looked at him. "That road to hell really is paved with good intentions, isn't it? You have any idea what you were playing good Samaritan to?"

Buddy looked at Dean. Even in the dim light Buddy could see how white he'd gone. There was sweat running into his eyes and he blinked it away.

"Why don't you tell him, Dean? Tell him where you've been the last four years."

"Dean, do you know him?"

"Oh, he knows me. Don't you sweetheart?" Harlan swung his head back to Buddy. "I fucked him for an eternity. I made him suck my dick until he choked. I fucked him on all fours and he'd beg me to stop, he'd fucking beg..."

Something black came whirling at Harlan and hit him in the back of the head and he bellowed and fell over on his knees.

"Hold your forked tongue, devil," July said.

Dean bent down and picked up what July had thrown and handed it to Buddy. It was the leather-bound King James Bible that his wife's sister had given him when she died.

Buddy stared at July. Wasn't that just like him to find the right word?

* * *

The Robicheaux kids who had lived down the road apiece had been Catholics and altar boys and they'd known that Church Latin backwards and forwards. Buddy hadn't heard it in more than sixty years but he knew what it was when Dean started saying it, just like July had said he'd done while he was feverish. It didn't make one word of sense to Buddy but it sure was having an effect on Harlan. He was spitting and hissing in the middle of the circle and his eyes had gone a flat, dead black.

Dean circled around Harlan saying things that Buddy didn't understand and by now he was limping so badly on his left side that he could hardly stay upright but he didn't seem to notice, just like he didn't seem to notice that Buddy and July were still in the room. He didn't even look up at Buddy when he stumbled and Buddy caught him.

"Where's my brother?"

"Dead."

Dean went back to that Church talk and Harlan started screaming. Dean stopped.

"Is he with her? Does she have him?"

"Lean in real close and I'll tell you."

Dean leaned towards the circle and Harlan grinned up at him. Buddy saw a silver ribbon of drool unspool from his mouth to the floor.

"He's dead. She tore his fucking head off. I saw her do it." He licked his lips.

Dean stood upright and closed his eyes and took a deep breath.

"They're all dead, Dean, everyone you knew is dead. There's no place for you here."

Dean opened his eyes and looked at Harlan.

"We're coming for you."

Dean shook his head. "Not you."

He threw more Latin at Harlan and the eyes of the man who was no man rolled up in his head and his head snapped around and Buddy heard his neck give. And then something black came up and out of his mouth and shot up to the ceiling and it was gone though it left a stink behind like shit and sulfur and the house fell very, very quiet.

Dean sat down and put his head in his hands. Buddy stood by the wall holding the bible. July was across the room with his hand over his mouth. The man on the floor was dead. It was six-thirty in the morning and the windows were lightening.

Finally Dean said, "How far will that truck get you?"

Buddy didn't understand the question. "What?"

"How far will that truck get you? How far from here?"

"Well I...I don't know. Where am I goin?"

"Both of you, you're leaving. Go somewhere, anywhere, just put a lot of miles between yourself and this place." He sat up and looked at Buddy. "A woman is dead because of me and you will be too if you don't leave."

"Did he kill her?"

"I don't know but he isn't the last one."

"Last one of what? I don't even know what in the hell just happened here except I got a dead militia on my kitchen floor."

Dean looked at July. "What do you think happened?"

July hitched in a breath and held it and looked at Buddy and looked back at Dean.

"I think an imp of Satan crawled up outta hell and found its way here, that's what I think."

"Well..." Buddy said. "If that don't..." He looked at Dean. "What does that make you?"

"Really bad luck. You have more shells for that shotgun?"

"At my house," July said.

"Good. Get them. And keep that piece you took off him."

Dean got off the chair and got down on the floor next to Harlan and started taking off his clothes.

"You're bleeding again," Buddy said.

Dean paused and put his hand on his back and looked at the blood on his fingers.

"Shit."

"Let me take care of it."

"I'll take the stuff with me and do it myself."

"Where are you going?"

"I don't know. But wherever I go, you go in the opposite direction, understand?" He had taken off Harlan's black t-shirt and was looking at his dog tags. "What's this militia? Some bunch of survivalist nutjobs?"

"No. They're the law. Martial law. Here in Mississippi and in most states."

"Since when?"

"Year or so."

Dean shook his head put the dog tag chain around his neck. He stripped off his bloody shirt and put on Harlan's shirt. He stood up and shucked off the pajama bottoms and put on the soldier's camouflage trousers and looked at the hole in the knee where the bullet had passed through.

"We're not gonna get very far, none of us," Buddy said. "The gas alone..."

"Don't worry about that," July said. "I got plenty of money back at the house."

"I don't think your penny jar'll do the trick," Buddy said.

"I got a couple hunnerd thousand. In a hole in the wall. Shoot, I never had no vacation in my entire life. Maybe it's time for one."

Dean paused in pulling on Harlan's boots. He looked at Buddy. "This guy's full of surprises."

"Sure is," said Buddy in amazement. "He's a regular jack-in-the-box."

* * *

July took the Chevy to his house and Buddy helped Dean wrap Harlan's body in a sheet and take it out to the black Hummer H3. They put it in the back and closed the door and Dean stopped and put his arm on the H3's roof and laid his forehead against it.

"You're not doin too good," Buddy said.

"I'll be okay," he said. He raised his head and wiped his face and looked at Buddy. "I'm sorry about this."

"I don't get the feelin this was your fault, bad luck or no. Times are hard. Bad things're happenin. It comes to everyone sooner or later."

"I wish I could help you."

"Seems like you need to look out for yourself right now, whatever you done. Are you gonna try and find your brother?"

"Yeah."

"Well, I sure hope you do."

"I hope so too."

Dean smiled. It was the first real smile Buddy had seen on him and it made him look very young but very tired. There were a couple dozen questions Buddy wanted to ask him but couldn't bring himself to do it. This boy has a hell of a long row to hoe, Buddy thought. I wouldn't want to be in his shoes.

* * *

July came back and they packed a few things in the truck and July made Dean take some money.

"The Lord helps those that helps themselves, so you just...you help yourself," July said. "I got somethin else for you too."

He held out his hand and dropped the silver chain and St. Michael's medal into Dean's palm. Dean looked at it.

"I don't even know where this came from," he said.

"You know who that is I take it?"

"St. Michael," Dean said. "The archangel."

"Who trod Satan under his foot," July said and Dean looked up at him. "Maybe you don't know where it came from but you sure deserve to wear it. You take care now, son."

"I'll try." He looked from July to Buddy and then at the Chevy. "Just keep driving. Get as far as you can. Wherever you stay, do that thing with the salt that I told you about."

"Do you know where you're goin?" Buddy asked.

"I'm still working on it. West, I think."

"Well good luck to you, wherever you go."

"God bless you," July added.

Dean smiled and fastened the medal around his neck. He climbed in the H3 and looked at both of them.

"Thank you," he said and keyed the ignition and pulled out.

They'd been driving for about half an hour when Buddy glanced over at July.

"I know what you're thinkin," he said.

"What would that be?"

"You're thinkin next time I wanna go and fish someone up outta the river I can do it myself."

"I wasn't thinkin no such thing."

"Well what then?"

"For some have entertained angels unawares," July said. "That's what I was thinkin."

Buddy thought he had something to say but he didn't. He reached out and patted his old friend on the arm and turned back to the road.

Chapter Text

Dean had been to the Mississippi Delta in his previous life and though he had no exact idea of where he was now he knew that if he kept the river to his left he'd be going north. On the other side of the river was Arkansas and from there he could head up into the Ozarks and through the middle of the country to South Dakota and Bobby's. He had nowhere else to go.

At Roundlake he pulled off into a campsite and parked beneath the green darkness of the low-hanging trees. There was a GPS navigator on the dashboard but not a type he'd ever seen and when he emptied the glovebox he found a nine-millimeter Walther with a spare clip and a rolled up canvas duffel bag with something that looked like a canister of tear gas in it but no maps. He also found a box of double ought buckshot shells and Roy Harlan's Patriots Militia I.D. card with the Confederate flag on the front and something about Ehrlich Defense Contractors on the back and he pitched all of this back in the glovebox and slammed the door and sat up stiffly. The bandage on his back was wet and heavy and his shirt was wet and the air conditioning was chilling him so he turned off the engine and put down the window and sat there listening to the high-summer sound of the woods while the sultry air washed over him.

He tried to remember phone numbers but nothing was coming to him. Bobby had always kept a landline and Dean somehow remembered the area code or thought he did. He closed his eyes and recited the three numbers to himself trying to trigger the other seven and Harlan's words about everyone he knew being dead came back to him but he pushed them away. Four years was a long time but someone had gotten him out of hell so it wasn't true. It just wasn't true. Couldn't be true.

It was warm and close in the H3 and the drone of the flies that had found Harlan's sheet-wrapped body was numbing and Christ he was tired. If Sam had been here he would have been pissing and moaning about how Dean should be in bed before he bled to death or he would have been checking that bandage every fifteen minutes throwing around words like sepsis or God knows what. Sam should have been somebody's mom.

"What the fuck, Sam?" he said and didn't realize he was dozing. "Where are you?"

Come on, Sam said but Dean didn't know where he was only that his voice was very close, as if in his own head. Stay with me, Dean.

I'm with you, Dean thought but he couldn't say the words. I'm with you, Sam, please don't leave me please please...

A crackling burst of radio static jolted him awake so hard he had to grab the steering wheel to steady himself.

"Harlan? Harlan, pick up the fuckin radio. Your vehicle was on the road five fuckin minutes ago so pick up the goddamn radio."

He felt disoriented and sick and it took him a minute to find the radio and by then the voice on the other side was yelling Harlan's name.

"Yeah?"

"Harlan, why isn't your phone on and what the fuck are you doin in Roundlake?"

"I stopped to take a piss."

"Well zip up and get your ass back to Clarksdale. You're in deep shit."

Dean thought for a second. "Rena Lara?"

"You'd better fuckin believe Rena Lara. You know DiRita and Eula are dead?"

"Ah, yeah....they were fine when I left them."

"Well they ain't fine now. Where the fuck were you when your team members were gettin shot in the head? This ain't company policy, Harlan."

Dean tapped the steering wheel.

"What about the fugitive?"

"Fugitive? What fuckin fugitive?"

Dean smiled. There were demons on his ass but at least the whole goddamn army wasn't piling on. Not yet.

"You sit right there, Harlan. We got your position, we're gonna come and pick you up."

"No no no, I'm coming in."

"We got a team in Hushpuckena, gonna send em right over."

"Shit," Dean breathed. "Don't send anyone, I'm coming in."

"Be there in ten minutes. Over and out."

Dean got out of the H3 and opened the back door and dragged Harlan's body out. It was going stiff and was heavy as cordwood. They'd find it when they searched the site but it didn't have to be there waiting for them in the backseat and the search would slow them down. He got back to the H3 and took the Walther and the clip and the shells and looked at the tear gas canister and took that too. He stuffed everything in the bag along with the first aid supplies Buddy had given him and slung it over his shoulder. There was a long-range rifle with a big scope on it and a Remington pump-action shotgun on the rack and he looked both of them over and took only the shotgun.

He listened to hear if any vehicle was approaching but none was so he crossed the road and made for the river and Arkansas on the other side.

* * *

By the time he crossed over to Arkansas it was a tossup between whether his back hurt worse or his feet. He was wearing Harlan's boots and inside them his bandaged feet were bleeding. At the first place he came to there was nothing but one gas station and it was closed and the convenience store next to it was closed too and the doorglass was smashed in.

He pushed the door open, his boots crunching on broken glass. He stood in the hot quiet and looked around. There were still a few goods on the dark shelves though the beer coolers were all empty and the cash register had been torn off its moorings, its drawer left stuck out over the counter like a black tongue. He found one bottle of orange soda and took that but there wasn't anything else worth carrying.

There were restrooms behind the convenience store, explosively hot inside and they stank like decades of piss had baked into the concrete floor. He tried the lights but they didn't work and he stood there with his leg propping open the door and tried the sink but that didn't work either. He went back out into the blazing daylight. There was a pay phone between the men's and women's restrooms and he stopped and looked at it.

He picked up the receiver and the dial tone sounded so steady and normal that for a moment he could only stand there with the hot black plastic pressed to his ear. He dialed zero and waited. The phone rang once, twice, ten times and he was ready to hang up when the automated voice came on and asked him for city and listing.

"Creighton, South Dakota. Listing for Singer Salvage."

He listened to a whisper of static on the line and waited for the number and for the sound of Bobby's voice. Or Sam's voice. He hardly knew what he would say. What the fuck? seemed like a good opener.

The phone clicked and went silent and then the dial tone came back.

"What...?" He held down the lever and released it and when he had a dial tone he punched zero again and waited through another long series of rings and then repeated his information with the same result. On the third try he pressed zero and then zero again when the automated voice came on and he waited for a human operator but none came. He tried this again too and kept coming back to the canned operator.

He put the receiver in the cradle and stepped away from the phone. Phones don't work, he thought. It happens. It doesn't mean anything. Though in all his long experience he'd found that it was usually the very thing that seemed to mean nothing that meant everything.

There was a soft, gravelly step behind him and he spun around and pulled out the handgun. A woman and a little girl were in his line of fire. They both froze. The woman put one hand in the air and the other on the little girl's head.

"We didn't rob that place, sir, it's been like that," she said.

Dean put the gun down and held up a hand. "It's all right, I'm sorry. Is there something wrong with the phones out here?"

"Nossir." The little girl was hugging the woman's leg and staring at Dean over her shoulder. The woman still had her hand in the air as if she were surrendering and her eyes went from the gun in Dean's hand to the shotgun over his shoulder. He put the gun in the back of his waistband.

"Where is this?"

"Deerfield, sir."

"Why are you calling me sir?"

"Respect for the militia, sir."

"Oh," Dean said. He looked down at himself. He'd forgotten what he was wearing. "Okay well that's...duly noted. You can put your hand down."

"Thank you, sir. Can we be goin now, sir?"

"Yeah...wait, wait."

"Yessir?"

"Is there another gas station around here, one that's open? Someplace with running water?"

"There's one in Elaine. About ten miles."

"We've got water..." the little girl said and her mother shushed her sharply and stared at Dean and he could see how frightened she was. He shook his head.

"It's okay," he said. "It's okay. I'm not going to your house." He smiled at the little girl and then looked up at her mother. "Okay?"

She nodded. "Yessir."

"Elaine's this way?"

"Yessir."

"Ten miles?"

"Take you about fifteen minutes. Just stay on this road."

Dean ran a hand through his hair and looked at the dusty blacktop. "Yeah, fifteen minutes."

The woman was standing there looking at him.

"Where's your truck?" she asked.

"Broke down."

She ran her eyes over him. "What happened to your leg?"

He looked down and saw the bloodied hole where he'd shot Harlan. "Skinned my knee?"

After a moment she said, "You're not militia, are you?"

Dean took a breath and studied the woman. "No."

"Are you hurt?"

"Yeah."

"Can you walk to Elaine?"

"Probably," he said. "It might take me a half a day if I don't get a ride."

"There ain't no rides, not on this road. You got any money?"

"Why?"

"You wanna buy a car?"

"What?"

"I got two cars and don't drive neither one. You take the one off my hands and I can give you enough gas to get to Elaine, too."

"How much?"

"Seven-fifty."

"Do I look like I have that kind of money?"

"You look like you're in a tight spot," she said.

"The car runs?"

"It runs. Old, but it runs."

"How old?"

"Eighty-nine. Mercury Grand Marquis. Gas-guzzler, nobody wants it."

"I'll give you five hundred," he said.

She nodded and narrowed her eyes at him. "I'll bring it around."

"Works for me."

"All right," she said. "You sit tight."

"I'm not going anywhere."

She took off down the road pulling the little girl behind her. The girl stared back at Dean and he waved at her. When they were out of sight he went into the shade of the building and sat down and drank the orange soda. It was fizzy and blood-warm. He pulled up his shirt and picked the top of the gauze bandage from his skin and looked at the wound. Blood and yellow serum were leaking out of it but he didn't want to change the dressing until he could get to some water and clean himself up. He pressed the surgical tape back in place.

After about fifteen minutes it occurred to Dean that the woman might come back with cops or militia or whatever the hell was passing for the law these days. If they were people he wasn't too worried but if they were demons he was in bad shape. Silver bullets would slow them down and double ought buckshot might stop one in his tracks if he could get a point-blank shot but he'd never be able to make a run for it. If she didn't come back at all he was still screwed. There was no way he was going to be able to walk ten more miles, not in this heat. It wasn't going to take Harlan's buddies, human or not, too long to start checking out the other side of the river.

He heard a car coming and took out the handgun and stayed in the shelter of the building where he couldn't be seen from the road. A blue sedan came into view with the woman behind the wheel without the little girl. The car was ochre with dust and the windshield was almost opaque with it but for a smeary clean crescent on the driver's side and the tires looked underinflated.

"Title's in the glovebox. Registration's expired but I put a sticker over the old one so it looks new. Just don't get pulled over for nothin."

"That's the plan," he said and handed her the money.

"My husband was one of the strikers at the GM plant in Dumas," she said and he didn't know why she was telling him this. She pressed her lips together and fixed him with a look. "The Arkansas Militia shot him when they busted up the strike. Opened fire on all of them."

"I'm sorry."

"Guess you're not from around here."

"No, I'm from out of town." WAY out of town.

"Well, you'd best be gettin outta town again. I put some of my husband's clothes in the car for you. Any one a them catches you dressed like that you'll have some explainin to do."

"Okay, thanks."

"They find you with that car I'll say someone stole'd it outta my front yard, never saw the guy. You see what'm sayin?"

"Yeah," Dean said. "Yeah, I do."

"All right then. You take it easy."

Dean nodded and the woman turned away. He called her back and held his hand out to her.

"What's this?"

"It's the other two-fifty," he said. "Take it."

She looked at the bills and took them and fanned through them. She put them in her pocket and gave Dean a brittle smile.

"You fuck em if you can," she said. "Fuck all of em."

* * *

He changed clothes before leaving Deerfield and threw Harlan's uniform and dog tags into the trees behind the gas station. In Elaine he blew more than two hundred bucks on gas and thought the pump had gotten it wrong until he checked the plastic numbers posted over the pumps. Twelve bucks a gallon for God's sake. He put air in the tires and bought a road atlas from the dusty selection on the rack. It was two years old and the clerk said he didn't have anything more recent. The bathroom was filthy and there was only a trickle of cold water in the sink so Dean slapped fresh gauze over the wound without changing the dressing and hit the road. It was good to be moving again and the Grand Marquis was better than the disorienting hulk of the H3, though its glassy eighties engine had none of the Impala's throaty power.

"That car'd better be looking good, Sammy," he said and then realized he didn't know where Sam or the Impala was and he couldn't make book on ever seeing either one of them again.

"Bullshit," he said. He shook his head. "That's bullshit."

* * *

He took a switching series of state routes towards Pine Bluff where he'd be able to swing north on Route 365, straight up past Little Rock and through the Ozark range into Missouri. There were few cars on these back roads and the traffic didn't get much thicker once he passed Pine Bluff. Not far from Little Rock the cars in the northbound lane slowed to ten miles an hour and he was suddenly bumper-to-bumper. Ahead of him a black SUV was parked across the southbound lane and a man stood atop it with his legs straddled and a rifle cocked on his hip and Dean had already seen enough to recognize the armed man as militia. Beyond the rifleman a team of men in orange jumpsuits was asphalting the road. They were chained to each other at the leg and each one wore a black plastic collar around his neck. They were guarded by militia, not state troopers or DOC officers, and some were standing in the road, some were atop vehicles, all of them were armed with long-range sniper rifles. There were demons among them.

Dean could see two of them and with the traffic behind and ahead of him there was nowhere for him to go. There was a guardrail on the right side of the road and he wouldn't be able to get up enough speed to go through it and even if he could they'd be able to shoot him right through the back window without breaking a sweat.

One of the demons was flanking the prisoners with his back to the east and would have been close enough to touch if Dean had put out his arm. He had his thumb hooked into his gunbelt and beneath his human skin his hand was charred and claw-tipped and Dean went cold and almost faint. The veil was thin, God it was so thin.

We can smell you, Harlan had said and Dean knew that demons liked big talk but that had made horrible sense. If he could see them then they could probably pick him out but this one hadn't even turned around yet. Dean had his right hand on the gun at the small of his back and his pulse hammered so hard there were starry bursts in the corners of his eyes.

The demon never turned around and gave no sign that he knew Dean was there. He kept his eyes on the prisoners and shuffled a toothpick slowly from one corner of his mouth to the other. Past the chain gang the traffic sped up and spread out and Dean drove about half a mile and then pulled over fast onto the shoulder and kicked open the door and leaned out and threw up. He braced himself on the doorframe and closed his watering eyes and breathed hard through his nose and behind his eyelids he saw the demon by the side of the road and along with it something dreamed or remembered or imagined but wholly unfaceable and nothing that he ever, ever wanted to know. He fought it for another several seconds and then doubled over and puked and spat until he had nothing left to bring up and even then it was a few minutes before he could close the door and get back on the road.

* * *

Highway 65 had grown to four lanes since Dean had been here last but the roadbed was cracked and potholed with high weeds growing up along the sides. He turned on the radio and switched over to the AM dial to see if he'd hear anything about a fugitive from Mississippi on the run in Arkansas and he heard plenty of other news but not that. A blackout in New York City had given the Empire State Militia cause to relieve the city's Chief of Police of his duties and he was being held on charges of obstruction of justice. Wildfires were raging out west while the middle of the country continued to suffer from a record-breaking drought. Galveston was being declared a total loss following three consecutive hurricanes and the refugee camps stretched as far as the Mexican border. And Shiloh Jolie-Pitt had attended her first day of school in Prague.

"Bring on the fucking locusts," Dean muttered and turned off the radio.

* * *

He breathed easier when he crossed the state line into Missouri and saw Branson billboards coming up. If Elvis tributes and Dolly Parton's Dixie Stampede were still reeling them in things couldn't be too bad but when Dean got closer he saw that most of the billboards were from last summer. Like that had been the last time anyone had cared. There were black SUVs traveling the roads here too.

* * *

In Ozark he found a Catholic church and filled two gallon water jugs at the font while a blue-haired woman with a rosary wound around her knuckles watched him. He went to Walmart and bought a hacksaw and file but they said they wouldn't have rocksalt in until maybe October so he bought two boxes of table salt. They didn't have any salt shells in the hunting department and he drove around town until he found a gun shop.

"What do you want with them for?" the clerk asked. "Won't kill nothin."

"There's a bear been hanging around the house. The kids don't want me to kill it, just scare it off."

The clerk brought a box of the big shells out from under the counter. "That oughta do the trick. Might just put a hair across his ass, though."

"Guess we'll see about that."

* * *

It was after seven in the evening and he had about seven hundred miles to go to South Dakota and he thought if he ate something he'd be able to make it there in one long hitch. That would put him at Bobby's near dawn but Dean could remember many times his father had left him and Sam on Bobby's porch like orphans at some crazy hour and barely taken time to ring the bell before heading back out into the night and not coming back for days.

He was sitting at a table in a diner near Kansas City waiting for his order when the bell jangled over the door and a man stepped in and Dean looked at him and pulled his gun out and balanced it on his knee beneath the table. The demon didn't pay attention to him any more than the one guarding the chain gang had done and he sat down at a table opposite and nodded genially in Dean's direction like any old boy stopped off for a cup of joe.

The waitress brought the demon coffee and he sat there pouring a thick white stream of sugar into his cup and clanking the spoon around the rim.

"Gettin breezy out," he said to Dean. "Maybe we're gonna get some rain finally."

Dean smiled stiffly at him. "Maybe."

"Tell you, never seen nothin like this weather. Regular damn dustbowl."

Dean didn't say anything and the demon drank his coffee and read the placemat.

The waitress brought Dean bacon and eggs and grits on a thick china plate and put a bottle of ketchup on the table but Dean couldn't eat. His mouth had gone dry as dust. He drank the coffee and it burned his empty stomach. He scouted the room and noted all of the exits and scanned the parking lot through the big windows and saw only two vehicles, the Grand Marquis and a long-haul truck sitting in the fading daylight with its running lights on.

He watched the demon banter with the waitress about how they were all going to be Okies if this kept up. There was something else going on that only Dean could see, the man's eyes were on the waitress but the demon's eyes were on something else and Dean followed that look and saw a boy of about fourteen wiping down the counter.

The man chatted with the waitress and the busboy came around the counter with a plastic dishpan and started clearing off a table and the demon's eyes followed him and while the man smiled in a neighborly way at the waitress the demon was grinning at the busboy with such ferocity it seemed his head might split in two.

The waitress went back around the counter and Dean heard her tell the busboy he could get on home because it wasn't busy tonight. And the busboy took off his apron and the man paid his check with a smile. And the busboy said goodnight to the waitress and she said to be careful on that bike of his and he went out and the demon followed him.

Dean got up so fast that he banged his knees on the table and the dishes and silverware rattled and the waitress turned and looked at him. He threw a twenty dollar bill on the table and went out and down the steps outside the diner and looked across the parking lot and couldn't see anyone. He went to the car and got the holy water and a box of salt. He pulled himself up into the cab of the truck but it was empty and the sleeper bunk in back of the cab was empty and it stank like beer and pot and sulfur.

They couldn't have gone far if the truck was still here and Dean walked the perimeter of the parking lot looking for a bike and listening for any sound at all. About twenty feet behind the back of the diner the paved lot ended in a sloping ditch and beyond that was a field of high, dense weeds that whispered in the wind. It was dusk now and the sky that deep indigo of late summer and in the bottom of the ditch Dean could see the glimmer of metal wheelspokes with one wheel still spinning and glinting in the last of the light.

"Shit," Dean said. He plowed down the ditch and fell and slid most of the way. He got up panting and listened and heard nothing but the wind in the weeds and then he heard the choked sound of someone trying to yell while being muzzled and he ran in that direction and he found the kid facedown in the weeds with the demon's hand clamped over his mouth and his jeans already off his hips.

"Hey!" Dean said and the demon turned around and Dean let him have it with the holy water and the salt and the demon clutched its face and fell backwards. Before it could get up Dean was on it and he straddled it and with salt in his palm he slammed his hand over the demon's eyes and slammed the demon's head into the ground and exorcised it.

"I know you, I know you!" it gurgled. "I know you now!"

"Yeah? Good for you."

"Winchester, Winchester, they're coming for you!"

"So I've heard," he said and finished the exorcism and the demon went out of the man and he was still.

Dean got off him and went to the kid and pulled his jeans back up and turned him over. He put a hand on the kid's face and patted him a little and after a minute he came to with a start and pushed himself away from Dean.

"It's okay," Dean said. "It's okay."

The kid wiped the back of his hand across his mouth.

"What was he, a fucking pervert?"

"Are you all right?"

"Yeah, yeah."

"You should go home. Okay?"

The kid nodded and turned and ran for his bike and was up and out of the ditch in seconds. Dean turned to the man and in the dim light he could see that he really was a man, the demon was gone from him and he was awake and blinking at the sky.

"Dude," Dean said. "You wanna get in that truck and get outta here."

"What? What am I doing here?"

Dean held out an arm and helped the trucker up. He picked up the trucker's cap and handed it to him. "Trust me. Just clear out."

He left the trucker in the field staring around himself in a daze. There wasn't anything else he could do and he needed to clear out himself before that kid came back with his parents and the militia or counties or Dateline NBC if that still existed. His back was throbbing and he had to get up the side of the ditch on his hands and knees. It was dark now and when he pulled back onto the road his vision was blurred with pain and the headlights were a wavering white smear on the blacktop.

* * *

There were militia checkpoints ringing Kansas City and he skirted them and headed northwest. The reflector sign for Interstate 70 pointed to LAWRENCE - TOPEKA - ALL POINTS WEST. The name still had the sorcerous power to call up memories so awful but also so good, of the last time anything had ever made unquestionable sense and he stared at the sign until he'd passed it on his way not west, but north. There was nothing for him in Lawrence and if he was going to find anything left of his life it would be in South Dakota.

* * *

He reached Nebraska City and knew that he could go no further. The pain in his back was so bad that he couldn't sit upright and he was too tired to see straight. He checked into a Super 8 and had to brace himself on the counter to fill out the registration. The desk clerk looked him up and down and asked if he was feeling all right.

"Fine," he said. "Just tired. Long drive."

"I hear that," the clerk said and Dean knew that the clerk had overcharged him and was staring at him as he limped out of the office.

He made it to the room and salted the door and the one window and then fell on the bed with his clothes on. Lying down didn't make the spine-rattling throb in his back any better but he was too exhausted to do anything except draw up his knees and try to ride it out.

Dean, you better change that dressing, Sam said in his head.

"You do it, Sammy," Dean muttered but Sam wasn't there to do anything.

He lay there for about twenty more minutes and then hauled himself up and got the bag and carried it into the bathroom. He switched on the light and he looked so awful in the mirror that he couldn't believe the desk clerk had let him have a room. He took out Buddy's medical supplies and he took off his shirt and peeled off the two layers of gauze and threw them in the wastebasket where they landed with a wet thud. He pulled out the wound packing in one shot thinking that would hurt less but it didn't and he sat down on the floor so that he'd have a shorter distance to fall in case he passed out. After a while he got up and leaned over the sink and flooded the wound with Betadine and stood there gripping the edge of the sink and rocking back and forth. Then he dried his back and bandaged the wound and taped it and splashed cold water on his face and the back of his neck. The sink was splattered with his watered-down blood and the brown ink of Betadine. He drank two glasses of water and turned off the light and went back to bed shivering with fatigue.

Buddy had given him pills but he was afraid of sleeping too deeply. After an hour of lying awake all twisted up he doubted that anything would make him sleep too deeply and he took one capsule and put the handgun under his pillow and turned off the light. The raw edge of the pain began to blur and his muscles relaxed as his breathing evened out and finally he fell asleep.

* * *

He was descending endless stairs into some black and bottomless cellar with nothing for light but a cone of paper burning from the inside. The stairs kept changing, metal to wood to stone to something that felt like wet earth. The fire in his hand was guttering out and far above him steps had begun to pound on the floor, back and forth. The fire went out and it was completely dark. For a time he heard nothing and he turned in circles and groped around himself in the dark but he touched nothing as if he were in some infinite empty space. There was a low wind blowing from somewhere neither warm nor cool but almost thick, it stank and he could feel it wrapping around his legs like fog. "Sam?" he whispered. "It's all right, it's just dark, see, there's nothing here. It's all right. It's all right." He was alone in this place for a long time and after a while there was a whispering in the darkness and a sense of things scrabbling by though nothing touched him. And then there was a sound like an iron door opening, like the sound of old iron elevator gates being pulled back and though he could see nothing he was taken by one arm and then the other by something big enough to all but lift his feet off the ground and marched out of there and then suddenly there was light at the end of a long tunnel and this was it then, this was hellfire and what had him on one side and the other were not demons but something that had been spawned down in these depths and had never seen the light of day, that not even the most twisted demon would have allowed to walk the earth. At the end of the tunnel was the fire and the sound of a large crowd screaming with laughter, screaming in pain, screaming with rage and he knew they were waiting for him. He tried to pull back but their claws were sunk in his flesh, this new flesh that couldn't die or be released and blood was running down his arms and they were waiting for him. They were waiting for him and the gates swung open and they fell silent and they turned to him. Oh God, Sam, oh Jesus oh God... There were so many of them. There were so many, so many so...

* * *

He woke up terrified with Sam's name still ringing in the room and he fumbled for the light in such a blind panic that if it hadn't been bolted to the nightstand he would have knocked it over. He closed his eyes and then opened them and stared at the room's furnishings, so bland and safe.

"Fucking pills," he said to no one. "Fucked with my head."

He sat up and looked at the clock. It was two-thirty in the morning and he'd been asleep for three hours. He looked back at the bed and saw a watery bloodstain on the white sheet. He got up and dressed and went to the motel office. The clerk was different than the one who had checked him in. He was reading a tabloid spread out on the counter and behind him in the office a blue bank of closed-circuit televisions flickered in the dark revealing shifting views of the motel. Lobby. Parking lot. Stairwell. Lobby. Dean motioned at the office.

"You have a computer in there?"

"Computer's not for guest use."

"Yeah okay, but maybe I could use it. I just need it for a few minutes."

"I guess you want to use my card, too."

"What card?"

"My social security card."

"No, I just want to look something up. It'll take me five minutes."

"On whose card?"

Dean shook his head. "What are you talking about?"

"Internet clearance?" the clerk said.

"What?"

"Where are you from, Canada? You need a valid social security card to get internet access in this state, mister. And I can't let you access that ISP back there with your card. I'd get fired pretty damn quick."

"You want to make some money?"

"Sure, I like making money."

The computer in the back office was old and had something attached to it that looked like a supermarket card scanner. The clerk took a white plastic card out of his wallet and ran the magnetic strip through and the Google homepage came up.

"I'm gonna stand right here and watch what you look up. I don't aim to get redflagged."

"Yeah, you go ahead and do that."

The most recent information on Sam Winchester dated to 2008, when he and his fugitive from justice brother were reported to have died during a botched rescue attempt at a police station in Colorado. There was a summary of their rap sheets along with their mug shots and Dean's own cocky and so different face looked out at him from a lifetime ago along with Sam's, looking pissed as only Sam could look. He stared at the photo for a long time.

Dean sat there for about half an hour absently forking ten-dollar bills over to the motel clerk. Nothing on Bobby or Robert Singer. Nothing on Ellen or Joanna Harvelle. Reports of tornadoes and dust storms in the area around Creighton, South Dakota but the whole region seemed to be having them. A black blizzard of dust had swallowed up half of western Nebraska in the span of one afternoon just a few months before and any surviving population had emptied out of the area. He looked up Rena Lara and found a brief account of the fire on August 29, just five days before, and that a woman named Catherine Parsons had died there. There were no other search matches for Catherine Parsons. He streamed past news reports of fires and floods and storms and militia restoring order and none of it was good.

"What is happening here?" he said to himself but the motel clerk answered.

"End times," he said. "End times if you ask me."

Dean cleared the computer and shut it down and gave the clerk another ten bucks for his time.

"You tryin to find some family out there?"

Dean shook his head and thanked him and went back to his room. He took the shotgun and got out the saw and the file and sawed off the barrel of the gun and the stock and filed them until the gun was short enough to fit in the duffel bag. By the end of this he was in a drenching sweat and he got undressed and unbandaged his back and his feet and took a shower and gave himself a few minutes to stand there while the water drummed on his neck and stung the wound in his back. When he was done he felt a little better and he got dressed and packed his few things and left.

* * *

As dawn broke over Buddy Lennox's vacated house a black sedan pulled up in the front yard. The driver got out and looked around and climbed the porch steps. He didn't knock or ring the bell because the door was standing open. The house already felt as if no one lived there or ever would again.

He walked through the front room, past the overturned and broken furniture and into the kitchen where all the drawers had been pulled out and even the contents of the refrigerator were lying on the floor. Only one space on the kitchen floor remained almost clear and that was the circle of symbols in the doorway. As if no one had dared to go near it.

He heard a thick, furious buzzing from the back of the house and glanced out through the kitchen window and saw the black dog's carcass lying flyblown in the early sun. He could smell it rotting. He stepped out onto the back porch where a battered Kenmore washer sat with its lid standing open. The laundry was pulled out and strewn across the porchrail and he looked it over and saw sheets and towels bearing shadowy stains in washed-out shades of brown.

He went back into the house and into the small bedroom off the kitchen. He stood in the doorway and looked at the pulled-out drawers and broken lamps and the stripped mattress lying half off the bedframe.

In the kitchen he sifted through the overturned garbage and found bloody strips of gauze and cotton swabs and an empty bottle of iodine. He left this and went back to the circle of symbols on the floor and stepped inside it. In a heap inside the circle lay a white shirt and pajama bottoms and he squatted down and picked them up and looked at them. The white shirt was bloody and a half-moon of blood was dried into the back waistband of the pajamas and he put his hand over his own back imagining where a wound would have to be to leave such a pattern. Then he set the clothes down and looked at the drawn symbols. He ran his hand over them thoughtfully and shook his head and mouthed a name and then said it out loud though there was no one to hear him but the flies.

Chapter Text

The feeling of something being bad wrong was growing on Dean as he headed west through Nebraska in the early hours of that morning. By the time dawn began to pale the sky it was so strong that he was riding the Grand Marquis at over ninety with no one in sight to stop him. The day broke with a dim brown light that revealed a barren landscape where no cars but his own were on the road and he had to turn on the wipers to keep the windshield clear of dust that sanded against it like dry rain.

He turned on the radio to a garble of sound and shifting static from one end of the dial to the other. He crossed the state line into South Dakota and a sudden sharp memory came to him of crossing this border as a kid and Dad making Sam and him set their watches back because they'd gained an hour just by crossing the state line. Dean had no watch and the clock in the dashboard was broken but he thought it must have been about nine o'clock in the morning. He blurred north past a string of small towns, all of their names coming back to him as if he'd been here yesterday, Olsonville and Antelope and White River and Murdo that sounded like murder, and then a bleak stretch of Interstate 90 and then Creighton. Then that shitty, rutted dirt road somewhere between Creighton and Elm Springs near the Cheyenne River that was the only way to get to Singer Salvage, the sort of place no one could find if they didn't know it was there.

The iron gate at the entrance of Bobby's property was still standing, the pitted lettering above it looking worse than ever. Dean gunned the car up the hill in a smoky haze of dust and he saw but didn't see that everything on the place was covered in brown dirt, that the cars and parts of cars and trucks and farm equipment that had forever surrounded Bobby's house were all but buried in dust. Dean came to a hard stop in the yard and he sat there and looked at the house. After a moment he reached down and switched off the ignition and the only sound was the wind and the dry dirt sifting over the car.

There was no dog in the yard, no sign of a dog, no car that looked as if anyone had driven it in recent memory. The back porch was covered in dust up to its top step without a single footprint in it. The door was closed and a drift of dirt sloped up against it like brown snow. It was already cool here and there was no sun and Bobby would have had a fire going in the house but there was no scent of smoke on the air and nothing coming out of the chimney.

Dean opened the door and got out of the car and the blowing dirt stung his face. The only sounds were the wind and his pulse in his ears. He took a step towards the house and then turned around and ducked back into the car and got the shotgun out of the bag. He chambered a round and turned back to the house.

He climbed the back porch steps and his boots made the only imprint in the dust. The door was not locked and he went inside. It was dark in the house and quiet but for the wind. Dust lay over everything. The kitchen was thick with it. Through the double doors into the front room. Bobby's things, Bobby's books, most of them gone, some of them still there. Covered in dust. On the ceiling the Devil's Trap still tattooed into the plaster. The fireplace empty except for a drift of brown dirt.

His boots gritted in the dust on the floor. He could hear a window rattling in its frame upstairs and he knew what room that was. He'd slept in that room many times, Sam and him. As far back as childhood. He'd slept in that room, or had tried to sleep, just two days before he had died. Lying there staring out the rattling window, listening to Sam and Bobby downstairs the way he'd once listened to Bobby and Dad talking while Sam slept. Sam coming upstairs on that last night and asking if he was asleep. He'd pretended to be because Sam would have heard it in his voice, how terrified he was. If he'd known what was coming he wouldn't have been terrified. He would have been out of his fucking mind.

He went up the stairs, not knowing why. Knowing he'd find no one. The banister was rough with dirt. Upstairs, empty rooms full of dust. Flat brown light at the windows. The last room he'd slept in before he died unchanged, the same cover on the bed. No electricity when he hit the switch. No water when he turned the taps. An abandoned house. He went back down the hall and came to the top of the stairs.

Something at the foot of the stairs was grinning up at him.

"Knew you'd come."

He had no holy water, he'd left it in the car. Stupid, so stupid. Should have known.

"Been waiting for you," it said and then it was running up the stairs and Dean barely had time to raise the shotgun and blast it, once with salt and it shrieked and then again at close range with buckshot, not enough to kill it but enough to knock it over the railing down to the first floor. He ran down the stairs chambering another round in the shotgun and by then it was up on its feet and it slammed him into the wall. It was right on top of him and he flipped over onto his back and got the shotgun under its chin and blew its head off. Black smoke shot up out of the gaping head and the body collapsed and Dean realized there were more of them and they were almost on him before he made it into the front room. The Devil's Trap stopped them at the threshold. Through the double doors he could see others in the kitchen between him and the back door. Five altogether.

He stood beneath the Devil's Trap and caught his breath. It had grown much darker as if the sickly day were giving up altogether and in the gloom he could see their teeth and the flat obsidian shine of their eyes.

"You can't stay in there forever."

"You'll starve to death."

"You'll die of thirst."

Why don't they shoot me? he thought wildly. Why don't they just fucking shoot me?

They didn't. They stood there, two of them in the hall and three of them in the kitchen and watched him like wolves. It grew even darker and the wind was louder now and the dirt striking the windows and the side of the house rattled like fine hail. The house shuddered.

"Come on, Dean. Time to get your ass back where it belongs."

"There's nowhere left to go."

"They’re all dead."

Dean turned and looked at the one who had spoken. It was in the kitchen with its hands wrapped around the doorjamb, claws dug into the wood.

"We killed all of them. The one who lived here. That woman in Nebraska. Your brother. Everyone. They're all gone. You're on your own, Dean."

"That's a fucking lie."

It cocked its head and smiled. "No one alive even remembers you existed."

"Someone got me out," Dean said.

"And paid the price for it."

"What?"

"You think getting someone out of hell is like picking them up at the airport? There's a price to be paid. In blood."

"Bullshit."

"Really, Dean. How many people have to die so that you can live?"

"They aren't dead."

"Then where are they? Where is Sam?"

He had no answer for that. It was so dark now that he could barely see anything. He could just make out the big bay window as a faint brown transparency like light struggling through mud. The wind shrieked and there was a sound of glass shattering upstairs, something tearing off the house.

"Where is your brother, Dean?"

"Not dead."

"Where is he?"

“He’s not dead!” Dean shouted into the howling darkness. “He’s not dead you son of a bitch!” He pumped the shotgun and aimed and shot towards the demon’s voice and heard it squeal like a beast and then he turned and shot out the bay window and threw himself through it head first and hit the ground rolling. Outside it had gone wholly black and the air was so filled with dirt it felt solid. He fell down choking and blind and he got up and staggered along the side of the house. He couldn't see a thing and he had no bearings and the demons would be out here too.

He hit up against the hood of the Grand Marquis and almost went sprawling and then one of them was on him. It bore him to the ground and clawed at him, at his back where he'd been shot and he gasped and got a mouthful of dust. He kicked out blindly and lunged for the door handle and pulled himself up and into the car and slammed the door. The demon punched through the side window and grabbed his arm and he reared back and shot it point blank in the face. Another was on the hood kicking in the windshield and he keyed the ignition and slammed the car into reverse. The sedan shot backwards and the demon on the hood went flying and he heard another one thump hard beneath the rear wheels and he sawed the car around and tore down the hill from memory not sight.

The wind was so strong he could hardly keep the car in a straight line and he didn't know if he was on the road. He couldn't see. He couldn't breathe. He drove near-blind and coughing for he didn't know how long until suddenly something big and solid loomed in front of him and he slammed the brakes but couldn't stop the car in time. He plowed straight through whatever it was with a jolting crash of glass and metal and wood and finally brought the car to a shuddering stop.

The car was in the middle of someone's living room and he opened the door and fell out and lay gasping on the dust-gritted carpet, his eyes streaming. It seemed almost quiet inside the house but he could still hear the wind and now another sound like the sucking howl of a jet engine. He'd been in tornadoes before and he could hear it coming, shattering glass and twisting metal and tearing up everything in its path. He could almost have laughed. Demons and dust storms and twisters, oh-fucking-my.

He hauled himself up on the stock of the shotgun and grabbed the bag out of the car. The windows of the house were blowing out, one by one. He felt his way into the kitchen and found the cellar door and stumbled down the stairs in the blackness. He crawled beneath the stairs and set his back to the wall. It was cool down there and smelled sweet and sawdusty. He felt the wall tremble and he put his head on his knees and his arms over his head and the storm roared over the house like hell on earth.

* * *

It was so quiet in the tornado's wake that Dean felt as if he'd gone deaf. He stood up and climbed the stairs. There was red light coming from underneath the door. He opened the door. The kitchen was still standing and the broken windows were lit by flat, coppery daylight.

The front of the house was gone. The Grand Marquis was gone with it. He stood in a bare space that had once been the living room and he could see the funnel moving off to the east. The air was full of dust and the sun was an alien red disk in a lightning-seared sky.

* * *

He had torn up the kitchen curtains from the house and tied a piece of them over his nose and mouth and that helped him breathe but his eyes were shot. They felt as if they were bleeding. Every time he wiped them he'd look at his fingers and expect to see red but he saw only tears and dirt.

He began to think he was going in circles. The sun didn't seem to have moved in hours and he cast no shadow in its dim red light. His feet on the road raised a waist-high cloud of dust around him. He was thirsty, God was he thirsty. All the water had been in the car and the car was probably somewhere in Minnesota by now. He didn't think he'd been this thirsty in hell.

I don't remember that.

"I don't remember anything about that," he rasped out loud. "Okay?" He had no idea who he was talking to.

He stumbled and fell. His wound lit up with pain and he lay in the dirt clenching his teeth.

Get up, asshole. Get up.

He made a halfhearted attempt but then just lay there.

What for? You know they're telling the truth.

"The fuck I do," he said.

Four years, long time. They're gone, all of them.

"Sam got me out. I know that."

Come on, stay with me, Dean.

I'm with you, Sam, please don't leave me...

"I remember that."

He got you out and now he's dead. He died for you, he's dead because of you, he's dead, he's dead...

"Shut the fuck up," he croaked and got up.

* * *

It was getting dark. Maybe it was sunset but he didn't think so. He hadn't been walking long enough. There was a road sign lying flat on the ground and he got on his knees and wiped the dust off and saw the red and blue marker of Interstate 90. He looked around and could just make out the strip of blacktop beneath a swirling veil of dirt. He got up and started walking parallel to the road. He thought he was going east. He looked over his shoulder. It was darker in the west. It might have been his eyes but there was something there like a brown wall that went from the horizon to the sky. As if the earth ended right there. It was eating up the light as it came.

Shit, he thought. Son of a...

He tripped over something and fell again. He raised himself up on his hands and coughed until he retched up a gritty drool and he tore the rag off his face and spat.

Tell you a story...guy dies, right? Goes to hell, he's in hell for four years. His brother gets him out, nobody knows how. So then what happens? Dumb sonofabitch dies in a fucking dust storm couple of weeks later. You believe that shit? Oh, and here's the good part...the brother? He's dead too. And the guy who went to hell? Did it to save the brother's life. You gotta love it, man. You can't make this shit up.

* * *

He knew if he kept walking east he'd come to a truck stop or gas station or someplace to hole up until the storm passed but he wasn't going to get there in time. It was even darker and the dust was thicker in the air and the dirt on the ground was jumping as if it had been electrified. The wind howled in his ears and drove dirt into them. It was impossible to walk. He crouched down and crossed his arms over his knees and pressed his swollen eyes into the crook of his arm.

Fuck, Sammy, fuck, I'm so sorry.

"Hey!"

He looked up and saw someone through a blur of tears.

"What the fuck are you doing, man?"

The figure before him was swathed up like a Bedouin. He was wearing goggles and a two-filter respirator that made his voice muffled and hollow.

"What are you doing out here?"

"Show me your face!" Dean hollered over the wind.

"What?"

He raised the shotgun. "Let me see your face!"

The man put his hands in the air. "Okay, dude, okay. No sudden movements, all right?" He pushed the goggles up on top of his head and pulled the respirator down to his neck. "Okay?"

Dean nodded and lowered the shotgun.

"You gonna shoot me?"

Dean shook his head.

"Dude, I don't wanna leave you out here. You put the sawed-off in the trunk you can come with me, otherwise..."

"Here," he said. "Take it."

"All right. Okay." The man took the shotgun and held out a hand to Dean. "We gotta hurry. Shit's almost right on top of us."

He had a small car whose backseat was packed with stuff from floor to roof and the man had to push things off the passenger seat so that Dean could sit. He rounded the car and got behind the wheel and floored the gas pedal.

"Wow," he said. "Wow. What the hell were you doing out there?"

Dean flapped a hand at him and shook his head. He couldn't talk.

"Here," the man said and nudged Dean's arm. Dean cracked open his eyes and saw that the man was handing him a bottle of Mountain Dew and Dean took it and drank three long swallows, sugar and caffeine and dirt sliding down his throat. He lapsed into a coughing fit that bent him double.

"Don't puke on the cat, man." There was a plastic pet carrier on the floor at Dean's feet. "Mr. Bojangles don’t dig puke in his fur, believe me."

Dean shook his head and sat up. "I'm good. Thanks, man." He took another drink and this one went down easier.

The driver glanced at him. "Damn, how long were you out there? You look like the fucking sandman."

"Too long."

"No shit. You see that twister?"

"Yeah."

"That was a big bitch. Just missed me."

"Me too."

"Where you headed?"

Dean put his head back on the seat and closed his eyes. "I don't know," he said. His eyes burned beneath his lids. "I don't know."

* * *

The driver's name was Gary and he was from Rapid City. He told Dean he was headed for Mexico.

"Everyone else's trying to get to Canada. Me, I don't like the cold. Gonna stake out a little beach, hook up with a senorita, tan my pale ass and wait it out. Fucking tornadoes, fucking dust storms, fucking crazy-ass fascist bullshit. Maybe I won't come back at all. What the fuck for? My shitass job? You know what I did? I worked in a fucking gift shop in Sturgis. Had to dress up all Wild West every day like some fucking cowpoke jackass. Shit." He shook his head in disgust and the respirator swayed beneath his chin. "Me and Mr. Bojangles, man. Gonna be Mexicans." He shouted down at the pet carrier. "How you like that, el gato?" He shook his head again. "Frigging cat. Hey, what the hell were you doing out there anyway?"

"Just got stuck," Dean said. "Caught out."

"Rock and a hard place, huh? I feel your pain. It's all fucked up now. Everything's all fucked up. You got someplace to go? Want me to drop you somewhere?"

Dean shook his head. They had crossed the Nebraska state line and were headed south down Route 83. "I used to know someone around here but I don't think she's here anymore."

"You got that right. Nobody's here anymore. Gone anywhere but here. Hey, maybe we can get something on the radio."

Gary started fiddling with the dial. A scratchy jumble of news and music and weather spilled out. Dean leaned against the passenger door and kept his eyes on the rearview mirror. There had been no one behind them for the entire stretch from South Dakota and now another vehicle was in the mirror, coming up fast. The shotgun was in the trunk but Dean still had his gun and the Walther. He had salt and teargas in the bag. Hell of an arsenal.

Gary was still messing with the radio. Dean stared at the mirror. I'm gonna get this kid killed. Jesus Christ.

"Gary?"

"Yeah?"

"How fast does this car go?"

"Loaded up like this? Not too damn fast."

"Okay, Gary? If I tell you to pull over and let me out, just do it, okay? Just do it and keep driving."

"What, here? There's nothing out here, man."

The other vehicle was right behind them now, a dust-covered Ram Charger. Dean couldn't see the driver's face.

"Gary..."

The truck swung out from behind and roared passed them in a brown cloud and Dean bent over so that he wouldn't be seen and the truck kept going.

"What're you doing, man?"

Dean looked over the dashboard and saw the truck receding into the distance."Checking on el gato," he said. The truck was swallowed by the dust and only its taillights could be seen burning like fire and then those were gone too.

Dean sat up stiffly and shifted in the seat and tried to find some position that didn't hurt. Gary tapped his fingers on the steering wheel and watched him out of the corner of his eye.

"You all right, dude?"

"Yeah," Dean said but he wasn't.

Where is your brother, Dean?

Yellow lines fell one after the other beneath the car's wheels. There was a heavy haze in the air and the light was weak and brown. Dean leaned against the passenger door and fell into a cloudy stupor of pain and exhaustion and when Gary asked him if he was asleep he was so close to it that he said "I don't know," but it wasn't Gary's question he was answering.

Where is your brother, Dean?

* * *

Dean said he didn't know. He was in hell, how could he know where Sam was? Dean knew or thought he'd known that this wasn't his father but he began to think that it was and he began to hope that it was because someone had to know he was here and if anyone could walk into hell it would be Dad. Who else but Dad?

His father hunkered down on the balls of his feet to where Dean was lying on the floor chained up and so bloody that if he moved even a little there was a sloppy wet sound like someone walking through mud. Dean rolled his eyes up to him and said, Dad, please. Help me. His father touched Dean's face and Dean turned his face into his father's hand and begged him again, Help me. His father took his hand away and wiped it on his leg and shook his head. This is a real mess, Dean, he said. Sam's dead.

No, Dean said. It's okay, Dad, he’s safe. Dad sighed and looked up as if he were asking for infinite patience and looked down and said, You let him die because you weren't looking out for him. Then you had to make a deal you couldn't figure your way out of and you weren't there when he needed you.

Dean raised his head and stared at his father and said, No, that can't be true and Dad said, How would you know? How the fuck would you know, Dean? You weren't there. When they tore my boy's head off you weren't there and where the fuck were you, Dean? Why the FUCK weren't you looking out for him?

Dad, please, Dean said, it isn't true, Dad, please. His father stood up and looked down at him and said, Well, you have the rest of eternity to think about it. He turned around and walked away and Dean lay on the floor with his broken arms wrenched and shackled behind his back, screaming for his father to come back, please come back, Dad please but he never did.

* * *

When he woke up the cat was wailing and the car was stopped.

"What the fuck, man? What's the matter with you?"

"What?" Dean gasped. "What?" He turned to Gary and saw him sitting under the waxy glow of the domelight with the cat carrier on his lap.

"I thought you were having a fucking seizure or something."

"I need some air." He pushed open the door and got out of the car on shaking legs. He left the door open and walked a few yards into the low grass and bent over and braced his hands on his knees and closed his eyes.

"Bad dream," he said. "That's all."

Dream my ass.

"Hey, you all right?" Gary called.

"Yeah," Dean said.

"You sick or something?"

He waved an arm at Gary without turning around.

"You want me to drive away like you said?"

"No, don't drive away. Okay, Gary?"

He heard Gary muttering okay and it was so quiet he could hear the car squeak and shift when Gary got back behind the wheel. Dean stood there with his hands on his knees and his eyes closed and made himself breathe deep and slowly.

He opened his eyes and looked out over the plain. The land was flat enough to see the curve of the earth. It was past dusk and the air was clear and early stars were starting to show. A light wind stirred the grass and it felt good against his face, he was sweating and his eyes were wet. Two deer stood like phantoms in the distance, one cropping the grass the other with its head erect watching him, its eyes reflecting back the last of the daylight. Dean straightened up and the other deer raised its head and looked at him. He gestured at them.

"Go," he said, and they seemed to think about it for a second and then turned and bounded off across the plain. Dean envied them. After a while he wiped his face and went back to the car.

* * *

They were coming up on Stapleton when Dean made Gary stop the car.

"What's wrong?"

"Nothing," Dean said. "You see that sign, right?"

"What, that? Yeah I see it. It's another holy roller, they're all over the place."

"No." Dean shook his head. "I know him." He stared at the sign, block letters faded and flaking beneath the sallow light of two smutty bulbs. "I knew him." He took money out of his pocket and folded back some bills and turned to Gary. "I'm getting out here. This is for the gas. Thanks for saving my ass back there."

Gary took the money without counting it. "You gonna get another ride here?"

"I don't know. I just need to see this guy."

"Well, hell, I can take a break. They usually got some pretty good grub cooking up at these things." He glanced at the sign. "It's almost eight o'clock, you're just in time for a meeting. I'll stick around."

"Okay," Dean said, not listening.

Gary drove past the sign over the packed dirt road. He parked next to a battered minivan that was loaded with household goods and had two mattresses strapped to its roof. Dean was out of the car before Gary even turned off the engine.

"I'll wait for you," Gary called after him.

"Okay," Dean said.

He joined the last stragglers making their way into tent. He thought it was the same tent, the exact same, just worse for wear like everything else. Like himself. The tent was almost full and there were no seats left in the front. Sam had made him sit in the front, had steered him to the front with an arm around him that he had kept shaking off. He could use that arm now. He'd give anything for it.

He made his way up to the stage where a man was checking the lectern and microphone.

"I need to see Reverend LeGrange."

The man didn't look down. "He don't sit with folks before a meeting. He'll take personal prayers afterwards if you can get to him."

"Look, I know him. He knows me. He...he healed me. Would've been a couple...six years ago."

"He healed a lot of people back then."

"I think he'll remember me. Tell him it's Dean, it's Dean Winchester."

The man stopped what he was doing and came around from behind the lectern and crouched down at the edge of the stage. "You can try and get some time with him after the meeting, but I don't want you to get your hopes up none. He don't remember too much about them days."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean after his wife died. He don't talk about them days. Lost his gift, lost his faith along with it for a long time."

Dean stared at the man and couldn't find anything to say.

"Why don't you go find a seat before they're all gone?"

Dean took a step back from the stage.

"Go on and sit down," the man said standing up. "Go on now."

Dean fell back through the crowd and at the back of the tent he sat down on the edge of a shaky folding chair. There was a shift and buzz of chatter around him and after a while a woman with a badly disfigured face came out and took a seat at the piano and lifted the lid off the keys and began to play. The crowd quieted down. Reverend LeGrange came out and stood behind the lectern and welcomed them and led them in a hymn that everyone but Dean knew. LeGrange looked much older than he had six years ago, he was a withered old man.

The reverend preached to outbursts of amens and hallelujahs and the woman next to Dean swayed in her seat with a Bible clutched to her chest. It grew hot and airless in the tent and Dean saw a double-exposed reel of the present and the rainy afternoon six years before when the man on the stage had chosen him to be healed. He saw Sam nudging him, telling him to get up there. A brief glimpse of the dying girl’s mother, stricken with dismay and anger because her daughter should have been going, not him. Reverend LeGrange motioning to him. Dean climbing the stairs, so fucking tired but nothing like now. The reverend's wife patting his back, encouraging. The reverend's hand on his head praying over him, unknowingly giving him someone else’s life. What goes around comes around, Dean thought and maybe it had all started then, maybe if he had died the way he'd been meant to six years ago nothing that came afterward would have happened. There's always a reckoning.

Dean hardly noticed that the service had ended. The crowd surged forward and he stayed in his seat and saw the people at the stage as they reached out to the reverend with their arms in the air and their hands splayed out in supplication. He was alone at the back of the tent and then he got up suddenly and headed for the stage and the crowd pushed him back like something adrift on the tide. He made it to the front at last and he called out to the reverend and knew he couldn't be heard over all the other people but he kept calling the reverend's name and finally the reverend turned his blind eyes to Dean and Dean grabbed his hand.

"Reverend LeGrange? Do you remember me? Dean, Dean Winchester."

The reverend paused and put a hand on Dean's face and Dean closed his eyes and kept his own hand over the old man's bony fingers.

"Six years ago," he said. "Six years ago, remember?"

Reverend LeGrange traced his hands over Dean's face.

"Please, Reverend."

The reverend shook his head. "No," he said. "No, no I don't remember you." He took his hands from Dean's face and drew away from him. "I don't know you."

The other people called out to the reverend and shouted their prayer intentions and the reverend stood up and stumbled and the piano player came and helped him off the stage. Dean let himself be pushed this way and that by the crowd until he found himself at the back of the tent again with no one around him and then he was outside. He took a few steps from the tent but he suddenly felt too tired to walk and he sat down on a trailer hitch and stared out at the landscape of parked vehicles and lunchwagons and strung lightbulbs, like a fairground where all the rides and the booths had somehow gotten lost on the way.

* * *

He sat there for some time and after a while he heard someone coming toward him and his hand went towards the gun at his back and then he saw it was only the disfigured piano player. She held the sort of heavy white mug that diners used and she came beside Dean and handed it down to him. One side of her mouth didn't move right and when she spoke her words were soft and slurry.

"I saw you in the crowd. You look like you need to eat something."

"I'm okay, thanks."

"Take it," she said. "It's just soup. Everything else here is fried to within an inch of its life. You don't want to be putting that on an empty stomach."

The night had grown cool and windy and when Dean took the mug its warmth was welcome against his hands. It smelled like tomato soup and he realized for the first time that he had barely eaten anything since that last evening at Buddy's house which already seemed like some distant long-ago. He drank some of the soup and it was very hot and felt so good against his dust-raked throat.

"Thanks," he said. The woman was across from Dean, sitting on a truck bumper. She kept the bad side of her face turned away from him so that it was lost in shadow.

"Don't mention it," she said.

They sat in silence until she said, "I'm sorry the reverend didn't remember you. You have to pardon him."

"It's all right."

"You seemed upset."

"It doesn't matter."

"Dean?" she said and he looked at her. "That's your name if I heard it right?" After a moment he nodded.

"Dean, I think maybe you should come with me."

"Where?"

"Not far. Just come."

She got up and turned her back and started walking away from the tent. He stood up but hung back and she turned around and smiled at him with the good side of her mouth.

"Don't worry," she said. "I know I look like hell but I'm pretty harmless."

"No, no," Dean stammered. "It's just...I have to get going. Someone's waiting for me."

"Just a few minutes," she said and added, "Please, Dean," and something in the way she said his name made him follow her across the cheerless midway out past the dirty lightbulbs on their bare wires until they came to what had once been a self-storage facility, a long low building of corrugated metal that had turned into a warren of people who sat inside or in front of the units on a shabby collection of lawn chairs and mattresses and blankets with dirty children and dogs running among them.

"Why are all these people here?"

"They're Dusters," she said. "Displaced people." She went to a unit that had a piece of sheeting strung up over the opening and she held the sheet back to let him in and he looked down and saw a thick white line laid across the threshold that couldn't have been there by accident. He looked at the woman and she smiled.

"Yes, it's salt."

She turned on the light and said that they were lucky to have electricity here and then she was on her knees pulling a plastic storage box from under a rollaway bed against the unit's corrugate wall. Dean had stepped over the saltline as carefully as he had ever stepped over any of them and he let the sheet fall behind him and he stood there and watched her, too full of questions to speak.

"Sit," she said. There was nowhere to sit but the rollaway bed and a few mattresses on the floor so he sat at the foot of the bed while she went through the box. There was a cross hanging from a nail over the bed with a Catholic scapular wound around it and there were crates of books and suitcases as though other people lived there with her but other than these things the space was bare as a monk's cell.

She finally pulled out some sheets of paper and handed them to him. They were printouts from newspaper websites in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and Monument, Colorado and on both of them his name and his brother's name had been circled in red ink.

"That's you, right? You're that Dean Winchester?"

Dean read the pages and chewed his lip and looked at her. "Do I know you?"

"No, you don't. My name is Alice Denham. My husband’s name was Joshua. He was a hunter. We knew your father."

"Dad? You knew Dad?"

She nodded. "Your brother too, sort of, he called my husband once. He said you were sick and Joshua told him to take you to Reverend LeGrange. That would have been six years ago like you said."

"He talked to Sam," Dean said quietly. "I remember. I remember Sam saying he'd heard of LeGrange from someone named Joshua but..." He gestured with the pages. "What’s all this?"

"He knew that something had happened between you and the reverend, with Sue-Ann dying the way she did and the reverend giving up his ministry all of a sudden. Joshua did a little digging around, that's what he was good at. Never much with a gun but he could find things out." She motioned at the crates of books. "These were all his."

"What did he find out?"

She was sitting on her heels on the floor with her hands folded in her lap and she smiled at him. "You know."

"He knew how LeGrange was healing people?"

"Yes."

"So he knew how I was healed."

"Yes. I don't know if he felt guilty for sending you to the reverend or what but he sort of kept tabs on you after that. You and Sam. You had a way of popping up on the radar, you know. Among hunters and out there in the real world."

Dean looked at the printouts and remembered both incidents vividly, the insanity at the bank in Milwaukee and that disaster in Monument. "Not so much with the low profile, huh?"

"When Joshua heard that you and Sam had died in Monument, he didn't believe it, he said it wasn't like you and Sam to just get blown up by accident at some police station."

"It wasn't much of an accident," Dean said.

"But you made it out."

"Yeah. Yeah we did. A lot of other people didn't, though."

"It was demons, wasn't it? In Monument?"

Dean nodded.

"Around then was when Joshua started thinking something was coming. Something big, but no one had a handle on what it was. He thought that you and Sam would and he talked about trying to get in touch with you and then we heard again that you were dead." She paused. "We heard a lot of versions of the story but everyone agreed on one thing. That you'd made a deal. And gone to hell."

Dean stared at Alice for a moment and then put his head down and looked at his hands. It was shocking to hear someone say it.

"Were you really in hell?"

Dean took a deep breath and held it and let it go. He couldn't answer her in words so he only nodded.

"Oh my God," she whispered. "How long?"

"Four years."

"All this time? All this time?"

"Yeah," he said and then, "Wait...wait wait...if you know about that then do you know what happened after? Do you know what happened to my brother, to Sam?" Alice didn't say anything. "Do you?"

"He was hell on demons, I know that. And anything else that got in his way. They said he was doing it for you. And then..."

"What? Then what?"

"He...things had been going bad for a long time. You see what it's like out there. It didn't happen overnight. But a year or so ago, last winter, things got worse, a lot worse, and not just the bad things that were happening everywhere to everyone. They started going after hunters."

"They? Demons?"

"There were so many of them. And they were so strong, I thought they'd gotten everyone. You're the first hunter I've seen since they killed Joshua. Since they did this to my face."

Dean had gone cold while she was talking. "My brother. Did they kill him?"

"Around the time when things started getting bad was when...when we stopped hearing anything about Sam. I don't know if he's dead, Dean. I don't know what happened to him."

The wind moved the sheet with a soft sighing sound and he could almost hear the grains of salt at the threshold stirring and shifting along with it and outside someone was calling, some kid calling to another that it was bedtime.

"No," Dean said. "No, no...he got me out. He came for me."

"Dean...are you sure? "

"No...it's all...I can't...don't want to remember it. Any of it. I dream about it and that's bad enough, but I can hear him..."

Stay with me, Dean.

"I can almost see him. But I can't think about that without bringing up everything else and I can't...I just can't..."

He squeezed his eyes shut and he heard Alice move and felt her hand on his knee and he turned away from her with his hand over his eyes and she said, "Dean."

He looked down at her ruined face, her one eye bright and fixed on him.

"It's got to mean something that you're back, nobody comes back from hell. When I saw you tonight I knew."

"Knew what?"

"That it wasn't over."

Dean shook his head and coughed out a desperate laugh. "I've got demons on my ass trying to drag me back to hell. I already got one person killed, maybe two more and I don't know where Sam is, I don't know where anyone is. I don't even know how to use a fucking computer anymore so I'm the last guy you wanna pin your hopes on."

She sat there looking at him. "Why don't you stay here? Stay here and rest and maybe you'll remember..."

He stood up and walked away from her. She got up and followed him.

"Everything they take from us makes them so much stronger. They want us not to be able to face what they do so they can keep doing it, keep using us. They want you to forget so that you can't find Sam. So that you'll just be running from it and that's how they'll get you. That's what they do. They feed on fear."

"I can't, okay? Not now, not yet."

"Okay," Alice said. "Okay, but please, stay here a while. Please don't go back out there."

It sounded good, better than good, to stay there with someone who had known Dad and Sam, who knew why doors needed to be salted, to stay there and maybe be safe for a little while, maybe figure out how to move around this new world as he had once done, recover from what he'd been so eager to forget some memory that would bring him to Sam, or Sam to him, or something, anything that would set this some way to right. A line from the exorcism ritual came to him, one he'd said in Latin many times but now he heard it in English, I am needy and poor, oh God help me. Help me remember if that was really Sam, help me remember what happened, help me, help me.

He turned to Alice. "There are kids here, families. Innocent people. I can't stay here. They're looking for me. You know what they can do."

Alice was quiet. She looked away and her only good eye stared into the distance, far beyond the metal walls of the unit. After a moment she looked back at him.

"What will you do?"

"I don't know. Keep moving, keep looking for Sam. Try to stay topside."

"How can you do that on your own?"

"I don't know," he said. He gave her a faint smile. "I'm making it up as I go along."

"If you need help, anything, please come back. I'll do whatever I can."

Dean nodded. "All right. Thank you. I thought everyone was gone. At least there are some of us left."

"One more, now."

"Yeah," Dean said. He turned to go and at the threshold he turned at looked over his shoulder. "Hell on demons, huh?"

"Oh yeah. You wouldn't believe it."

"Sure I would," Dean said and he was smiling. "He's my brother." He left Alice safe behind her saltline in the metal box and though there was no reason for it he felt something closer to hope than anything in his recent memory.

* * *

He found Gary sleeping in the car and he rapped on the window and Gary sat up and rubbed his eyes and unlocked the passenger door.

"So, you been saved or what?" Gary asked.

Dean sat down and closed the door. "Something like that."

Gary yawned and stretched and drummed his fingers on the wheel. "You ready to hit the road?"

"Yeah," Dean said. "Let's go."

Gary put the car in gear and pulled out and drove down the dirt track and turned onto the highway. In the rearview mirror Dean watched the revival ground grow smaller and dimmer until it was only a pale white glow amidst all that dark plain and then it was gone.

Chapter Text

There were people running the border into Mexico, abandoning their cars on the American side all along Texas, New Mexico, Arizona. Gary said that as long as Dean could bring the gas he could just drive away in one of them and because Dean needed wheels of his own he decided to go with Gary as far as the border, a half-day's drive. Dean was riding his second or maybe third wind and just over the Kansas state line he took over the wheel and Gary climbed into the passenger seat and took the cat out of its carrier and went to sleep with it on his lap.

Through the late night and early morning hours Dean covered the southward stretch of Route 83 down Kansas while a waning quartermoon tracked across the sky. In the dark plains to either side of the road he sometimes saw the lights of houses or shopping centers or towns. He saw very few other vehicles until he came to the Interstate 70 junction and once he left that behind he was back in that nightbound country with not another soul on the road.

He had always enjoyed night driving best and he chased his headlights and rotated through Gary's very good collection of CDs and The Allman Brothers and Steely Dan and Steve Miller played out songs he hadn't heard in years, had never thought he would hear again. Songs his mother had listened to on the radio in their kitchen in Lawrence or in her Chevy Cavalier before Sam was even born. How he could remember that he had no idea. Near Lake Scott he brought the car to a stop at a railroad crossing and sat there listening to the warning bell and the train's high lonesome whistle as it approached the crossing, its singlebore headlamp amber-white in the darkness. When the big diesel locomotive rumbled through the crossing the engineer raised his hand at Dean and Dean mirrored the gesture as he always had, two travelers meeting in the night and moving on with nothing exchanged between them but the simple and somehow necessary acknowledgment of their shared passage.

* * *

At Liberal on the Oklahoma border Dean pulled over and got the atlas out of the glovebox and switched on the domelight. Gary woke up and rubbed his eyes and the cat stretched across his knees.

"What's the matter?"

"You wanted to take Route 54 but they've got a roadblock up." Dean gestured through the windshield at the orange-and-white barricade. At a distance the sky was lit up red and smoky from some accident and there were flares on the road.

"Shit," Gary said. "Shit."

"We can take 70 into Texas and then cut over."

Gary took the atlas from Dean. "Yeah, but that puts us in Texas a little longer than's cool with me."

"What's wrong with Texas?"

"Nothing if you're into brownshirts and prison camps." He studied the map and rubbed his forehead.

"Why didn't we go through Colorado?"

"Colorado's been on fire all summer," Gary muttered and Dean didn't bother questioning him. By now he would have been more amazed to hear that Colorado had not been on fire all summer. "Ah well," Gary said. "Guess we gotta grin and bear it. Better let me drive."

"I'm good," Dean said and Gary shook his head.

"Car's in my name, I should be behind the wheel. Texas, man." He lifted the cat and stared at it. "Back in the box, Mr. Bojangles," he said and the cat blinked and yawned and stretched its toes.

* * *

Two signs greeted them at the Texas border, one behind the other. The first said,

Welcome Visitors
TEXAS is a CHRISTIAN state.
Are you RIGHT with JESUS?

And the second read,

This State is Protected by The Texas Rangers
Diligence. Duty. Defense.

* * *

What should have been easy was not, the roads Gary wanted to take were closed off and they wound up headed south on Route 70 as far as Pampa and then hooked up with U.S. Route 60 west towards Amarillo. By then the sun was up and as they approached Amarillo there were more cars on the road and Dean began to see black SUVs as he'd seen in Mississippi and Arkansas only these were marked on their doors with the silver stars and sixguns of the Texas Rangers. Gary was jittering and wiping his lip and mouthing expletives under his breath. He rifled through his CDs without taking his eyes off the road and slid Jimi Hendrix into the CD player and against the sound of those dark psychedelic chords Dean saw a landscape of vehicles on the road and others stopped beside the road, some with people milling around them looking lost and some that seemed vacant and abandoned. Outside of Panhandle a woman had been pulled over and she stood beside her car gesturing to a Texas Ranger while he stood there with his hands on his hips staring down at her and as they approached the ranger backhanded her across the face and knocked her down.

"Shit!" Dean said and he turned his head as they passed and saw her on her knees wiping her face.

"Don't look, man," Gary said but he did and when the ranger looked up from the woman Dean saw its face beneath the black stetson and the demon took off its aviator glasses and its head seemed to track in Dean's direction like an animal scenting him on the air.

Dean turned away from the window. "I think we should avoid Amarillo."

"Yeah, I think we're fucked there, my friend. They got it all blocked off. Fuck. Fuck."

"Can we go back?"

"Back where?"

"Nebraska. We'll go back north and then west through Wyoming."

"Most of western Nebraska is gone man, wiped off the map. You can't even drive through it. And I'm not heading back into tornado alley, man, no way."

"That old rock and a hard place again, huh?"

"You got that right," Gary said. "Look, it's just a couple hours. We just gotta sit tight, stay cool."

"Yeah," Dean said.

* * *

There was no skirting the militia checkpoints around Amarillo. In front of them the road had been closed off by a Hummer truck with a manned machine gun mounted in the truckbed and the rangers were letting some drivers through and pulling others over and Dean could see no way of getting away that would not call attention to himself and to Gary so he held his breath and waited.

A ranger came up to the car gesturing as he walked for Gary to roll down the window and Gary put the window down and the ranger leaned into the window and asked Gary for his ID.

"Yes, sir," Gary said and he fished some papers out of the glovebox and handed them up to the ranger and he stood there and went through them. He looked at the papers and he looked at Gary and walked the perimeter of the car and came back to the driver's window and handed the papers back to Gary. He jerked his chin at Dean.

"What about him?"

Gary looked at Dean. "Give him your papers."

Dean ducked his head so that he could see the ranger through the driver's-side window. "Officer, I barely got out of the house before a tornado blew the whole damn thing away. Didn't have time to grab my papers or anything."

"It's rough up there, sir," Gary added. "It's real bad."

"Is that what you're doing in Texas? Coupla Dusters? Think you're gonna find work here?"

"Oh no sir, we're just passing through. Headed for New Mexico, sir, we've got some family to stay with there."

He straightened up and hooked his rifle over his shoulder and hitched up his gunbelt and went over to talk to another ranger. He came back and leaned into the window.

"Pull the car up over there, please. Turn the engine off and step out, both of you."

"Sir?"

"Pull the car up over there. Turn off the engine. Step out. You got dirt in your ears?"

"No sir. No," Gary said and put the car in gear.

"I should have told you," Dean said.

"Nah," Gary said. He looked at Dean and smiled. "They fucking hate us down here. Dusters. Fuck. Like anyone would want to stay in their shitass state."

Gary stopped the car and turned off the engine and he and Dean got out. Gary tried to take the cat carrier with him and one of the rangers told him to leave everything in the car and step away.

"It's just my cat," Gary said.

"Leave everything in the car, please."

"Okay. Okay, sir." Gary said something to the cat through the carrier's little mesh screen and set it down on the passenger seat and went and stood beside Dean.

"What do they want?" Dean asked him.

"Search the car, steal whatever they can. Douchebags."

Two more rangers had come and they opened the back doors of the car and started pulling everything out.

"These Dusters are filthy," said one of the rangers. "Live like fucking animals."

They found Dean's shotgun in the trunk. On the floor of the passenger seat they found the duffel with the Walther and the shells and the teargas canister that he'd taken off Roy Harlan in Mississippi.

"One a you boys wanna explain this?"

"They're just firearms, sir," Gary said. "All legal in Texas."

"You're gonna tell me what's legal and what's not in Texas? This stuff's militia-issue. Where'd you get it?"

"My uncle," Dean said. "Works for Ehrlich Defense. Mississippi." He stared evenly at the ranger. "He's a real supporter of the Second Amendment. Sir."

The ranger looked away from Dean and called one of his men over and told him to put the shotgun and the other things in his truck. The ranger stood there and studied them with his eyes shadowed by the wide brim of his hat. He looked from Dean to Gary and back at Dean. "Pack up your shit. I want you out of Texas by the end of the day, understand?"

"Yes, sir," Dean said and then from behind the ranger he heard Gary's cat yowl.

Gary said, "Hey, hey!" and stepped forward and Dean put his hand on Gary's arm. "Hey!"

One of the rangers had the cat out of the carrier and was holding it up by the scruff of its neck and it twisted and hissed with its fur on end and its claws splayed out. "Relax boy, we love pussy. Don't we, pussy?"

Dean said, "Gary..." and the ranger shook the cat said, "Here, pussy, pussy, pussy," and the cat whirled around and scratched the man's face. He cursed and another ranger laughed and said, "That's what pussy'll getcha," and then the ranger said, "Fuck pussy," and he threw the animal howling up in the air and yanked his pistol from its hip holster and shot the cat in midair like a clay pigeon.

Gary shook off Dean's arm and ran forward shouting and pulling a small handgun out from under his jacket and they opened fire on him with such force that the bullets kept him upright and jigging on his feet until they stopped shooting. When he finally fell down he was soaked in blood and Dean tried to get to him but a crackling volley of riflefire studded into the dirt before him and he froze. There were half a dozen guns trained on him and Gary and the cat were both dead at his feet.

"Get on your knees! Put your hands on your head!"

Dean put his hands up and heard the double-chock of a shotgun close by and a man shouted, "Get on your fucking knees!"

He got on his knees. "Hands on your head!" He laced his hands on top of his head and from behind someone gave him a rough patdown and jerked the pistol he'd had since Rena Lara out of where it had been lodged at the small of his back and then came around and stood in front of him, blocking his view of the salesclerk and the cat who would never make it to Mexico. The man's sleeves were rolled up and his right forearm was inked with a winding tattoo that read Diablos Tejanos and he had Dean's gun in his hand, butt-side out.

"What's this for?"

"Self defense," Dean said.

"Self defense. Against who?"

Dean looked up into his stetson-shadowed face. "Against you, motherfucker."

"How's that?"

"Motherfucker," Dean repeated and was out before he even hit the ground.

* * *

He came to on the floor of some moving vehicle. When he opened his eyes his vision doubled briefly and then came back together and he tried to raise his head and was checked by a bolt of pain like whiplash in his neck.

"Don't," someone said and he felt a hand on his forehead. "You took a helluva hit back there."

He rolled his eyes up and saw a man sitting beside him. His head was on the man's knee and the man was manacled as he was. Dean felt blood on his face and he tried to reach up and wipe it off and realized he was wearing a full set of transport restraints, manacles and waist chain and leg irons. He closed his eyes and said, "Ah, shit."

"Yeah, that about sums up the situation," the man said.

* * *

They offloaded the prisoners in Amarillo. There had been about two dozen men in the van with Dean but there must have been more than a hundred prisoners in the white and shadowless prison yard, men and women and kids who looked barely old enough to drive. The man who'd sat with Dean in the van was named Ed and he said he'd been arrested for possessing illegal reading materials. Dean didn't even know what that meant. He squinted up at the prison walls and saw sharpshooters walking their perimeter and counted six manned guntowers with the silver stars and sixguns flying like a Jolly Roger from each one.

"Just pray they don't send you to Galveston," Ed said from behind him.

"What's in Galveston?"

"They had that big chemical spill there after the last hurricane and they've been sending busloads of chain gangs down there to clean it up. They can't even send enough men because they all get so sick. I heard they're just burning bodies by now."

"Jesus Christ," Dean said.

"Jesus's got nothing to do with it."

* * *

The guards wore ranger uniforms and they segregated the prisoners and took the women away and herded the men into a cavernous hall with sharpshooters stationed in galleries around the walls. Dean was separated from Ed and never saw him again. The guards lined up the prisoners and took their restraints off and told them to get undressed, clothes, underwear, shoes, socks, everything. A man came by with a rolling bin and told them to put their clothes into it.

"Jewelry, too."

"No," Dean said. "I'm keeping this."

"Is it religious?"

"It's St. Michael."

"All right," the man said. "Someone's probably gonna steal it off you but all right."

He trundled away with the bin and then someone that Dean couldn't see started shouting that he hadn't done anything. Good luck with that, buddy, Dean thought and then suddenly the shouter was running across the hall half naked to the door. One of the sharpshooters gunned him down with such swift precision that he dropped like a birdshot duck and lay there dead.

"What in the hell happened to you, boy?"

A guard began to drag the dead man out by his legs. The body was leaving a wide bloodstreak on the floor and another guard came over and hollered at him to pick that fucking thing up for the love of Jesus or he was going to make him mop the floor himself.

"Hey." Fingers snapping. "Over here."

"What?" Dean said.

"All them stitches. You wrestle gators in your spare time?"

The guard across from him was wearing a black ballcap instead of the stetson and a short-sleeved uniform shirt and he had latex gloves on his hands.

"Yeah, something like that."

"Well shit. Looks like them stitches oughta be comin out. You'll wanna tell em about that when you get wherever you're goin."

"Where am I going?"

"Beats the hell outta me." He touched Dean's chin and Dean winced. "Your jaw ain't broke, you wouldn't be talkin if it was. Get any teeth knocked out?"

"No."

"Lucky fella. That hurts like a sumbitch." He listened to Dean's chest with a stethoscope. "You got a rattle in your lungs, you know that?"

"No."

"Been seein a lotta that, you must of come down from dust country. You'll wanna keep an eye on that." He circled around Dean. "What's this bandage back here, looks kinda messy." He picked the edge of the bandage off and pulled it away. "Woo, that there is a bullet hole if I ever saw one. Ain't you the desperado."

He told Dean he was going to have to clean out the wound and he made Dean put his hands flat on the metal table before him and he wrapped his gloved index finger in gauze and soaked it in antiseptic and said, "This'll sting a little," and he shoved his finger in the wound and scooped it. Dean's left leg buckled from the pain and he hissed wordlessly through his teeth.

"Now look at that," said the guard. He held his finger up before Dean's watering eyes and Dean saw a black crust of dried blood on it. "Ain't that a mess. Ain't you glad the Texas Rangers is here to take care a you, son? Better'n your own momma."

Dean put his head down and saw drops of his sweat pattering onto the metal table. He clenched his eyes shut and the guard flooded out the wound and bandaged it up and gave Dean a shot of penicillin in his back and peeled off the latex gloves. Dean straightened up and wiped his face. His hands were shaking.

"You'll wanna put your hands right back on that table, son," the guard said. He was taking a clean pair of gloves from a box of them on the table. "We're not quite done here." He put the gloves on and folded his hands and stood there and waited. Dean stared at him for a second and then looked away. He bent over. He put his hands on the table.

* * *

They gave him underwear and an orange jumpsuit stenciled with TEXAS DOC CLEMENTS UNIT on the back and socks and soft-soled slip-ons. Then a guard came over and told him to lift his chin and snapped something onto his neck. When Dean reached up to touch it he felt smoothly molded plastic and a cool metal plate on the inside of it against the back of his neck.

"That collar has an embedded GPS, so if you decide to take a stroll we can come around and pick you up. That little metal thing you feel there on your neck is your own portable taser. It's got three settings on it, real uncomfortable, down for the count and stone dead. Which of those three you get is up to you. Play your cards right and you won't get any. Understand?"

No, I don't understand, Dean thought. I don't understand one fucking thing that's going on here, you cocksucker.

They photographed him and finally they made him put his hands on a glass plate and scanned his fingerprints. He'd told them his name was Robert Johnson. He wondered how long it would take them to find out that it wasn't.

* * *

There was some sort of chili for lunch but he hadn't eaten anything solid in days so he left most of it on his plate. By now it was afternoon and they brought him and a few dozen other prisoners down to a glass-partitioned visiting room and told him to sit down in a booth. There was a woman on the other side of the glass with blonde hair piled messily up on top of her head and a blue suit gone shiny around the lapels and frayed at the cuffs. She had a stack of folders in front of her and she motioned to him to pick up the phone on the wall.

"Robert Johnson?" she asked. "You're Robert Johnson?"

"Are you my public defender?"

"My name is Stephanie Courson. I'm a prisoner relations representative for the state of Texas."

"A what?"

"I'm here to explain your conviction."

"Wait, wait, wait...my conviction? When did I get convicted of anything?"

She opened the folder on top of her stack and took out a sheet of paper. There was a metal drawer underneath the table and she put the paper and a felt-tip pen in it and slid it over to Dean's side of the glass and he took the paper out and looked at it. Traveling without proper identification. Resisting arrest. Assaulting a law enforcement official. Accessory to attempted murder of a law enforcement official.

"These charges carry a minimum sentence of ten years and a maximum sentence of..."

"No," he said. "No, listen... I just got here a few hours ago. I..." He looked at the paper again. "None of these things happened. I mean, just the ID thing but...resisting arrest? When did I do that? When I was unconscious? Accessory to attempted murder? Some kid with a pea shooter? He didn't even have it out of his jacket."

"Mr. Johnson..."

"I know I missed a lot in four years but for Christ's sake..."

"Mr. Johnson, please," she said and her eyes flicked to a point over Dean's shoulder and he turned and saw a guard watching him with his hand on his holster. He turned back to her and she was looking at him pityingly and pleadingly and she looked almost as exhausted as he was and he knew that every one of those folders was for some other poor bastard and it was her job to bring bad news to all of them. And whatever job she'd bought that blue suit for it sure as hell wasn't this.

"You have the right to plead innocent of these charges in thirty days time. If at that time you are able to produce four reliable witnesses who can testify to your innocence we'll review your case."

Dean shook his head. He couldn't think of anything to say.

"You'll be held here for thirty days until the board decides where you'll serve out your sentence. There's..." She shuffled through her folder. "Um...the work farm here at Clements, a road gang or Galveston Bay." She looked up at him. "I'll try to persuade them not to send you to Galveston. Okay? It's the best I can do."

"How long? How long has it been like this?"

"I don't follow you, Mr. Johnson," she said and then dropped her voice. "Did they do that to your face?"

"Yeah. While I was resisting arrest."

"I'll try to get the infirmary to give you some aspirin. Maybe an ice pack."

"Sure. Whatever."

"I'll need you to sign that paper please."

Dean picked it up. "This paper? This paper here?"

"Yes, please just sign on the..."

He tore it up into four quarters. He put them in the metal drawer and slid it back at her. "I saw your law enforcement officials pump fifty rounds into some kid today after they used his cat for target practice. I saw them shoot a guy just for getting a little bent outta shape. And they weren't even demons they were...people. Just people. I'm not signing anything. Put that in your...report or whatever you got there. Okay, Stephanie?"

She took the four pieces of paper and put them in the folder and sat there looking at him. She said, "I'm sorry," and she took the pen and gathered her things up and walked away. He almost felt bad about laying into her, his old self wouldn't have done it or would have tried to talk to her or might have even turned on some charm but that was all behind him now for all the good it would have done anyway.

* * *

By evening he was in a cell with five other men. There was a stainless steel sink in the cell with a stainless steel mirror above it and he got a look at himself and thought he'd seen skid row crackheads in better shape than he was. He looked like the walking dead. He was the walking dead.

He coughed heavily and spat something that looked like mud into the sink. He sat down on his bunk and rubbed his chest and the man in the bunk opposite asked him if he was sick. Dean shook his head. "I inhaled half of South Dakota yesterday."

"Dust storm? You'll want to..."

"I'll wanna keep an eye on that. Yeah, I know."

"You just come in today?"

Dean nodded and looked at the man who was small and sunburned and looked to be somewhere in middle age. "You?"

"No, I've been getting moved around. I was on a road gang for a month and they sent me up here to be reassigned."

Dean looked around the windowless cell. "I don't guess anyone's busted outta here, huh?"

"The last man who tried it was cooked by his dogcollar half an hour after they noticed he was missing. When they brought his body through the front gate his eyes were still smoking."

"Well that's comforting."

"Excuse me?"

"Nothing." There was a Bible and a rosary on the man's bunk and Dean stared at them for a few seconds and then asked where he'd gotten them.

"We have services every Sunday. The chaplain can get them for you if you want."

"What day is this?"

"Thursday, I think."

"I don't have until Sunday."

"Are you getting shipped out?"

"Yeah. Yeah I am."

"Do you know where?"

Yeah, I know where, Dean thought but shook his head.

The man held the things out to Dean. "Take them. I can get others."

"No, it's okay."

"Please, take them. Please. God would want me to give them to you."

"Well, I'm not gonna argue with God. Thanks." He took the Bible and the rosary and put them on the mattress beside him.

"You are religious," the man said and gestured at the medal around Dean's neck.

"Not really...I don't know. I don't know what that means."

"It means you have faith in God's plan for you."

Dean thought about this for a few seconds and gave the man a faint smile. "I don't think I'm religious."

"Well, I will pray for you. And for myself. And for all of us."

"Okay," Dean said. He lay down on the bunk and closed his eyes. "You do that." Lights out was called and behind his eyelids Dean saw Gary dancing his bullet-riddled jig. He saw Alice Denham telling him to stay in Nebraska. He saw Buddy and July. He saw demons. He saw Sam.

He fell asleep or passed out and he woke up coughing and breathless. The man in the bunk above his own told him to shut the fuck up. He lay there trying to get his breath back and heard someone coming down the cellblock. Heavy steps and chains clanking.

Time to go, he thought. The steps came to a stop outside his cell.

"Robert Johnson?"

Time to go.

He raised himself on his elbows and saw two guards outside the cell. "Yeah?"

"Let's go. Warden wants to see you."

He didn't say anything. He took the Bible and the rosary and got up and one of the guards unlocked the cell and cuffed his wrists and ankles and looped the chain around his waist and locked it all together.

"I will pray for you," his cellmate said through the bars. He was sitting up on his bunk.

"Thanks," Dean said and then the guards told him to get moving and he shuffled down the hall in the restraints with one guard ahead of him and the other behind.

* * *

He expected a demon or demons and instead he got Hollis Lux whose office in an older part of the prison was as small and shabby as a sheriff's station in some western backwater. Lux sat behind a putty-colored metal desk with a Frederic Remington print above it and on the desk's simulated oak surface was a lacquered hunk of wood with the name Hollis Lux burned onto it like something a kid would make in summer camp. A desk fan oscillated from the top of a file cabinet and the clock on the wall said it was almost six a.m. Dean sat in a vinyl chair with his chains pooling on the floor while Lux tapped on his computer keyboard.

"Be right with you," Lux said and he hit a few more keystrokes and then turned to Dean and folded his hands on the desk and smiled. "Mr. Johnson."

Dean knew that Lux knew that wasn't his name but he said, "Yeah."

"You like my office, Mr. Johnson?"

"It's kind of crappy, actually."

Lux laughed loudly. "It is, isn't it? I asked for it though. I've been in law enforcement forty years, Mr. Johnson, started out as a rookie in Hidalgo County, sheriff's office not much bigger'n this one. They wanted to give me some big shiny office I said no. Keeps me grounded being in a place like this, reminds me of my duty to serve and protect the people of the state of Texas. This facility was built for three thousand men and I've got five thousand in it right now and I can't do with gettin all fancy about myself."

Dean cleared his throat and put his head down and coughed against his shoulder.

"Can I get you a glass of water, Mr. Johnson?"

"No. Thanks."

"You a religious man, Mr. Johnson?"

"Devout."

"Is that so, Mr. Johnson?"

"Oh, I am right with Jesus."

"How long're you gonna keep answerin to Mr. Johnson, Mr. Johnson?"

"I guess as long as you keep calling me that."

Lux leaned forward and turned the computer screen to Dean and Dean saw his old mugshot from Green River with his real name and beneath that the new picture, bruised and hollow-eyed, and another window showed his inked fingerprints from that arrest in 2006 and his newly scanned ones and a single word in red over all of it, MATCH.

"You got anything to say?"

"Yeah. I was a handsome bastard."

"Dead bastard too. File says you're supposed to have died in Colorado four years ago. Seems kinda funny, don't it?"

"I guess somebody made a mistake."

"That somebody was you when you crossed paths with the Texas Rangers. What've you been doin with yourself for four years?"

"Staying out of trouble."

"Well now, I don't know about that. From what I hear, you just got yourself in a big mess of trouble with some old boys over in Mississippi. Ain't that right, Mr.Winchester?"

"I couldn't say anything about that."

Lux creaked back in his seat and laced his hands over his belly and stared at Dean. "I'm a disappointed man today, you wanna ask me why?"

"Not really."

"Well, I'll tell you anyway. I'm a disappointed man because it's not often I get a fella like you up in here. I mean, hell boy, you're the genuine article. A bona fide outlaw. But nothin's like it used to be. Time was, you arrest a man, he's yours. You're the law. Now I got some guy in a suit tellin me what to do. Defense contractors. What in the hell does that mean, anyway? Find out this mornin, I gotta ship you back to Mississippi. Company policy. Goddamn. What's the world comin to?" He sucked on his teeth and ruminated on the injustice of these times. "They're sendin over a transfer agent. Should be here in a couple hours."

He stood up and came around the desk and stood beside Dean's chair and Dean looked up and they stared at each other. Lux shook his head.

"I sure hate to let a big fish like you go," he said. He waited another second and then jerked up his leg and kicked over the chair with a loud grunt. The chair and Dean crashed to the floor and the Bible and rosary skidded away under Lux's desk. Dean rolled over onto his back and Lux kicked the chair out of the way and straddled Dean with his knees and put his service revolver to Dean's forehead.

"They say you killed five people there in Mississippi, including two militia boys. Still it's my boys that brought you in, not those crackers. Don't seem fair, does it?" He cocked back the hammer. "It just don't seem fair."

The fan on the file cabinet turned and creaked in its arc and Dean could smell the machine oil in the gun and he lay there looking at Lux's narrowed eyes around the barrel of the revolver. He said nothing and after a few seconds Lux holstered his revolver and stood up and walked to the door. Dean levered himself up and leaned against the wall with his shackled hands between his knees and caught his breath.

"I'm lookin forward to bein front'n center at your execution," Lux said. He went out and said something to the guards and they came in and hauled Dean to his feet and took him away.

* * *

He sat alone and still in chains on the floor in an old barred cell that looked like a county drunk tank and he made a passing attempt to examine the locks on the chains but he had nothing to pick them open with and nowhere to go from there. He was collared and cornered. He thought about his cellmate praying for him and for a while he tried to pray but he couldn't. He'd never believed in God. It had been Sam that he'd pleaded to in hell but now he couldn't even seem to do that. One hour passed. Two. The only sound his own hoarse breathing and wet cough. After the second hour two guards came down and told him to get up and he pushed himself up the wall and went with them.

* * *

The transfer agent was signing papers with Lux at the prison's central admissions desk when they brought Dean up and when Dean saw him he staggered so badly that one of the guards had to hold him up.

"Looks like he's had a good Texas knock-around," the agent said and Lux chuckled and told the agent that he knew how it was.

The agent grinned and said "I sure do," and then, "Is he ready to go?"

"All yours," Lux said. The agent thanked Lux and shook his hand and turned and walked away and the two guards followed with Dean between them until they were in a parking garage. The agent had come in a dark sedan with smoked windows and he turned and shook hands with the guards and then opened the sedan's back door and laid his hand on Dean's head to put him inside the car. When Dean was sitting the agent slid his hand to the back of Dean's head and left it there for the briefest moment. Dean didn't look at him. The agent closed the door and went around to the front seat and got behind the wheel and turned the ignition and pulled away.

There was a wire grille between the front and back seats. Dean waited until the car had cleared the prison walls and then he leaned forward and grasped the mesh with both hands.

He said, "Bobby. Jesus, Bobby."

Bobby looked at him in the rearview mirror and put his right hand back against the grille and laced his fingers with Dean's.

"You okay, kid?"

Dean nodded. He put his forehead against the grille and closed his eyes and tightened his fingers around Bobby's until they ached.

* * *

"I don't think I've been more than a day behind you since Mississippi," Bobby said. "Probably would've caught up with you in South Dakota if it wasn't for the storm. If you hadn't got yourself arrested I don't know how the hell I would've found you."

"Bobby," Dean said and raised his head. "Is Sam with you? Are we meeting up with him?"

Bobby's eyes shifted to meet his in the rearview mirror. "He's not with me, Dean."

"Is he dead?" Bobby didn't say anything. "Bobby?"

"Dean, I don't know where he is."

Dean leaned back from the grille and let his fingers slip from Bobby's.

"Once we're someplace safe I'll give you the whole story, what I know of it. But right now we gotta get you outta here and get that thing off your neck before the real deal shows up to collect you."

Dean leaned back against the seat, his last reserve of adrenaline gone. "Okay, Bobby," he said. "Okay." He shut his eyes and let himself drift and Bobby drove them eastwards out of Texas.

* * *

Some time after they'd crossed the border into Oklahoma Bobby pulled the car beneath an overpass and Dean roused himself from shifting semiconsciousness and looked out the window.

"Why are we stopping?"

"That thing's gotta come off before we go any farther."

Bobby got out and came in the back beside Dean and Dean elbowed himself up off the seat and Bobby tipped Dean's head back and examined the collar.

"Shit," he said. "It's one of the new ones."

"That doesn't sound good."

"It's not." He traced his thumb over the swollen bruise on Dean's jaw. "What's this? Official Texas Rangers souvenir?"

"Yeah," Dean said.

"Sons of bitches." He sat there with Dean's face in his hands and after a moment he shook his head. "I didn't think I was ever gonna see you again."

Dean closed his eyes and when he opened them again they were wet and he said, "Me neither."

Bobby cleared his throat and let Dean go. He got out of the backseat and went into the trunk and came back with a bag.

"How're you gonna get this thing off without electrocuting me?"

"That ain't the first one I've gotten off someone, they're just changing em all the time, so what worked the last time..."

"Yeah? What worked the last time?"

"Won't always work this time. But we'll keep our fingers crossed. Here, put this in your mouth."

Dean looked at Bobby and took the rounded piece of rubber from him and studied it. There were teeth marks in it. "I'll need to bite down on something?"

"Just to be on the safe side."

"You're not filling me with confidence here, Bobby," Dean said and Bobby gave him a look and he raised an eyebrow at him and slipped the bite block between his teeth. Bobby tilted Dean's head forward and Dean felt him put something between the metal plate on the inside of the collar and his neck and then he heard a rattle of tools and he looked around to see what Bobby was doing. Bobby pushed his head away.

"Don't move."

He sat there with his head down and Bobby felt around the length of the collar, pausing in spots to slip his finger in between the collar and Dean's neck. He stopped in one place and raised the collar up off Dean's neck and slipped something cold and hard underneath it. He checked the padding at the back of the collar and put a hand on Dean's back.

"Ready?"

Dean made some sound of agreement around the block. He could hear Bobby's breathing, short and tense, and the drone of wheels passing above them on the interstate. He could feel his own pulse against the collar and he clenched his hands on his knees and squeezed his eyes shut and he heard Bobby say "Okay," and then his teeth drove down onto the block and there was one agonizing second of consciousness before his vision went white then black, all black.

* * *

"Look at me! Come on Dean, look at me!"

Where the fuck are you? He couldn't focus his eyes in one spot, they were juddering around in his head and his ears were shrieking and every muscle in his body had locked up on itself. Where are you?

He felt Bobby grab his face and turn his head and that was too much movement and he screamed through his clenched teeth.

"Look at me," Bobby said. "That's it. That's it. Okay."

It's not okay! Dean thought but then he saw Bobby's face above him and he made himself focus on that and try to steady his breathing, try to get his body under control.

"You'll be okay, you didn't get the full hit just enough to hurt like hell." Dean stared at Bobby and nodded and Bobby got his mouth open and pulled out the block. "Just breathe for me, okay, Dean? Nice and slow."

Dean sucked in a few rasping breaths and he started coughing and Christ it hurt, it hurt. He rolled over and curled in on himself and Bobby sat there with his hands on Dean's shoulder and head and after a while Dean quieted down. "All right?" Bobby said and Dean nodded. "We need to get moving. They know that collar's off now." Dean felt Bobby get up out of the backseat. He heard the backdoor close and then the front door open and close and the engine turn over and felt the motion of the car beneath him. Sunlight struck his face when they left the shadow of the overpass and Dean covered his eyes with his hands.

They'd been on the road for a few minutes when Dean said, "I'm all wet," and Bobby said something he couldn't hear. "I fucking pissed myself," Dean clarified.

"Well," Bobby said. "That happens."

"Fuck," Dean said through his teeth and he kicked at the back door in sheer helpless anger. "FUCK!"

* * *

Bobby stopped only once and he tried to get Dean to eat something but Dean couldn't eat, he could barely move. His head was bursting with pain and he was coughing hard and steadily now and Bobby turned him onto his back and listened to his chest.

"How long've you been breathing like that?"

"I don't know. A day, I don't know."

"You were caught in that storm?"

"Mm."

"Guess we'll worry about that later." He got Dean upright long enough to swallow some pills and then laid him down and covered him up with a blanket. Whatever Bobby gave him knocked him out and he didn't wake up until the car stopped.

It was very dark and Bobby was helping him sit up. "I'm okay," Dean said. His words were slurred. "I can walk."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah."

He got out of the car on his own and Bobby held him up and he looked around and saw nothing but darkness and the bluish arc of Bobby's flashlight.

"Where are we?"

"West Virginia."

"Oh," Dean said as if that meant something to him.

Suddenly he had no strength left. His legs folded beneath him and he was pulled down by the weight of his jailhouse chains. Bobby had him under the arms but Dean put his head on Bobby's shoulder and Bobby got down on the ground with him. He couldn't move and he didn't want to be moved. Bobby put his arms around him and Dean crossed his shackled wrists against his chest and pressed his forehead against Bobby. He was shaking and then he was crying.

After a while Bobby got him back on his feet and when he collapsed again Bobby lifted him up and carried him.

* * *

By morning he was sick and by evening of the next day he was very sick. He felt as if he had wet concrete in his lungs and he coughed and retched up South Dakota mud until he was too weak to cough anymore and he burned with fever and shuddered with chills. He began to see demons in the room, first in the bedroom where Bobby had put him and then in the living room where Bobby moved him to be closer to the woodstove's warmth. They were waiting for him to die and he was too exhausted even to be afraid.

"Come 'n get it," he said.

"What?"

"Fuckin demons," he told Bobby. "They're all over the joint," he said and they were, slipping in and out of the ceiling, passing between the walls, circling the couch and looking down at him.

"Nobody here but us, kid," Bobby said. "Nobody's getting in here neither."

"They're waiting for me to kick it. Take me back."

Bobby was sitting beside him with a basin of water on his lap and he dipped a cloth in the basin and wrung it out and folded it and wiped Dean's face. Dean closed his eyes because it felt so good. "First of all," Bobby said, "It doesn't work that way. You paid your debt, get it? You're free and clear."

"You know that?"

"Well I...it's just common sense. You sell your soul once, they can't collect twice."

Dean smiled. "You're a lousy fuckin liar Bobby."

"I know it. That's why I'm telling the truth."

Dean opened his eyes and looked around the room. His eyeballs felt like hot marbles in his head. There was a demon sitting on its haunches by the woodstove, grinning at him. "I know you, fucker," he said and it licked its fingers obscenely. "Can't wait, can you?"

Bobby turned Dean's head back to look at him and passed the cloth over his forehead and up into his hair. "Second," Bobby said, "Nobody's kicking it around here. I just won't stand for it."

Dean stared at Bobby in the dim light. "Sam did, didn't he? He's dead. Tell me the truth."

Bobby looked away. He put the facecloth in the basin and picked it up and wrung it out and the water fell into the basin with a soft patter. He folded the cloth into a rectangle and turned back to Dean and laid it over his forehead. "I saw him three months ago. He said he'd found a way to get you out and see? Here you are. So Sam's somewhere too. We'll find him or he'll find us." He put a hand on Dean's face. "You believe me?"

"Yeah. I do."

"You're a lousy liar too," Bobby said and smiled. "Close your eyes. Get some rest."

* * *

He saw her once, only once in all that time. By then he'd stopped talking and no matter what they did to him he wouldn't talk to them or say anything but she was different from all of them, worse, terrible, terrifying. She stood before him and said tell me and he turned his face away and she took him and made him look at her and said it again, tell me.

She made him talk. She laid him open and made him tell her everything, tell it all until he couldn't bear the sound of his own voice or the sense of her gorging herself on everything he had tried to hold onto. She left him with nothing to himself and then she told him how she was going to use what she'd wrung from him and she left him screaming in the dark until they came and took him away and put him out on the road.

* * *

There was something on his face and he tried to get it off because he needed to talk, had to talk, and then Bobby was there holding his hands down.

"Leave it alone, Dean."

Dean shook his head frantically. "Bobby..." he said and heard his voice, little more than a whisper and barely audible through the oxygen mask. "Bobby, I remember..."

"Shh, don't talk."

"I remember what she did, Bobby. What she was going to do. She took it all..."

"Shh."

"All of it. She took it. From me. Out of me."

"Okay," Bobby said. "All right. Shhh."

* * *

They put him out on the road and the road was burning and they told him to walk, he was good at following orders, wasn't he? The road was black burning tar and he was burning and bleeding and he had to keep going, he couldn't stop, he couldn't rest, they were on him like flies if he tried. The horizon was on fire and the black road was paved with smoldering coals and he couldn't stop and then he fell and waited for them to come. But they didn't.

He heard his name and he looked up and saw his brother. This was how Sam found him. Sam tried to pick him up and he couldn't, his hands passed through Dean like water and neither could Dean touch Sam or hold onto him. Sam said, "You have to follow me, Dean," and Dean couldn't talk but he nodded. "Stay with me, Dean," he said and Dean followed crawling on the charred and blackened road and then staggering on his feet and he thought, I'm with you Sam, please don't leave me, please, please... His brother led him out of hell and everything fled before them.

* * *

"I saw him," he said to Bobby. It was very dark and he could hardly see Bobby but could feel his hands around his own. "He found me."

"I know he did."

"He got me."

"I know."

* * *

He dreamt that he was at the ocean with Sam and they were both children. Sam was very small, so small that every time a wave rolled in he'd put his arms around Dean's waist and hold on and Dean could look down and see the crown of his brother's head and his hair was still baby's hair, dark gold, the color of ripe wheat. "It's scary," he said and Dean said, "Don't worry, I've got you."

"I've got you too," Sam said and linked his hands together around Dean. "I've got you." And Dean passed his hand through Sam's hair and the waves broke out at sea, sparkling clean and blue in the sun.

* * *

Dean woke up and saw Bobby crouched before the woodstove, feeding it with the slow movements of someone trying not to make any noise. He wasn't wearing the oxygen mask anymore and his chest ached but he could breathe and he lay there feeling warm and weightless and watched Bobby. Bobby closed the woodstove's iron door with an exaggerated and almost dainty caution that would have made Dean laugh if he'd had the energy and then Bobby turned around and saw Dean looking at him. He dusted off his hands and came over to the couch and sat down beside him.

"Welcome back," he said and Dean raised an eyebrow at him and went back to sleep.

* * *

He'd been sick for more than a week and by the time he was able to get up it was the middle of September and the leaves outside the cabin had begun to change color. The cabin was little more than two rooms and seemed to have no neighbors. Bobby told him that it was in the middle of West Virginia's iron country and that demons couldn't come near it though he still salted the doors and windows and laid a sigil upon every entrance. At night it was so quiet Dean could hear ashes sifting in the woodstove. There was a gas powered generator that Bobby never fired up and well water had to be brought in from outside and Dean told Bobby that he'd finally embraced the Unabomber lifestyle once and for all.

He didn't ask Bobby any questions until one evening he said, "Okay, Bobby."

Bobby glanced up from the map on his knees and sat there looking at Dean and then he put the map on the floor and got up. He went into the kitchen and rattled around in there for a minute and came back with two mugs and a bottle of whiskey. He poured out for both of them and drank his down and wiped his mouth and sat down by the woodstove across from Dean.

"You sure you're ready for this?" he asked and Dean nodded. "All right," he said, and started to talk.

Chapter Text

The night Dean died Bobby saw a blinding light come from inside the house and the demons around it scattered like cockroaches and he thought anything that sent demons packing had to have some good to it. Then inside the house he found Sam with Dean.

Sam said nothing and he picked up his brother's body and put it over his shoulder and left the house without looking back. And Bobby followed right after him and left those Fremonts there with a mess of dead people to account for and no explanation that anyone in his right mind would ever believe. Bobby never found out what happened to them.

Sam straightarrowed back to South Dakota, fifteen hours without ever breaking seventy miles per any of them and Bobby was behind him all the way. By the time they reached Bobby's house Dean's clothes had crusted onto him and his body had become so rigid that Sam had to cut off his clothing. He put it in a pile on the floor and he washed his brother's body and Bobby helped him. And when they finished this Sam took Dean's bloodied clothing and took all the towels and sheets and anything with Dean's blood on it and burned them to ash. Bobby watched and said nothing until finally he asked Sam if he wanted help burning or burying Dean's body. And Sam looked up at Bobby and laughed and said, "Dean'll tear me a new one if I do that, Bobby." And he went and got Bobby's medical supplies and began to sew his brother back together.

* * *

When Sam finished the ritual and Dean was lying in the low and shifting candlelight painted forehead to ankle with sigils of ash that Bobby had never seen before and spoken over with incantations that he'd never heard, he actually felt for a pulse. Put his hand out and felt for some sign of life. There was none but Dean's neck, his body had become warm. Pliant. As if only sleeping. Bobby stood there with his fingers on Dean's still throat and looked at Sam and said, "What is this?"

"Plan B," Sam said. "I'm not letting him go."

* * *

It was near midnight, twenty-four hours after Dean died that Bobby checked on Sam and found him with Dean, dressed now and lying on the bed in the room upstairs where he and Sam had always slept and Sam was finally crying.

He'd taken off the pendant that Dean always wore and had put it on himself and he'd given Dean a saint's medal, St. Michael the Archangel because Dean had once told Sam that their mother had said angels were watching over them. And Sam asked Bobby to take care of him, please take care of him because he had to find Lilith and get his brother back.

Bobby watched Sam drive away and thought, I'm never gonna see that boy again.

* * *

Two years went by and in all that time Bobby heard nothing about Lilith and he wondered if that blaze of white light in New Harmony had pitched her back in hell for good. Bobby heard stories about Sam exorcising people, killing demons, even summoning them and interrogating them and sending them back to hell but he never saw Sam or heard from him and all of Sam's old phone numbers and email addresses had turned to dead air. The everyday world began to disintegrate but the supernatural one that Bobby watched and kept an ear to became very, very quiet and Bobby heard no news of Sam or Lilith or any demon or their manifestations. As if all these things had crawled back to hell once and for all and good riddance to them.

Upstairs Dean's body lay on the bed, breathless, bloodless, unnaturally vivid, the soul it had once housed far, far beyond the reach of any mortal help.

* * *

In the fall of the year two years after Dean died Bobby killed a black dog outside his house. It was the first one he'd seen in years and it didn't act like any other, it wasn't lying in wait to gut someone but sniffing, sniffing around the house right up to the back porch where Bobby killed it with two double-ought silver tipped buckshot shells. He chopped up the carcass and burned it with a pile of trash out in his back dump and it made such a stink that Pete Forrester, county sheriff for as long as Bobby had lived there by the Cheyenne River, came to find out what in the hell old Singer was up to now.

Forrester made Bobby put a lid on his trashfire and stayed on for coffee and told Bobby that he was being retired day after next. Something calling itself the South Dakota Civil Defense was taking over most of the law enforcement duties in the state.

"Ain't that the goddamnest thing you ever heard?" Forrester asked. "Ain't it though?"

A few days later a South Dakota Civil Defender showed up at Bobby's house and stood there on the back porch and asked him questions about Sam and Dean Winchester. Bobby told him they had died years ago and the soldier or officer or whatever the hell he was asked Bobby if he knew where they were buried.

"Buried?" Bobby said. "Well hell, I heard they got blown up for all I know there wasn't nothin left to bury. Say, why don't you come inside, have a cuppa joe?"

The soldier looked down at the salt line across the threshold and Bobby watched him and wasn't surprised when the soldier looked up and said, "No thank you, Mr. Singer." They stood there and stared at each other and there was no sound but the wind and a hiss of dry dirt striking the house's old clapboards and then the soldier raised his head and took a great sniff at the air.

"Smells like you got a dead rat up in your walls. Might wanna check that out."

"Will do, sir," Bobby said and the soldier stepped off the porch and got in his black truck and drove away and Bobby closed the door and went upstairs and ten minutes later he had Dean out of the house and in the back of his Chevelle, bound for Mississippi.

* * *

Catherine Parsons was the last of a line that stretched back to the Yorkshire moors and probably to the Druids and God only knows what before that. The family had been run out of Yazoo City after the fire that took out half the town and they'd settled in Rena Lara near the banks of the Mississippi River and there Catherine had learned about her many weird gifts at her great-grandmother's and grandmother's and mother's knees. She wasn't a hunter and if any hunters had heard of her they probably thought she was dead.

Catherine was maybe fifty years old and lived there by herself and she could still make a fire blaze up in the fireplace just by thinking about it and could move things around the room without lifting a finger and Bobby Singer showing up at her doorstep with a lifelike corpse in his arms didn't even make her blink. He left Dean there like something out of the Brothers Grimm and went back to South Dakota with an arsenal of salt and holy water and silver bullets ready to fight whatever might be waiting for him.

When he drove up the hill to his house that October evening his headlights bounced off the chrome trim and lowslung taillights of a car he'd never expected to see again and he pulled up behind the big black sedan and sat there staring at it.

He got out of his car and put his hand on the Impala's hood and it was still warm. He called out, "Sam?" and no one answered. He had one foot on the first porch step when the back door opened and Bobby expected to see Sam's lanky frame but it wasn't Sam. Bobby stumbled back off the porch step and almost fell down. Then Sam was out of the house and was hugging him and Bobby stared over Sam's shoulder at Dean Winchester standing there with one hand on the doorknob and his shoulder against the door and a smile on his face.

* * *

Dean stared at Bobby. "Me?"

"Yeah," Bobby said. He got up and poured himself a shot and sat down and drank it and looked at Dean.

"Demon? Shapeshifter?"

"You think we didn't consider that? They stayed with me for a week and you...or what we thought was you, passed every test. Exorcism, holy water, he stood right under that Devil's Trap and didn't bat an eye. He was flesh and blood, Dean. He was you, down to the last...gesture. Everything. Even you wouldn't have known the difference."

"Then something got up in my body while you were driving back from Mississippi."

"No scars, no stitches. Timing was all wrong, too. Sam said he'd been with you for weeks already."

Dean ran a hand over his face. "Okay," he said. "Okay. Wait a minute. Wait. My body...this body's stashed away in Mississippi and Sam's sitting there with some phony me."

"Yeah."

"Well fuck, Bobby, did you tell him?"

"What was I gonna tell him? It was you Dean."

"So what, I just walked in the door one day?"

"He said Lilith had given you back."

"Given me back?" Dean said. And then, "Oh shit. Fuck, Bobby...what the fuck did he do?"

"I asked him if he'd made a deal and he said no. I asked him what the hell that meant and he said that Lilith had come to him. She called for a truce. Voided the contract, no strings attached."

"She's a fucking demon, when do they ever come with no strings attached?"

"I don't know, Dean but I believed him. He didn't sign anything, he didn't barter anything, he just...agreed to a truce. And she told him where to find you, I mean, not you...it...him."

"Where was that?"

"Wyoming, near the Devil's Gate. By the time Sam got there he'd been picked up by the cops. They still had cops in Wyoming back then. They'd put him in the state hospital in Evanston, didn't know what else to do with him. Sam got him released and holed up with him until he came around and then they turned up at my place."

Bobby put his mug on the floor beside his chair and looked at Dean. It had gotten dark while he was talking and there was no light in the room but the woodstove's fire and Dean was sitting in the shadows across from him with his hands clasped between his knees staring into the coals. Bobby let him sit like that for a minute and then said, "Dean?"

Dean looked at him and stood up. He grabbed the whiskey bottle by the neck and walked out of the room and through the kitchen and Bobby heard the backdoor open and slam closed.

* * *

Bobby opened the stove door and poked at the embers and threw in some more kindling and got the fire up again. He closed the door and sat there staring at the flames. There was more to tell but for now he could let Dean be alone.

On the last night that Sam and that other Dean stayed in his house Bobby had been woken up at some late hour by the sound of Dean calling for Sam. He'd sounded so lost and in so much pain that Bobby could have cried for both of them. He'd sat up in bed and seen the light come on from their room down the hall and heard the low sound of Sam talking Dean out of his nightmare.

After a few minutes he got up to see if they needed anything and he went down the hall and saw the door standing ajar with a triangle of light spilling onto the floor. Bobby could hear the rustle of their voices and see them through the quarter-open door where Dean sat up on the bed with his legs tucked underneath him and Sam was on the edge of the bed beside him and they had their foreheads together, whispering to each other like that while Sam cupped Dean's face in his hands and Dean ran his hands up and down Sam's arms as if trying to make sure he was real. There was an intimacy to the scene that made Bobby turn to go and just then they put their arms around each other and Dean rested his chin on Sam's shoulder and looked through the open door right at Bobby, unsmiling and his eyes were deep and lambent green in the dim light.

The Dean that Bobby had known from childhood had taken plenty of ribbing about his looks from guys who called him pretty boy and heygorgeous and even Bobby had teased him about it now and then. He'd once heard John say that Dean was too goddamned pretty for his own good, looked just like his mother, that one.

But this Dean. This Dean. Was beautiful. In a way that made Bobby's heart fold in on itself because he knew what he saw hadn't been meant for him. He was beautiful, enough to make Bobby's blood turn to ice. The devil hath power to achieve a pleasing shape, he thought and where had he read that? When had he heard that? He had known Dean since he was eight years old and for all that he was pretty whatever was in that room with Sam was so beautiful it was horrible and it was not him.

Dean had blinked and put his forehead down on Sam's shoulder and when he'd looked up again he'd smiled and said, "Hey, Bobby," and whatever Bobby had seen or thought he'd seen was gone. By morning he hadn't been able to believe he'd seen it at all but it had haunted him ever since and probably always would.

There was more to tell and Bobby would tell it but he would never tell Dean about this. Kid had been through enough.

* * *

Dean must have polished off a good quarter of the bottle by the time Bobby came out on the back porch and he put the bottle down on the boards between his feet before Bobby could say anything about drinking too much with all the meds he was on. He heard the doorjamb creak when Bobby leaned up against it and he didn't turn around and neither of them said anything for a while.

"Getting damn cold out," Bobby said.

"Yeah."

"Early, too. It'll be winter before you know it."

"Bobby," Dean said. "This is the worst fucking small talk I ever heard."

"Thank God one of us said it. I thought you were gonna let me keep yammering like an idiot."

"Well, I considered it."

"You all right?"

Dean stared out across the porch railing. There was nothing to see but the dark treeline. "I'm okay." He shrugged. "Considering I just found out that while I was getting tortured down in hell my brother was up here thinking I was safe. She sure knows her shit, doesn't she?" He turned around and looked at Bobby. "That was Lilith. That...what you thought was me? It was her."

"We sort of figured that out, well, Sam did. Later though, not then."

Dean nodded and looked down and picked up the bottle and took a drink and held it in his hands and peeled the label down in slow strips. "I didn't figure it out. I remember it." He looked at Bobby and Bobby didn't say anything and he looked away. "You thought that was me because it was me. She got it all out of me, Bobby. All of it. What the fuck, why not? I was there for the picking."

"Jesus Christ."

"And it hurt, Bobby, it fucking hurt, you have no idea. You'd think..." He smiled. "You'd think having all your bones broken hurts but not like that, not even close. And I knew why she was doing it. She didn't share the whole plan with me but I knew it was for Sam. She couldn't kill him so she had to find another way to get to him. Pretty fucking brilliant. Me locked up in hell and her playing house with Sam. Jesus..." He grimaced and wiped a hand over his face. "Driving my car too? It just gets better and better."

"There's more to the story, Dean. It doesn't end there."

"Well I'm here so I figured there was."

"You wanna go inside and hear the rest of it or sit out here and freeze our asses off?"

Dean looked at him. "Let's go."

He stood up and Bobby opened the back door and pointed at the bottle on the board floor.

"Bring that."

* * *

A hunter's never going to make it if he doesn't rely on hunches now and then and the one smart thing Bobby did during that whole week that Sam and Dean stayed with him was lie to them about Dean's body. They asked where it was and Bobby told them that the spells hadn't held and he'd had to burn the body. The lie came easy to him and he felt a strange relief when he told it and an even greater relief when they believed it.

They left and the year guttered out. By the beginning of 2011 things started getting bad as if a whole army of demons had woken up. Bobby heard of hunters getting attacked or killed, one after the other, everyone Bobby knew. Jo Harvelle turned up half dead at her mother's house one night and Bobby helped them get out of the country into Canada though where they went from there he didn't know. He left messages for Sam and Dean and never got a response and after a while he began to think they were dead too. By the middle of the year Bobby had been driven out of South Dakota by demons and dust storms and he was on the run and had cast off all his old phone numbers so if Sam or Dean ever called him he wouldn't have known.

The one connection Bobby had to his old life was a post office box in Brainerd, Minnesota, the last of several that he'd had scattered around the country under different names. He showed up there in September to pay the fee on it and found inside it a postcard of Santa Cruz, California. On the back was a six week old postmark and a phone number and two words driven hard into the paper and underlined: NOT HIM.

Bobby left the post office and went and sat in his car and stared at the postcard. Finally he called the number on the card and he heard Sam's voice. The call went to voicemail. Two hours later Sam called him back. By then Bobby was sitting in a motel room in Duluth with salt piled up across the doors and windows and a shotgun in his lap.

"It's not him," Sam said. "It's not Dean."

"Come and see me," Bobby said.

"I can't. They could follow me."

"Find a way," Bobby said.

Three days later they met in the nave of a church in Duluth and even in that low stained-glass light Sam looked twenty years older and little like the kid that Bobby had known.

"Consecrated ground," he said. "I'm surprised I can even walk in here."

He wouldn't tell Bobby anything except that he knew what he'd been living with was not his brother and so Dean was still in hell, had been in hell all this time. Bobby told Sam to stay with him and Bobby smiled and shook his head and said that he was going back.

"I've been wasting my time with every useless fucking demon I could find and now I've got her, Bobby, right where I want her. She's gonna lead me right to him, I know she is."

"Are you crazy? Once she figures out you know, what do you think she's gonna do?"

"She's not gonna figure it out. Her guard is way down right now, I just need to keep it there and wait."

"You don't know what you're doing," Bobby said.

"I have no choice. He's been down there for three years, three years, Bobby. I've gotta get him out."

"What'll you do with him if you do?" Bobby asked and watched Sam. Wary. "He can't come back like you knew him, Sam."

"I don't care," Sam said. "I just want him out of there, like Dad. Just...free."

Bobby almost told Sam then about Dean's body in Mississippi. But too many things had happened and too much was uncertain and he didn't. Couldn't. They parted in Duluth and Bobby thought of following Sam but he waited until he thought it was safe and he went to Catherine Parsons instead. He went upstairs and sat beside the bed and took Dean's warm but lifeless hand in his own and he told him everything. And finished with a prayer, though whether it was to Dean or God or Sam or someone else altogether he couldn't say.

"Please let me do the right thing here. Please."

* * *

In June of 2012 Bobby got a last call from Sam.

"I've got it, Bobby. I'm going in."

"What? When?"

"Tomorrow. Summer solstice, it's gotta be then. I won't get another chance."

"Sam, for Christ's sake..."

"I might not talk to you again."

"Sam, wait..."

"I'll tell Dean you're okay. I love you, Bobby," he said and hung up. Bobby dialed the number back and it rang and rang and he was finally able to get an operator who traced the number to a pay phone in Barstow, California. And he stood there with the phone growing sweaty in his hand and then he got behind the wheel of the militia-issue sedan he'd rigged up for himself and he redlined that thing all the way to Mississippi.

* * *

Summer solstice came and went. It grew thick and hot outside as June turned into July and Dean did not stir. Bobby put his fingers on Dean's neck and there was nothing and he laid his hand on Dean's chest and it was still. He left Catherine Parsons with a semi-automatic handgun and a cartridge of silver bullets and went on the road to find Sam, if he was still on earth at all.

In Barstow he finally sat down beside the pay phone outside a derelict gas station and he put his head in his hands and cried. Crazy old man.

* * *

He heard of the fire in Rena Lara on an Ehrlich Defense newsfeed. He made it there by the second day of September and lied himself into the Clarksdale morgue and saw the three burned bodies.

Catherine Parsons was in the first drawer that the medical examiner opened for him. Her blackened corpse lay there and her skull was horribly caved in and Bobby touched her and turned her dried head to look at where the back of it should have been.

"What in the hell did this?" he asked the medical examiner.

"Can't account for it, sir."

"You can't account for it?"

"Nossir."

"Well, I can. Somebody was having a little fun here. You make sure and write that up, that somebody desecrated this woman's body. Understand?"

"Yessir."

"There were two others?"

"Yessir."

"They've been ID'd?"

"Nossir, just the woman. Funny old gal, lived over in Rena Lara. There were some stories about her but you know how people talk." He pulled out another drawer and Bobby bent down to the body and then looked up.

"Where's the third?"

"Right over here sir."

Bobby held his breath and the medical examiner opened the third drawer. Bobby leaned over the charred remains and studied them and he finally exhaled and straightened up.

"Thanks for your help," he said to the medical examiner and walked out.

* * *

It took him two days to track Dean to the old house twenty miles from Rena Lara and by then the place had been deserted and ransacked. He found the black dog's carcass in the backyard and the Devil's Trap on the kitchen floor and bandages and bloody clothing and he crouched down in the Devil's Trap and looked around helplessly and said, "Goddamnit, Dean," and there was no one to hear him but the flies.

* * *

Bobby had lit a kerosene lamp because he hadn't been able to keep talking about these things in the dark. Now he was finished and he sat there staring at the burning wick and smoky chimney and Dean sat across from him and didn't say anything. He was holding the postcard that Bobby had gotten from Sam and was tracing his fingers over the writing and the ashes rustled and shifted in the stove and made the only sound.

Finally Dean said, "Sam doesn't know I'm alive."

"I don't see how he could."

"We don't know if Sam's alive."

"I never heard from him after June."

Dean shook his head. "I saw him, Bobby. I saw him in hell."

"I believe you."

"He walked out of there with me, I know he did, he..." Dean pressed a hand to his mouth and squeezed his eyes shut, trying to remember. "He turned around and I could touch him I could almost touch him and then..."

There had been a fleeting moment when Sam had turned and reached out to him and Dean had felt him for the first time. And there had been sunlight and he'd said Sam's name, he'd spoken and Sam had heard him. He'd heard him. Then Dean had felt a blow as if he'd been thrown from a height and hit solid concrete and he was blind and sick and in his own body with everything behind him fading to black and he'd slept. For the first time in eternity, he'd slept.

"Dean?"

"I woke up in Mississippi. I didn't even know where I was. I thought I was still in hell. I knew there was someone with me and she took care of me...I couldn't talk. I could barely see. She got me out of the house and told me to run..." He looked up at Bobby. "They killed her. Shot her."

"I know. I don't know how they found her. You must've just been so fresh out that you were easy to track."

"They burned the place too."

Bobby shook his head. "She was a firestarter among other things. Whole place must've gone up when she died. That can happen with people like her."

"Hell of a thank you, huh?"

"There was nothing you could've done. I shouldn't've left. That's on my head, Dean, not yours."

"Does it matter?"

Bobby stood up. He took the empty whiskey bottle in one hand and the cups in the other. "It's been a hell of a long night. Practically morning. Why don't you get some sleep? That's what I'm gonna do, I'm all talked out."

Dean nodded and didn't look at him and Bobby went in the kitchen and put the things away and came back.

"Are you gonna be okay?"

"Yeah," Dean said and he looked up at Bobby. "We're going to California."

"Yeah, I figured you were gonna say that."

"Okay."

Bobby turned to go and at the bedroom door he turned around.

"I've talked more tonight than I have in the last twenty years, but I got one more thing to say."

"All right."

Bobby took a deep breath and let it out and cleared his throat and looked at Dean and Dean got the feeling he was about to hear a speech Bobby had rehearsed to himself and wanted to get right.

"I've known you and Sam since you were kids. And Sam...I love Sam. But you... you're." He sighed and ran his hand up the back of his neck and looked away and looked back at Dean. "At least three times already I thought I lost you and I'm not going through that again. I am too goddamn old for this. You try to do this thing on your own, you try...you even think about trying to go after Sam by yourself and I will break both your legs to keep you here if I have to. You got that?"

Dean put his head down and nodded and looked up. "Yeah. Okay, Bobby."

"Okay. You better believe okay. Now get some sleep."

"Yes, sir."

"And don't give me that sir shit," he said and went to bed.

* * *

Bobby walked in the door and threw something at him.

"You're kidding, right?"

"No. I don't want you getting picked out on the first security cam we run into. It's not just demons that're after you, y'know."

"Gee, Bobby is this really my custom color?"

"Just get in there and slap it on. You gonna need help?"

"No, but you can give me a nice mani-pedi while my color sets." He grinned at him.

"Smartass," Bobby said.

Dean got up and went in the bathroom and frowned over the haircolor instructions. He glanced up at himself in the mirror and muttered, "This is stupid..." and then he stood there and stared at himself. He had gray all through his hair. He hadn't noticed it before.

* * *

They tried to find Lilith with Bobby's torquetum and the pointer remained completely still.

"She's in hell."

"No," Bobby said. "It hasn't moved in years. Not for her anyway."

"Not even when Sam was with her?"

"Not even then."

Dean looked down at the map. His eyes roamed from West Virginia to Minnesota to California, Santa Cruz and Barstow.

He said, "Guess it's easy to hide when you're someone else."

* * *

"Don't lose that," Bobby said. "I'm not gonna be able to get you another one."

Dean looked down at the ID book in his hand. Gary had had one just like it. His new name was Michael Ellis.

"We couldn't have gone with Robert Plant or something?"

"This ain't just some fake ID, this is state of the art identity trafficking. Michael Ellis was real, all that info on him is real. The only thing fake is your picture. Like I said, don't lose it...Michael."

"How bad is it? I mean, is it full-on Big Brother or what?"

"They think it is but the security net's so big there's plenty of holes in it. We've just gotta keep our heads down and stay clear of the cities. We'll go west as far as we can and then cut north and down. Middle of the country's one big dustbowl and God knows we can't go anywhere near Texas."

"Yeah, God knows." He looked at Bobby. "What do we worry about more? Demons or people?"

"Both. There ain't much difference these days."

"Bobby."

"What?"

"All this...this, what's been going on. Are demons behind this? Because I gotta tell you I was only on the road for a few days and the shit I saw...the things I heard..." He shook his head. "How did it get this bad?"

"I don't know, Dean. It's been coming to this for a long time and I don't think Lilith showing up when she did was some coincidence. I think she's been waiting for this. They've all been waiting."

"Ruby said Sam could destroy Lilith without moving a muscle."

"Who even knows if that was true?"

"What if it was?"

Bobby shrugged. "What're you getting at, Dean?"

"If Sam could've stopped her and didn't...he let the world go to hell for me, Bobby. Maybe now it's too late."

"No," Bobby said. "No...no. You don't know anything like that." He shook his head. "No."

How many people have to die so that you can live?

"Okay, Bobby. I guess you're right."

* * *

The night before they left West Virginia he dreamt of himself in a place that he'd never seen before, a crumbling apartment building whose walls were covered in violent graffiti and stairwells were filled with garbage. The lights were out and there were people in the shadows begging for help but he couldn't stop for any of them, he could only keep going up. At the top of the stairs was a woman in rags and she said, inside, inside, and motioned him towards an apartment whose door was standing open. There was a window in the hallway and outside he saw plains turned to ash and cities burning in the distance and inside the apartment there was a mattress on the floor and Sam was lying on it, bloody and dead and his own hands were full of blood.

He woke up sweating and shaken and stumbled through the dark cabin into the kitchen where he bent over the sink thinking he was going to throw up. He turned on the tap before remembering they didn't work and then Bobby was beside him with a battery lantern and a cup of water.

"Nightmare?"

"Yeah," Dean said. He took the cup and saw Bobby studying him in the pale light.

"We don't have to go tomorrow."

"No. We have to go."

"You've been in a pretty bad way. Maybe you need more time."

Dean shook his head. "There is no more time, Bobby."

"Okay," Bobby said. He put a hand on Dean's back. "All right."

They left before dawn, headed west.

Chapter Text

Dean woke up with a hard start and braced an arm on the door handle.

"All right?" Bobby asked.

"Yeah," Dean said.

"You feel like driving?"

Dean scrubbed a hand over his eyes. "Yeah, if I could get some caffeine first. Where are we?"

"North Dakota. Crossed the border about half an hour ago."

"Guess that explains the sleet."

"We'll pull off in the next town, get some coffee, something to eat."

"Okay."

They drove without speaking against the sound of the sedan's wheels on the asphalt and the ice hitting the window and the muted stutter of the police scanner. It was the middle of the afternoon but dusky dark and they passed one car traveling in the opposite direction and then had the road to themselves.

Bobby glanced at Dean and looked back at the road. "It's coming back, isn't it?"

"What is?"

"Hell. That's all coming back."

Dean shook his head. "Not all of it. But yeah, I have these...dreams, nightmares whatever you wanna call them, only I know they're not dreams. They're different."

"You ever wanna talk about it, you know..." He glanced at Dean again. "You know."

Dean grinned. "Well thanks, Dr. Phil."

"I mean it y'jackass."

"I know," Dean said. He watched sleet bounce off the windshield and pit through the headlights and could feel Bobby sitting there waiting for him to say something. After a while he said, "They told me he was dead."

"Aw, you know demons..."

"Lie. They lie."

"Right."

"Only they don't," Dean said. "You said if I wanted to talk about hell...I don't. But I'll tell you it's not the lies they get you with, it's the truth. They know every goddamn thing you ever did and every mistake you ever made and they know that nothing'll tear you apart like the truth."

"Well, Sam was alive and kicking in June, that's all I know, so if they were telling you he was dead before that..."

"Before what? Four months ago up here wasn't four months ago down there. You couldn't say this happened yesterday or last week or last year because it was always the same time but it was also no time." He stared out the window, biting his lip. "I know that sounds crazy."

"It sounds like hell," Bobby said and Dean coughed out a laugh and rubbed the back of his neck. Bobby said, "Dean," and Dean looked over at him. "Don't you think if Sam was dead you'd know it?"

"What, like I'd...I'd know it in my heart? Come on, Bobby."

"Yeah. Yeah, Dean, I do think you'd know it." Bobby glanced at him. "Do you think he's dead? Do you really believe that?" Dean didn't say anything and Bobby asked him again and Dean closed his eyes and said, "No. But I don't...something's wrong, Bobby."

"Well, kid," he said and he was quiet for such a long time that Dean thought that was all he had to say. Then he said, "When's it ever been right?" He reached out and clapped Dean on the knee but didn't look at him and neither of them said anything else.

* * *

It was close to three in the morning when they pulled into a truckstop near Hardin, Montana. Bobby went in for coffee and Dean climbed into the passenger seat. It was windy outside and the steel pulleys on the gas station flags smacked against the poles with a hollow rhythm and the car rocked in the wind. Dean was dozing until a sharp rap on the window jolted him awake. He looked out and saw a hatchet-faced girl shivering there in a short skirt and a red fur jacket and her hair was snapping around in the wind. Lot lizard.

"Can you put down the window?"

He shook his head and waved her off.

"I just want to talk, that's all."

Dean took out his wallet and pulled out a ten-dollar bill and rolled down the window and handed it to her. "Go and warm up. Get yourself a cup of coffee."

"I just wanna talk. Where's your dad?"

"My dad?"

"The guy you come in here with."

"Why're you asking?"

"Is he all right?"

"All right?"

"Is he all right, you ain't a couple a weirdos or nothin are you?"

Dean looked her up and down. Pathetic-looking thing. About nineteen going on fifty, standing there hugging herself and bouncing from one foot to the other to stay warm. "What's the matter?"

She tossed her head in some direction over her shoulder. "I got three guys over there won't leave me alone. Say they wanna make a movie but I don't wanna make no movie with em and I need a ride outta here with someone who ain't gonna turn outta be crazy too. I seen you two come in and you look all right. Just gimme a ride outta here an I'll do whatever you want for free an if you don't want nothin I'll pay you just get me outta here."

"Listen..."

"Stacey, my name's Stacey, come on mister."

Dean saw Bobby coming across the parking lot with two cups of coffee. Bobby was giving him a look and Dean held up his hands in a gesture of helplessness. He turned back to Stacey and she wasn't looking at him anymore. She was facing Bobby and her hand was under her jacket and Dean lunged for the doorhandle and shoved the sedan's heavy door into her side but she'd already fired. The sound of the shot was a thin, flat crack in the wind.

"Bobby!"

Bobby had fallen between the parked cars and one of the coffee cups was rolling away on the asphalt spewing its contents and Stacey grabbed Dean's leg and her eyes were just two rounds of charcoal in her head. He kicked her and her head rapped off the pavement and she laughed and held onto him. He pulled out a hipflask of holy water and upended it on her and she stopped laughing and started screaming. She dropped the gun and Dean grabbed it and set off at a dead run across the parking lot.

"Bobby...Bobby..." Bobby was lying on his side and he was conscious. Dean turned him over and the front of his shirt was orange under the parking lot's yellow arclights and the pavement beneath him was slicked with blood. Oh God, Dean thought. Oh my God.

"Dean..."

"Come on," Dean said and he got an arm under Bobby and pulled him up and Bobby groaned.

"Fuck, that hurts."

"I know, I know. Come on."

They made it to the car and Stacey was there keening on her hands and knees and Dean kicked her away and got Bobby in the passenger seat. "Two more," Bobby wheezed and Dean looked up and saw two men running across the parking lot. Bobby handed the shotgun up to him and Dean sighted it and fired off two shells of rock salt and that bought him enough time to round the sedan's hood. He was behind the wheel and the men were back on their feet and Stacey lunged in snarling through the open passenger window.

"Bobby, move!" Dean said and he pumped the shotgun and blasted her in the face. She fell off the side of the car like the husk of an insect and Dean pulled out and sawed the car around and made for the onramp and in the rearview mirror people or demons were running across the parking lot.

"Bobby, say something."

"I thought you could see them."

Dean shook his head. "She just looked like a girl to me. I don't know what happened."

"You've been out too long." He doubled over and caught his breath and said, "Where're you going?"

"Billings."

"No hospital."

"What?"

"First place they'll look," Bobby said, then said, "Get off the interstate," and passed out.

* * *

He took Route 87 north and as he drove he heard about the shooting on the radio and the police scanner and they had a description of the car and of Bobby and himself. He left the road at Roundup and pulled into the shadows of a loading dock in an abandoned industrial park. Beside him Bobby was white and sweating and Dean gave him a shot of Dilaudid and sat with the heels of his hands pressed to the wadded up gauze over Bobby's stomach.

"It's gonna be okay," Dean said. "It'll be okay."

"Yeah," Bobby said.

"We have to go to the hospital."

Bobby rolled his head towards Dean. "That's a one way ticket. For both of us."

"No...no. I'll figure something out."

Bobby closed his eyes and smiled. "It ain't like the old days, kid. You can't...there's militia stationed in every hospital. There'll be demons looking for you to bring me in too." He opened his eyes. "And you can't tell em apart."

"I'm not letting you die out here."

"No...listen." He paused and caught his breath and Dean leaned towards him because Bobby's voice was faint and tired. "Duluth...there's a place in Duluth."

"Duluth?"

"Yeah. Hospital. Underground. No one knows about it...no one who shouldn't know. There were hunters there too, last time. Safe."

"Bobby, that's almost a thousand miles from here."

"I'll keep breathing, you just drive. Okay?"

"Okay," Dean said. He wrapped gauze tight around Bobby's stomach and got back behind the wheel and headed east for Minnesota.

* * *

He drove straight through the dusted-out country they had gone north to avoid and the road was so obscured by dirt there seemed to be no road at all. The sky grew lighter but the sun was veiled by a brown haze and could not be seen. The houses and gas stations and convenience stores had been abandoned to the storms and some were buried in dust up to the tops of their doors and there were no people at all. Bobby fell so quiet that Dean thought he had died. He put his right hand over Bobby's wrist and felt a pulse still beating there and he could only think don't die over and over. He kept going east and with every mile California and Sam became farther away.

* * *

He came into Duluth in the late afternoon, taking a crisscrossing route of local streets to avoid the militia checkpoints on the highways. The city was dark with a heavy lake fog and there were gulls crying overhead but the streets were quiet. Dean drove through an old part of town that sloped up steeply from the waterfront until he came to a redbrick warehouse from the century before last, caged with sagging fire escapes. The wired panes of its arching windows were opaque with age and dirt and the iron door was rusted and there was no sign of life about the place. Dean sat there staring at it and was sure that Bobby had made some mistake until Bobby whispered, "Around to the back."

Behind the warehouse there were derelict railroad tracks paralleling a loading platform and Dean stopped the car in a thick patch of weeds. Beneath the loading platform were more weeds and trash and a crumbling detritus of unknown origin and a tin sign that pointed the way to a fallout shelter, its three yellow radiation triangles pitted and pocked with rust. Dean got out of the car and looked around. He had the feeling of being watched.

"What do you want?"

There was a man sitting on a milkcrate in the weeds beneath the fallout shelter sign. Wrapped up in an old coat and blanket and his hands were stuck in his armpits for warmth and he blended into the trashy surroundings so well that Dean had not even seen him until he spoke.

"Is this the hospital?"

"Hospital?"

Dean studied the man. "My friend's been shot and I can't take him to a hospital. He told me to come here." The man had no reaction and Dean said, "His name's Singer. Bobby Singer."

The man got up off the milkcrate as if someone had shot a charge through it and came straight to the car with such urgency that Dean let himself be pushed aside so that the man could lean into the car. He said, "Shit," and stood up and looked at Dean. "Drive down a few yards that way and there's a garage bay. We'll open it up for you."

Dean nodded and he did what the man told him and pulled up before a truck-sized garage door that looked as if it hadn't been opened in decades. It was opened now and he drove in.

* * *

Dean didn't even have time to turn off the ignition before they were pulling Bobby out of the car, a man and a woman and the man who'd been outside and then Dean himself was pulled out of the car by two armed men who whirled him around and frisked him.

"What the fuck?" Dean said. He was splayed out across the hood of the car and Bobby was being wheeled away. "Get off me!"

"No weapons," one of the men said from behind and he pulled the pistol out of Dean's belt and the knife from his boot and then the man from outside was running over in his tramp's clothing waving his hands.

"He's all right, he's with someone I know. He's good."

"You sure?"

"Yeah. Let him go."

Dean straightened up and one of the men handed his weapons back to him and said, "Sorry," and Dean took them without a word and set off after Bobby. He didn't know where they had taken him. He was in a gray, high-ceilinged industrial space with a concrete floor and a collection of vehicles parked at haphazard angles. In the direction they'd taken Bobby Dean could make out the wire cage of a freight elevator and then the man from outside was running along beside him and tugging on his elbow.

"This way," he said. "It'll take the elevator forever to come back down."

They took the stairs and the man said his name was Gus and on the third floor Gus led him through a noisy maze of beds and wheelchairs and sick and injured people to a curtained area and here he put his hand on Dean's chest and held him back.

"Let them work," he said. Bobby was on the table. There was not enough light. There were drifts of Bobby's clothes and bloody gauze on the floor. "Why don't you come with me and get cleaned up?"

Dean shook his head. "No," he said. They pulled a bullet out of Bobby and cleaned out the wound and cleaned him off. Then they put him in a hospital gown and took him off the table and put him into a bed and Dean stayed with him.

* * *

It was very much later and the little light coming in through the windows had vanished. Dean stood beside Bobby's bed until he finally had to sit down on the floor. He put his back against the wall and drew his knees up and folded his hands over them. There was blood caked under his nails and in the creases of his knuckles. The floor was cold and he could feel the chill of the brick wall through his clothes. There was no heat and very little light. Gus brought him a cup of coffee and hunkered down on the floor in front of Dean.

"He's gonna be all right."

"That's what they said. He'll be here a while though."

"Well, he's a tough old bastard but he's no kid, either. How the hell did he get shot, anyway?"

Dean shrugged. "Some...truckstop hooker in Montana. I don't know. Lot of crazies out there."

"Crazy or possessed?"

Dean raised an eyebrow over the cup's styrofoam rim. "Possessed?"

"Listen," Gus said and leaned towards Dean. "I know what Bobby Singer does for a living. Or a calling or whatever you want to call it. I used to be in that line of work myself."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah. And if you're Bobby's friend, you know the score. So what was it?"

"At the truckstop?"

"Yeah."

Dean put the coffee cup down and sighed and ran a hand over his face. "Demon. I mean it was a girl, but she was possessed. There were others but we got outta there before they could join the party."

"So they're looking for you?" Gus said and Dean nodded. "Fuckin Bobby. I told him last time I saw him he was gonna get himself killed. Asked him to stay here. There's other ways to help people besides hunting demons and God, Satan and everyone in between knows how fuckin outnumbered we are now. The jig, as they say, is up."

"I don't even know why she shot him. Why didn't she shoot me?"

"I'm sure she would've gotten around to it."

"No, I mean..." Dean began and then couldn't go on. "I don't know. I was an easier target."

"Well, if you want some advice, take this as your wake-up call. This whole thing, this is all over with."

"What is?"

"Hunting. Used to be things were even. You could've even have said we had the upper hand. But now? What are we gonna do? Run around with holy water when they're coming at us with goddamn militias?"

"So we let the world go to hell?"

Gus shrugged. "I'm thinking that's where it's been headed all along. Maybe we stemmed the tide a little but..." He shook his head. "There's no stopping it now. We can just try to hold on, take care of each other. You know?"

Dean laughed and leaned his head against the wall. "I don't know a goddamn thing," he said. "I don't think I ever did."

* * *

Gus left him alone and Dean sat there and stared up into the high black vault of the ceiling. There were chains hanging there, the remnants of some long-forgotten rustbelt industry and they were moving in a draft and Dean could hear them glancing off each other with a hard, cold sound that made him feel vaguely sick. He looked away and closed his eyes but he couldn't sleep. He got up and walked around Bobby's bed and looked at him. Bobby was still and pale but his heart rate was steady. Dean sat at the foot of the bed and rubbed warmth back into his arms and listened to Bobby's monitor and the other monitors around him and the sound of people in pain and the hushed voices of those who tried to comfort them.

Dean looked out over the dim hospital ward and understood at last that the world he'd known before he died was gone and he thought about his last year and all the things Ruby had said about Sam's power against Lilith and also the things Dean had told Sam before he died. It seemed to him now that he had been wrong about everything, all wrong. The world had rotted away while he had rotted in hell and though Sam might have been able to stop it he hadn't and he hadn't because his brother had asked him not to. Then left him. And for another year Sam had been with Lilith thinking she was his brother all that time and what had she asked him to do? What advice had she had for someone who had been recruited from his cradle to destroy her?

Dean stood up as if something had pulled him to his feet and he looked at Bobby and felt his pulse and then turned and walked across the ward and took the stairs down to the garage. He found the car they had come in and took some things out of the trunk and went to find a place where no one would see him or what he had to do.

* * *

Dean went back upstairs. It was very late and the ward was quiet. Bobby's bed was at the far end of the ward and by the time Dean got there he felt as if he had walked miles. The bed had no hospital rails and Dean sat on the edge. After a while he slid down to the floor and put his arms on the bed and his head on his arms and closed his eyes.

He felt Bobby's hand on his head and he opened his eyes but didn't look up. For a few minutes he just lay there and Bobby didn't take his hand away and neither of them said anything. Then Dean raised his head and Bobby's hand fell to the side of Dean's face.

"How do you feel?"

"Better'n you look. What's wrong?"

Dean took Bobby's hand and put it down on the bed and looked away. "I found him."

Bobby shook his head. "How?"

A brittle smile broke Dean's face. "That thing with the pendulum."

"Torquetum's for finding demons, Dean."

Dean looked at Bobby. He said, "I know," and they just stared at each other. Bobby put his hand on Dean's arm and Dean stood up and walked away.

* * *

He stayed in Duluth for two days and they barely spoke about it. On the afternoon of the second day Bobby was sitting up in bed eating applesauce and he grimaced and put the spoon down.

"Blech," he said. "Baby food."

"Want me to run out and get you a steak?"

"Yeah, wouldja?" He looked at Dean in the chair beside the bed and Dean smiled but Bobby didn't and Dean sat up straight.

"What's the matter?"

"Gus will get you a car," Bobby said. "I already talked to him about it. You should be fine with the ID I gave you in West Virginia, no one's made that yet."

"Bobby..."

"Stay off the interstates, avoid the cities as much as you can. You probably can't stay in a motel now so make sure you have some blankets in the backseat. But get some sleep for chrissake, don't try to do it in one shot or you're gonna drive yourself off an overpass."

"Bobby, I'm not leaving."

"I don't know how in hell you're gonna get over the border but there's ways to do it. Talk to Gus, he thinks he can hook you up in Arizona..."

"Okay, stop talking, all right? I'm not going anywhere."

"Yeah, y'are," he said. "You don't have half the poker face you think you do. I appreciate you sticking around to babysit me but there's plenty of folks here to do that."

Dean looked down and looked up with half a smile. "I thought you were gonna break both my legs if I tried to go it alone."

"Well, that was then. Situation's changed. Gotta roll with the punches."

"That's all we ever do."

"That's all anyone does," Bobby said. "Go talk to Gus. Come and see me before you go."

* * *

Dean talked to Gus. He spent one last night in the hospital and before dawn he went to say goodbye to Bobby. Bobby was awake and sitting up and he shook his head when he saw Dean. "I knew the day John Winchester dumped two rugrats on my couch it was gonna be nothing but trouble."

"Should've had better aim with the buckshot."

"No shit. Gus outfitted you? Salt, holy water..."

"Yeah."

"Ammo?"

"Everything short of a suitcase bomb, yeah."

"He's a good guy, Gus."

"I can see that."

"Knows his shit."

"Yeah."

"Okay, well..." Bobby said. "You be careful."

"Bobby..." Dean said.

"He's your brother, Dean," Bobby said. "I know what that means for you."

"Do you want me to stay?"

"Do you want to stay?"

"Yes," he said. Almost laughing. "But I can't."

"I know it," Bobby said. He closed his eyes. "Get the hell outta here, kid. I've been through enough lately, don't need to start bawling on top of it."

Dean bent over and put his head on Bobby's shoulder and Bobby put an arm around him. "Tell me I'm gonna see you again," Bobby said.

"You'll see me. Sam too."

"Good enough," Bobby said. He held onto Dean for a moment longer and then let him go. Downstairs Gus was waiting with the car keys. Dawn was breaking when Dean pulled out of the garage and the day was fresh and autumn cool and gulls were wheeling out over the city.

* * *

He drove sixteen hours in one hard backroad haul from Duluth to the energy fields of southern Wyoming and finally parked behind the concrete outbuildings of an abandoned pumping station in Judas Valley. He could see gas flares burning in the distance but here the old grasshopper rig was a still black monolith against the night sky.

He was tired but he couldn't sleep and he turned on the radio and skimmed over the FM dial and then the AM. The news he heard was very bad. It had been some six weeks since he had left Buddy Lennox's house in Mississippi and the country had deteriorated in that time and he thought of Lilith waiting for this. Of hell, waiting for this.

There were stations broadcasting in Spanish and he thought he might be picking them up from Mexico already and he had a sudden vivid memory of Sam about eight years old and telling him that at night the AM signal traveled over skywave not groundwave and some AM stations were so powerful at night that they weren't even allowed to broadcast. When they had been kids the Impala had only had the original AM radio with its big chrome pushbuttons and they'd spent countless nights in that car listening to country music and sports talk and Jesus freaks and singsong French from the Canadian stations and soccer games from broadcasters way over the Mexican border. That was so long ago that Dean could hardly believe that he and Sam had ever been those children. He dialed past an angry voice and turned back and listened to a preacher hectoring about the coming tribulations and the end of days and how the earth would burn and burn in the everlasting lake of fire. For a minute Dean sat there and listened and then he kicked the door open and got out and walked out past the derrick toward the road. He heard nothing but the low whine of the wind over the flat earth of those southern plains and the ghostly chatter of the radio behind him yet for all that it was quiet it was not peaceful. He felt so close to hell it was as though the pit were about to open up at his feet and swallow him and God. Dear God, he wanted to see his brother one last time.

Orange fire flared on the horizon and there were no stars. After a while Dean went back to the car and turned off the radio and knew that he would never sleep and so he got back on the road.

* * *

He packed up what he could carry and abandoned the car in Arizona at the northern edge of the Yuma Desert. Twenty-five miles to the Mexican border. He hadn't slept in almost thirty-six hours and had barely eaten. He waited until dusk and then started out across the desert. The air smelled wet and after dark it began to drizzle then to rain then to downpour. There was no road and the gray earth was gullying into mud under his boots and that could mean a flash flood and he was in very low ground. He knew there were low hills half a mile to the west and he struck the hills as the rain was at its worst and felt his way over the rocks. He lost his footing and fell clutching at ocotillio and creosote roots and ricocheting off jagged stones until he hit bottom winded and rolled over to catch his breath while the rain pounded on his back.

When does it rain in the desert? he thought. When the fuck does it ever fucking RAIN?

He pulled himself up and began ascending again on his hands and knees. He saw the bus at the top of the narrow gorge, seated on high ground and butted up against a rock wall, an ancient Volkswagen camper van that must have been sitting there for decades, the tires long since rotted out from underneath it and the windows opaque with age but unbroken. My lucky day, he thought and pulled himself into the van. He made one sweep around with the flashlight and then another and on the second he saw the man crouched in the corner with a pistol aimed at him.

"Who are you?" the man said.

"No one."

"What are you doing here?"

"Same as you."

"Yeah? What's that?"

"Trying not to drown." It was cold in the van and Dean was soaked through to the skin and he was shivering. The flashlight shook in his hand and in its wavering beam he saw the front of the man's jacket shift and part and a child's hand and eyes appeared. Dean looked at the child and then looked at the man and put his other hand up. "I'm sorry," he said. "I'm not gonna be any trouble to you. I'm just trying to get to the border and I got caught out."

"Are you armed?"

"Yes."

"In the bag or carrying?"

"Both."

"Put the bag down on the floor and put anything else you got on you on top of the bag and back away from it. And don't do anything stupid because I will shoot you."

"Got it," Dean said. He put the flashlight down and unshouldered the bag and took the one gun out of its shoulder-holster and the other from the small of his back and crossed them on top of the bag and put his hands up and stepped away. "All right?"

"Fine," the man said. "Sit over there."

The van's seats had been stripped out and Dean sat down in the van's opposite corner with his back to the sheetmetal wall. From across the van he heard the child's muffled voice, "Daddy," and the man bent his head and said something and then looked at Dean. "I'm going to lower this gun," he said. "But I want you to know it's right here."

"Okay," Dean said. The man set the gun down and the child turned in his father's lap and now Dean could see that he was a little boy, about five years old. The man stroked his son's head and the boy stared at Dean in the pale flashlight glow and Dean smiled at him.

* * *

After a while the man said that he could hear Dean's teeth chattering.

"Sorry about that."

"Catch," the man said and threw a blanket at him.

"Thanks," Dean said. He took off his wet jacket and wrapped himself in the blanket and looked at the man. The flashlight on the floor threw a white streak of light across the van. "Can you turn that off?" Dean said. "I don't want it to burn out."

The man didn't say anything but he leaned across the floor and the little boy stretched out his hand and picked up the flashlight and gave it to his father and he switched it off. They sat in the dark.

Dean put his head against the wall and closed his eyes and listened to the rain drum on the roof and run in little rivers through the rocks down towards the desert floor. He was still cold and the gunshot wound in his back had started aching. The rain slacked off and wind hooted through the hills and across the valley. Dean didn't fall asleep but he was dozing when light struck his face and he shaded his eyes and squinted at the man.

"Hey," the man said.

"What?"

"Do you know what you're doing?"

"About what?"

"Getting over the border."

"I'm the one sitting here unarmed," Dean said. "Not for nothing but you look like you can take care of yourself."

The man turned the flashlight up so that the glare wasn't in Dean's eyes and Dean saw that the little boy was asleep against his father's chest with his hands folded under his chin and the man was staring at him.

"My name is Jim," he whispered. "I'm a high school teacher from Lubbock."

"Well," Dean said. "This ain't Lubbock."

"I'm in trouble," Jim said and when Dean didn't say anything he kept talking. "I had a website, you know? I had this stupid, stupid website and they told me to shut it down and I didn't."

"Who told you?"

"The guys who tell you these things," Jim said. "You been to Texas lately?"

"Yeah, I've been to Texas."

Jim nodded. "Rangers. You know about the rangers?"

"State militia."

"They came to the house a week ago. Ten o'clock at night. Took the computer, printer, everything then told us to get in the car. We wouldn't do it and my wife picked up the phone and they told her to put it down and she didn't and they..." He dropped his voice so low that Dean could barely hear him. "They shot her. Right in front of Alex, he was standing there in his pajamas, in his fucking pajamas..." He put his face down on the boy's head and sat there.

"I'm sorry," Dean said.

"I got away with Alex when they were moving us. I don't even know where we were going." He looked at Dean. "My picture was on the news. It was all over the web. They said I killed my wife and kidnapped my son and I have to get to Mexico and I don't..." He shook his head. "I'm a schoolteacher, for Christ's sake."

Dean didn't say anything. He looked out of the van's dirty windows and saw pale moonlight shining on the desert. He looked back at Jim and after a while he said, "What else are you?"

"What?"

"Why did you tell me all that?"

"Because I need help, that's why. Jesus Christ..."

"What makes you think I can help you? I'm just a guy who came in out of the rain."

"I don't know," Jim said. "You just...you don't look like a schoolteacher."

Dean pulled the flask of holy water from his jacket and skidded it across the floor at Jim. "Drink that," he said.

"What is it?"

"It's water. It's just water. Holy water."

"Holy water?"

"I'm born again. Like to keep righteous company."

"Since when do born agains carry holy water around?"

"Humor me."

Jim picked up the flask and unscrewed the cap and sniffed at it. "Holy water?"

"Just a sip," Dean said.

Jim licked his lips and tipped the flask into his mouth and took a swig and swallowed it. He looked at Dean and put the cap back on.

"How're you feeling?" Dean asked.

"Um...fine. How should I be feeling?"

"Fine," Dean said. "You should be feeling fine." He stood up and shrugged off the blanket and folded it without looking at Jim. "There's a tunnel," he said. "About fifteen miles from here, under that wall they built along the border. It's not easy to find but that's the point. I can tell you what landmarks to look out for..."

"Can we go with you?"

Dean shook his head. "You don't want to be with me."

"I can't do this alone."

"You got this far, you're tougher than you think," Dean said. He glanced at the sleeping boy. "So is he."

"Please."

Dean sighed and stood there and rubbed the back of his neck. He looked at the man. He looked at the little boy. After a while he said, "You'll have to carry him or he'll slow us down."

"All right."

"If we leave now we should get there by dawn."

"Okay," Jim said. He shook Alex awake and the boy rubbed his eyes and looked at his father and looked at Dean. Dean crouched down and smiled at the kid.

"You ready to go to Mexico, Alex?"

"No."

"I dunno, it's pretty great...tacos, pinatas...um...wrestling?"

"I want to go home," Alex said.

"Yeah," Dean said. "I know." He thought of all the things people had said to him after his mother died and how he'd wished they would shut up and so he shut up too. He stood up and gave the blanket to Jim and put on his jacket and took his guns and bag and climbed out of the van with Jim and Alex behind him.

* * *

They tramped some fifteen miles through the desert and for a while Alex rode on his father's shoulders but he kept falling asleep and slipping off and then Jim carried him. Jim looked like he'd had even less sleep than Dean in the past week so by the time they came to the border Dean was carrying the boy. They stopped about a quarter of a mile from the border. The sky was turning gray and the first pale light of dawn was seeping over the flat country and in the distance they could see the black wall that had been built at a time when keeping Mexicans out had been a bigger problem than keeping Americans in.

"No border guards," Jim said. "That's good."

"That's bad. How can this be unpatrolled?"

"They don't know about the tunnel."

"Still," Dean said. "What do they have that we can't see?"

Jim shook his head. "I know parts of the border have unmanned drones flying patrol. They've got heat detectors, motion detectors..." He looked out over the desert. "There's no personnel here."

Dean's eyes scanned the wall. It was smooth and black and Dean couldn't imagine what it was made of but it was something that could only be breached by going over or tunneling under. Along the top of the wall he saw cameras and every few yards something like a small satellite dish but there were no guards or guard towers and the desert was quiet but for the wind. Gus had told him how to find the tunnel and from where they stood he could see the landmark of rocks that pointed the way.

He turned to Jim and handed Alex into his arms. "You follow me. If I run you run but stay behind me." Jim nodded and wrapped his arms around Alex and the boy stared at Dean and at the alien countryside and the black wall in the distance.

* * *

They were a few yards from the tunnel when the fire hit them and Dean heard Jim behind him screaming. Alex screaming. Dean was on fire and burning he turned on his hands and knees and saw Jim lying face down with his son beneath him to protect him. There were no flames or smoke and Dean didn't know what he was seeing but they were burning all the same.

He couldn't stand up but he crawled to Jim and pulled at his arm and Jim looked up half conscious and Dean shouted, "Get up get up!" Jim stared at him and Dean couldn't talk anymore and then he heard an engine and looked up and saw a truck coming across the desert. Black, four-wheel-drive. Dean grabbed Alex's arm and pulled him out from under his father and staggered to his feet. The boy was limp in his arms. "Get up!" he said to Jim. "Run!"

Jim was on his feet and staggering along the wall in a shambling run and he fell down screaming and beating at himself. "GET UP!" Dean yelled at him and the man got up and fell and got up again and then there was the tunnel and he kicked Jim into it and shoved the boy after him and threw himself in. At the mouth of the tunnel was a straight drop down into the earth and Dean fell. Burning.

He hit the ground hard and grayed out for a second and when he came to he was shuddering and he couldn't see. It was too dark or maybe he had gone blind. His eyes felt seared in their sockets. Far above he could hear a truck engine and somewhere beside him he heard Alex crying for his father and Dean felt his way to him in the dark and picked him up and put a hand over the boy's mouth.

"Shh, shh," he whispered. "Your dad's right here but we have to be really quiet, okay? Okay, Alex?"

Alex nodded and Dean stayed there for a few seconds with the boy's tears trickling over the back of his hand. After a while he started patting the boy's hair and face but there were no burns and none on himself either. He wasn't in pain any longer only very cold and very tired and he couldn't see a goddamned thing.

From the dark Jim said, "Alex?" in a thick voice and Dean shushed him.

"He's all right. They're right above us. Are you okay?"

"Yeah."

"We should get moving."

"Okay," Jim said. They started crawling through the dark. It was cold and wet in the tunnel but the sun was fully risen when they came out on the other side and they were in Mexico.

* * *

Jim told Dean he thought they'd been hit by a heat shield. It boiled the moisture under the skin to make the victim feel as if he'd been set on fire. "How the hell did you stay on your feet?" Jim asked. "Jesus Christ, I could hardly move."

"Been there, done that," Dean said.

"What?"

Dean shrugged. He shook his head. "Nothing."

* * *

He needed to get to San Lazaro but it was more than two hundred miles away and no one was giving out rides for free. Dean would walk it if he had to and if he fell over dead from exhaustion when he finally got there he hardly cared as long as he found Sam first. Jim said that he hoped to find people that he knew in Caborca and they could take Dean to San Lazaro. They came to the junction of Mexico's State Highway 2 and here they gave a man in a pickup truck a hundred American dollars to take them to Caborca. Jim and Alex sat in the cab with the driver and Dean sat in the truckbed and watched the dry landscape rolling away alongside the road under the white southern sun.

They reached Caborca around noon, the three of them looking like the vagrants that they were. Hot, dirty, exhausted. Alex couldn't stay on his feet. The city was full of American refugees and there were no places to stay. Jim spoke Spanish and Dean didn't so Dean sat on a bench in a plaza with Alex sleeping on his lap while Jim talked to people and tried to find his friends. It was Sunday and church bells were ringing across the city and there were girls feeding pigeons in a dry fountain and Dean fell into a stupor watching the rhythmic arc of their arms throwing seed at the birds. Jim came back and told him that he'd found a room where they could get some sleep for a few hours and Dean shook himself awake and stood up and handed Alex to Jim.

"I have to go," he said. "You guys'll be okay."

"Michael," Jim said, because that was the name Dean had given him. "If you don't get some rest you're never gonna make it to San Lazaro."

"I'll make it," Dean said.

"Give me a few hours to sleep and I can find my friends and we'll take you there. Look, it's the least I can do. We'd never have gotten over the border without you." Dean stared across the plaza in a haze of fatigue. He wanted to sleep. He wanted to go to San Lazaro. He wanted this to be over, however it ended.

Jim said, "Michael?" and Dean hardly knew who he was talking to. "Michael?" he said again.

Dean looked at him and said, "Okay," and went with him.

* * *

It was a closet next to the storeroom of some bodega and there was no bed, just a mattress. Dean lay down on the floor and was almost asleep when Alex said, "There's room." He opened his eyes and looked at the boy and Alex was staring at him and Dean smiled.

"That's okay," Dean said.

"But there's room," Alex said and he patted the mattress next to him. Behind him, Jim was already asleep, an arm around Alex's shoulders.

"All right," Dean said. He pulled himself up the few inches onto the mattress and fell into a thin and restless sleep. He dreamt that he was in a motel room with Sam and Sam was maybe eight years old and he was scared. They were alone and outside it was raining and Dean sat on the couch with his arms wrapped around Sam and they watched the rain striking the window turn from clear water into blood and then into something like black tar, running down the window in thick sludgy streaks.

"Is Dad coming?" Sam whispered.

"No," Dean said. "He can't."

"Where is everyone?"

"They're all gone," Dean said.

"Are you leaving too?"

"No way," Dean said. The windows filled up with black ash and Dean drew Sam closer to him. "Never, Sammy. I promise."

He snapped out of the dream and with his eyes still closed he could feel Sam's hair tickling him beneath his chin and could hear his father's light snoring. He lay there deeply relieved and then he opened his eyes and the unwelcome present slowly slotted itself back into his mind. He wasn't a kid. His father was long gone. His brother was lost.

Alex was sleeping with his head tucked against Dean's chest and Dean pushed him away gently and got up. He left them some money and one of his guns and slipped out of the room and started out for San Lazaro alone.

* * *

He paid a man to take him to San Lazaro and the man pulled up in a Wal-Mart parking lot and said that they were there.

"This is San Lazaro?" Dean asked.

"Si," the man said. "Nuevo Lazaro."

"No, I need to go to San Lazaro. Not Nuevo Lazaro."

"Americans don't go to San Lazaro. Here is where to be." He made a sweeping gesture at the scenery. Wal-Mart. Pizza Hut. Taco Bell. "Here is everything you want."

"Where is San Lazaro?"

The man pointed in a vaguely westward direction. "Twenty miles. But you don't want to go there. Poor people there, very bad."

"I do want to go there."

"I do not want to go there," the man said. Dean sighed and looked at the man and the man shook his head and repeated, "I do not want to go there." Dean got out of the car and started walking.

* * *

It was dark when he reached San Lazaro and he didn't know where he was supposed to go. He walked down a dirty street of bars and cafes where men and women loitered outside and called out to him or just stared at him. A few cabs pulled up alongside him as he walked and offered to take him to different establishments and he thought about asking them if they knew anyone that looked like Sam but he didn't. He came to the center of town where there was a neglected plaza and an elaborate cathedral whose white facade lit up everything around it. In front of the church was a posterboard with photographs and fliers of missing people, Americans and Mexicans. Some of the fliers were brand new and some were yellow with age and curling at the edges and the idea of seeing Sam up on that posterboard was ridiculous but he stopped and looked all the same.

"Busca alguien?"

Dean turned and saw a priest standing beside him. "No habla espanol," he said.

"I asked if you were looking for someone."

"I'm..." He trailed off and looked at the priest. He looked at the church and thought that Sam might have come here, no matter what the torquetum had said. He might have come here looking for help. He'd been the religious one, or at least the one who prayed. He might have come here. "I'm looking for a friend of mine. Someone told me he's here."

The priest pointed to the board. "These people are all kidnapped or murdered by the narcos. Was your friend in the cartels?"

Dean shook his head. "No, no. He was...I don't know why he'd have come down here."

"Not many Americans come to San Lazaro. Would he have been here lately?"

"Yeah, I mean it was...I don't know, just a few days ago I heard that he was here."

"What does he look like?"

"He's tall, taller than me. Darker hair. Mid-twenties..." Dean corrected himself. "About thirty. He's thirty now. His name is Sam but I don't know if he was using that name..." The priest's face had changed. "What?" Dean said. "Did you see him?"

"You should come inside."

"Is he there, have you seen him..."

The priest put a hand on Dean's arm. "Come with me."

Dean shook him off. "No. Where is he?"

"I have seen him but if you say you are his friend I don't want to talk to you here. Come inside."

The priest took him to the rectory where he sat down behind a desk and Dean wouldn't sit but stood there with his heart hammering and waited for the priest to talk and then finally the priest said, "I am sad to tell you that this person you describe is dead." Dean didn't say anything. The priest kept talking. "He came here in August and he was very sick. No one knows how he got here. But he was already very sick when he came and no one could do anything."

"Sick...I don't...sick or hurt? Was he hurt?"

"He did not have any wounds but he was bleeding. From his eyes, his nose. He was in pain, his head, terrible headache. We sent for a doctor but it was too late."

"He..." Dean put his hand over his eyes. "He would get headaches when he...they weren't enough to kill him for God's sake, they..."

You think getting someone out of hell is like picking them up at the airport? Who had said that? The demon. The demon in Bobby's house. There's a price to be paid. In blood.

"The doctor thought maybe it was a brain hemorrhage but some of the people who saw him were afraid he was sick. There are so many sick people on the road..."

"Where is he?"

"Excuse me?"

"Did you bury him, autopsy him, stick him in a meat locker, where is he?"

"They burned him," the priest said. "Because they thought he was sick they burned the body."

"That can't be true."

"I am very sorry."

"No...no. I know he's here. I know it." Dean stood there and stared at the priest. "What are you?"

"What?"

"You must be a powerful fucking demon to walk in here and wear that big cross around your neck."

"I don't know..." the priest began and Dean threw himself at him. Over the desk and knocked him out of his chair to the ground and pulled out his gun and shoved it under the priest's chin.

"Where is he? What the fuck did you do with him you sonofabitch?"

The priest stared up at Dean terrified. "Please, please, I don't know what you're talking about, please..."

"What are you?"

"Please..."

"Tell me where he is!" The priest started praying in Spanish. "Nice touch, fucker," Dean said and he pulled back his fist and hesitated for one second and then hit him squarely in the face. The priest's eyes rolled up and he went still.

* * *

The Devil's Trap was almost finished on the floor and the priest was just coming to behind him when there was a light rap on the door and Dean looked up and aimed the gun at the door. He didn't say anything but the door opened and a woman peered around the door at him. An old woman, tiny, barely higher than the doorknob.

"Please," she said. "You must come with me." Dean stared at her. "This man is no priest. He is lying to you. Your brother is alive."

"Where?"

"He is sick, that is true, but he is alive." She looked at Dean and then stuck her arm into the room. There was a font of holy water by the door and she dipped her fingers into in and crossed herself. "By Holy Jesus Christ I am telling you the truth."

Dean looked back at the priest. He looked at the woman. She reached into her pocket and pulled something out and held it up to Dean and he saw the amulet that he had worn since Sam had given it to him that Christmas when they were kids, the one Sam had taken from him when he'd died. "Do you see?" she said. "This is your brother's. So you know that he is here."

Dean reached out and took it. He stared at it in the palm of his hand. He looked up at the woman and he didn't say anything but she turned to go and he followed her.

* * *

She took him through bleak alleys to a dirty street and a hotel where loud music was playing and there were men and women and girls in the bar downstairs and she started going up the stairs and Dean grabbed her arm.

"Sam is here?"

"We had to hide him," she said. "We know who is looking for him."

"Who?"

"The devil," she said and turned back to the stairs.

The stairs were dark and Dean stumbled after her. The second floor was lined with closed doors and lit by one bulb and she stopped before one of the doors with her hand on the knob and turned to him. "He is inside. You must come." She pushed open the door.

Dean came to the door and she moved aside. The room was small and dark and the only light came from the streetlamp outside and there was someone lying on the bed with his back turned to Dean and his dark hair above the covers and Dean said, "Sam?" and he came closer to the bed and the person lying there turned over and Dean said, "Oh my God, Sam?" and then something hit him from behind hard enough to drive him to his knees. He looked up through watering eyes and saw nothing but a shadow before him and he was struck again across the face and had enough time to taste blood in his mouth before he blacked out.

* * *

He came to concussed and nauseated and lying on the floor with his wrists strapped behind his back. Music from downstairs pounded through the floor and into his head. There was a light on in the ceiling and Dean rolled onto his back and looked at the bed and it was empty. A low funk of sulfur hung in the air and he rolled back onto his side and looked around the room and saw a man sitting in the corner dressed in black pants and a white shirt like a waiter from the bar downstairs except for the black scleras of his eyes.

"What're you waiting for?" Dean said. "Do it."

"Do what?"

"Kill me.

The demon shook his head. "No one's going to kill you."

"What?"

"If we'd just wanted you dead your face would have been on every goddamn website and 24-hour news channel. We'd have had everyone from the Secret Service to Joe-fucking-Sixpack gunning for you. You'd never have made it out of Mississippi." The demon got up and came over to Dean and crouched a few feet away from him. "We don't want to lose you, Dean. Dead, you're gone. Out of reach."

Dean grinned at him. "Only can collect once, huh? Sucks for you. Guess we won't be hanging around the pit like old times."

"Oh, you're going back to hell. I never said you weren't."

"What're you gonna do, wait around for me to die? Hope that I make another deal with one of you? I don't think so."

"What's the body, Dean?"

"What?"

"What's the body?"

"Oh for Christ's sake..."

"Temple of the soul. Temple of the soul, Dean." The demon cocked its head at Dean. "Prison of the soul, too. You starting to follow me?"

"I don't know what the fuck you're talking about."

"You're going back to hell body and soul, Dean. Body and soul."

Dean stared at the demon. "You're full of shit. Even if you can do that, so what? How long do you think flesh and blood will last down there?"

"We can keep it alive and you trapped in it. Can you imagine? Lilith is so happy. Oh, she's gonna take such care of you."

"Why does she even fucking care? She's gotten everything she wants."

"But she needs to keep it. She can't have you out here on your own where anything could happen to you. The world's become very dangerous, you know."

Dean closed his eyes. He was tired and sick and the demon was talking shit that didn't make any sense and he didn't want to listen to it anymore.

"Poor Sam," the demon said and Dean opened his eyes and stared at him.

"What about him?"

"All that work to save you and for what? You haven't done one goddamn worthwhile thing since you got out. Got some old lady killed. That poor kid and his cat. Your friend there, gutshot in a parking lot. Did he die?" Dean didn't say anything and the demon shot an arm out and grabbed Dean by the throat. "Did he die?"

"Yes," Dean said and the demon tightened his fingers until Dean was wheezing.

"How long did it take?"

"Fuck you."

"How long?"

Dean grinned at him. "Little harder," he said through clenched teeth and the demon relaxed his fingers and let go and Dean laughed. "You need to handle me with kid gloves, asshole. Boss won't be happy if you choke me to death."

The demon stood up. He walked a few steps away and stood there with his back to Dean. Then he turned and ran at Dean and Dean couldn't get out of the way and the demon kicked him in the side and Dean heard something crack inside him and he bellowed in pain. The demon kicked him again and another rib went and Dean's vision blurred and he rolled over and almost puked. The demon grabbed him by the arm and turned him over like a doll and half-straddled him with one knee on the floor and the other on his broken side and Dean lay there gasping.

"You're gonna rot, you pathetic shit," the demon said. "Body and soul, you're gonna rot and Sam's never gonna find you again, he's never..."

"He's alive?" Dean said and the demon froze. "He's alive," Dean said and suddenly he was smiling. "He's alive and you don't know where he is. She doesn't know where he is, oh my God." He started laughing. "Oh my God, that's beautiful. That's fucking priceless."

"You won't be laughing when they come for you. You'll be screaming." The demon grabbed Dean's head. "You'll be screaming," he said and he bashed Dean's head against the floor and Dean passed out thinking, Sam's alive. Sam's alive.

* * *

When he woke up it was dark and he was alone. The music downstairs had stopped and he could hear his own heartbeat in his ears. He heard the bell in that cathedral toll twice and thought about how he'd beaten up that priest and left him there and it was almost funny because if for nothing else he'd probably earned himself a space in hell for that.

He was in a lot of pain and thought the demon must have kept wailing on him after knocking him out. His side was a white flare of agony and whatever bound his wrists had stripped them raw and his head felt close to splitting. Maybe was split. His thoughts faded in and out. July Scales prayed a psalm while rain beat on the roof. Dust drifted up like brown snow against Bobby's backporch door. A long road uncoiled before him, yellow lines slipping one after the other beneath the wheels. Steely Dan was on the radio, his mother had liked that song, had danced around the kitchen to it ten thousand years ago.

He remembered waking in Caborca with the little boy Alex tucked up against him and how he'd thought in that moment that Alex was Sam and they were both still children and he thought about his childhood now and about his mother, whose image was still so vivid after so many years, and about how his father had fought so hard to prepare them for this and he thought about Sam and of all the things that he hadn't protected him from. He thought of all their years on the road and what a waste, what a senseless waste it had all been.

I'm sorry, Mom, he thought. I'm sorry, Dad, I'm sorry, Bobby and oh God, Sam I'm so sorry, if you find out about this please don't come for me again, please don't. Please, for God's sake, don't. Just leave me, leave it, let this be over.

He lay there in pain and his mind drifted and then the cathedral bell struck three and he was suddenly afraid. He had no fear of dying but he wasn't going to die, he knew where he was going, body and soul this time, and he was terrified. Body and soul. He tried to make sense of it but he couldn't, Lilith didn't need him and yet she did and something wasn't right and it scratched at him but he couldn't get his mind around it. He thought if he could get up he would throw himself out the window but the demon must have thought of that because his wrists were tied to something that wouldn't move. Maybe the leg of the bed he couldn't tell.

He heard steps on the stairs. They came up the stairs and down the hall and stopped in front of the door of the room he was in.

No. No, no, no...

He thought it would be Lilith but it wasn't. It was one of the legion who had no name and it wore no human skin and its eyes burned in its head like twin furnaces. It crossed the room and bent down to where Dean lay and he tried to pull away from it but there was nowhere to go. It reached out and looped one blackened finger around the silver chain on Dean's neck and snapped it and threw it and the saint's medal across the room and they hit the floor with a faint ring.

There had been howling last time, and screaming and blood but this time was all silence and suffocating fear. Dean could hear himself panting in terror and the demon reached behind him and broke whatever had bound him to the bedframe. He wanted to fight and couldn't, wanted to scream and couldn't. Wanted to die and couldn't, never would and when the demon pulled him up and threw him over its shoulder he didn't even know it. He was choking on sulfur and shit and blood and fire and descending, descending, descending and it was over and not over and would never be over and so eternity swallowed him up.

* * *

"Dean."

He wouldn't look. He knew that voice. He wouldn't look.

"Dean?"

He turned away from it. The movement was painful and he moaned and something touched him and he jerked away from it. Get off me.

* * *

He opened his eyes and saw a wall. A window in it with a dark shade pulled down. A sink bolted to the wall beside the window. Mirror above it. Clock ticking somewhere. He was in bed. On his side. One arm was up on the pillow and on the wrist was a bandage with a little blood seeping through. What is this? He was in hell. They could make him see what they wanted. They could make him think he was safe and then the next minute they'd be tearing him to pieces. This is a lie.

He turned over onto his back, an arm wrapped around his ribs. Some light came in from around the shade over the window but there was no other light. The room was cool and gray. He lay there. After a while he turned his head. He wasn't alone. Someone was slumped in a chair at the foot of the bed with his forehead down in his hand. Dean pushed himself up on one elbow and stared. This is a lie.

He stayed there until the other one stirred and rubbed his face and then he looked at Dean and froze.

"Dean?" Dean said nothing. "Dean, it's me."

Dean didn't move. Sam didn't move. They stared at each other.

Chapter Text

Dean sat upright in the bed and looked at his brother. Sam said, "Dean? It's me." Dean ignored him and looked around the small room. He thought about what was on the other side of those walls and knew they were only something they wanted him to see. Like this apparition of his brother. He heard the legs of Sam's chair scrape on the floor and his eyes snapped back to Sam and Sam stopped in a crouch with his eyes on Dean.

"It's all right, Dean. I swear to God it is."

Dean didn't say anything and Sam stood up and went to the sink. He turned on the tap and let it run and put his hand under the stream of water for a second and then he filled a glass and brought it over to Dean and sat down on the edge of the bed beside him.

"You need to drink something. You've been out of it for almost two days and I've barely been able to get anything into you." Now that he was close Dean saw that Sam looked familiar and yet different from how Dean remembered him, older and his hair was shorter and he was unshaven. He was close enough for Dean to smell him and he didn't smell like sulfur but like coffee and soap and faintly of sweat and his fingers on the glass were Sam's, long and heavy knuckled.

Dean took the glass and stared at it. He remembered being parched until his throat bled and begging for water or anything, anything to drink and what they gave him was so filthy that remembering it made his throat hitch and he doubled over gagging. He heard Sam say his name and then he felt Sam's hand on his shoulder and he recoiled and swung up his arm and shattered the glass against Sam's head. He kicked off the sheets and scrabbled back across the bed and fell out of it hard onto the floor and his ribs clacked and ground like broken glass and he clenched his teeth and staggered up onto his feet. The room pitched and spun and his vision whited out and came back. He found the wall and put his back against it and stood there with his arms wrapped around his broken bones and his breath rasping in his throat. A few feet away stood Sam with blood seeping down the side of his face and his hands out in front of him and Dean said, "None of it was real, was it? Mississippi and the militias and...and Texas and Bobby..."

"Bobby? You've seen Bobby?"

"Oh fuck you, " Dean said. He slid down the wall until he was on the floor and Sam came and knelt before him but didn't touch him or make any move to touch him. "Dean," he said. "Dean, listen to me. You're hurt and I can't take you to a hospital. You have to drink something and you have to eat and you have to...Dean, you fucking have to believe me. You're not in hell. I'm Sam, I'm your brother. Dean...for God's sake."

Dean put his head against the wall and closed his eyes and when he opened them Sam was still there on his knees two feet away from him. "Go fuck yourself," Dean said. "Show's over."

He closed his eyes again and Sam said "Dean?" and Dean didn't answer. He'd said enough and he'd heard enough. Enough.

* * *

It was later and Dean was alone. He hadn't moved from where he sat on the floor and there was a blanket and another glass of water beside him but he didn't touch either one. After a while the gray light outside faded and a pale electric glow took its place and the room became dark but for the slashes of light around the windowshade. His side throbbed with his pulse. He was desperately thirsty. He stared at the glass for a while and then he reached out and picked it up and dipped a finger into the water. He put his finger in his mouth and sat there for a few seconds and then downed the water all at once. It had a bitter iron taste and his empty stomach clenched around it but mercifully didn't throw it up and the water's coolness sank into his tongue and throat and gut.

He put the glass back on the floor and he held up both wrists and looked at the white gauze wrapped around them. He unwound the bandage on the left wrist and unstuck the last layer from the laceration beneath it. He remembered lying on the floor in the San Lazaro whorehouse with his hands bound to the bed behind him and that the demon came up the stairs and into the room and tore off the saint's medal and broke whatever tied him to the bed and he remembered nothing after that except a mindless horror of what was to come until he'd woken up in this quiet room with bandages on his wrists and his brother dozing in a chair at the foot of the bed.

Don't don't don't, he thought. It isn't real.

Still he stood up and pushed himself up the wall. He'd grown chilled and stiff and he couldn't straighten up but he made his way around the room with one hand on the wall until he found a pushbutton switch by the door and pressed it and a dusky light came on in the ceiling. He tried the door and it rattled as if bolted from the outside and there was a white line of salt across the threshold. He went to the window and found the windowsill also salted and the window had a wrought grillwork over its exterior and looked down two stories onto a narrow brick alley where one bulb burned under a tin shade and something was graffitied in Spanish on the wall beneath it. Dean let the windowshade drop back in place. He went to the sink and turned on the tap and put his hand under the water. His fingers were cut and the blood rinsed away into the rusted bowl of the sink and down the drain. He bent over and scooped handfuls of water into his mouth and over his face and then he looked at himself in the mirror over the sink. His face and throat were blackly bruised and around his neck hung the St. Michael's medal, the chain shorter than it had been and he reached up and ran his fingers over the little silver disk.

Don't.

He lifted up his shirt to dry his face and saw himself black and blue and swollen from his right armpit down to his hip and across his stomach also. He let down his shirt and felt along the back of his head and found a lump and a dry plaque of blood beneath his hair.

He looked around the room again and it looked exactly the same. A cracked plastic alarm clock on a shelf beside the bed said that it was just after eight o'clock. Dean looked out the window and saw the same alley except now it was raining. Water dripped off the corrugate tin edge of the lightshade and onto the slicked pavement below. He crossed to the door and tried it again and it was still bolted so he went to the bed and stood beside it. He took one more look around the room. He sat down on the bed. He put his hands on his knees and waited.

* * *

Sam came back a quarter of an hour later and when he saw Dean on the bed he stopped and closed the door quietly behind him and they looked at each other across the room. After a while Sam stepped away from the door and put a bag down on the table and pulled out a brown plastic bottle and shook it. "Mexican-grade morphine," he said. "It'll help with your ribs but you need to eat something first." He took plastic containers out of the bag and soda bottles and plastic forks and paper napkins. Dean didn't say anything. He turned away from Sam and sat there. It grew still in the room and from behind him Sam said, "Dean," with a firm edge on his voice that made Dean turn around.

"You don't have to talk to me, Dean. You don't even have to look at me. I don't care. I stayed beside you through miles of hell until you finally believed me, so this? This is nothing. But we're not in hell and you have to eat and drink, and take these pills if you need them which you probably do after that somersault off the bed. You have to get well enough to come with me and you have to trust me because we can't stay here and I'm not leaving you behind. Okay?"

Sam went back to putting things on the table and then he folded the plastic bag into a perilously neat square and Dean watched him do this.

Miles of hell.

"Sam."

Sam stopped and looked at him.

"You remember carrying me out?" Dean asked. "Remember that?"

Sam shook his head. "I didn't carry you out. Dean, I wanted to but I couldn't even touch you."

Dean looked past Sam and bit his lip in desperation and turned his eyes back to him.

"The postcard, where did you send it from?"

"The postcard...what postcard..."

"The one you sent to Bobby."

"The postcard to Bobby..." Sam said, then said, "Santa Cruz. Santa Cruz California."

"What did it say?"

Sam swallowed. "It said not him. That's all. Not him. It wasn't you and I didn't...I'm sorry..."

Dean stood up and Sam stopped talking and took a half step back as if wary of what Dean was going to do.

Dean said, "Tell me this is real."

"It's real."

"It's really you."

"It's really me," Sam said and Dean's legs buckled out from under him. He caught himself on the edge of the bed and then Sam was there with his arms around him and Sam was telling him it was okay and Dean couldn't say anything at all. He slumped against Sam and they sat down on the floor and they stayed there for a long time.

* * *

"Too tight?"

"What?"

"Is that too tight?"

"Sammy, I can't feel a fuckin thing."

Sam tried slipping a finger in between the elastic bandage and Dean's side and couldn't. "That's too tight," he said and started unwrapping the bandage. He glanced at Dean and smiled. "You are baked."

"Yeah, Mexican morphine my ass. Fuckin roofies is more like it." He was exhausted and numbly stoned and he leaned heavily against Sam and closed his eyes.

"Dean, I can't do this if you're leaning on me."

"Hmm."

"Dean, come on." Sam nudged Dean off him and slid off the bed onto the floor and finished unwinding the bandage. When he was done he fell quiet and Dean looked down and saw Sam's eyes skating over his chest and stomach.

"Looks worse than it is."

Sam shook his head. "It's not that, it's...I should've done a better job stitching you up."

"Chicks'll dig it. Looks dangerous."

"Looks like a topography map."

Dean shrugged. "Doesn't matter."

"Who took the stitches out?"

"Bobby."

"Thank God for Bobby."

"Thank someone."

"He patch up that hole in your back, too?"

"Nooo, that was two awesome old dudes in Mississippi. Tough old fuckin bastards. Think they dug that thing outta me with a shovel."

"Mississippi," Sam said. "Where you...where Bobby..."

"Where he stashed my corpse? Yeah."

Sam shook his head. "He never told me."

"I know."

"He didn't trust me."

"No."

Sam paused and sat twisting a section of bandage around his hand and he looked down at it and after a while he said, "I wanted...I needed to believe it was you."

"I know, Sammy."

Sam set his mouth and nodded and went back to wrapping Dean's ribs and Dean watched him. He was fading fast and he put his hand on Sam's face and Sam looked up at him. "You've got to tell me everything, Sam. I have to know what happened to you." Sam didn't say anything and Dean said, "It's the only way we can fix this."

"Okay, Dean. All right."

Dean put his hand under Sam's chin and ran his thumb over the heavy growth of stubble there and frowned.

Sam said, "What?"

"Dad," Dean said. "You look just like Dad."

"It's been a long four years."

"Yeah," Dean said. "Shave it off." He closed his eyes and then he lay down and then he was asleep.

* * *

Sam sat at the little table and watched Dean sleep. All the years Sam had lived with him Dean had slept in a full sprawl on his back or his stomach and now he was sleeping so turned and twisted in on himself that his shoulderblades and spinal disks stood out like shales of rock through the scarred and puckered skin on his back. Sam looked away from him and passed his hand over his clean-shaven face and rubbed his eyes and tried to concentrate on the notes and the maps in front of him but he couldn't. Outside the night's violence was winding up and he could hear ambulance sirens and peppered gunfire and there would be bodies in the street by morning but inside this room above a boarded farmacia it was quiet except for the ticking clock and now the shallow quickening of Dean's breath.

They were in Culiacán on the coast some five hundred miles from the U.S. border where Father Ramos from the cathedral in San Lazaro had sent Sam because Culiacán was a lawless city and it was easy to disappear in such a place, even from demons. San Lazaro was much the same and Sam had been there since August when he had indeed made it to the cathedral half dead from pulling Dean out of hell. Sam knew Ramos from the two long years after Dean's death when he had hunted alone and he had gone to San Lazaro in August because he'd had nowhere else to go.

On the morning that Buddy Lennox and July Scales found Dean on the banks of the Mississippi Sam crossed the Mexican border in the company of three narcos from San Lazaro to whom he gave all his money and anything of value save for the bone-handled knife that had once belonged to Ruby and with only this left to him he went to the cathedral and Ramos took him in. He was sick and barely conscious for days and didn't come around until early September. Somewhere in the iron hills of West Virginia Dean lay feverish and hallucinating and while Dean dreamt his brother was dead Sam was certain of it because he had seen Dean's soul depart right before his eyes.

On Sunday night Ramos came to him bloody in the face and told him that someone had come looking for him and Sam was certain it was Lilith until Ramos shook his head frantically and slipping between English and Spanish told him the things Dean had said to him and showed Sam the Devil's Trap on the rectory floor. A man who begged in front of the cathedral was there that night and from his piece of cardboard where he sat with his withered legs on display in front of him he had seen Dean leave with the old woman and he told Sam in what direction they had gone. By luck and luck alone Sam came to the whorehouse before it was too late. There were three demons in the place, the old woman and the waiter and the creature upstairs and Sam killed them all, the first two by slitting their throats and the last one he gutted like an animal so that something black and stinking was still boiling out of it when Sam carried Dean out of that place. His brother's eyes were open but Dean didn't look at him or talk to him and more than a day passed before Dean finally closed his eyes and seemed to sleep. Until this evening Sam wouldn't have been able to say whether Dean would wake up or be in his right mind if he did. He'd had no plan for what he'd have done then. He hardly knew what to do even though that hadn't happened. He had thought his brother was safe and at peace and now he knew that he wasn't and there were things Sam knew that Dean didn't and wouldn't have ever known and Sam needed to think about that.

* * *

Sam got up and crossed the room and crouched beside the bed. He'd thought the medication would knock Dean out for hours but he wasn't sleeping quietly and Sam laid a hand on his shoulder. Dean grimaced in pain or fear and bent his head toward his knees and Sam wanted to climb in bed behind Dean but he didn't.

The first time Sam thought he'd gotten Dean back he'd found him in the psychiatric unit of the state hospital in Evanston, Wyoming and it had taken Dean close to half an hour to understand who Sam was. The admitting physician said the police had found him staggering dazed and naked on the shoulder of an unincorporated county road but he had no physical injuries that they could see and they had no reason to hold him and they released him into Sam's custody. Sam holed them up in a motel and in a few days Dean was so much like his old self that it was as if he'd never been gone but at night Dean would shout and weep and claw at himself and Sam started sleeping in the same bed with him because it seemed the only thing that gave Dean some peace. They would lie there together like children and like children they would stay awake and talk. Dean talked about Ruby and how he'd seen her in hell and how he knew now that they should have listened to her. And Sam told him what he knew about what Azazel had done to him and in the dark Dean would nod against Sam and say that maybe it had been a gift after all and over time it all began to make sense and it seemed so easy to practice that thing that Sam had always kept pushed down inside of him and to feel it pumping like fresh, quickened blood in his veins, so easy and so good that it took him time, a long time, to see the delight on Dean's face and know that something was wrong.

It was then that Sam began to have hideous nightmares about Dean in hell and he would wake up with the sound of his brother's agony still ringing in his ears to find Dean lying right there beside him fast asleep and soon Sam stopped sleeping in Dean's bed and wouldn't let Dean sleep in his and Dean grew silent. He began to go away and would sometimes come back after days filthy and stinking and battered as if he'd been hard used and Sam would take care of him as if he still believed that this thing was his brother. During one of these debauched disappearances Sam went to Santa Cruz and mailed a desperate postcard to Minnesota and during another he met Bobby at the church in Duluth and when he went back to California he started sleeping in Lilith's bed again and again they would stay up and talk late into the night and the next day Sam would parse and analyze everything she had said because somewhere in there he'd find the key to saving his brother. And so he had.

"Shhh," Sam said. "It's all right, shhh." Dean made a strangled noise that might have had words in it and his whole body shuddered and Sam chafed his arm and wondered if he should wake him up and then Dean's eyes opened and he lay there staring half-lidded at nothing until Sam said, "Dean?" and Dean rolled his eyes to him.

"You all right?" Sam asked and Dean swallowed hard and nodded. "You need another pill?" Sam said and Dean shook his head. He raised up on one elbow and pushed himself until he was against the wall and he sat there sweaty and exhausted and looked at Sam.

"You didn't ask me how I found you."

"Does it matter?"

Dean said, "I found you the same way we found Lilith."

Sam put his head down and got up off the floor and then sat on the edge of the bed and let his hands dangle between his knees and he sat there until Dean said, "Sam?" and then he turned and looked at him.

"You would've always been able to find me with that thing."

"Bullshit. That's Dad talking. That's what he thought."

"No, that's what Dad didn't want to think. He left it on you when he died because he didn't want to think about it. He didn't want to know."

"Know what? That you're a demon? You're not. Whatever Lilith did..."

"She didn't do anything. It was the other one."

"Yellow eyes."

"Yellow eyes, Azazel, whatever you want to call him."

"Okay, so he picked you to be one of his kids or whatever..."

"He didn't just pick me he...changed me."

"What?"

"When I was a baby. The night Mom died. He changed me, he bled into me. All that psychic shit, all that..." Sam tapped the side of his head. "All that came from him."

Dean stared at him. "How long have you known that?"

"Since Cold Oak."

"Why didn't you tell me?"

"Because he died and I thought it was over. But it was just beginning."

"Jesus Christ, Sam."

"I was supposed to stand with him against Lilith. That was what he wanted, that was why he did those things."

"So what, you're telling me he was the good guy?"

Sam smiled. "Oh God no. But when he was gone I was supposed to take his place. That's what Ruby was doing here only...well, you know how that worked out."

They both fell silent. Sam sat and stared at his hands and behind him Dean didn't move. After a while Dean took a deep breath and said, "What the hell are we gonna do?"

Sam stood up. He went to the table and picked up the notebook and looked at it for a second and put it down. He looked at the map. It had many notes on it but only one red circle. He looked up at Dean leaning painfully against the wall with his arms around his ribs. His face was battered and gaunt in the dim light.

"When I got you out of hell I thought that bitch could never touch you again."

"You're not doing anything without me, Sam."

Sam nodded. He looked down at the map and then at Dean. "Think you can travel?"

"Are you kidding? Of course."

"Morning?"

"Fuck it," Dean said. "Let's go right now." He kicked off the covers and swung his legs off the bed in one movement that left him bent over and wheezing and cursing under his breath. "You know, maybe morning," he said. "Yeah, morning's good."

Sam said, "Okay," and he folded the map, marked side out.

* * *

Dean woke before dawn and staggered out of bed and leaned over the little sink and threw up the pills and everything he'd eaten and drunk the night before. His arms trembled on the edge of the sink and Sam held him up while he puked and gasped sons of bitches out between heaves and then Sam got him back into bed.

"Guess that's it for the pills, huh?"

Dean grimaced and closed his eyes. "Just gimme a few minutes," he said. "I'll be fine."

When he woke next it was morning. He rolled over in bed and saw Sam sitting at the table turning pages in a notebook and he lay there and watched him. After a while he said, "Why didn't you wake me up?"

"You needed the sleep. We can leave tomorrow."

"Tonight."

"If you're up for it."

"Don't worry about me. I'll be up for it. Where are we going?"

"North. Over the border."

Dean lay back and stared at the ceiling. He thought about his last border crossing with Jim and Alex and the heat shield and the long drop and crawl through the black tunnel under the wall and for all his talk about being up for it he didn't think his broken ribs or any other contused inch of him would stand for another run at the border like that. "That's gonna be a bitch," he said.

"I know, but there's ways to do it. The narcos go back and forth every day."

"My baby brother, hanging with dope dealers. I'm so proud."

"Lesser of two evils," he said. "Lesser of a lot of evils these days."

"Yeah," Dean said. "Say...speaking of a life of crime, I'm sort of, you know, wanted up there."

"Wanted."

"Yeah."

"As in face-in-the-post-office wanted?"

"That'd be the one."

"Besides what happened in Texas?"

Dean took a deep breath and held it for a second and blew it out. "Well...supposedly I killed five or six people in Mississippi and then there were a few in South Dakota but I think the tornado probably covered that up and then the whole Amarillo prison break thing and a couple of possessed people there in Montana."

Sam sat considering this. "So basically, in six weeks you wreaked a trail of Dateline NBC-worthy havoc across the United States?"

"Yeah, pretty much."

Sam nodded. "Sounds about right." He smiled. "I've missed the hell out of you, Dean."

"Dean Winchester, accept no substitutes," he said and it was supposed to be funny but his words hung heavy in the room and after a long moment he turned his head and looked at Sam and said, "What was it like?"

Sam looked down and shrugged. "At first I was so happy to have you back that I didn't notice anything but then it was...I don't know."

Dean thought about this for a few seconds. Sam thumbed a page in the notebook and turned it without looking at it and then turned it back. Dean half-smiled and raised an eyebrow and said, "Better?"

Sam shook his head. "Different." He looked up at Dean. "Just different."

Dean accepted that and left it alone.

* * *

There was a bathroom down the hall with no shower just a stained tub and a toilet with the tank lid missing. The tank water was brown as if people had been shitting in there instead of in the bowl. Maybe they had been. The water in the tub ran clear and hot, and Dean filled the tub and lowered his aching bones into it. He couldn't even remember the last time he'd taken an actual bath. Must've been five years old or close to it.

He lay there and watched the steam rise from the tub and tracked a cockroach up the wall. Don't fall in my water, you little shit, he thought so of course it did. It treaded water with its six jointed legs and flapped its chitinous wings and Dean sat up with an effort and flicked the thing out onto the floor. A man had to draw the line somewhere.

He sank down in the water and leaned back and put a hand over his eyes. But for the drip of the faucet it was quiet.

Different.

Ah, you bitch, you bitch, he thought. If I ever get my fucking hands on you.

What? What are you gonna do to her, asshole?

He had no answer for that and he wondered if he'd ever had an answer. He took a deep shuddering breath and listened to the water drip. He fell asleep and dreamt that he stood on Indiana Street in Lawrence and he was four years old and his brother was in his arms. Their house was on fire and flames licked out of every window on the second floor and he already knew he would never live in that house again and his father came out of the front door moving with great, strange slowness and silhouetted black against the flames. He bent down to Dean and said, What've you done with your brother? and Dean said that Sam was right there but when he held up his arms what was wrapped in the blankets was some misshapen thing wearing his brother like a caul, its long and vicious snout thrusting up through the thin infant skin of his brother's face.

He woke up choking and gasping for air and slopping water out of the tub onto the floor. Drown in the bathtub you jackass. Great. Sam knocked on the door and asked if he'd fallen asleep in there and he said no and that he was fine and he heard Sam's footsteps recede down the hall. The water had cooled and he was shivering and he got out of the tub and dried off with a threadbare rag little bigger than a dishtowel and got dressed and then sat on the edge of the tub. On the floor lay the cockroach belly up in a puddle of water with its legs kicking futilely in the air.

* * *

They left at dark in a white Ford pickup with rusted Sinaloa plates. It was so familiar to be on the road with Sam that Dean almost asked him what had happened to his car but he couldn't do it. He picked a flake of vinyl from the Ford's dashboard and would have said a prayer for the Impala if he'd been a praying man but he wasn't.

Over Avenida Jesús-María a body was hanging from its wrists on a streetlight. The corpse's bloody mouth gaped dark and its pants were pulled down and its genitals were gone and it wore a sign around its neck that read Boca Floja and Dean didn't understand Spanish but he got the gist all the same.

"Nice neighborhood," he said to Sam.

"Nice for us," Sam said. He gestured at the grisly remains. "Demons don't give a shit about this stuff. It's smalltime for them."

"Better things to do, huh?"

"Better and bigger," Sam said and the truck's wheels rolled through the blood on the street and two crimson drops splattered down and fanned on the windshield.

* * *

They made it to Ciudad Juarez in the very early hours and drove through the city until they were almost at the border. To the north Dean could see the American flag belling out against the pre-dawn darkness and right beside it the silver-on-black standard of the Texas Rangers, both mounted so high and lit by such floodlights that they seemed like planetary satellites trapped in some low and stationary orbit over the border.

"This is fucking crazy," he said to Sam.

"I know, you said that."

"Texas, Sam. Texas. Are you fucking kidding me?"

"I told you I know a guy."

"You know a guy? Does he have papers for both of us? Something that's gonna keep us from getting shot on sight by those fucking cowboys?"

"Better than that. He's got everyone on both sides of the border in his pocket. Or his boss does, anyway."

"Who's his boss?"

"He's the kind of guy that castrates people and hangs them off lightpoles," Sam said and turned to Dean and raised his eyebrows. "Okay?"

Dean snorted out a laugh and shook his head. "I've been to Texas, Sam. You think that's gonna be enough?"

"It has to be," Sam said.

They pulled into the parking lot of a bleached cinderblock motel named La Frontera. Some of the doors sagged open and a yellow dog was going through the garbage by the ice machine and the asphalt was buckled and cracked. The early morning air was cool but not fresh with a smell of burning oil or rubber on it. Sam knocked on the door of Number 12 and after a moment of silence the door was opened by a lanky American of Sam's height with a lean and closed face, barefoot and wearing boxers and a white tank and a semi-automatic holstered under each arm.

"David Simon?" Sam said.

"You Sam?"

"Yeah."

"All right. Come in."

The room smelled like cigarettes and whiskey and mold and was lit only by a grainy yet lurid Mexican variety show on the television. Simon swigged coffee from a styrofoam cup and sat down on the edge of the bed and started pulling on his socks. He looked both of them over.

"What's the cargo?"

"No cargo," Sam said. "Just us."

"Ah, in case you haven't heard, most folks want to get the fuck out of America these days. Especially now."

"What's now?" Dean said.

"There's some fucking epidemic in California. Cholera or some shit."

Dean and Sam looked at each other and Sam said to Simon, "We need to get to California."

"You're not getting near the coast, I'll tell you that. Even I couldn't get you there."

"That's all right," Sam said. "That's not where we're going."

"Well, whatever. Once I get you over the border you're not my problem." Simon jutted his chin towards Dean. "What's wrong with you?"

"What?"

"You look pretty banged up. Are you sick?"

"Nah, a Mexican waiter just did a little hat dance on my face."

Simon nodded. "Father Ramos said you were in San Lazaro. It's a good place to avoid."

"You know the priest?"

Simon pulled on some pants and stood up and buttoned them. "I know him."

"Sorry," Dean said, "But you don't look like the religious type." He studied Simon. "Are you a hunter?"

Sam said, "Dean..."

"No," Dean said. "Why is this guy helping us?"

Simon put on a camp shirt and left it unbuttoned and went over to the table and drained the last of the coffee and gathered up the things that were on the table. Clips, money, cigarettes. "You want to know who I am? I'm lots of things. Today I'm a transporter. I move stuff around for people. Stuff like you in this case. I'm doing a favor for Father Ramos because he did a favor for someone who did a favor for me. I'm not helping you. I'm not into heroics, there's no future in it. Answer your question?"

"Well, I wasn't expecting a speech but yeah, pretty much."

"Okay then," he said. "Time to go, gringos. Ándale."

* * *

At the border a Mexican guard waved them over and Simon pulled the Ram2500 over to the side of the road and put down the window.

"Quién está?" the guard said to him.

"Simon. El hombre del Esteban."

"Ah, sí sí, sí. Conozco. Espérate, muchacho. Espérate."

The guard slapped his hand congenially on the Ram's door and went to talk to his counterpart at the American border. The guard there was a Texas Ranger wearing enough firepower to be a one-man army and he smiled and nodded at the Mexican and Dean could see his white teeth under the shadow of his hat. From behind the Ram's tinted windows he scanned the razorwired fencing at the border and the guntowers and radar dishes and Sam glanced at him from the front seat and Dean set his jaw and shook his head and looked away.

The Mexican guard turned to them and raised his hand and waved for them to come on. Simon eased the big truck up to the gate and the Mexican slapped the door again and said, "El hombre del Esteban! Bueno, bueno!"

Simon thanked the Mexican and shook his hand and passed him something when he did. He turned his eyes to the ranger and said, "Good morning, sir."

"Mornin, gentlemen. Welcome back to God's country."

"Damn good to be back," Simon said. "You fellas're doing a fine job. Keep it up." He shook the ranger's hand as well and also gave him something which the ranger disappeared into his back pocket deftly as a magician and then he stood back with his left thumb hooked under his riflestrap and grinned like an ape and tipped his stetson to Simon.

"You boys have a real nice day now."

"We aim to do it, sir. And you have a fine day yourself."

"A fine day in Texas? Well hell son, now you're just repeatin yourself."

Simon threw back his head and laughed. He put the truck in gear and touched two fingers to his temple in a brisk patriotic salute and then rode the truck across the Rio Grande and past a phalanx of armed vehicles until a sign welcomed them first to the United States and then to the Christian state of Texas where the city of El Paso lay in eerie morning stillness under a black and starless sky.

* * *

They crossed the state line at Santa Teresa into New Mexico and Simon drove them up Route 28 to San Miguel outside of Las Cruces and stopped in a Target parking lot where it looked as if all the cars had been parked by drunks they sat at such painful angles to one another.

"Take your pick," Simon said. "No one's coming back for them."

"Sounds good," Sam said. "Thanks."

They took their gear and got out of the Ram and Dean was shouldering his rifle when Simon called out, "Hey," and they both turned around.

"You ever need...you need a favor, call Father Ramos. He can usually find me."

"Okay," Sam said.

"No heroics though, right?" Dean said.

Simon grinned. "That's right, man. That's right." He put the Ram in gear and pulled out of the parking lot and turned back towards El Paso. To the east the sky was graying and the sun's first cool rays were beginning to wash the sheer walls of the Organ Mountains but they put the sun behind them and headed west into the dark.

* * *

The radio picked up celebrity gossip and music and chatter from one end of the dial to the other but the newscasts were spotty and mentioned only briefly that areas of the California coast from Los Angeles to San Francisco had been quarantined and that visitors should expect to delay their travel for two to three days until the Golden State Militia gave the all-clear and Dean knew whatever they were reporting was most likely not even a grain of the full story. The radio said to avoid Phoenix and they would have avoided it anyway but even from their distance on Route 85 they could see it burning and there were few cars on the road headed west but many headed east and south and many more stalled out or abandoned along the side of the road.

For a while Dean drove while Sam slept and then Sam drove and they reached Cadiz on the edge of the Mojave Desert in the late afternoon while the sun was still broiling the martian landscape and not another vehicle or person was abroad in the town so that the whole place felt deserted and maybe was. Sam pulled up underneath a red blinker and sat there until Dean said, "I think you could've rolled it, Sam."

Sam glanced at him and smiled. "I want to make sure you're okay."

"I'm fine."

"You're always fine. You always say you're fine."

"Well, I'm fine. My ribs hurt like a sonofabitch and I could really use more than two hours of sleep but otherwise I'm fine."

"You think you're up for this?"

"You think you are? You're the one she got all up inside, remember, not me."

"That's a pretty hard thing to forget."

"You really think you can trust her?"

Sam sat there and scratched his palm over the steering wheel and stared out at the dusty crossroads. "I don't know how I would've found you in hell without her. I was able to get in but...it's not like there's a map, you know."

"I don't remember her there," Dean said. "All I remember is you."

"She kept her distance. The whole time. When I finally got to the gate she didn't even say anything she just disappeared, like that."

"Well, you didn't expect her to hang around and say thanks, did you?"

Sam shook his head. "No."

"What do you think she's gonna do when she sees you? Us?"

"I don't think she'll be surprised. I think she's been waiting for me to show up."

"Does this happen to everyone who's been possessed and lives to tell about it? This whole...psychic bond deal?"

"Probably not," Sam said. "But then...I am special."

"Hey, I always told you that when we were kids."

"Yeah, but you meant short-bus special, Dean."

"Yeah," he said and grinned. "Yeah, those were some good times."

"Jerk."

"Bitch," Dean said. Sam shook his head and Dean laughed and turned in his seat to look out the windshield. "Let's go find your soulmate. Get this shit over with."

* * *

The trailer sat squat on a heat shimmered salt flat near the dessicate remains of Bristol Lake and it was white and pitted red with desert sand and all of its windows were louvered shut against the late sunlight. A small troupe of whirlygigs led up to it, their wings still in the hot air and a wind chime made from tubes of hollow wood hung like a plumb line from a planter bracket next to the trailer's door. The name Viney was spelled out in adhesive letters on the black tin mailbox.

Sam pulled up next to the mailbox and cut the engine and they sat there and looked at the trailer. It seemed wholly abandoned. The engine ticked and the air vibrated with heat but there was no other sound or movement. Dean reached for the rifle where it leant against his knee and then the door of the trailer squealed open and Dean stopped. An old man stuck out his head and then he came out and stood on the top step and waited for them.

* * *

It was hot as a blast furnace inside the trailer and not so much as a table fan moved the breathless air. A greasy air conditioner tilted through one window and Dean gestured at it.

"That thing work?"

"I've never turned it on. I like the heat."

"Reminds you of home?"

"In a manner of speaking," she said and went to the window and twisted some buttons on the machine and it coughed into life with a roar that shook the whole place.

"Who's Viney?" Sam asked.

She settled into a vinyl recliner and crossed Viney's hands over Viney's belly. "First sucker I ran into when I got out. I needed a low profile and you can't sink much lower than this."

"Wonder what old Viney thinks about that," Dean said. "Don't suppose you asked."

"Asked who? Clem? If it wasn't for me he'd be dead already. Ass-cancer. The dirty old shit was rotting from the inside out. He had two, maybe three weeks to go and then I came along and gave him a new lease on life. Got his dick working again too. Once a week I take him out to his titty bars in Barstow, let him smack his lips over the girls and pull his pud all the way home." She winked at Dean and for a second there was nothing of Meg there at all just an old man full of mean and stupid lechery and then just as suddenly Meg was back and all her cruel mirth lit up Viney's rheumy eyes. "Of course, I like cock myself, but Clem's come around on that pretty quickly. Say, how'd you like it, Dean? I heard they really used to pound it to you, I sure hope you started to enjoy it after a while."

"Meg," Sam said sharply. "We didn't come here to listen to your shit. Do you know where she is?"

"Yes I do."

"Can we get to her?"

"Yes."

"Can I kill her?"

"Yes," she said. "But not with Ruby's little shiv. You're gonna have to pull out some mojo, Sammy. My father didn't choose you so that this would be a fair fight."

"Choose him," Dean said. "Is that what you call it?"

"You're right," she said. She got up and got a beer out of the refrigerator and came back and sat down and said, "He improved him." She popped open the beer and sat there and slurped it and waited and after a while Dean asked her if she had another one of those and she grinned and said, "Help yourself."

* * *

"I'm probably going to be telling you some things you already know, Sam, seeing as how you're the bookworm in the family, but I figure you can stand to hear it again. Some of this stuff though, it's not in any book. Nowhere." She took a long pull on the beer and said, "So first of all, you know that Lilith isn't a demon. Not really."

"Yeah," Sam said. "She's...she was human. Only not like us."

"Oh, definitely not like you. Better than you, way better than you. God's crowning glory. Pride and joy. He loved her more than anything he had made and he couldn't see her for what she was. My father Azazel did and he told God he wouldn't bow down before her and God hated him for it. He turned him out along with all the other demons of the first world and they hid themselves in a low place out of God's sight and that place became hell.

"But it was Lilith who betrayed God and tried to set herself above him and God was so angry that he destroyed the entire world that he had made. Every living thing, down to the last leaf, he burned it all up and then there was only heaven and hell...and Lilith. God made her so close to his own image that she was a god herself only something stronger than that too, cunning and deceitful and she lied her way into hell saying that God had also cast her out and a place was made for her and there she stayed and was very, very quiet. But Azazel always watched her. He always knew.

"There was a void left behind where the old world had been and God decided to leave that void alone and over time this world evolved out of the void and you evolved along with it. But God never got over that bitch. He missed her so much that he put the spark of her into you. God's pathetic broken heart made you human."

Meg sat back in the recliner and pulled a pack of cigarettes out from the crease between the seat and the arm and shook one out and lit it and sucked on it and chimneyed smoke into the air. Dean sat there and watched her and then said, "Are you getting to the part where your old man fucked around with my brother because I don't really care about the rest of this shit. I don't have the fucking time for it."

"No you don't," she said. "It's very late. It's almost too late." She lit another cigarette off the first and said, "Azazel was a prince of hell. He didn't give much of a shit about God's little monkeys. Lilith? She was a different story. She wanted to overthrow him and rule hell but that wasn't enough for her because she wanted to rule you little monkeys too. As far as she's concerned you belong to her. She wants this disgusting world that you've fouled and filthied because your filth is the essence of Lilith herself. You know that. Anything you've ever hunted, whatever beast or demon or spirit has never been as hideous as you yourselves are. Man is monstrous because Lilith is a monster. Lilith is the monster and you're all her children. That's where your brother comes in.

"No other demon could kill Lilith, not even Azazel. He needed recruits from among Lilith's own. One of you. But he needed to make them stronger, as strong as he was. So he anointed you," she said to Sam. "With his own blood."

"Why Sam?" Dean said.

"Does it matter? Azazel had his reasons. Even I never knew them all. But Sam was his favorite."

"Why?"

"Why do you think? Your father. Your childhood, the whole fucking crazy way you grew up. All the others, they grew up normal. School and chores and dinnertime and the junior prom and all that shit. They were weak but you, Sam? You were a soldier. You were the one." She turned to Dean. "And then there was the brother," she said. "What were we going to do about you?

"You almost died six years ago, remember? You would have died if that fucking hack preacher hadn't brought you back. So my father told me to kill you, and your father if I could find him. That didn't quite work out but then, everything has a silver lining. In that hospital when you were close, so close to just slipping away your father gave up his own life and soul for you. Not even the favorite son and yet. Azazel thought...well, maybe you weren't that dispensable after all. Maybe, maybe you were worth keeping around. And so he waited. And watched."

"Watched?" Dean said. "What was he watching when you possessed Sam and tried to knock my brains out of my head?"

"He wanted to see how deep it went between you and Sam. Turned out you wouldn't touch a hair on Sammy's head, not even if your own life depended upon it. A man like that...well, he'll do anything for his brother, won't he? Anything. That's a good thing to know.

"Cold Oak was the turning point. You weren't supposed to die there, Sam, you really weren't. Azazel was disappointed but he knew...he knew..." She turned in her seat and pointed the cigarette at Dean. "Exactly what your brother would do. He was so excited he almost showed up at that crossroads himself. What a threefer you handed him, Dean. Sam back in the game, you out of the picture in twelve months and your soul right in the palm of his hand. Talk about leverage."

"That's bullshit. Lilith owned my soul."

"Later. When you went to the crossroads that night, you sold your soul to Azazel without knowing it and when you killed him Lilith rose up to take his place as she'd been waiting years upon years to do and your soul fell to her and the whole fucking tide of fate turned in her favor. All because you fired that bullet."

Dean sat there and stared at her and it had grown dark in the trailer and the coal on her cigarette burned in the gloom like a tiny incandescent sore. After a time he said, "You're saying I did this?"

"However you want to look at it."

None of them said anything and it was so quiet that Dean could hear the ash on her cigarette crackle when she took a drag. Then Sam said, "Where is God? Is he anywhere in this?"

She stood up and threw the cigarette on the carpet and ground it out with Viney's bare foot. "God? God pretty much left the building a long time ago. You boys are on your own. Time for you to finish the job."

She was at the trailer's door when Dean said, "Why should we believe anything you say?"

"Because I hate her more than I hate you. And because this is what my father told me to do and of all people, Dean, I'm sure you can understand that." She turned away and opened the door and the air outside had freshened with nightfall and she left the door open and went out into the desert.

* * *

She had been gone for a while and Sam had fallen asleep with his head down on his arms on the kitchen table when Dean went out after her. The heat of the day radiated up through his soles but the air was cool and dry and the night sky was piercingly clear, reeling with stars.

A wind was blowing in out of the west and the wooden chime by the door made a sound like bones strung on a cord and the wind carried the scent of burning wood on it. Dean looked out over the pale waste of the desert and saw a small fire burning there and he walked towards it. She was sitting before the fire with Viney's back to him and his knees hugged up against his chest and when Dean came around to face her her eyes were not Viney's but her own stygian black. A tiny twin of the fire flared in each one of them. She didn't look at him.

She said, "Guess you're a light sleeper these days."

"I want to talk to you."

"All alone?"

"Yeah."

"My goodness," she said. She rocked back and forth before the fire. "What could this be about?"

He put his head down and shoved his hands in his pockets and dug a hole in the ground with the toe of his boot. The dry dirt was carried away in a dust devil and the fire heeled over in the wind and sent a ghostly trail of blue flamelets across the desert where they smoked out in the darkness one by one.

"He's not going to be able to do it, is he? Kill Lilith."

"He could do it," she said and then she finally looked up at him.

"What'll happen to him?"

"He honed his power while he was with Lilith but he used up most of it raising you out of hell. So honestly, it'll probably kill him."

"And if it doesn't?"

"If it doesn't he'll take Lilith's place."

"What does that mean?"

"Exactly that. Her power will pass into him and he'll be what she is."

"A demon."

"And then some."

He looked up at the sky and stood there and stared at the wheel of constellations and saw stars fall, one after the other. After a while he said, "I've gotta tell you those are some pretty shitty options."

"They are what they are."

He crouched down on his heels across from her and glared at her through the flames. "Really? Who made them that way? Your father? What the fuck gave him the right to do that to my brother?"

"The whole fucking track of time gave us the right. Who the fuck do you think you are? Or Sam is? All those countless years of waiting should have come to nothing just so that the Winchester boys could go to Little League? Have birthday parties at Chuck E. Cheese? Sorry, sweetie."

"He murdered our mother, you smartass bitch."

"Collateral damage."

"He destroyed our lives."

"So?"

Dean stood up. He stood up and turned his back and walked away and covered his eyes with the heels of his hands and stood there. He put down his hands and said, "We could just walk away. Fuck it."

"You think she'll just back off if you do? You don't take her out she'll kill Sam and cart you back to hell. Besides Dean," she said, "You've been out there. You know what's going on. You really want to do nothing?"

"What the fuck is getting rid of Lilith even going to do? It's too late, like you said."

"Almost too late," she said.

He turned back to her. "Can you help us? I mean you're his...daughter or...spawn or whatever."

"The help I've already given is all I'm going to give. You think you suffered down in hell? You don't know anything about it. Imagine what she did to Azazel's spawn after you killed him. You bring me her fucking head and I'll burn it but I'm not going anywhere near her."

"So this is the best you can do? This is all you can do?"

"There's one other way."

"Are you gonna tell me or sit there and be mysterious?"

"Sam kills her straight out, the old fashioned way."

"How the hell is he supposed to do that? Ruby's knife isn't enough."

"There's a crack in her armor."

"What's that?"

"What did she do to you in hell?"

Dean looked at her. He shook his head. "She..."

"What did she take from you?"

"Everything," he said.

"Everything is an awful lot," she said.

A knot of wood burst in the flames like cracking bone and sent a shudder of sparks up into the blameless night sky. Dean didn't say anything. He went back to the fire and hunkered down across from her. After a while he stood up and left her sitting there contemplating heaven or hell alone knew what with her ancient black eyes.

* * *

They left before midnight, headed for the coast and they stopped for gas outside of Barstow. The road was empty and there were no other customers at the station and no attendant, just a row of pumps standing sentry under the sodium lights. Sam paid with a gas card he'd bought in Las Cruces and he got back in the shotgun seat and Dean sat behind the wheel in silence and didn't turn the ignition. Sam looked at Dean and saw him gazing out at the dark road beyond the station's yellow nimbus.

"What's wrong?"

Dean didn't look at Sam and he shook his head. "It's near here, isn't it? Where you got me out?"

"Yeah. North of here, up in the desert. How did you know?"

"I don't know. I just know." He turned to Sam. "I never said thank you."

"I never said thank you for saving my life in the first place, did I?"

Dean smiled. "I don't remember. I don't care." He chewed his lip and looked past Sam. "It's been a real fuck-up, hasn't it? From start to finish." Sam didn't say anything and Dean said, "All I ever wanted was for...for nothing bad to happen to you. And look at this."

"Dean, this isn't your fault."

Dean looked at him and shrugged and gave him a faint smile. "I did some job taking care of you, didn't I?"

Sam looked at Dean. He was down about twenty pounds and was beaten and exhausted but he looked the same to Sam as he always had, in the way that siblings or the people one has known as children always do. He looked the same as he did in Sam's most vivid memory of him, not his earliest but his clearest and like all such things important for no reason that could be spoken out loud. He thought he'd been maybe four years old and so Dean eight. Someplace cold, raining outside and the leaves blowing down. They were in a laundromat and Dean was so small that he'd needed to ask someone to put the quarters in the dryer for him because there was nothing to stand on. There had been only women in that place except for them and Sam remembered the look on those women's faces, watching these two urchins. He remembered how Dean had taken Sam's jacket out of the dryer and put it on him while it was still really warm, how good it had felt and he remembered Dean on his knees in front of him fumbling with the hot zipper, he remembered looking down at the top of Dean's head, at the nascent crease already in place between his eyes and how he'd loved him. Not like Dad, Dad was a mountain range to him, something huge and distant but Dean made his dinner and put him to bed and washed his clothes and zipped him up in his jacket while it was still hot from the dryer. It was Dean who did these things. He'd gotten the zipper to catch and he zipped Sam up to his chin and looked up at him and said, "There." And though Sam didn't know it then that second in time and everything about it, the heat of the jacket and the smell of fabric softener and the tumbling whir of the dryers and the green of his brother's eyes under the fluorescent lights and the pure dizzying love he had for Dean at that moment would be with him for the rest of his life, as it was with him now.

There.

"Yeah, you did," Sam said.

Dean didn't say anything else and he turned away from Sam and started the car and they got back on the road.

* * *

They drove without speaking and the radio on low but the radio had nothing important to say. It was nearly three in the morning and they had just passed Keene some twenty miles east of Bakersfield. There were more cars on the road now and Dean said, "Something's wrong."

"There's too much traffic."

"Yeah."

"Double back," Sam said. "Get off 58."

Dean said, "I can't," and swung the car onto the first local road that came up on his right but there were vehicles ahead and behind them and in the other lane too.

"We've gotta get outta this," Dean said. "We're gonna get stuck."

There was no going back the way they had come so he got off the road onto a dirt track and headed northwest and they'd gone about half a mile when Dean slammed on the brakes. There were cars across the road ahead of them, left there every way like the cars in the Target parking lot and behind them more refugees from Route 58 were piling up and coming to a stop and they were deadlocked.

"Son of a bitch," Dean said. He got out of the car and stood there and climbed up on the running board and looked around and then got back in the car.

"This is bad."

"What is it?"

"It's not a traffic jam it's...some kind of shantytown or something. There's just cars and fucking tents as far as I can see. On the road, the dirt, everything. What the fuck? Dusters?"

"If they quarantined the coast some of them are probably people who made it out before the lockdown and now they're stuck."

"Well, this isn't going anywhere and we can't sit here. Looks like we're hoofing it."

"How're your ribs?"

"Fantastic. Good as new."

"Let me carry the heavy shit."

"It's all heavy shit, Sammy."

They took two rifles and a shotgun and flashlights and two handguns each and as much ammo and water as they could carry and Sam had Ruby's knife strapped to his leg and they set off on foot through the camp. There were people who had been there long enough to build themselves little shelters and lean-tos and there were tents and there were still other people just lying out in the open in sleeping bags or blankets. Some people had lanterns and others candles and in places there were fires or banked coals smoldering in the dark. The air smelled of burnt meat and rotting garbage and sewage and they kicked through drifts of cans and bottles and plastic bags and shitty diapers and all the other trash cast off by people who have been so reduced that they've forgotten what it's like not to live in filth.

Dean was tired and aching and sweaty and in the dark he stumbled over something and Sam caught him by the arm. "Why don't we wait till light?" Sam said. "Take it easy for a couple hours?"

"No," Dean said. He wiped his face and looked at his watch and up at the dark sky. "No, we need to get out of here."

"Maybe we'll get out of here faster when we get some rest and can see where we're going."

Dean shook his head. "Let's just go, okay? I'm all right."

"Okay."

They went on. Dean could feel Sam almost at his elbow and was about to say something to him about it and then he stopped.

"What's the matter?"

"Do you hear that?"

Sam listened and said, "It sounds like a prop plane."

"More than one, and low. There's no airstrip around here."

"What..." Sam said and then he stopped with his eyes on something and he said, "Dean, get down," and Dean followed his gaze and saw three maybe four small planes coming in low from the west. Crop dusters. Even as Sam was telling him to get down they let loose synchronized sprays of fog that glowed white against the black sky and already Dean could hear people screaming and Sam was yelling at him to get down and pulling him to the ground. Sam shouted at him to cover his face and then he was on his knees with his arms over his head and the planes buzzed over like insects of some hellish size and the spray hit him and even with his face covered it was like acid in his eyes and nose and mouth. He fell down writhing and clawing at his eyes and Sam's hand was on his arm and then it wasn't.

He bellowed, "Fuck!" and "Sam!" and Sam shouted back to him but he couldn't open his eyes to see where he was and then he began to cough and retch up a caustic slurry and he couldn't call out again. He heard screaming and shouts and the ragged thunder of a horde running in wild panic and he raised himself up onto his knees and groped around himself for Sam and was knocked flat. Pain clamped down on his side like iron jaws and he couldn't get up. He was being trampled and blindly he dragged himself on his forearms until he hit something solid and he pushed himself up against it and shouted for Sam and no one answered and he couldn't hear anything but shrieks and pounding feet and now volleys of automatic gunfire in the distance, the same direction from which the planes had come.

"Sam!"

He swung his head from left to right and through a burning haze he saw a howling chaos of people running and falling and crawling along the ground with their hands over their faces but he didn't see Sam. He had been right behind him. Right behind him. From the west now came armored trucks with assault rifles mounted in them and lit up to their rooftops in gaudy blazes of white and yellow and red and the soldiers manning the guns shot anything that moved and some things that didn't.

"SAM!"

People were falling before the trucks. The trucks rolled over them. Dean flattened onto his belly and pulled himself beneath the chassis of the car he'd been up against and the trucks rumbled past and slaughtered everything in their path and Dean dug his forehead into the ground and fisted his hands in his hair and through clenched jaws he screamed out his brother's name while all around him that naked butchery went on and on.

* * *

After the trucks came soldiers on foot, so armored and masked that they seemed barely human and they cleaned up whatever the trucks had left behind. Dean lay under the car splay-legged and still as a lizard on a hot rock and held his breath. His scorched throat ached to cough. His heart hammered down into the ground. If they had infrared detectors he was finished. It was still dark but parts of the routed camp were burning and the fiery light showed the steel toes and the soles of the soldiers' boots. Their heavy steps crunched and slogged wetly in the garbage and among the bodies and they passed the car where Dean lay hidden and they did not return.

* * *

It was not yet dawn when Dean pulled himself out from under the car. He lay there listening. He couldn't hear anything except the crackle of fire and far off the squealing crash of heavy machinery and he thought they must have brought in bulldozers to raze and bury the camp.

He crawled through the carnage on his hands and knees and turned over bodies. These were so mangled that they were little more than bloody sops with scraps of clothing clung to them but he would have known Sam and none of them was Sam. He was up to his forearms in gore and mud and shit when he heard someone whimpering, one little breathy cry after the other and each coming closer to him and he looked up and saw a woman stumbling upright over the wreckage. She was stark naked except for one white sock crumpled on her left ankle and there was blood splattered all down the insides of her thighs.

"Hey," he whispered. She ignored him and he said it again and she looked at him and for one second she stood there and stared at him blankly and then she turned and broke into a loping run.

Let her go, he thought. Let her GO.

"No no no," he said. She wasn't moving fast and he went after her in a stoop and lunged at her and pulled her to the ground. She put her hands over her face and shrieked.

"Shh, shh, quiet or we're gonna get shot. Quiet, quiet."

He turned her over and she stared up at him and said, "Look what they did," and kept saying it. Her face was swollen and her front teeth were broken. She was cut and burned and he unbuttoned his shirt and took it off and put it around her shoulders and she grabbed at it and clutched it to herself. "Look what they did," she said. "Look what they did."

"I know, I know," he said. She buried her forehead against his neck and twisted a hand in his t-shirt and he held onto her and looked around and said, "We're gonna get you outta here."

"We?" she said. "We who?"

"My brother. I have to find him."

She said, "Yes, we do," and he stopped and looked down at her. His hands were on her shoulders and Lilith turned her face up to him, her white eyes up to him and smiled.

* * *

When Sam came to he sat up so suddenly that the person next to him tumbled over and Sam felt a press of people shifting around him in the dark and the motion of wheels beneath him.

"Dean?" he said and no one answered. "Dean?"

Someone was beside him and she said, "Who're you lookin for, hon?" Her face was a pale circle in the gloom.

"My brother, he was right in front of me...Dean!"

"Shh, shh," she said. "Anyone here named Dean? Anyone here this boy's brother?"

There was another shuffle of bodies but no one called out and Sam said, "Where am I?"

"You're gettin the hell outta California's where."

She fired a cigarette lighter and in its wavering light Sam saw a huddle of people, more than two dozen of them and all of them filthy and many of them bleeding or injured and he reached up and felt blood on his own forehead and already drying into his hair. He looked around wildly and didn't see Dean and then a man said, "You was supposed to be someone else. I thought you was someone else."

"What?"

The man stared at him shellshocked and expressionless and said, "I thought you was someone else when I pulled you up in the truck. Thought you was my boy."

"I'm sorry," Sam said. "I'm sorry I..." He took one more look around the truck and said, "How far are we? I have to go back."

"We're not goin back," the woman said. "There's nothin left back there."

"Then stop the truck," Sam said and both of them stared at him. "Stop the truck and let me out, I have to go back."

"What for? They'll have buried what they ain't shot by now."

"Stop the truck," he said and he got up on his knees and the world swam before his eyes and he braced himself on the floor and shouted, "Stop the goddamn truck!"

A call went up and the truck shuddered to a stop and Sam stumbled through those ragged survivors until he came to the back of the truck and he climbed out onto the blacktop. The woman leaned out of the truck and said, "Twenty miles or so, back that way. You see any headlights you get off the road and lie low, they'll be roundin up anyone they think made it out." He nodded and she said, "Hon, you're makin a big mistake." Sam looked at her and at all the other faces in the shadows of the truck and he couldn't say anything. He just turned around and started walking.

* * *

He awoke on his back and his first thought was that she had blinded him. He hadn't seen such blackness since hell. He blinked and so he knew that his eyes were open and he touched his face and felt the sphere of his eyeballs beneath their scalded lids but he couldn't see anything at all and the darkness seemed to lie so heavily on him that he put his hands up as if he could push it away. He felt nothing above him but dry, still air. God help me, Dean thought. He wasn't praying. He didn't know what he was doing. God help me, God help me.

"Do you think I did that?" she said. Dean put his hands down flat on the ground. There was dirt beneath him. He lay there frozen. "That business at the camp? I tell you I did not do that. I had nothing to do with it." He turned his head in the direction of her voice but he couldn't see her or anything else. "Your kind did that. You're responsible for it."

There was a slight shift in the air and he knew that she was beside him. He could feel the fever-burn and drenching cold of her. He could smell her. He could taste her in his mouth like congealed blood and shit and fuming rot.

"There will be more order soon," she said. Then she said, "Where's your brother?" She grabbed his face and twisted it around and he stared up blindly into that crushing darkness. "Where is he?"

He didn't answer and she let go of him and then he felt her hand on his shoulder and she snapped his collarbone. The pain hit him like an electric shock and he arched up off the ground and clawed at the dirt.

"Where is he?"

He lay there panting and she broke his upper arm over her knee like wood kindling and he howled and twisted away from her and hissed, "Bitch."

"Ah, it can talk. Where's your brother?"

"I don't know. Dead. I lost him."

"He was with you at the camp," she said and when he didn't answer she wrenched his broken arm up behind him until Dean almost fainted and finally he said yes and she let go of him.

"I have good news for you," she said. "He isn't dead."

"You don't know anything."

"I know that much. And as long as he's alive he's going to come looking for you." She leaned down over him and she had paralyzed him or put him in so much pain that he couldn't move. He could only lie there and listen to her. She said, "He can't kill me. He burned it all up getting you out of hell. All his gifts. A sorry trade if you ask me. It'll kill him if he tries. I'll bring you his head. Then we'll take a ride out to the desert and you'll go back where you belong. But Sam first," she said. "Sammy first."

He heard her get up. He heard her feet grit over the dirt. Walk away and then come back to him and then suddenly there was light and he looked up and saw not Lilith crouching there but himself with Lilith's blank eyes in his sockets.

"He was happier with me than he ever was with you," she said. "He went after you out of pity and guilt. That's all he's ever felt for you, Dean. Pity. And guilt." She blinked and his own green eyes looked down at him. "Never love."

"I know," he said. He smiled up at her. "I don't care. I never did."

"Stupid," she said and she stood up and the darkness fell again and she was gone.

* * *

It was near dawn when Sam made it back to the camp. He saw the smoke and a haze of dust rising from the ruins over the low dark hills and at the crest of the hills he stopped and looked down onto the smoldering pit and the yellow bulldozers moving over it like maggots. Above him the sky was lightening into a pale ochre color. He heard a step behind him and didn't have time to turn around before the man was shouting at Sam to freeze. Sam put his hands up and turned his head and looked over his shoulder. The soldier was armored and wearing a respirator and goggles and he had an M4 carbine rifle bridged across his forearm.

"Where the fuck did you come from?" he said and Sam didn't answer. "Get on the fucking ground, asshole!"

"No," Sam said. He put his arms down and turned and faced the soldier. "Put that thing down."

The soldier lowered the gun and shook his head like a wet dog and stared at Sam through the buglike lenses.

"I said put that thing down."

The soldier bent over at the waist and laid the rifle on the ground and then straightened up. Sam felt a bloom of pain behind his eyes and he pressed his fingers to them and when he took them away the soldier was still standing there staring at him.

"Get undressed," Sam said and was doubled over by the pain that drove through his head. He braced his hands on his knees and closed his eyes and breathed steady through his nose and listened to the clatter of the soldier removing his gear and armor. Sam sat down on the ground and waited. It took close to ten minutes for the soldier to be stripped to his underwear and he was starting to pull down his shorts when Sam stopped him.

"That's enough. Go over there and lie down and go to sleep."

Sam leaned over and threw up. Blood ran out of his nose. The soldier stepped out of the circle of his armor and clothing and walked over to a scrub of dry trees and lay down at their roots and closed his eyes.

Sam put his forehead on his knees and clasped his hands over the back of his head and sat there. When he was able he stood up and pulled the respirator over his face and put the soldier's uniform on over his own clothes and slung the dogtags around his neck. He left the armor and he took the soldier's service pistol and stuck it in his belt and hoisted the M4 and wove his way down the hill towards the camp.

* * *

After Lilith left him Dean could move again and he pushed himself up and cradled his left arm and rocked on his knees. The arm was useless and the pain was horrific. The upper arm had begun to swell and he skimmed his fingertips over his collar and felt a jagged edge of bone broken through the skin and choked back a wave of nausea. He crept around on his right hand and knees with his left arm tucked against his chest and tried to get some bearings. The floor was gritty with dirt but the walls were concrete and he thought he was in a deep cellar or some kind of underground shelter. There were no windows. There was nothing in the place. He found a set of concrete stairs and climbed them and felt a flat metal trapdoor at the top with a bar handle in it and not a sliver of light around it and he stood there and pushed against it but it didn't give even the slightest bit. He wasn't making it out of there. He descended the stairs and sat down. He closed his eyes as if there were anything to close his eyes against and thought. He saw Meg in Viney's body before the fire in the desert and she'd asked him what Lilith had taken from him and he'd said everything. She'd taken everything.

Why do you think she wants you back as a package deal? she'd said. Body and soul? You think you're just her favorite pet or something?

He'd stared into her black eyes and seen the fire in them and seen himself in them too and he'd asked her what he had to do.

You have to get it right. Right time, right place, no second chances. It'll impair her, you understand? Shake her up enough so that she can be killed but it won't last. That's what you have to do. Get it right.

He had nothing to do it with. The room was empty, there wasn't even a sliver of glass in the place. Ceiling too high to reach and no banister on the stairs. Even his fingernails were worn down to nothing. He put his forehead in his hand. He was sweating and shivering.

Somebody help me. Somebody fucking help me here.

He passed his hand over the back of his head and rested it on his neck and he sat there for more than a minute before he noticed the smooth chain under his fingers and he brought up onto his hand the medal that Sam had given him, St. Michael the Archangel. Who had trod Satan under his foot.

* * *

Sam crossed the charred and scoured remains of the camp and one of the bulldozer drivers hailed him and waved and he waved back as if this were just another ordinary day's work and they weren't both treading on such grossly unhallowed ground. The black overturned earth smoked in places and even with the respirator the stench was overwhelming. He had no reason to believe Dean had made it out of here yet he did. He couldn't imagine that after everything his brother's bones were crushed and buried in this place but there was nothing left of the camp and if his brother was alive he was not here. He came to a paved county road that wound northward up through the hills and towards Havilah and the Greenhorn Mountains and here the militia vehicles were parked and the guns silent and pointing down from their mountings and some of them were festooned with women's panties and bras and these trophies hung like limp party banners of cotton and nylon from the black barrels. The sun was coming up over the hills and the men were standing on the road eating breakfast. Sam passed among them and some grinned at him and others clapped him on the back with the good nature and camaraderie of all men who believe they have taken on a dirty job and seen it done right.

He followed the road upcountry and there was nothing to see but the double yellow line on the asphalt and the small dry trees that twisted up from the rocky ground. He rounded a hill and saw a spotted cow standing in an enclosure of wire and wooden poles and the cow gazed at him with her simple innocence and then looked away. Set back from the cow's little corral was a slate-topped ranch house behind a chainlink fence adorned with hubcaps and he walked up the dirt road and climbed the two steps to the door and opened it.

He took off the respirator and called out a hello and no one answered. He walked through the living room then into the kitchen and stood there. The kitchen windows faced east and dust motes floated in the early morning light and the place was tidy and no one was there. He turned and went down the hallway and a door on his right was ajar and he pushed it open cautiously with the barrel of the M4. The room was bright with sunlight and Dean was lying on the floor.

* * *

His hands were shaking and he couldn't unclasp the chain so he broke it off his neck and he held the smooth silver disk of the medal in his hand for a moment and then he bent over the concrete step and set the medal against it and snapped it in half. One piece skittered off into the darkness but the other stayed in his fingers and its edge was cool and sharp.

Do it. Do it quick, do it.

* * *

Sam dropped the rifle and knelt down beside Dean and turned him over. He was filthy and bloody and Sam lifted him up and put his hand under Dean's head and Dean's eyes fluttered open and he shuddered and pushed Sam away.

"Dean, Dean, it's me. It's me."

Dean stared up at him. "Sam?"

"Yeah," Sam said and was laughing in his relief. "Oh my God, I knew you made it out. Thank God."

"Sam?" Dean said and then he was laughing too. "I don't believe it. I don't fucking believe it." He sat up and put his arms around Sam's neck. Sam hugged Dean and there were tears in Sam's eyes and running down his face.

Then Dean said, "Let's get the fuck outta here."

"Great idea," Sam said and they stood up and Dean said he'd lost all of his gear at the camp and Sam took the soldier's service pistol out from his belt and handed it to Dean and Dean looked at him.

"Thanks, Sammy," Dean said and Sam smiled and turned around.

* * *

He braced his left arm on his knees and dragged the shard of silver up from the wrist to the elbow. It almost wasn't sharp enough to go through the skin but it did. All the way up. Dean didn't even feel it. The fingers of his left hand were numb and swollen and he couldn't hold the little thing in them so he put it between his teeth and opened up his right wrist the same way, wrist to elbow. He spat the medal out and it clinked softly on the concrete and Dean lay down at the foot of the stairs and waited to die.

* * *

The shot went wide past Sam and up into the ceiling puffing plaster dust out of the hole and Sam wheeled around and saw Dean standing there staring at him with absolute shock on his face.

"What the hell was that?" Sam shouted and Dean dropped the gun and doubled over and when he looked up Sam knew this wasn't his brother.

"Fuck," he said and he put up his hand and drove her against the wall and she was pinned there staring at him with her white eyes in his brother's face and the effort of doing that made Sam stagger and clutch his head.

"Go ahead," she said. "Do it, Sam."

He looked up at her through watering eyes and she said, "Come on, Sam, remember how good it felt? Strong and right, remember?"

It had. It had. He had Lilith here and he could finish her once and for all and all he needed was the power in his own head, the power that Azazel had given him that had slept in him since he was six months old.

Do it, he thought. Do it quick, do it, do it!

She wasn't Dean now at all, she was herself. A hideous dark thing in that fresh sunlight. She scrabbled her nails against the wall and stared at him.

He said, "No. Not like that."

She cocked her head at him. Perplexed. Then some realization came into her face and he bent down and in one motion he pulled Ruby's knife from his boot and she snarled at him and he shoved her against the wall with one arm and drove the knife into her guts. She threw back her head and howled and the glass shattered out of every window in the house and the ground shook so that even the hired butchers at the camp felt it and thought it was an earthquake and they ran for cover.

* * *

Dean felt it. He heard it, even down there. He was freezing cold and trembling with shock but he smiled. That's it, Sammy. That's my boy.

* * *

She wasn't dead. She stared into Sam's eyes with the hollow and ancient emptiness of her own and said, "Dean's alive. Let me go and I'll show you."

He pulled the knife out from her and put it to her throat and she said, "Do that and you'll never find him. He'll die in the fucking dark screaming for you. I'll let both of you go. Think, Sammy. Think."

He looked at her for a second and then he put the knife down and he stepped away from her. He pulled her away from the wall and said, "Show me."

She stumbled beside Sam. His hand was wrapped around her arm and he could feel the monstrous heat of her power thrumming beneath her skin and knew she was only unguarded and weak for a little while. She led him out behind the house towards the hills to a metal door, a padlocked hasp.

"In there," she said. He looked at her. She was like a plague stain in the sunlight. He let go of her arm and looked down at the door and saw her shadow behind him and then he was hurled across the yard. He slammed into a tree and lay there stunned and he heard her coming towards him in the dry brush and knew she was still weak or he'd be dead already. She came over him and he whirled around and reared up and slammed the knife into her throat. Drove it up to the hilt in her head. Her blank eyes went wide. Her blackened hands flew up. He pulled the knife out and grabbed her by the hair and with one stroke he hacked off her head.

Then the earthquake did come. Far off he could hear the hillsides crumbling. Men shouting. Sam lay on the ground, his fingers knotted in Lilith's hair. When the quake passed he cast off her head and went into the house and came back with the M4 and shot the padlock off the hasp and raised the door.

* * *

He felt light on his face. He heard his name. "Dean." He opened his eyes but he couldn't see. Still he knew it was Sam. He couldn't talk. He felt Sam lift him up.

* * *

Dean's body was loose and heavy and bloodsoaked and it bowed backwards over Sam's arms. His collarbone jutted grotesquely. Sam laid him down. His arms were around Dean's waist and he bent over him.

"It's okay," he whispered. "I've got you. Don't worry. I've got you. I've got you."

He said it over and over. A tremor ran through Dean's body.

"I've got you," Sam said. "I've got you."

* * *

Sunlight, hot like July. Smell of asphalt under the sun, warm and rich and full of possibility and the scent of hay and earth and soft summer air. Birds. He opened his eyes onto blue sky. Ribbons of high cloud wisped across it. He raised himself up on his elbows. He sat up. Nothing on him was broken. He didn't hurt. He saw two roads crossing each other, shimmering blacktop stretching out. A signpost stood at the edge of the crossroads with two old tin markers crisscrossed upon it and one of them said Indiana Street and he couldn't see the other one but it didn't matter. He knew this wasn't Lawrence any more than he was alive.

"You just gonna sit there?"

Dean turned his head. Sam was crouched beside him. He smiled and raised an eyebrow at Dean.

"What the shit, Sammy? Are you dead too?"

"I wouldn't call it dead exactly. Not alive either."

"Am I dead?"

"Oh yeah, you're dead."

"As a doornail."

"As any kind of nail you can think of."

"What happened to Lilith?"

"She's gone."

"So this..." He made a motion across his wrists. "This worked?"

"Yeah," Sam said. "But you might've clued me in beforehand."

"I didn't want you to know. You would've given me endless shit about it."

"Damn right I would have."

"It was the only way."

"Still."

Dean looked around. "What now?"

"I don't know. What do you want to do?"

"What can I do?"

"You can do anything you want."

Dean didn't know what that meant. He stood up. He stretched his legs. "I want to walk," he said.

"Okay."

Sam stood up and they started walking. The breeze was light. The sun felt so good. They didn't say anything. After a while Dean said, "If you're not dead what are you doing here?"

"I'm a demon, Dean, I can come and go."

Dean stopped and looked up at Sam. "You're not a demon, okay. Enough of that shit. You're nothing but my kid brother with a little deviljuice in you so I don't wanna hear it."

Sam rubbed the back of his neck. "Well, if I'm not a demon then we've got a situation here that needs some explaining."

"Yeah? What's that?"

"I own your soul."

Dean gaped at him. "What?"

"You sold your soul, Dean. When Azazel died it passed to Lilith and when Lilith died..."

"It passed to you?"

Sam squinted. "You got it."

"How long did you know about this?"

"I don't think I really knew until you died and I was able to follow you. I see things differently here. I know things I didn't know before."

Dean pondered this and said, "I don't believe it. Show me."

Sam laughed. "There's nothing to show, it just is what it is."

"Well I thought there'd at least...be a scroll or something kinda...cool. Like that."

"Sorry."

Dean nodded. He shrugged. He started walking again and Sam walked beside him. The road was straight and long and they came upon a stile by the side of it and Dean didn't feel like walking anymore and he hooked his elbows over the stile and crossed his legs and Sam leaned up beside him.

"This is kind of awkward," Dean said.

"Yeah, it's gonna get worse too."

"Oh Jesus. What else?"

"Well, I own your soul. And since your death was untimely and unnatural to say the least, I can...make a deal with you."

"You can make a deal. You. With me."

"Yeah."

"What kind of deal?"

"I can give you your soul back."

"Okay. So?"

"While I still hold it though..."

"What?"

"I can bring you back."

Dean stared at him. "To life."

"Yeah."

"Is there a catch?"

"No catch. Just once I do that your soul is yours again and you're on your own. If I let you go here, you'll stay here. If I bring you back it's a one-time deal."

Dean looked up the road. He looked down the road. "What's here, though? Is this it?"

"Oh, I don't think so."

"Is this heaven?"

"It's peace. It's rest, it's...resting in peace."

"You won't be here."

"Not yet. But you'll be okay. As bad as hell was that's how good this is."

"That's pretty fucking good."

"Yeah."

"Sammy..."

"You know what's back there," Sam said. "You know what you'd be going back to. It's painful and it's terrifying and it's dark way more than it's light. And it's worse now than ever, even though Lilith's gone. So you need to think about this, Dean. You've earned your rest. You earned it a long time ago. Do you really want to give it up?"

Dean pushed himself off the stile. He walked out to the center of the road and looked towards the horizonline and felt it pulling at him and behind him was a great black fog of everything his life had been from that night in Lawrence until he'd bled to death in the dark. He saw it all unspool before him, years of looking out for Sam and living under his father and loving them both and yet terrified all the time of losing them. He saw Sam eighteen years old at the bus stop on his way to California and Dean getting back in the car by himself and going back to his father alone and wiping tears out of his eyes the whole way, which no one ever knew. He saw his father dying and burning on a pyre and Sam dead on a mattress in Cold Oak. He saw Azazel with a bullet in his heart. He saw hellhounds. Lilith. Centuries of hell. Lastly he saw the world that was so changed and Sam on his knees in the cellar with him dead in his arms. He knew Sam was right and all of that was behind him now and the whole of eternity stretched out and beckoned before him.

He turned to Sam. "Do you want me to come back?"

"It doesn't matter what I want."

"Yes it does."

Sam looked at him. The sun shone down. The air was still. "I want you to be happy," he said. "That's all I want. I love you, and that's all I want."

Dean took a deep breath. He put his head down. He walked up the road apiece and came back and looked at Sam and then turned and crossed the road and walked through the grass. There was an oak tree there in the meadow and he went and leaned against it and then he sat down in its cool shade and rested his elbows on his knees and looked out at the sunlight on that grassy plain.

* * *

It was later when Dean returned to where he had left Sam and the trees were lit up gold in the late sunlight. Sam got up and came to Dean and they stood in the middle of the road and their shadows were long behind them.

"I want to go back," he said.

"Don't do this for me, Dean."

"No. It's..." He wiped his hand over his face and looked at Sam. "There were people who helped me, Sam. There were so many people who helped me or I'd never have made it to you. People like Bobby and then people I didn't even know and who didn't know me and there was this little kid, Alex, and his father and...and I don't know. I don't know. This is...I want to stay here, Sam. I really do, you don't know how bad. But there's good there too, there's a lot of good and I'm not ready to leave it behind. Not yet. Especially not now. If you..." He smiled shakily. "If you love me, Sam, you get it."

"I do," Sam said. "This is it, Dean, you can't change your mind."

"I won't."

"Promise me you'll take better care of your soul once you get it back?"

"Oh, I think I've learned my lesson on that score. Do we have a deal?"

Sam smiled. "Yes," he said. He laid his hand on Dean's face and Dean looked up at him. He tipped his face up to him and Sam kissed him. He put his hand over Sam's and closed his eyes and Sam rested his forehead against Dean's and softly he said, "There."

* * *

He woke up on the floor of the bomb shelter near Bakersfield with a scintilla of that kiss still on his mouth and a cooling puddle of his own arterial blood beneath him and Sam lying there with his arms around Dean's waist.

"Sam."

He pushed at Sam a little. His left arm and collarbone were whole and the only pain he was in was Sam's weight on him and the sticky wet misery under him. "Sam, get off me."

Sam stirred and he raised his head and stared down at Dean and said, "Jesus Christ."

"Yeah," Dean said. "How many lives is that?"

"Three. No, four."

"Five left. Let's go."

* * *

They couldn't burn the corpse because the country around was tinder dry. They went through the house and the shed in the back and found a tarp and Dean wouldn't look at her or touch her so Sam rolled her and her head up in it and tied off both ends with bungee cord.

They didn't know if she had killed the people who lived in the house or if the horrors down at the camp had driven them away in the night but no one was there and no one seemed to be coming there. Dean found some clothes that fit him in the bedroom and he changed into them and rolled his bloodsoaked things up and stuffed them into a black trash bag and then he washed his hands and face and ran his head under the kitchen faucet to get some of the blood out of his hair. Sam took off the militia uniform and the dog tags and put them in the bag with Dean's clothes. There were five twenty-dollar bills tucked beneath a collection of matchbooks in a bowl in the kitchen and they had no money so Sam took the bills and put them in his pocket and lastly they went out to the carport and threw the trash bag and Lilith's remains in the back of the El Camino that sat there on four low tires. Dean angled himself under the dashboard to jumpstart the car but Sam pulled down the visor and the keys tumbled out onto the driver's seat and Dean looked up at him from under the dashboard and said, "That's why you're the smart one."

They drove out and down the dirt drive and when they got to the road the cow started bawling and backed to the far corner of her wire pen with her eyes rolling and Dean said, "Wait."

"Wait what?"

"What about the cow?"

"What about the cow?"

"We can't just leave her there. What if these people don't come back?"

"What?"

"She's gonna die of thirst in there. That's a horrible way to go."

He said, "Dean..." but Dean was already getting out of the car. He shut the passenger door and leaned down into the window and said, "She's scared of that thing in the back. You drive up over there and wait."

Dean was halfway across the yard. "You gonna be a vegetarian now, too?" Sam called. Dean flapped an arm at him. The cow bawled louder. Sam sighed and pulled the car out of the driveway and a few yards up onto the road. He watched Dean in the rearview mirror.

"I bring him back from the dead," Sam said, "I've got a superdemon's corpse in the back, probably a ring of militia five miles around and he's watering the cow. And...now he's petting the cow."

Dean scratched the cow between her eyes. She flapped her little ears at him. Sam blew the horn.

* * *

They drove out past Havilah and Bodfish and the reservoir and they took 395 North straight up through the cool Sierras. They stopped for gas in Olancha and the sign over the gas station offered a strange smorgasbord of olives and salami and fresh jerky but neither of them was interested. They crossed the Nevada state line at Montgomery Pass and there was no militia there and no one stopped them and they kept going north.

Near Winnemucca they passed an abandoned gas station and they pulled into it. There were iron dumpsters behind the station and Sam threw the black trash bag and Lilith's remains into the dumpster and they siphoned gas out of the car and doused the tarp and burned it. The smoke of her burning reeked horribly. It was now late afternoon and the sun was low and red on the western horizon and the flames were the same color as the sun and Sam looked at Dean and saw him staring into the flames and he had no expression on his face at all. Or none that Sam could read. When the flames died they closed the lid of the dumpster and they left Lilith's ashes there with the trash and they drove away.

* * *

By nightfall they were in Idaho and it was cold. It began to rain and then it began to snow. Sam turned on the heater. Dean hadn't said anything for hours and Sam thought he was dozing but he wasn't.

"I think we should stop."

"Hmm?"

"I think we should stop, get a little sleep."

"Okay."

"You all right?"

Dean looked at him. "Yeah, Sam. I'm fine."

He found a motel outside of Buhl and he left Dean in the car and went into the office. The clerk looked at him over his half glasses and pushed the registration card towards him and Sam filled it out. Behind the clerk a television was on with the sound turned down low and Sam stopped filling out the registration card and stared at the television and asked the clerk if he could turn it up.

The clerk dialed up the sound and said, "Terrible thing. Horrible."

"Where is that?"

"Outside Bakersfield California. They say the militia just went in there and killed all these people. Hundreds of em. There were stories the cholera was coming out of the homeless camps and the militia went in there to clean em out. They cleaned em out all right. Now they're the ones gonna get cleaned out, that's for sure. Bout time too."

"Who's broadcasting this?"

"Who ain't?" the clerk said and he flicked the channels around and every one was showing the same thing. "Jesus wept. What people do to each other. Jesus wept."

* * *

In the car Dean sat and looked at the sign above the motel. Starlight was the name of the place. He stared at it. The snow eddied down. Starlight, starlight, starlight.

* * *

The room was like a thousand other such rooms they had occupied in their vagabond lives. Brown-orange bedspreads. Green carpet. Television bolted to a stand that was bolted to the floor. The heater was loud and gave off a burnt smell. It was beautiful.

Dean was still bloody beneath his borrowed clothes and he went to take a shower. He came out with a towel around his hips and his clothes folded over his arm and he went to bed without saying anything. Sam took a shower and when he came out Dean was asleep in a sprawl on his stomach with the little light on beside the bed. Sam could see that his hair was still wet. He took the towel from where Dean had left it on the back of the brown-orange chair and he bent over Dean and gently dried his hair and then changed the wet pillow out for a dry one and pulled the covers up over Dean's back. Dean never stirred.

* * *

Sam dreamt about the place in Minnesota where Pastor Jim had lived. There was a lake there with a raft in the middle of it and on hot summer afternoons they would swim to the raft and lie out. Dean was a stronger swimmer than he was and always made it to the raft first. In this dream Sam was just a kid and as in real life he swam across the lake after his brother and by the time he rose dripping and nearly blue from the icy lake water Dean was stretched out half-asleep on the sunwarmed boards. His teeth were chattering and he lay down next to Dean and butted his cold shoulder up against Dean's warm one and Dean took a deep breath and put his arm over his eyes and they lay there under the hot summer sun and Dean said, It should always be like this and then Sam woke up.

The heater was loud and he got up and turned it off. He could hear snow falling against the window and he looked out through the curtain and saw the parking lot covered. Theirs was the only car in the lot and the motel sign was off and the amber light beside the office door glowed in the snowy night.

Sam stood there and listened to Dean breathe. Then he went to Dean's bed and pulled back the covers and slid in behind him. He put his shoulder against his brother's scarred and warm back and he lay there and then Dean said, "Sam?"

"Did I wake you up? Sorry."

"I was kind of awake anyway."

"You want me to go back to my bed?"

"No, it's okay," he said. And then, "Sam?"

"Yeah?"

"I feel weird."

Sam propped himself on one elbow and looked at Dean. "Sick weird? Hurt?"

"No," Dean said. He rolled over onto his back and looked up at Sam. He looked as if he were trying to figure out what to say. After a while he said, "I feel like everything will be all right. Do you feel that way?"

"Yeah, I think I do."

"That's weird."

"No, that's good."

"I think I'm going crazy."

"I don't think so."

Dean rolled back over onto his side. "I don't know about you, Sam."

Sam smiled and lay down. Dean pressed his back against Sam and Sam pulled up the covers and fell asleep.

* * *

They were maybe two hours out from Duluth when Sam swung the car north onto 71 towards Bemidji.

"Wrong way, Sam."

"We need to make a little detour."

"Detour? We're gonna be in Duluth in a couple hours."

"There's someone I have to see."

"Yeah, well Bobby's in Duluth and that's who I have to see, who do you have to see that's more important than that?"

"It's just a little bit out of the way."

"Is this another demon girlfriend?"

Sam laughed. "No. It's just someone I need to see."

"I gotta tell you Sam, I am all full up on surprises these days."

"Just relax, would you."

"All right but only because you got me out of hell. And, you know...brought me back from the dead and..." He flapped his hand in the air. "That whole thing."

"Got it," Sam said.

Sam drove north up into the Mesabi Iron Range and near Chisholm he pulled off down an old mining road and when he came to a chained fence he stopped the car and got out and took bolt cutters from the flatbed and snapped the padlock open and pulled the chain through the links and swung the gate open. He got back in the car and could feel Dean staring at him while they drove down the road and in a little way they came to the entrance of a decommissioned and shuttered mineshaft. Sam shut off the car and he turned to Dean.

"Can you stay here for a minute?"

"Like shit, I'm not staying here."

"Dean, just for a minute." Dean glared at him and Sam said, "Hell. Back from the dead," and stared him down soulfully.

"One minute," Dean said. "You've got one minute and then I'm going after you."

"Fine," Sam said. He got out of the car with the bolt cutters and went to the mineshaft and broke the lock over the iron hatch and went inside. From outside he heard Dean loudly counting down the seconds.

* * *

He got to ten and stopped and listened. It was very quiet. He heard nothing from inside the shaft and he opened the car door and got out.

"Sam?"

He took a step forward and the small gray stones shifted and gritted beneath his feet and then Sam was at the entrance to the mine and he called, "Okay, Dean."

He crossed over the gravel and put his hand on the iron hatch and looked at Sam and then he looked inside. He looked at Sam again and then he turned and walked into the mine. There was just enough light. At first he saw only the gleaming bezels of the cornering lights and then he saw the headlights and then the front grille and Chevrolet scripted in chrome. He walked around to the driver's side. He heard Sam behind him and he looked at him and then back at the car. He licked his thumb and rubbed at the Impala's door.

"Scratch," he said.

"Oh yeah. Meant to get that buffed out."

Dean nodded. He leaned over the windshield and tapped on it. "Little nick there."

"Whoops. My bad."

Dean turned and walked to the back of the car, trailing his hand over its cool, smooth surface. He kicked the rear tires, left then right. He crouched down and picked a pebble from the tread. He straightened up and walked to the front of the car on the shotgun side. He stood there with his hand on the hood until Sam said, "Dean?" and Dean couldn't say anything. "Are you okay?"

Dean opened his mouth. He closed it. He looked at the car and he looked at Sam and then he was charging past Sam out into the daylight and he went a few feet and sat down hard in the dirt and pulled up his knees and put his head on them and his arms over his head and sat there for a second without breathing and then he was crying and then he was sobbing. Loud. Like a baby.

* * *

Sam leaned against the mine hatch. He looked at Dean and watched his shoulders shake and listened to him weep. He took a deep breath and looked up. Overhead a formation of geese passed, headed south. A perfect arrowhead in the blue October sky. He could hear them on the wind. After a minute he went over and sat down next to Dean and after another minute he put his hand on Dean's back and Dean raised his head and looked at him with his face all wet and laughed.

"You bastard," he said. He scrubbed his hand across his face. "Why didn't you tell me?"

"I don't know. I guess I wanted you to have a good surprise for a change."

Dean laughed and then he was sobbing again. He leaned over onto Sam's shoulder and covered his face with his hands and Sam laid his cheek against the top of his brother's head and closed his eyes and the world went on around them. The world went on. They went on.

* * *

When he slept he slept dreamlessly and if dreams did come they were good ones of childhood and his brother and the things and people he loved. He was quieter now and softer and had a patience about him that had not been there before. Sam called it serenity and the word sounded so serious and so Samlike that it made Dean laugh yet he knew it was something just like that but so wholly new and unexpected that he had no name for it. There had been a yoke on him of sadness and shame and the terror of loss that he had borne since Indiana Street and he had carried it down to hell and brought it back up with him. He had died with it. So it had died too or he had been released from it or cast it off himself. It didn't matter. There are things not to be questioned. There are signs and wonders. And after everything there is love and there is rest and there is peace. Peace at the last.

June 6, 2008 - March 16, 2009
Thank you for reading.