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The sound of a car.
Petrol.
The smell of leather.
The feel of the seat beneath me.
Dust.
Sunlight through a windscreen.
Those were the first things I noticed as I woke up in the passenger seat of our home, the Impala. I shifted sleepily, and Dean looked over at me as I blinked myself awake.
“Mornin sleepyhead” Dean said from the drivers seat. He drove casually, leaning back slightly in the chair, and holding the wheel with one hand. He prodded my face to irritate me. I raised my eyebrows at him, and avoided his further attacks on my face by half-yawning-half-groaning.
“How you feeling?” My brother asked.
I yawned again.
“Tired” I replied.
“You slept all night”
That surprised me. Recently I hadn’t slept well, if at all. My sleep patterns being seriously interrupted by violent, disturbing dreams depicting people’s deaths. All in vivid, graphic details. What was even weirder, more freaky, was that these dreams had come true.
“How longs it been since that happened?” I asked sitting up.
“ A while” Dean sighed.
Trust him to notice.
If a stranger were to look at us now, they wouldn’t think anything of us. We don’t look any different to anyone else; really, I guess they would just assume that we were just two guys on a road trip or something. Which is partly true. We are on a road. We are on a journey. Just not the kind that normal people would take. Unless normal people go on demon-hunting holidays. You could hardly guess that there was anything extraordinary about us.
Except that there was. Stuff happened to us. Not stuff that happens to ordinary people. Weird stuff. Bad stuff. Like predicting people’s deaths in dreams.
Looking at my brother, he looks remarkably calm. Somebody, even someone close to us, who didn’t know Dean as well as I do, would guess that everything is fine. Even though until recently we hadn’t spoken in years, since I went away to law school, much to my father’s disgust, I can safely say that I still know Dean better than anyone else. I know when something’s wrong.
Thing is with Dean, he doesn’t exactly…well; he tries not to show weakness. Emotion even. It’s only by the look in his eyes as he looks out the windscreen, that I can tell he’s been thinking.
I turn into the dawn sunlight and roll down the window. Dean puts AC/DC or some other ancient rock band from dads tape collection into the cassette player. My brother is rather old fashioned in a way. Sort of sentimental I suppose, insisting on using tapes. He starts to sing rather out of tune.
Everything was a hazy orange, pink and red as twilight almost reached sunrise. The road ahead stretched out for miles and miles into the almost desert of one of America’s back roads. The landscape was bare. Dry dust, sand. The occasional tumbleweed, run down town or old car. A diner’s neon sign flickered in the rear view mirror, a distant speck.
It would be a while yet before we saw any kind of civilisation.
Bare dust, sand and desert. Bleak. Yet strangely beautiful.
You really could forget about everything out here.
Leave it all behind.
Start anew.
The dawn rose, fresh and rosy fingered.
We drove on.