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Low barometric pressure recorded in the Pheonix district, at 12.45 am, today, with the likelihood of a storm-brewing rising, our meterologists can predict that the likely surge bands pushing it to the outer regions of the city in the already sweltering Arizona. The cumulonimbus, creatively nicknamed 'Storm Dean' -
Jessica Sansour turned off the roadside tv with a harsh click. She grimmaced at the blank, and fuzzy screen, filling the air with an unsettling static she hoped not to put down to the lowering barometric pressure.
Working, now, full-time at the greasy spoon, 'Angelo's Bistro' at the side of the Interstate 10, had gotten her more than enough lethargy without dealing with this atrocious weather. She worried her bottom lip between two teeth as she brushed the afternoon's dust on the front of her already besmirched smock, and had to imagine this likely wasn't what her grandmother had intended for her, after leaving Palestine thirty years, previous. Yet, her father had been in similar business most of his life, with not many in the post-911 world able to 'handle' any one with an accent even skimming that of any of the innumerable ones spanning the entire region of the middle East, and, she was now technically running the joint after Angelo Bernardini had had that sudden heart attack three years prior, back when all the crazy weather events, blood fountains and sudden deaths were dropping people, too. He had been in Lewis, Oklahoma at the time, visiting family. He was good people.
She supposed she didn't have much to complain about. She was doing better than her father ever managed, Allah rest him.
The sound of blaring fire alarms as the crimson truck streaked past pulled her back to her senses. They almost never saw that, anymore. Fire, police, ambulance. Whatever happened, about twelve months ago, when the Earth shook and people declard 'Apocalypse' left and right, things became... calmer. Somehow. She didn't think she'd ever forget the day she spent cowering under her desk, a hair's breadth from her college, we three other roommates packed under with her, as Earthquakes rocked almost every continent on the planet, and the sky bristled with static. Rare phenomena, the meterologists had said. Unprecedented, but not impossible fall out of global heat rising, the climate scientists had chimed in.
Bullshit, she called. Not that she had a particular apathy to that growing issue, but carbon dioxide didn't made rivers run red in three major equatorial countries.
Her father had ran a hand down her terse forehead, and swept sweaty palms down the thick, now prematurely greying strands of her loosely braided hair.
Bismillah, he had whispered, pressing kisses to her hair parting. Bismillah, he had prayed as his shaking arms held her more closely and tightly than she had known what to do with, the day after the Big Disaster.
What do we do now? she has whispered back to her father, in broken, Palestinian arabic she had picked up from him as a child.
Her father stilled for a long, broken, stalling moment.
Inshallah, he had prayed. If God wills it. And God could wish only good fortunes, right?
She swiped tears from her eyes that were only just brewing, attempting to keep the dust out from clouding the wet membranes. Allah, she missed him.
She sniffed, lightly and curt. She had to get back in to prepare for the six pm dinner rush. Those burgers wouldn't flip themselves.
It wasn't half an hour later, at 6.23 pm, when she heard the growl of a muscle car as it ground heavily onto her gravelled drive.
She heard the burger patty sizzle under the heat of the grill, as she had left the steel spatular rest on the top for too long, and quickly turned it with a flick of the wrist. She hadn't been expecting any other patrons, except for the handful of regulars that turned up at 6pm, sharp.
Allen Turner, the retired Veteran-turned-art-teacher who had served in the gulf war, and had taught her how to cross-hatch, once upon a lifetime ago. Rebecca Knowle, who had made a habbit of turning up on random weekdays after she lost both of her kids in the divorce, after her husband had claimed she was convinced she was turning into an angel, on the word of the powerful entity known as 'Joshua' or 'Jack', or something equally mundane, occasionally with the two kids in tow on custody weekends. Fergus... something, too. He rarely spoke. She wouldn't know enough about him to write a name card.
The six-cylinder engine purred to a park, as the vehicle had swung into one of the, admittedly, many open spaces.
The sound wasn't unfamiliar. Not in the hair-standing-up on the back of her neck, type, that she had often read in b-class horror novels her friends implored her to skim through, or the fuzzy extraterrestrial manner she assumed ET had filled Elliot's senses with, full of friendship and harmony. More of a... neutral buzz. Like the shock waves in the air after a storm, or the sweet, fresh scent of petrichor rising up from the ground after it was cut, or a rainstorm. Sweet, sublte. Neutralising.
It took her a moment to place the origin of her familiarity with the sound.
Jessica. Jessica, her cousin had pleaded, soft, brown hands wrapping hers in a dry, fervent expression.
We know what's behind the storms, the lack of attacks, the changes.
Her bloodshot, swollen eyes still haunted her in their expression now, eight months after the fact. A chill shock was echoing down her spine.
Two brothers, she insisted. Still did, every Saturday evening over the telephone, whenever Jessica had brothered to pick up.
Two brothers started the end of the world. And the beginning of the next-
Sacrilege, was what she had summed it up to. Or religious delusion. She knew things like that often happened after severe, traumatic events, such as one's leg being crushed, pinned under beams of rubble for hours at a time in the wake of a world-affecting earthquake. It might have been the pain meds that had done it.
She knew all of this from her three years in Fundamental and Advanced Psychology at Pheonix U. God, she was wasted at a road diner.
She still had plastic crates stuffed with the dime-store novels Rania had sent her, cracking the corners on several with the impetuous packing. The Winchester Gospels, the fringier groups of Apocalypse Apologists had called them. Supernatural, the publishists had. A feild day, she was sure, happened at the book publishers' main office when they realised their novels were being handed around as religious texts. Hooey, she called it, embracing the several Americanisms from outside her state that her flatmates and college buddies had brought with them from around the continental US, when they came to Pheonix.
Despite this insistance on denying the garbage that was stinking her rooms with the scent of fresh must and and sodden, finger smudged pages, the memory of the impala, titular to some stories her cousin had described, brought a faint smile to her face at the memory of her state-distant Rania. Her remaining family.
Two doors clicked open and closed in unison, with two towering figures in clothes of opposing colour were faintly seen through the colour-swathing blurs of frosted glass. Their faces were impossible to discern through the glass.
The two stood on either side of the front door, bell hanging unrung on her side of the wooden slab. She squinted her confusion at the pair. Between the odd movements, impractical vehicle choice and late arrival, they seemed... distinctly odd, her burger-fume-addled brain. God, she was hungry.
They stayed there for another second. Definitely odd.
Then, not one by one, or spontaneous or food-slowed, every patron on the diner sat up, and stood.
She blinked, and Fergus was gone.
... what?
Then, slowly, but with apparent determination, Allen and Rebecca started walking towards the door. Arms stiff with what looked like practiced movement, and their torsos and legs moving in perfect unison as if they learned how to walk from a book. A very non descriptive book.
She was used to odd, what with patrons who spoke in stilted words, flipping between what seemed like an English and Scottish accent at will, a woman who constantly spoke in gravelly tones in a language she had never spoken, or encountered, and a man who seemes to know her every other thought. She was used to weird, in a place such as this. In a timeline she assumed was so backwards as this one she was born into, with both her home and ancestral countries dealing with their citizens in quite apathetic ways, and a world brimming with unused heat, until... it didn't. Near enough a year ago.
Her cousin tried to convince her of her Fraternal theory, with this as a basis. She was still unconvinced.
The two remaining patrons made there way out of the diner, on single file. They weren't back to their cars when the two men approached the door, and stepped in.
The other patrons' cars roared off in a muffled sound, in the distance, compared to the beating thumps of blood in Jessica's ears.
One carried himself much as she pictured the cowboys of old, or like Clint Eastwood in the films she watched at college parties, or the one dinner her cousin had invited her two before she became... unstable.
Bow legged, confident, and brash. Yes, that summed up the first man quite nicely.
The other, nearly a head taller than the first, which was surprising, considering the first could easily be a basketball player in stature, was his polar opposite.
Shoulders slouched, as if the whole of the world was brimming in his heavy, perma-wet eyes, and shrinking in on himself to the point where she was convinced, if he was a star, he would have long condensed into a black hole by now.
One was wearing an all grey suit, to the point of being black in it's dark intensity, with the only defining feature taking away from it's sleek nature to add a more rugged tone was the plaid-looking pattern of the silky shirt.
The other couldn't be simpler. A loose, cotton gym shirt in a grey so light it was almost blinding. A zip up hoodie, simple, and light, draped over the top. Smooth, cotton joggers in the same, clear colour.
Each had once difference. The shorter held a white, horned figure around his neck, the taller, a black symbol blazened on his neck, looking what she could only assume was a flaming pentagram in depiction.
They seemed to saunter as if the ground didn't touch them. As if the air would part their way even if they weren't there to move into the empty space.
They sat opposite each other at her cleanest table, in her cleanest booth, in such a perfect motion she couldn't be sure they weren't synchronised swimmers, if they hadn't clearly not gotten the slender physique for it.
She stalled her judgements. She took a breath. She could handle weird. She had been head chef at Angelo's Bistro for three years. Rania, Fergus, Gospels, Earthquake. She could handle weird.
She whisked over to them with a set of menus in hand, and stood with a practiced, eased posture at the side of their table. She could handle weird.
"And, what would you two gentlemen like this evening?"
She can't have been quite sure of her volume, because neither man had been interupted from their incessant bicker-chatting.
"Come on, Dean," the taller had whispered, "I'm getting tired of marching everyone out of places just because you want a private conversation."
"Dude, chillax. It's funny," the shorter had replied, snorting into his fist as he swept his eyes across the semi abandoned diner. Slabs of steak and pinches of fries were still steaming where they were abandoned by the quickly evacuated chairs and cuttlery. Jessica was sure she was going to have to start asking for payment in advance.
"Besides, you saw who was here, man-"
The taller, long haired man rolled his eyes. "I thought you got over your beef with him when you gained a, erm, 'Supernatural Perspective'," the taller said, chuckling as if at some private joke she was not privy to.
The shorter rolled his eyes, finding a half-torn straw wrapper, scrunching it into a ball, and throwing it at the taller's head. Jessica blinked her confusion, but it seemed to vanish before it ever touched him.
She could handle weird-
"Just cause they're your 'children' or whatever, Sammy, doesn't mean you have to treat them like toddlers," the lighter haired said. Jessica squinted her eyes slightly. She couldn't quite get a read on either of their faces, not obscured, but hard to pin down. She wondered what the man meant by 'children' he seemed much too young to have children that old, and, as far as Jessica knew, none of them were related. Maybe he was a pastor, or an imam or something.
"Just let them tootle out of here and grab a burger somewhere else so I can enjoy my fries in peace."
The taller, Sammy, or Sam, apparently, hid his displeasure poorly, like an American toilet cubicle hid shits, and leaned back in his chair like he was more used to his companion's nonsense than Jessica was used to air.
She didn't often like assuming the gender of her patrons. She would be a hypocrite, if she was, but she seemed to need to give these two an honorific of power. It seemed better than to leave it.
It was in this moment that she realised she hadn't said her original statement outloud.
The taller, Sam, seemed to look up at her like he knew what she said, anyway.
He smiled, and it was like the sun was in her tiny diner.
"Hi, Ms Sansour. Can we have the double-bubble bacon cheeseburger with the cilantro-hashbrwon fries, and, huh, a Cesar-and-pinenut salad, please, with two small strawberry milkshakes-," a thud like a kick sounded under the table, "-a small and one large strawberry milkshakes, please. Thank you, Ms."
He had a voice like velvet, and it crushed her senses with the weight of his attention on her. She sucked in a deep breath, and went to note it down on her notepad. The words were already written on it, in a hand not her own. A neat, tight script.
She hadn't shown them the menus. She looked down at her name tag, which she had, obviously, by it's lack of appearance, forgotten to wear that day.
She had not given her name.
The shorter, Dean, her mind corrected, shared a glance with him that was equally condemning as it was amused.
"I, er, I- what-?"
"Jessica, sorry."
He corrected himself after a quick beat of a moment, a saddened, mournful smile tugging at his lips. It reminded him of the one she had seen on her dad's face, that day twelve months ago. She wondered if he had lost his wife as well.
The two men shared a glance she couldn't discern.
"I, uh, 'll get right on that, fellas," she said, slipping into a more conversational tone
She slid back into her enclosed kitchen space within a matter of seconds, breathing heavily as she leaned against her parting-door. Her safe space. Her enclosed centre.
She could handle weird.
She was on their orders, immediately. She was a professional, and she knew what she was doing.
She was used to weird patrons, including others she was sure were telepaths, not that she'd ever tell Rania that.
The burger she had been heating for Fergus was essentially ruined, now. It was charcoaled on the one side, almost raw on the other. She was surprised neither of her new patrons complained about the atrocious smoke smell. It disappeared within a second of her acknowledging it. Weird was right, she mentally commented, as she scooped the fried burger into the open bin.
She began listening in, again, as she prepared their meals, without ever really meaning to.
"How's Cas?"
"I thought that was your division now, dude."
There was a smirk in Samuel's tone as he replied, "But I thought you were like, 'best buds'-"
"Shut it-'
"Dude, I'm pissing with you. I know you're all buddy-buddy with Death, now-"
"Her name's Billie, man. Old Death's taking a long retirement party. I think he deserves it afer the shit we put him through, Sammy."
Death? Come on, weird was one thing.
"That's...entirely fair, De. And I was kidding. Archangel Cas is enjoying his new set of wings. Our Angel of Thursday won't stop telling me about all the conflicts he's resolving. He's so... excited. To make real differences, that is. Without our textbook bad luck messsing it up. He's planting crops near children's shelters. He's... doing real good, Dean. You should talk to him again, soon, man."
Dean continued as if he hadn't heard, without missing a beat, "Jack's been around."
"That kid of ours really is something," Sam said, and it seemed like a fond, wistful tone. Nostalgic, even.
Kid of theirs? So, a couple then, Jessica concluded.
"Your kid, Sam. And not in the metaphysical hooey way like the rest, like, literal, dude. I'm a... wayward uncle at best."
She reformed her theory. Brothers.
"Mm. Regardless. You know he's doing great things on Europa."
"The... ice planet?"
"Moon, Dean. Practicing his talents. I think we'll have a fun surprise in a couple million years."
"I will, you all knowing bastard."
Sam chuckled. "Expaaand your mind, Deaaan..."
An audible slap occured.
"Bitch ass little brother."
"Mm. You mean, 'bitch ass little God', Dean. Don't you go forgetting my official title." The smirk tone was back again. What the fuck.
"...yeah." Dean said, at what Jessica assumed was a lack of other response.
There was a small thump sound, as if one punched the shoulder of the other, lightly.
"Come on, don't get all dark and broody on me, De."
There was a small chuckles, again, apparently from Dean.
"I thought it was me and your new rehire, Gabe, who made the shitty dad jokes."
"Hey. Raph has his moments, too. And I'm sort of like, the world's biggest dad, now."
The burger sizzled it's final hiss before she knew it. She was snapped out of her reverie immediately, and her eavesdropping in the same moment. She stuck the patty in between the brioche buns, and carried the salad she had prepared with an idle mind in the other. The tray with two milkshakes was balanced in the curve of her inner elbow.
She stepped out of the kitchen, and the brothers' immediate attention was drawn to her, or, likely, to their food.
She set it down hurriedly in front of them, not eager to spend time so near to whatever ... beings these were.
Come on, Jess. Her mind whispered. She was lying to herself if she said she didn't know who these two were. She kept her voice silent.
"Thank you, Jessica," Sam said, with a bright smile once again, like a light bulb flicked into existence out of nothingness.
"Thanks for the grub,... Jess," Dean said, taking the lead from his brother.
His dark eyes, unlidded and in a bright enough diner, held more depths and swirling bands of dark colours than she thougbt existed in all the galaxy. She blinked, hurriedly, when he turned away from her, trying to clear her mind of the visions.
She made to go back to her safe zone, to the kitchen, when she heard something snap into existence by her side. She turned at the sweet, meaty smell. A freshly made burger, right in front of her. Just the correct ratio of patty to fries.
She turned back to the brothers with slow, deliberate movements.
Both were staring at her. One smiled brightly. The other, a dark, knowing smirk.
"For the grub, Jess. And scaring off your patrons. Whoops," Dean replied to her bemused expression, while Sam slapped him upside the head.
The latter snapped his fingers, and when she turned back, money enough to cover all the patrons' meals, and then some, was piled on the table next to her burger.
When she turned back, both brothers were packing up their meals, somehow now in travel containers she had never given them, and were already walking back to the exit door, in their perfect, synchronised movements.
They whisperer somethinf to each other as they walked, but Jess picked up on it, regardless.
"Speaking of dads, man, how d'you think Chuck's faring at that wannabe Bedlam?"
"I'd say about the opposite of how Amara is, depowered at that resort in Tahiti."
Dean chuckled to himself as he left, bell dinging, resounded, behind him.
Sam turned back before he left, smiling brightly at her.
"Have a Good, long life, Jessica. Inshallah."
He turned and left the way he came, bell dinging as they left. The gravel crunched once more beneath the impala tyres, and they were gone as fast as they came.
She turned, tapping with shaking fingers on the faux buttons on her phone in a hasty attempt at a phone call, as the light in the diner grew dim in the coming, August twilight.
She sat, slouched into her chair, as she got a notification through her email.
Miss Jessica Sansour,
Your vagioplasty surgery has been booked ...
Her eyes glanced hurriedly between words.
All at the cost of your insurance...
... no extra fees...
Her eyes welled with tears as she gasped, pressing the heel of her hand to her mouth.
She quickly tapped through her speed dials.
"Rania," she said, as it had barely rung for half a beat, before her cousin had picked up on that hot, Friday evening, "you were right-"