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In hunting, there was always a second when you knew something was wrong. You didn't know what, necessarily, but you could feel the world shifting. Fourteen-year-old Dean Winchester had that feeling now. Something was going cold around him...
He gazed through an increasing fog at the way Christmas had thrown up all over the mall they were in, at the way the zombies—or zombie-like monsters, anyway—were mostly lying in jello-y heaps around them... He looked at his dad, who had a smear of zombie gunk on his arm—
And then he was looking at the skylight four floors above. The glass was dark with the night outside, but the city lights bouncing off the clouds showed the snow that was just starting. When had he fallen flat on his back?
"Dean?" Dad's face was right there all of a sudden, looking down at him. "Dean, can you hear me?"
“Just give me a minute. I’m fine.” That was what he meant to say. It came out as a long zombie-ish groan.
Dad… looked seriously freaked out. And resigned.
“Not a zombie! I’m not a zombie!” Which came out sounding exactly like he was a zombie. Damn it. Dad wouldn’t really kill him, would he? Well, if he was an actual zombie, he’d want Dad to do it, but he wasn’t. He wasn’t, right?
“Bobby, where the hell are you!?” Dad yelled, eyes darting around in search of his friend.
Dean tried to do the same, but couldn’t do anything but stare straight up at that skylight. Freaking out was looking like a better and better idea.
“Been a little busy, Winchester,” Bobby said, somewhere off to the left. “Hold your… Oh, Jesus.”
Bobby was above him now, too, looking more devastated than Dad. “Dean, you in there?”
This time, Dean was smart enough not to answer. Bobby groaned—but not like a zombie—and he and Dad had a long, nonverbal discussion. The angle was all wrong for Dean to see Dad’s face clearly, but Bobby looked increasingly horrified.
“We’re taking him back to my place,” Bobby said, anger in his voice. “Now give me something to bandage that arm.”
His arm? Yeah, Dean supposed he had felt something there. A bite, maybe. Before his body stopped listening to his brain…
Time skipped for him and suddenly, Dean was lying on his bed in the room they stayed in at Bobby’s house. The ceiling had water damage. Had always had water damage. The stain never changed, though, and the room was dry, so Dean figured, one day, Bobby would make him or Sammy repaint the ceiling and erase the memory. Never did happen, though.
“What’s wrong with him?” Sammy’s voice was soft and shocked and Dean would have sighed if he didn’t know that would freak the little jerk out even more.
“We, um… ain’t sure yet, kid,” Bobby lied. “But we’ll figure it out.”
Dean wished one of the two of them would stand over him, so he could see something other than that water stain. It looked a little like a werewolf and he’d always hated it.
“Will you watch over him for a minute?” Bobby asked. There was a long moment where Sammy didn’t say anything, and Dean wondered what that was all about.
“Why do I need that?” Sammy asked.
Need what?
“I’m sure you don’t, Sam,” Bobby said in that fake reassuring way he had when he knew things were bad. “But you know it never pays to be caught unaware.”
Bobby’s heavy work boots clomped out of the room and stopped almost immediately. Sammy’s face finally got in the way of the water-stain werewolf.
“Dean?” Sammy was terrified. Dean tried to make sure that didn’t happen often, but it looked like he didn’t have much choice today.
“A kyonshi ? Damn it,” Bobby said from outside the door, too loudly. Or maybe being frozen stiff helped Dean’s hearing. “Okay, there’s a girl in Chicago…”
“Dean, can you hear me?” Sammy said, covering whatever Dad was saying—it would be Dad out there in the hallway with Bobby, right? “You’re still in there, right?”
“Shut up, Sammy,” Dean growled without thinking. The mumbling rattle had Sammy’s eyes going wide and pained.
Damn it.
“You can’t just—” Bobby was arguing. “John!”
The sharp rap of Dad’s boots clipped through the hall and down the stairs. Where’s he going? Not Chicago. Chicago’s hours away!
Time skipped, but only a few seconds, probably. Bobby was looking down at him, Sammy, too.
“How you doing, kid?” Bobby asked. Dean wasn’t sure whether he was talking to him or Sammy, but he didn’t answer. He didn’t want to see that look on Sam’s face again.
“He’s going to get better, right?” Sammy asked. He was trying not to cry. “I haven’t even figured out what to get him for Christmas yet.”
Dean wondered where they were spending Christmas this year. Last year, Dad had dropped them at Father Jim’s and gone after… He didn’t even remember. But Dad hadn’t come back until New Year’s.
The year before that was the year Santa bought Sammy that Barbie doll. Good times...
The room was suddenly darker, lit by the one crappy lamp in the corner. Dean realized that he kept falling asleep. With his eyes open. Well, Dad had always told him he’d master it one day. Looked like that was now.
Sammy moved into his eye line, even more freaked out than before.
“Come on, Sam,” Bobby said quietly. “You can’t be here.” Why not? “If he turns…”
Into a zombie. Great.
“But Dad is—”
Bobby’s voice was absolutely brutal. “Your dad makes his own choices,” he grated. “He always has.” Sammy moved away and the werewolf stared down at him again. He could hear the two of them heading for the door.
And then he was alone.
Are you kidding me? he thought angrily. Well that’s friggin’ great. Left alone to turn into a zombie all by myself. What the hell are they going to do when I rise up and head for their brains?
The werewolf still stared.
The light was still on and the silence was still there, but Dean thought maybe time had passed. He wondered how long, and why he wasn’t a zombie yet.
Man, Christmas sucked. Not every Christmas, of course. There’d been a few really good ones. He even dimly remembered when he was three and Mom woke up to find he’d ripped the wrapping paper off all the packages under the tree. Maybe the details were mostly from Dad retelling it, but the memory was there all the same.
Things were hazier now, foggier. His mind was still clear, but he could feel his body… dying maybe? He didn’t know.
“Think we can get it down his throat?” someone asked. Dean couldn’t hear well enough to figure out who it was, and his eyes weren’t working quite right. The werewolf was all distorted and dangerous. He wished for a silver bullet.
“We don’t have a choice,” someone else said.
And then there was a pain in his throat and a burning in his gut and his eyes finally, blessedly, snapped shut on that God damned werewolf and everything, everything hurt. God, it hurt!
“Dad?” he whispered, not begging, because begging didn’t change things. It didn’t sound like zombie-speak—didn’t sound like anything, really. But still. He needed his dad.
But he’d gone, hadn’t he? He’d be back. He always came back.
“Dean, you need to be ready. Someday, I might not come back. I won’t mean to, but…”
This time, maybe he meant to.
Dean got to open his eyes this time, to see the change. Dawn had broken outside, white and bright and probably snow-filled, even though he couldn’t see through the sheer curtains. He was lying on his side, and he felt like something—maybe one of those damn zombies—had died in his mouth. Someone was sitting in a chair by the door, and he blinked a few times to clear his vision.
“Dad?”
Dad was sitting forward, elbows on his knees and hands clasped between them, his head hanging down in exhaustion. But at Dean’s call, he looked up and that look—the look Dean almost never got, all pride and… whatever it was—broke across his face.
“How you feeling?” he asked, his voice rough. He looked like… Nah. Dad wouldn’t have been crying.
Dean discounted the thought and considered the question. “Alive.”
Dad snorted at that and rose, setting something aside as he approached the bed and sat on the edge. “You still are, don’t worry.”
“What were they?” Dean asked, though his eyes stuck on the rifle Dad had propped against the chair he’d just left. If I had gone zombie, I’d’ve wanted him to…
“Kyonshi,” Dad said unhelpfully. Dean blinked away from the rifle and met Dad’s eyes. Eyes that were full of relief and shadows.
“What?” he replied, trying for his normal what-the-hell-is-that tone, so that the shadows in Dad’s eyes would just… go away.
A few of them did. “Zombies. Sort of.” Dad watched him carefully. “Took a little bit to figure out how to lick it.”
Dean nodded, remembering how much the licking had hurt. “I’m glad Bobby got Sam out of here, anyway,” he replied. “He okay?”
Dad stared a minute. “Yeah. He’s fine.”
“Bobby was smart to just lock me in,” Dean said, pushing himself to sitting and trying to just deal. Move on. Sure he’d been left to die, but it was the smartest move, given the circumstances.
Dad got a very serious look on his face, his hand coming out to grasp Dean’s shoulder. “Dean, you were never alone,” he promised.
Dean looked over at the rifle, and swallowed, realizing exactly who had been here, waiting silently. “Yes, sir,” he said quietly. “Thanks.”
Dad squeezed his arm, the last of the shadows melting away. “You want to go down and get something to eat?” he asked, patting him on the knee.
Dean took a deep, full, completely non-zombied breath and shoved it all into the box where crap lived.
“Think Bobby’ll cook me up some brains?” he asked with a grin.
Dad chuckled and headed for the door.
Dean’s eyes were drawn back to the rifle, and then, up to the werewolf on the ceiling. The second he was done with breakfast, he was finding a ladder and some paint and erasing the memory.
******
the end