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apocalypsosFor the record, I need to get a new computer if only because if I try to open Word one more time only to be asked for a product key I don't have, need to download a new program to get, and end up being told is the wrong one to reinstall anyway, I'm going out to the back driveway with the computer, equipping it with a shiv, and fighting it to the death with a broken JD bottle. This bitch is going DOWN, y'all.
Title: It's Not Hiding If Everyone Knows Where You Are
Author: Troll Princess
Fandom: Supernatural
Rating: R
Word Count: 10,000 words
Spoilers: "Dead Man's Blood" (Obviously goes a bit AU before the beginning of "Salvation")
Written for:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
verstehen
Request: Avoiding the whole voodoo cliche would be nice. So would gen.
Pairing: Hints of Sam/OFC and Dean/OFC
Warnings: Violence, bad language
Disclaimer: I don't own these characters, I just like playing with them.
Summary: Two days ago, they celebrated the end of April by heading out to the porch with a pair of high-powered sniper rifles and counting off how many of the rambling bodies circling the perimeter outside the fence they could decapitate with a single shot.
Author's note: I did mention the voodoo thing, but only in passing, I swear, and it's not the reason for these zombies anyway. Witch's honor. :) (Tons of thanks tofollow_midnight, chaneen, and dodger_winslow for the beta. If I missed anything, it's because my computer is a rat bastard.)
*****
It's Not Hiding If Everyone Knows Where You Are
*****
When Sam opens his eyes that morning, the first thing he sees in the dim light of sunrise is the half-empty bottle of Southern Comfort dangling in his line of sight, scattering amber light across the walls like a sick sort of prism. Dean always brings the Southern Comfort on mornings like this, as if he's hoping the name alone will be enough to make Sam feel like he's been hugged or some shit.
Sam struggles up in bed, takes a long pull off the bottle, and waits for the reason.
You woke up screaming. The furniture was shaking. Well, that's another fire extinguisher gone. The fire thing is new. Half of the furniture in the bedroom Sam's been using brandishes the scars of fresh scorch marks in the wood.
Dean slumps into the lumpy chair in the corner of the room, settles in the kind of loose-limbed sprawl that used to drive girls wild and scratches absently at his chin. For all of the itching he goes through, you'd think he'd shave off the damn beard, Sam thinks, but Dean hasn't listened to his complaints since Dean started growing the fucking thing.
"Happy birthday, little brother," Dean says with a grin.
Sam's grip on the bottle weakens enough to make him worry, positive he's heard wrong. But a second's worth of simple math tells him Dean's right. Two days ago, they celebrated the end of April by heading out to the porch with a pair of high-powered sniper rifles and counting off how many of the rambling bodies circling the perimeter outside the fence they could decapitate with a single shot. Like always, Sam wasn't allowed to cheat.
"'Happy'?" Sam asks. He cocks an eyebrow and takes another swig from the bottle, and Dean shrugs.
"Still alive, aren't you?"
Sam can't argue that one.
The world's been dead for a year now. Neither one of them has seen another living person for six weeks.
*****
The place is actually theirs, in words and intent if not on paper, because Pastor Jim said so in pained whispers past lips stained with his own blood. Dean's figured from the beginning that's a hell of a lot more worthy than any pair of names scribbled across a deed, and Sam can't help but agree.
Not every property exchange that ends with a merciful bullet to the brain counts, but this one sure did.
Pastor Jim had a couple of houses to his name, family places he didn't use much, but this was the one that counted. He'd believed in the Rapture -- oh, that he had -- but even he used to say that the kind of Rapture he saw coming would make your average believer piss himself for days. Shame he'd gone so soon, is what the boys had thought from the start, because he'd sure as hell gotten a kick out of the holy sorts who'd clung to the outside of the wrought-iron fence and screamed for help now that the Good Lord had forsaken them. The wards circling the perimeter thirty feet away out from the fence keep the ramblers from coming anywhere near them if they stay close, but sometimes Pastor Jim had been too busy laughing to tell them not to wander too far back, and then it was just too late.
Jim had been a pastor, yeah, but even he would admit that sometimes he wasn't a very good one.
It's the whole reason for how fully stocked the damn compound is, though, hundreds of guns and enough ammunition to arm their grandchildren and more than enough food to last the boys until they can get around to making those grandkids some parents. That part's going to be a little tricky, the way things have been going lately.
"One trip," Dean says, and decapitates the chicken they'll have for dinner with a flick of his wrist.
Sam shakes his head, shifts his weight from one foot to the other as he leans back against the fence. "Not a chance, man. No one alive's been around here for weeks now, and any farther than West Fallow's just asking for trouble."
"It can't hurt to look, and we've got to reinforce the wards there anyway. And we've got the guns for it," Dean points out. "Grenades, too. Bet I can even get that flamethrower working again, with the right incentive."
"You that desperate to get laid?"
Dean just smiles, like he isn't about to answer stupid questions.
Another flick of Dean's wrist and the chicken head sails over the fence in a wide arc and lands well outside the wards. The ramblers fight for it, tearing at each other to get just that much scrap meat. They haven't seen the ramblers start dropping from starvation just yet, but it's only a matter of time with their food supply dwindling like it is.
Sam scratches at his own chin this time, the stubble steadily approaching beard territory whether he likes it or not. They haven't even seen a woman in three months since Carrie left on foot in the middle of the night with two of their guns, a knapsack full of food, and the imprint of her body still warming the far side of Dean's bed. Neither one of them think she got very far.
They've stopped a lot of things, though. Shaving's become a waste of time with livestock to keep alive, fresh plants to grow, magical wards to reinforce. Neither of them's much of a barber, and Dean's hair grows just as wild as Sam's in a sloppy male-model wave that he hates. With no one to impress, the clean laundry hasn't fallen by the wayside but the wearing of it certainly has.
Sam's palmed his dick more often than he cares to admit, jerking off with a frequency that might even be approaching Dean levels at this point, and he knows there were women since Jess but he's having a hard time remembering them lately.
"One trip?" he says.
Dean's grin widens. "One trip. Tomorrow. Flip you for who gets to pack the pickup."
Another thing they haven't seen in weeks is pocket change. Ten minutes of wrestling later, Sam takes Dean down and keeps him there, and Dean concedes defeat.
That's the night the girl shows up.
*****
"Dean."
He grumbles something that sounds like a curse and buries his face in the pillow.
"Dean, get up."
But he doesn't, not immediately, because this is nothing new. People show up at the fence all the time and none of them are all that interested in telling them how the hell they knew to come here. Carrie had claimed she'd seen the address on a flyer or something, tacked up on a bunch of telephone poles like an ad for a missing puppy. Before that had been Bob, this middle-aged dentist who'd somehow managed to keep his beer belly -- he'd given them this bullshit story about getting a forward in his email. Nice story, if the internet hadn't stopped working just like everything else about six months ago.
Pastor Jim had lots of friends, Dean thinks, people with stockpiles of their own who could survive longer than most and wouldn't know Jim's ashes floated away on a strong breeze months ago. Dean's theory is that Pastor Jim's contacts have big mouths.
Sam's the one who has the damn dreams. He's not so sure Dean's theory holds as much water as he seems to think it does.
"Dean."
"Who is it?" The words come out sounding more like a growl than anything else. Sam doesn't wake him up because of the dreams, not anymore, but he'll wake Dean up without thinking about it if someone's banging at the front gates.
Dean reinforced the wards a week ago, since for some reason they last longer and hold stronger than when Sam does it. Whatever's clutching the bars of the fence, it's not a rambler.
"A girl," Sam says quietly. He stands at the window with one arm resting against it, leaning against the cool glass to stare out into the darkness. The familiar low hum that hasn't stopped in a year like supernatural white noise grows a little as the ramblers get anxious, moan louder, tear one another to shreds trying to get past the wards. "I can't tell anymore without going out there."
"Well, then, go out there," Dean groans, and flings one of his pillows at Sam's chest as if he'll knock Sam right out the front door.
*****
The first thing they decided was that these fuckers weren't zombies, no matter what everybody else wanted to call them, no matter if they really were.
Sam saw his first zombie when he was ten, shambling towards Dean's back with blood-stained mouth gaping wide and sunken eyes focused on Dean's scrawny neck. The voodoo priestess who raised it took a thump to the back from the butt of Dad's rifle but the zombie kept on moving. Sam hadn't needed to summon up the courage to fire the gun in his hand, not with Dean in trouble.
These things might be the same kind of horse, but they're definitely a different color, vivid shades of red and gold where the thing that tried to kill his brother was a pale imitation in shades of gray.
Dean is the one who started calling them ramblers instead of zombies, because zombies just came at you slow and steady and these sons of bitches are something else entirely. They've seen slow and fast, fresh and rotted, and whereever the hell this curse on humanity came from, it's definitely not voodoo.
There's not enough crazed voodoo priestesses in the world to keep something like this up.
When Sam reaches the fence, they're swarming in the woods just past the wards, wanting to grab at the huddled shadow by the fence but hissing at the burn of the magic heating their dead flesh from inside. They do that most nights, stomping through the forest around the compound like they're scenting the air for fresh meat. He doesn't think their sense of smell still works, but the comparison still stands.
"Hey," he says, and when he does, the girl flinches away from the fence before she remembers what's behind her and goes back to clutching the iron rails again. Her fingers tremble visibly even from a good ten feet away, and with the night balmy and warm for early May, it's not from the cold.
When she lifts her head to look at Sam, she has to do so over the barrel of his rifle. If she's got any common sense, he figures, she shouldn't be offended.
"Let me in," she pleads.
"You know I can't," he says. "Not until tomorrow night."
It takes her a minute, but he finally gets a reluctant nod. Yeah, sure, she's got to be thinking. Can't have a carrier in your midst, right? She shifts on the ground until she's sitting rather than crouching, darts a nervous glance over her shoulder at the creeping masses in the shadows.
"There's wards up. You'll be safe where you're sitting until we're sure."
Sam expects her not to get that -- not many people understand the warding spells, even after everything that's happened -- but he could swear he hears a ragged sigh of relief out of her, and her thin body sags a little against the fence. The rifle lowers in his grasp as he does a quick check of her clothes -- jeans without much wear, durable hiking boots, brown leather jacket that looks tough and warm over a dark T-shirt. She'll be good out here until they're sure she's not carrying, he thinks, as long as she can handle listening to that for the next day.
"Thank you," she blurts suddenly.
Sam's palms go sweaty as he tries to remember what the hell he's done in the past few minutes to warrant gratitude. You'd think being ordered to spend the next day thirty feet away from a horde of zombies wouldn't be a good thing. "For what?"
She turns to look at him past dark gold hair that hasn't been washed recently and says, "For not shooting first."
But he doesn't hear her, the air choking off in his throat.
Jess's eyes. Jesus, she has Jess's eyes.
He sprints back to the house, and doesn't really care what she thinks of him for that.
*****
It doesn't occur to Sam until the next morning, when he's making chicken sandwiches for the three of them with the sun barely rising over the horizon, that he never asked the girl her name or how she got past the ramblers. It was the eyes that threw him, Jess's familiar gaze in an unfamiliar face, and he wonders briefly if after everything they've gone through in the past year, this is when he really gets cursed.
A hand comes out of nowhere and snatches away one of the sandwiches, and Sam startles at the contact he hadn't even noticed until now.
"Little distracted, Sammy?" Dean cups his free hand over his eyes as he stares out the kitchen window and takes a bite of his sandwich, spotting the ramblers pacing near the girl. His eyes narrow, sharp and assessing, and Sam can almost see the silent tally ring up over Dean's head. The last time Sam counted, there had been ten of them near her, but daylight made them sluggish and that had been ten minutes ago when the light wasn't as strong. "She cute enough to warrant that?"
"Don't start."
"What? Come on, if she's hot, she's hot. It's a fair question." Every word he says comes out past a mouthful of chicken, lettuce, and homemade bread, and yet somehow he's still managing a smirk. Some talent.
Sam lets the knife he sliced the chicken with slide into the sink, brushes the crumbs in after them, tucks the Thermos on the table under his arm and grabs the plate with the two leftover sandwiches before Dean can even think of swiping one. Reflex makes him grab a handgun from the shelf next to the door and tuck it into the back of his jeans. Leaving the house anymore without a gun isn't a debatable topic.
"You wouldn't like her," Sam says.
"Why not?"
"Because she hasn't tried to steal anything from us yet."
Sam closes the kitchen door behind him before he can hear Dean's response, but he's pretty sure he wouldn't have wanted to hear it anyway.
*****
When Dean and Sam first arrived at Pastor Jim's compound, guns blazing as they tore through a teeming mass of ramblers with the Impala before it died a glorious death just far enough within the confines of the wards, Pastor Jim had made them wait an entire day outside the gates. He even held a rifle on them, he and the transient who showed up a week before that pointing guns at their heads. Pastor Jim had been nice enough to apologize about it afterwards, Sam supposes, if you call, "You boys turned up clean and clear, so it couldn't have been that much of a hassle," a real apology.
Twenty-four hours hiding in a dead car within mere feet of a horde of ramblers isn't something Sam's ever going to forget. The constant hum of their moans and growls you can hear from the house isn't anything as bad as the sounds they make when they can see you move and sense your flesh within reach.
The girl's asleep when Sam reaches the fence, and he stops short.
Asleep, for fuck's sake. Thirty feet away, the ramblers pace like lions waiting on fresh meat, snarling and hissing and she's sleeping.
He takes advantage of the situation to put down the Thermos and remove the handgun from the back of his jeans, approaching the fence with the gun raised towards the ramblers. They might be behind the wards, but as Pastor Jim liked to say before he passed, better safe than shambling.
They snap at the air as he comes near, the few of them that haven't retreated into the woods until nightfall.
It takes a hell of a lot to resist the urge to blow one of their heads wide open with a few well-placed shots just for the hell of it.
He's still looking up at the ramblers when her breathing hitches and she jolts awake, spinning around on the grass to peer through the bars at him. Her mouth opens as if she's about to scream or cry or beg, but Sam can almost see the scent of the chicken sandwich hit her like a freight train and she backs down with a sound somewhere between a whimper and a moan. It's a safe bet she hasn't even seen a chicken in months, much less eaten one.
Those eyes hold onto him as he kneels to put the plate just within her reach, taking his own sandwich before stepping back safely out of biting distance.
The instant he moves away, she takes that as her cue to grab the other sandwich. Her teeth tear into the damn thing like maybe she is a carrier, like it's possible he really will have to shoot her, but then she mumbles a thank-you around her food and eyes the Thermos hopefully.
He almost sighs in relief as he sits down on the grass and rolls the Thermos towards her. The ramblers don't drink, and hydrophobia's one of the first signs of carrying.
"So do you have a name, or should I just call you She Who Inhales Her Breakfast?"
She's too busy twisting the top off the Thermos to look up at him again, and he half-expects her to spontaneously orgasm the way her eyes roll back in her head as she takes a drink of the iced tea inside. "Beth," she says when her mouth's not full anymore, and she licks her lips with this quick dart of her tongue that makes Sam more uncomfortable than he'd like to admit. "Beth McCoy."
"Sam Winchester," he says, and she nods before she catches herself.
I know hangs unspoken in the air like dead weight. Sam tries to ignore it. He could always ask why she came here, he figures, but a year's worth of experience tells him he won't get a straight answer anyway. "Mind if I ask how you got here past them?"
She swallows another barely chewed bite of her sandwich, licks her lips again in that annoyingly distracting way, and says, "I ran really, really fast."
Something about that strikes him as so absolutely fucking ridiculous that he starts laughing and doesn't stop until his sides ache.
It helps that the minute he starts laughing, so does she.
*****
After Pastor Jim let them into the compound that second day, Sam dog tired and Dean looking like he wanted to mourn the Impala by finishing off a bottle of whiskey and going the hell to bed, Pastor Jim made the egregious error of asking them where their father was.
The living room went silent then, cold and painful and Sam could not breathe. Remembering that moment makes his throat close up even now, makes it feel like all of the air on the planet's been sucked away in an instant. Sam has this vague memory of swimming in dizziness, of being positive he was about to pass out, and then Pastor Jim caught on and said, "Which one of you boys had to do it?" and the air came back into his lungs in a rush that left him hoarse.
"I was the one closest to the machete," was all he said.
He didn't bother speaking for the rest of the day, and Dean and Jim let it slide.
Beth McCoy was going to be a teacher before the world died, about to start her first job teaching kindergarten in the fall when the people around her began to drop like flies and rise right back up again with bloodlust in their eyes. Beth had a boyfriend who'd been eaten, a mother who'd been eaten, a pet Labrador that had been eaten, and a very nice neighbor lady who'd been the one that ate them all. Beth had spent the last year wandering from town to town looking for her sister, and hadn't found her yet.
Beth woke up three days ago from a dream that told her to come to Pastor Jim's compound and she'd find her sister, but the dream part she hadn't said out loud.
Less than a day, and Sam's already pretty sure he can't be the one closest to the machete again.
Dean listens to Sam tell him her story as the two of them scout the perimeter for breaks in the wards, picking off any ramblers edging too close with quick and easy head shots. The more the wards get set off, the more they wear down, so shooting a few keeps them from having to reinforce the damn things for a few days longer. The few ramblers out this late in the afternoon descend on one casualty in a feeding frenzy before they figure out he's just as dead as the rest of them, and Dean waits for the sound of flesh being shredded to die down before saying, "What aren't you telling me?"
Sam's smile tugs at the corners of his lips. "What makes you think I'm not telling you something?"
"Hey, there's a reason you couldn't cheat at cards worth a damn. Now, spill."
Sam's boot heels crush the grass as he walks for a long silent moment, and it takes him a minute before he can say, "She looks a little like Jess."
Dean gives him a look, hard and steady, then waits for the rest.
"I mean, around the eyes mostly. Around the eyes, exactly, if we're being honest. Same hair, in the right light. And she's got --"
"You gonna list off every way she's like Jess? Because I know if I were her, I sure as hell wouldn't appreciate it."
Sam flinches at that, his grip on his rifle tightening as he levels an annoyed look in Dean's direction. "She's only been out there a few hours. You seriously think I'd try anything?"
"No," Dean says, then claps him on the shoulder with a wily grin, "but that's what I'm here for."
But when they make it around to the front of the compound, Beth isn't there.
*****
"Did you find her?"
Dean shakes his head as he approaches Sam near the front gate, as if he knows damn well that isn't what his little brother wants to hear. Sam's got that determined look on his face, that tense flicker of the muscle in his jaw that says things aren't getting much easier from here on out. When Sam has that dark shadow behind his eyes is when their world gets strange and wild, when even the ramblers circling the perimeter get antsier than normal like they can sense him losing it.
The fence trembles as if it's the one humming with nervous energy, and now it's time for Dean to tense up. They don't need this now.
"She isn't on the property, as if she could even get over the fence or through the front gate," Dean says, then waves a hand towards the shaking wrought-iron bars. "And you might want to rein it in there a little."
Sam turns just enough to see the growing vibrations in the heavy iron, and the trembling immediately stops.
It'd be pretty goddamn creepy, if Dean wasn't already used to it.
"We have to go look for her," Sam says.
"What, out there?" Outside the fence, the ramblers have begun to crowd the edges and fill the air with that fucking moaning sound they make. The fast ones pounce around looking for weaknesses, but the slow ones just stand there and wait with eternal patience. Sam can always tell from the look on his face that Dean isn't sure which he likes less. "She probably got scared off. It's happened. They don't all stay, you know that."
"No," Sam says, that definite, stubborn tone of voice that's all Dad. "She wasn't going to leave."
"Why? Because she looked like Jess?"
Sam makes this sound in the back of his throat, harsh and raspy like he's swallowing cut glass, and Dean grimaces like he wishes he could take back what he said. But then the air rushes from Sam's lungs like something caught in the workings of an engine being spit out and he goes back to normal like he'd never flinched in the first place.
"I'm going after her," Sam says, and starts to head back to the house.
Dean trails after him in a sprint, the only way he'll catch up with Sam in the state he's in. "You honestly think that girl made it through the ramblers in the woods not once, but twice?"
"If she made it through the first time, what's to say she couldn't the second time?"
"We're not talking about a mine field here. We're talking about a zombie horde. It's not like once she makes the proper introductions, they just let her walk back into town."
The muscles in Sam's neck and shoulders tense and shift, because he knows damn well how this works. The few people who make to the compound alive don't always stay. Some of them take survival of the Winchesters as confirmation they can do it on their own with a couple of guns, some only plan to stay in passing anyway, and some of them Sam just fucking creeps out like he does. He's stopped taking it as a personal insult when one night of his waking screams or the scent of smoke at three in the morning spooks them and sends them running within hours.
But he's never been like this, not about one of the people who doesn't even make it past the fence. Their days saving people have been over since John Winchester turned on them with dead glassy eyes and snapped at their flesh with hungry growls. Since then, saving everybody's gotten a little more complicated, the kind of complicated that stopped being about running straight into the thick of danger with guns blazing a long time ago.
They keep a hell of a lot more people alive holed up in the compound than they ever would fighting their battles the way they used to. A safe haven's only safe if it isn't going anywhere, is what Pastor Jim told them when they first tried to arm up and head out, and it didn't take them long to figure out he had a point.
"I'm going into town," Sam says.
"Come on --"
"Hey, you were the one begging me yesterday for a field trip."
"Funny, I don't seem to remember any begging," Dean grumbles, but Sam's got a point.
Sam stops then and Dean nearly walks right into his back. He doesn't turn around to look at Dean when he says, "I have to do this. Stay here, come with, I don't really care right now."
Dean doesn't like this, doesn't like it one bit, and Sam just waits for the annoyance his older brother's choking down to bust out. It doesn't matter if Sam can wiggle his fingers and turn a crowd of ramblers into a walking, moaning bonfire if he wants, the same way it doesn't matter if a little tweaking with those freaky powers of his gives the term "magic bullet" a whole new meaning. This isn't the same world they grew up in, no matter how much more they might be prepared for it than most people.
But there's no way in hell Dean's letting Sam going out that gate alone, which is why he plasters on a smile and says, "You really think I'd let you have all the fun?"
*****
Five minutes away from the compound is a dump of a town named Prescott that's been deserted for six months and got cleared of anything worth keeping by Pastor Jim before Dean and Sam ever arrived. Half of it isn't even standing anymore thanks to a gas explosion and a stiff breeze, and what's left of it houses more wild animals than a good-sized zoo.
These days, they double the driving time and head for West Fallow one more town over. West Fallow has the distinction of being one of the few towns in the state that evacuated when the ramblers came. If the air were any closer to fresh with the lack of rotting flesh it might even sound like music, like a snappy little jingle as you pull into town. Now entering West Fallow. Least undead town this side of Iowa.
Walking through the woods gets you to West Fallow in a couple of hours, quicker than it takes to get you to Prescott. If Beth McCoy ended up anywhere, it's probably here.
It's the first ride in the truck in months where they don't count the ramblers they run down. Now isn't the time for games, not with that pissy look on Sam's face that drives Dean up a fucking wall.
After Sam parks the old pickup in the center of town, Dean gets out and kneels near the wards he placed near the fountain in front of the police station, tracing the chipped and faded black paint on the concrete with his fingertips. Pastor Jim's the one who put them there in the first place, setting up a protective circle big enough to keep the ramblers on the outskirts of town, and Dean's been the one to keep them up since his death. Erosion's worried the latest wards down enough to bother him, making their cover good for only a couple more hours if that, but in theory, they should be out of town before there's much of a problem.
You know, in theory.
"Well, college boy, what's your next bright idea?" Dean says, stepping back from the wards and rubbing at his beard as he shoots a quick glance towards the truck. There's always paints in the glove compartment just in case, for times like this when the ramblers hover near enough to warrant it. Wards on the verge of cracking open always make Dean nervous, and not in the best of ways. The ramblers moan and groan from the edge of town like an oncoming storm, with all the patience of a saint. They've got time to burn until the wards crumble, but they'll be pushing it.
Sam scans the buildings on Main Street searching for signs of life, his rifle hanging absently from his shoulder. The damn thing was a precautionary measure, the way he tends to get outside of the compound anymore. Ammo runs out, but spontaneous flames and invisible hands last as long as he does.
"Sammy?'
Something darts from behind the police station and between the cafe and bookstore, something fast and tall and humanoid, and both Dean and Sam raise their rifles on reflex.
"The wards?"
"They're holding," Dean says. "It's not a rambler."
He doesn't bother to mention that if it were an hour from now, he wouldn't be so sure.
Sam calls Beth's name as they approach the space between the cafe and the bookstore and Dean has to resist the urge to tell him to shut up, as if screaming's going to get the attention of the ramblers or something. The groans from the edge of town grow and roll, an ominous wave from the other side of Main Street, and if the hair on the back of Sam's neck is standing up, he'll be the last one to admit it.
The space between the cafe and bookstore used to be a parking lot before it was an elephant graveyard of sorts, a half-dozen cars now sinking on their flattened tires for eternity. In between the Hyundai and the hatchback are the corpses of a pair of little girls, and the minivan holds the half-eaten bodies of a mother and infant. One of these days when the ramblers fall away from the world, burying them might not be a waste of time anymore.
Dean's the one who notices it first, the thing that wasn't there before.
"Sam," he says, and waits for his little brother to turn before waving the barrel of his rifle towards the motorcycle parked behind the minivan, like somebody had made a point of hiding the damn thing. Not a surprise, with the wards set up like they are.
Dean hears Sam approach behind him, letting out a ragged breath as if he's disappointed his girl didn't suddenly just pop up from behind the motorcycle like it's all some great cosmic surprise. "Whoever it is, they've got good taste," Dean mutters, running his fingers over the chrome.
Sam rolls his eyes at that -- Typical Dean, he thinks -- and he'd start in a good session of teasing the hell out of Dean if they both didn't turn as one to point their rifles at the far end of the parking lot.
They might not have hunted for a long time, Sam thinks, but they're sure as hell not rusty enough to miss someone sneaking up behind them with a gun.
The girl isn't Beth McCoy, that's for damn sure, but there's a vague but close enough resemblance to make Sam wonder. In the moonlight, her tank top displays arms crisscrossed with scars that don't look remotely like bites, more like knife blades and a handful of bullets at work, but you can never be too sure these days. She holds her handgun with practiced ease, the kind of comfort neither one of them see in your average civilian even now.
"Either you're alive, or you guys have started using a hell of a moisturizer," she says, her lips curling in a mocking grin.
"Oh, we're alive, all right, sweetheart," Dean says, but his grip on the rifle doesn't waver even as he answers her grin with his own. He cocks his head in Sam's direction and flashes an apologetic look. "Some of us more than others."
Shaking his head, Sam lowers his own rifle, keeping eye contact with the girl, trying to telegraph that they're safe. "I'm Sam, and this is my brother Dean," he says. Her weapon doesn't move -- not a surprise -- so he tries for the puppy-dog smile Dean always teases him about and says, "You going to lower that anytime soon?"
"Against two guys bigger than me? And what's my next stupid move supposed to be, throwing myself to the zombies?"
Dean catches on slowly and puts his own rifle down, albeit it with a hell of a lot more reluctance. "We're not going to hurt you," he says, raising his hands even as he slants an annoyed look in Sam's direction. This is a dumb move, Sammy, unless you really want some psycho blowing our brains out.
"Funny, I hear that a lot," she says sarcastically. "Sometimes from people who actually are going to hurt me."
"Look, we're just here in town looking for a girl." Dean's smile is a pile of charm, but this girl isn't buying it and the cracks in the charm grind like broken glass against Sam's senses.
"Yeah," Sam says, "blonde, pretty eyes, name of Beth. You seen her?"
It's the first time the girl looks afraid, the first time her fingers come even close to a tremble. Her eyes narrow like she's waiting for the punchline and knows she won't like it, and Sam has the odd feeling a loud marching band just passed by and he missed it.
The handgun shakes a little in her grasp, and Dean and Sam exchange a quick look.
"You're kidding, right?"
*****
It turns out that the girl -- who'll only say her name is Grace while making a face that indicates she'd rather it was anything else on the planet -- has been staying in the empty apartment above the cafe. She paces back and forth around the living room tossing her things into a knapsack as Dean props himself up against the wall near the door and Sam leans out the open window and watches the gathering crowd of ramblers outside the perimeters of the wards.
She picked the perfect spot to keep an eye on the bastards, if she didn't know enough about the wards they'd used to reinforce them. When they came into the room, both of them spotted the rifle propped up next to the open window before they noticed anything else. In his mind, Sam can picture her falling asleep in the chair by the window, occasionally waking up to make sure the ramblers aren't coming.
It won't be long now.
At the end of Main Street, one gets shoved past the ward's perimeter by the pushing of the rest of them and falls to the ground with an unholy roar. Even if it doesn't come any farther, the fact that it's still in one unburned, moving piece says a lot.
"Who set up your wards?" Grace asks, and it startles Sam out of scanning the edges of town, out of checking the shadows within West Fallow's city limits for a flash of dark gold hair.
"I did," Dean says.
Grace lets out this bark of laughter, sharp and derisive, and something about it makes Dean squirm. "Yeah, well, they suck."
"Keep the ramblers out of town, don't they?"
"Barely," she says, this weird smile crossing her face when Dean calls them ramblers like she thinks it's fucking adorable, like he's a little boy naming a puppy or something. She slings her knapsack onto her shoulder and her rifle follows suit before Sam can back away to give her space. She marches from the room like she's going off to war, as if she just expects them to pad along after.
They do, of course. Not much choice, really.
"This afternoon, I had to peg one that got through and tried to pounce on me at the fountain," she says as they descend the stairs to the sidewalk. She gives the edge of town a cursory glance with a grimace as she walks towards the truck. "See?"
Dean and Sam turn towards where she looks and raise their rifles at once, one of the slower ramblers taking determined steps straight down the yellow line of Main Street. Maybe it says something about her, that she doesn't slip her own weapon into position to fire at the damn thing, but Sam isn't sure what.
Dean makes a face at the sight of it shambling towards them and lowers his weapon. He hates shooting the slow ones for anything other than fun, and it's only gotten a few feet past the wards anyway, its arms and legs moving like they're weighted down with iron.
When Sam sees the look on Dean's face, he nods with a sigh and narrows his eyes at the rambler.
It's like an invisible hand slaps the rambler backwards through the air, sending it flying into the teeming mass of zombies. The others make a grating noise, their best impression of laughter, and Sam's pretty sure he sees limbs being thrown as the rambler's torn to shreds.
Grace stops fiddling with her knapsack to stare at Sam with unapologetic interest. "How did you do that?"
"We've all got our bar tricks," Dean says with a smirk, the kind that used to get him laid at the drop of a pair of panties. "Wait'll we get you back to the compound and I'll show you how I can tie a cherry stem in a knot with my tongue."
Grace makes a face at that, and something about the familiarity of it slaps Sam in the face. "Beth is your sister," he says.
He almost regrets it, the way she comes close to flinching at that. He gets the impression she doesn't do that often. "Was, yeah. Before all this."
Dean's not about to let that slide. "You seeing ghosts again?"
Frowning, Sam shakes his head. The number of times he's seen dead people Dean hasn't has grown over the years, since they killed the demon, since his powers have grown in ragged spurts like they're going through puberty. However, this isn't one of those times. "I gave her a sandwich, Dean. I don't know about you, but I haven't seen a lot of ghosts that won't turn down a chicken sandwich."
Grace freezes in the middle of tossing her bag into the truck and turns slowly towards them. "You have chicken?" she says, in the same sort of tone she'd probably whip out if Sam had suddenly announced he could wiggle his nose and make the ramblers drop like stones. Dean nods, and Grace lets loose with this crooked smile full of awe and wonder. "I may actually apologize for the gun thing for some chicken."
"Hey, how do you know so much about the wards?" Dean asks.
"Grandma raised us, she was a witch." Grace's shoulders roll in something not quite a shrug, and she glances at the shadows around them as she clutches the rifle in her hands. "You want anything more complicated than that, it's going to have to wait for some fried chicken and the coldest drink you can get me that's not water."
"You always this anxious, sweetheart?"
She tilts her head just the right way, something about those green eyes sending chills settling over Dean. Goosebumps rise on Dean's skin and he steps back like he's escaping from a draft. "Around people who've seen my sister, I am," she says.
Sam frowns at that, something not right here. With the undead pushing at the barriers of town like an angry mob, that's saying a lot. "What is she?"
"Gracie?"
All three of them turn as one towards the voice across the street, towards the pale, thin girl standing by the cafe. She takes a few cautious steps towards them, absently tugging at something around her neck, and it doesn't take the glow of moonlight off those curls and those eyes for Sam to recognize Beth. Something inside him clenches with relief, and he looks over at Grace expecting there to be a hug, some tears that don't get shed, maybe an angry word or two out of gratitude that Beth's in one piece.
Instead, her rifle slides into place in one easy motion, like she doesn't even have to think about it.
"Hello, Beth," Grace says, aiming the gun at her sister.
And now it's Sam's turn not to think, stepping between the barrel of Grace's rifle and Beth's terrified form like a reflex. "What the hell are you doing?"
"Sam," Dean says. It sounds like Dean's warning him off, like he's telling him to let the girls fight this out on their own, and Sam tries not to think about why.
Grace's grip on the rifle is sure and steady. "You think I won't shoot you after the year I've had --"
Dean's got the handgun tucked in the holster at his side pointed at her head in a heartbeat. It's one thing to aim at her own sister, if Beth's not what she was before and Grace's got to take care of that, but threatening Sam's a dumb move. "You shoot him, and I'll make sure you don't even get a chance for a second shot."
"Then I'll make the first one count," she says.
Sam's tempted to concentrate, to just want the gun to leave Grace's hands so much that it flies into his own with a thought. But then Dean glances over at Beth like he's trying to come up with his next move and the tension in his muscles fades. "Sam, let her do it," he says.
"What?"
"She's not a ghost," Grace says, and makes sure the rifle points directly at Beth's forehead. "She's one of them."
Jesus, Sam thinks, and looks back at her.
He hadn't seen it before, not really, not with a horde of the undead thirty feet away and her dark gold hair spilling over her shoulders. It had hidden her face from view and her neck along with it the night before. The dark cord with the wooden sigil hanging from it might have been tucked inside her T-shirt and might not have been. Sam can't remember. But a year of putting down wards around the compound to fend off the ramblers has carved into his mind the really powerful ones, the ones that hold up the longest.
The ones that could probably even fend off death.
Or undeath, if you really tried.
"You two aren't the only ones who know how to work your way around a ward," Beth says with a weak smile.
When Sam curses, it rasps coming out of his throat, sandpaper crossing glass.
"Get out of the way," Grace says.
Sam shakes his head, unable to take his eyes off Beth.
"Sammy, move your ass," Dean says, and it's tough and painful and Dean's got to know damn well it's not going to work. Not considering how much he sounds like Dad when he says it.
"There's got to be something to do," Sam says.
"There isn't."
The small voice shakes Sam's attention and drags it back to Beth, those haunting eyes shimmering. Sam wants to think it's because she's about to cry, but he knows better. "I just wanted to find my sister," she says. "I had these dreams sometimes before all of this started, and she was just going to leave here without ..."
"I was going to leave tomorrow," Grace chokes out. Her voice sounds hollow with sudden realization.
Beth's gaze drifts from Sam to Grace, from Grace to Sam, with that fucking too-familiar gaze that slams into Sam's gut like a battering ram. "But then there was this attack, and I got bit by this -- I just wanted my sister to find you, that's all," she says. "I just wanted you to find her."
Sam's skin hums like a live wire, and the world's harder to see even with the moonlight as crisp as it is. It might be tears and it might not be, and he doesn't even know this girl, for Christ's sake. She's not Jess and she's not even fucking alive. Ten feet away Dean's staring at him and staring hard, and there's a girl between them both narrowing her eyes at her own sister down the barrel of a gun. And they're not even going to do anything, and they can't even if they could.
Sam's stomach threatens to empty. It's forgotten what a real hunt feels like, he thinks, what other people feel like.
The threat from his stomach becomes a promise, but not here, not now, and he steps out of the way of the rifle.
Beth grabs onto the necklace, taking a deep breath she doesn't need. "Bye, Gracie," she says, and tugs hard at the necklace until the cord snaps.
"Goodbye, Beth," Grace says.
And pulls the trigger.
*****
Grace doesn't ask for the matches and salt, the machete or even a goddamn shovel. But when Dean hands her the salt and matches, she takes them without comment and douses the body in crystals. There's no ghost yet, but there's no harm in making sure it won't happen.
Sam would offer to do it for her, but he doubts she'd appreciate any more "bar tricks" out of him just yet.
He focuses on the ramblers, on the way they practically tremble with energy. It's easier on him than looking over his shoulder at the lump on the ground currently taking on flames like dry cordwood.
"I'm not going to have time to repaint the wards."
Sam can sense Dean over by the fountain, can feel his presence behind him like the warmth of the sun on his back. But at the edge of town the ramblers writhe against the invisible barriers that hold them back, and Sam's got his rifle up and ready. He knows that look to them, that razor-sharp simmer of excitement like the last shred of restraint before a riot. "What the hell is that supposed to mean?" he asks Dean.
"It means say goodbye to West Fallow for good. Or at least until the ramblers take a long walk off a short pier."
Grace appears beside Sam like a wraith, right out of thin air, her own rifle at home in her hands. "How much longer?" she calls out.
As if on cue, one of the ramblers breaks free of the wards and races towards them. Fuck. It would be one of the sprinters. The slow ones were always the last to get through.
The rambler only makes it a few feet before his head explodes in a shower of bone and blood.
"Oh, not much longer," Dean mutters. Sam didn't see the shot but he can picture Dean making it, a one-two move they've both known as instinct since the rifles were taller than they were. He doesn't have to turn around to know Dean hasn't lowered his weapon yet, not even with the two of them raising theirs. It's not his way. "Get in the truck."
"Don't have to tell me twice," Grace says, and turns towards the truck.
The scream that follows is less terror and more surprise, and she's still raising her rifle against the rambler running towards them when Sam's reflexes kick in. Her feet sweep out from under her, unseen hands yanking her down and out of the way of Sam's rifle. He fires without thinking, and the rambler slams to a stop as his skull shatters.
The body slumps to the ground close enough to fry Sam's nerves, and he resists the urge to go over and give it a good kick.
Dean's picking off ramblers one, two, three as they break through the wards, but Sam's too busy hauling Grace to her feet, a little surprised when she lets him. She swipes her rifle off the ground with one easy move, focuses on the state of the gun instead of him when she speaks.
"Thanks," she says.
He responds with a short, sharp nod he's not sure she sees, and follows her into the cab of the truck without a word.
Grace's gaze lifts up to greet his as he gets in, as green as Dean's and just as wild. This close up, he realizes she smells like cherry lotion covering up the faint scent of rotting flesh. It's not a new trick, something everybody's got to try and hide these days, but she's done a hell of a job smothering the bad with the good. "Beth would have liked you," she says. "You know, if she hadn't been a zombie."
"That's a pretty lousy compliment," Sam says.
Grace shrugs. "I'm pretty lousy at giving compliments."
Sam stares at her long and hard as it suddenly occurs to him this is the first real rescue he can remember getting involved with in months.
"Everybody buckled up?"
Dean slides into the driver's side and shuts the door just before a rambler hits it, its head slamming into the glass so hard Sam's surprised it doesn't shatter. Dean acts like he doesn't notice, starting the truck and shifting into drive so fast that Sam and Grace nearly fly forward against the dash before they even realize he's hit the gas. When they slide forward on the seat and turn to glare at him in unison, Dean ignores it. "What, no seatbelts? Did I happen to mention this is going to be a bumpy ride?"
As if to make his point, he aims for the first rambler he sees break through the wards in front of them and drives right over it.
Grace's shoulder radiates warmth where it presses against Sam's arm. He has to resist the urge to ask if she stole extra warmth from her sister, clenching his teeth the way she's clenching hers when she says, "I'm going to smother him in his sleep, aren't I?"
But Sam's not really listening, and hasn't been for a while.
The sprinters charge through the wards and race towards the fountain, and when a pair of them pounces on something on the far side by the police station, Sam closes his eyes and doesn't open them for the rest of the ride home.
*****
Four weeks later
In summer, the compound feels like something out of a Norman Rockwell painting, if you can ignore the steady sounds of the ramblers pacing outside the wards and the faint scent of their rotting flesh in the air. Grace and Dean take turns picking them off with the rifles from all the way up on the porch, Dean repeatedly offering to turn the whole thing into a game of strip zombie-killing. She ignores him, but he figures she'll crack any day.
"Who can resist this face forever?" Dean says to Sam, throwing open his arms and flashing him a broad smile that usually makes Sam throw the nearest soft object at his head.
When he mentions that attitude to Grace in passing, she gives the cucumber she's slicing a good hearty chop, lets out that derisive bark of laughter and says, "So what do you do when his head is the nearest soft object?"
She keeps saying she's going to leave in a week, and Dean keeps threatening to shoot her if she doesn't.
Sam'll be shocked if he doesn't walk in on them fucking somewhere in the compound by the end of August.
One day, Sam's walking the perimeter when one of the ramblers just drops, sinking to the ground like the dead weight it is. The others pounce, but slower now, even the fast ones dragged down by something unseen and strange. They give up like always, but this time the rambler's all bones and no muscle, nothing but weak stretches of gray skin holding its skeleton together like fraying bungee cords.
It's starving. They're starving.
Sam might be happy, if he'd had a full night's sleep in the last four weeks.
For four weeks, there's a dark shadow wandering through his dreams like the demon's come back to haunt him, like it's watching Sam from afar with eyes that shift from demonic to hauntingly familiar. That sense of danger fades night by night, his screams dying down, until all that's left is a glimmer of hesitant anticipation as he wakes.
Someone's coming, he thinks one night, and when he sits up in bed the furniture is still and the air is clear of smoke.
Grace sits on the end of the bed, though, leaning back with one palm firmly planted on the bedspread, her legs stretching to the floor with ankles crossed. Her free hand's tilting back what's left of a bottle of amaretto and she takes a healthy pull off the bottle like he's not even there. She leans back until the baggy T-shirt she's wearing rides up her thighs, the ends of her dark red hair dancing over the bedding.
Sam thinks this is supposed to turn him on. Mostly, he just wishes she'd either pass over the booze or leave.
"You're keeping Dean up," she says.
He really doesn't want to know what she means or how she knows that, not with her wearing a T-shirt he could swear Dean had on yesterday. He swipes the bottle from her hand before she can protest, as if she were even going to, and says, "I'll try to concentrate harder on not keeping him up."
"You do that," she says, then grabs the bottle back before he can take one good swig and shoves him back in bed. The blankets get yanked up over him, and if she weren't tucking him in, he's pretty sure he wouldn't have gone from pissed and ready to drink to lacking liquor and trying not to laugh.
Grace leans over him, narrowed eyes dark with a threat about as menacing as an angry chipmunk, and says, "Sleep, Sam, or I swear next time I'll just drop a lamp on your head," before sauntering out of the room with the amaretto bottle dangling from her fingertips.
Subtle and genteel, Grace sure as hell ain't ever going to be.
Everything about this place is so fucking ridiculous anymore that it comes as a complete surprise to Sam when he wakes back up again and it isn't anymore.
*****
When Sam opens his eyes that morning, the first thing he sees in the dim light of sunrise is the half-empty bottle of Southern Comfort dangling in his line of sight, scattering amber light across the walls like a sick sort of prism. He accepts it with a morbid sense of deja vu, struggles up in bed just waiting for Dean to speak, and takes a swig as Dean settles into the chair on the other side of the room.
"There's a girl at the gate," Dean says, and when Sam smiles, that's how it really starts.
Title: It's Not Hiding If Everyone Knows Where You Are
Author: Troll Princess
Fandom: Supernatural
Rating: R
Word Count: 10,000 words
Spoilers: "Dead Man's Blood" (Obviously goes a bit AU before the beginning of "Salvation")
Written for:
verstehenRequest: Avoiding the whole voodoo cliche would be nice. So would gen.
Pairing: Hints of Sam/OFC and Dean/OFC
Warnings: Violence, bad language
Disclaimer: I don't own these characters, I just like playing with them.
Summary: Two days ago, they celebrated the end of April by heading out to the porch with a pair of high-powered sniper rifles and counting off how many of the rambling bodies circling the perimeter outside the fence they could decapitate with a single shot.
Author's note: I did mention the voodoo thing, but only in passing, I swear, and it's not the reason for these zombies anyway. Witch's honor. :) (Tons of thanks to
follow_midnight, chaneen, and dodger_winslow for the beta. If I missed anything, it's because my computer is a rat bastard.)It's Not Hiding If Everyone Knows Where You Are
*****
When Sam opens his eyes that morning, the first thing he sees in the dim light of sunrise is the half-empty bottle of Southern Comfort dangling in his line of sight, scattering amber light across the walls like a sick sort of prism. Dean always brings the Southern Comfort on mornings like this, as if he's hoping the name alone will be enough to make Sam feel like he's been hugged or some shit.
Sam struggles up in bed, takes a long pull off the bottle, and waits for the reason.
You woke up screaming. The furniture was shaking. Well, that's another fire extinguisher gone. The fire thing is new. Half of the furniture in the bedroom Sam's been using brandishes the scars of fresh scorch marks in the wood.
Dean slumps into the lumpy chair in the corner of the room, settles in the kind of loose-limbed sprawl that used to drive girls wild and scratches absently at his chin. For all of the itching he goes through, you'd think he'd shave off the damn beard, Sam thinks, but Dean hasn't listened to his complaints since Dean started growing the fucking thing.
"Happy birthday, little brother," Dean says with a grin.
Sam's grip on the bottle weakens enough to make him worry, positive he's heard wrong. But a second's worth of simple math tells him Dean's right. Two days ago, they celebrated the end of April by heading out to the porch with a pair of high-powered sniper rifles and counting off how many of the rambling bodies circling the perimeter outside the fence they could decapitate with a single shot. Like always, Sam wasn't allowed to cheat.
"'Happy'?" Sam asks. He cocks an eyebrow and takes another swig from the bottle, and Dean shrugs.
"Still alive, aren't you?"
Sam can't argue that one.
The world's been dead for a year now. Neither one of them has seen another living person for six weeks.
The place is actually theirs, in words and intent if not on paper, because Pastor Jim said so in pained whispers past lips stained with his own blood. Dean's figured from the beginning that's a hell of a lot more worthy than any pair of names scribbled across a deed, and Sam can't help but agree.
Not every property exchange that ends with a merciful bullet to the brain counts, but this one sure did.
Pastor Jim had a couple of houses to his name, family places he didn't use much, but this was the one that counted. He'd believed in the Rapture -- oh, that he had -- but even he used to say that the kind of Rapture he saw coming would make your average believer piss himself for days. Shame he'd gone so soon, is what the boys had thought from the start, because he'd sure as hell gotten a kick out of the holy sorts who'd clung to the outside of the wrought-iron fence and screamed for help now that the Good Lord had forsaken them. The wards circling the perimeter thirty feet away out from the fence keep the ramblers from coming anywhere near them if they stay close, but sometimes Pastor Jim had been too busy laughing to tell them not to wander too far back, and then it was just too late.
Jim had been a pastor, yeah, but even he would admit that sometimes he wasn't a very good one.
It's the whole reason for how fully stocked the damn compound is, though, hundreds of guns and enough ammunition to arm their grandchildren and more than enough food to last the boys until they can get around to making those grandkids some parents. That part's going to be a little tricky, the way things have been going lately.
"One trip," Dean says, and decapitates the chicken they'll have for dinner with a flick of his wrist.
Sam shakes his head, shifts his weight from one foot to the other as he leans back against the fence. "Not a chance, man. No one alive's been around here for weeks now, and any farther than West Fallow's just asking for trouble."
"It can't hurt to look, and we've got to reinforce the wards there anyway. And we've got the guns for it," Dean points out. "Grenades, too. Bet I can even get that flamethrower working again, with the right incentive."
"You that desperate to get laid?"
Dean just smiles, like he isn't about to answer stupid questions.
Another flick of Dean's wrist and the chicken head sails over the fence in a wide arc and lands well outside the wards. The ramblers fight for it, tearing at each other to get just that much scrap meat. They haven't seen the ramblers start dropping from starvation just yet, but it's only a matter of time with their food supply dwindling like it is.
Sam scratches at his own chin this time, the stubble steadily approaching beard territory whether he likes it or not. They haven't even seen a woman in three months since Carrie left on foot in the middle of the night with two of their guns, a knapsack full of food, and the imprint of her body still warming the far side of Dean's bed. Neither one of them think she got very far.
They've stopped a lot of things, though. Shaving's become a waste of time with livestock to keep alive, fresh plants to grow, magical wards to reinforce. Neither of them's much of a barber, and Dean's hair grows just as wild as Sam's in a sloppy male-model wave that he hates. With no one to impress, the clean laundry hasn't fallen by the wayside but the wearing of it certainly has.
Sam's palmed his dick more often than he cares to admit, jerking off with a frequency that might even be approaching Dean levels at this point, and he knows there were women since Jess but he's having a hard time remembering them lately.
"One trip?" he says.
Dean's grin widens. "One trip. Tomorrow. Flip you for who gets to pack the pickup."
Another thing they haven't seen in weeks is pocket change. Ten minutes of wrestling later, Sam takes Dean down and keeps him there, and Dean concedes defeat.
That's the night the girl shows up.
"Dean."
He grumbles something that sounds like a curse and buries his face in the pillow.
"Dean, get up."
But he doesn't, not immediately, because this is nothing new. People show up at the fence all the time and none of them are all that interested in telling them how the hell they knew to come here. Carrie had claimed she'd seen the address on a flyer or something, tacked up on a bunch of telephone poles like an ad for a missing puppy. Before that had been Bob, this middle-aged dentist who'd somehow managed to keep his beer belly -- he'd given them this bullshit story about getting a forward in his email. Nice story, if the internet hadn't stopped working just like everything else about six months ago.
Pastor Jim had lots of friends, Dean thinks, people with stockpiles of their own who could survive longer than most and wouldn't know Jim's ashes floated away on a strong breeze months ago. Dean's theory is that Pastor Jim's contacts have big mouths.
Sam's the one who has the damn dreams. He's not so sure Dean's theory holds as much water as he seems to think it does.
"Dean."
"Who is it?" The words come out sounding more like a growl than anything else. Sam doesn't wake him up because of the dreams, not anymore, but he'll wake Dean up without thinking about it if someone's banging at the front gates.
Dean reinforced the wards a week ago, since for some reason they last longer and hold stronger than when Sam does it. Whatever's clutching the bars of the fence, it's not a rambler.
"A girl," Sam says quietly. He stands at the window with one arm resting against it, leaning against the cool glass to stare out into the darkness. The familiar low hum that hasn't stopped in a year like supernatural white noise grows a little as the ramblers get anxious, moan louder, tear one another to shreds trying to get past the wards. "I can't tell anymore without going out there."
"Well, then, go out there," Dean groans, and flings one of his pillows at Sam's chest as if he'll knock Sam right out the front door.
The first thing they decided was that these fuckers weren't zombies, no matter what everybody else wanted to call them, no matter if they really were.
Sam saw his first zombie when he was ten, shambling towards Dean's back with blood-stained mouth gaping wide and sunken eyes focused on Dean's scrawny neck. The voodoo priestess who raised it took a thump to the back from the butt of Dad's rifle but the zombie kept on moving. Sam hadn't needed to summon up the courage to fire the gun in his hand, not with Dean in trouble.
These things might be the same kind of horse, but they're definitely a different color, vivid shades of red and gold where the thing that tried to kill his brother was a pale imitation in shades of gray.
Dean is the one who started calling them ramblers instead of zombies, because zombies just came at you slow and steady and these sons of bitches are something else entirely. They've seen slow and fast, fresh and rotted, and whereever the hell this curse on humanity came from, it's definitely not voodoo.
There's not enough crazed voodoo priestesses in the world to keep something like this up.
When Sam reaches the fence, they're swarming in the woods just past the wards, wanting to grab at the huddled shadow by the fence but hissing at the burn of the magic heating their dead flesh from inside. They do that most nights, stomping through the forest around the compound like they're scenting the air for fresh meat. He doesn't think their sense of smell still works, but the comparison still stands.
"Hey," he says, and when he does, the girl flinches away from the fence before she remembers what's behind her and goes back to clutching the iron rails again. Her fingers tremble visibly even from a good ten feet away, and with the night balmy and warm for early May, it's not from the cold.
When she lifts her head to look at Sam, she has to do so over the barrel of his rifle. If she's got any common sense, he figures, she shouldn't be offended.
"Let me in," she pleads.
"You know I can't," he says. "Not until tomorrow night."
It takes her a minute, but he finally gets a reluctant nod. Yeah, sure, she's got to be thinking. Can't have a carrier in your midst, right? She shifts on the ground until she's sitting rather than crouching, darts a nervous glance over her shoulder at the creeping masses in the shadows.
"There's wards up. You'll be safe where you're sitting until we're sure."
Sam expects her not to get that -- not many people understand the warding spells, even after everything that's happened -- but he could swear he hears a ragged sigh of relief out of her, and her thin body sags a little against the fence. The rifle lowers in his grasp as he does a quick check of her clothes -- jeans without much wear, durable hiking boots, brown leather jacket that looks tough and warm over a dark T-shirt. She'll be good out here until they're sure she's not carrying, he thinks, as long as she can handle listening to that for the next day.
"Thank you," she blurts suddenly.
Sam's palms go sweaty as he tries to remember what the hell he's done in the past few minutes to warrant gratitude. You'd think being ordered to spend the next day thirty feet away from a horde of zombies wouldn't be a good thing. "For what?"
She turns to look at him past dark gold hair that hasn't been washed recently and says, "For not shooting first."
But he doesn't hear her, the air choking off in his throat.
Jess's eyes. Jesus, she has Jess's eyes.
He sprints back to the house, and doesn't really care what she thinks of him for that.
It doesn't occur to Sam until the next morning, when he's making chicken sandwiches for the three of them with the sun barely rising over the horizon, that he never asked the girl her name or how she got past the ramblers. It was the eyes that threw him, Jess's familiar gaze in an unfamiliar face, and he wonders briefly if after everything they've gone through in the past year, this is when he really gets cursed.
A hand comes out of nowhere and snatches away one of the sandwiches, and Sam startles at the contact he hadn't even noticed until now.
"Little distracted, Sammy?" Dean cups his free hand over his eyes as he stares out the kitchen window and takes a bite of his sandwich, spotting the ramblers pacing near the girl. His eyes narrow, sharp and assessing, and Sam can almost see the silent tally ring up over Dean's head. The last time Sam counted, there had been ten of them near her, but daylight made them sluggish and that had been ten minutes ago when the light wasn't as strong. "She cute enough to warrant that?"
"Don't start."
"What? Come on, if she's hot, she's hot. It's a fair question." Every word he says comes out past a mouthful of chicken, lettuce, and homemade bread, and yet somehow he's still managing a smirk. Some talent.
Sam lets the knife he sliced the chicken with slide into the sink, brushes the crumbs in after them, tucks the Thermos on the table under his arm and grabs the plate with the two leftover sandwiches before Dean can even think of swiping one. Reflex makes him grab a handgun from the shelf next to the door and tuck it into the back of his jeans. Leaving the house anymore without a gun isn't a debatable topic.
"You wouldn't like her," Sam says.
"Why not?"
"Because she hasn't tried to steal anything from us yet."
Sam closes the kitchen door behind him before he can hear Dean's response, but he's pretty sure he wouldn't have wanted to hear it anyway.
When Dean and Sam first arrived at Pastor Jim's compound, guns blazing as they tore through a teeming mass of ramblers with the Impala before it died a glorious death just far enough within the confines of the wards, Pastor Jim had made them wait an entire day outside the gates. He even held a rifle on them, he and the transient who showed up a week before that pointing guns at their heads. Pastor Jim had been nice enough to apologize about it afterwards, Sam supposes, if you call, "You boys turned up clean and clear, so it couldn't have been that much of a hassle," a real apology.
Twenty-four hours hiding in a dead car within mere feet of a horde of ramblers isn't something Sam's ever going to forget. The constant hum of their moans and growls you can hear from the house isn't anything as bad as the sounds they make when they can see you move and sense your flesh within reach.
The girl's asleep when Sam reaches the fence, and he stops short.
Asleep, for fuck's sake. Thirty feet away, the ramblers pace like lions waiting on fresh meat, snarling and hissing and she's sleeping.
He takes advantage of the situation to put down the Thermos and remove the handgun from the back of his jeans, approaching the fence with the gun raised towards the ramblers. They might be behind the wards, but as Pastor Jim liked to say before he passed, better safe than shambling.
They snap at the air as he comes near, the few of them that haven't retreated into the woods until nightfall.
It takes a hell of a lot to resist the urge to blow one of their heads wide open with a few well-placed shots just for the hell of it.
He's still looking up at the ramblers when her breathing hitches and she jolts awake, spinning around on the grass to peer through the bars at him. Her mouth opens as if she's about to scream or cry or beg, but Sam can almost see the scent of the chicken sandwich hit her like a freight train and she backs down with a sound somewhere between a whimper and a moan. It's a safe bet she hasn't even seen a chicken in months, much less eaten one.
Those eyes hold onto him as he kneels to put the plate just within her reach, taking his own sandwich before stepping back safely out of biting distance.
The instant he moves away, she takes that as her cue to grab the other sandwich. Her teeth tear into the damn thing like maybe she is a carrier, like it's possible he really will have to shoot her, but then she mumbles a thank-you around her food and eyes the Thermos hopefully.
He almost sighs in relief as he sits down on the grass and rolls the Thermos towards her. The ramblers don't drink, and hydrophobia's one of the first signs of carrying.
"So do you have a name, or should I just call you She Who Inhales Her Breakfast?"
She's too busy twisting the top off the Thermos to look up at him again, and he half-expects her to spontaneously orgasm the way her eyes roll back in her head as she takes a drink of the iced tea inside. "Beth," she says when her mouth's not full anymore, and she licks her lips with this quick dart of her tongue that makes Sam more uncomfortable than he'd like to admit. "Beth McCoy."
"Sam Winchester," he says, and she nods before she catches herself.
I know hangs unspoken in the air like dead weight. Sam tries to ignore it. He could always ask why she came here, he figures, but a year's worth of experience tells him he won't get a straight answer anyway. "Mind if I ask how you got here past them?"
She swallows another barely chewed bite of her sandwich, licks her lips again in that annoyingly distracting way, and says, "I ran really, really fast."
Something about that strikes him as so absolutely fucking ridiculous that he starts laughing and doesn't stop until his sides ache.
It helps that the minute he starts laughing, so does she.
After Pastor Jim let them into the compound that second day, Sam dog tired and Dean looking like he wanted to mourn the Impala by finishing off a bottle of whiskey and going the hell to bed, Pastor Jim made the egregious error of asking them where their father was.
The living room went silent then, cold and painful and Sam could not breathe. Remembering that moment makes his throat close up even now, makes it feel like all of the air on the planet's been sucked away in an instant. Sam has this vague memory of swimming in dizziness, of being positive he was about to pass out, and then Pastor Jim caught on and said, "Which one of you boys had to do it?" and the air came back into his lungs in a rush that left him hoarse.
"I was the one closest to the machete," was all he said.
He didn't bother speaking for the rest of the day, and Dean and Jim let it slide.
Beth McCoy was going to be a teacher before the world died, about to start her first job teaching kindergarten in the fall when the people around her began to drop like flies and rise right back up again with bloodlust in their eyes. Beth had a boyfriend who'd been eaten, a mother who'd been eaten, a pet Labrador that had been eaten, and a very nice neighbor lady who'd been the one that ate them all. Beth had spent the last year wandering from town to town looking for her sister, and hadn't found her yet.
Beth woke up three days ago from a dream that told her to come to Pastor Jim's compound and she'd find her sister, but the dream part she hadn't said out loud.
Less than a day, and Sam's already pretty sure he can't be the one closest to the machete again.
Dean listens to Sam tell him her story as the two of them scout the perimeter for breaks in the wards, picking off any ramblers edging too close with quick and easy head shots. The more the wards get set off, the more they wear down, so shooting a few keeps them from having to reinforce the damn things for a few days longer. The few ramblers out this late in the afternoon descend on one casualty in a feeding frenzy before they figure out he's just as dead as the rest of them, and Dean waits for the sound of flesh being shredded to die down before saying, "What aren't you telling me?"
Sam's smile tugs at the corners of his lips. "What makes you think I'm not telling you something?"
"Hey, there's a reason you couldn't cheat at cards worth a damn. Now, spill."
Sam's boot heels crush the grass as he walks for a long silent moment, and it takes him a minute before he can say, "She looks a little like Jess."
Dean gives him a look, hard and steady, then waits for the rest.
"I mean, around the eyes mostly. Around the eyes, exactly, if we're being honest. Same hair, in the right light. And she's got --"
"You gonna list off every way she's like Jess? Because I know if I were her, I sure as hell wouldn't appreciate it."
Sam flinches at that, his grip on his rifle tightening as he levels an annoyed look in Dean's direction. "She's only been out there a few hours. You seriously think I'd try anything?"
"No," Dean says, then claps him on the shoulder with a wily grin, "but that's what I'm here for."
But when they make it around to the front of the compound, Beth isn't there.
"Did you find her?"
Dean shakes his head as he approaches Sam near the front gate, as if he knows damn well that isn't what his little brother wants to hear. Sam's got that determined look on his face, that tense flicker of the muscle in his jaw that says things aren't getting much easier from here on out. When Sam has that dark shadow behind his eyes is when their world gets strange and wild, when even the ramblers circling the perimeter get antsier than normal like they can sense him losing it.
The fence trembles as if it's the one humming with nervous energy, and now it's time for Dean to tense up. They don't need this now.
"She isn't on the property, as if she could even get over the fence or through the front gate," Dean says, then waves a hand towards the shaking wrought-iron bars. "And you might want to rein it in there a little."
Sam turns just enough to see the growing vibrations in the heavy iron, and the trembling immediately stops.
It'd be pretty goddamn creepy, if Dean wasn't already used to it.
"We have to go look for her," Sam says.
"What, out there?" Outside the fence, the ramblers have begun to crowd the edges and fill the air with that fucking moaning sound they make. The fast ones pounce around looking for weaknesses, but the slow ones just stand there and wait with eternal patience. Sam can always tell from the look on his face that Dean isn't sure which he likes less. "She probably got scared off. It's happened. They don't all stay, you know that."
"No," Sam says, that definite, stubborn tone of voice that's all Dad. "She wasn't going to leave."
"Why? Because she looked like Jess?"
Sam makes this sound in the back of his throat, harsh and raspy like he's swallowing cut glass, and Dean grimaces like he wishes he could take back what he said. But then the air rushes from Sam's lungs like something caught in the workings of an engine being spit out and he goes back to normal like he'd never flinched in the first place.
"I'm going after her," Sam says, and starts to head back to the house.
Dean trails after him in a sprint, the only way he'll catch up with Sam in the state he's in. "You honestly think that girl made it through the ramblers in the woods not once, but twice?"
"If she made it through the first time, what's to say she couldn't the second time?"
"We're not talking about a mine field here. We're talking about a zombie horde. It's not like once she makes the proper introductions, they just let her walk back into town."
The muscles in Sam's neck and shoulders tense and shift, because he knows damn well how this works. The few people who make to the compound alive don't always stay. Some of them take survival of the Winchesters as confirmation they can do it on their own with a couple of guns, some only plan to stay in passing anyway, and some of them Sam just fucking creeps out like he does. He's stopped taking it as a personal insult when one night of his waking screams or the scent of smoke at three in the morning spooks them and sends them running within hours.
But he's never been like this, not about one of the people who doesn't even make it past the fence. Their days saving people have been over since John Winchester turned on them with dead glassy eyes and snapped at their flesh with hungry growls. Since then, saving everybody's gotten a little more complicated, the kind of complicated that stopped being about running straight into the thick of danger with guns blazing a long time ago.
They keep a hell of a lot more people alive holed up in the compound than they ever would fighting their battles the way they used to. A safe haven's only safe if it isn't going anywhere, is what Pastor Jim told them when they first tried to arm up and head out, and it didn't take them long to figure out he had a point.
"I'm going into town," Sam says.
"Come on --"
"Hey, you were the one begging me yesterday for a field trip."
"Funny, I don't seem to remember any begging," Dean grumbles, but Sam's got a point.
Sam stops then and Dean nearly walks right into his back. He doesn't turn around to look at Dean when he says, "I have to do this. Stay here, come with, I don't really care right now."
Dean doesn't like this, doesn't like it one bit, and Sam just waits for the annoyance his older brother's choking down to bust out. It doesn't matter if Sam can wiggle his fingers and turn a crowd of ramblers into a walking, moaning bonfire if he wants, the same way it doesn't matter if a little tweaking with those freaky powers of his gives the term "magic bullet" a whole new meaning. This isn't the same world they grew up in, no matter how much more they might be prepared for it than most people.
But there's no way in hell Dean's letting Sam going out that gate alone, which is why he plasters on a smile and says, "You really think I'd let you have all the fun?"
Five minutes away from the compound is a dump of a town named Prescott that's been deserted for six months and got cleared of anything worth keeping by Pastor Jim before Dean and Sam ever arrived. Half of it isn't even standing anymore thanks to a gas explosion and a stiff breeze, and what's left of it houses more wild animals than a good-sized zoo.
These days, they double the driving time and head for West Fallow one more town over. West Fallow has the distinction of being one of the few towns in the state that evacuated when the ramblers came. If the air were any closer to fresh with the lack of rotting flesh it might even sound like music, like a snappy little jingle as you pull into town. Now entering West Fallow. Least undead town this side of Iowa.
Walking through the woods gets you to West Fallow in a couple of hours, quicker than it takes to get you to Prescott. If Beth McCoy ended up anywhere, it's probably here.
It's the first ride in the truck in months where they don't count the ramblers they run down. Now isn't the time for games, not with that pissy look on Sam's face that drives Dean up a fucking wall.
After Sam parks the old pickup in the center of town, Dean gets out and kneels near the wards he placed near the fountain in front of the police station, tracing the chipped and faded black paint on the concrete with his fingertips. Pastor Jim's the one who put them there in the first place, setting up a protective circle big enough to keep the ramblers on the outskirts of town, and Dean's been the one to keep them up since his death. Erosion's worried the latest wards down enough to bother him, making their cover good for only a couple more hours if that, but in theory, they should be out of town before there's much of a problem.
You know, in theory.
"Well, college boy, what's your next bright idea?" Dean says, stepping back from the wards and rubbing at his beard as he shoots a quick glance towards the truck. There's always paints in the glove compartment just in case, for times like this when the ramblers hover near enough to warrant it. Wards on the verge of cracking open always make Dean nervous, and not in the best of ways. The ramblers moan and groan from the edge of town like an oncoming storm, with all the patience of a saint. They've got time to burn until the wards crumble, but they'll be pushing it.
Sam scans the buildings on Main Street searching for signs of life, his rifle hanging absently from his shoulder. The damn thing was a precautionary measure, the way he tends to get outside of the compound anymore. Ammo runs out, but spontaneous flames and invisible hands last as long as he does.
"Sammy?'
Something darts from behind the police station and between the cafe and bookstore, something fast and tall and humanoid, and both Dean and Sam raise their rifles on reflex.
"The wards?"
"They're holding," Dean says. "It's not a rambler."
He doesn't bother to mention that if it were an hour from now, he wouldn't be so sure.
Sam calls Beth's name as they approach the space between the cafe and the bookstore and Dean has to resist the urge to tell him to shut up, as if screaming's going to get the attention of the ramblers or something. The groans from the edge of town grow and roll, an ominous wave from the other side of Main Street, and if the hair on the back of Sam's neck is standing up, he'll be the last one to admit it.
The space between the cafe and bookstore used to be a parking lot before it was an elephant graveyard of sorts, a half-dozen cars now sinking on their flattened tires for eternity. In between the Hyundai and the hatchback are the corpses of a pair of little girls, and the minivan holds the half-eaten bodies of a mother and infant. One of these days when the ramblers fall away from the world, burying them might not be a waste of time anymore.
Dean's the one who notices it first, the thing that wasn't there before.
"Sam," he says, and waits for his little brother to turn before waving the barrel of his rifle towards the motorcycle parked behind the minivan, like somebody had made a point of hiding the damn thing. Not a surprise, with the wards set up like they are.
Dean hears Sam approach behind him, letting out a ragged breath as if he's disappointed his girl didn't suddenly just pop up from behind the motorcycle like it's all some great cosmic surprise. "Whoever it is, they've got good taste," Dean mutters, running his fingers over the chrome.
Sam rolls his eyes at that -- Typical Dean, he thinks -- and he'd start in a good session of teasing the hell out of Dean if they both didn't turn as one to point their rifles at the far end of the parking lot.
They might not have hunted for a long time, Sam thinks, but they're sure as hell not rusty enough to miss someone sneaking up behind them with a gun.
The girl isn't Beth McCoy, that's for damn sure, but there's a vague but close enough resemblance to make Sam wonder. In the moonlight, her tank top displays arms crisscrossed with scars that don't look remotely like bites, more like knife blades and a handful of bullets at work, but you can never be too sure these days. She holds her handgun with practiced ease, the kind of comfort neither one of them see in your average civilian even now.
"Either you're alive, or you guys have started using a hell of a moisturizer," she says, her lips curling in a mocking grin.
"Oh, we're alive, all right, sweetheart," Dean says, but his grip on the rifle doesn't waver even as he answers her grin with his own. He cocks his head in Sam's direction and flashes an apologetic look. "Some of us more than others."
Shaking his head, Sam lowers his own rifle, keeping eye contact with the girl, trying to telegraph that they're safe. "I'm Sam, and this is my brother Dean," he says. Her weapon doesn't move -- not a surprise -- so he tries for the puppy-dog smile Dean always teases him about and says, "You going to lower that anytime soon?"
"Against two guys bigger than me? And what's my next stupid move supposed to be, throwing myself to the zombies?"
Dean catches on slowly and puts his own rifle down, albeit it with a hell of a lot more reluctance. "We're not going to hurt you," he says, raising his hands even as he slants an annoyed look in Sam's direction. This is a dumb move, Sammy, unless you really want some psycho blowing our brains out.
"Funny, I hear that a lot," she says sarcastically. "Sometimes from people who actually are going to hurt me."
"Look, we're just here in town looking for a girl." Dean's smile is a pile of charm, but this girl isn't buying it and the cracks in the charm grind like broken glass against Sam's senses.
"Yeah," Sam says, "blonde, pretty eyes, name of Beth. You seen her?"
It's the first time the girl looks afraid, the first time her fingers come even close to a tremble. Her eyes narrow like she's waiting for the punchline and knows she won't like it, and Sam has the odd feeling a loud marching band just passed by and he missed it.
The handgun shakes a little in her grasp, and Dean and Sam exchange a quick look.
"You're kidding, right?"
It turns out that the girl -- who'll only say her name is Grace while making a face that indicates she'd rather it was anything else on the planet -- has been staying in the empty apartment above the cafe. She paces back and forth around the living room tossing her things into a knapsack as Dean props himself up against the wall near the door and Sam leans out the open window and watches the gathering crowd of ramblers outside the perimeters of the wards.
She picked the perfect spot to keep an eye on the bastards, if she didn't know enough about the wards they'd used to reinforce them. When they came into the room, both of them spotted the rifle propped up next to the open window before they noticed anything else. In his mind, Sam can picture her falling asleep in the chair by the window, occasionally waking up to make sure the ramblers aren't coming.
It won't be long now.
At the end of Main Street, one gets shoved past the ward's perimeter by the pushing of the rest of them and falls to the ground with an unholy roar. Even if it doesn't come any farther, the fact that it's still in one unburned, moving piece says a lot.
"Who set up your wards?" Grace asks, and it startles Sam out of scanning the edges of town, out of checking the shadows within West Fallow's city limits for a flash of dark gold hair.
"I did," Dean says.
Grace lets out this bark of laughter, sharp and derisive, and something about it makes Dean squirm. "Yeah, well, they suck."
"Keep the ramblers out of town, don't they?"
"Barely," she says, this weird smile crossing her face when Dean calls them ramblers like she thinks it's fucking adorable, like he's a little boy naming a puppy or something. She slings her knapsack onto her shoulder and her rifle follows suit before Sam can back away to give her space. She marches from the room like she's going off to war, as if she just expects them to pad along after.
They do, of course. Not much choice, really.
"This afternoon, I had to peg one that got through and tried to pounce on me at the fountain," she says as they descend the stairs to the sidewalk. She gives the edge of town a cursory glance with a grimace as she walks towards the truck. "See?"
Dean and Sam turn towards where she looks and raise their rifles at once, one of the slower ramblers taking determined steps straight down the yellow line of Main Street. Maybe it says something about her, that she doesn't slip her own weapon into position to fire at the damn thing, but Sam isn't sure what.
Dean makes a face at the sight of it shambling towards them and lowers his weapon. He hates shooting the slow ones for anything other than fun, and it's only gotten a few feet past the wards anyway, its arms and legs moving like they're weighted down with iron.
When Sam sees the look on Dean's face, he nods with a sigh and narrows his eyes at the rambler.
It's like an invisible hand slaps the rambler backwards through the air, sending it flying into the teeming mass of zombies. The others make a grating noise, their best impression of laughter, and Sam's pretty sure he sees limbs being thrown as the rambler's torn to shreds.
Grace stops fiddling with her knapsack to stare at Sam with unapologetic interest. "How did you do that?"
"We've all got our bar tricks," Dean says with a smirk, the kind that used to get him laid at the drop of a pair of panties. "Wait'll we get you back to the compound and I'll show you how I can tie a cherry stem in a knot with my tongue."
Grace makes a face at that, and something about the familiarity of it slaps Sam in the face. "Beth is your sister," he says.
He almost regrets it, the way she comes close to flinching at that. He gets the impression she doesn't do that often. "Was, yeah. Before all this."
Dean's not about to let that slide. "You seeing ghosts again?"
Frowning, Sam shakes his head. The number of times he's seen dead people Dean hasn't has grown over the years, since they killed the demon, since his powers have grown in ragged spurts like they're going through puberty. However, this isn't one of those times. "I gave her a sandwich, Dean. I don't know about you, but I haven't seen a lot of ghosts that won't turn down a chicken sandwich."
Grace freezes in the middle of tossing her bag into the truck and turns slowly towards them. "You have chicken?" she says, in the same sort of tone she'd probably whip out if Sam had suddenly announced he could wiggle his nose and make the ramblers drop like stones. Dean nods, and Grace lets loose with this crooked smile full of awe and wonder. "I may actually apologize for the gun thing for some chicken."
"Hey, how do you know so much about the wards?" Dean asks.
"Grandma raised us, she was a witch." Grace's shoulders roll in something not quite a shrug, and she glances at the shadows around them as she clutches the rifle in her hands. "You want anything more complicated than that, it's going to have to wait for some fried chicken and the coldest drink you can get me that's not water."
"You always this anxious, sweetheart?"
She tilts her head just the right way, something about those green eyes sending chills settling over Dean. Goosebumps rise on Dean's skin and he steps back like he's escaping from a draft. "Around people who've seen my sister, I am," she says.
Sam frowns at that, something not right here. With the undead pushing at the barriers of town like an angry mob, that's saying a lot. "What is she?"
"Gracie?"
All three of them turn as one towards the voice across the street, towards the pale, thin girl standing by the cafe. She takes a few cautious steps towards them, absently tugging at something around her neck, and it doesn't take the glow of moonlight off those curls and those eyes for Sam to recognize Beth. Something inside him clenches with relief, and he looks over at Grace expecting there to be a hug, some tears that don't get shed, maybe an angry word or two out of gratitude that Beth's in one piece.
Instead, her rifle slides into place in one easy motion, like she doesn't even have to think about it.
"Hello, Beth," Grace says, aiming the gun at her sister.
And now it's Sam's turn not to think, stepping between the barrel of Grace's rifle and Beth's terrified form like a reflex. "What the hell are you doing?"
"Sam," Dean says. It sounds like Dean's warning him off, like he's telling him to let the girls fight this out on their own, and Sam tries not to think about why.
Grace's grip on the rifle is sure and steady. "You think I won't shoot you after the year I've had --"
Dean's got the handgun tucked in the holster at his side pointed at her head in a heartbeat. It's one thing to aim at her own sister, if Beth's not what she was before and Grace's got to take care of that, but threatening Sam's a dumb move. "You shoot him, and I'll make sure you don't even get a chance for a second shot."
"Then I'll make the first one count," she says.
Sam's tempted to concentrate, to just want the gun to leave Grace's hands so much that it flies into his own with a thought. But then Dean glances over at Beth like he's trying to come up with his next move and the tension in his muscles fades. "Sam, let her do it," he says.
"What?"
"She's not a ghost," Grace says, and makes sure the rifle points directly at Beth's forehead. "She's one of them."
Jesus, Sam thinks, and looks back at her.
He hadn't seen it before, not really, not with a horde of the undead thirty feet away and her dark gold hair spilling over her shoulders. It had hidden her face from view and her neck along with it the night before. The dark cord with the wooden sigil hanging from it might have been tucked inside her T-shirt and might not have been. Sam can't remember. But a year of putting down wards around the compound to fend off the ramblers has carved into his mind the really powerful ones, the ones that hold up the longest.
The ones that could probably even fend off death.
Or undeath, if you really tried.
"You two aren't the only ones who know how to work your way around a ward," Beth says with a weak smile.
When Sam curses, it rasps coming out of his throat, sandpaper crossing glass.
"Get out of the way," Grace says.
Sam shakes his head, unable to take his eyes off Beth.
"Sammy, move your ass," Dean says, and it's tough and painful and Dean's got to know damn well it's not going to work. Not considering how much he sounds like Dad when he says it.
"There's got to be something to do," Sam says.
"There isn't."
The small voice shakes Sam's attention and drags it back to Beth, those haunting eyes shimmering. Sam wants to think it's because she's about to cry, but he knows better. "I just wanted to find my sister," she says. "I had these dreams sometimes before all of this started, and she was just going to leave here without ..."
"I was going to leave tomorrow," Grace chokes out. Her voice sounds hollow with sudden realization.
Beth's gaze drifts from Sam to Grace, from Grace to Sam, with that fucking too-familiar gaze that slams into Sam's gut like a battering ram. "But then there was this attack, and I got bit by this -- I just wanted my sister to find you, that's all," she says. "I just wanted you to find her."
Sam's skin hums like a live wire, and the world's harder to see even with the moonlight as crisp as it is. It might be tears and it might not be, and he doesn't even know this girl, for Christ's sake. She's not Jess and she's not even fucking alive. Ten feet away Dean's staring at him and staring hard, and there's a girl between them both narrowing her eyes at her own sister down the barrel of a gun. And they're not even going to do anything, and they can't even if they could.
Sam's stomach threatens to empty. It's forgotten what a real hunt feels like, he thinks, what other people feel like.
The threat from his stomach becomes a promise, but not here, not now, and he steps out of the way of the rifle.
Beth grabs onto the necklace, taking a deep breath she doesn't need. "Bye, Gracie," she says, and tugs hard at the necklace until the cord snaps.
"Goodbye, Beth," Grace says.
And pulls the trigger.
Grace doesn't ask for the matches and salt, the machete or even a goddamn shovel. But when Dean hands her the salt and matches, she takes them without comment and douses the body in crystals. There's no ghost yet, but there's no harm in making sure it won't happen.
Sam would offer to do it for her, but he doubts she'd appreciate any more "bar tricks" out of him just yet.
He focuses on the ramblers, on the way they practically tremble with energy. It's easier on him than looking over his shoulder at the lump on the ground currently taking on flames like dry cordwood.
"I'm not going to have time to repaint the wards."
Sam can sense Dean over by the fountain, can feel his presence behind him like the warmth of the sun on his back. But at the edge of town the ramblers writhe against the invisible barriers that hold them back, and Sam's got his rifle up and ready. He knows that look to them, that razor-sharp simmer of excitement like the last shred of restraint before a riot. "What the hell is that supposed to mean?" he asks Dean.
"It means say goodbye to West Fallow for good. Or at least until the ramblers take a long walk off a short pier."
Grace appears beside Sam like a wraith, right out of thin air, her own rifle at home in her hands. "How much longer?" she calls out.
As if on cue, one of the ramblers breaks free of the wards and races towards them. Fuck. It would be one of the sprinters. The slow ones were always the last to get through.
The rambler only makes it a few feet before his head explodes in a shower of bone and blood.
"Oh, not much longer," Dean mutters. Sam didn't see the shot but he can picture Dean making it, a one-two move they've both known as instinct since the rifles were taller than they were. He doesn't have to turn around to know Dean hasn't lowered his weapon yet, not even with the two of them raising theirs. It's not his way. "Get in the truck."
"Don't have to tell me twice," Grace says, and turns towards the truck.
The scream that follows is less terror and more surprise, and she's still raising her rifle against the rambler running towards them when Sam's reflexes kick in. Her feet sweep out from under her, unseen hands yanking her down and out of the way of Sam's rifle. He fires without thinking, and the rambler slams to a stop as his skull shatters.
The body slumps to the ground close enough to fry Sam's nerves, and he resists the urge to go over and give it a good kick.
Dean's picking off ramblers one, two, three as they break through the wards, but Sam's too busy hauling Grace to her feet, a little surprised when she lets him. She swipes her rifle off the ground with one easy move, focuses on the state of the gun instead of him when she speaks.
"Thanks," she says.
He responds with a short, sharp nod he's not sure she sees, and follows her into the cab of the truck without a word.
Grace's gaze lifts up to greet his as he gets in, as green as Dean's and just as wild. This close up, he realizes she smells like cherry lotion covering up the faint scent of rotting flesh. It's not a new trick, something everybody's got to try and hide these days, but she's done a hell of a job smothering the bad with the good. "Beth would have liked you," she says. "You know, if she hadn't been a zombie."
"That's a pretty lousy compliment," Sam says.
Grace shrugs. "I'm pretty lousy at giving compliments."
Sam stares at her long and hard as it suddenly occurs to him this is the first real rescue he can remember getting involved with in months.
"Everybody buckled up?"
Dean slides into the driver's side and shuts the door just before a rambler hits it, its head slamming into the glass so hard Sam's surprised it doesn't shatter. Dean acts like he doesn't notice, starting the truck and shifting into drive so fast that Sam and Grace nearly fly forward against the dash before they even realize he's hit the gas. When they slide forward on the seat and turn to glare at him in unison, Dean ignores it. "What, no seatbelts? Did I happen to mention this is going to be a bumpy ride?"
As if to make his point, he aims for the first rambler he sees break through the wards in front of them and drives right over it.
Grace's shoulder radiates warmth where it presses against Sam's arm. He has to resist the urge to ask if she stole extra warmth from her sister, clenching his teeth the way she's clenching hers when she says, "I'm going to smother him in his sleep, aren't I?"
But Sam's not really listening, and hasn't been for a while.
The sprinters charge through the wards and race towards the fountain, and when a pair of them pounces on something on the far side by the police station, Sam closes his eyes and doesn't open them for the rest of the ride home.
Four weeks later
In summer, the compound feels like something out of a Norman Rockwell painting, if you can ignore the steady sounds of the ramblers pacing outside the wards and the faint scent of their rotting flesh in the air. Grace and Dean take turns picking them off with the rifles from all the way up on the porch, Dean repeatedly offering to turn the whole thing into a game of strip zombie-killing. She ignores him, but he figures she'll crack any day.
"Who can resist this face forever?" Dean says to Sam, throwing open his arms and flashing him a broad smile that usually makes Sam throw the nearest soft object at his head.
When he mentions that attitude to Grace in passing, she gives the cucumber she's slicing a good hearty chop, lets out that derisive bark of laughter and says, "So what do you do when his head is the nearest soft object?"
She keeps saying she's going to leave in a week, and Dean keeps threatening to shoot her if she doesn't.
Sam'll be shocked if he doesn't walk in on them fucking somewhere in the compound by the end of August.
One day, Sam's walking the perimeter when one of the ramblers just drops, sinking to the ground like the dead weight it is. The others pounce, but slower now, even the fast ones dragged down by something unseen and strange. They give up like always, but this time the rambler's all bones and no muscle, nothing but weak stretches of gray skin holding its skeleton together like fraying bungee cords.
It's starving. They're starving.
Sam might be happy, if he'd had a full night's sleep in the last four weeks.
For four weeks, there's a dark shadow wandering through his dreams like the demon's come back to haunt him, like it's watching Sam from afar with eyes that shift from demonic to hauntingly familiar. That sense of danger fades night by night, his screams dying down, until all that's left is a glimmer of hesitant anticipation as he wakes.
Someone's coming, he thinks one night, and when he sits up in bed the furniture is still and the air is clear of smoke.
Grace sits on the end of the bed, though, leaning back with one palm firmly planted on the bedspread, her legs stretching to the floor with ankles crossed. Her free hand's tilting back what's left of a bottle of amaretto and she takes a healthy pull off the bottle like he's not even there. She leans back until the baggy T-shirt she's wearing rides up her thighs, the ends of her dark red hair dancing over the bedding.
Sam thinks this is supposed to turn him on. Mostly, he just wishes she'd either pass over the booze or leave.
"You're keeping Dean up," she says.
He really doesn't want to know what she means or how she knows that, not with her wearing a T-shirt he could swear Dean had on yesterday. He swipes the bottle from her hand before she can protest, as if she were even going to, and says, "I'll try to concentrate harder on not keeping him up."
"You do that," she says, then grabs the bottle back before he can take one good swig and shoves him back in bed. The blankets get yanked up over him, and if she weren't tucking him in, he's pretty sure he wouldn't have gone from pissed and ready to drink to lacking liquor and trying not to laugh.
Grace leans over him, narrowed eyes dark with a threat about as menacing as an angry chipmunk, and says, "Sleep, Sam, or I swear next time I'll just drop a lamp on your head," before sauntering out of the room with the amaretto bottle dangling from her fingertips.
Subtle and genteel, Grace sure as hell ain't ever going to be.
Everything about this place is so fucking ridiculous anymore that it comes as a complete surprise to Sam when he wakes back up again and it isn't anymore.
When Sam opens his eyes that morning, the first thing he sees in the dim light of sunrise is the half-empty bottle of Southern Comfort dangling in his line of sight, scattering amber light across the walls like a sick sort of prism. He accepts it with a morbid sense of deja vu, struggles up in bed just waiting for Dean to speak, and takes a swig as Dean settles into the chair on the other side of the room.
"There's a girl at the gate," Dean says, and when Sam smiles, that's how it really starts.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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Date: 2006-05-01 06:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-05-01 06:04 pm (UTC)(Then again, here's hoping it doesn't make the crappy computer explode. *crosses fingers*)
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Date: 2006-05-02 02:00 am (UTC)Links!
Date: 2006-05-02 03:41 am (UTC)Re: Links!
Date: 2006-05-02 04:44 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-05-01 06:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-05-01 06:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-05-01 07:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-05-01 08:30 pm (UTC)...I heart you.
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Date: 2006-05-01 08:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-05-01 08:59 pm (UTC):)
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Date: 2006-05-01 09:44 pm (UTC):)
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Date: 2006-05-01 10:41 pm (UTC)Awesome job!
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Date: 2006-05-02 12:15 am (UTC)the ending did confuse me though. I'm not sure what I was supposed to think or assume from the point when Sam wakes up with Grace on the bed to the very end.
Very intriguing though!
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Date: 2006-05-02 12:25 am (UTC)1, 2, 3, 4
I declare a Zombie War!
What do we want?
Braaaaiinns!
When do we want 'em?
Braaaaaiiinns!
Awww, this just makes me happy.
Apocalyse!fic, and powers!Sam, and the wards, and, and Zombies!
What more do you need?
And mucho involved plotting, just so they can get the girl. Actually came off like a real Zombie movie, y'know?
They're so romantic. *laughs*
Were you actually planning on a sequel? (Like, why's Sam having *nightmares* about someone turning up?)
Or y'know, was the plan to just end on the reassuring note that the world will probably be re-populated by Winchesters?
(Ok, yes! Reassuring. *grins*)
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Date: 2006-05-02 12:48 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-05-02 01:13 am (UTC)The ending was a little confusing - is it deja vu, or did Sam dream the whole thing? I'm with
The groans from the edge of town grow and roll, an ominous wave from the other side of Main Street, and if the hair on the back of Sam's neck is standing up, he'll be the last one to admit it.
Awesome description. My hair did the same damn thing, with bonus shivers.
Grace rocks and gives good snark, so she can be with Dean. I approve *g* I want to know more about her, how she survived, where she got so scarred....
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Date: 2006-05-02 06:07 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-05-02 07:45 pm (UTC)What an amazing story-- the post-apocalyptic stuff seems to be my new crack. And then the twist at the end-- just bizarrely intriguing.
Though I can't help wishing that Sam and Dean had turned to each other in that broken, self-destructing world. AND that they'd found a dynamic that didn't almost always include driving each other nuts. You know-- less pestering, more accepting.
Although Dean always brings the Southern Comfort on mornings like this, as if he's hoping the name alone will be enough to make Sam feel like he's been hugged or some shit. was pretty damn cute.
And loved the nightmares, the room scorching, the whole Pastor Jim sideline.
If I had the time, I would just be reading your fanfic plus a few others and never coming up for air. Although I'd never get around to writing my own then. But still-- damn.
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Date: 2006-05-03 12:30 am (UTC)I'm also a tiny bit confused by the ending, but maybe that's just me. :)
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Date: 2006-05-03 04:30 am (UTC)Anyway. That's a not very clear way of saying GREAT job...I've never had a short story, fan OR original fic, stick with me like that.
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Date: 2006-05-03 10:23 am (UTC)So, Sam dreamed it, right? and now, it's all going to happen, as he dreamed. Yes?
You managed to paint a whole apocalyptic world in a short story, and to give a clear idea of how they boys are living through it, and how they are changed, and how they are still the same...I really like it :) sure, if you turned it into a 200 pages novel, that'd be okay too ;)
*hides*
thank you :)
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Date: 2006-05-03 03:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-05-17 02:59 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-05-23 06:30 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-06-23 04:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-09-01 06:31 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-10-26 12:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-03-07 06:24 am (UTC)I didn't cry but for a second my breath caught in my throat when I realized what you'd done, how you'd ripped away that cliche I'd been pretty sure was coming. It was beautiful.
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Date: 2007-06-01 12:25 am (UTC)I really, really, reeeeally liked this story. I had marked it down ages ago in my "come back to read later" file, and I'm so glad I finally did.
What I liked best about it was that it was a real story. I'm not sure I can explain what I mean by that, exactly, but it had sharp characterizations, and drew you into the world of the story immediately. It had tension--our not knowing whether Beth would be safe outside the gates, whether she would turn into a zombie (oops, I meant "rambler"), what had happened to her when she disappeared....
Even if it hadn't featured the Winchester boys I would have enjoyed this story, and I always think that's a sign of a good fanfic.
A very big "Brava!"
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Date: 2007-11-11 07:33 am (UTC)Zombies and HalfWacky!Dean Winchester and zombies and TurboCharged!Sammy Winchester and zombies and snarling toothy terror and, er,
Zombies. Hot Damn.
Ah, there IS joy in Mudville tonight, folks, and oh, it felt GOOD.
Thank you for feeding my Zombiferous Desires. *sighs, licks fingers daintily*
I wouldn't turn down a chicken sandwich Dean made *either*, but this fic would have to run a reeeeeel close second.
*throws roses and chocolates*
Red
Happy Deangirl