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“All I’m sayin’ is, how many trees you think we could’ve taken down with that chainsaw in the time it’ll take to pull one down with a freaking axe?” Dean huffed, grumbling as the straps on his backpack dug into his shoulders. He hefted it higher again, tightening the waist strap to give it a little extra support. “Do the math, Sam. One chainsaw would have been way better than four axes in the long run.” His feet crunched over dead leaves and gravel; the trees along the road weren’t quite tall enough to provide much shade, and the summer heat beating on his head was making Dean feel even more stubbornly combative.“The chainsaw needed gas, Dean,” Sam sighed, exasperation in his tone. “Axes operate on elbow grease, which is one of the few things not heavily rationed at the moment. Plus, four axes means potentially four people working in four different locations, compared to only one person with the saw—”“—who could be whipping through the wood…”“—along with at least a dozen people there to protect him from the inevitable swarm of zoms pouring in from all over, because of the freaking noise. Use your head, for God’s sake. Everything is not a matter of horsepower.”Dean rolled his eyes behind his brother’s back. “Whatever, man. When’s the last time you even saw a working chainsaw, anyway? It was just sitting there behind the counter, just needing a little TLC and some motor oil, but oh, no. ‘Major said axes, not power tools,’” he mimicked Sam’s voice, waggling his head in sarcastic imitation. “Can’t believe…”“Do you two ever shut up?” interrupted the third person in the group, twisting her neck to peer back over her shoulder and glare at Dean. “Jesus Christ, you’re worse than my parents. Than they used to be, anyway.” There was nothing in her voice to betray any feelings beyond bored disdain, the same attitude she’d shown for most of the hour they’d been walking. It was a pretty solidly-built mask, Dean thought.Of course, pretty much everybody was wearing some kind of mask these days, some kind of defense to hide the near-constant worries and fear and grief that were a part of everyday life. His own mom and dad had been six feet under since well before the whole world turned upside down, and that memory still made his chest twinge a little on bad days. If he’d had to watch them turn gray, or, worse, had to deal with them when they did, a mere bad attitude after the fact would have been a best-case scenario.Sam grunted, leaning forward a moment as he almost stumbled under the shifting weight. “Stop moving, Claire,” he hissed, adjusting his grip under her legs where they wrapped around his waist from behind. “If I trip and sprain an ankle, we’re both screwed. Hey, Dean, could you…?” He stopped trudging and turned, exaggeratedly jerking his head to the side in an attempt to throw his sweaty hair out of his eyes.“Yeah, sure,” Dean said, stepping closer and pulling a rag from his pocket. He wiped the perspiration from Sam’s forehead and pushed the hair back, blinking away the flash of a sudden memory of tending to a shorter, gawkier, teenaged version of Sam. There was a smudge of dirt across Sam’s cheekbone now, and Dean had to force himself not to scrub at it as he adjusted his brother’s headset from where it had slipped.“Thanks,” Sam said, tilting his head back and forth to stretch sore neck muscles. “God, I’m beat. Longest freaking run in a while. If anybody tries to stand between me and the showers when we get back, I’m going through them.”A short crackle popped in Dean’s ear. “Oh, so you boys are actually coming back, then? ‘Cause I was beginning to wonder.” The radio handler’s voice was dry and grumpy-sounding, but that was hardly unusual for him. “Good to finally hear your voices, so I know you’re both still alive and not gray. You were supposed to be back in transmission range, oh, about two hours ago.”“We know, Bobby,” Sam spoke into his microphone apologetically, turning back around and resuming his onward plod. “We sort of ran into…complications.”“Boy, what the hell are you talking about? Spit it out. Don’t tell me you ran into a bunch of shamblers—Jody said they cleared out that quadrant last week, and they shouldn’t have had time to gather up again too much since then. Besides, I’ve been tracking your positions, and all I’ve seen is a couple of slowpokes who’ve apparently forgotten that a Runner’s first job is to, you know, run.” “Hey, old man, this shit’s not light,” Dean protested, following along behind Sam. “Lot harder to spend the day running with packs of hardware than it is with bottles of meds or food, you know. Anyway, no problems with shamblers or anything else bitey—you can tell Jody she and her crew did a damn good job—but a couple crawlers were hiding in the overgrowth outside camp gates, FYI. Oh, and one extra crawler inside the store, except that one had a pulse.” Claire made a rude noise without turning, and Dean grinned.“What the hell’s that supposed to…aw, don’t tell me you’re bringing back another stray. You were meant to be going after wires and screwdrivers and crap, not people.” Dean could almost see Bobby slumping back in his chair, yanking off his cap to run a hand through his thinning hair.“C’mon, Bobby, she’s a kid,” Sam argued. “We couldn’t just leave her there alone. She’s got a busted knee.”“I was fine! It was only a little twisted until you guys broke in, making a racket that sounded like an army of undead attacking. I fell on it trying to get away! And I’m not a kid,” Claire added, thumping Sam’s back with her fist.“Oh, for the love of…” Bobby groaned. “Just perfect. That’s what we needed more of around here, teenage drama and moodiness. I was supposed to be retired by now, not that anybody cares. These are my damn golden years.”“Bobby says you sound charming and he can’t wait to meet you,” Dean said to the back of Claire’s head. Bobby cursed into his microphone at the same time that Claire said something equally rude, to which Dean laughed.“We’re moving slower than we expected since I’m carrying Claire and Dean’s packing the whole hardware store haul by himself,” Sam went on. “But we’re coming up on Limestone Creek, so you should have us on camera soon.”“Yeah, if I don’t sink,” Dean interjected.Sam barked a derisive laugh. “Dean seems to think he’s carrying the weight of the world, not just a bunch of hatchets. And, by the way, Bobby, would you please tell him that we did not need to bring back a damn chainsaw, which would have taken up most of the room in the bag, anyway?”“Less room than a human being,” Bobby answered. “But no, a chainsaw isn’t on anyone’s priority list right now. Hell, hatchets are pretty low down, at that. Top of the list was Red’s electronics supplies, batteries, hand tools. Don’t suppose you found any of that?”“Everything we could grab that hadn’t been looted already,” Dean said, sighing. “Probably a few thousand feet of Romex wire, too. Charlie better be satisfied. Nothing says ‘thank you’ like a shoulder massage, I hear.”“Oh, I’m sure she’ll get right on that,” Bobby deadpanned. “And…there you boys are. I got visual on you two idiots now. Good lord, you were serious about the kid.”“Did you think we were kidding?” Shaking his head, Sam adjusted his grip around Claire’s legs for the hundredth time. “Hey, Claire, look up and wave hello. Bobby’s got cameras in the trees.”“Creepy,” she said, sounding unimpressed. Dean noted how, even though she clung to her facade of utter boredom, not bothering to lift her head, she did turn it to one side, her eyes flicking upward curiously. When they’d run across Claire, hiding in the back of the old hardware store, it was obvious she’d been on her own for a while, holing up in whatever location she could secure. Sam’s sincere promises of a safe haven and a dependable community had only seemed to make her more suspicious, and Dean wondered if she was only now beginning to truly believe that they hadn’t been lying, drawing her out for some twisted purpose of their own.That’s okay. She’ll see. After all, Dean wouldn’t have believed any of this, either, if it hadn’t been Bobby Singer’s familiar voice on the radio when those first Runners had stumbled across him and Sam a couple of months into the Crisis. He’d been ready to knock them out and run—not kill if he didn’t have to; the men were obviously still human, after all—when one of them had suddenly gotten a funny look on his face and called them by name, then grinned and handed over his headset. Hearing that voice, one of many familiar voices that Dean had thought he’d never hear again—that had been the first moment in a long while that he had felt like he could really breathe.Bobby, a longtime family friend who they’d both considered family in all but blood, had been just as stunned as Dean and Sam. He’d switched back and forth between shocked profanities and expressions of relief as he swore that he’d done everything he could to find them and the rest of their family, right up until the established communications grid failed for good. It had taken Dean and Sam ages to reassure him that there was no ill will on their part; they were fine, they were safe, and his word of assurance was all they needed to hear to get on board with enlisting in whatever business with which he’d found himself involved.“I’ve given up on trying to guess when you two are joking or not,” Bobby now answered Sam. “Ever since the goat thing.”Dean snorted. “You love the goats,” he said.“I love the goat milk,” Bobby retorted. “I love the goat cheese, even if it does smell like old socks. And as soon as we manage to get a good enough size herd out of the group, I’m going to love the hell out of some goat stew. But the goats themselves are the stinkiest, orneriest bunch of stubborn cusses I’ve ever seen.”“Sure, Bobby,” Sam said, amusement thick in his tone. “Hey, who was it that made the little brass bell collar for Annette?”“Nanette,” Bobby corrected automatically, then blustered when the brothers burst into laughter. “It’s a joke! Because she’s a nanny goat, and…aw, damn it! I should just let that group of zombies about thirty degrees to your northeast have your sorry asses.”Adjusting their course south slightly, they kept moving, chuckling more quietly. As much hassle as it had been to haul the three young goats back to camp all those months ago, it had been more than worth the effort they’d expended in chasing down the creatures, roping their legs together (after finding out the hard way how hard those little hooves could kick), and traipsing several miles through the woods carrying them. The looks of shock on Bobby’s and Major Naomi’s faces when they’d reached the gate, the largest of the three goats draped over Sam’s shoulders and the two smaller kids under Dean’s arms, had been priceless.“Hey, Sam, at least Claire hasn’t shit down your back,” Dean teased.Claire narrowed her eyes and smirked at him. “Yet,” she added sarcastically.The speaker crackled in Dean’s ear again, louder than before. He grimaced, jiggling it a little. “Think my headset’s going on the fritz again,” he muttered, hoping it wasn’t damage that he’d done tripping over that old bike hidden in the knee-high grass a couple miles back. The major would have his head if it was, no matter how many bags of supplies he managed to bring in. He really was good at the job, but whenever he and Sam trotted back in after a mission, anyone who saw them had no trouble concluding that, of the two of them, Dean was definitely the one to “find” the hidden bikes, or the leaf-covered tree stumps, or the camouflaged remains of things too long dead to be identifiable. The evidence was there in his torn trousers or the scrapes and bruises on his skin. Or damaged gear. Think they’ll believe me if I say it was already crackling when we left?Sam rarely fell, which was just not fair. Of course, he’d been a runner before he became a capital-R “Runner.” To hear him tell it, lacing up these days and jogging a few hours to investigate a rumor of an untapped cache of pharmaceuticals wasn’t too different from the trail running he’d loved years before. “Just keep your eyes ahead of you on the trail and lift your feet more, Dean,” Sam would say as he helped Dean back to his feet each time. Then he’d be off again, loping along like the freaking overgrown puppy he was, knowing Dean would be right along behind.As though I’d ever be anywhere else. Dean, decidedly not a runner of any kind, would have probably stepped neatly into the role of camp mechanic or maintenance, and it would have suited him perfectly. When Asa, head of the Runners at the time, had lit on Sam’s runner’s form like a bloodhound on a scent trail, though, Dean had balked. There had been absolutely no part of Dean’s brain that was okay with letting Sam be recruited for work that would send him right back out into danger, especially without somebody he could trust to watch his back. Somehow, though, all his arguments had backfired, and instead of convincing Sam to opt for a nice safe job in records or archives, Dean had gotten pulled the other direction. I always said I’d only run if something was chasing me, he mused. Guess that one bit me in the ass.Picking their way across the chilly creek, lifting his knees high and being cautious about where their feet were planting under the water, the intermittent earpiece crackling abruptly resolved into a finger-plucked acoustic guitar arpeggio. As Dean listened, the music slowed into a gentle chorded strumming. A rich, dark voice joined in over the guitar, singing. “Hope there's someone who'll take care of me when I die...will I go?” The plaintive words yanked at Dean’s heart uncomfortably.“Bobby, you watching old soap opera tapes again?” he asked, raising his voice to be heard over the song. The collection of scavenged soaps and reality TV show recordings was a poorly kept secret among those who’d ever dropped in on the man unexpectedly.“Shut up,” Bobby growled. “And no, I am not. Not that it’s any of your business what I choose to do, but don’t you think I know better than to be distracted when I’ve got Runners in the field?”Dean frowned. “‘Kay, fine, whatever, but then turn down the music. It’s loud enough I can hear it on my end, and it’s not much better if the Runners are the ones being distracted.”Sam turned to look at Dean quizzically, while Bobby paused before answering. “Not listening to any music either, Dean. I don’t see anything unusual on the cameras, but you sure what you’re hearing isn’t on your side? A radio or…”“Not a soul for miles, man. Who’d be stupid enough to be playing music loud enough for anyone to hear around here, anyway?” Dean scanned the surroundings all the same, seeing only scraggly trees and brush. The singer continued to croon in his ear as Dean clambered up the creek bank and paused to try tapping the transmitter attached to his belt.“No, I think…” Sam paused, looking at his own transmitter. “I can kind of hear something, too. Dean, you still at 225 megahertz, or did you get knocked off the frequency a little when you fell? Here, let me…” Despite Bobby’s immediate shouting that they were not to touch the channel adjustments on their headsets, Sam leaned over to keep Claire balanced flat on his back and then started to fiddle with the dial. A few seconds later, he glanced up in triumph. “Got it! Yeah, almost right on top of our channel, someone playing music.”“Well, that’s just great,” groused Bobby, and now that Dean stopped to think, the base’s reception was a little different, maybe a touch deeper, from what he usually noted when the handler spoke. “Probably some damn local radio station that put things on autoplay before they all ate each other’s brains. Something else for us to deal with when we gear you all up for missions.”Dean was already shaking his head in disagreement. “Doesn’t sound like a recordi—” Just then the music trailed away and the singer started talking.“Little on the nose, maybe, for this fine, gray day, perhaps,” the voice said, “but I suppose I’ve been a touch morose lately. I haven’t been keeping close track of things like the date lately, because why bother, but I did a little math yesterday and I think I just missed my birthday. So…hurray. Thanks for bringing me into the world all those years ago, Mom. I’m sure your card must have gotten lost in the mail.” Sarcasm tinged his words, and Dean snorted a laugh.“Anyway, even if I’m the only one around to say it...Happy birthday to me,” he sang. The guitar accompanied the voice as he continued the song, and Dean found himself wanting to sing along as well.Sam, smiling a little sadly, nudged Dean’s shoulder to get his attention. “C’mon,” he said, gesturing with a head tilt. “Gotta keep moving.”“Yeah, but…” Dean looked around helplessly. He wasn’t sure what he should, or could, possibly do, but he found himself very reluctant to chalk up the mysterious voice as a pre-Crisis artifact and let it go.The sound of muffled conversation pulled his attention back. “Yeah, they’re right—” Bobby was saying, interrupted by someone in the background who sounded impatient and tense. A moment later, Bobby was saying, “Hang on,” and the comms switched hands.“Misters Winchester, this is Major Novak,” Naomi said, as though there was another person in camp who would ever address them with that tone of authority. “What seems to be the hold-up?”“Apologies, ma’am,” Sam said, all casualness gone. He even picked up his speed a little as he spoke; Dean could practically see him trying to snap to attention, despite Claire’s weight on his shoulders. “We had the opportunity to give aid and rescue to a…a young woman with a leg injury, and we’re keeping as good a pace as we can under the circumstances.”“Hmm,” Naomi said noncommittally. “I trust you’re aware that the sun will be setting soon, and that we have no runners to spare who we could send out to assist you in your return?” Dean rolled his eyes, knowing full well that even if the entire roster of runners was rested and in full health, the major wouldn’t offer their support. She’d consider it too close to coddling, encouraging laziness and lack of discipline. Naomi was undeniably excellent at maintaining order and keeping things together that by all rights should be falling apart, but she didn’t know the meaning of “relaxed.”“We know,” Sam replied, turning his head to frown slightly at Claire when she started to make questioning noises. “But now that we’re this side of Limestone, it’s pretty cleared, so we can make better time, I think.” Dean choked on an incredulous reaction. Maybe the path was more clear of obstructions, but it was also steadily uphill. Then again, Sam had legs up to his freaking chin, so “hills” were a relative measure.As they’d moved, the sound of improvised guitar strumming in the background had become harder to hear, fading in and out behind crackles and small bursts of static. With a stab of regret, Dean thumbed the dial on his transmitter, adjusting it minutely so that Naomi’s lecture became a touch more distinct. “—keeping in mind that precision in our time tables is crucial, so that we can ensure the safety of all residents of New Lebanon.”Sam was making placating comments, moving up the rising slope at a rate that had Dean beginning to pant to keep up. The hatchets in his bag clacked against each other as he trotted, and he winced a little, imagining dings in the blades. Not that he’d suggest slowing down or stopping to repack things more carefully. The major was right about one thing: the sun was definitely closer to the tops of the trees ahead than Dean felt good about seeing. His legs strained with effort and sweat beaded along his hairline, but he didn’t complain at all, even as Sam began nearly jogging.The memory of a rough baritone singing voice lingered in Dean’s ears. “I don’t want to be the one left in there, left in there…” He shivered, sure that those echoes would be there with him long after the other details of this run had faded from recollection.
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
In a brick-walled room, completely silent except for the creak of the chair springs and the sound of his pencil tapping on his thigh, a young man leaned back in his seat and sighed heavily. The little red light on his ham radio was dimmed now, his transmission ended for the evening. “Good night, and good luck,” he said mockingly, the silenced microphone in front of him on the desk glinting in the glow of the solar-powered desk lamp. Smirking at his own humor, he pushed back from the desk and stood, carefully lifting the precious guitar in his arms to replace it in its lined case.
Finding the guitar had excited him almost more than finding the underground…dugout? Bunker? He hadn’t quite figured out what this space had been before it had become his home, at least temporarily. Of course, that, too, was a definition in flux; he’d been here for almost two months and had the distinct and unsettling feeling that roots were beginning to form beneath him. He couldn’t deny that, of all the places in which he’d found shelter since his terrifying flight from the scene of madness and blood that still haunted his nightmares, this was certainly the closest he’d come to feeling safe. The only entrance he’d found was almost completely hidden, nestled in the side of a hill that was only approachable from a narrow path along a glorified cliff’s edge, and it had been pure unbelievable luck that his fourth attempt at guessing the combination on the padlock—10-15-68, the date for Led Zeppelin’s first show—had actually worked. And when he’d taken a look inside…
Well. Suffice it to say that there was more than enough to occupy him. He could probably spend a year exploring and still have questions he’d never be able to answer.
The latches on the guitar case clicked shut, the sound loud in the otherwise noiseless room. That was the big problem with being perhaps the last human survivor in a wasteland world: the utter lack of noise. Sometimes, when it got too bad, he found himself venturing to the door and opening it a crack, listening as hard as he could, though he never heard much besides animal noises and the occasional distant groaning chorus that didn’t bear examining too closely.
“Who am I trying to kid?” he said to himself, closing his eyes and rubbing them with the heels of his palms. “The only human sounds out there are mine. I should…” But he wouldn’t. Blinking the world back into focus, he turned to the desk, gaze falling on the framed photo beside the radio. The man in the photo was dead, without a doubt, no matter how much life there seemed to be in the image left behind, sparkling at him through green eyes.
“Good night,” the young man said anyway, as he did every night. Day and night were also arbitrary in an underground bunker, but, then, it was probably little things like those that prevented him from losing his tenuous grip on sanity for good. He wondered whether he hadn’t done so already.
“…and there the guy is, waving a goddamn halberd around, naked as the day he was born! I swear to God, I almost pissed myself!” The entire group sitting around the lunch table roared with laughter, grabbing each other’s shoulders for support and wiping tears from their eyes. Donna, her blond ponytail whipping from side to side as she embellished her recount with hand gestures and dramatic reenactments, put one hand on her chest and lifted the other in a parody of a solemn vow. “Strike me down for a liar, I thought I was gonna have to joust him or something. Luckily, he was so drunk, he wound up tripping over his own weapon and falling on his face.”“By weapon, you mean the halberd, right?” Meg cut in, eyes glinting with mischief. “Or do I need to take a trip down to the infirmary and see for myself what kind of dude can trip himself on his own—” Hilarity erupted again, drawing curious attention from other groups seated at long tables around the large room.Dean snickered as he spooned up a bite of stew. The food wasn’t bad, particularly since Benny had wandered into camp and brought with him his impressive background as an experienced line cook. The seasoning was that much more improved by the good company, though. The group of Runners in New Lebanon, formerly Camp Last Call, were a raucous and motley bunch, but they were as tight-knit as any family, and certainly closer than most of the actual family Dean had once known. The camaraderie between all of them was one of the few good things to come out of the whole mess, he figured.Donna was blushing, but her grin was as bright as ever. “Doc’s still checking him over, making sure he doesn’t need quarantined, but he seemed healthy enough to me, once he realized I wasn’t gonna bite him and he let me get closer. I figure he’ll be out soon enough, and you can check his weaponry for yourself then, ya perv.” Meg just shrugged in good-natured acceptance, not bothering to deny the friendly accusation, and Donna continued. “Anyway, Jody and I brought back the dude’s pile of weapons, too, and I have no clue what a lot of it is, but it sure seemed deadly enough, I gotta give him that. Lots of things on long poles with big sharp edges.”“You should let Charlie take a look at it,” Dean cut in. “She used to be into the whole medieval role-playing thing—mock battles and stuff. I bet she’d recognize most of it. Probably geek out on it, too.”“Think she might already know,” drawled Krissy from the end of the table. “She was in the comms shack with Kevin this evening, when he was in my ear for my patrol. She was just asking him something about some network stuff, and all of a sudden she squealed so loud it damn near popped my eardrum.” Krissy was among the newest Runners, but she was already fitting right in, despite the fact that, in Dean’s unbiased opinion, she made him feel way too old. She winked at him, knowing what he was thinking, and took an enormous bite of a roll.It had been a good week, all told. Nobody had died or even come close, the builders had managed to finish erecting another dorm building so that people could spread out and breathe a little more, and Donna and Jody had even managed to successfully track down the hidden liquor still that everybody had been gossiping about for weeks. Nobody was sure yet whether the thing was actually going to be any use, but hopes were definitely high, even if the product it made was too dangerous to drink and could only work for medicine.As dinner ended and everybody began wandering off to either train, head back to work, or hit the dorms for shut-eye, Dean decided he’d earned a reward. Sam was off in the camp’s fledgling kennels, cooing over some sheepdog puppies born a couple of weeks ago, so there was no chance he’d be back to the dorm any time soon. They were due a rest day tomorrow, anyway, so there was no need to crash early. The evening free, Dean turned his feet toward the heart of the camp, to the building that had somehow managed to give birth to a town.The sun was below the hills to the west, though it wasn’t quite fully dark, as he walked. Once, maybe, a settlement this size would have been full of noise: the sound of car engines, the hum of air conditioners and other small machinery, dozens of conversations forming a patchwork buzz of living. There was sound around Dean now, but it was different. The low hum of the wind turbines was hardly noticeable anymore, part of the regular soundtrack of camp. There were soft clucks and bleating coming from the makeshift barnyard on the north side—far enough from the perimeter to deter predators, but distant enough from the main living areas to avoid complaints about the smell. A group of young people sat in the middle of the quad, several of them tapping rhythmic patterns on the benches with sticks as the rest bobbed their heads and danced. Dean nodded and waved when a few called out a greeting as he passed.Light was flickering in the windows as Dean mounted the steps to Last Call, the run-down bar and grill Bobby Singer had owned and operated when there was not much else around but pastures and cornfields. Oil for lanterns might be rationed, but since Bobby actually owned the land on which the camp had been established, he often managed to get his way with the major when anyone else would be out of luck. Dean pushed open the doors, grinning as he glanced around and saw the usual crowd occupying the stools by the bar.“No, no. None of your type in here,” called Bobby from his perch on the far side of the bar. It had been years since he’d actually earned his living as a real bartender, and almost as long since Last Call had been a money-making bar, but old habits died hard. These days, the bar served more as a social club and informal community center, but it remained Bobby’s unquestioned realm, no matter what else went on in the rest of camp.“I dunno. Think I see plenty of my type here,” Dean replied, throwing a wink at a brunette woman who was leaning back on her elbows against the bar. She rolled her eyes at him as she smiled sardonically. Dean couldn’t quite remember her name, but he could recall well the evening they’d enjoyed together not long after she’d arrived at camp. Neither of them had wanted any more than that, but it was definitely a good memory.Bobby held out a hand, palm up, and Dean slapped a paper ration slip into it. Grunting as he dropped it into the jar behind the counter, Bobby pushed a glass toward Dean and waved at the bottles behind him. “Whiskey or whiskey? We’re spoiled for choice tonight.”Dean made a face when he tasted the brown liquid poured from the unlabeled bottle. “God, this shit could strip paint,” he coughed. “Remind me to see if there’s a Moose Lodge or a VFW anywhere around that we haven’t searched yet. Bet those guys had some liquor stashed around.”Conversation drifted idly, covering rumors and stories anybody had heard about happenings in the world outside. New Lebanon wasn’t the only little island of civilization struggling to survive in a world overrun by the undead, though contact between them ranged from strained but courteous to openly hostile. Mostly what there was was speculation. Someone had heard from someone else who had a cousin up in Hastings Settlement, who was sure the Canadians had managed to build up a force of Mounties again, bringing down hordes on horseback. Another woman had seen a helicopter flying overhead from the south, sporting colors that didn’t look like US military. One guy reported having witnessed Major Novak actually, unbelievably, wearing something close to a smile when she’d arrived back at camp the night before, just choppered in from her most recent briefing at Offutt, which had to mean that the Powers That Be had found a way to put the country back together again.That one, of course, got jeered down by nearly everyone in the room.“Cut him off,” somebody shouted. “Or else gimme some of whatever he has.” Hoots and cackling followed the joke, and Dean whistled his agreement, feeling the whiskey warming his veins pleasantly. The man who’d shared the rumor scowled, face dark red. He glanced around at his hecklers, eyes landing on Dean.“No dumber than a ghost DJ,” he argued with a sneer. “At least I actually saw what I said I saw. Winchester hears little birdies in the trees and thinks it’s the damn Beatles.” The crowd laughed again, someone on the other side of Dean leaning over to slap him on the shoulder. Dean flushed in embarrassment, but rather than retaliate, he opted instead to shrug and smile ruefully.“I believe you, Dean,” yawned a scrawny guy who sported an impressive mullet, especially considering the camp’s lack of buzz clippers for barbering.“Thanks, Ash,” Dean nodded gratefully.“Yeah, man, everybody knows there were ghost stations broadcasting even before the mainstream comms went down,” Ash went on, swirling the drink in his glass. “Ever hear of UVB-76? The Russian station that just buzzed all the time, except for when it paused to read out strings of numbers and people’s names? They found the bunker where it was transmitting from, but there was nothing there except the equipment and a notebook with military codes.”Bobby snorted. “You think the KGB is alive and kicking, spinning the hits of yesterday to the former citizens of East Bumblefuck, USA?” Ash just grinned lazily, which could have meant anything, and the conversation drifted once more, to Dean’s relief.It had been several weeks since he’d heard the mysterious voice over the radio that first time, and even Sam had decided that it had probably been a fluke, a bizarre echo from the past, courtesy of equipment that had outlived its human operators. Maybe Dean would have gone along with that theory, except that something about the voice had just resonated so strongly inside him that he didn’t want to let it go so easily. Under the excuse that “good music is hard to come by anymore,” he’d surreptitiously adjusted his frequency dial the next time he’d gone out in the general direction of where he’d heard the music begin, searching for that tell-tale crackle that might herald something besides the signal from his handler.It took a couple of tries, but finally, while he was standing in the middle of a clearing and waving like an idiot so that Frank, the Head of Security, could check the camera angles, he’d heard it again.“—no, I know, I do. I mean, it’s not like it’s a great interpretive leap, ‘Kerouac is damn depressing, news at eleven.’ I just mean, like, all the teachers and professors were always pointing out how it was about the search, about looking for meaning, about the importance of the next breath or whatever metaphorical crap they were trying to use to justify a few weeks of lesson planning. But you just read—here, right here. ‘My whole wretched life swam before my weary eyes, and I realized no matter what you do it's bound to be a waste of time in the end so you might as well go mad.’ And if that doesn’t just say it, you know? Screw the next breath, we should all just…yeah, whatever.” The voice laughed humorously, a dry chuckle. “Sure does make all those engineering classes I took feel like an even bigger joke. Thanks again, Dad.”“Frank,” Dean had hissed, flapping a hand over his head. “You hear that?” Desperately, he’d tried to explain again, tried to get Frank to help zero in on the foreign signal, but apparently it was just strong enough to reach Dean’s location and not much further. Frank had been as unimpressed as Bobby had been, and the scolding he’d received over messing with his transmitter had been enough to keep him from pushing the matter publicly any more.But that didn’t mean he didn’t find himself doing the same damn thing the very next time he went out. The siren’s call of the whole puzzle was just too strong to resist. Little bits and pieces, tiny remarks and throwaway wisecracks, started to accumulate and create a picture in Dean’s head. The guy had at least a couple siblings, but he was the baby. He’d hinted that his dad was military and probably a controlling asshole (well, Dean knew all about that). The guy apparently liked a lot of the same books and music Dean did, and he either had a hell of a memory or he toted them around with him so he could rip out quotes at the drop of a hat. He was damn smart, and his cynical and often dark sense of humor was razor sharp.The image that grew from Dean’s guesswork was likely a wildly inaccurate one, but it only served to stoke his curiosity more. He was fascinated.“Quit humming, Dean,” Sam complained as they forded the chilly stream, searching for the red scarf tied to a branch that would signal the cache of fuel they were trying to retrieve, secured and marked by another Runner on a previous assignment. “You’re distracting me.”“Sorry,” Dean said; he hadn’t even realized he’d been humming along with the song, caught up in the familiar melody. Mystery Guy was doing a rather amazing cover of “Comfortably Numb,” darker and edgier and nearly brooding, and Dean almost wished he was hearing a recording, so that there would be a possibility that he could hear it again sometime.He was growing more and more certain, though, that that wasn’t the case. “Mmm, first time I ever heard that song, I think I was probably more stoned that I’d ever been before in my life,” the guy murmured, still strumming. “Probably more than I ever have been again, really. It was an interesting night. An interesting time as a whole.” Strum, strum. “Of course, there are no drugs around anymore. I suppose those were probably looted quite thoroughly from the beginning, probably even before the batteries and bottled water. Plenty of people likely looked around and said, ‘Fuck it, if I’m going to die, I might as well be blitzed for it.’”There. There it was, yet another sign of proof that, whether recorded or not, what Dean was hearing was not a pre-Crisis artifact. This guy had been alive and apparently doing okay at staying that way at least a few months into the mess. Dean bit his lip, conflicted about whether to say anything to anybody again. If nothing else, any broadcasting equipment that had survived the initial wave of looting and madness was maybe worth searching out, even if it was a ghost station.“David Gilmour was always one of my favorite guitarists,” he was saying now, aimlessly improvising some harmonies. “I was going to meet him someday, I was so sure. I spent so much time practicing, every chance I got, because I was going to meet him and tell him I was a guitarist, too. And he’d ask me to play something, and…I’m not sure what would have happened next, but it would have been good. Wonder if he’s still around out there? Probably not.”“Hey, Sam.” Only a grunt came in reply, as Sam was now half-buried in brush, dismantling a pile of dead branches camouflaging the tanks of gas. “Sam, how bad you think it is in the UK? About like it is here?”“Probably. I remember Bobby saying how he tried calling around to distant friends and contacts before anybody knew what was really going on, when they thought it was just a weird flu. I know he said there was somebody in London…Belle? Bella? Isabelle? Anyway, she warned him it was there, too, even though they weren’t making it public, so he should stay put here. If they got hit about the same time we did, I can’t see how they would have done better.”Huh. Goodbye, Jimmy Page. Dean tipped his hat mentally.“Here, take these,” Sam said, thrusting a couple of tanks into Dean’s arms. The liquid inside sloshed, and Dean hummed appreciatively at the weight of them. His arms would be screaming by the time they got back, but fuel was worth its weight in gold. More than that, truthfully.“Hey, you know what? We should officially change the idea of ‘gold standard’ to ‘gas standard.’ Measure things against how much gas they’re worth. Nobody cares about gold anymore, right?”Sam rolled his eyes in amusement. “Sure, Dean. Why not?”“Anyway, guess I’ll never get the chance to find out if I would have been good enough to make it as a musician. No more bands, no more concerts. No more audiences. Hah, I wonder if any zombie corpses are stumbling around with headphones still lodged in their ears? Grr, argh, guys!” Dean hastily turned a laugh into a cough, getting a weird look from Sam. “You mindless undead are…are the best crowd I could ask for. If I have to die alone here, waiting for the food to run out and force me to choose between starving or being eaten…well, at least I have you.”Dean’s heart lurched. God, this was hard. If Sam and the rest were right, if this was all just a recording, then he was almost certainly listening to a guy telling his own future—not a huge prophetic leap to make, under the circumstances, but disturbing nonetheless. He wondered if the recordings would just stop, as the man got weaker and weaker until he starved, or if there would be a final recording that captured his grisly death, preserving his last cries and screams. Dean didn’t know which would be worse.He should quit listening. As it was, he couldn’t even vent about his fears to Sam without admitting he’d never stopped.The fuel slowed them down on their way back, so despite his misgivings about keeping his headset tuned into the broadcast, Dean got to listen to the man soulfully working his way through the Beatles’ “Good Night.”“Now the sun turns out his light, good night, sleep tight,” he sang roughly, voice full of emotion. He cleared his throat when the song ended, silent for a few moments. “I used to sing that song to my little brother Alfie. Well, not my real brother. Alfie and I actually got along with each other, unlike my real brother and I. Alfie was a missionary kid, living in Zambia, and he stayed with us when his family came back to the states to visit. He was—” Voice breaking, then guy cut himself off, pausing again until he could speak. “You know, maybe Alfie got lucky in the end. Zambia’s pretty remote, and it’s not like people would have been fighting to escape to there, so maybe it stayed safe from zombies. I want to think that. I want to think about Alfie still being out there, as happy as it might be possible to be anymore. He deserved—deserves that.”Another long moment of silence passed, with only faint rustling in the background to indicate that Dean hadn’t lost the stray signal entirely. Then, abruptly, the guitar strumming resumed, playing a lighter, rhythmically swaying pattern. “I used to play this for him, a long time ago, to make him laugh. Maybe someday I’ll get to do that again. And, hey, I have no real way of knowing, since I haven’t looked at a calendar in…well. Who knows how long? But it sort of feels like September, with the humidity starting to fade and the first leaves just beginning to turn. So it’d be the second September since calendars became irrelevant, and that means Alfie is twenty-one now. When I see you again, kid, I’ll buy you a drink and we can celebrate.”“Dean, what’s wrong?” Sam’s voice barely registered in Dean’s ears; he didn’t even realize he’d stopped moving entirely until he felt Sam’s hand on his shoulder, shaking. “Did you see something? What’s going on? You look like you saw a whole swarm of zoms.”Air refused to leave Dean’s lungs; he couldn’t make a sound. The second September. It had been almost eighteen months since the first wave of infection had swept the country in early spring. The leaves were still thick in the branches over their heads, but there had been a hint of crispness in the early morning air lately. It sort of feels like September. Dean stared at his brother’s face, helpless to form any words that could stop the alarm he was starting to see there.“Talk to me, Sam!” hissed Kevin in a panic. It was only Kevin’s second month as a radio handler, and he lacked the calm composure that the other handlers had at least learned how to feign. “I can’t see what you’re seeing! There’s nothing on my cameras! Why are you guys just standing there frozen?”Finally, Dean managed to push through the shock. “He’s alive, Sam,” he croaked. “He’s still out there.”“Who?” Sam looked even more shaken and confused.“The…the guy!” Dean pointed wildly in the direction of the transmitter on his belt. “The one with the guitar! He’s not a recording, Sam—he’s actually out there, talking and…and hiding someplace, right now!”“Dean, I don’t understand,” Sam said firmly, stepping back and holding out his hands, palms out in an attempt to calm him. “Are you talking about what we heard all those weeks ago? You can’t know he’s okay. He didn’t say anything that would have—”“Not then, right now!” Dean interrupted. “Just—” There was no time for Sam to try to find the signal on his own; Dean had no patience for that. He ripped the headset from his head, then reached for Sam’s. Naturally, Sam protested, but Dean just knocked his hands away and jerked the headphones off, then pushed his toward Sam. “Listen!” Sam’s bitchface spoke volumes, but he reluctantly put Dean’s headphone over his head, settling them in his ears with his mouth already open to argue. Then he paused, frown shifting.“It’s just a song, Dean,” he said. “Not one I know. What’s this about?”Dean was hurriedly putting on Sam’s headset, quickly thumbing at Sam’s transmitter dial to find the frequency over Kevin’s increasingly hysterical demands to be filled in on the situation. A loud burst of static, a crackling, and then he found it. “—no caramel corn in the Congo, and you won’t find gummy bears in the Sudan, but when I’m eating Tootsie Rolls here in Kansas, Alfie, I’ll pray for you whenever I can…”Sam was rolling his eyes. “Funny,” he said. “But how—”“A minute ago, when he was talking…” Dean cut himself off, nearly growling in frustration. “Look, I’ll explain later. But I know now. It’s not a recording. We gotta get back to camp right now.” With that, he hefted the fuel cans and took off, barely glancing back to make sure Sam was with him.There were raised voices coming from behind the door of the small brick building that served as headquarters. Major Novak didn’t often resort to shouting to get what she wanted—she didn’t need to—but there was definitely some heated disagreement surrounding whatever was being discussed in there. The other party seemed to be giving as good as he got, though the volume was slightly more muffled, leading Dean to the easy conclusion that the battle was happening over shortwave, not in person, and probably with one of the brass at Offutt.Most days, that would have been a pretty good indication that he should turn right back around and go, wait for somebody else to be the unfortunate sonofabitch to be the next guy in the major’s sights. Truthfully, Dean knew that was still the logical choice; even knowing he’d been hearing a live broadcast from a guy trapped all alone and waiting to die, the fact was that the guy wasn’t on the brink of death at the moment. He could probably hold off his own demise for at least a couple more hours.Dean leaned against the wall and waited.The altercation cut off abruptly, and the ensuing silence felt thick with tension. The seconds ticked by, marked by the cheap but reliable watch on Dean’s wrist that was part of every Runner’s mandatory equipment. He drummed his fingers against his bicep restlessly, his arms tightly folded across his chest. There was still sweat and dirt on his clothes, since he’d come straight from the maintenance shop after dropping off the fuel cans, skipping the shower and required post-run recovery stretches and physical checks. He could already hear the lecture he’d get about proper decorum and its effect on morale, but it didn’t matter.The door creaked open. Dean sprang away from the bricks, spinning to face the door. “Major, I need to talk to you,” he said before she could speak.She sighed, looking exhausted. “Mister Winchester, I have a dozen problems on my hands as it is. Besides our usual issues of more mouths than meals, more enemies than bullets, and more work to do than hours in the day to do it, I now have to deal with finding resources to handle a the dozens of survivalists we now know, thanks to our new resident moonshiner, have been hiding around the area and starting pointless, imbecilic turf wars over their asinine bootlegging start-ups. Not only are we fortunate not to have accidentally had a Runner stumble across one of the ones who have apparently set deadly traps around the area they’ve decided to claim, but apparently more than a few of them have families. With children. Hiding in little shacks all over the uncleared countryside, just waiting to be set upon by the undead.”Dean grimaced. “Yeah, that’s pretty bad.”“Yes. Pretty bad indeed.” Naomi gave him an unimpressed look. “Not to mention the ledger we found among Mister Gallagher’s supplies indicates an even greater number of customers tucked away in various unsafe locations, choosing to prioritize numbing their senses over actual self-preservation. Also with families and children. God preserve us.” She pinched the bridge of her nose and exhaled hard through her nostrils. “Or at least the ones who actually want to be preserved.”“Well, speaking of that,” Dean started, trying his best to sound less demanding, “I wanted to request permission and support in finding someone. Not someone missing from before,” he quickly added, seeing her immediate negative reaction. “This is somebody I know is out there, in the vicinity, alive and unbitten. I have proof. Or, well, I heard proof.”“Mister Singer informed me of the incident in the field already.” Naomi turned aside, heading back into her office and seating herself behind a desk towering with papers. Dean followed her in, pushing his luck and hoping it wouldn’t backfire. The major’s expression could have been carved of marble for all he could read into it. “An odd encounter, but we deal with oddness every day. From what I heard, your experience hardly could be considered proof of anything, much less of a circumstance that would justify risking lives to explore.”Time to pay the piper. “I might have been exploring already,” Dean slowly confessed. “Not, like, search and rescue, but…tuning in, listening.”“Are you actively disclosing that you’ve been breaking protocol, misusing issued equipment in a way explicitly prohibited in the regulations, and putting yourself and your fellow Runners’ safety in jeopardy?” Naomi’s eyes glinted dangerously as she leaned forward, bracing her forearms on the desk.“Hey, I never endangered anyone. I could always hear the handler, no matter what,” Dean protested.Naomi’s frown deepened. “Except that you wouldn’t actually know if you weren’t hearing the handler. What you might have construed as silence between instructions could have been an important warning that you wouldn’t have known you hadn’t heard.”Realizing he was backed into a corner, Dean swallowed his protests. “Understood, Major. I see what you mean, and I’ll definitely remember that in the future. Right now, though, I need to tell you that this guy is somewhere in the area, alone and apparently unaware that there are any living souls besides him anywhere around. And, uh, if it helps your decision, he’s also apparently sitting on some pretty sweet tech, so we should…go after him?”“Electronics are certainly of value, but I question the logic by which you’ve reached the conclusion that either man or equipment is ‘in the area.’ Mister Singer’s assumption that the transmission was a commercial radio station was ludicrous, of course, as we transmit on a band nowhere near the ones used by AM or FM stations. On the other hand, the number of amateur radio operators who broadcast on the neighboring band was not insignificant pre-Crisis. Any of them could have been transmitting pre-recorded messages. And the fact that the signal overlap reached your headset but not our base station could indicate either a very weak signal, coming from a great distance, or that it was being relayed from a signal repeater outside of our range, in which case the transmission could have originated literally anywhere in the world. Now, as for whether it was a live broadcast or pre-recorded—”“It’s live,” interrupted Dean. The technical explanation was going over his head, but this much, at least, he knew for certain. “He mentioned today that he thought it was September, and that it was the second fall since everything went to hell. Oh, and, also, that probably means he’s at least in an area kind of near us, or at least with the same climate. If he was in, say, Australia, it’d be starting spring, not fall.”“All right, the transmission is coming from somewhere in the northern hemisphere,” Naomi said, eyebrow lited. “And I’ll even grant you that, as the voice was in English, we could easily assume it to be an American broadcast. That still leaves millions of square miles to search.”Dean bit back a retort that the guy’s accent sounded just as flat as hers, since he knew it wouldn't help. Neither would the fact that the guy had once idly remarked, after playing “Dust in the Wind,” that he’d actually seen Kansas play a show in Kansas. For that matter, so had Dean, and he wondered if they’d literally crossed paths. They could have been standing right next to each other, and…it wouldn’t have mattered. How many people had be bumped into that night? Something in him balked hard at the thought that he could have missed his only chance to…to…what?Nothing about this made any logical sense. But, then, Dean was getting pretty used to a world that made no sense, he supposed. “So you’re saying that there’s nothing we can do,” he said, jaw tight. “We couldn’t even try to extend our broadcast signal or something to at least let the dude know that he’s not the last man on earth? I tried, just with my headset, but maybe if we had Charlie give me something a little more juiced up, a few more watts or whatever, I might be able to get through.”Naomi was already turning away again. “Absolutely not. It would be utterly pointless, without a way to send actual, useful aid. Even if I were convinced that we could successfully make contact, simply informing this man that there are other survivors would do no more than futilely raise hopes, possibly even convincing him to risk losing the safe haven he’s found in an attempt to locate others. Frankly, Mister Winchester, he would be better off in ignorance.”“You can’t say that!” This time both of the major’s eyebrows shot upward as Dean came close to shouting. “All due respect, Major, I just listened to the guy almost break down just wondering if his best friend Alfie might have somehow survived, over in Africa. He has no idea about anything, and it’s torture! Just listening to him sing this song, about no caramel corn in the Congo but how he’s eating candy in Alfie’s honor…he might be safe, Major, but he’s going to give up. And he’ll die one way or another after that. We—I can’t just do nothing.”Catching his breath, feeling his heart race with the sudden surge of unexpected emotions that had swept through him, Dean suddenly noticed that Naomi’s face had paled. Her eyes were wide, and her mouth had dropped open slightly. He wondered if he’d really gone and crossed the line; maybe shouting at an officer was the sort of thing that got you thrown into whatever makeshift jail they might now need to construct.“Ma’am?” he asked hesitantly, after the silence stretched uncomfortably. His prompting snapped the spell, and suddenly the major was blinking rapidly, then clearing her throat.“It’s a pre-recorded message,” Naomi said, much more quietly than she had been speaking up until that moment. “I can tell you that now for an absolute fact. You are to let the matter drop.”Dean’s stomach dropped to his toes. “I don’t understand,” he said. “How did what I said tell you—”“Because it’s—” Naomi snapped, cutting him short, then clamped her lips together tightly. She breathed slowly for a minute, pressing a hand over her eyes. “Because the man in the recording…I knew him. I know the song, rather, and I knew Alfie, and the odds of this happening are so unbelievably unlikely as to resurrect my dead and rotting belief in a higher power, a malicious one with a vendetta against me personally.” Her hand trembled and her voice shook. Dean waited, not having the first clue what to say. Finally, Naomi removed her hand, revealing reddened eyes that looked much older than they had when Dean had walked into the room.“The man in the recording was my brother, Castiel,” she stated. “And he died on the night that the Crisis began.”
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
Whoever lived in this place before he’d found it, they’d truly thought of everything. Turning the hand crank on the side of the manual clothes washer, the young man listened to the swish of the warm water in the rotating drum. It only took a few minutes to get the clothes inside cleaned and rinsed before he was able to insert the tube to drain the water into a basin. Near the washer, there had been an honest-to-God wringer, meant to push excess water out of the fabric for quicker line drying. He didn’t think he’d ever seen one of those outside of children’s picture books about colonial life.
His shirts had probably never felt so clean, really. There was definitely something to be said for the old methods. Of course, there was nobody around for whom he really needed to be clean, so there wasn’t much of a point to it, but still. The principle of the thing remained.
One of the closets he’d found had still held a few articles of clothing, wrapped in plastic and presumably left there in case they were needed in an emergency. Well, this was an emergency, but a few flannel shirts, some jeans, and an old canvas jacket weren’t really the solution he needed. The sturdy boots, on the other hand, were not to be dismissed.
He’d taken to wearing the red flannel over his t-shirt, not because it was growing chilly (the bunker managed to hold warmth quite well), but because it wasn’t his own. Borrowing clothing, even from the dead, felt at least a little like human contact.
“Was this yours?” he asked the man in the photo. He looked about the same size as himself, and, at least at the point when the photo had been taken, maybe only a couple years younger. A few days ago, he’d stumbled across another photo of the other man; he was grinning at a younger guy, who stood almost a half-foot taller even as he ducked his head so that the tassel on his graduation cap swung into his face. A blonde woman had her arms around them both, probably their mother. “I think it must have been. Thank you for lending it to me. I promise to wash it before I return it.”
One of his fingertips gently touched the glass in the frame, running over man’s cheekbone. The thought that he’d never have the opportunity to really touch another human again was shoved down as quickly as it arose. He closed his eyes and let himself imagine what the man in the picture had sounded like when he laughed.
“Are you kidding me?” Charlie Bradbury, self-proclaimed Queen of Wires, almost dropped the multitool she was holding; her head had turned toward him so quickly so quickly at the news that her bright red ponytail whipped across her face. “Your mystery guy was the major’s brother?”“Yep,” Dean grunted, straining to to keep his grip on the heavy pipes Charlie was working to join together. His palms slipped and he hissed.“Sorry, sorry,” she muttered, quickly returning to the task at hand. As she worked to secure the coupling, she kept up a steady stream of chatter. “How amazingly awful a coincidence is that? Of all the people in the world who could have shown up on the radio, you get the major’s dead baby brother. And you didn’t know! Was it horrible?”Dean just narrowed his eyes, refraining from commenting on the obvious. “Horrible” didn’t really describe the moments following that bombshell of a revelation. He couldn’t recall exactly what he’d manage to stammer out, but he’d never forget the look of utter devastation on Naomi’s face as he’d fled.“I mean, I knew she’d lost everybody,” Charlie continued. “I looked into her whole backstory when I got here—yeah, I know, but it’s a compulsion. Of course, you can’t really vet a person these days like you could when the Internet was still a thing. Did you know the Darknet actually survived in places, though? Sort of scary. The one time I ventured into a Darknet market to see if anybody around could get me a battery-powered soldering iron, it was enough to make me swear I’d use hamster wheels for power before I went back. But you can also still send and receive data packets via radio, if you’re determined enough. Y’know?”“Uh-huh.” The pipes hadn’t felt so heavy when Charlie had pushed him into the middle of the room and thrust them into his hands. She seemed oblivious to the strain in his face, caught up in her own little world where the only thing better than a little information was a little more information than anyone else had. It wasn't that Dean really believed that Charlie had been some sort of CIA operative back when there had been a CIA, but then again, he was pretty sure that if she hadn't been on their payroll, it was because she was on another of their lists.“Anyway, the military files were all pretty well backed-up, of course, and they made all their databases a priority for if the shit ever hit the fan, which it did, and God only knows how much cultural history is gone forever, but we’ll always have the knowledge that Private So-and-so got dishonorably discharged for going AWOL when their back-home girlfriend broke up with them. But the major’s files were actually really heartbreaking. Her whole family, pretty much, got killed right in front of her—dad, mom, brother. Her other brother was stationed down in Texas—they’re all army—and he got killed, too, a day or so later.” Tossing the multitool onto the tarp beside her, Charlie wiped her hands on her pants and pursed her lips to blow her bangs off of her forehead.“You done with this? I can put it down?” Dean groaned, then almost dropped the pipes when she nodded. “Thank God,” he sighed.“I know, but it’s worth it,” Charlie said with a shrug and an apologetic smile. “Sturdier construction means the signal repeaters don’t need to be replaced or repaired as often, which means that you get to be safer when you’re running away from the undead.” She punched him lightly on the shoulder, and his wince was only half pretense.“Yeah, yeah,” he said, leaning against Charlie’s workbench and watching her continue to work on the wiring that would be threaded through the pipes. “I knew his—Castiel’s family was military, from what he’d said. Freaking small world, though. Sounded like they might have wanted him to head that way, too, but I’m pretty sure he’d never have gone for it.”“Well, can you imagine? I mean, think about the major, and…and, like, older versions of her for your dad and mom. I know I’d rebel.”“I just can’t believe he’s actually dead,” Dean said thoughtfully. “Still doesn’t make sense. He was talking about zombies! He talked about the Crisis happening a year and a half ago! If he got bit that first night, then how’d he make a recording with all that information on it? Longest I’ve ever seen a person last between being bit and going gray was, what, five days?”Charlie nodded. “Madison. Tiny little bite on her finger, from a kid zom she didn’t know had turned. I guess it just took longer to go through her system, but it did. And Major Novak’s sure her brother got bitten?”“Absolutely,” Dean confirmed, recalling the haunted expression she’d worn as she’d spoken.
“They were in our house. They must have come through the back door, or the windows, because they were behind us as we tried to escape out the front, to the Jeep. I was already on the porch when I heard Mom scream.” Naomi didn’t blink; her gaze was turned inward, reliving the horror as it had happened. “There were two of them, pulling her back, and one already had its teeth in her neck. There was so much blood. Dad shouted, shoved Castiel at me and told us to run, but Castiel was frozen. I was pulling at his arm, trying to keep him moving, and Dad just kept shouting for us to go, to get to Leavenworth, and then they had him, too. They jerked so hard, and Castiel still had a grip on him, but they were too strong. His head…it was nearly torn completely off, just like that. And Castiel was screaming, and I was pulling so hard, telling him not to look, but it was too late. One grabbed him, bit into his shoulder. His cries…and I ran. The keys were in Castiel’s bag, and I just ran. And I don’t remember much of anything else until I was picked up by the National Guard in Kansas City.”
“Well, then I don’t know what to say. If he’s still alive, then he can’t be her brother. And if he’s her brother, then he must have had one hell of an imagination, along with a scary streak of prophetic ability, to have recorded something like that ahead of time. And he did have the creativity, I know, but the other part…” Charlie shrugged.“And how do you know about her brother’s creativity?” Dean asked suspiciously. “Don’t tell me that was in her military files.”“Nope, his.” Charlie winked, waving her screwdriver. “Cross-referenced for easy reading. His college transcripts, included in his Officer Candidate School records and evaluations. Master’s Degree in engineering, which he got through an accelerated program in five years. Decent grades, but mostly because he had a bunch of arts classes to help with his overall GPA. And his volunteer work was almost all music—playing songs and singing to sick kids in the hospital, that kind of thing.”“Poor guy. Probably got railroaded into studying something ‘practical,’ even if he hated it.” Biting his lip, Dean tried to push away the ache in his chest. Ridiculous to mourn a guy he’d never met. And anyway, it was impossible that Castiel was his mystery guy. The mystery guy. Not his. This was all getting so messed up.“You’re probably right. Accelerated or not, the guy’s transcript definitely read ‘procrastinating,’ not ‘enthusiastic.’” Charlie bent over her work, and the two of them were quiet for a few moments. Dean wondered if she was dropping the subject, like he should. Then she broke the silence with a satisfied huff, switching tools. “But you want to find out for sure whether there’s somebody out there who really needs help, right?” she said over her shoulder, not looking at his face and therefore missing anything incriminating that might have been showing. “Obviously, or else you wouldn’t have come to my Fortress of Solitude. You’d have waited to spill it all over dinner or something, so I wouldn’t enlist you as my handmaiden. I know the way you work, Winchester.”He couldn’t help chuckling a little. “You got me. Don’t think I can just let this die, not until I have some sort of answers. Shit’s too weird.”“Story of our world,” Charlie returned. “And can I assume that this is all super top secret, totally unauthorized by any kind of brass? Not that that’s a deal-breaker,” she hastily added. “Just want to know where we stand.”“You assume correctly. And, I should tell you, I have no idea how this is going to play out. Simplest result is that we prove for certain it’s a recording somehow, but I have no idea how that would happen. Find the radio? I dunno. Most complicated, we find out there’s a guy out there somewhere in the area, surrounded by zoms, and then I have to convince the major not to haul me in front of a firing squad for disobeying her orders, and also to send somebody to save his ass.” Dean ticked off the possibilities on his fingers as he listed them.“Don’t discount the case where it is a living guy, but he’s in Guam or something,” Charlie said, tilting her head thoughtfully. “But I think I can at least help with ruling that out. Now, you said you tried to communicate back on his frequency?”“Yep. No dice.”“His receiver circuit is probably dead, if I had to guess. He’s probably not looking at it too closely, especially if he thinks there’s nobody living to talk back to him. So asking him directly whether he’s anywhere near New Lebanon is out of the question.” Dropping to the floor to sit cross-legged, Charlie propped her chin in her hands, elbows resting on her knees, and studied Dean’s face. “The signal is either coming straight from a radio or from a signal repeater we don’t know about. If it’s a repeater, of course, then you’d have to track down whether the signal is getting there only secondhand, or third, or fourth…”“…and then it doesn’t really matter, because no way am I getting authorization to take a vehicle more than a day’s trip out for this,” Dean muttered.“Right. But first things first, we need to track down the initial signal. Now, I know I don’t actually have a directional antenna, let alone a portable one. Hmmm.” She pushed onto her knees and crawled to a large trunk in the corner. When she lifted the lid, Dean was surprised the thing didn’t erupt in a shower of bolts and random pieces of metal, as packed as it was. “I might be able to knock together something that will do the trick, but I’ll need some more coax cable, around fifty ohm?”Wincing, Dean replied, “We took all the cable and wire that was left in the last store with any hardware supplies. Any more, and we’ll need that vehicle to get to Phillipsburg or Stockton.”Charlie just smiled, a glint in her eye. “I’m a green kind of girl,” she said. “Reduce, reuse, recycle, isn’t that right? That apartment complex over along Route 36, where you guys scored all those pallets of Ramen noodles and the complete Star Wars collection of DVDs…I’m thinking the former residents probably enjoyed their televisions. Grab your sledgehammer and go play demolition man!”She was already urging him out the door, even as he protested. “How am I supposed to get anyone to sign off on this? Sam and I are supposed to be playing courier to the outpost at Burnt Oak this week.” It was a stretch to call the tiny building an “outpost,” with its crew of four men maintaining it, but those dudes were hardcore, determined to hold onto their land until the world burnt down entirely, and their signal network was more than impressive.“Just tell Bobby you saw a ‘Real Housewives’ box set,” Charlie said, grinning. “He’ll agree to the switch.”There was plenty of coaxial cable in the walls of the once luxury apartment building that was now unsuitable even for rats, thanks to having been thoroughly looted of everything remotely edible. Dean felt guilty that he wasn’t able to make good on his “Real Housewives” promise, but he was able to retrieve a dog-eared copy of Bethenny Frankel’s book, I Suck At Relationships So You Don’t Have To, and even though the old man had scowled, he’d yanked it from Dean’s hand before stalking off.Unfortunately, the homemade antenna wasn’t remotely subtle; it was three feet long, about as wide, and wouldn’t come close to fitting in Dean’s pack. He probably could have gotten away with making up something that would have satisfied Sam’s questions (bringing Charlie into that web of lies was out of the question; her “poker face” had bought many a round of bad whiskey for the other card players at Last Call before she’d moved on to darts), but the radio handlers would definitely have demanded better explanations if he’d suddenly stopped running and started waving a contraption of wires and pipes around over his head.“You’ve got Kevin guiding you when you do the routine perimeter range sweep next week,” Charlie proposed. “I’ve seen him mooning over Channing, one of the group that stumbled in from their college up north a while back. If I bring her with me to the comms shack while you’re out there, maybe to carry some things for me, he’d probably be plenty distracted.”“And then I swing it around until the signal gets stronger,” Dean finished. “You know this is all hocus-pocus to me, right?”“Just be as fast as you can,” Charlie said. “And hope it’s obvious. I mean, it’s so flat around here, signals don’t have much trouble going long distance. That’s good for survival, but not so great for pinpointing things that are far away. Like, ‘west’ can be a little vague, you know?”Dean knew. And, spinning in a circle with the homemade antenna raised over his head and trying to tell whether any difference in strength was real or wishful thinking, he hated that he did.“You played violin? I was a cellist!” Kevin was babbling in the background. Sam had kept his mouth shut but given Dean an amused look when they’d heard Kevin greeting Charlie and Channing with far too much enthusiasm, but now he was starting to look impatient. They hadn’t seen the first sign of anything dangerous so far, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t anything out there, and Kevin was obviously not giving his all to the job just then,“Seriously, couldn’t Frank have gotten you to do that some other run?” he grumbled at Dean.“Shut up, I’m…” It was impossible. The signals from the camp’s repeaters kept getting amplified over the antenna, and the voice he really wanted to hear sounded quieter than usual. Maybe somewhere to the south?
“Well, I'm near the end and I just ain't got the time, and I'm wasted and I can't find my way home…”
“Dean? Uh, what are you doing? Oh, crap, guys. Um. Sorry about this, but, uh, you need to move. Like, fast. North, toward that old water tower—run!”Two hours later, when he and Sam were finally climbing down the rickety ladder on the side of the tower and thanking the other set of Runners for helping dispatch the small horde of zoms that had trapped them up there, Dean was pretty sure he needed a new plan.Charlie was persistent. She kept tinkering with the antenna, wrapping and taping and sticking extra lengths of aluminum strips off the sides until Dean started worrying that he’d never be able to maneuver it. She was beginning to make noises about some other device—an attenuator?—but building one would require a host of supplies that didn’t sound at all familiar to Dean and that were going to be hard as hell to come by.He knew she’d never call it quits if he was determined to keep trying. On the other hand, he knew what she was like with a puzzle in her hand, and he wondered how he was supposed to keep her grounded when he was starting to realize he was starting to grow rather obsessed himself.He kept running. He kept listening. And his heart broke a little more every time he had to turn away and let the signal fade.
“I’m drinking tea, and it’s an amazing thing. Last year about this time, or at least as near as I care to figure, I’d found my way into the capitol building, which was, surprisingly, a ghost town. Guess all those politicians either tried to get back home to their families, or else they got whisked away to some top-secret bunker none of us knew about, but they sure as hell didn’t stick around to try to keep things running. I didn’t even see any blood. Anyway, one of the staffers had a whole cabinet full of bottled water, just sitting there, and I was…well, my jaw almost hit the floor, it’d been so long since I’d seen clean water that wasn’t in a stream or falling on my head. And I grabbed one, ripped it open, and started guzzling…and the damn thing was mineral water. It was so bitter, I just started crying and laughing. And now here I am, with water somehow running through pipes, and, I’ve tested it, it’s pure and safe. And so…tea.”
Sam was always the one who liked tea; Dean called it leaf water, and he made fun of it, but now he realized he couldn’t even remember the taste.And on another run...
“—and then Michael gets this look on his face, like last night’s dinner is trying to crawl back up out of his stomach, and he looks at me, and he’s just begging me with his eyes not to say anything. But I was six! I had no ability to lie whatsoever! So I’m standing there, completely covered in mud, and Mom and all the church ladies are looking at me like I’m some disgusting insect that crawled onto their lace tablecloth, and we’d probably have stood there a lot longer, staring at each other and not knowing what to do, but that was when the smoke alarms all started screaming.”“Hey, Sam, remember when I convinced you that we could fly if we tied capes around our necks and jumped off something high enough? And you hurt your arm, but I begged you not to tell Mom and Dad what happened, and they ended up having to take you to the hospital for a cast, but you just clamped your mouth shut and refused to say anything at all, so they wound up deciding that you must have done something wrong but that the broken arm would have to be punishment enough?” Dean was still laughing to himself as they banged mud from their sneakers outside the dorm.“Uh, yeah, Dean,” Sam replied, narrowing his eyes. “I missed a whole summer of playing in the pool. Kind of hard to forget.”Dean snickered. “Yeah, sorry. But, God, we had fun back then, right?” He wasn’t quite fast enough to duck the swat Sam aimed at the back of his head.And yet another run...
“I was thinking about graduations earlier. I was looking at a photo that reminded me, and I don’t think I’ve thought about my own in ages. High school graduation was boring, as those things tend to be. Mom got appropriately teary-eyed, since I was the baby, and everybody looked at me standing next to Dad in his uniform, and there was this feeling of a lot of nodding and winking, like, ‘Yep, that’s what’s next.’ University was noisier, of course. We had the college ceremony, with the diplomas, and then there was the big university ceremony, with the thousands and thousands of graduates, and…I skipped. I went back to the music building, still in my cap and gown, and just sat in a practice room. Didn’t even play anything. I just sat there, trying to say goodbye. And I wasn’t all that sure what I was saying goodbye to, but it hurt.”
Fact: whoever this guy was, he was remarkable. Piecing together everything he knew or had guessed, Dean was almost sure the guy was still in Kansas or nearby, but it was clear from his stories that he’d been all over, surviving on his own ever since the Crisis. He definitely was carrying more than a few scars, literal and figurative, from it, but at the same time, he was still making jokes, singing love songs, waxing poetic over the smell of clean sheets on a bed. He hadn’t lost his passion, when so many people around Dean had; he hadn’t lost his heart.Years before, in a simpler time, a former friend of Dean’s had dragged him to a John Mayer concert, a fact that Dean would forever deny and was going to take with him to the goddamn grave. He’d only gone because the friend had been going through a bad breakup, and the tickets were supposed to have been for him and his girl, and, well, Dean wasn’t made of stone. But they’d stood there, surrounded by swaying sorority girls, listening to “Slow Dancing in a Burning Room,” and his friend had cried into Dean’s shoulder. “He gets me, he really gets me,” he’d sobbed. And because Dean was not an asshole, he'd just patted the guy’s back and hadn't said what he was really thinking: “Oh, please.”Maybe you could identify with what somebody was saying, sure, and maybe you could feel like their words struck a cord inside you. But feeling a connection with a complete stranger? No way. Dean had felt even felt a little skeptical once when Sam had started sounding attached to a girl he’d only met online.Now, though, he thought he might need to eat his words. True, the man behind the voice didn’t know him, but whatever this one-sided connection was, it was doing strange things inside Dean with every hearing. When the guy was happy, Dean felt warmth in his own chest and a smile on his lips. When the guy was nostalgic, Dean wanted to pour him a drink and let him talk until the memories stopped aching. When the guy grew morose, it was almost painful not to be able to wrap his arms around him, pull him close, and do or say anything he could to soothe and encourage him.And Dean wasn’t even going to touch on the one time when the guy had talked about the last serious relationship he’d had, back in college. The guy was either completely shameless, or else his candor was born from the belief that nobody was actually alive to hear him; either way, he had Dean blushing to the roots of his hair when he described the particular physical aspects of human contact that he missed most. Damn.“Is it gauche, living in a zombie-infested world, to say that I miss the taste of another person’s skin? I’m talking about the salt of their sweat, the headiness of the scent and the heat on my tongue. The way, if you’re in a cool room, the goosebumps pop up along their flesh when you lick and bite and suck your way across their stomach, sliding down their body just slow enough that they’re trembling. And then, God, the feel of the weight in my mouth, pressing my jaw down and just overwhelming the senses until there’s nothing but the slide of lips and the salt and the rising heat and the way my lungs would burn and my hands would leave marks on the soft inner part of their thighs. I can’t remember what I said to him the last time we spoke, but I can remember the taste of him as he came down my throat, calling my name.”Dean had given a few blowjobs in his time, mostly one-night stands and random hookups, but just hearing this guy speak, he felt like he’d never fully appreciated them. Thank God there were no zombies around on that particular run’s listening session, and also that his cargo pants were forgiving.“This is silly,” Sam said, but his lips were quirking up at the corner. “You realize we’re risking our lives for this?”Dean waved a hand dismissively. “Eh, we risk our lives every time they raise the gates and we head out. But this isn’t silly. It’s going to be amazing. We’re going to be heroes, like Santa.”“It’s October, not Christmas,” Sam retorted. “And I’m not sure this really rises to the level of a heroic act.”They shoved on the doors to the abandoned school one more time; they weren’t locked, but a year and a half of rust and neglect had made them stubborn. With a loud creak, the hinges finally gave way, separating the doors just wide enough for the brothers to enter. Dean glanced at the bulletin boards, covered with faded construction paper and dust. “That way?” he suggested, pointing down a hallway.Jackpot. The kindergarten rooms were in a cluster, and each of them had, amid the clutter, a small dress-up box full of costumes and accessories. Dean whooped as he pulled out a fireman’s coat and hat.“The camp kids will get to have Trick-or-Treat after all!” he said. Reaching up, he plopped the hat on Sam’s head. “Big kids, too. Don’t make yourself sick!”Sam snorted a laugh, then reached into the trunk himself. “Yes, your Highness,” he said, dropping a tiara onto Dean’s brow. The tiara drooped to the side, earning another chuckle.“Hey, I ain’t ashamed to be a Disney princess,” Dean argued, smirking widely. “I’d make a bad-ass Elsa, and you know it.”They quickly swept all the costumes they could find into their bags, then topped them with the math and history books that had been the primary reason their mission request had been approved. The brothers were much slower as they moved out, but their grins were irrepressible. Dean felt lighter than he had in ages, imagining the looks on the children’s faces when they saw the outfits. Too many of those kids were scarily serious, staring somberly at the playground instead of running and giggling.Bobby was giving them minimal guidance as they ran, so the soft crackling in Dean’s headset was obvious when he started moving into range. He sighed a little, thinking about Charlie’s latest attempt at a more portable, more powerful antenna, which had wound up short-circuiting in his hands.“—not knowing that’s the worst,” the guy was saying. It was apparently a melancholy day for him; his voice was rougher, as though he hadn’t slept. “I feel caught between two places. If I knew they were alive, I could hope, and if I knew they were dead, I could mourn. But I can’t really do either.”“Princess dresses getting heavy?” Sam teased, calling Dean’s focus onto how he’d slowed. Dean made a face and sped up.
“And I have no idea what’s supposed to happen next. Maybe I should just give up on hoping? It’s not making anything better, really. Except that…if I stopped hoping, and I just lived, just survived…then am I different from the undead? I wouldn’t be eating brains, but in most other senses, my motivations would be the same. It’s the connection, or the hope for connection, with other people that’s giving me any kind of other purpose. Sometimes I think about the people who owned this place I’m sitting, and I make up stories about them, just so I can imagine them, living in this space, filling it with something that isn’t stale. The Nutella that was in the pantry—gone now, and delicious…did they put it on toast, or did they eat it straight from the jar with a spoon?”
Sam had always gotten offended when Dean dipped his spoon into the Nutella jar, like it was the height of savagery.
“And the books. Some are more well-read than others, so I can make guesses about which were particular favorites. And, of course, this guitar. I miss my own guitar so very much, but I could tell immediately that this one was loved. Not a scratch on the body, and the care that was taken in maintaining her is obvious. Whoever owned her is someone I could respect. Not just for that, even. They were also a person of good taste, I can tell, because of the inscription. Right there, along the neck, so tiny I almost missed it until I felt it with my thumb. ‘You can deliver me, Lord, I only wanted to have some fun.’”
The air abruptly disappeared from Dean’s lungs, and he fell to his knees.
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
The flickering of the candle made strange shadows on the brick walls. It was a silly indulgence, considering that the solar power generator was still quite functional and more than capable of powering the lamps in every room of this place. For some reason, candles still felt warmer, and not just in the most literal sense. There was an iciness in his chest tonight, a chill that felt disturbingly ominous, and even a roaring fireplace likely would have been insufficient to chase it away.
He'd woken with his sister's voice in his ear. It had felt so real that he was mumbling a rude response, telling her to go away and leave him alone, before he'd roused enough to come to his senses and remember. She had left him alone, after all.
He wasn't sure he could even truly recall what Naomi's voice sounded like.
When he finished playing "In My Time of Dying," dedicated to his found guitar's former owner, he moved on to "Gallows Pole," trying his hardest to imagine Michael riding to his rescue or Naomi giving her body in exchange for his life. He'd never had a close relationship with either his brother or sister, but he had still loved them, and he had to believe that they'd loved him, in their own ways. The memory of Naomi turning and running, even as he'd screamed for her…well, he couldn't blame her, could he? Had their positions been reversed, he might have fled. Or maybe he would have stayed, and they both would have been killed. And she was probably dead, now, the way he should have been. What kind of twisted world was it, when he, the most useless member of the whole Novak family, was the only one to survive what was indisputably a raging, violent war?
He kept playing, segueing into something even slower and more mournful. It wasn't how the original song had been sung, less energetic and more sober, but he wasn't picturing himself in the role of the conquering warrior, either. "The devil mocks their every step, the snow drives back the foot that's slow. The dogs of doom are howling more…"
There had been howling earlier, when he'd cracked open the door and listened. The lake that shimmered far below, on the other side of the narrow path, looked so peaceful that the echoing noises jarred his nerves even more by contrast: howling, groaning, and the high-pitched scream of something he prayed was some sort of animal.
He wished…
The ripples of the lake water sparkled, throwing back the sun's light; if he craned his head far enough, looking downward, he could see the tip of a tiny pier extending out over the water. There would be two Adirondack chairs sitting on it, he knew, as long as nobody had disturbed them. He couldn't imagine why anyone would want to. Closing his eyes, allowing the guitar strings to resonate and the sound to die, he let his mind float, seeing the scene described in the pages of the leather-bound journal tucked beneath the borrowed pillow in his borrowed room.
"It might be quieter than a mummy's tomb around here, but at least it means that the fish practically catch themselves. Sammy doesn't like to come sit with me too often, but I think he's just got bad associations from that time Dad dragged us to this place, just when he was starting to get comfortable in Omaha. Apparently, the Cawker City library still blows, too. He whined for weeks about it when he was a kid, and I guess some things never change. Well, except that back then, Mom was around to keep Dad and Sam from each other's throats…"
Ever since he'd found the small pile of notebooks in a rucksack buried at the bottom of a trunk, he'd been reading and rereading them, poring over the words penned into them. There were drawings, too, surprisingly detailed: a classic Chevy, a woman's hand with a wedding ring, an intricate mandala that filled a page to the edges.
And there were poems, or perhaps song lyrics; either way, they were full of rhythm and passion and life. He read them out loud to himself, relishing the way the fire in the lines seemed to pulse through his veins. If he tried, he could visualize the man in the photo bending over these pages, pressing a pen between his full lips before putting it to the paper to capture in ink the casual beauty he was able to find in the smallest things around him. It had to be him, the man in the photo, who wrote these words, just as it had to be his guitar, his clothing, his pillow that smelled of detergent and must but might just have had the barest hint of something else.
Naomi was dead. Michael was dead, and Mom and Dad were definitely dead, and Castiel himself should have been dead. But the man in the photo…he knew it was the worst kind of fantasy, one that was completely impossible, but Castiel wanted him to be alive.
The man's green eyes, in the photo on the desk, seemed to gleam.
"Are you even listening to me?" Dean raged, nearly nose to nose with Sam. He'd barely spoken a word the rest of the way back to camp, rushing ahead of Sam and making his brother struggle to keep up with him for perhaps the first time in their adult lives. Sam had grown more and more anxious with each mile, demanding that Dean tell him what the hell was happening and threatening not to take another step until he knew what had sent Dean to his knees, pale and almost choking for breath with his eyes as huge as dinner plates. Sam had just started to frantically search the ground around them for a hidden crawling zom when Dean had staggered back to his feet and took off, stumbling as he ran back toward home.Finally, when Dean had thrown his backpack into his dorm bedroom and spun right back around to take off for the major's quarters, Sam had grabbed his shoulder and pushed him through the door and into the room, then shoved him up against the wall."You are going to tell me what's going on," he had panted, red-faced and sweaty. "I did not just chase you for miles so you could run from me some more. What did you see out there?"Dean had tried to pull away, but Sam refused to budge an inch, glaring at him sternly. Dean had been tempted to aim a kick at his brother's kneecaps; he didn't have time for this! Finally deciding it was quicker just to spill the truth so he could get moving, he'd sagged back against the wood. "Not saw, heard," he'd explained. "The guy on the radio. I know where he is, and we need to go get him.""You never let that go?" Sam had hissed in a shocked voice. "Dean, that was months ago! And it was just a recording, not a person.""You're wrong," Dean had said, feeling his voice tremble. "He's alive, and he's at the Glen Elder bunker."Abruptly, Sam had stepped backward, releasing Dean from his hold. "You've lost your mind," he had said. "Overheating, or…or exhaustion, or maybe PTSD finally kicking in, but I think you need to just sit down for a minute. I'll go get the doctor, and—"Of course, that was the last thing Dean was going to do. And, also of course, Sam was unwilling to take no for an answer and let Dean go running off to try to spread his "delusions."“I am listening to you. Are you listening to yourself?” Sam argued back now, and the way he was visibly restraining himself, as though Dean was something fragile that needed to be handled delicately just pissed him off even more. “First you deliberately disobeyed orders from the major and put yourself in danger by tampering with your equipment. Then you somehow came to the bizarre conclusion that there’s a dude out there riding out the apocalypse by hosting a radio program. You have to know how crazy that sounds, all on its own.”“Oh, come on. The only actual danger I was ever in was Kevin’s fault, getting distracted.” Never mind that that had been part of the plan; Sam didn’t need to know everything.Sam narrowed his eyes and pursed his lips. “That weird thing you were waving around in the air that time,” he said. “Did that have anything to do with this? Did…did you get Charlie into this, too?”“Charlie believes me,” Dean growled. “She actually listened to me, and not only that, she isn’t trying to convince me that I should just let some poor sap die out there alone rather than take a little extra time to make sure that isn’t what we’re doing.”“And I’m sure she’s being totally up-front about it, too,” Sam sighed. “But setting that aside—which, by the way, Major Novak is not going to do—there’s a big leap between deciding that the guy is alive and concluding that he’s living in our house. There are coincidences and then there are coincidences, Dean, and that would be like…there aren’t words for it.”Dean held up his hands, shrugging and shaking his head. “Ain’t gonna argue with you, Sam. It’s insane, is what it is. But listen to me for real, now. I’d already figured the guy was in the state. Then Charlie’s antenna said he was somewhere to the south.” Sam looked as if he was going to interrupt and argue, so Dean cut to the chase. “And he’s playing my guitar.” Sam’s brow furrowed in confusion. “How the hell do you figure?” he said. “You can’t tell me that you can recognize the sound of one particular guitar out of any others out there. Jesus, maybe the brand if you got lucky, but there’s no way.”“First off, it’s not that hard to tell a Fender from a Gibson. But I didn’t have to, anyway,” Dean said. “He found the inscription. Remember? ‘In My Time of Dying’?”Pausing, Sam blinked. “The line about wanting to be saved?”“Delivered. ‘You can deliver me, Lord,’” Dean sang, and Sam snapped his fingers, remembering.“‘I only wanted to have some fun!’” he finished. Then he froze, eyes blowing wide open. “What are the odds that anyone else would have gotten that quote etched into the neck of a guitar?” He was almost whispering, the weight of what he was proposing almost too big to handle.“Smaller than the likelihood of finding a survivor hanging out in one of Dad’s old hideaway spots, I can tell you that much,” Dean replied. “What are we going to do?” One of the things about Sam that Dean had always appreciated was that, confronted with logic and reasoning, he was always willing to admit he was wrong and move on, rather than argue on out of pride. Dean didn’t miss that “you” had become “we” without even a moment of hesitation.“Well, I figure we got two big hurdles,” Dean said, plunging right into the thoughts that he’d spent the run sorting through. “First, Waconda Lake is a good thirty-mile run if we’re lucky and don’t have to dodge any packs of zoms. We could take a Jeep…”“…but we’d have to convince the major of what you’re saying, and also talk her down when she finds out you disobeyed her in the first place,” Sam finished.Dean nodded. “Yeah, that’s the hitch. She likes you better than me, though, so maybe you should be the one to try.”Huffing, Sam shrugged. “Sure, why not,” he said. “But I’m pretty sure I know what problem two is, and we can’t talk our way through that.”“Dad,” Dean said, exhaling hard as he rolled his head back on his shoulders and closed his eyes.“Dad,” Sam agreed.The fact of the matter was that John Winchester had been many things, but “paranoid sonovabitch” ranked pretty damn high on the list, especially in his later years. In retrospect, some of his crazier rantings about being prepared for “Shit Hits The Fan” scenarios hadn’t been quite so crazy. Dean was pretty sure that if he had lived to see the dead walking, Dad would have relished giving the biggest, most smug “I told you so” speech in history, right before he reached for one of the many weapons he’d stashed wherever he thought he might possibly need one and jumping right into the fray with a righteous shout.The Glen Elder bunker, dug into one of the hills along the northeast side of Waconda Lake, was one of a half-dozen bug-out shelters Dad had built and equipped in case of, well, anything. Government collapse, nuclear attack, Biblical armageddon, whatever. Dean had never heard Dad suggest that a zombie uprising was among his fears, but it was definitely possible. Those shelters had been designed to hold off an army of pretty much everything.“I don’t suppose you’ve managed to make contact with this guy?” Sam asked doubtfully. “Let him know we’re coming, so he’ll open the main door?”Dean shook his head, smirking without humor, and Sam ran his palm over his face. They both knew that the main entrance to that bunker, like all the other shelters, would be almost impossible to force their way through. It was heavy, fortified, and there was almost no chance that the guy inside wouldn’t have thrown the triple set of deadbolts that backed up the combination lock system.“Back door it is, then,” Sam muttered unhappily. “God, I thought I’d never have to do one of those again.”“You and me both, but I don’t see that we have another choice,” Dean said. Dad, not being a fool, had definitely known better than to construct a safehouse with only one way out, but that meant that the emergency exits were always extremely well-hidden and designed to completely discourage anyone from wanting to go exploring if they happened to get lucky.Sam was already heading for the door. “No point in delaying the inevitable,” he said over his shoulder. “But whoever this guy is, he better be grateful when we get there.”Whoever this guy is. “Uh, Sam, there might be one more…complicating factor I should probably tell you before we go talk to Naomi.” To Sam's credit, he was giving the battle everything he had. He was working the puppy dog eyes, somehow managing to duck his head and look humble while simultaneously maintaining a perfectly respectful military posture. He argued like a lawyer, not a scrapper, and maybe if there had been an impartial judge choosing between Sam and Naomi, there might have been a chance for success. As things stood, though, Dean could see the handwriting on the wall almost from the beginning."I should remove you from your position as Runner, Mister Winchester!" she stormed, glaring at Dean. "How dare you violate a direct order, on the heels of being reprimanded for breaking protocol in the first place! The insubordination you have shown in this matter demands consequences, and I will be speaking with the head of Runners first thing in the morning." Dean wanted to argue, but a subtle jerk of Sam's head had his teeth clamping hard on his tongue."Ma'am, believe me, we both understand the seriousness of the situation," Sam said placatingly. "And I'm not trying to argue that the ends justify the means, but in the meantime, we now know that there is a lone survivor within a day's run, and it would be inhumane to leave him to die because of a breach in protocol that led to the discovery."Naomi turned her glare on Sam. "As I have already informed your brother, and as I would have hoped he had the sensitivity and tact to accept, there is no lost survivor sending messages over the airwaves. There is only the voice of my dead brother, and I don't appreciate having to repeat myself on this matter.""Are you one hundred percent on that?" Dean snapped, ignoring Sam's noise of consternation. "On both counts? It might or might not be Castiel, and I'm actually sort of inclined to believe it is, since everything this guy has said lines up exactly with—" he remembered at the last second that he really shouldn't throw Charlie under the bus "—everything you've said. He even talked about his brother Michael. Didn't you have a brother Mike in the service, too?"Major Novak looked as though she was wishing for a weapon in her hand. "I did, yes. And he was killed, just as Castiel was. You are on very thin ice right now."Sam broke in once more. "Major, we're both very sorry for your loss. What Dean is asking, though, is whether you're confident that Castiel was actually bitten. Is it possible that the zom only got his clothes, or that the teeth didn't break his skin? We've all had some pretty close calls that have had us going over our own skin, inch by inch, just to be sure we only got bruised. Maybe you didn't see what you thought you saw."Naomi's expression didn't soften a hair; if anything, it hardened even more. "There is not a second of that night that was not impressed into my memory, engraved into my mind like photos on a page. I saw the light die in my mother's eyes, felt my father's blood warm on my hands. And I saw my brother bitten." She bent slightly, from where she stood behind her desk, and yanked a drawer open. From inside, she pulled a notebook, which she slammed onto the table. Snapping open the front cover, she rammed her finger down onto the photo attached to the first page, one of a smiling young man. "My brother," she spat. "He was only twenty-three, and the last thing I said to him before the screaming started was a question about when he was going to grow up and face life. Not a day has passed since then that I haven't regretted that." She turned page after page, each covered with photos that Dean realized had probably all been printed from her pre-Crisis cell phone, now useless. There were family photos, birthdays, graduations. The corners of the pages were extremely worn.Sam looked near tears himself. "Major, I'm so, so sorry. I can't imagine how horrible that was…""Try," she said bitterly. Her eyes were icy, her tone dangerous.Dean knew he should stop talking, but he had to try one more time. "But if you knew there was a chance he was still alive…""You need to go," Naomi said. Her voice cracked, ever so slightly, on the last word, and she broke eye contact, dropping her gaze to the last photo she'd reached. It must have been Castiel's college graduation, Dean thought. He was looking away from the camera, focused on something off to the side as he stood between his brother and sister, who were smiling confidently. Despite being the center of the celebration, Castiel looked far less polished than his siblings; his unfastened robes showed a tie hanging loose and backward, and his hair was rumpled from the cap. A hint of shadow covered his jaw, as though he hadn't put much effort into shaving that morning. Dean wondered whether this was before or after Castiel had run off in search of that little bit of solitude.Sam was tugging at his arm, pulling Dean's attention away from where it was fixed on the printed photo. Naomi didn't look up as they quickly exited the building.The brothers were quiet as they walked back to the dorms, each caught in his own thoughts. When they reached the building, Dean headed for his room and Sam followed, closing the door behind him. Dean dropped onto his bed, sitting with his elbows braced against his knees as he stared at the floor."We'll try again tomorrow," Sam suggested. "I could try going in alone, telling her we just want to run check the bunker. No matter what, it wouldn't hurt to gather up some of the stuff you know Dad left in there. She might—"Dean cut him off with a shake of his head. "She won't," he said. "She's not going for any part of this. She's already said goodbye to him, and this is ripping off the scab.""She feels guilty," Sam added. "It's not rational, especially since, true or not, she believes he was bit and that should be that. She probably still feels like she turned her back on him."Dean pinched the bridge of his nose, feeling the tension thrumming through him. "And if by some miracle he actually did survive, then that's exactly what she did. Which is another reason why she's never, ever going to go for this, even if it meant a chance to have him back."Sam, moving to sit next to Dean, patted him on the shoulder. "Like I said, we'll keep trying. I don't want to give up any more than you do.""I'm not giving up," Dean said immediately. That was all there was to it. "If you go back there, she's going to get more pissed, and she's probably already planning on having me confined to camp for the next ten years, anyway. You keep pushing, she'll have you working sanitation alongside me.""Then what?" Sam asked slowly, then suddenly closed his eyes and threw back his head on a short laugh. "Of course. What else? Dean, just because we're apparently revisiting ghosts of Dad's craziness doesn't mean you have to try to one-up him.""You don't have to come," Dean retorted. It would turn an insane plan into a suicidal one if he had to go alone, but determination was flooding his system. The idea of just letting go, turning a deaf ear to the messages being sent through the air, knowing that eventually they would simply stop coming—he couldn’t begin to consider it, even if the alternative was probably only slightly less deadly."Yeah, that's a non-starter," Sam said, rolling his eyes. "Like I'd let you go by yourself with nobody to watch your back. But you realize that trying to do this on our own, on foot, without any kind of backup or support from anybody else…it's a long shot that we're even going to make it to the bunker.""Ah, come on," Dean said, pasting on a broad grin that he hoped didn't show any of the doubts he was feeling about the plan. "You and I managed to last on our own for a while back when the world went sideways. We didn't need any handlers or radios then. It'll be just like old times."Sam groaned a little, laughing. "I think you must have very different memories of those old times than I did. Let's just hope that if we manage to make it back here, they don't turn us right back out on our asses again."Dean was sure it wouldn't come to that. More likely was a new career in ditch digging, but he hoped the risk would pay off in the end. He recalled that photo again, pairing it with the voice that he'd grown to know so intimately. I'm going to hear it in person, he promised himself. I'm going to bring him home.
Running his fingers softly along the edge of the page, he read the passage again, even though he didn’t need to see it written to remember it by heart at this point. Probably it was pathetic to have memorized a particular entry in someone else’s personal diary; probably it was creepy, and he should feel embarrassed. Not only that, but he was a terrible person in that this, of all the entries in any of the journals, was the one to which he couldn’t stop returning.
“I think I’ve got to admit it at this point, write it down on paper, or else I’m never going to be able to really accept it. Dad’s not coming back. He died when Mom did, even if he was still walking and talking and faking it for as long as he could. Sam can say what he wants, about Dad just being on a bender somewhere or needing to find himself or whatever. There was no note, which is proof enough, since he’s never once taken off without at least giving us a general trajectory, in case we needed him. I knew all I needed to when I saw that. Finding their wedding rings today, tucked inside the cover of Grandad’s old Bible, was just confirmation."He always said he hadn't really lived before he found her. I guess he decided he couldn't live without her, either."I keep wondering why I'm not falling apart over it. It hurts, like an ache when I forget and look around for him before it comes back. How come Dad was destroyed when he lost Mom, but I've lost both my folks and I'm not in pieces? I'm no stronger than he was. Dad was so tough. Sometimes, though, it was like he only had one purpose, taking care of her and us, and when that went away, he was just done. I think maybe you've got to have more than that. I love Sammy, I loved Mom and Dad, but I'm not living for them. I don't know if that makes any sense, but it's as good a reason as any."
He closed the journal and dropped it onto the desk with a thump, rubbing his eyes. It did make sense, the writer's premise, but he wondered whether he himself had more in common with the father than the son. What was his reason to keep going? If it had only been his own family lost, he was pretty sure he could have rebuilt himself eventually, as shattered as he would have felt in the meantime. How much could a person lose before there simply was no more left on which to build?
The lake had looked so beautiful that morning when he'd gazed at it. Inviting. Beckoning. He wondered if those feelings hadn't run through the mind of the grieving husband, and whether it was those sparkling depths that had offered up a final comfort to him in the end.
He had trouble meeting the eyes of the young man in the photo, but he forced himself to try, hoping to draw a little more strength, praying that not wanting to disappoint a ghost would be enough for the moment. Even so, he made certain to avoid the front door as he moved through the shelter for the rest of the evening.
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
As Sam paced anxiously in the shadows behind the guard shack, his figure indistinct in the pre-dawn mist, Charlie fussed over Dean, making last-minute adjustments to his belt transmitter. His nerves were jittery and he had to resist the urge to push away her hands so they could just get moving. Sam had been initially opposed to telling anybody at all about their plan, so as not to implicate anyone else if they had to face consequences, but Dean had talked him around. After all, Charlie would have definitely figured it out anyway, and this way, they’d been able to get some last-minute assistance.“So this is as souped-up as I could get it, modified to get you a few more watts of power. Um, you’ll probably actually not want to have it on you any longer than you absolutely need to, since there are reasons handheld radios are limited to around five watts. For a day or two, you should be fine, but try not to, you know, touch the antenna with your bare hands?” She gave him a nervous smile of encouragement, stepping back. “You still probably won’t be able to talk to me for the better part of the trip, but I’ve got you tuned to a much lower band than we ordinarily use. If I lose the frequency we’re on now, you might have to search for me, but there’s nobody else around who should be using this band, and I’ll put everything I have into keeping it going strong.”“Thanks, Charlie,” he said quietly. His throat tightened at the thought that, if they ended up going gray, she would probably keep trying to reach them long after there was no point. “Even if you can’t see us or tell us about any trouble in our path, just hearing your voice will be good.”“Well, and then there are the trackers,” she continued. “Those are on your wrists and have separate batteries, just in case. I’ll be able to see where you are on a map, even if you can’t tell me what’s going on. That way I’ll know when you’re on your way back. And you will come back, do you hear me, Dean Winchester?”At the sound of her voice trembling, Dean pulled her in close for a hug (avoiding pressing her up against the apparently lethal antenna), patting her back gently. “You know I will,” he said.Another reason for letting Charlie in on the action was that it made leaving camp a much simpler proposition than it otherwise might have been. Tall fences topped with barbed wire and an electronic gate that loudly alerted everyone of potential risk whenever it opened were precautions that were necessary to protect the wellbeing of everyone in New Lebanon, as were the regular patrols of guards along the inside of the fence, but they definitely made leaving without being noticed a tricky proposition. It’s a good thing she’s on the side of good, Dean mused as Charlie deftly did something to the wires on the hinges and then, with an eerie creaking sound that caused all three of them to flinch and draw breath sharply, nudging it open a few feet. She froze, eyes darting, waiting to see if anyone would come investigate the noise, then wildly beckoned them forward to make their escape.“Go get ‘im,” she whispered as they dashed past and slid into the fog.With the sun still at least an hour away from crossing the horizon, and with no power grid for city or street lights, the brothers had little choice but to stick to paved surfaces until the sky began its shift from black to gray. Neither of them wanted to risk tripping over something they’d have no prayer of seeing in the darkness. The highway heading south had its own hazards, with potholes and debris littering the asphalt, but it could have been much worse. Before coming to New Lebanon, they’d seen the gridlock of abandoned cars around Kansas City, with shattered windows, splatters of blood, and the remains of victims who’d been too brutalized in the killing to manage the transition to the gruesome sort of afterlife. Only a few cars decorated the sides of the highway down which they now ran, and they were blessedly empty, abandoned when they either broke down or ran out of fuel.They ran without speaking, making as little noise as they possibly could. Charlie murmured quiet encouragement in their ears, but she knew better than to distract them from their surroundings. Even the thud of rubber soles on pavement sounded unnervingly loud when there was no way to see more than a few yards around them. The saving grace, of course, was that zombies didn’t know how to move quietly at all. Moaning and groaning and shuffling, it was a fair bet that if the two of them kept their ears trained, they’d get a pretty good heads up if anything found them.Not that there were many options available in that case. Dean scanned every car they passed, studied the outline of every copse of trees, in case they needed quick protection. He took comfort in the weight of the pistols strapped to his thigh, the machete strapped to his back, the hunting knife on his belt. Sam was just as armed, and, when Dean glanced at him, his face looked as tense as Dean felt.The thing about their particular region of pre-Crisis Kansas was that before everything fell, it was mostly farm country: flat, sparsely populated, and without much in the way of forestry. Since large-scale farming hit its abrupt end, nature had definitely made progress in reclaiming the land, but it was still about as dull as a bag of hammers. The sunrise might have been pretty, all streaky oranges and golds, but the land it lit up wasn’t really worth appreciating, in Dean’s opinion.“At least now we can see for certain the nothing that’s surrounding us,” he joked.Sam aimed a shove at his shoulder. “You want excitement?” he said. “I hope it stays this boring the whole way there. Boring is safe, safe is good.”“Do I get a vote?” came Charlie’s voice over their headsets. They were stretching the bounds of their radio’s transmission abilities, but she could apparently still hear enough to weigh in on their discussions. “Because I’m a big fan of boring.”Dean grunted in noncommittal acknowledgment, lifting the compass from his belt. “Think we’re coming up on Oak Creek pretty soon,” he said, glancing to the left. Looking over old maps, they’d decided on a rough course that would have them following the slow-moving water south until it reached the remains of the tiny little town of Dispatch. Then they’d break east and south, crossing more desolate farmland where there had hopefully been too few people for there to be any massed undead now, until they reached Lake Waconda.“We’re making decent time,” Sam said. “If we could keep this pace, kept the stops to a minimum, we could definitely be there before noon.”An hour later, wiping rancid blood and gore from the blade of his machete with the hem of the tattered dress that one of them had been wearing, Dean made a face at his brother. “Had to go and jinx us, didn’t you? With your ‘if we can keep this pace’ bullshit. Practically begging for something to go wrong.”“If I jinxed us, you did it first, complaining about being bored,” Sam retorted, looking vaguely ill as he nudged a headless corpse with the toe of his boot. “At least there were only four of them. But, God, I hate the younger ones.”“Is that one wearing overalls?” Dean asked. “Hey, group of four zombies, one of them a girl, one in overalls who’s kind of skinny like a scarecrow…quick, see if the others look like a lion and a tin man!”“Oh, my God, Dean,” Sam complained, looking appalled. “We freaking grew up here. Wizard of Oz jokes got old before we hit middle school, and you’re making them now? Really?”Dean put a hand on his chest and pretended to sniffle sadly. “Now I know I’ve got a heart, because it’s breaking. Bitch.”“Jerk,” Sam retaliated, resheathing his hunting knife.Charlie’s mic crackled. “I can see that you guys have stopped moving, and I really, really hope it’s so you can retie your shoes or something. God, this is nerve-wracking.” Dean and Sam exchanged a glance, then broke into laughter as the tension of the fight dissipated.They kept moving, using the creek to guide their path southward. The water was clear and cold, but neither of them were willing to trust the quality too far, not when iodine tablets were available for added insurance when they needed to drink. Dean felt rather grateful that if they had to do this, at least it wasn’t happening at the peak of summer heat. He was stooping to splash a little water on his face when Sam made a thoughtful sound.“Think we should probably stop in Dispatch for a bit,” Sam said, biting his lip. “I bet there’ll be some solid building that’ll be decent shelter.”“What, you feeling tired already?” Dean teased. In fairness, they’d already covered more miles than a typical assigned run, but Dean had always been more of an endurance guy than a sprinter.Unamused, Sam pursed his lips. “I just think we should probably avoid getting stuck in that,” he said, pointing at the sky toward the southwest, where large gray clouds were beginning to mass.Shit. One big downside of the fall of most major civilizations was a great big gaping service gap that had developed in the field of weather reporting. “Just a little rain,” Dean protested weakly. He really didn’t want to waste time sitting around in some barn when they’d already come so far.“Don’t be stupid, Dean,” Sam said firmly. “We won’t stand a chance if one of us gets hypothermia from getting soaked in the storm. Plus, can’t you feel the electricity in the air? There’s going to be lightning, I bet. We need to be smart about this, and that means waiting out at least the worst of the weather.”He was right, of course, but that didn’t mean Dean had to like it. Watching the clouds come closer and closer, lanced by the occasional blinding flash of lightning, they picked up speed, breaking away from the creek and heading out onto a dusty road just as the first fat drops began to fall. Within moments, the sky started to really open up, and they found themselves sprinting toward the first building they spotted ahead on the road.The red brick church, thankfully, was devoid of any large stained-glass windows; what windows it did have were mostly broken, but at least they’d been regular squared-paned jobs, not ones that took up half the wall. It looked like, at least early on, some people had tried to hide out here for safety. The wooden pews had been piled against the walls, stacked on top of each other, and covering most of the broken window panes. A few had been shoved against the doors, too, but those had been pushed back when the refugees had decided, for whatever reason, to abandon ship.“Probably got hungry,” Dean mused, not bothering to explain what he meant. Sam would know. “Couldn’t have been too many packs of communion wafers and Sunday School graham crackers in a place like this.”“Think they were a wine or a grape juice church?” Sam asked, brushing some dead leaves off a pew before dropping onto it. The rain thundered onto the roof of the church, making them raise their voices in order to be heard.“Bet you’re out of luck there,” Dean said wryly. “I know if I was trapped here, that’d probably be the first thing I’d go for, devout or not.”There didn’t seem to be any signs that the storm would let up soon, so after they’d rested their legs a little, they started exploring the rest of the church. There was always the possibility of finding something useful, but not too big or bulky, that they might want to bring back with them. Sam whooped when he found a pack of batteries in a desk drawer. “Score!”“Anything else in there?” Dean called from the other side of the room, where he was rummaging through a closet that was mostly packed with hymnals and bulletins.“Let’s see. Flip phone, probably from the early nineties. Pens, paper clips. Oh, sweet, chewing gum!”“No way.” Dropping his armload of books, Dean strode across the room. “Gimme!”Sam held the pack high. “Why should I? Finders keepers!”“Are you a child?” Dean scolded, then immediately gave up any tenuous claims on greater maturity by attempting to climb up Sam’s back to grab the gum. There was an undignified scuffle, involving a lot of laughter, before they finally settled down and, leaning against the desk, shoved the gum into their mouths.“Holy shit, I haven’t tasted spearmint in years,” Sam groaned. “Was it always this strong?”“Can’t talk, mouth freezing,” Dean sighed happily, closing his eyes.They chewed in silence, listening to the rain falling. Charlie, having realized that they were probably sheltering from the same storm that was lashing the camp, wasn’t freaking out that their trackers had stopped moving; now she was prattling on about whatever project she was assembling, apparently dedicated to maintaining constant contact with them. After a while, Sam cleared his throat. “So what’s the real story here, anyway?” Dean gave him a questioning look, and he waved a hand impatiently. “You know what I mean. All this ‘screw Naomi, I’m doing this thing’ focus. Not saying you were ever great at respecting authority, unless it was Dad, but this is a bit much, even for you.”Dean frowned. “You saying you would have left this guy to rot or be eaten? I seem to recall you insisting on coming along, you know.”“And like I said then, there was no way I could have done anything else. It was obvious you were going to go running off vigilante style, no matter what I said. But I mean even before that, when Bobby, Frank, and then the major all told you off for messing with your radio, and you kept doing it anyway. I know you didn’t have any proof back then that you were listening to a living person. I’m just trying to figure out why you decided to ignore everyone.”Dean poked his tongue into the gum, blowing a bubble so he could put off answering. He really wished he had a rational explanation to give, one that Sam might accept. “Not really sure,” he finally said truthfully. “I mean at first. It was just…there was something about the way he was reaching out. I think even if it had been a radio recording, and I knew that for certain, I probably still wouldn’t have been able to help trying to hear him again.”“Hear him?” Sam repeated. He sounded hesitant. “Not just to hear the music, at the beginning?”“Well, he does play a mean ‘Bad Moon Rising,’” Dean tried to joke, but it fell flat in the face of Sam’s knowing stare. “No, it wasn’t just that. I just felt…” He trailed off, the right words eluding him. “It sounds cheesy to say ‘a connection,’ but that’s about the only way I can think to describe it. And before you say it, I know. I don’t even know this guy. He has no idea I, or anyone else on earth, even exists right now.”“I wasn’t going to say that,” Sam said. His eyes were wide and full of something Dean couldn’t read and felt reluctant about trying. “From what you’ve told me, this guy has been basically screaming into a void, or thought he was, for months at minimum. He was probably showing more of himself than most people show to people they see every day, just because he felt like he could, that he had no reason not to. And even if it’s one-sided, the connection you’re feeling is probably more honest than if it was based on the stuff people usually feel attracted to at first, like looks or similar taste in movies.”“Hey, I didn’t say anything about being attracted,” Dean protested, feeling his cheeks heat. Not out loud, anyway.“Dean,” Sam said chidingly. “You know there’s different kinds of attraction. Platonic, for one. If you jumped straight into assuming I was talking about sex, then maybe you should think about that. You know I don’t care.”“Yeah, doesn’t mean I want to talk about it with you.” Dean got up and wandered back toward the closet, shoving aside some boxes of choir robes. “Anyway, it’s not…weird? To be doing this for somebody I’ve never met?”“I’ve never met him, either. Sometimes, you just have to go with your gut. Mine told me to trust you. Yours told you not to hesitate. No matter how it shakes out, I feel like we’re trying to do the right thing, so I can’t feel bad about doing it.”Dean didn’t know how to respond to that, so he didn’t. He nodded, and Sam smiled with that weird look again, and they rummaged in silence until the storm moved past over their heads.“You sure you don’t want to go knock on the door first? Just see if he’ll let us in?” Sam fidgeted, standing on the road over the land bridge that overlooked Waconda Lake. Directly beneath their feet, if Dean was correct in all his beliefs, Castiel Novak was waiting. If he didn’t know personally, if he hadn’t spent years, on and off, living there himself, he would never have guessed there was anything there at all. Certainly, there was no sign visible from the road that there was an elaborate safe-house built into the earth below.“Would you let us in?” Dean asked pessimistically, gesturing at their sweaty, mud-stained clothing, featuring a number of stains and rips from their undead encounters. “If you thought you were the last man standing, would you answer a knock at the door, or would you shoot first and ask questions never?”“He could just as easily shoot us when we come in through the back,” Sam argued in reply. “Are you thinking we can sneak up on him, disarm him before he has a chance?”Honestly, Dean wasn’t sure what he was going to do. He just knew that he needed to get in there, to see the man who’d been talking to him (not to me personally, but damned if it didn’t feel that way) all this time, and he knew there was really only one way that was going to happen. Instead of saying that, though, he just huffed and shook his head. “You’re just trying to put it off. It won’t get any less creepy for waiting, dude.”Sam shuddered. “You know, I swear Dad got some sort of sadistic pleasure just thinking about how miserable it would be for anybody who tried to break in this way. Ugh. You’re going first.”They scrambled down the opposite side of the land bridge, stumbling through the overgrown weeds. In the distance, they’d heard the sound of groaning, echoing faintly as it bounced off the sides of the valley, but there didn’t seem to be any dangers in the immediate vicinity. In any event, their way into the bunker lay on the other side of a tall fence, which no zoms seemed to have even approached.Dean scrambled over first, and when Sam’s feet thumped to the ground behind him, he was already on the far side of the dam’s outlet works access house, feeling along the corner for the loose brick that, if he was lucky, still concealed the spare key. He grunted in satisfaction when he found it, then grinned when his searching fingertips brushed metal.“Really hoping this guy isn’t too hostile,” Sam mused. He grimaced as he stretched his quadricep muscles, pulling his ankles up behind his hips one at a time. “Gotta tell you, I am not looking forward to the return trip. My legs are shot. I know we need to get back, but I wish we’d planned this better, told Charlie we’d spend the night here before heading back.”Bouncing the key in his hand, Dean sighed. He was pretty destroyed, too, but he also didn’t want to put Charlie any more at risk with Naomi, and he didn’t want to scare her, either. “Makes you wish we’d left Baby here when we took off the last time,” he said, glancing toward the small gravel patch where the classic Chevy would have been parked. “She’d probably have been hotwired and long gone, but would have been nice.”Sam was gazing off toward the south, frowning in thought. Suddenly he squinted, leaning his head forward a little. A tiny smile started to play around the corners of his mouth. “Hey. Remember the goats?”“I’m not chasing any barnyard animals today, Sammy,” Dean said immediately. “You can go chase pigs for bacon some other time.”“Mmm-hmm,” Sam said, still grinning. After another moment of contemplation, he turned back around and heaved a deep breath, stretching his arms. “Okay, procrastinated enough, I guess.“You know, you should be grateful,” Dean teased as he unlocked the steel door to the access house. “If Dad hadn’t known one of the contractors who worked on this dam, and if they hadn’t gotten him onto the construction crew, he’d have had to cook up something entirely on his own. Then you’d have to trust that whatever tunnel he managed to dig by himself wouldn’t fall in on your head before you got through it.”“Oh, sure. I’m much more confident about crawling through one built by him and some other, totally unknown conspiracy theorist.” Moving around the room, Sam carefully tapped his foot across the ground, listening. After a few minutes of tapping, one tap landed with a slightly hollow thud. “Got it.”A compacted layer of dirt covered what looked like a manhole, just wide enough that Sam, with his broad shoulders, would be able to climb down with his elbows tucked against his sides. Metal rungs were embedded into the wall, rusty and corroded in spots. There was not a hint of light behind the first several feet down.“Geronimo,” Dean grumbled, rubbing his hands on his pant legs before sitting and dangling his legs into the darkness. The rungs felt freezing against his palms, but hesitation wouldn’t make it better.“Everything good down there?” Sam called down when he heard Dean’s feet hit the ground. The tunnel widened just slightly at the bottom, forming a small cave; a low tunnel branched off to one side, condensation dripping down the walls when he carefully explored them with his hands.“Oh, just peachy,” Dean called back, hating the way his voice echoed and rebounded over and over. “Is it a Black Widow or a Brown Recluse that has the bright red stripes? I can’t remember.”“Go to hell, Dean,” Sam called back, beginning his own descent with much more cursing and muttering than Dean had done. “I fucking hate spiders.”Dean smirked, knowing Sam couldn’t see his face. “Aw, you’ll hurt their feelings.” He held his hands over his head, just in case he miscalculated the tunnel height, and headed off into even deeper darkness. Charlie’s reassuring presence in their ears, already taxed to its limits by the distance, had been cut off completely by the earth over their heads, and the comparative silence was all the more startling for the loss.“Don’t forget to count!” Sam quickly reminded Dean as he was shuffling ahead. Mentally slapping himself for almost forgetting Dad’s last-ditch security defense against intruders, Dean moved back toward the tunnel mouth and started again, this time counting off his paces carefully as he moved.“...nineteen, twenty,” he finished under his breath. Reaching over his head, he fumbled, looking for the concealed switch that would disable the alarm at the door. Setting off that alarm would do way more than just trigger a blaring signal throughout the bunker, and Dean was singularly uninterested in experiencing the electric shock that would have also awaited him when he touched the door.A few more yards along, they reached the end of the tunnel, Dean’s hands sliding along the tunnel roof’s downward slope as it curved ahead of him, transitioning from rough earth and stone into smooth metal. “All right, we’re there,” he said; his voice was suddenly hoarse, and his words came out barely louder than a whisper. “You ready?” He wasn’t sure that he was. Castiel pushed his hips up higher into Downward-Facing Dog, trying to elongate his spine the way the yoga instructor had encouraged when he’d taken the class as an elective in college. Back then, it had been a way to try to calm his mind and ease his anxieties and irritation over the lack of control he felt over his life, over his future. Now it was a weapon against involuntary idleness. There weren’t many opportunities for him to go jogging or for a peaceful hike anymore, and as well-stocked as this haven was, it didn’t have a gym. Thinking back to the timed rucks and the five-mile runs in hundred-plus-degree heat through which he’d suffered in Officer Candidate School, he experienced a surge of vindictive satisfaction that he’d at least been able to put all that earned endurance to use getting to this point without being torn to pieces, even if it was all going stagnant now.Three-legged Downward-Facing Dog. Warrior pose. Breathe in, breathe out. “Lay down all thoughts, surrender to the void. It is shining…it is shining…”He wondered whether John Lennon was a poor choice for his current state of mind. He balanced on one foot, and the pose felt like an echo of the struggle for balance in his brain. A slip, an unexpected sound to startle the nerves, and down he might fall—down, down, into a bottomless abyss.The floor in the hallway outside the door creaked. Castiel startled. He fell.
I don’t want to die.
Well, now, there was clarity and the true answer to the question he’d been avoiding asking himself for days, rocketing through his brain as terror made his blood run cold. It was unfortunate, yet appropriate, that he’d only come to know it for certain when it might be too late to do anything about it.Don’t call out “who’s there?” to the zombies, he told himself. Instead, he scrambled madly to the far corner of the room, diving behind a desk just as slow footsteps came through the open doorway.Walking, not shuffling. His heart was pounding so hard, he thought the intruders must be able to hear it. Human. Alive. How could they get in? The door was locked, barred, and he hadn’t heard anything from that direction. Had he been so caught up in his own thoughts that he could have missed the sound of someone breaking it down?“I don’t see anyone,” a deep male voice said, hushed. Peeking between the desk legs, Castiel glimpsed two pairs of feet, both in worn running shoes.“Lights are on,” the second man replied. “He’s here.”Castiel tried not to gasp, dizzy with panic. They know who I am. Not just random looters—they’re here because of me. The men moved out of the doorway, wandering cautiously through the bunker, and the way they ignored the rest of the bunker provisions made it crystal clear that they were actively searching for him.He clenched his fists tightly, shaking. Think, think! He’d never had to face actual combat in OCS, only simulated battle conditions. Could he get past them to the front door? He couldn’t tell whether they were together or in separate rooms, and though he’d only seen their shoes, it was a safe bet that they were probably armed. He’d have no chance at all if one of them spotted him. There was no other choice, though.Listening as hard as he could, he waited until he thought both sets of footsteps were coming from the rear of the bunker, as far from the door as they were likely to get. He quickly but carefully crept to the doorway of the room, holding his breath anxiously. There was no time to consider taking anything with him, but he’d almost certainly die quickly if he was forced to leave here empty-handed. Casting his eyes around the room desperately, he almost cried in relief when he saw the revolver he’d left sitting on top of the squat cabinet. It was even loaded, and it would be far better than nothing, at least until he could find somewhere else to hide.The men were talking now, mumbling to each other from the office. Probably looking at the radio. He wanted to kick himself for even switching it on in the first place. How could he not have realized that he might be heard by people whose attention he didn’t want? Not that he’d ever given his location, but surely it was foreseeable that there would be those who knew how to track a transmitter and find the source.He was almost there. The door was…still closed and barred, which was a surprise. Then again, if the looters planned to shoot and kill him, they wouldn’t want to risk the attention that a gunshot might bring. Easy enough to open it again after he was dead, so they could toss his body out into the water. Another tremor coursed through him, making his teeth chatter.Getting the door open quickly without making noise was going to be a problem. Castiel inched forward, reaching for the bolt handle. It was stubborn, he remembered, requiring a strong tug. Gritting his teeth, he tried to ease it open without jerking it.The chunk of the bolt sliding open was the loudest sound on earth.“Hey!” Castiel heard the shout from behind him, and he knew he was about to die. Suddenly, he was full of rage. All this time, all the tragedy and death and terror and loss, and he was going to be killed by a couple of…of common thugs. Well, he wasn’t going alone.Snarling, he spun, lifting the revolver as he turned. He stopped with it pointed directly into the chest of one of the men, who must have come running the moment he heard the noise. “Holy shit!” the man cried, freezing in place with his hands held up, palms facing front. His eyes were huge and shocked.Green eyes, full of life. Time seemed to stop. Castiel’s heart, so loud in his ears a moment before, stopped beating. The man in front of him wasn’t looking at the gun anymore; he was staring directly into Castiel’s face, his lips parted as if to speak but making no sound. The sun-kissed cheekbones were more bronzed than in the photo, the skin around his eyes more lined, but the freckles on the bridge of his nose were every bit as fascinating as Castiel had imagined they might be in person.“Castiel Novak?” the man finally said, sounding dazed.Castiel giggled. The burst of noise surprised both the man and himself; it bubbled up from his chest and escaped from his throat without permission. His heart seemed to be stuttering, trying to restart itself, and he laughed again, choking over it as it tore free.“Dean?” he thought he heard the second man say, creeping up behind the first man cautiously. Those green eyes narrowed a little as a tiny frown crept between them.“Castiel?” he repeated. “Is that your name?”“Well, it was,” Castiel managed, caught between hysterical laughter and sobbing. “I died, though, right? Or I’m dying now, and you’re my…my hallucination?” Nothing made sense, but, then again, everything did. He must have been shot, or maybe the whole intruder scenario had been one large hallucination and he was dying from some other means.Both men were frowning now, looking grim. “What do we do now?” said the second man, taller than the first. Taller…“You’re the brother!” Castiel gasped, almost able to feel reason literally slipping through his fingers. “The one in the cap and gown!” He wasn’t sure why he’d be hallucinating the two of them as aged-up versions of their photographed images, but he decided not to concern himself with details. Instead, feeling light-headed, he opted to drop to the floor on his knees, wheezing a little.The freckled brother—Dean, his brother had called him—quickly squatted down beside him, putting a hand on his forehead as though he was checking for fever. “You’re not dying,” Dean said slowly, speaking too slowly, like one would to someone who spoke little English. “I’m Dean, and this is my brother Sam, and we’ve come to rescue you.”“Rescue?” Castiel repeated. His knees were aching a little from where he’d fallen, and his throat was beginning to feel sore from the way he’d been gasping for air. His shirt was still wet with perspiration from the yoga, and it was beginning to feel chilly against his skin. If he was dead or dying, and his brain was helping him escape from the agony, would he be feeling all these smaller, mildly irritating sensations with such realistic accuracy?There was another possibility, but he wasn’t sure he liked it any better. Lifting his hand, Castiel reached hesitantly forward, toward Dean’s face. Dean seemed rooted in place, not moving a muscle as the fingers came closer, hovering close to his jawline. Swallowing, Castiel made himself close the final centimeters, tracing the sharp contours with his fingertips.The skin was warm, almost hot; the stubble prickled the pads of his fingers. He even felt the soft flutter of Dean’s pulse, racing nearly as quickly as Castiel’s was.“I’m not dead, but…” Castiel blinked, then rubbed his eyes with both hands. “God, how am I even supposed to know? Not like there’s anyone else around who could tell me.” He glanced back and forth between Dean and the other man, then groaned and buried his face in his hands. Of all the things to happen…well, I did say I was lonely.“Tell you what?” Dean’s brother said. He sounded as though he was still frowning. Or, rather, as though Castiel was imagining him still frowning. Were they the same thing?Offering a reply was probably only reinforcing things he ought not to reinforce, but he couldn’t help the notion that ignoring the question would still be somehow rude. “That I’m having a psychotic break,” Castiel said without removing his hands. “That I’m seeing and hearing things that aren’t there, likely due to the profound stress and isolation. They say it happens to prisoners in solitary, and this is, well, similar, I suppose.” His eyes were beginning to leak tears, which trickled down his wrists.“Castiel. Hey, Cas. Cas, man, look here.” There was a warm grip around his hands, gently prying them away from his face. Dean’s expression, already full of worry, looked even more broken when Castiel blinked up at him and more tears fell. “It’s going to be okay. I know you’re freaked out right now, and…and you’re probably thinking, ‘Hey, that sounds like exactly what a hallucination would say,’ but I promise, we’re actually real, and we’re actually here.” With a trembling smile, he added, “Hey, I heard you on the radio, dude. You’re pretty damn good, you know that?”Caught off guard, Castiel almost laughed again, but it turned into a coughing, choking fit, and he nearly collapsed. When he had recovered enough to open his bleary eyes once more, Dean’s brother was squatting next to them, supporting Castiel behind his back with his large, warm hand.“I’m Sam, like Dean said,” he said. “It’s okay if you need to take some time before you trust us on this. It does sound sort of crazy, I know—complete strangers showing up out of nowhere, knowing your name like this.”“But you knew Sam was my brother,” Dean seemed to suddenly remember. “And you said something about a cap and gown. How did—”“The pictures,” Sam interrupted, full of dawning realization. “Remember, the ones on Dad’s desk and on his bookshelves! There’s one at my high school graduation, with Mom.”The blonde woman. Castiel watched the brothers talk, fascinated by the way they communicated with each other. It had been far too long since he’d watched or participated in an actual conversation, and he found himself entranced, even knowing that it was all likely happening inside some misfiring part of his traumatized brain.Dean, apparently noticing that Castiel was looking a bit dazed, frowned again. “I honestly don’t know what to do for this kind of mental shock, or whatever,” he said, sounding frustrated. “Tessa, our camp medic, might know, but I guess you’ll have to wait a day or two. It’s not exactly next door, and my legs...oh, shit.” Dean tried to stand, but his muscles seemed to protest violently.Sam chuckled a little, but he apparently chose to learn from Dean’s mistake, using the wall to assist himself in rising to his feet. Castiel followed suit, a little uncertainly. If, against all logical likelihood, this was actually happening, he was definitely not going to complain, and if it wasn’t, well, then it probably didn’t matter what he did. He glanced down the hall at the bedrooms, wondering if Dean would be upset when he found out that he’d been sleeping in his bed. Of course, he’d have to sleep somewhere else tonight and until it was time to leave; he felt an irrational pang of disappointment over that.“Actually, about that,” Sam said, cutting through Castiel’s confusing line of thought. “There’s something I need to check on outside, but it’ll only take me a few minutes. If I’m right, we might just be able to get out of here today. Be right back.” He yanked open the door and headed out along the path, leaving Dean and Castiel staring at each other in bewilderment.“So,” Dean said, suddenly awkward. “You play guitar?” It was such a ridiculous question, coming out of nowhere, and he seemed to realize it as soon as he spoke. His cheeks flushed red as he bit his lip, and Castiel felt himself smile despite his lingering doubts.“I do,” he said, and that was all the time they had to speak before Sam came dashing back through the door, grinning widely and beckoning for them to follow.
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
“You have got to be kidding me,” Dean said, arms folded across his chest in the hope that maybe a show of stubbornness would break Sam’s bluff, make him admit that he was actually just joking after all.“Like I’ve said the last three times you said that, I’m not kidding in the least,” Sam insisted. “It’ll work, Dean. Look, you want to get back quick, and so do I. I don’t know about you, but there’s no way in hell my legs are going to be up for running all the way back even by tomorrow. In fact, it’s a pretty fair bet that we’re both going to be waking up in some serious agony tomorrow morning. Also,” he added with a significant glance toward Castiel, “this time it won’t be just you and me and a few weapons to carry.”Dean’s stomach sank a little. He could still feel the tightness in his throat from having watched Castiel shatter into pieces like he had. God, how could they not have seen that coming? There had been no telling how long it had been since the guy had seen another human being, and there they went, sneaking in and scaring the living hell out of him. The fact that Castiel had almost shot him was actually the easiest part of the whole mess for Dean to process.Castiel still looked weirdly fragile, like a loud noise or sudden movement would either send him running or have his fists flying, and there was no way to predict which. He looked like he could definitely hold his own in a fight, and it had been obvious that he’d known how to handle that gun, but asking him to run for hours through undead-infested farmland was patently unrealistic.Even so, though, Sam was clearly out of his damn mind with this plan.“You know, when I thought you were running off because you spied a rusted-out tractor or something, I was sure you’d lost it,” Dean said. “But at least a tractor would have been semi-familiar territory. You’re not a goddamn cowboy, Sam, and neither am I.”Sam rolled his eyes and leaned on the fence surrounding most of the former paddock. The posts swayed ominously under his weight, creaking loudly, and he quickly stood back up. “Look, I’m not suggesting we go rope a herd of cattle or anything. This is just transportation. Think of it as motorcycles that don’t need gas. You’ve ridden before, anyway.”“That was a guided trail ride at a summer camp! I was twelve!” Dean unfolded his arms and flung a pointed finger in the direction of the horses grazing on the far side of the field. “Those are not pack ponies that haul boys and girls around all day and have names like Princess or Calico!”“It’s the same principle,” Sam said calmly. He turned to watch the horses some more, practically making heart eyes at them. Any one of them would probably be capable of biting his hand clean off his wrist, but he looked like he was already considering putting their manes into little braids. “I saw a bunch of saddles and things in the barn. They were obviously used to being ridden.”“Sure, by someone,” Dean said. “Not us. And that was before they spent a year and a half going feral.” The former owners were no longer in residence, their demise self-explanatory by the broken farmhouse door hanging loose from one hinge and the large reddish-brown stains dried onto the linoleum kitchen floor. The broken sections of paddock fence, on the other hand, appeared to be the work of hooves, probably seeking access to the cornfield and the small pond downslope from the barn.Sam ran a hand through his hair, tilting his head thoughtfully. “I don’t think it’s been that long,” he said. “For one thing, I’m not sure they could have made it through the winter without somebody bringing them grain or something.”“I think…” Castiel coughed, looking surprised at himself for speaking, before starting again. “I think it was around the beginning of May. That was when I got here, and there were a few zombies wandering up on the road there. I was surprised, because I hadn’t seen any for a while, and also, they looked sort of…new.” He made a face, remembering. “They didn’t see me, and I ducked down behind the side of the cliff so I could try to hide until they’d wandered off. That was when I saw the door.”Dean whistled. “Lucky break,” he said. “And later you are definitely going to be telling me how you managed to pick the lock. That’s impressive stuff.” Castiel shrugged awkwardly and opened his mouth to reply, but Sam cleared his throat to pull their attention back to the matter at hand.“Like I was saying,” he said, raising an eyebrow meaningfully at Dean, “the horses probably aren’t wild bucking broncos or anything like you’re worrying about. I say we pick out a few that look cooperative, saddle them up, and take them home. It’ll be worth it just for the look on Bobby’s face alone.”Dean glared balefully at the horses, racking his brain for any alternative. “What about Cas?” he asked, looking back at him. “You ever ride? If you’ve never been on a horse before, it’s okay if you’re not comfortable with it. We’re not going to make you do this if you don’t wanna, just because we’re a little achy and tired.”“Actually, I was in 4-H all through school, and I’m a decent rider,” Castiel said helpfully. “My brother was better, of course.”“Oh,” Dean said, at a loss for any other response. He stuffed his hands into his pockets and returned to eyeing the grazing animals.Sam was striding toward a gap in the fence, heading for a couple of horses that stood apart from the others. “I think a couple of these guys are a little small for me,” he said over his shoulder. “Probably they’re still young. I’m thinking maybe one of the big brown ones would do, though.”Dean held his breath as he watched Sam sidle closer, raising a hand cautiously to stroke the horse’s flank. He was positive he was about to bear witness to a brutal maiming, but instead, the horse only turned to look at Sam questioningly, not even bothering to stop chewing its mouthful of grass. Sam grinned at Dean and Castiel, thrilled.“I believe those are probably work horses,” Castiel told Dean. “They’re very even-tempered and docile. If you’re nervous about riding, you should consider one of them for yourself, too.”Dean spluttered, flushing at being called out on his worries. “Nervous? I’m not nervous, Cas. I might want to take time to think before we go rushing off into making hasty decisions, but that doesn’t mean I’m nervous.”Castiel nodded hesitantly. “I’m glad to hear that,” he said.“And…and I definitely don’t need any beginner’s horse,” Dean went on, cheeks burning even hotter. He was being an idiot, he knew that, but now it was a matter of pride. A sleek black horse stood near the middle of the group, cropping grass; taking the dark shine of its coat, so reminiscent of his old beloved Chevy, as a sign, he pointed at it. “I’ll take that one.”Sam looked up in alarm. “You sure?” he said. “That one looks a little—”“Course I’m sure.” Can’t back down now. Hey, Mom, if you’re up there watching, a little angelic intervention wouldn’t hurt. Doing his best to not show any fear, Dean kept his eyes trained on the stallion as he crept closer to it. It raised its head to watch him cautiously, but it didn’t move. Dean raised a hand to pet it, just like Sam had done, but before he could make contact, it snorted and danced a few steps away.“Dean, perhaps you should—”“I got this, Cas! Lemme try again.” He lifted both hands this time, keeping them visible, and approached the horse from the side. It flared its nostrils and snorted. “Easy, Baby,” he murmured. “Just want to say hello.” One hand touched the horse’s side, warm and heaving slightly. “Good horse,” he breathed. Hell, yeah, I can do this.Twenty minutes later, he passionately regretted his overconfidence. Spitting a mouthful of dirt onto the ground, Dean scowled venomously at his brother, who was almost rolling on the ground with his laughter.“You almost had it that time!” Sam managed to say. The black horse, wearing the saddle it had obediently allowed Sam to buckle around its middle, seemed almost smug as it stomped its feet several yards away.Castiel, already seated on a gray thoroughbred with his duffel bag and Dean’s guitar case strapped to the saddle behind him, looked anxious as Dean stood back up and brushed his pants off with his palms. There had been another minor breakdown over that duffel, when Sam had offered to carry it for him. Castiel had tripped over his own feet as he stumbled backward, as though Sam had tried to take it from him forcibly, and they’d had to spend several minutes convincing him that it was fine, that he could carry his own bag if it was important. His eyes still retained that hint of fear that had returned to them, though. Probably having second thoughts about trusting us to get him to safety, Dean thought. Doesn’t help that I look like a damn fool. He was on the verge of announcing that, sore muscles or no sore muscles, he’d just be jogging alongside the two of them, when he heard Charlie’s voice again.“So I don’t want to alarm you guys or anything, but I’m pretty sure the major knows you’re, ah, AWOL,” she said with a nervous giggle. “Kevin was going around looking for you, Dean, apparently. He said she sent him to get you, and when he couldn’t find you right away, she said to get Sam, and, well…” Dean could almost see her, tapping her foot anxiously as she tried to stay calm. “I can see you again now, and I hope you can hear me, though I guess I won’t know for sure until it doesn’t matter anymore. But, um, you might want to hurry. I mean, if you can. Hah. No idea how you people run like you do…”She started rambling about gym classes and school sports, and Dean stopped paying attention. Fiercely turning his attention back to the horse, he firmed his jaw and stood tall. “Okay, enough screwing around,” he said, not sure whether he was addressing the stallion or himself. He grabbed the saddle, ignoring the whickering sounds the horse made, and scrambled into the saddle. It wasn’t graceful or smooth, but it worked. “Let’s go, Sammy,” he called.Castiel was wearing a tiny, tentative smile of encouragement when he maneuvered his horse close beside Dean’s as they made their way out of the paddock. Maybe he was just making sure he’d be within grabbing distance of Dean’s reins if the stallion decided to bolt, but it didn’t matter one bit. The two of them let Sam take the lead, turning north toward home. They stopped to stretch their legs after an hour, wincing and groaning as their feet hit the ground. Dean dropped to the side of the creek to splash some water on his hands and face, and Castiel stood to the side, squinting a bit against the dappling late afternoon sunlight as he studied the man.“You know, I’m still not convinced this is real,” he said softly. He wasn’t even sure in his own head whether he was talking to Dean or to himself, but Dean answered anyway. His brow was furrowed, full of the same nervous worry he’d been exhibiting since he’d knelt beside Castiel and promised that none of this was an illusion.“Here, come over here,” Dean said, beckoning with a jerk of his head to the side. Castiel wasn’t particularly thirsty, but he came obediently, dropping to his knees by the water. Dean took one of Castiel’s hands in his own calloused grip, firm but not rough, and dipped it into the chilly water. “Feel that? Pretty damn cold, right? Doesn’t that feel real?”Castiel shrugged impassively, wiggling his fingers in the slow current. “It does. But, then, there’s always the possibility that all of this could be real, except that I’m alone out here, imagining you and Sam are accompanying me.” Dean tried to argue, but Castiel wouldn’t let him interrupt. “I’ve been talking to you for months, you realize. It’s ridiculous to think that the man whose picture I’ve held, whose clothes I’ve been wearing, and whose bed I’ve been sleeping in—that that very man would somehow show up out of nowhere, just as I was losing hope in everything.”“Any more ridiculous than you wandering into my dad’s old place, hopping onto his old radio, and playing my old guitar over the airwaves directly into my ear?” Dean retorted. “These are freaking bizarre coincidences, I agree, but, like I said, just trust us a little further. I don’t know what else I could say or do to prove I’m real; this is way out of my wheelhouse. But we can deal with all of this once we’re out of danger and you get settled in.”They sat, just looking at each other in silence as the moment stretched. Dean was disturbingly gorgeous, and, ironically, that was one of the big reasons why Castiel kept swaying back to the argument that this was a fantasy born of desperate wishing. Reality could never have created a man so utterly beautiful.A pink blush suffused Dean’s cheeks as he blinked, and Castiel realized with a start that he must have spoken aloud. Well, it didn’t matter, in all probability. Shame was an irrelevant concept at this point.“Let’s get moving again,” Sam called from further upstream, startling them both. “I don’t think it’ll rain again, but I’d really like to be back before dusk, if we can.” He was already back on his horse, waiting. Castiel stood, shaking the water from his hand, and offered the other to Dean for aid in standing. Dean still looked a bit flustered, but he smiled self-consciously as he accepted the help.The three of them were just making their way up out of the creek bed where it was crossed by a country road overpass that was too short to go under on horseback when they heard the ominous sounds of groaning. It was echoing a bit, making it difficult to immediately pinpoint the location of the source, but Castiel could make a pretty strong guess that the large farm a little way down the road was the best bet. It was too loud, way too loud, to be one of the tiny groups of straggler zoms that tended to show up around these patches of farmland, apparently as unsociable in death as they had been in life.Dean was scanning the landscape. “If we make for the trees, they might not see us,” he suggested to his brother in a quiet voice. “Sounds like a damn pack.”“They’ve probably already seen us,” Castiel said. He felt strangely detached, as though the part of his brain unconvinced that this was real had therefore concluded that the danger must be equally imaginary. He could see movement in the shadows at the base of the nearest silo, and a moment later he was able to pick out the shapes of the first zoms heading unmistakably in their direction.Sam cursed softly, vehemently. “Trees or road?” he asked Dean without turning away from the creatures. “Trees, we might be able to hide better, but we’d be slower. Road, we can try outrunning them, at least as long as the horses can go.” Castiel’s horse seemed ready to make the choice already, shying away from the oncoming growls and sobs.“Road,” Dean decided, pulling his gun free from his thigh holster. “I have no idea how to gallop or whatever, but let’s figure it out fast.”Luckily, the horses didn’t need much encouragement to flee down the road, moving toward the small hills in the west. In most other places, the hills would hardly have been considered worth recognizing as such, mere bumps in an unrelentingly flat topography. As fast as the horses galloped, they would have had to go much further than they would be able to travel to escape from view. After a handful of minutes, they were flagging and heaving for breath.Sam pulled off the road into a small stand of trees. Behind them, they could still see the distant shapes of the zombies trailing them. Castiel had no idea how good a zombie’s vision was, but it was probably safer to assume that if he could see, then he could be seen. Sam, checking his pistol, seemed to have concluded the same thing.“Stupid things don’t get tired,” Dean growled. “We could try sitting here and picking ‘em off at a distance, but ammunition will be a problem. They’d have to get closer before we could shoot accurately, and they’d be too close.” He was pale and tense, sawing the reins between his hands as he watched over his shoulder.“Or,” Castiel said, flinching a little when both brothers quickly sharp gazes on him, “we just keep going, but at a slower pace. The horses can trot faster than a human can run, and definitely faster than a zombie can shuffle. They’ll follow, but they won’t catch up.”“So you’re suggesting that we show up at camp leading a massive train of zoms, like the worst Pied Pipers ever,” Dean said with a huff. He looked at Sam, who just shrugged, looking back at the road pointedly. They were already losing some of the head start they’d gained, by the sound of things. “Fine, whatever. We’re already going to be in hot water. Just have to send up the alarm the moment we get back into transmission range.”North they went again, this time sticking to a much tinier country road barely wide enough for a single car. The pack of undead behind them, of course, felt no obligation to keep to the pavement, and the noises they made as they crashed through the trees that lined the road made the hairs on the back of Castiel’s neck rise. All three men had some difficulty restraining their mounts as the sounds got louder, especially since their own instincts were screaming to go faster.Castiel was still in the dark about where they were ultimately heading, and there was still enough of that strange apathy lingering in his brain that he didn’t feel compelled to ask. Sam and Dean conferred briefly after a while, muttering over a compass, before changing course and abandoning the road in favor of more pastures and overgrown fields. It didn’t seem like the safest option, in Castiel’s opinion; the zombies behind them immediately began to fan out into a much bigger-looking group that crept forward at the edges as if they wanted to encircle them. “How much further?” he asked, nerves beginning to vibrate once more.“Charlie, tell me Bobby’s around,” Dean said incongruously. He was thumbing the hammer of his pistol; the muscle in his jaw was jumping. “Yeah, yeah, I know you’re glad to hear me, but…well, go get him. I don’t have time to explain! By the time you get back, you’ll be able to see! Actually, just go to the comms shack, and tell them they need every Runner available ready with weapons, probably in about fifteen or twenty. Just go!”Another road crossed their path, a highway with narrow shoulders that had been almost completely overtaken by weeds. Sam, leading their group, started picking up speed once more when they reached the less treacherous terrain, but nobody pointed it out. From the way Dean kept muttering into his headset, Castiel assumed that they must be getting close enough that the pace was worth the risk of exhausting the horses again.“I know, Bobby!” Dean burst out with a frustrated shout. “You can skin me later, if the major leaves enough of my hide intact for it, but we don’t have time right now! Maybe…” He glanced backward and cursed. “Maybe a couple dozen. Could be as many as thirty. Oh, cut the shit, it’s not like we did this on purpose—”“South border, Bobby!” Sam interrupted, flinging a hand toward the tops of some trees on the east side of the highway. Camera surveillance, Castiel guessed. Even over the now pounding sounds of six pairs of hooves, Castiel thought he heard astonished squawking over Dean’s headphones.“Tell Donna she can have this one if she gets out here with her shotgun! I’m never touching a saddle again,” growled Dean, leaning forward slightly, perhaps squinting into the distance toward home, or maybe just trying to prevent his ass from bouncing any harder against the unforgiving leather.The pack of zombies seemed to be growing more agitated by the noise, and Castiel wondered if they were attracting even more to their number. He didn’t want to risk glancing behind to check. The same panic he’d fought down back at the safehouse was returning; maybe this was all actually truly happening, and if it was, he could be about to meet his death right here, almost within sight of safety. He could be dragged from the back of the horse, thrown to the ground, and be unable to do more than scream—just like Mom, just like so many other people he’d heard die in the past year—as fingers tore through his flesh and ripped him to bloody pieces…A shot rang out over his head. Distracted, he wasn’t prepared when his horse panicked and reared. The reins slipped from his hands, and he grabbed frantically at the horse’s mane as he slid. The hooves slammed back to the ground, jolting him hard and making his teeth clack painfully, and then Castiel was sliding sideways, holding on for dear life as the horse galloped forward along the pavement.There were more shots, but Castiel couldn’t sit up to see who was doing the shooting. He had no clue where the horse was running, either, and he prayed that it wasn’t just heading for the nearest wilderness. He heard shouting, someone calling his name. A hand reached out, grabbing at his leg, and the smoldering fire of panic burning in his blood suddenly erupted into a raging wildfire. He was screaming, flailing, falling… “Castiel!”It seemed a lifetime until his body hit the ground with a bone-jarring thud that knocked him senseless. Later, he’d tremble at how close he must have come to being trampled by the terrified horse, or to snapping his neck in the fall, but all he could do in that moment was try to remember how to breathe. The sky was wheeling in dizzying circles around him, and he felt close to vomiting.“Cas,” the voice called again, much closer. “Cas, don’t move. Just…just don’t…are you okay? God, of course you’re not. Christ! Dammit, Sam, go get Tessa! Tell her it’s an emergency! And bring a stretcher or something!”Castiel coughed, creating a little eddy of air in the dust. He tried to speak, but he still couldn’t manage enough air to do it. His arm throbbed sharply from where he must have landed on it, and he gasped hoarsely through his teeth.“What happened?” That voice…it sounded familiar. Sam, offered his brain, slowly trying to come back online. “Did he just fall, or did he get—”“Just fell,” said the first voice. Dean; that’s Dean. Castiel, without thought, reached out a hand blindly, making contact in the direction from which the voice had come. Immediately, his hand was grasped and held tightly. “I tried to get to him, but I just—the horse was going so fast, Sam. And he freaked out, for some reason, and…and…”A hand was carefully touching his head, probing. “Think he hit his head?” Sam asked, and Castiel wanted to answer that no, he hadn’t, but he was still floating, spinning, and conversations was definitely going to have to be a problem for a later date.“I don’t think so,” Dean was answering. “Looked like he landed on his side and back, kind of balled up. Probably dislocated his shoulder, I’d bet, at least. Can’t see if there’s anything else obviously broken or out of place yet.”Sam hummed thoughtfully. “This guy has to be the luckiest son of a bitch on the planet,” he said. Castiel would have laughed until he cried, if he’d been capable of it. He cracked an eyelid open and glared instead.“There you are!” Dean said, much too loud in his relief. Castiel groaned and closed his eyes again, and Dean hastily apologized, squeezing his hand again.There were hands fiddling with his shirt buttons now, probably Sam’s. “I don’t see any blood or anything, but I just want to make sure. If he’s bleeding badly anywhere, we should deal with that if we can while we wait, put pressure on it.” Castiel didn’t try to react, either to help or to hinder, and Sam finally got the last button free and opened his shirt wide. “Gonna have some wicked bruises and one hell of a road rash there on his ribs. Hope he just bruised them, that they’re not broken.”“Sam,” Dean hissed, his grip turning to iron. “Look at that. Look, there. His shoulder.”Ah, Castiel thought. His stomach swooped in sudden realization that had nothing to do with the fall. I forgot. How utterly ludicrous, that he could forget this, of all things. But, then, it was no longer a fresh thing, and until today, he’d not really entertained the idea of having to explain or thought about what he might say.“It’s…old,” Sam said, almost breathy. Someone was carefully tracing the old scar on the skin of Castiel’s shoulder, running a finger over the ridges. “Completely healed. It couldn’t be what it looks like, or else…”“I know, but what else could it be?” Dean sounded urgent, serious. He hadn’t let go of Castiel’s hand, though. “You know as well as I do that there’s nothing else that leaves that kind of mark. Even regular humans can’t get the same kind of force—” There was abrupt silence, during which Castiel felt afraid to open his eyes to see what was happening. Then fingers were hastily closing his shirt and redoing the buttons. “Just for now,” Dean muttered. “We can figure it out later.”Meanwhile, Sam was moving away and standing. “Over here!” he shouted. More voices were coming, asking rapid questions too quickly for Castiel to follow. He hissed in pain again as he was jostled and shifted. When hands slipped under his shoulders and hips and lifted him onto the waiting stretcher, though, the pain that ripped through his body was too much, and he cried out inarticulately, trying to curl up against it.“You have to keep still,” a woman urged. “You’ll hurt yourself more.” He could barely understand, let alone comply, and when they finally pushed up his sleeve and he felt the sharp prick of a needle, he fell into the encroaching darkness with gratitude on his lips.
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
“I don’t have time to explain. You have to go, right now. Go!” There was shouting coming from somewhere down the street; in the distance, there were sirens. Too many sirens. Castiel’s phone hadn’t stopped vibrating, feeling like one long, continuous buzz in his hand.
“I’m not going anywhere until you tell me what’s going on!”
The room spun, shifted. Castiel spun with it, stumbling. He saw his father’s face, his mother’s, his sister’s. On the television, the faces of the news anchors, too afraid to maintain their professional masks. The reporter in the helicopter was screaming now. “Oh, God, oh, God, they’re killing each other…”
“You have to go, right now. Go, right now. Go, right now—” His father’s words were echoing, over and over, the last thing he’d said to Castiel. “Take the bag and go with your sister. Get to Leavenworth and find Doctor Benton. Give him the bag. This is important, Castiel!”
“Wait, the news says we’re supposed to stay inside or we’ll be arrested—”
Naomi’s face, anxious but determined. “Sir, will this take long? My CO wants everyone back ASAP.”
“Take the keys, and take your brother. Make sure he gets in to Doctor Benton.You’ll need the security clearance—”
There was the smell of something burning close by. The neighborhood dogs were howling and barking in a deafening chorus, and the sirens wailed on and on.
“Why won’t anyone listen to me? Mom, what’s happening?”
“Obey your father, Castiel.” Her eyes were too large, her voice too level. Maybe she was in shock, or maybe she’d always been so distant, even from her own body. Castiel noted, without understanding that she was holding a cloth to the upper part of one arm, and a spent hypodermic needle was lying on the table behind her.
“I don’t have time to explain. You have to go now, go now, go now…”
Naomi was already in her combat uniform, freshly washed and pressed, somehow still smelling of smoke and fire and blood and death. She was pulling his arms. “Come on, Castiel. You have to go. There’s no time to explain.”
“No, I can’t!” He resisted, dragging his feet. He couldn’t quite remember why, but just looking at the door filled him with dread.
“Obey your father, Castiel.”
“Take the bag. You have to go, right now.”
They were all pushing him now, his father and his mother and his sister and Michael, who was in Texas, and Doctor Benton. All of them, pushing and dragging as he shouted and struggled.
“You have to go, right now, Castiel. Go!”
The door flew open, and he was through, falling forward and landing on his knees. The shouting was louder outside, the howling deafening, the smell of smoke suffocating. Behind him, there was another scream, and he tried to stand back up, pushing on the gravel path with his hands as he twisted to see a scene from a nightmare.
“No! Mom! Dad! Naomi, please, run!”
There was blood, and worse than blood. There were choked-off cries that gurgled horribly as his entire family was slaughtered mercilessly, and there were hands raised toward him, reaching out for help that would have been too late even if he could have made it through the wall of glass that had somehow erupted from the ground, separating him from them forever. He beat at it, shouting and cursing, until his hands were bruised and sore, but the undead paid him no attention whatsoever.
His father, hardly recognizable any longer, should have been dead, yet his head turned to face Castiel, rolling grotesquely on what remained of his neck. “Castiel,” he moaned, blood pouring from his mouth. “You have to GO.”
“No, please,” he whimpered, his throat raw. His eyes were closed, though he didn’t remember closing them. He clenched his fists, ready to break through the wall if it meant shattering every bone in his hands. They brushed over something soft as he did, which startled him. Breathing deeply through his nose, he found only clean air with no trace of smoke.It was the nightmare again. The fact that he’d had nearly the same nightmare, varying only in the methods by which he’d seen his family die and the ways he’d been kept from coming to their aid, didn’t make it any easier to process. Tears leaked from behind his lids, and he shuddered.Castiel shifted under the sheets, his breath catching in his throat at the pain that came with the movement. From shoulder to knee, his left side felt like one massive bruise, and his back and hips seemed to have been scraped raw, judging by the way they burned against the slide of the fabric. His neck ached like he had a case of terrible whiplash, and his head was beginning to throb. In the middle of his agony, he fought to remember what had happened.I’d say that I felt like I’d been hit by a truck, but I’m not sure that happens anymore. Castiel clenched his fists again, and this time he felt the pain of more raw skin, across both his palms. Rope burn. It all came rushing back, then: the reins in his hands, the terrible fall, the impact. He almost wanted to laugh; apparently, he was getting really hard to kill.Now that he was taking stock of the situation, Castiel slowly became aware of muffled voices, maybe in the next room. He opened his eyes just a crack, blinking in the brightness of sunlight slanting in through the old-fashioned blinds before shutting them again. He was apparently in some sort of medical clinic, the blood pressure cuff and the jars of cotton balls and other paraphernalia on the counter identifying it as such. The voice he had been hearing belonged to women, he determined, and they were arguing. He couldn’t quite make out everything they were saying, but he tried his best.“…the best of my ability to tell…no traces visible in blood or saliva samples…”“…expect me to believe…my own eyes, Doctor…completely unprecedented…not getting emotional…”There was something familiar about one of those voices, but when he thought too hard about it, his head pulsed in a particularly painful way, and he groaned.A cool cloth brushed against his forehead, and, startled, his eyes flew open wide as he gasped. His sudden reaction managed to surprise the person standing over him, who jumped and nearly dropped the compress. “Jesus, you’re awake!” Dean blurted.Castiel couldn’t resist. “Not Jesus. Castiel. Just an angel, not the Son of God.” His throat rasped when he spoke, and he coughed, which sent flames licking up his trachea.“Here,” Dean said, grabbing for a glass of water on the table by Castiel’s bed. “Tessa—that’s the doc—says you can sit up and move now, so long as you take it easy. Nothing busted, but you strained the hell out of some ligaments and stuff. Here, let me help you sit up so you can drink this.” Between the two of them, they managed to maneuver him into a semi-upright position against a pile of pillows; his ribs screamed when he tried to sit fully upright.He was wearing what looked like a painter’s smock, he noticed with interest. Hospital gowns probably weren’t a priority when it came to finding necessary supplies. The smock tied in the back in a similar fashion, so it must work just as well for the purpose. It also bared just as much of the patient’s backside as hospital gowns had done in the old days, and—he shifted in his seat, making sure—yes, whoever had changed him into the smock had most certainly removed every bit of the rest of his clothing. He wondered whether Dean had helped with that, too, then forced himself to stop considering it before he embarrassed himself any more.“How long have I been unconscious?” he asked instead, returning the glass to Dean, who set it back on the table.“Well, we got in last night around six-thirty or so, and it’s around eight in the morning now, so a good long while. You were pretty out of it there for a while, so Tessa knocked you out until she could reset the shoulder you dislocated and make sure you hadn’t broken your neck or anything. Then you were in a bunch of pain that was making you toss and turn when you slept, so she gave you some of the good drugs to help with that, and you slept like a rock until just a little bit ago.”He nodded, fully prepared to accept that; his eyelids still felt like they’d been glued shut. “And did you just get here, or…” He glanced to the other side of the room, sentence trailing off when he saw the blanket draped over a threadbare recliner in the corner. “Did you stay here all night, Dean?”Fidgeting and toying with the other objects on the table, Dean looked chagrined at being called out. “Well, you were banged up, man. Not like I was going to get much sleep back in my bunk, anyway. After that horse race, I was too wired to rest much. Figured I’d keep an eye on you for the doc, let her get a little shut-eye.” He gave Castiel a crooked grin and a wink that didn’t come off quite as self-assured as he’d likely meant it to.“Thank you, Dean,” Castiel said, a little flustered himself, not to mention warmed by the gesture. He imagined it: Dean sitting beside him through the night, keeping watch over him as he rested, caring for him in any way he could. It was a little overwhelming.“So, you believe me now?” Dean asked. When Castiel looked at him questioningly, he clarified, “That this is all real, not a massive hallucination?”Castiel snorted, wincing then at what it did to his ribs. “Yes, I think I’m beginning to truly believe,” he said. “I’ve been accused of having the occasional masochistic tendency, but that does not extend to fantasizing about myself narrowly escaping death by horse trampling. Ouch.”“Yeah, I could see that.” Dean laughed, a little shyly, glancing up at him from under thick lashes. Again, Castiel fought to remind himself that this man was more than just a magically animated version of the person whose image he’d cultivated in his imagination. He was a living, breathing human, and it wouldn’t be right to entertain those kinds of thoughts about him any more.Dean’s eyes lit with a sudden recollection. “Oh, hey, thought you might want to know—your horse finally stopped right inside the camp gates. Guess she felt like she was back in her pen or something, and she calmed right down. Hope you weren’t getting too attached, because I think I heard Jody talking baby-talk to her when I went by to pick up your bag.”“Oh, the bag!” He’d almost forgotten to ask. It was sitting in the corner, the guitar case propped against the worn fabric. The faint whisper of his father’s orders came back at the sight, a little more raw than usual coming on the heels of the nightmare. He probably shouldn’t have bothered bringing it with him; he probably should have dumped it somewhere a year ago, when it become obvious that there was no longer a point in hauling it around. After everything, though, he couldn’t give up this last thread, certainly no more than a useless relic anymore, connecting him to his past and to his family.“Yeah, and the old six-string,” Dean said cheerfully, oblivious to the storm in Castiel’s head. “I mean, I haven’t played in years, myself, and I wasn’t even all that great back when I did. Not like you, anyway. But you’re amazing, man. Like, first time we heard you, it was hard to convince Sam that you weren’t actually some recording left on repeat.”“The first time?” This part, which Dean had mentioned a little on the long ride back, was still hard for Castiel to wrap his mind around. For months, he’d had an actual audience, and he never knew. Castiel couldn’t remember all the personal information he’d spilled into the microphone, the very definition of oversharing, and maybe that was for the best. “What was I playing?”“I don’t actually know the song. It sounded familiar, but…something about hoping someone was out there, that you didn’t want to be left alone.” Dean had moved over to the guitar case, popped it open. He ran a hand along the wood grain of the body fondly.“Antony and the Johnsons,” Castiel confirmed. “I loved the song when I was a teenager, but it was more metaphor for me back then. Perhaps a little too fitting, these days.”“Well, it got my attention,” Dean said with a shrug. “It was so…powerful, I guess. Not just the talent, which—damn.”“Thank you,” said Castiel, blushing at the paise.“But like I say, it wasn’t like I was just sitting back and listening to you play, like it was just entertainment. Cas, you were putting everything into that music, like you felt every word you were singing and you wanted me to feel it, too. And, uh, I did.” Looking a little unsure at how his admission would be taken, Dean bit his lip, watching Castiel cautiously.Castiel, too, felt a little uncertain about how to respond. Truthfully, what he felt was something close to awe. Other than Alfie and a few close friends in college, he’d never really had anybody connect with his music like this, beyond surface compliments on his technical abilities. That it was Dean saying these things felt much more significant to him than it should, since, no matter what his confused mind might want to believe, they didn’t really know each other at all.“You’ve been calling me ‘Cas,’” he said, finally changing the subject after the silence had stretched just a fraction too long for any reply to feel comfortable. Dean looked confused and a little abashed, and he looked like he was about to apologize, so Castiel shook his head. “It’s fine, don’t worry about it. My college friends gave me far stranger and much more inappropriate nicknames, believe me. My family…well, they weren’t the nicknaming sort, and I suppose it struck me as unusual that you gave me one so quickly. But, then, I suppose imminent death does tend to expedite friend-making.”Dean visibly relaxed at the joke, and his sincere grin made Castiel feel rather pleased with himself. I did that; I made him happier. “You could be right about that. God knows, there are folks here in camp that, if we’d met each other back when we’d have been just regular people who worked together or lived on the same street, I’d have been hard-pressed to give them the time of day. And then there’s those of us who just don’t have the first thing in common. Little Krissy, for one—looks like she could still be selling Girl Scout Cookies if you squint, and comes back from thrift shop raids with tapes of electronic music.” He made a face, and Castiel chuckled.“But these days, none of that shit matters, because it’s like we all have the same big goal.”“Killing zombies?” Castiel asked.Dean shook his head. “Surviving. Sticking it out, and holding on to the hope that if we do, there’ll be something worth having stuck it out for.”Again, Castiel didn’t know what to say. This time, Dean seemed to understand that, though. He took the guitar from its case, then carried it over to the chair and sat, plucking quietly as he adjusted the tuning pegs. When he was satisfied, Dean started playing, just some simple chord progressions that filled the room with quiet comfort.Castiel listened, watching Dean’s fingers as they curved and pressed against the strings. It was obvious that he hadn’t been exaggerating about how long it had been since he’d played, but the occasional fumbles did nothing to detract from how moved Castiel felt by the sight. After a little while, though, he began to find himself distracted by a nagging thought that refused to leave him. It was irrational, but he couldn’t help but feel somewhat ashamed anyway.“I need to tell you something,” he finally said. “I…sort of knew who you were before you showed up yesterday. Not by name, I mean, but…”“You already said, and it’s okay,” Dean said, slowing down his strumming as he looked up at Castiel’s face, not a hint of discomfort in his eyes. “You found my pictures. Would have been weirder if you didn’t go all through the stuff lying around the place, with all that time you were holed up down there.”“It was more than the pictures, Dean,” Castiel confessed. He couldn’t maintain eye contact for this; dropping his gaze to his hands, which were twisted in the bed sheets, he went on. “I found some of the things you wrote, too. Old notebooks and such.”“You found my journals?” Dean said. He stopped playing. “And you read through them?” He sounded less relaxed now, and Castiel found himself pulling harder against the linens over his legs.“I did,” he confirmed. “Of course, I thought you were dead. Rather, I thought whoever had written them was dead, when I found them; I didn’t know they were yours specifically. So I didn’t see any reason not to look at them, you understand. I truly was beginning to believe that there was nobody left alive in the area, possibly in the entire country. At the very best, I thought perhaps there were a handful of survivors like me, scattered around, but that the likelihood of one of us stumbling over another would be…miniscule. I believed the person who wrote those words was gone—and that I myself would probably not last much longer.”“Cas, I’m not upset,” Dean said, his frown audible. “I was just sort of surprised. I forgot all about those journals I left there. Wish I could remember what all was in them, but I can probably take a guess, just thinking about when it was that Dad had us staying there, and…well, after Dad was gone.” He didn’t say anything for a moment, then started strumming again. “But it’s fine. I mean, you didn’t know I was listening to you, either, so we both got a glimpse behind the curtain. Guess it’s fair.”Castiel hesitated, but he couldn’t just accept the forgiveness as easily as it was offered. “You were listening out of a desire to find and rescue me, though. My prying was far more selfishly motivated.”“Well, of course it was, because you thought you were the only person around. Kind of hard not to be selfish when there’s nobody else to put first,” Dean said, far too reasonably. “Anyway, I might have been trying to listen for clues about your hiding place, but I can’t say I wasn’t getting anything else out of it.”“Some amateur covers of songs by artists who are probably moaning for human flesh,” Castiel sniffed dismissively. “It hardly equates, when I was practically putting on ‘The Castiel Novak Entertainment Hour’ for the world. Meanwhile, I was rationalizing my incredibly invasiveness as…as self-care.”Dean hummed a little as he played. “Did it help?” he asked. “Did you need whatever it was that you managed to get from my doodles and dumb-ass ramblings?”“They weren’t dumb,” Castiel muttered. “And…yes. It did help. Quite a lot.” He almost stopped there, but decided that, in the spirit of full disclosure, he might as well come fully clean. “It was incredibly isolating, living there by myself. The radio helped, but I sometimes felt as though there was less and less point to any of it. What you said before, about sticking it out for the chance to see something better? I was truly losing hope in that future ever happening, and so I was seeing fewer reasons to keep surviving at all. I may have believed that your journals had outlived you personally, but when I read them, I was able to feel connected to you in some way, which…well, you helped remind me that I wasn’t really ready to give up.” Castiel flushed when his own words registered. “I mean, your journals did. I’m not delusional.”“I know you’re not. I’m the one who told you that, if you’ll remember,” Dean said, a gentle teasing note in his voice. Castiel finally worked up the courage to meet his eyes again at that, and he was smiling. “But if feeling a connection to somebody you only know through a one-sided interaction is a mark of insanity, then Tessa’s gonna have to give me the same pills she’d give you.” Castiel stared, confused, and Dean rolled his eyes and grimaced in a show of reluctant embarrassment. “So when you were talking about all the concerts you’ve attended, or the pranks in college, or even past relationships? It may almost have slipped my mind, listening to all that, that I was supposed to be worried about you. All I could think was, ‘God, I really wish I could meet this guy for real.’”A short laugh burst from Castiel’s chest. “Seriously?” He couldn’t imagine somebody like Dean, so full of confidence and humor and perfectly gorgeous on top of that, ever being intrigued by someone like him.“Seriously! I even imagined how you and I might actually have bumped into each other, only in my head, we didn’t just keep going without noticing. Maybe I would have turned around and told you how sorry I was for being clumsy, and you would have told me it was no big deal, that I could make it up to you by getting you a cup of coffee, and then we would have sat for hours over just an unhealthy amount of coffee and pie, talking about everything under the sun.”“I do like pie,” Castiel encouraged, caught up in the picture.“See? You’re perfect,” Dean said, like it was just that easy to use a few words to reshape Castiel’s entire existence. “And you don’t think that’s weird? That even though I didn’t know you, I was spending whole days and nights with you in my head?”Castiel shook his head. “No, not at all,” he said. Then he remembered something horrible, and he felt his whole face turn dark red. “Oh, my God, I did a whole monologue about giving head.”Dean, without the slightest trace of sympathy, burst into raucous laughter. “Hell, yeah, you did!” he crowed. Castiel buried his face in his hands, groaning. He actually wished he’d stumbled across something truly personal and mortifying in Dean’s journals, suddenly feeling far less guilt about having gone through them.“What’s going on in here? Dean, are you disturbing my patient?” A friendly-appearing young woman stood in the doorway, eyeing Dean with an expression that was part frustration and part affection. Dean wiped his eyes, trying to regain control of himself, and she just sighed, crossing the room toward Castiel.“He’s really not bothering me, Doctor,” Castiel said, worried that she might actually make Dean leave. He might be embarrassed beyond belief, but that didn’t mean he wanted to see Dean go.“I know. It’s all part of the Winchester package,” she said. “Rarely boring, even when you might wish otherwise. Now, I managed to do a pretty good patch-up job on you while you were out, and I don’t think you’ll be laid up too long, but there are a few things I do need to check now that you’re awake.” Switching into a more clinical gear, Tessa peeled back bandages to examine abrasions, probed at his ribs, and had him turn his head from side to side to make sure his range of movement was typical for him. Dean watched in silence, apparently fascinated.“Good,” the doctor finally said. “Just one more thing. Can you tell me about how you got this?” With a gloved hand, she reached for the sleeve of his smock. Instinctively, he flinched away, and her eyebrows raised. “I won’t hurt you,” she said. “Please hold still.” Releasing a breath, knowing there was nothing he could say, he nodded. She reached forward once again, and this time, the sleeve was pulled up, revealing the scar of a large bite mark, faded red against his skin.The temperature in the room seemed to dip sharply as nobody spoke for a moment.“Castiel,” Tessa said. “You know what this looks like.”His throat was dry, and he cleared it, avoiding Dean’s stare. “Yes,” he said, “but you can see that I’m fine. You can test me—go ahead. My heart is still working, and my circulation seems perfectly normal, and…and I’m eating and drinking like I always have, not even any strange cravings. I didn’t even get a fever when it happened! I—”“Castiel, please, calm down,” she said, and he realized he was almost hyperventilating. “I’ve already checked your blood.”“Please don’t make me leave,” he said, trying desperately to interpret the look on her face. “I promise, I’m not infected.”“Nobody’s making you go anywhere,” Dean cut in. He was standing now, his whole posture just shy of aggressive as he stared down Tessa.To her credit, she didn’t quail at all under Dean’s stony expression. “Dean, I think at this point everyone in town knows your position on the matter, as well as what you think about following instructions that might run counter to that. You’re lucky I didn’t tell Major Novak you were in here with him when she came by again this morning. You can’t avoid her forever.”“Yeah, I know…” Dean replied, deflating a little, but Castiel barely heard.“Novak?” he said, sure that he had misunderstood. He lifted a hand to the back of his head, wondering if he’d actually hit it on the ground in the fall.Dean and Tessa were still arguing, oblivious to his bewilderment. “Nobody wants to just throw him out of camp,” she was saying. “But you have to understand that this isn’t anything we’ve seen, and—”“What I understand is that you guys have no idea what to do, and I don’t want anyone to start thinking that ‘new’ is the same thing as ‘dangerous,’ and using that to excuse doing something stupid.”“Dean, please,” Castiel tried again. They kept talking right over him, so he finally reached out and gripped Dean’s shirt. Dean stopped mid-sentence, turning to blink down at Castiel. “Please, tell me. She said…Doctor, you said ‘Major Novak.’” He turned his head back and forth to see both of their faces, searching for an explanation. “What did you mean?”Tessa frowned, annoyed at the interruption. “New Lebanon has a military presence, helping protect and keep us in the loop,” she said. “We’re lucky to have it.”Castiel frowned impatiently. “I understand that, but…” He looked back at Dean, thinking to try again, but he was caught off-guard by the apprehension on Dean’s face.“The major was in here last night, wasn’t she?” he muttered, not waiting for Tessa’s nod before going on. “So she knows, but she didn’t say anything? Damn it to hell.” He bent his neck forward, shaking his head with his eyes closed. “Tessa, you wanna…can you give us a minute or two?”“Fine, whatever you need,” she said, throwing up her hands and turning to leave. “It’s just our main medical building, but, sure, you can use it like your personal lounge. Why would I have a problem with that?” The door closed behind her as she was still talking.“Dean, I need you to tell me what’s going on, and quickly. I don’t think I can handle much more weirdness,” Castiel said. “If I have family left, and they’re here…I come from a large family, with lots of cousins, and there were others in the military. Please.” His heart was beginning to race, and he had no idea what to make of Dean’s blatant nervousness.“I’ll tell you, don’t worry,” Dean said. “I’d tell you to sit down, but, um, you’re ahead of me there, I guess. Just tell me one thing, Cas. Do you remember the night of the outbreak? Really, really remember?”“I won’t ever forget,” Castiel said simply. “I wish I could.”“You’re not the only one. But there was a lot of craziness that night, and I think a lot of folks probably thought they saw things they didn’t really see, or they remembered things in ways that didn’t actually happen. Panic can do that.” He rubbed his eyes, then took a breath. “Major Novak…that’s Naomi Novak.”
“Come on, Castiel! There’s no time!” Hands pulling him, pulling and pulling…
“My sister,” Castiel said through lips gone numb. “She didn’t die.”
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
Eighteen months earlier
“Fuck.” The pencil hit the wall, leaving a black mark on the plaster. Neither the mark nor the cracking sound the pencil made were nearly strong enough to feel satisfying, but Castiel felt too damn tired, all the way to his bones, to consider getting up and finding something else to throw. Maybe a Sharpie pen.It just never ended. Every time he thought he’d compromised enough, every time he took a step away from what he really wanted, hoping that maybe this time would be the last and that he could finally just take a breath and take stock and try to figure out how to make the best of things, it turned out that, no, it still wasn’t going to be enough. He wasn’t going to be enough. No matter how miserable he made himself, sacrificing goddamn everything—This was supposed to be his last opportunity for a frighteningly long time to have a little agency in his own life. A couple of unexpected months, dropped into his lap like a surprise gift, all because apparently the earliest report date for the Engineer course at Fort Leonard wasn’t going to be until the middle of July. Part of him had felt relieved at the temporary reprieve, but he really should have known better than to think he’d get anything like a vacation. No, this was just more time for Dad to keep “persuading” him to switch branches.Not enough for him to have picked his college major based on what Dad considered practical instead of what he himself loved; he “should” have gone to Annapolis or VMI, not Northwestern. Not enough to have compromised on going through Officer Candidate School in exchange for his college tuition money, even though he’d never wanted to be in the army in the first place. Now, even though he’d been one of the top picks from his OCS class for the Engineer Officer branch, Dad was still throwing passive-aggressive hissyfits because it wasn’t Infantry or Aviation.“‘Eisenhower was Infantry,’” Castiel mimicked bitterly, after taking a long drink from the bottle of beer he’d snatched from the fridge before storming off to his childhood bedroom. “‘MacArthur started as Engineer, but he asked to be moved to Infantry. Think you know better, boy?’” He wanted to slam the bottle down, but he gripped it tightly instead, watching the muscles in his arm tremble with the force of his anger.For what felt like the thousandth time, he had to remind himself that at this point, he couldn’t just pack up and disappear, or he’d be arrested for going AWOL. It served him right for ever compromising in the first place, rather than just hitchhiking his way out west somewhere where nobody ever heard of the Novak family or its “fine military tradition.”“Such a good little soldier,” Castiel muttered as he finished the beer. He left the bottle sitting on his desk and threw himself onto his bed, growling in irritation when he landed on his upper arm and it throbbed in protest. Another “compromise,” that. It wasn’t even like he was shipping out anywhere exotic anytime soon; as far as he knew, there were no yellow fever or malaria outbreaks in the Ozarks. When Dad had taken him to run an errand at Leavenworth back in January, though, it had somehow turned into an impromptu opportunity to “look proactive” by having all the inoculations in place ahead of time, and—oh, look, there’s old family friend and Chief Medic Doctor Benton, all prepared with the needles, so why don’t you just sit down, son? Won’t hurt a bit…Bullshit, it won’t. But after the first vaccine ambush, there wasn’t much point in protesting the rest of the series, leaving himself only semi-immune for no good reason. Hopefully, today’s round was the last, because he didn’t think he could take one more instance of having to sit still with a needle jabbing into him while a bunch of old angry men told him everything he was doing wrong with his life.The neighbor’s dogs were barking at squirrels again. If the Novaks lived on base, Castiel mused, instead of out in the more fashionable suburbs, that would be one annoyance he wouldn’t have to hear. When the hounds really got worked up, they were almost deafening, and they could make their fury known all night. Grumbling, Castiel got up and went to close his window against the noise. He paused with his fingers on the frame before he could slam it down. Something about the noise nudged at his brain to pay attention.The dogs didn’t sound angry, or at least not “kill the fuzzy thing” angry. They sounded alarmed—very alarmed. And it wasn’t just the neighbor’s pack, either; he thought he could hear barking and howling from almost every direction, though mostly from the east, toward town.Whatever. Castiel pulled the window shut with a firm thud. Downstairs, Dad was watching some crime drama, the television volume turned up way too high, even though it would be a cold day in hell before the man admitted the possibility that he might be getting old enough to need hearing aids. Even Naomi sometimes got aggravated by the cranked up noise sometimes, though living on base at Fort Riley meant that she only had to deal with it when she came to visit, as she was this weekend. Castiel was almost surprised she hadn’t asked him to turn it down, but he guessed she might have decided that would be disrespectful.The sound of gunshots, nearly shaking the floor, made him jump. Cursing, he stomped his foot loudly, not giving one flying shit about being respectful. When the soundtrack of sirens and shouting remained at a level that could wake the dead, Castiel stormed to his door and threw it open.“Dad, could you please turn that down before the cops show up with a citation?” he shouted. They wouldn’t, of course. Half the force worked as deacons and greeters at their church and thought his dad was every bit the community pillar, and the other half were old war buddies. Mom might be convinced by the risk, though. “Dad!”Behind him in his room, a guitar riff blared from his cell phone, signaling a text message. Before he could even turn around, it played again. And again. “What the hell,” he mumbled, heading for his desk where it sat.Bang. Another shot was followed by a scream, and Castiel’s head whipped around. That hadn’t come from downstairs, but from outside, maybe a few blocks away. Grabbing his phone and shoving it into his pocket without looking at the screen, he spun on his heel and dashed out the door, taking the steps two at a time.“Dad, did you hear that?” he hissed as he rounded the corner into the living room. To his surprise, the leather recliner was empty, Dad nowhere in sight. On the television, rather than a crime drama, there was a news broadcast, a bright red emergency alert banner covering the bottom of the screen.Naomi was standing in the middle of the room, her eyes glued to the screen of the phone in her hand. She didn’t appear to have heard him enter, and she startled violently when he approached her and touched her shoulder.“Castiel,” she breathed, grabbing her chest. “You scared the hell out of me.”“What’s going on?” he demanded, gesturing toward the TV. A female reporter holding a microphone with both hands was stumbling her way through some sort of inarticulate attempt to describe what looked like a riot happening at the Walmart down toward Lansing.Naomi was scrolling through her texts again, barely listening. “Check your phone,” she said. “There’s probably orders from whoever led your company in OCS, since you’re between stations right now.”“What?” Feeling confused, Castiel pulled his phone back out of his pocket, where it hadn’t stopped vibrating; the lock screen was a mass of messages from college friends, from army colleagues, and alerts from various news and social media applications.“I have to make a call,” Naomi said, striding out of the room as she dialed, but Castiel didn’t really care, caught up in trying to make sense of what he was seeing. “John Fosted was marked safe in the Attack in Monterey, CA.” “Inias Jones was marked safe in the Attack in Wilmington, NC.” There was text after text in the group chat with the the gang in Chicago, who were freaking out because the trains had all been shut down and the traffic-jammed streets were beginning to fill with shoving, hysterical mobs.Shots rang out yet again, though this time they had actually come from the television. Just as Castiel looked back up at the screen, a man in the crowd not far behind the reporter stumbled, his chest blooming red against his light blue jacket. The riot immediately erupted into an uncontrolled stampede as people screamed and tried to escape with no idea where to run. The reporter, wide-eyed with fear, opened her mouth to speak, but her camera cut out before she could say a word. The news anchors, thrust back into view behind the desk, were stunned into bewildered silence, staring at the monitors and waiting to be told what to say.“Anna Milton has been marked safe,” buzzed his phone in his hand. Anna, a friend from high school, was in Italy on a vineyard tour, nowhere near Kansas, or California, or North Carolina.It was getting impossible to keep up with the alerts, and from what he was able to gather from some of the messages, only a fraction were getting through, anyway. He tried to call the first friend on his contact list, more out of curiosity about whether it would work than out of any particular concern for them specifically, but there was only a recording telling him that all circuits were busy. If any officers from training were attempting to reach him and press him into emergency service in some way, he was pretty sure they’d have a fun time trying.With a hair-raising digital screech, the televised news program vanished and was replaced with an Emergency Alert Bulletin. Hoping this would finally provide some information about what was going on, Castiel found himself actually leaning forward a little as he waited for the message to begin scrolling. The screeching cut off, and in the silence, a computerized voice spoke. “This is an Emergency Action Notification. This station has interrupted its regular programming to—”“Yeah, yeah, come on,” Castiel urged impatiently.“—Federal government has declared martial law effective immediately throughout the state of Kansas. For your protection, please remain indoors with all doors securely locked. If you attempt to leave your homes or shelters or to travel by foot or vehicle without authorization, you will be immediately arrested. This is not a drill…”Castiel’s jaw hit the floor. “What the fuck?” he shouted. Remembering where he was, he found himself waiting for the inevitable maternal reprimand over his language, but none came. Actually, come to that point, where was Mom? Surely, she would have heard the Emergency Alert, even if she hadn’t been concerned about the sounds of the gunshots, the screaming, the howling, and, newly added to the cacophony, the rising wail of sirens in the distance.“Mom? Dad?” Castiel called out, heading into the kitchen, then poking his head through the open doorway of the master suite just beyond. His mother’s purse lay on the bed, as though she’d been rummaging through it and tossed it aside, but the room was otherwise empty. He went back out into the hallway, checking the front parlor and Mom’s sewing room before finally heading toward Dad’s office. The door was closed, and years of ingrained habit had him knocking before he threw open the door.There were both Dad and Mom, standing close together by the large polished mahogany desk that dominated the room. Much later, whenever Castiel found himself recalling this scene to mind, he would find it oddly strange that neither of them had actually frozen in place, startled and staring. Somehow, he felt, it would have been more appropriate if they had frozen, or given some other sign, any sign at all, that something incredibly significant was about to laid bare.“Castiel,” Dad said, every bit as formal as ever, even as he raised his voice slightly to be heard over the rising clamor. He hadn’t paused in his whatever he was doing; he’d barely looked up at Castiel’s arrival, glancing toward the door just long enough to identify who had entered. “Good, you’re here.”“Dad, you need to come quick and see this,” Castiel said urgently. “Has the colonel called you? Something big is happening—I don’t know if we’re being attacked, if we’re at war, or if it’s terrorists, but it’s bad. The news reporters—”“I’m aware of the situation, Castiel,” Dad interrupted tersely, examining something held in his hands. Outside, one of the neighbor’s dogs punctuated the sentiment with a series of snarling barks that ended in a piercing whine.“So did he tell you to head in?” Castiel demanded. “Did he say what’s going on? Naomi’s CO already called her—I think she’s probably already throwing her bag together to head back to Riley, if she didn’t already leave. Dad, are we safe here? I mean, those shots earlier—that was close. What—”“Enough.” With a sharp rap of his knuckles against wood, Dad turned to glare fiercely, his jaw set. “There is absolutely no time to spare, here. Certainly, there is no time for you to babble like an idiot child. I expect you to listen, not ask questions about matters that do not require your understanding.”Castiel gaped in astonishment, brain struggling to comprehend what he was being told. Behind Dad, he noticed Mom swaying slightly as she stood staring at nothing. Her face was pale, almost grayish. “Wait, Mom. Are you okay?” he asked in concern.“Your mother is fine,” Dad said briskly, not turning to check. Frowning, Castiel looked closer, seeing details he hadn’t noticed in his agitation: the way she was holding her arm awkwardly against her body, how she was holding a bit of gauze tightly against the skin bared by her rolled-up sleeve. A hypodermic needle, uncapped and empty, lay discarded on the surface of the desk, and next to that, as Castiel watched, Dad now placed the empty one he’d apparently just finished using. The sight elicited an sympathetic throb of pain in his own recently vaccinated arm.“Can somebody please just tell me what is happening?” he heard himself ask, but his voice sounded strange even to him. Mom was barely blinking, unresponsive, even when a siren suddenly blared unexpectedly nearby.“Dad, the entire garrison is being recalled to Riley, ASAP,” Naomi said as she came through the door. She hardly seemed to notice that anything unusual was happening, already having slipped into both her combat uniform and her soldier mentality. “I’ll call to let you know when everything’s under control.” Behind her, the TV news was shrieking about mob violence and an unverified rumor that some sort of mild-altering substance was at the root.“That won’t be necessary, Naomi. I have a different set of orders for you, much higher priority.”“Sir?” she asked. Her brow furrowed, but she held herself in restraint, hands fisted at the small of her back like she was standing in front of her CO instead of her own father. Castiel felt a scream building in his throat.“I need you to go to Leavenworth,” Dad said, moving quickly behind his desk and retrieving a dark green duffel bag. “It is imperative that this bag reach Doctor Thomas Benton. The contents are highly confidential, and you will not entrust this to any of his staff or to any other officer who says they will take it to Benton for you. Do you understand me?”“Yes, sir,” Naomi replied immediately. Outside, the dogs brayed; the smell of smoke began filtering into the room, and Castiel felt his heart begin to race even more quickly.“Castiel, you will go with your sister.” The sound of his name made Castiel jump in nervous alarm. Naomi turned to watch him impassively.“No, wait, I can’t,” he protested. “We’re in a state of martial law, and I don’t have any legitimate reason to be out there. No orders from anyone to report, and definitely no reason to head to Leavenworth!”“If you are stopped by anyone, give them this number,” Dad said dismissively, scribbling on a piece of paper. “You will be let through. Take the Jeep. Naomi, I’m trusting you.” He held out both the bag and the paper.Castiel, suddenly more frustrated and furious than he’d ever felt in his life, could hardly think. Impulsively, he threw out his arm, knocking away the hand with which Dad was holding the written phone number. “No!” he shouted. “Why do we have to go see Doctor Benton? There’s a goddamn battle zone out there, and…and does anyone else in this room even give a shit that there’s apparently something on actual fire?”For a moment, Dad seemed to come close to losing his temper, and Castiel prayed that he would. Then he grimaced, almost a baring of teeth. “I don’t have time to explain. You have to go, right now. Go!” Naomi reached for the note and the keys to the Jeep, ready to move out, but the chaos outside seemed to be fueling a similar pandemonium inside Castiel.“I’m not going anywhere until you tell me what’s going on,” he cried at the top of his lungs. There was too much happening, and there was no way to understand even a fraction of it, but he was sure that, no matter what, it would be suicidally stupid to head out into the madness without at least a little more information.Dad was shoving the bag into his arms, repeating himself as he tried to turn Castiel around and push him bodily out the door. Naomi seemed more concerned about getting there quickly so she could report back to her own base than she was about the risk that they would be arrested, or shot, or…what was the reporter screaming about now? Fucking cannibalism?“Why won’t anyone listen to me?” he begged, but it was like talking to a horde of zombies, single-mindedly focused on getting him out the door. “What about you, Dad? Why can’t you take him the bag, if it’s so important?”“I’ll be there soon,” Dad said. Out of the corner of his eye, Castiel saw him move a hand to the small of Mom’s back, pulling her a fraction closer. “It’s crucial that we all play our parts in this, and your job is simply to follow instructions. Get to Leavenworth, and don’t stop. Move, Castiel!”Naomi reached for the doorknob; the smell of smoke filled Castiel’s lungs when she pulled the door open and surveyed the scene. Up and down the block, people were panicking, plainly ignoring the mandate to stay indoors, as they rushed to throw things into cars and escape. To where, he had no idea, and he wasn’t convinced planning was playing much of a part in this madness. Children were shrieking, horns were blaring from the direction of the highway, and the dogs were going fucking insane.Something clattered and crashed near the back of the house, and they all jumped, startled. Dad recovered first, giving Castiel a hard shove forward toward where Naomi was standing on the porch. “Go!”Castiel’s shoulder hit the doorframe sharply, and he yelped, staggering a little. The impact and subsequent stumble turned his body, and when he looked up, he was facing Mom, looking straight at her as two unfamiliar men came crashing through the hall, coming directly toward them.He barely had time to draw breath for a shout of alarm before the intruders had wrapped their arms around her, yanking and—oh God, biting. She screamed, arms reaching desperately for help, as one of them jerked her head backward and fastened his jaws on her throat. The men had already been coated in blood to a horrifying degree when they’d entered the room, and now fresh spurts were covering the older stains, spattering over the walls and the carpet.He felt his own arm being pulled hard in the other direction. Naomi was frantically trying to drag him outside, shouting something he couldn’t understand and could barely hear. Dad was shouting, too, and his face was paper-white except for where Mom’s blood had splashed, and Castiel couldn’t breathe, there was too much smoke and too much everything—The man—no, the thing; nothing human could do this—who hadn’t dragged Mom to the floor threw himself at Dad, and for a moment, Castiel fully expected Dad to demonstrate exactly why, even at fifty-two years old, he still intimidated the hell out of most of the junior officers in PT. That thought only lasted a heartbeat, though, before the thing had Dad on the ground and…“NO!” Castiel screamed and screamed. He thought he might never stop. He was still screaming when Naomi pulled so hard that he fell to his knees. He was screaming when the first thing looked up from Mom (lying so still, so quiet) and snarled at him, lunging menacingly. He was screaming, and he couldn’t move, couldn’t do anything at all, and the thing lurched forward and grabbed at him.The feel of teeth digging into the meat of his shoulder sent fiery agony through his entire body. Naomi was still trying to pull him away, shrieking his name over and over, and the distant part of his brain that was still capable of any thought wondered if it was possible to be torn in two this way, whether it could possibly hurt more than he was already hurting. Then, abruptly, he wasn’t being pulled, because Naomi had dropped his arm and was stumbling back, her eyes wide and hopelessly terrified. And then she ran, disappearing into the chaotic darkness.Numb with shock, Castiel tried to call out to her, his voice breaking hoarsely. As though part of their feral insanity involved some type of prey drive, both intruders also lifted their faces and watched Naomi flee, tilting their heads and growling. The one who had bitten Castiel, closer to the door, unexpectedly released him, dropping his arm and lurching to his feet. The other followed just behind, and the two of them stumbled off in pursuit, leaving Castiel sprawled in a pool of blood that was only partly his own.He was alone. In the distance, there was another scream.
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
Present
“But you didn’t die.”“Don’t spoil the ending,” Castiel said. It could have been a joke, but there wasn’t much humor in his eyes. Dean wouldn’t have expected there to be, not after recounting the worst night of his life like that. Joking about painful things might serve as a time-honored coping mechanism, but it was never actually funny. “Obviously, I didn’t die. And I didn’t turn, either, which I only realized was strange a few days after that. Remember, we were all still operating under the assumption that it was terrorists, or drugged-up gang fights.”“Or brain fevers from meningitis or encephalitis, once we realized it was spreading,” Dean said. “All those college kids in dorms, sharing bodily fluids, were the problem, right? There was a different theory every day.”Castiel nodded. “But anyone paying any attention at all figured out pretty damn fast that even if you refused to buy into the notion that we were all living in a Romero head-trip, getting bitten by one of the other victims was not something from which you were going to recover. After the first dozen or so people I saw who went from bite to choking on their last breaths, then getting back up and shambling off groaning…I figured I was just taking my time about it. I had plenty of time to think, anyway, since there wasn’t much else I could do.”Sitting on the bed facing him, Dean was leaning forward with his elbows propped on his knees, completely drawn in. Castiel had been talking all morning, trying to explain what had happened to bring him here. More than once, he’d had to stop, wrapping his arms around himself and shaking as he tried to push past the memories that still gripped his heart. When Castiel had started silently weeping as he described his mother’s death, Dean could no longer hold back; he’d jumped out of the easy chair in which he’d started out and climbed onto the bed beside Castiel to gently hold him, rocking back and forth in silence until Castiel released a shuddering breath and went on talking.“So did you go to Leavenworth after that?” he asked. Glancing at the bag sitting in the corner, he figured he already knew.“I did try,” Castiel said sadly. “How could I not, when it was literally the last thing Dad asked me to do? But by the time I got myself pulled together and into the Jeep, feeling like maybe I wouldn’t immediately crash into a utility pole when I tried to drive, the main road was completely blocked. We lived about twenty miles away from the base, but I could barely make it past the outskirts of the town, between the car pileups and the riots and the roaming undead. Not to mention the Army, who gave up trying to arrest everybody when that plan turned out to be impossible, so they were just trying to set up roadblocks as though everybody would just turn around and go back home.”“Sure, same thing they tried near Omaha,” Dean said. “Sam and I were north of there, in the Sioux Falls area. We had to cut west into farm country in order to come south to get here.”“Cities were awful,” Castiel sighed. “Do you think they still are, or did they eventually clear out once there were no living people left?”“Depends on the city, I guess. I hear Kansas City’s not too bad anymore. Supposedly the military’s working on getting parts of it fixed up, so we can have a real hospital again.”Castiel nodded, looking as though he didn’t really believe but didn’t care enough to argue. ”So I couldn’t get near the base, but I couldn’t go back, either, and the way things were going, I wound up hiding out at the community college, just to stay out of sight. They didn’t have campus housing, and I suppose nobody immediately thinks about looting classrooms in a civil emergency, so I wound up staying there about a week. Good thing they’d just stocked the vending machine in the basement of the music building.”Dean snorted. “You and the whole underground music bunker scene, man. Kind of a theme, isn’t it?”Castiel rolled his eyes, trying not to smile. “I hoped things would be quieter when I headed out, that maybe the Army would have gotten its shit together with the martial law enforcement so I could try getting the bag to Doctor Benton. I went through it the next day, and it’s just a case with some flash drives, a notebook full of some code I can’t read, and…” He paused, then gestured toward the duffel. “You look.”Dean frowned, glancing at the bag and then back at Castiel. He slid his legs off the edge of the bed, standing and crossing the room hesitantly. Something about this had him wondering whether he was about to find a severed hand, a million dollars, or a ticking time bomb. Dean slid open the zipper carefully and peeked inside. It was all as Castiel had described, with the addition of a roll of heavy-duty black nylon, secured with a buckle. Looking back at Castiel, he cautiously lifted the roll and brought it back to the bed before unfastening the buckle and unrolling it. Inside, it was lined with small clear pockets, each of which held a hypodermic needle filled with a yellowish fluid.“What the hell is that,” Dean said, not really intending it as a question. Castiel shrugged anyway.“I couldn’t tell you that. What I can tell you is that I’d bet confidently that whatever it is, it’s what Dad was injecting into Mom and himself that night. I also have a fairly strong suspicion that I was not being inoculated against yellow fever in the months leading up to that night.”“You think your dad was playing Mad Scientist with his own kid?” Dean said, stunned by the thought.“Well, look at the evidence. Doctor Benton was giving me shots, which was, frankly, pretty sketchy anyway, since I hadn’t even finished the full officers’ course and they had no idea when or where I might end up being deployed. Dad, who wasn’t a doctor, had a bunch of needles and chose the middle of a worldwide catastrophe to attempt to use them on himself and his wife. Dad and Benton were doing something together that involved whatever is in those needles, and it was apparently top-secret. Yeah, I don’t think those are CDC-approved vaccinations.”Dean let out a long, low whistle. “You don’t think…” He looked pointedly at the bite-mark on Castiel’s shoulder, not daring to voice the idea.“Well, of course the thought occurred to me. How could it not?” Castiel held out his hands, frustrated, and started ticking down his fingers. “I cleaned it as best I could, when I thought it was just a really bad wound. Then, when I realized whatever it was was spreading through bites and scratches, I found some bottles of alcohol and dumped them all over it, hoping it might help. It wouldn’t have, by the way. If I’d really been infected, I’d have been better off drinking every drop of that alcohol and hoping my liver would kill me first. But I tried. Then, when the wound turned bright red, which I now realize was probably due to the alcohol, I thought, well, this is it, right? Time for the risky experimental options. I was going to cut off my arm.”“Holy shit,” Dean said, feeling his stomach flip. “Yourself? With what, a butcher knife?”“Probably? I couldn’t have swung an axe with enough force using only one hand, not at that angle.” Castiel seemed unfazed by the thought, and Dean had a moment to wonder at just how badly the situation had messed with this man’s head. “But then I decided that I’d never be able to stop the bleeding and I’d die anyway. I did try to make a tourniquet, which I didn’t really think would do much to keep whatever it was from spreading through my body. I honestly believed I was just dying a really, really long, protracted death. And then I didn’t.”“And that was a year and a half ago,” Dean said unnecessarily, still trying to reconcile the fact with everything he knew to be true. “You think your dad and this Benton guy made a vaccine to fight a zombie plague?”Castiel shook his head, dismissing the idea. “No, I doubt that. Unorthodox as whatever it was that the two of them might have been doing was, I still think that if Dad had known there was a possibility for a global apocalypse like this, he wouldn’t have kept a potential preventative measure secret. I don’t know what they were trying to do. All I can do is see what actually happened and make guesses as to how.”“So…back to the story,” Dean said, trying to regain focus. “You stayed at the college for a week, then tried the base again?”“Yes, this time by bicycle. One of the instructors had left a mountain bike in his office, and I was reasonably certain he wouldn’t be returning for it anytime soon. With that, I didn’t have to worry about the impassable roads, or about eventually needing to find gas. It was quieter, too, which turned out to be important, since most of the soldiers that hadn’t thrown up their hands and taken off were now walking corpses.”“Walking corpses in body armor,” amended Dean, and Castiel snickered.“Yes, though I wasn’t quite at the point of wanting to fight them, anyway. I had some trouble making my way the remaining miles without being spotted, but eventually I made it to the main gates, and it was immediately obvious that I’d wasted my time. Fort Leavenworth was completely, hopelessly overrun.”Dean winced. “No chance Benton was pinned down in a building in there?”“There was no way to find out. Dean, when I say ‘overrun,’ you need to understand that I’m talking about several thousand soldiers, the United States Army Combined Arms Center, the Command and General Staff College, and a brigade of military police. All milling about, groaning and bumping into each other, as far as I could see.”Dean understood more than well enough. He’d seen similar swarms, in former shopping malls and city streets and, once, in an unexpectedly deadly candy store where a crowd of people must have tried to hide together without realizing that one of them had already been bitten. Familiarity never made that type of scene any less chilling.“Clearly, there was no way I was ever going to be able to deliver the bag to Benton. Probably he was killed, anyway, and it doesn’t matter. Hell, maybe he was even Patient Zero, like they used to talk about in zombie flicks. I have no idea why I’m still carrying the thing around. Maybe I just feel guilty. If I’d just gone right away when Dad said, without demanding that he start explaining, he’d still be alive. Mom might be alive. It’s my fault.”“No, don’t do that,” Dean said sharply.Castiel scoffed, turning his head to look away. “Please don’t tell me I shouldn’t feel guilt over this. I’ve replayed that night so many times in my head, wishing I could have done it differently.”“It’s survivor’s guilt. I get it, and join the club.” When Castiel still refused to look him in the eye, Dean sighed and sat back down on the bed. “Fourteen.”A few seconds passed, and then Castiel’s curiosity seemed to win over his stubbornness. “Fourteen what?”“Fourteen is the number of people I’ve tried and failed to save since last April. The first six were before we got here, when Sam and I were still on the road. A mom, dad, and their kid, who we ran into at a gas station. We tried to band together, but a few days later, the mom twisted her ankle trying to carry the kid down a rocky slope, and we had to slow down. When zoms found our camp, the kid started screaming, and the dad panicked, and…it was bad. Then there were two college kids. Came across them trying to use baseball bats to hold off a group of zoms. Sam and I jumped in from behind and took care of the zombies, but that was the day we learned that it didn’t have to be bites, that deep scratches do the trick just as well. Those guys already knew, but they thanked us for trying before asking us to put bullets in their brains.” He swallowed hard, remembering how Sam couldn’t do it, so he’d had to handle it for both of them. “Last guy before we got here was a big dude, and he asked if he could tag along. Then he tried to rob us in the night. Good thing I’m a light sleeper. Even then, I still would have tried to find a way not to kill him, but he came at Sam with a knife, and…”Castiel reached out and put a hand over his, gently squeezing. “None of those were your fault, Dean.”“I know that. Doesn’t mean I don’t remember them when I try to close my eyes, wonder where I could have done something different. And the others after them, too, and there’ll be more. Hell, Castiel, you could have been number fifteen, either because I didn’t find you in time, or because I didn’t manage to get you back here safe.” The sight of Castiel falling from the saddle had made his heart seize in his chest, and it hadn’t really beat easier until Tessa had reassured him multiple times that no permanent harm had been done.Castiel still looked dissatisfied. “Once you made me aware of the existence of this place, though, it wasn’t your sole responsibility to keep me alive. Dean, I’ve been on my own almost the entire year and a half since all this began. I’ve had to fight, though I hate doing it, and I’ve held my own. You’ll remember that I did train as an officer in the Army—I’m a commissioned Second Lieutenant. I might actually be a little insulted by the logic you’re using, but I’m trying to understand.”Dean finally caught Castiel’s eyes and held them with his own. “Huh, a lieutenant. And what rank was your dad?”“Lieutenant Colonel. Oh-Five,” Castiel replied, not seeing the path down which Dean was steering him.Dean smiled, turning his hand over to grasp the hand Castiel had put over his. “So if I’m not supposed to feel guilty for not protecting you, what’s that say about your responsibility to keep your dad alive? You don’t think that’s a little insulting to him?”“No, but Dean…”“Look, you have no idea what would have happened.” Taking Castiel’s other hand and gripping them together between them. “Could be that if you’d gotten into that car, you and Naomi would have gotten to the base and been trapped in there, both been killed, and maybe then New Lebanon never happens and half the people here, including me and Sam, end up dead too. Maybe if you left, your dad and mom would have gotten out of there, but then they would have been attacked a block away and the same thing happens there. Maybe you all would have lived, I don’t know. But neither do you, and all we can do is find something about what we did end up getting that we can be grateful for.”They sat quietly, just holding hands for a few moments. Castiel closed his eyes, lowered his head. “My sister is alive,” he said. “I sometimes wondered. But I never let myself hope. And she’s here?” His eyes were shining, a clear blue that seemed brighter than before, when he opened them.“Yep.” Dean couldn’t stop grinning, and his heart felt like it could burst when he saw belief finally begin to sink in for Castiel. A tear escaped from one of Castiel’s eyes, along with a short laugh that was overflowing with relief and joy. There was no way he was going to spoil it by telling him how Naomi had tried to prevent them from going after him, or how, when she’d seen Castiel lying unconscious in the bed, she’d stared hard for long minutes before storming out of the room and refusing to come back in. There would be time for that later, once she managed to get her head around the incredibility of it all.“Oh, my God, you have no idea,” Castiel murmured, lips tremulous. “Dean, I have to tell you—I don’t think you truly realize. In the past forty-eight hours or so, I have gone from having almost no reason to keep going to feeling like…like I must actually be dead, because there can’t rationally be a way for this much happiness to be possible.”“Swear to God, Cas, you’re still breathing,” Dean laughed as his eyes started to water a little too. “And you better stay that way, after all the work we both put into it.” He released their shared handclasp with one hand and, with his thumb, brushed away a few of the tears tracking down Castiel’s cheek, relishing how the rasp of stubble was so tangible and real against his own skin.Castiel’s breathy laughter quieted, though the smile stayed, as he shook his head. “You don’t even know how much you actually did. I need to confess, Dean. I’m really not exaggerating when I say that I was so close to just giving up; you and your brother truly arrived in the eleventh hour, in all likelihood. I was struggling—no, that’s not right. I had been struggling for months, but I think I had just…stopped. I was drowning.”Dean’s hand hadn’t moved away from Castiel’s cheek, and now he paused in his ministrations, his thumb lingering on the sharp cheekbone. “Cas, you don’t have to,” he said softly. Thinking about Castiel like that, all alone in the bunker with only his darkest thoughts for company, made Dean’s throat tighten. He wanted to wrap Castiel up in a soft blanket, hold him tight, and do everything in his power to erase those memories for him.“No, I do,” Castiel said. “Dean, in my lowest moments, when I was surrounded by nothing but ghosts and despair, and part of me just knew it would be so easy to just throw open that door and finally join them, like I should have done in the beginning—” Dean’s hand tightened around Castiel’s jaw as he flinched “—there was nothing that truly helped, except that I had you there with me.”Castiel’s face was flushed, and he seemed ashamed by that admission. “You mean my pictures and journals?” Dean clarified, wanting to understand and feeling a little awkward about the way Castiel was gazing at him so intently.“Yes, but more than that. I imagined you, built you into something more than a two-dimensional image. Your written words, your clothing…the texture of your blankets and the slight wear that the oils in your fingers had left on the body of your guitar. I didn’t know your name, but I knew you, and knowing you, I knew that you would never give up like that, and that you would never forgive me for giving up, either.”Dean was absolutely floored. From the way Castiel’s jaw was trembling, he could easily tell that Castiel was nervous about how his confession would be taken, probably still worried about coming off as a creepy stalker type. He wasn’t crying anymore, but his eyes were still rather glassy, waiting to see how Dean would react.“This whole thing between us,” he said slowly. “Sort of amazing, isn’t it? You’d never buy this kind of thing if you saw it in a movie. It’d be too cheesy, too hard to swallow with all the random coincidences. Here’s me, trying to learn everything I could about you, up here working under the sister you thought you lost. And you, living in my old house and trying to figure me out from the things I left behind. We were both trying so damn hard to find each other, one way or another, and that was before we ever even met.”He was well and truly cradling Castiel’s face in his palm now, no two ways about it, and Castiel leaned into the warmth, lids drooping as he released the tension in his body. “It is absolutely ridiculous, isn’t it,” he said in agreement, a wry smile curling the corners of his mouth. “That night, I had my entire past ripped away from me, like we all did, and all I had left of it was some tattered threads. There was nothing left of my old life that I could cling to, but somehow, I managed to find a foothold in yours. And I know it wasn’t really you there with me, that it was only what you had left behind, but I still can’t help feeling like you saved my life twice.”Dean didn’t know which of them moved first. He was already leaning in, powerless to fight the demand coursing through his veins for one more second, but Castiel, apparently in similar thrall, was pushing forward onto his knees, freeing his hands so that he could plant one on the mattress between them and use the other to curl around the back of Dean’s head and draw him closer. Their lips met in a graceless collision, bumping roughly as the mattress dipped beneath their weight, but then they were guiding each other on with seamless give and take, push and pull. Castiel’s fingers threaded through Dean’s hair, tugging gently as he angled his head to deepen the kiss. Dean felt more than heard a small sound in his throat that was not a whimper, and his own hands were wrapped around Castiel’s jaw on both sides, fingers curling involuntarily through the tiny curls at his nape.Castiel kissed with the same passion that he made music, all-consuming and unafraid. The heat of his mouth, the intoxicating natural scent of the oils in his skin, and the relentless hold of those powerful hands in his hair and around the small of his back overwhelmed Dean, destroyed and rebuilt and then took him to pieces again. He never wanted to stop kissing Castiel. He parted his lips against Castiel’s, an unspoken invitation that was immediately accepted with a deep, vibrating groan and the slide of tongue against tongue.The mattress dipped again as Castiel rose to his knees without breaking the kiss, shuffling forward until he was straddling Dean’s lap. When he lowered his weight onto Dean’s thighs, rocking forward, the frisson of sparking pleasure made both men gasp, and Dean dropped his hands to Castiel’s hips, gripping firmly to encourage him on.A sudden voice clearing from the doorway startled them. Dean’s head shot upward, resulting in an unfortunate collision with Castiel’s chin as Castiel ducked his own head. Their consequential groans were of an entirely different timbre than the ones they’d been making only moments before, and Tessa covered her mouth with her hand to hide her smile.“I’m not giving you ice packs for any bruises you get for that,” she said. “Serves you right for sullying my clinic. Now, if you’ve quite finished, I’d appreciate the opportunity to actually do my job. Dean, clear out.”Face bright red but without a regret in the world, Dean turned back to Castiel. “Guess I better head back to work. But I’ll be back around later this afternoon, okay?”“You’d better,” Castiel said, his eyes sparkling. “I look forward to…finishing our conversation.”Tessa huffed. “Oh, for the love of…you know, I’m pretty sure you’re going to have a miraculously quick recovery, Castiel. In fact, I’m sensing a discharge to bedrest in your own cabin just as soon as it wouldn’t be considered egregious malpractice. God knows it’s hard enough to maintain sterile hygiene around here without adding in recreational exchanges of bodily fluids, right there in one of the clinic’s only beds.”Jumping to his feet with a chuckle, Dean dropped a kiss on Castiel’s temple, then practically skipped toward the door. Impulsively, he planted a kiss on Tessa’s cheek as well. “Take good care of him, Doc,” he said as she spluttered, then dashed out the door with the sound of Castiel’s deep laughter following him.
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
“What do you mean, she’s not here? When I came by this morning, you informed me that she would be out of her office all morning, but it’s two o’clock now. Let me ask you this: does Naomi ever actually use this office, or is it simply the place where her mail is forwarded?”The young man sitting at the small table in the corner of Naomi’s office, apparently in charge of pointless paperwork, gave Castiel a weak smile. For once, Castiel actually wished he still had his old uniform. It was harder to radiate authority in flannel and faded jeans.“If my sister returns,” he said, biting off the words with as much force as he could muster, “please pass on the message that I’ve been trying to speak with her.” He turned on his heel and stalked out, nearly bumping directly into a woman walking past. She glanced at his face and whatever she saw had her quickly hurrying out of his way before he could apologize.This was incredible. Castiel had been somewhat confused, after thinking about it, that Naomi hadn’t come by to see him while he was still in the clinic. If their positions had been reversed, he was sure that he would have refused to leave his sister’s side, overcome with joy that she had been found alive. Naomi had never been the most emotionally demonstrative of siblings, but surely these were extraordinary circumstances.Then again, she was apparently in charge of the military leadership of the settlement, which couldn’t be an easy job. Her plate was likely overfull, and so he decided to be patient and to wait until he was released and able to go to her, rather than expecting her to come to him. It was a little troubling, though. He confided as much in Dean, who seemed sympathetic, but who also warned him that Naomi might be a little more prickly that Castiel remembered.“A zombie apocalypse changes a person,” he’d said, attempting to lighten the mood, but it was quite true. Castiel tried to release any preconceived notions as he prepared for their reunion.What he hadn’t anticipated was that apparently Naomi didn’t want a reunion at all.At first, he’d told himself he was being paranoid. She was busy; that was undeniable. It simply wasn’t logical to believe that every single person in town was lying to him about having seen her running about, or occupied with this task or the other, or having had to fly to Offutt for an unscheduled meeting with the generals. As time passed, though, the likelihood of Naomi being unaware that Castiel was there and trying to catch up with her diminished rapidly, leaving him with the only possible conclusions being that she either didn’t care or that she was deliberately avoiding him.He was hurt. No, he was angry. The question was whether he was angry with her or with himself. Before any of this had happened, Castiel would have found it laughable to imagine his sister being eager to see him, let alone being tearfully moved by the prospect. How stupid of him to think that things would be different now just because they had each believed the other to be dead.He wasn’t giving up, though. His motivation had simply changed shape. Now he wanted an explanation.Other than his family trouble (he did find that a small swell of wonder swept through him every time he remembered that he still had family with whom he could have trouble), fitting into camp had been astonishingly easy. He’d barely walked out of the clinic, supported by Dean’s arm around his shoulders, when he’d nearly been knocked off his feet by a redheaded whirlwind who was apparently his new “bestie.” “They should have let me talk to you on one of their headsets, so we’d already know each other!” Charlie Bradbury had complained after they’d been more formally introduced. “You’re going to have to come to game night so I can find out all about you, the stuff they didn’t write about in your files.” Castiel had decided not to ask what files she was talking about, but he’d been unable to resist falling under the spell of her infectious enthusiasm.He’d gotten to know the other Runners, as well, and he found them to be a raucous but friendly group, despite the teasing they’d hurled at Dean when he’d led Castiel to their long dinner table the first time. Despite Castiel’s usual level of shamelessness, the curly-haired brunette named Meg had managed to make his ears burn with some of her cruder suggestions until a few of the others took pity on them and steered the conversation around to their long-running competition of zombie kill counts. (He’d definitely made note, however, of which suggestions had made Dean blush the hardest.)Bobby Singer, the radio handler and unofficial uncle, apparently, to everyone in town, had given him a hard stare when Dean had dragged Castiel to the bar his first night out. Castiel had tried not to flinch under the weight of his eyes, worried that he might fail to pass muster, which might cause trouble for Dean, but then Bobby had harrumphed and slid a drink in to his hand, keeping his opinions to himself on Castiel’s worth. He hadn’t spared Dean his gruff remarks, though, for what Castiel had recently discovered had been an entirely unauthorized rescue mission.“Next time you decide you want to go chasing will-o-wisps out in the woods, boy, you best remember who it was who tanned your hide when you were a boy and ran off and got lost. Your daddy wasn’t the only one who knew how to follow a trail, and if I have to hunt you down and put the fear of God in you again, don’t think I won’t.”Dean just grinned sheepishly, palming the back of his neck, and Bobby huffed again. “Put a leash on him if you have to,” he’d said to Castiel before slumping back onto his stool.There was also a fair amount of astonishment over the fact that Castiel was actually real, which had apparently been in doubt. The strangest inquiry along those lines had been a very confusing line of questioning about whether he’d ever worked for the Soviets, and when he’d denied it, the mulleted man asking had seemed so disappointed that Castiel had found himself trying to make up for it by adding that he did take Russian language classes in college. Unfortunately, that admission led to a lot of cryptic looks and sly winking and oblique comments, and Castiel was pretty sure he’d somehow accidentally managed to imply he was a KGB agent, but he supposed it didn’t matter anymore.He paused to consider. Perhaps being a spy, even rudimentarily, was what he needed to do after all.Instead of heading back toward the dormitories or to the greenhouses that had fascinated him from his first glance, he made his way around the side of Naomi’s office building, ducking behind a corner so that he could hear anyone approaching without being seen. He felt a little ridiculous, lurking in the shadows like a child playing hide-and-seek, but he wasn’t the one who’d chosen this game. He’d be the one who won, though. She’d have to come back eventually.Castiel yawned, tipping his head back against the wood siding. He’d only been here about a week, but his body had obviously become accustomed to the more sedentary life he’d led in seclusion. Around New Lebanon, everybody worked, even the newest arrivals. He had no permanent role yet, since he was still technically recovering from his injuries and couldn’t do much heavy lifting, but that only meant he’d been relegated to busy-work like errand running and message delivering.It was hard to complain too much, though, seeing how exhausted and sore Dean was when he practically collapsed onto the floor each night. Evidently, the consequences for his rogue mission had come to roost, and he and Sam were being run ragged to the extent that they’d never even dream of running so much as ten extra feet without permission. Castiel felt a twinge of guilt, remembering the way Dean’s calf muscles had spasmed under his fingers the night before when he’d tried to massage them; Dean had reassured him repeatedly that none of it was Castiel’s fault and that he’d do it again in a heartbeat, but Castiel still couldn’t help feeling responsible. It was also probably wrong for him to be getting any amount of gratification from having his hands all over those aching muscles, but dammit, he was only human.The click of the door made him jump, when he’d been leaning there long enough that his feet had started to cramp, but it was only the assistant leaving the office, his arms full of papers. Castiel grimaced, looking up at the sun’s position in the sky. Was he being an idiot? He might end up waiting here for hours, and he wasn’t even sure that the assistant had been truthful when he’d said Naomi was in camp. Maybe she was off somewhere working on a long-range project that would keep her away for days.Fortunately, just as he was beginning to conclude that he should head back to the dorms and try again later, he heard the sound of brisk footsteps approaching. He recognized that gait well, having heard the same sort of confident stride echoing through the hallways of his house since his earliest memories. Novaks didn’t walk; they marched.Without hesitation, Castiel pushed himself upright and strode toward the sound, falling into an identical march of his own. Naomi, reaching for the doorknob, paused in place as her eyes fell on him. To her credit, she didn’t even seem surprised. “Castiel,” she said; only the slightest shake in her voice over the last syllable betrayed any uncertainty.“Naomi,” he replied. Then he tipped his head in a show of consideration. “Or should I be calling you ‘Major’? I’m not sure what protocol is here, you see. Am I your long-lost brother, or are we keeping this to some sort of formal acquaintanceship? I only ask because it seemed rather strange that my arrival here doesn’t seem to have even warranted a courier message from you, which isn’t exactly indicative of familial closeness.”“I was going to come find you,” Naomi said, but she wasn’t meeting his eyes. She pushed the door open, then hesitated before stepping inside. “You should come in,” she eventually said.“Only if it’s not too inconvenient,” Castiel said drily. He knew he was being harsh, and it felt almost mean with the way she wasn’t really defending herself, but he couldn’t seem to stop. She sighed softly, stepping to the side to let him pass, then closed the door behind them both. Castiel didn’t wait to be asked to sit; no matter what he’d said, he had no intention of being treated like a subordinate officer here. He pulled the chair from behind the assistant’s table to a patch of floor off to the side of her desk, turning it to face her seat without being separated by any physical barriers that might bolster ideas of authority or submission. Naomi seemed to understand the unspoken message, and she sank into her own seat with her shoulders dropping tiredly.And then they sat there, awkwardly staring at each other. Well, Castiel was staring at Naomi, anyway; her eyes were still determinedly downcast.Finally, he relented. “We can’t do this forever,” he said. “It’s just us left. We need to be able to at least talk.”“I know,” she said in a strained voice. “I’m just having a hard time with this.”He lifted his eyebrows. “A harder time than when you thought I was dead?” he asked.Snorting, she lifted her gaze and met his, but there was a sadness there. “Honestly? Maybe a little.”“Ouch,” he said, not trying to conceal the sharp impact of her words.“Not what I meant,” Naomi said, lifting a hand to her furrowed forehead and rubbing hard. “It’s just that when you were dead, or I thought you were, it was terrible. I spent months trying to get over seeing you and Mom and Dad attacked and killed. I grieved, and it hurt so bad. I’m still grieving. It never stops.”“But…I’m here,” Castiel said as gently as he could manage.“You’re here,” Naomi agreed, closing her eyes. “And I’m so, so overwhelmed and grateful for that, even if I can’t understand it. But at the same time…Castiel, if you’re alive, then that means…it means I…” She fought visibly for control, then clenched her hands into fists that she rested in her lap before opening her eyes and looking at him fiercely. “It means I have to accept that I ran off and left you for no reason but my own cowardice.”“Naomi,” he tried to protest, but she cut him off before he could continue.“I’m sorry, Castiel,” she said, and then, as though the dam had broken, she poured out her feelings brokenly. “I’m so sorry, and there’s absolutely nothing I can say to make up for it. I’d ask you to forgive me, but there’s no reason you should. What I did was indefensible. I don’t deserve forgiveness.”“Well, who does?” Castiel asked. His anger had evaporated quickly at the sight of Naomi’s honest remorse. It was blatantly obvious that she’d been avoiding him not out of disinterest, but out of some form of misguided self-punishment. “Forgiveness isn’t about deserving, anyway. Whether I forgive you or not is up to me, and it really only affects me in the end, not you. For the record, though, I don’t really need to forgive you because I was never angry with you about that.”“What?” she said. “How could you not be? I left you there surrounded by monsters, the monsters that had just killed our parents. I ran, and I found safety, and I didn’t even think about going back for you, not once.”“Why would you have?” he insisted. “You saw what happened. The thing bit me—there wasn’t even a question about that. It was a zombie, and it sank its teeth into me, and even if we didn’t know right that moment what we were facing, it wasn’t a difficult leap to know that a bite was a death sentence. Staying would have been stupid. I would have run, too. There’s absolutely no way in hell you could have known I’d live. I’m guessing Dad never played Mad Scientist with you like he did with me?”Naomi shook her head slowly. “Tessa told me what you think. I can’t believe Dad would have had anything to do with this. But you’re saying he lied to you and had you given injections of some sort of unknown substance instead of ordinary travel vaccinations?”“I honestly don’t know what to believe,” Castiel said, “but any theories I can imagine are all pretty damning. Why wasn’t he panicking like everyone else? And why am I alive when we’ve literally never heard of another single person who was bitten and didn’t go gray? I kept waiting to get sick and die, but it never happened, and there’s only one variable I can see. And then there’s how obsessed he was over that duffel, getting it to Doctor Benton, and it’s full of more needles and shots like the ones Dad and Mom were trying to give themselves that night.”“It’s Lindbergh and Carrel all over,” Naomi murmured. Castiel lifted his chin questioningly, and she chuckled without much humor. “You always did turn your nose up at any history subject that wasn’t music or the arts. Charles Lindbergh, the pilot. Army officer, too, by coincidence. He and a doctor named Alexis Carrel, back in the early 20th century, bonded over the idea that with the right science, they could make the human body immortal, like the soul inside.”“You’re kidding,” Castiel said, fascinated and unnerved at once.“It was quite disturbing. They tried to reanimate mummies, and they experimented on Lindbergh’s son’s own pets.” She shuddered; Naomi had always had a soft spot for cats. “They also were proponents of eugenics, and they experimented on rats and mice to find ways to enhance the strengths of the strongest and allow the weak to be eliminated. Eventually, Lindbergh did come to his senses and turn his back on all that, but Carrel ended up with a Nobel prize, and his work paved the way for the development of organ transplants.”Castiel narrowed his eyes, trying to process this new information. “Are you thinking Dad and Doctor Benton were doing sinister experiments, and it ended up starting the apocalypse? That’s a rather big leap based on the evidence. It would also imply he had the cure, which he gave me.”“Maybe a cure, or maybe not. He had something, certainly. I remember Benton, and he was always ambitious in the extreme. I heard his name mentioned as a possibility for Army Surgeon General back when the last one retired, but he didn’t want to give up hands-on practicing and research. There were jokes that he was too busy with his wars on death and disease to think about other wars. Now I wonder.” The whole time she’d been speaking, Naomi was sitting up straighter and straighter in her chair, but now she sagged back again, wilting. “But it doesn’t matter. It’s been too long for any of this to help. You might have been his test subject, but Tessa checked your blood, and whatever was in there isn’t there anymore, or not enough to tell us anything helpful.”“The needles in the bag—”“I’m not about to authorize human testing like Dad and Benton were doing,” she said firmly. “And we have nothing like the equipment they had at Leavenworth to try to figure out what’s in them through experimentation. For all we know, whatever is in there is what kicked off this whole disaster.”Castiel thought for a minute. “But if we had the equipment at Leavenworth?”“That might be a different situation, but so would having the equipment they had at Hopkins or Argonne or MIT. All equally useless to us now. I don’t know if you were aware of this, but it makes a whole lot more sense after this conversation. All the largest outbreaks at the very beginning were centered around military bases. It spread quickly, and they weren’t the only hotbeds, but they remain the worst areas even now. There could be a certified letter confessing the cause, the process, and the fix for the outbreak sitting on Doctor Benton’s desk, but trying to get anything out of Fort Leavenworth would be a nightmare.”Castiel was lying face-down on his mattress, the same position into which he’d flopped the moment he’d returned to the dormitory, when his door opened. “I’ve been paroled,” Dean’s cheerful baritone voice announced. “Don’t tell anybody, or they’ll pull me back. Managed to multitask a couple of projects into one, so I could finish before sunset for a change. Hey, what’s wrong?” He finally took in Castiel’s defeated slump, and he made his way to the bed, kicking off his sneakers as he walked.“Finally talked to Naomi,” Castiel mumbled into his pillow, not lifting his head. Fingers threaded their way into his hair, comfortingly rubbing.“Went that well, huh?” Dean said softly.Castiel turned his head, pushing onto his elbows. “Oh, that part was okay, I suppose. I had to hide and jump out at her in order to get her to stop running away, but I think we can get past that with a little time. She thinks she…well, we can talk about that later. But then we got to discussing all the other things—the fact that I survived, the mess with Dad.”“And she really didn’t know anything about it?” Dean asked. “The injections, whatever’s in the notebook or on the drives?” They’d given the flash drives to Charlie right away, after Dean promised Castiel that if there was one brain within a thousand miles that could break through the encryption and understand what was on the other side, it would be hers. She’d been avid in her agreement, had immediately started mumbling to herself over them, and hadn’t even noticed when they’d slipped out of her workshop, but they hadn’t seen her since then.“She says she didn’t, and I believe her,” Castiel said. “She was distraught over the idea that she’d abandoned me with no clue that I wasn’t necessarily terminal. God, just talking with her, though,” he groaned, flipping onto his back and running his hands over his face. “I’d pretty much accepted that Dad was up to his elbows in something with this, but now I can’t stop thinking. Our father destroyed the world, Dean.”“Hey, you don’t know that for sure,” Dean argued. His face was lined, and his eyes still showed the tiredness from the many miles he’d been putting on his legs over the past week, but he seemed more energetic than he had in days. If it wasn’t for the fact that every time he closed his eyes Castiel kept seeing his father’s hands holding that needle he’d just pulled out of Mom’s arm, Castiel might have already stripped that sweaty shirt away from those broad, freckled shoulders and gotten a start on some of the other things he’d been thinking about doing since he first laid eyes on Dean Winchester.“Naomi makes a good case,” Castiel huffed instead. “You should have heard her talking. I had no clue Doctor Benton was as obsessed as he was, but I can definitely believe that between him and Dad, they could have pushed each other toward something frightening, something they thought would be groundbreaking. It broke something, anyway.”Dean picked up Castiel’s hand in his, running his fingers over the knuckles. He didn’t seem to know what to say, which was fine; there wasn’t anything that could be said that would make this any better.“Anyway,” Castiel continued, “None of it’s important anymore. There’s absolutely nothing we can do, and there’s no way to prove any of this. Dad’s dead, Benton probably is, and they took their secrets with them, other than a roll of needles we can’t analyze without different tech, some flash drives we can’t break into, and a notebook full of what might as well be Sudoku solutions. And me, but I’m useless, too, because the doctor says I used up too much of the magic juice in not dying, and now I’m just an ordinary person again.”“Okay, first, you are the furthest thing from ordinary,” Dean said, bending forward to brush Castiel’s lips with his own. Castiel sighed into the kiss, protesting a little when Dean sat back up, but Dean kept him from chasing after another with a gentle but firm hand against his chest. “Second, don’t write off Charlie yet. She’s like a pit bull with things like this, and she’s not close to waving a white flag. Sam’s over there now with coffee for her, since he knows better than to try to get her to take a break before she’s good and ready.”“All right, but even if she gets into them, what good will it do?” Castiel griped. His distress was rising again, and now all he wanted to do was kiss Dean until he stopped thinking about anything else. He wanted his hands on more than just his thighs; he hadn’t realized the true extent of his sexual frustration after such prolonged celibacy until these past few days.“Hang on, hang on,” Dean said patiently, grinning when Castiel scowled. “God, you’re adorable. Anyway, you said you needed different tech to figure out what’s in those needles. Are we talking about any old lab stuff, or stuff from Benton’s personal stash?”“Why, is there a major research closer than that one?” Dean raised an unimpressed brow at Castiel’s sarcasm. “Sorry. It’s just…I don’t know. I studied engineering, not chemistry or bio. I’m fairly certain Tessa has ordinary lab equipment already, so we probably would need something more advanced. Ideally, yes, we could use Benton’s equipment, since access to that would mean we also had access to anything else he had left in his office and lab, but I’m telling you, that’s not an option. Naomi already told me that, when I had a similar idea. There are far more zombies swarming the base than we can send fighters to handle. We’d be overwhelmed in minutes.”“Well, sure, an assault would be fucking stupid and a waste of time,” Dean interrupted with a shake of his head. “That’s not what I’m talking about. We can’t go in and try to battle our way through, but a stealth raid might work. Go in the back door, take a smaller group that can move quietly, grab and go.”Castiel stared, stunned. “Are you serious?” he said. “Dean, you heard how I described the base. Thousands of zoms in battle gear. Even if half of them have wandered away by now, it would still be insane.”Dropping onto his side to curl under Castiel’s arm, Dean poked him in the ribs. “Come on, where’s your sense of adventure?” he teased.“A zombie ripped it out of my shoulder with his teeth.”“Fair point,” Dean conceded. “But I’ve done crazy shit before, and this could actually be worth it. Castiel, what if we could find something that really explained how all this started, what happened to turn regular human beings into flesh-eating monsters? What if there’s formulas, and documentation, and we could study it all and maybe even figure out how to make it stop spreading? Whatever your dad gave you, whatever he was trying to give your mom and himself before it was too late—think about it. If Sam and I and all the other Runners had that kind of protection, or if we could figure out how to make it safe for wider use, we could finally get ahead of this thing instead of running around putting out little fires all the time.”Castiel couldn’t help it; Dean’s vision was drawing him in. “We could start growing again, having families. We could start clearing out larger areas rather than hiding behind fences and holding our breaths.”“Sam could finally get his own dog,” Dean chuckled. “Now, we’ll have to get your sister’s approval this time, since I’m not a complete moron, but I’m thinking maybe a dozen of us? There’s about a half-dozen Runners I trust who I’m pretty sure would be down, plus another half-dozen soldiers of Naomi’s choosing from off-site. Not so many that we’ll be noticed, but enough to hold our own long enough to make a break for it if we have to.”“Would I count among those soldiers?” Castiel wanted to know, and Dean immediately frowned.“No, you don’t need to get into this,” he stated firmly. “You might technically be an officer, but you’ve been out of practice for way too long. Plus, you’re still injured.”“I’m sorry, but I missed the part where you said we were leaving tomorrow morning,” Castiel retaliated. “I’m bruised, but I’m healing, and in another week I’ll be fine. You said yourself that we’ll need my sister to sign off on this, and between that and getting the military back-up, my injuries will not be an issue. And ‘out of practice’ is an assessment so laughable that I’m not going to bother addressing it.”“Yeah, maybe, but…”Castiel huffed, rolling his eyes in annoyance. The mattress was narrow, but it was just wide enough that he was able to roll onto his side and then further, landing astride Dean with a hand planted on either side of his head. “You are infuriating,” he said, “and all the more so because you’ve had every reason to be. I know for a fact that you are every bit as good as you think you are. You can run twenty miles, scale walls, handle weapons with ease, and take on an entire mob of the undead, all without losing that insufferable smirk.”“It was twenty-seven miles,” Dean added helpfully, smirk solidly in place.“Braggart,” Castiel deadpanned. “But you need to remember, Dean Winchester, that you are not the only one with a little room to boast. Did you know that there are three levels of qualified marksmanship in the United States Army, Dean? Out of forty targets, soldiers must hit at least twenty-three at various ranges and from a variety of positions. Hitting thirty will earn you a sharpshooter badge. Please guess how many I hit when I was tested.”Dean groaned, not because he knew where this was headed, but because Castiel punctuated his request with an open-mouthed glide of his lips over the bolt of Dean’s jaw.“That’s correct, Dean. I hit all forty. I’m a qualified expert marksman. I also received a perfect score of three hundred on my APFT—that’s physical fitness—and I hold the current four-kilometer open water swim record at my alma mater.” He moved to the other side of Dean’s throat and ran the tip of his tongue playfully along his pulse point.“Okay, okay, you’re a bad-ass,” Dean said breathlessly. He tried to wrap his arms around Castiel’s hips, only to have Castiel grab both of his hands and move them to rest against the pillow, holding them in place. Dean looked almost pained in his growing desperation. “Maybe a bigger bad-ass than me! You happy?”“Mmm, maybe,” Castiel said, quirking a smile. “I could be happier, though.”“You and me both,” muttered Dean, but Castiel didn’t give him long to pout, sliding downward along his body. He released Dean’s hands with a stern look of warning that had Dean keeping them obediently in place, and then he placed his own hands on the waistband of Dean’s track pants. Wanting to be sure, he looked back up and raised his eyebrows in silent question. “Oh, don’t you dare stop now, sir,” Dean growled, and Castiel shuddered with desire.*****Slipping his fingers under the waistband, he slowly drew down Dean’s pants and briefs in one go. His skin was salty from the sweat of the day’s exertions, but Castiel had always found something sensually pleasing about the tastes and smells associated with physical exertion. With absolutely no preamble, he ran his tongue along Dean’s already hardening cock, root to tip, before sucking the head between his lips.“Holy shit,” Dean hissed. Glancing up, Castiel preened in satisfaction to see that Dean was gripping the pillowcase with both hands, knuckles turning white. “This isn’t going to take long, Cas,” he said hoarsely, lids hooded over his dilated eyes.Castiel didn’t care. He’d take his time later, but for now, he wasn’t interested in holding back a single thing. With his eyes trained on Dean’s face, treasuring every detail of how his eyes squeezed tightly shut and his lips parted around each gasp, Castiel set about utterly wrecking him. He let himself be purposefully sloppy, allowing his saliva to cover the fingers that were caressing Dean’s balls, then slipped them further down to glide between his ass cheeks and massage the tight furl he found there. He pulled out every trick in the book with his lips and tongue, alternating shallow and quick pumps of his mouth with deep swallows that took the head into his throat.Dean was a man of his word. It didn’t take long at all.“Get up here,” he said, sounding as hoarse as if it had been his throat accepting the abuse rather than Castiel’s. Castiel crawled up and over Dean’s waist, allowing Dean’s trembling fingers to quickly open his belt buckle and shove his jeans down around his hips. Warm, callused fingers wrapped around his throbbing cock, already slick with arousal, and stroked firmly. In far less time than it had taken Dean to reach his own climax, Castiel was groaning and coming in hot streaks across Dean’s chest. His eyes rolled back into his head as, with an exaggeratedly dopey grin, he collapsed onto the bed beside Dean, legs tangling.*****“So,” he said, after they both caught their breaths. “Can I assume I’ve made my point?”Dean snorted. “What, did they give a badge for that in the Army, too?”“Don’t be ridiculous. That was part of my thesis defense.” Dean elbowed him in the side, and he chuckled. “But I actually got distracted. The biggest point I could make is that I’m the only one here, other than Naomi, who’s actually been in Benton’s office before. I can get us in there without getting lost, and I know where his files are likely to be. Face it, you need me.”Dean gazed at him through narrowed eyes, then exhaled hard before rolling to the side and wrapping an arm around his waist. “Yeah, I know.”“Good. Now get off me, your shirt is disgusting.” Castiel shoved at him playfully, not really trying hard to escape.“Well, whose fault is that? Only half these fluids are mine, dude.” Sitting up and carefully pulling the soaked shirt over his head, Dean made a face at the smell. “Yeah, shower time. You coming?”There wasn’t even the slightest possibility Castiel could imagine himself ever saying no.
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
“You know, it’s only a couple hundred miles. If we played it conservative, did between ten and fifteen a day, we’d be there in less than two weeks.”“As opposed to about an hour in the choppers,” Castiel reminded him. They’d been going round and round about this ever since the final travel arrangements had been settled, leading to the revelation that, despite being some sort of real-life action hero, Dean was absolutely petrified of flying.“Give it up, Cas,” Sam called from where he stood beside the Blackhawk that would carry the group to the base. “He was afraid of the little helicopters on poles that the county fair had when we were kids. You’ll never get him on board willingly, so just skip to the coercion and bribery.”“Shut up, Samantha,” Dean threw back, holding up his middle finger in his brother’s direction. “At least I didn’t need to be carried screaming past the Fun House. The clowns weren’t even real, just painted on the walls.”Jody and Donna, sitting in the shade by the foot of the helicopter, laughed at the argument, looking as though neither of them had a care in the world. Castiel envied their relaxation, even if it was only partly genuine and part for show. A couple of the soldiers Naomi had brought in for the mission had openly questioned the abilities of the female Runners, though they’d given that a rest when Naomi had made some cutting remarks of her own. Castiel had no idea how those men had managed to retain their sexist biases in the face of all that had happened in the world, but he supposed that, despite what Dean had once told him, a zombie apocalypse didn’t necessarily have to change everyone.This one had certainly changed Naomi, though. He did have to disagree with Dean’s initial warning that she had grown more irritable since the last time they’d been together. Contrary to that, Castiel actually found his sister to have mellowed from the humorless stiff she’d been before, probably as a result of seeing where unquestioning obedience could lead. Her eyes were softer, as well, when she looked at him, and he found himself beginning to believe that this, too, could be the start of something good unexpectedly born from the terrible.Deciding to follow Sam’s lead, using teasing as a distraction instead of trying to persuade, he folded his arms and tsked disappointedly. “After all that time you spent telling me your tales of daring and bravery, surely you’re not going to be nervous about a little helicopter ride?” he said.“That’s no little helicopter,” Dean volleyed back, then added with a twinkle in his eye, “and don’t call me Shirley.”“I…didn’t?” Castiel said, confused. “It was an adverb, modifying the verb ‘to be’? They’re homonyms.” His confusion only grew when Sam bent almost double in laughter and Dean slapped a hand over his eyes.“It’s likely my fault,” Naomi said from behind him, causing Castiel to jump in surprise. “We did actually have copies of the Airplane movies on VHS at one point, but I persuaded Mom to donate most of our collection to a school rummage sale before Castiel would have been old enough to be interested. It was to benefit the debate club.”Dean shook his head in disappointment. “All right, but what about college, man? Nobody ever took the time to show you then? That’s just tragic; we gotta fix that.”“I’ve got the two of the three Naked Gun movies from that run we did on the Phillipsburg Blockbuster, but I don’t know where you’re going to find the Airplane flicks at this point,” said Meg, walking up with her bag slung over her shoulder. She and the man next to her, a brusque Runner named Victor, were the last of the team to arrive. “I think we’ve cleaned out every library, rental place, and used video store inside a hundred miles.” Meg winked at Castiel, eyeing him up and down with her customary air of lechery. Dean had assured him that she looked at everyone that way, but Castiel noticed him stepping a little closer anyway.“Well, I’ve got an idea,” Dean said, as though inspiration had struck. “How about we skip the helicopter, and we just head on down the road, taking the opportunity to hit up all the unlooted stores along the way? There’s got to be dozens of video places nobody’s gotten to yet, and maybe even some game stores! It’s perfect!”Donna and Jody made rude noises, while Sam waved away Meg’s splutters of flabbergasted vetoes. “No movie is entertaining enough for that, Dean, and I’m including all the Star Wars and Indiana Jones movies in that statement.”Dean grabbed his chest. “Naomi, I’ve changed my mind,” he said. “The human race doesn’t deserve to be saved.”“Enough, Mister Winchester,” she said. Despite the formality of the words, Castiel noted that Naomi’s lips were shaking the tiniest bit, revealing that she was actually fighting off a giggle. Nobody who didn’t know her extremely well would have picked up on it, but it was clear as day to him. No matter how much Dean insisted that Naomi would happily see him skinned for a floor covering in her office, Castiel had a sneaking suspicion that she was softening toward Dean.“You know he’s not good enough for you,” she’d said to him the night she’d agreed to their plan, surprising the hell out of Castiel with her decision. She’d dismissed the Winchester brothers, then “suddenly remembered” that she needed Castiel to stick around for some paperwork before he followed. When he’d been unable to hide his shock that she had known about him and Dean, she’d looked at him as if he was an idiot. “Come on, Castiel. No platonic friend goes to that kind of trouble for someone they barely know, and they certainly don’t sit up all night by their bedside, holding their hand. I may have been avoiding you, but that doesn’t mean I was ignoring you.”“Oh,” he’d said, his lungs abruptly deflating with a whoosh of air.“As I was saying. He’s not good enough for you. Then again, pickings have gotten quite slim as of late. Tom Hiddleston is probably off the market for good, along with most of London.” She’d chuckled, her bluff falling apart at his look of incredulity. “Oh, just be happy, Castiel. I think, or I hope, we’ve all earned a little of that.”Now, standing in the parking lot of the old Cracker Barrel restaurant that served as the landing pad for New Lebanon, Castiel couldn’t help but agree. He slung his arm around Dean’s waist, guiding him to the helicopter door. “I’ll tell you what,” he said. “I can’t properly distract you during the flight, surrounded as we will be by family and friends. What I can do is make you a promise. After we do this, and we all come out the other side whole and alive, I will do anything you wish with you, and allow you the same freedom, for an entire night.”Dean paused, considering. “Anything?”“Anything.” He sincerely doubted that whatever Dean was considering would rise to the level of any of his personal limits. “We will, naturally, have to make sure that when we are collecting Benton’s things, we also include as many of the lab’s packages of petroleum jelly as we can find.”“Damn straight,” Dean said vehemently, eyes widening. He turned to face the gathering group. “Well? What are we waiting for, guys? The zoms aren’t getting any less bitey, and we’ve got a world to fix! Load ‘er up!” He hoisted himself through the helicopter door without further hesitation, yelling back over his shoulder, “Dibs on the seat without the rips!”Sam followed, shrugging and laughing, with a clap to Castiel’s back. The others filed in after, leaving Castiel standing with Naomi. “Will we really fix the world?” she asked him, and for a moment, she sounded like an uncertain young girl again, as though he was the leader instead of her.He knew what she was asking, but instead of talking strategies and fighting odds, he chose to smile instead, looking toward the helicopter door, though which Dean was watching with a grin. “I rather believe we might already be doing it,” he said, and his heart was light as he headed toward the waiting team.“Don’t go in too close,” the major called over the headset to to the pilot. “We can’t risk having them hear us coming before we get near the medical center.” The pilot nodded, scanning the ground for an open area before descending toward a patch of rocky ground that lay on the other side of a wooded area to the west of the base.“The old shooting range,” Castiel pointed out. Dean cast an appraising eye over the grounds, taking in the deteriorating target lines and crumbling stands. Sam was already making for a large building marked as the clubhouse.A lanky soldier with three stripes on his uniform shoulder sneered, making the hackles rise on Dean’s neck. “Don’t bother looking for anything useful,” he said with derision. “This wasn’t a training facility for the enlisted men. Skeet shooting, trap shooting, just for the entertainment of the families on base. Those rifles are basically toys.”“Still better than trying to protect yourself with tree branches and pocket knives,” Jody called. “We’ve still got new people showing up on the regular, with nothing more than the ragged clothes on their backs. They’d happily take toys over nothing, when those toys can fire bullets.”Sam came back out, examining one of the range rifles as he walked. “They’re not that bad,” he said. “Besides, we can always strip them down and use the better parts of them. We’re not military. If it shoots straight, I don’t care if it’s regulation.”“Even the military isn’t military anymore,” Naomi added, earning a look of surprise from Castiel. Dean felt his own eyebrows shoot upward, too. She noticed the reactions from the group and shrugged wryly. “I’m not saying that’s a good or a bad thing. It’s simply the way things are.”“Dad would definitely call it a change for the worse,” Castiel mused, and Naomi acknowledged the truth of that with a nod.“We can deal with these later,” she finished, turning to address the rest of the group. “Once we’ve gotten what we came for, we can think about other things, but for now, we need to push on.”Making their way through the woods at a light jog felt like any other day of work for the Runners; it was almost familiar enough to allow them to forget that they weren’t just out on an ordinary run for mundane supplies. Meg was actually humming quietly to herself, some rock song with a repetitive drum part that she kept emphasizing with clicks of her tongue. Dean caught her eye, and she grinned, making it obvious that her aim was to irritate the sergeant trotting in front of her. Dean rolled his eyes at her, but he decided to let her have her fun. Jody and Donna were running well ahead of the group, knees high and feet light as they avoided obstacles buried in leaves. A few of the uniformed soldiers were watching them in admiration.“Dean,” Castiel said, jogging alongside him. “It’s been too long since I’ve been able to get out and run.” His cheeks were slightly pink, and he seemed to be actually enjoying himself, judging by the sparkle in his eyes. He also seemed to be barely breaking a sweat.“Why don’t you go catch up with the girls up there?” Dean suggested. “Really stretch your legs, and make sure they keep heading the right direction.” Of course, there was no real danger of that, since they were navigating by compass, but Castiel took the suggestion for the offering it was. Beaming, he pushed off with a burst of speed, seeming to almost fly over the fallen leaves. Damn, Dean thought admiringly as he watched him go. The muscles of Castiel’s calves were built enough to be visible through the fabric of his track pants, and his ass…well. Dean had to force himself to stop staring at the hypnotic flexing of Castiel’s glutes when he tripped and almost fell over a mid-sized rock.The wooded area thinned, opening into an area cleared of trees; a very strange winding trail, nearly swallowed by the taller growth surrounding it, swept back and forth tightly across the field. “What the heck is this?” Donna asked, jerking her thumb in the direction of it.“The hunting club,” Castiel answered, wrinkling his nose in distaste. “Foxes, mostly. Some coyotes.” The others looked at each other skeptically. Castiel seemed to realize what they were all wondering, and he sighed, lifting his eyes upward. “Not real hunts, of course. From what I understand, the foxes were caught and released, just for the purposes of the sport. The hounds and hunters would chase them down, but they simply caught them, not killed them.”“You guys tortured small animals for fun, is what you’re saying,” Dean said, pointing in accusation.Castiel made a disgruntled sound. “Not me, Dean. Again, this was like the rifle range, for base entertainment.”“Oh, I’m sure the foxes felt real entertained,” Meg drawled. The soldier she’d been passively harassing threw her a look as if he wanted to argue, but Naomi cleared her throat to pull their attention.“There’s a small creek a little further beyond here to the east, but we are less than a quarter-mile from the main part of the base,” she said, voice lowered but steely. “It would be best from here out if we spoke as little as possible, moved as quickly and quietly as possible, and tried to keep our minds on the mission at hand.” Silence greeted her instructions; Dean thought he already heard groaning in the distance.The creek was hardly worth noticing, and the group shortly found themselves standing at the edge of a wooded patch that ended at the edge of a parking lot behind a row of warehouses. A barbed-wire fence stood between the woods and the pavement, extending into the distance in either direction, but it was a laughable hurdle now; one by one, each member of the group jumped up to grab one of the many branches over their heads, easily hauling themselves up and over, and dropping to the ground on the other side of the fence.Now Dean definitely heard moaning, seeming to come from every direction. He knew from the maps Castiel and Naomi had sketched that, apart from the general population of military personnel and their families, there had been a maximum-security military prison on the north side of the base and a penitentiary for regular old civilians just to the south. Zombies were zombies, and it didn’t matter a lick what sort of person they’d been before they went gray, but he still couldn’t fight the chill that ran down his spine at the thought of confronting a horde of undead murderers and psychos.Now they moved like they were playing leapfrog, three or four at a time while the others crouched under the cover of buildings and abandoned vehicles to provide them cover if they needed it. Sam snorted, leaning against a van beside Dean, and Dean turned to glare at him for the noise. Sam just shook his head, apologizing mutely, then gestured up at the street sign on the corner nearby. Organ Ave, it read. Dean bit his lip, struggling through his own urge to snicker at the perverse humor of it.The laughter died abruptly a few minutes later, when they crept south between buildings labeled “VETERINARY.” Zoms didn’t go after animals other than the two-legged variety, everyone knew, but that small consolation hadn’t really mattered; the growling they could hear through the broken windows was definitely not human, and when one soldier cautiously lifted his head and peered inside, he immediately gagged and clapped a hand over his mouth. A muscle in Sam’s jaw jumped as he clenched his teeth. Dean wasn’t the dog-lover Sam was, but even he felt his stomach roll uneasily at the thought of animals starving slowly in cages, waiting for owners who would never come.At last, the group reached a cluster of small buildings that had been housing for families. Now they could see the first groups of zombies inhabiting the base, milling aimlessly around what looked like a nearby church and its parking lot. Everyone seemed to hold their breath as, one at a time, they each crept across the small grass-covered lot to the nearest brick building and stooped in the shadows. The door was closed but not locked, which was a positive sign, since it meant that the danger would be limited to those who had been in the building at the time that they died. Wordlessly, Naomi signaled for the soldiers to enter first, clearing the space as swiftly and quietly as they could. Moments later, following a series of aborted growls, grunts, and thumps, the rest of the group slipped inside, ignoring the handful of gruesome corpse parts littering the floor.They were in what had been a living room, the contents utterly demolished in the violent struggles that had preceded the deaths of the former residents. One cracked and broken sliding glass door led out onto a grass patch; it was partially covered by wooden planks that had apparently once been bookshelves. The family had obviously been in the process of trying to barricade their home, but it hadn’t been enough. The team gathered around the broken boards, peering out into the yard. Directly ahead was a large gray building.“So that’s the Gentry clinic,” Castiel said in a hushed voice. “Past that is the main medical building, where we’re headed.” Squinting, Dean could see a taller structure peeking over the top of the clinic.“Jesus,” Victor muttered. “We’re supposed to make it through that?” Dean wanted to tell him to shut up, but he wasn’t wrong. Around the sides of the clinic, dozens of zombies were shuffling, and the swarm seemed to thicken substantially as it disappeared from view around the building. A few cars and vans were scattered between where they stood and the door to the clinic, but the further they’d have to go, the more likely it was that somebody would be spotted.“The basements of the two buildings are connected through a tunnel,” Castiel replied.Naomi gave him a surprised look. “How on earth do you know that?” she asked.Catching Dean’s eye for a moment, Castiel ducked his head, grinning a bit guiltily. “Son of one of the doctors.” Naomi winced, regretting having asked, and Dean teasingly shook a finger in his direction.It was a hair-raising few minutes later that they all crouched inside the gloomy waiting room of the clinic, backs to the wall beneath windows that provided only faint traces of light, leaving most of the room in ominous shadows. The hallways branching out on the far side of the room were pitch-black, though definitely not uninhabited.Using gestures and hand signals, Naomi directed the soldiers to follow her as she carefully stole across the floor to a heavy fire door and tugged it open against the resistance of dust and deterioration. The Runners followed, Sam following last and moving backwards to make certain nothing was going to appear and give chase. Then they were all descending a staircase through the dark by the light of their small flashlights, heaving silent sighs of relief that there didn’t seem to be any zoms in the stairwell, as there was no way to completely muffle the sounds of their echoing steps.At the base of the staircase, a large set of double doors was closed, a rough two-by-four shoved through the handles keeping them secured. “Oh, shit, that’s not good,” one soldier muttered, and nobody bothered to hush him.“What’s this tunnel like?” Meg asked Castiel, a slight tremor in her voice the only sign of her nerves. Her thumb was rubbing the hilt of her machete as though she was already preparing to start swinging. “Narrow, wide, lots of side entrances? How long is it?”“It’s not long, maybe four or five hundred feet at the most,” he answered, staring at the splintered wood. “I’d say about ten feet wide. No side entrances, but there are a few alcoves with maintenance-type panels, maybe closets. We didn’t do much exploring, you have to understand. I remember that there were emergency lights, but they’ll obviously not be working now.”“I don’t like this at all,” Dean said, glancing toward where Sam stood frowning. “That barred door tells a story all on its own. If we get in there, and there’s company, it could come up both behind and in front of us, and we’d be trapped like fucking rats.”“But that’s an ‘if,’ Donna said, earning a surprised sound from Jody. She looked around at them, brows knitting with impatience. “I’m not saying it sounds like a barrel of monkeys to me, either, but it’s one heck of a lot better than trying to fight my way through all those creatures I know for certain are up above. Here, they might be waiting.” Waving an arm toward the doors, she added, “I don’t hear them kicking up a fuss over our chatter, do you?”It was true; the tunnel seemed silent as a tomb. When nobody else seemed to have anything else to contribute, Naomi hefted her flashlight, slapping it against the opposite palm. “Sergeant Campbell,” she said, “get the doors. Everyone else, weapons.”Here we go. Dean peered into the deeper blackness as the named soldier pulled one of the unbarred doors outward, trying to force his eyes to adjust more quickly. The flashlights’ beams were feeble things that left a lot of dark places to be filled by morbid imagination, but there was no hint of movement, not a single bit of noise.Four hundred feet should have taken no time at all to cross, but the group moved at a snail’s pace, pairs walking shoulder-to-shoulder as they flashed their lights into every shadow they could. Naomi was at the front of the group, so she was the one to make the first grisly discovery, about a hundred yards in. She inhaled sharply, stopping so suddenly that Jody almost bumped into her.The soldier beside Naomi held up his arm, fist clenched, then took a hesitant step forward, holstering his handgun to pull the rifle strapped to his back around to his chest. Gripping it with one hand, he extended it gingerly and used the barrel to poke at the figure lying on the floor. The body flopped to the side, lifeless. It had been a doctor, or at least someone who wore scrubs, but the pattern of dried blood around the chest of its shirt, heavy directional splatters, said that it had been something else entirely before a bullet had been put through its head. Visible in the light of the soldier’s flashlight, a large chunk of bone was missing from the front of the corpse’s skull.Just beyond this body, an outstretched arm lay at the edges of the circle of light. There was just an arm; the rest of body was hideously absent.Everyone looked at each other, bewildered. Dean felt his skin try to crawl away entirely. Castiel was gazing at the corpse’s grinning face in deep concentration, as though he could identify who it had been in life. Dean wondered why he would want to try.There were other bodies strewn along the way, as well as pieces. Not all of them were easily recognizable as having been turned before being killed a second time, but enough were that they could hazard guesses. Someone had lived; someone had managed to survive at least long enough to kill these guys and make it through the doors, barring them behind themselves. There was the strong likelihood that they might have been bitten in the fighting, turning gray after they made it out, certainly. There was no way to know the rest of the story.A surge of panic abruptly swept through Dean, as he considered that perhaps the doors on the other end could have been similarly barred. Unlikely, based on what they could probably determine about the fight, but they hadn’t even considered that thought before heading in. Well, maybe Naomi had. Dean sure hadn’t, and his throat tightened just imagining it now.They moved faster as they approached the end of the tunnel, probably unintentionally. Nobody looked unaffected by the ghoulishness of the journey, and it was with visible haste that Sergeant Campbell, not even waiting for Naomi’s orders, stepped ahead and put his shoulder to the door, shoving hard.“Get down!” Naomi suddenly shouted. Too late, the soldier tried to duck, to let the guns aimed over his head open fire on the mass of ravenous mottled faces peering back at them from the darkness beyond. Hands grabbed for him, pulling him off balance, and he screamed—once, twice—and then he wasn’t making noise anymore, his twitching legs all that were visible beneath the pile of creatures devouring him.Dean didn’t take time to try to see more. He was firing into the mob, aiming for their heads out of ingrained practice more than by conscious thought. The people at the front of their group had dropped to knees or slid to the side out of the way, and there was so much gunfire that smoke filled the narrow hallway to choking. The blasting echoes made Dean’s ears ring painfully, but he kept shooting, moving on to the other zombies in the room he hadn’t even noticed in the chaos of the initial attack. Now they were swarming toward the door, hands grasping and teeth gnashing even as they dropped to the ground under the hail of bullets.It was over in minutes. It felt like hours. In the aftermath, they stood panting, eyes wide as they looked around the room, looking at each other to reassure themselves that there had been no more casualties. They avoided looking at Campbell, though Dean made note that someone had managed to give him a bullet, too, preempting any reanimations.One of the soldiers was cursing a blue streak. “So much for a covert operation,” he growled. “Every damn zom in the building is heading our way right now. What do we do, Major?”Naomi had lost all trace of softness in her face and posture. “We need to move fast at this point,” she said, reloading her weapons. “The lab is up one floor, on the east side. File formation, get there fast and secure the room. We won’t have time to search, or we’ll get pinned down there, so just grab whatever—”“Naomi, wait,” Castiel interrupted. “The lab is important, but it was a shared space. Benton might have kept confidential information in his office, not the lab. That’s up on the third floor.”“I know, but we won’t have time to cover both places,” she argued. “With the noise we just made, the plan has changed. Now we need to prioritize.”“We could split up,” Castiel said firmly. “We may not get another chance at this. Just let me get in there—I can grab everything quick, and we can meet back up here.” She was already shaking her head in refusal, but he didn’t let her speak. “And you’d better not try to say no just because we’re family. Or because of anything else that’s between us.”For a moment, it looked as though Naomi was about to lash out in anger. Her eyes narrowed, and her nostrils flared. Then, after a deep breath, she lifted her chin and held it high. “If you’re not back in fifteen minutes…”“We will be.” I will be, his face seemed to promise, and Naomi nodded in acceptance of the unspoken vow.“Cuevas and Walker, you go with Castiel,” she said, naming off two of the three remaining men in fatigues. Castiel stared at her, unimpressed at the blatant weighting of the teams, but she was unmoved. “Misters Winchester, you two go with him as well, and you, Miss Masters. The rest of you are with me.”“See you guys soon,” Jody whispered, squeezing Dean’s shoulder as they headed for the stairwell door. Dean lifted a hand to wave, praying she was right. “Shit! God dammit, move!” Meg was shouting, turning to fire over her shoulder in the direction they’d come. Castiel sped down the corridor, trusting that others were just behind him. Panting, he spared a thought toward the hope that the first floor had been less of a disaster than the third.Apparently, when the outbreak erupted, large groups of panicked patients, doctors, and other staff had thought higher ground would be safer, and they had fled to the third floor in mass. It hadn’t helped, in the end, and there had been dozens of undead practically lying in wait the moment their raiding party had left the stairwell. Castiel had vague memories of how to get to Benton’s office, but he’d never tried to find his way in reduced light, with many of the signs (and walls themselves) hanging in pieces, while running as fast as he could.“This way!” he shouted, the larger windows down one hallway feeling familiar. They ran, firing and trying not to stumble, making a sharp turn at the end of the hall as Castiel spotted a waiting area where he remembered thumbing through magazines impatiently. “Here!” The once fancy wooden doorway to the office areas of the higher-level staff members hadn’t been destroyed, and they pushed through, shoving a desk against it on the other side.“This isn’t going to hold long,” the younger of the two soldiers said. One of the windows alongside the door was already shattered, and a rotting arm was flailing blindly through the gap. “Get whatever you’re getting so we can get the hell out of here!” He turned back to fire, not waiting for a response.Castiel locked eyes with Dean for a heartbeat. There was only strength to be seen within them, not a bit of fear. Nothing that said he blamed Castiel for leading them into this, probably dooming them all with his choice. For that, Castiel was grateful, and his resolve firmed. He would not fail. They would make it through this, no matter what he had to do.The door to Benton’s office stood slightly open, and Castiel kicked it the rest of the way, scanning the room with gun trained ahead of him. There were no zombies, but…there was nothing else, either. The filing cabinet in the corner had its drawers yanked open, emptied of their contents. The desk was bare to the wood, and the closet held no trace of coat or briefcase. It almost appeared that Benton had moved out entirely.He had no time to think about the meaning behind that. Frantically, Castiel’s eyes darted around the room. Benton had done much of his work on a laptop, he remembered, but there was a desktop computer still present and dusty in the corner. Castiel dashed to it, ripping the cords out of the back of the CPU, thankful for its small size so that he could shove it into his bag. Whether anything of use was still on it remained to be seen, but he tried to hang onto some bit of faith.A sharp shout of pain from the outer entry sent a chill of terror down his spine. He turned on his heel and broke for the door, coming through just in time to see the older soldier spin away from the wooden door, being forced open now. Blood ran freely from a wound on his shoulder, and the look of despair on his face told Castiel it has been a bite wound. “One of you bastards better take me out before you go,” the man shouted, and then he threw himself back into the fight, nothing else left to lose.“Castiel, you better be done,” Dean yelled, shoulder pushing against the desk. “We’re not getting back out this way, so any other suggestions would be fantastic right now.” He ducked just as Sam hefted the wood frame of a sofa from another office on top of the desk. Meg was shooting through the broken window, next to the younger soldier.“There’s a secretary’s desk on the other side of that partition, there,” Castiel called. “It has a sliding window to the hall. If it’s clear, we can try going through that.”“Sounds better than the alternative,” Meg shouted, firing one last time before pulling back. As a group, they backed toward the partition, keeping up the gunfire as long as they could, while the bitten soldier held the door closed as long as he could. Finally, just as they turned to go, Sam aimed his gun for the man’s head. “I’m sorry,” he shouted.“Just do it,” the soldier screamed. Castiel forced himself to watch, the crack of this bullet somehow louder than the rest, and then they were moving once more.The battle at the doorway had blessedly pulled the attention of most of the zombies, so the hallways they took were now much more empty. Sam and Dean switched to using machetes instead of guns, hoping not to waste their good fortune. Reaching the stairwell, they wasted no time waiting for their eyes to readjust to the darkness, instead using the rails and counting the steps out loud as they ran as fast as they could.At the first floor, Castiel paused, a sudden bad feeling in his stomach. The door was propped open slightly, and the sound of agitated groaning was almost as loud as it had been on the third floor. “Dean,” he said, overwhelmed beyond the point of explaining. Whatever was on his face must have said enough, though, because Dean stopped too, leaning his ear toward the door.“Major Novak said regroup in the basement,” the remaining soldier protested, bouncing on the balls of his feet.“Major Novak might be surrounded by zoms,” Sam replied. “Dean, what are you thinking?”“Thinking a Runner’s first job is to run,” Dean answered. Without waiting, he shoved open the door and took off toward the noise, Sam right on his heels. Meg rolled her eyes, muttering about “damn idiots” as she followed. Castiel heard the soldier protesting, but he didn’t hesitate before chasing after the Runners, weapon in hand. He had no intention of dying here, but if he had to go, it would be by Dean’s side.“I already knew Mister Winchester was incapable of following instructions, but I did hope that you had learned more discipline than that, Castiel.” Naomi didn’t sound as genuinely upset as she was trying for, Dean thought. Then again, she was probably too exhausted to stay too upset.Getting the team out of the lab had actually gone more smoothly than their own self-extraction. Nobody had to die, for one; the only injury was his own, and it was his own carelessness that had caused it, tripping over a decapitated zombie and falling against a jaggedly broken window. The laceration on his bicep wasn’t huge, and it might not even need stitches, but Castiel looked about ready to award him a Purple Heart over it.Finding out that the office had possibly been a complete waste of time had been a bit of a blow, but they wouldn’t know for certain until somebody broke into the computer. On the other hand, the lab had appeared completely untouched—which made sense, Dean supposed, considering it had apparently been at the center of a massive horde of the undead. If it had been like that from the beginning, nobody making a cover-up attempt would have been able to breach it. Once their half of the group had come up from behind the zoms surrounding the doorway to the lab, surprising them as well as they could, they’d been able to clear the way for the retrieval of a satisfying haul of equipment that the military scientists would be able to put to good use.More interesting than the equipment, though, was the drawer of patient records labeled with doctors’ names, including Benton’s. Naomi had been poring over the pages intently since they’d climbed back into the Black Hawk and headed for home, and while she said there wasn’t anything overtly incriminating written in them, or at least not so far as she could understand, there were…intriguing aspects.“This is your file,” she told Castiel, holding one up. “Now, as far as it says, Benton was giving you routine inoculations, nothing out of the ordinary, except for this code number. It’s not the same as the ones in the files for soldiers under the care of other doctors. Here it is in another file, another young officer, and here again. Dozens of them, probably all being given something experimental.”“So there’s potentially other people out there who got bit and didn’t turn?” Dean asked.“Maybe, though they could still have been killed,” Naomi said. “Also, many of the files show that patients who got those shots died of ‘unknown neural disorders’ or other brain-related issues. They were spread out over multiple bases, administered when he traveled, or else someone had to have noticed.”“Or else he had help covering it up, from people like Dad,” Castiel said. His voice was rough with tiredness, and he had his arm wrapped around Dean’s waist, refusing to let go.“Possibly. There’s probably much more here than I can see with untrained eyes, but I’m sure the experts will be eager to go through it all. They’ll want to examine you, too, Castiel.”“What, me?” At that, Castiel jerked upright from where he’d been sagging into Dean’s side.Naomi nodded. “Something about you allowed you to survive whatever he injected into you, and then made use of it to resist being turned. I’m sure that when the equipment and records are transported to Offutt, they’ll insist that you accompany them.”“No,” Castiel said. “No, I won’t. I’ll send them whatever blood or tissue samples they need, or they can come to me, but I’m not going.”“Castiel, you’re technically still an officer in the United States Army. You don’t have the option to say no.”“Bullshit,” Dean said, starting to rise to outrage on Castiel’s behalf. Castiel laid a hand on his thigh.“Would you court martial me?” he asked Naomi, voice surprisingly mild. “Is it truly the priority of the Army to chase down former soldiers who’ve gone AWOL at this point? Because I’m sure there are plenty.”“Not so many of those who’ve come to the attention of the big decision-makers,” Naomi retorted, then sighed. “What am I supposed to do? I don’t want to arrest you. You would have been an amazing soldier, and you still could be, but…”“But I’m done.” Castiel sounded firm but not heated. “If we’re saving the world, then I want to be a part of that, but I want it to be a world where I’m doing what I want to do. I want to be happy living in the world I helped save.”Naomi’s face was unreadable. “Dad would arrest you. He’d take you into custody, say it was for the good of the country, and get you there even if he had to do it in cuffs.” She searched his face, then looked back at the papers in her lap with a frown. “I’m not Dad. Prioritizing whatever this experiment was, probably out of some sense of patriotism and loyalty, over his own son…no. There has to be a line somewhere. I can’t be…that.”Dean felt Castiel relax slightly, and he realized Castiel hadn’t really been confident about what his sister would choose to do. Not that Dean would have let her take Castiel away against his will, but he felt relief that this, at least, wouldn’t have to be a fight. “So you’ll stay in New Lebanon?” he asked, hoping.“I’ll stay with you,” Castiel corrected, smiling faintly. “Though I think, after today, I’d like a break from running. Perhaps your greenhouses could use an apiary? I haven’t heard about zombie bees. It would be a refreshing change.”Dean pulled him closer, closing his eyes to pretend they weren’t surrounded by filthy and sweaty men and women, and kissed him as though the world were ending.
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TOP SECRET/SENSITIVEAUTHORITY NND69359121 October 2022 MEMORANDUM FOR GENERAL D______________SUBJECT: Findings from Materials Salvaged from Fort Leavenworth (Project LAMBS BLOOD) A summary of the pertinent findings of the enclosed report follows:
The patient records recovered from the lab have confirmed earlier unverified reports that Lt. Gen. Benton had achieved success in a segment of the test subjects, as well as the reports that the Project's mortality rate among newly commissioned officers were being underreported, compared to that of enlisted men. It is our presumption that Benton was withholding this data until his successes had grown to a level that might outweigh the failed trials, so as to avoid scrutiny.
It is an unfortunate consequence of his actions that nearly all of those test subjects who completed the full series of neurohormetic challenges in good health are now missing/AWOL or presumed KIA. We are therefore unable to perform further physical examinations (blood, tissue, pulmonary systems, etc.) and draw clinical conclusions. However, the recovered files contain a reasonable amount of diagnostic and observational material, and we are optimistic that we may be able to build upon it.
The hard drive recovered from Benton’s office (MAHC 318a) showed evidence of intentional efforts at erasure. The deleted files were quickly retrieved, and the material therein has been quite enlightening with regards to Benton’s disposition throughout the Project. His personal logs, while not a “smoking gun,” do raise the question of whether the Project’s unfortunate side effects were purely accidental.
Subjects who did not complete the study due to death or permanent impairment (TABLE 1), hereafter classified as DNF-M, had no distinguishing predictive characteristic evident from our reading, yet there was a marked drop-off in subjects falling into this category over time. This decline is perhaps due to refining of the administered genotoxic agent, though we cannot confirm this hypothesis.
Subjects who completed the full study (TABLE 2), receiving at least three doses of the genotoxin, with no or only temporary impairment (hereafter classified as DF-Z) are noted in their records as either Biomarker Positive (BP) or Biomarker Negative (BN). Group DF-Z(BP), exhibiting serum evidence of positive neurohormetic response to subsequent neurotoxin exposure, are considered “successful trial subjects.”
We can now conclude, based on study of the records of Group DF-Z(BN), who showed no lasting serum evidence of having received the agent, that the disastrous unanticipated side-effects that escalated beyond our control originated in this group of subjects. Benton performed three separate examinations of the subjects’ serum, drawn over a period spanning thirty days, and apparently found no change.
At this point, deviating from research methods we might have expected, Benton appeared to focus a strangely high level of effort toward the examination of neurotrophic factors and apoptosis protein levels in DF-Z(BN). No such examination in other subject groups is evident in files.
Benton did not record the reasoning behind this further study, nor did he record what he found or expected to find. It is logical to assume, however, based on what we have observed from our own samples taken from reanimated combatants , that Benton’s collection of “Patients Zero” may have shown disruption in neurotrophy and a systemic spike apoptosis beginning with brain cells.
There are several unexplained codes and highlighted sections in the records of DF-Z(BN), leading us to conclude that Benton was seeking a fundamental similarity between the subjects. Perhaps he was merely attempting to find a method to work around whatever similarity they shared. His fascination with the group does raise questions.
Most damning of Benton’s private motivations, obviously, are the circumstances surrounding his continued absence. While his hasty departure from MAHC was justified, and it would have been reasonable to believe that he did not survive the initial waves of the Crisis, the disappearance and attempts at the destruction of most of his research is incriminating.
RECOMMENDATION: While the recovery of Project Lambs Blood test subject files is an achievement that may lead to great gains in our current war, it is imperative that Lt. Gen. Benton be found, either living or proved otherwise. Whether or not his actions were intentionally damaging, he should be considered unreliable and potentially treasonous. For the sake of national security, locating and securing Benton should be considered a priority.Castiel Novak (2LT), while technically AWOL, is to be allowed to remain at the New Lebanon settlement camp for the time being. He continues to be closely monitored by a trusted source placed close to him.A letter of commendation is to be placed in the file of Major Naomi Novak for her leadership in the raid on MAHC, Fort Leavenworth.FROM: AVA WILSON, Cpt. MSC, Offutt AFB PIERCE MONCRIEFF, MG MSC, Offutt AFB