Last Outpost Of All That Is

For the spn_apocasmut challenge. The world is over, and it’s a Winchester’s lot in life to cope with anything – no matter what. The actual prompt is the first quote below, courtesy of innie_darling.

Warnings: language, angst, attempted humor; all the usual. NC-17 for graphic Sam/Dean. If you have a problem with end-of-the-world tales, skip this one, please.

This assumes that Dean never had to make the deal at the end of season II. Notes follow the tale.

______________

The world begins with the interruption of a sleep. Which is why wakefulness is the only proof of existence. And why the world is fragmented and cannot achieve fullness. And why it constantly seeks to reconstruct fullness. In vain, because the discontinuous will never pass over into the continuous. Mathematics tells us that, last outpost of all that is.

-- Roberto Calasso, Ka

For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.

–Carl Sagan

_________________

-|-

Saturday, September 13^th, 2008; 4:29 am EST

The world ends while they’re asleep.

-|-

Sam’s first memory of that morning – nothing woke him during the night that he could remember – was a sudden crash of consciousness. He remembered nothing of what had gone on in the darkness prior...and then there was everything.

He’d sat up and turned his head toward Dean, always toward Dean, one commonality in the ever-changing and uncertain life they led. Dean slept on, face down, one arm dangling toward the floor, the skin beneath his eyes bruised with exhaustion. They were in some small but carefully kept roadside motel just outside Roanoke, Virginia, one more stepping stone to yet another strange place further on. One more break in the asphalt ribbon that served as their yellow brick road, that ephemeral promise of an end somewhere, somewhen, an idea other than that the road went ever on. Waiting for their real lives to begin, or end so fast that it didn’t matter anymore.

He had known, right away. Dean was alive and breathing, but the world was not, not in the ways he was used to.

He had seen his first real death at five, the first one he could remember, in any case. Sam had been asleep in the back seat and Dean was riding up front when a coyote crossed the road in the dark, and John had mowed it down rather than risk swerving with Sam sprawled out unbuckled in the back. Dean had told him that, later, that it was the way of things and that family came first, something their father would say over and over until a later day when he changed his mind. Sam had not taken it as a token of blame; he’d understood that these things happened, that the coyote had made a choice and then his father had had to make another as a result.

He had watched with wide eyes while it thrashed in the eastbound lane in the sullen glow of the Impala’s brake lights, shrieking, alive and broken and struggling to get the former to overcome the latter.

Dean had not let him see the shot from his father’s gun that stopped the coyote from thrashing around. He heard it all the same, the finality of it, and it didn’t sound anything like it did when Dean was target practicing.

When he’d looked over the back seat and out the window again, the coyote was still. Not the still of sleeping, not the still of waiting; still in a way that Sam grasped even then. You could look at anyone or anything and know immediately whether it was alive or not, without waiting to see if the chest would expand with air again. The vibration of everything that lived was louder in its absence than in its full, unfurled hysteria. It was subtle from a distance, but terribly obvious all the same.

The world, at first glance, was dead.

The parking lot still had cars lined in it, waiting. But none passed on the interstate adjoining it by a short gravel drive. There was a breeze, and trees to carry it along, leaves fluttering and lending some bit of sound to the morning. His watch still kept the time, nothing but a man-made concept trapped against his wrist. When he huffed out a breath while standing in the open door, he heard himself and breathed in clear, cool air. He knew he was fully awake and not in some in-between place. Dew had gathered on the cars and grass, birds chittered and darted in the catalpa tree at the edge of the lot. The sky was a normal color, faint autumn blue with high clouds gathering from the east.

It took him another minute to realize that part of his unease was the silence above. No air traffic. They were right in the middle of so many major cities that there should have been a plane by then, regardless of which way the breeze was blowing the engine noise.

His hands on his own face were real, something solid and rough and connected with the world. The salt line at the door had not been broken before he’d touched it.

Dean was warm and real and breathing, and the fact that he didn’t stir when Sam ran the backs of his fingers along one of his shoulderblades was nothing new.

The bathroom light came on when he flipped the switch. Water gushed out of the taps when he turned them.

The television came on, but showed nothing on the local channels. Snow crossed the screen until he reached the first cable channel, an old movie, and he felt his shoulders slump in relief until he realized...most stations ran on presets. They were set to go for days without a single button pushed.

There was a dial tone, but no operator ever answered when he pushed zero; the ringing went on interminably and he hung up when he’d had all he could take. His cell had a signal, but Bobby never answered. Missouri never answered. Ellen never answered. Jo never answered.

No one ever answered.

That was enough to wake Dean for, finally.

Dean’s first response to the shaking was to ask where his coffee was. Then Sam could tell the look on his own face was enough to get his attention, because Dean sat up and glanced around before tilting his head at Sam.

“Something’s happened.” It was the only thing Sam could think of to say.

Dean went through all the same motions, and Sam knew it wasn’t because he thought maybe Sam wasn’t thorough enough but because Dean was hands-on, first person, last chance. The phones, the sky, the water, the TV, it was all enough, and Dean shimmied into his jeans that were still on the floor and took off out the door, looking for the office. Sam followed along in boxers, because there was no one to see him anymore but Dean.

The bell on the office door was too bright and normal for the kind of day they were already having. There was no one in there. No phone ringing, no sounds of someone in the back getting ready for the day. The silence was suffocating and rang much louder than the bell.

Dean began kicking in doors after that, shouting fire and trying to get a response.

Winchesters always began with the obvious, but usually from different angles. Dean said it could just be this area.

Sam kept his thoughts to himself: maximum room capacity plus staff comes out to roughly fifty people missing.

He watched with a peculiar mix of gathering despair and awe when Dean stood in the middle of the parking lot with bare feet and chest and flung his head back, arms out. He was listening to the world, with everything he was, waiting for the simplest thing. It only lasted maybe a minute, tops, but Sam lived there for awhile and didn’t mind.

No cars passed. No planes rumbled above.

The Impala’s radio, when they tried it, was a low and steady buzz except for a couple of top 40 stations that were probably running on presets, like the cable channels were.

Dean kept dialing Bobby’s number because he couldn’t stop hoping. It wasn’t in him to.

They dressed and packed, silent with each other, lost in thought and dread, not ready to postulate. Sam added the local population to his running tally, and possibly Bobby’s part of South Dakota, but wasn’t ready to add the figures for the areas the cable channels were coming from. Not until he could line them all up. Knowing the scope was nothing but information, and information was something you gathered without knowing why, because you never knew when it would come in handy.

There was no one in town.

No one.

Stores, restaurants, homes. There were lights, inside and out; traffic lights changed intermittently to keep nonexistent traffic flowing, TVs flickered sporadically, screens flipping with snow or a grayed out and rolling pop. Canned musak went on in an insensible loop.

There were no cars on the roads. None. Parked in lots and driveways, but not on the roads.

Sam saw the first instant of fear in his brother, after that. Dean was always eyes first unless he was playing poker. Even when he was conning, there were any number of emotions in his eyes, whether he felt them or not. Even his grin was second only to his eyes. His brother’s eyes were wide and severe and looking, always looking for a sign of life or an ignition point for the end of it.

Getting out of the car and walking around downtown Roanoke didn’t give them any answers.

They passed supermarkets and restaurants, gas stations, Starbucks stores, a McDonald’s. There was no one inside. Lights on, deep fryers and cash registers running and ready to go, but no one manning them and no sign that they’d been taken in any way that had been a surprise to them. Nothing had been dropped or shoved over, no cash registers left open to give change, no blood-spatters, no pleas for help scratched into any surface. Things were put away. If it was already in use, it was running, but there was no scattering of money or half-eaten food, no gas nozzles trailing along the pavement, no cars running. Things were too orderly.

There were no portents or omens, no waving flags, no Nostradamus-style announcements. No I told you so’s. There was no destruction or chaos, nothing left abandoned mid-panic; the evidence for any world-ending event was shocking in that it just didn’t exist. There were no dust clouds or boiling seas. The human experience in every culture allowed for the end of everything as a battle, or a catastrophe wrought by a higher being come to punish its wayward children and exact some sort of instantaneous justice. It did not allow, in any circumstance, for an utter and complete stillness. Humankind goes kicking and screaming to its doom. It does not get up from breakfast one morning and wander away, leaving the lights and the TV on.

That ruled out the demon virus they’d seen run through that town in Oregon. That had not been orderly. Everyone had vanished afterwards, but from a small town. Not from whole cities.

It was silent but for the birds. The white noise of human existence had drifted to nothing, not even leaving a final hollow ringing sound of its once-clamor.

Sam was so intent on listening for more that he startled when Dean spoke.

“You feel okay, right? Nothing...I mean, you don’t feel weird or anything.”

Sam took a steadying breath. “You mean a vision, or something? No. I didn’t have any nightmares last night. I don’t even remember dreaming. That doesn’t mean anything, though. I mean...maybe if demons were involved. But even then, it was always kind of hit and miss, wasn’t it? If I’d thought the world was gonna end today, Dean, I’d have at least told you.”

“And we’re awake,” Dean said.

Sam grabbed Dean’s wrist and held on for a long moment. Neither of them broke stride. “Feels like we are,” Sam said softly.

They didn’t separate, but Dean wandered along the front of a still-closed bank for several long minutes, looking in the windows.

“It’s not like, you know, the Langoliers,” Dean said, yards away and not raising his voice but still so audible. “It’s not The Neverending Story where the Nothing is swallowing everything away. It’s not a progression, it’s just...everything’s the same. Without the people.”

Then he walked back to the Impala, popped the trunk, and got out a crowbar and one of his shotguns. Sam didn’t comment or offer to help. He knew what was coming and didn’t think it mattered.

Dean blew out the bank’s first three plate glass windows with the shotgun. The alarm wailed, loud and sure, and they knew somewhere a series of silent alarms went off as well, alerting cops for miles around. After three minutes had passed with no response, Dean wandered across the street

(jaywalking, except it wasn’t anymore, was it, now that all the roads were his, all his)

and using the crowbar to take out the windows and glass doors of several businesses in the little strip mall across the way. Three of the four shops he hit – the shoe place, the teriyaki place, the Hallmark – had alarms, too. Maybe the bank alarm just hadn’t been working right, so Dean and his need for empirical evidence tested the hypothesis with a little wholesale destruction.

The alarms would burn themselves out before anyone came. The fucking sun would burn itself out before anyone came.

They sat in the car for a little while, watching nothing pass. The light changed as the planet kept turning, but the hamster of humanity was gone from its wheel.

Dean dialed Bobby again only to hear the standard twenty eight rings before the recorded operator came on to tell him he was being disconnected. “I slept through the fuckin’ Rapture,” he said with a note of open complaint in his voice. “This is bullshit, I wanted to see, like, cars crashing all over and swings swinging by themselves and stuff. This is just...it’s boring.”

Sam didn’t respond. Dean was going to be brave for a good long time with nervous jokes and whistling in the dark, and Sam could handle that just fine.

“Okay,” Dean said, flipping his phone shut. “Let’s pretend this is it. We have to plan, we can‘t sit around and wait for something to happen. The gas pumps will keep working as long as the power stays on. That’ll be...anywhere from hours, to a day or two, three at most. The power plants will shut down if no one is keeping them running. That’ll be our next big sign that everybody’s really gone. After that...we break into the tanks under the stations. So let’s stock up on gas and supplies while it’s easier to do it, start looking for survivors and see if anybody knows anything.”

“There has to be something to survive,” Sam said. “To leave survivors behind....something has to happen. There are birds and squirrels and bugs, Dean. But no people.”

Dean swallowed visibly, but held his unimpressed expression. “So what do you think this is?”

Sam shook his head. “I’m trying to wrap my head around this, okay? It’s like we were in some kind of...safe zone, or we got passed over. Or maybe this isn’t our world at all.”

“Unpopulated alternate dimension?” Dean said. There was no sneer in it, though. “With every sign that there were people, but they’ve just stepped off the edge?”

Sam wanted more than anything to think they were in a hollow echo of the world, left there accidentally, spelled there by unknown forces, dropped there by chance. Because that meant the real world went on somewhere, safe and common.

They pumped three different stations empty of both unleaded and diesel and began stockpiling it. They gathered all the additives and stabilizers they could find to make sure it lasted as long as it could. They chose several separate buildings away from roads, with cool, dry, dark central rooms, using every capable and sealable container from a couple of hardware stores and gas stations that they could find. Sam kept track of their hoards on a map. They filled the car’s tank and put two full gas cans in the trunk. They stocked up on ammo like they never had before.

They went into automatic survival mode. It was second nature. Winchesters were built for world-endings.

Or even just the pauses; the world was all still there, just not the one they had always known. It went on living, quietly and inexorably shifting back toward the way it had been before five-toed primate footprints had begun marking its face.

“So I guess we’re not on the FBI’s most wanted anymore,” Dean said, sleeves rolled up, checking for parts for the Impala at yet another gas station. They would need them, if this was all that was left. If the end went on for a good long time. “Nobody looking for us.”

“I wish they were,” Sam said.

Dean paused to look at him.

“We can’t be sure the whole world’s empty,” Sam said, eyes down. “We just can’t. Maybe this is still a local thing. We’ve gotta give it time.”

Dean’s eyes might have held sympathy or pity, but Sam carefully looked away.

-|-

Dean watched his back for a moment. The only way to handle the whole thing was to approach it as if it was another job, one more thing to conquer. They didn’t have all the info yet, but he knew deep down it was all over. He just hadn’t hit the wall yet. He couldn’t. If he thought about it, if he really let it sink in and land instead of just living alongside like he’d always done, he might fall down and never get up, not even for Sam. Because a world with all the people missing meant they had saved so many for nothing. Nothing. All gone. So much sacrifice and blood and pain and love, for nothing, for no one. No legacy, no victory over evil, no chance to keep it all going and beat back the dark. All their decisions, all the decisions ever made, taken away.

Sam was enough. Sam had always been enough. He could happily count Sam as the world and go on.

“Okay,” he said. “South Dakota. We’ll go there, check Bobby’s.”

He didn’t say maybe he’s still there or maybe he left a sign. He didn’t have to. It simply gave them a goal, no matter how short term.

They would check for people along the way, and maybe Bobby didn’t even realize the world had vanished yet, since he lived out in the middle of nowhere anyway. They loaded the car carefully with the basics in case they found a different situation as they moved west. Maybe people weren’t so much missing as flocking somewhere else in search of brains. Maybe something else had taken over and hadn’t made itself plain yet. Maybe everything was gone in other places, rather than just the people. They could imagine a lot.

-|-

Dean went into the bank one last time before they left town, looking at the vault longingly. The alarms had finally burned themselves out.

Sam stood in the shattered doorway, arms folded, carefully blank, holding it all together while he waited to see more of the world. “There’s no point, Dean.”

Dean shrugged. “Hey, you never know. There’s probably gold in there, and if there’s anybody left, paper money won’t be worth anything anymore. The hard stuff will be coin of the realm. Or bartering. Chickens and goats. I’m not carting a bunch of fuckin’ chickens around, that’s for sure.”

Sam just shook his head, making some kind of response to keep himself from panicking, to keep himself in the now.

Dean settled for clearing out a few of the teller’s drawers to amuse himself. “I’ve already been accused of trying to rob a bank,” he said. “May as well do it.”

They sat in the car and took a last look around, looking for something besides birds that might move, react, give a damn. There was a dog barking somewhere, nonstop.

They only used the freeways and interstates between cities and towns. At first, Dean took every second exit or used the backroads to check every single habitable area. Farms, small towns, rest areas while heading southwest; Christiansburg, Whytheville. They cut north on the 77 and into West Virginia, pausing in Beckley and then Cabin Creek and Marmet. Right up into Charleston, the first decently sized city between them and Bobby’s.

Sam’s tally of the missing had risen to roughly two million: the state of West Virginia.

The thing that kept hitting them both the hardest – except for the lack of people – was the cars. There were none blocking any road. None were crashed into each other or veered to any side; none were abandoned in the middle of any lane or on an overpass. None in the ditches. They were in parking lots and driveways, parked at curbs. None were running or had their hazards on or their doors left open. There was no sign of mayhem or shock. Everything was left behind, but not in a panic. It was obvious that if it was already parked, it had stayed parked.

“The hell,” Dean said, checking from one side of the street to the other and back, over and over.

They drove through major shopping areas and strip malls, then outlying neighborhoods. It was going to be dark soon, but they had to check, had to know. They split up on one street and tried doors. Some were open. They kicked in the ones that weren’t.

TVs were on but received nothing unless they were on a cable channel. Lights were on, coffeepots were heating the last dregs of coffee that was burning away to leave a residue. Dogs and cats and birds greeted them, sometimes happily but often not. Fish tanks bubbled away. There wasn’t one sign that anyone had jumped up to run from a table or bathroom, to escape. There was nothing that had been left right in the middle. No cigarettes burning, no forks thrown down in the middle of breakfast, no water left running. Nothing burning on stoves.

They met back up in the middle of the street, a block away from the car, and stared at each other.

“It’s like they all took a trip,” Dean said. “And they left all their stuff behind.”

“Except us,” Sam said.

“We weren’t invited,” Dean said.

Sam folded his arms and looked around. He’d started leaving doors open as he went because the dogs and cats were going to be better off having a chance to run in and out rather than being trapped inside to starve. Of the pets in backyards, only two dogs had let him get close enough to let them loose. He didn’t mention it to Dean. He didn’t have to. Dean had been doing the same.

“We just have to keep going,” Dean said. “Just...keep going. That’s what we do. What we’ve always done.”

“I’m glad you’re here,” Sam said suddenly, looking at one of the houses he’d recently been in. “If I’d woken up and there wasn’t...if you were...”

“Hey,” Dean said. “Kind of always been that way, right? You and me. It’s okay as long as we’re...you and me.”

Sam nodded. Nothing was actually okay, but Dean was there like always, and that was enough just then.

They went back into Charleston and began stockpiling gas like they had before, so that it was easily accessible at a later time. They had decided to do that every chance they got. Even needing to break into the tanks later wasn’t a solid guarantee; the fuel would begin to evaporate sooner or later. Or break down. None of those tanks was as airtight or leakproof as anybody said. They needed to be able to get around, somehow.

While Dean was filling containers, Sam went into a pharmacy just across the street and perused the medical supplies. He chose several broad-spectrum antibiotics, burn remedies, painkillers, anti-inflammatories, first aid supplies. He didn’t know what they were up against. Maybe they would run into straggling survivors who needed help; maybe they would run into something that would cause them to need patching up. The end of things the way he knew them didn’t mean he stopped trying to do what he could for the people that weren’t as prepared.

He was careful to keep Dean in sight though the front plate glass windows as he walked aisle to aisle.

He checked around and found a good set of walkie-talkies with a five mile range, and an emergency crank-powered radio that came with a light. It would be good to keep around, since it didn’t need batteries and could charge other things. Their cell phones, at least, while they worked.

When he returned, Dean was trying to call Bobby again. Dialing zero, dialing 911. Nothing.

Dean filled the Impala’s tank, checked the oil, checked the tire pressure. He grabbed a case of beer from the station’s store along with a case of bottled water, then got ice and pop from the fountain for them both, because the point was unspoken but well heard all the same: Dean was really going to miss ice machines, and pop once it all went flat. There was no one to make more.

Their lives were suddenly going to be full of more last times than they ever had before.

It wasn’t a matter of being pessimistic or giving up. It was just a way of taking in the available evidence and responding appropriately. It was what they knew how to do.

They leaned against the car and sipped, each grateful for the small semblance of normalcy.

“We gotta bed down for the night,” Dean said. “Gotta pick a place that we can easily defend, if we have to. Just ‘cause we haven’t seen anything doesn’t mean there’s nothing there.”

Sam let that ride for a moment, glancing around the empty street, checking the three cars in the gas station’s parking lot once again. “Since the animals are still around, since it’s not all life that’s missing, then maybe it’s just human life that’s gone. What about...Wendigos, werewolves, vampires? Vampires aren’t alive, I guess, but they’re...animate. What about demons, Dean? No way they gave up this easily.”

Dean shrugged, the motion looking more casual than it was. “After planning to come take over the world for so long? Hell, for all we know...it’s demons that did this.”

Sam sighed quietly in anxiety. Would the demons come and find the world hollow, to have everything and yet nothing, with the human herd gone to unknown pastures?

“For all we know,” Sam said softly, “this is Hell. This is what we can’t stand.”

“No,” Dean said quickly. “Mariah Carey would be playing on eternal repeat on some sort of unseen Muzak system if this was Hell. I can’t say anything will ever be all right, but this isn’t the worst, Sammy. We’re still here and...”

He didn’t say it. He’d been about to echo Sam’s earlier sentiment, about being together. He didn’t need to. Sam knew.

“Hell wouldn’t let me keep you, Sam,” Dean said. “Hell for you might be getting stuck with me. But my Hell doesn’t have you in it.”

Sam felt his face begin to crumple and looked away, fighting it all down.

“We’re kind of overwhelmed,” Dean said, softer. “A lot less than anybody else would be, okay, but this is pretty heavy shit. And we haven’t seen everything yet, and there’s not much we really know. So, we can just keep looking. First we gotta eat and sleep, or that won’t be possible. We can sleep in shifts to keep an eye out.”

“At least we don’t have to stay in a motel, right?” Sam said, face still turned away, voice a little shaky.

Dean was silent for a moment, then said, “Oh, wow. Sam, you genius.”

Sam looked straight ahead but didn’t want to look right at Dean and let Dean see the residual pain on his face. “What.”

“Dude, five-star hotel,” Dean said. “Come on. Oh, man. This is...okay, aside from everybody missing, that’s pretty cool. Penthouse suite.”

Sam found himself snorting. “Jesus. You can find the bright spot in anything, can’t you? Fuckin’ hedonist.”

“Hey, guilty as charged,” Dean said. “We have to deal with what we have until we know more. You know, not give up hope, just sort of put it on the back burner while we gather intel.”

Sam felt a confused mixture of grief and laughter bubble up in his chest and gave voice to neither. “We can do this, huh? Whatever it is.”

“Yeah,” Dean said. “So let’s go.”

“You do realize there won’t be any room service,” Sam said.

“Hey,” Dean said. “That’s nothing. It’s occurred to me that there might be no chicks left. That sucks.”

-|-

They stood in the lobby of the Marriott in Charleston.

Sam couldn’t remember this ever coming up before, not while they were working. They didn’t stay in places with more than two floors, ever. Bottom floor meant something might get in, but they could deal with that. Upper floors meant risking being trapped, by a fire, or a crowd of whatever might be left.

“Corner room is a defensible position,” Dean said. “Easy to get out, stairs are always right there. Bottom floor means barricading the windows, and I want to leave the windows open in case there’s something to hear. So let’s go up, but not up high enough to cause us a problem if we need to get out fast.”

Sam nodded. “No elevators,” he said. “Stairs only. We get trapped in an elevator now, we’re really screwed.”

“Yeah, ‘cause I’m not climbing the goddamn cables to get out,” Dean said. “Sad way to die, in an elevator. Survive the fuckin’ apocalypse and then die in an elevator.”

They made a quick search of the main areas and hallways of the hotel, then grabbed a bunch of cardkeys and wandered around on the third floor. They found a corner room they liked that was ridiculously fancy. Three rooms, huge bathroom, fireplace, sitting area. Hot tub. Full bar. Fridge with snacks not commonly found in a convenience store. If the power went out, they couldn’t use the cardkeys anymore, but they’d be able to break the door if they had to. And they had a fireplace. Dean wasn’t sure he wanted to be the only visible smoke for miles, but, sooner or later, something would catch fire without people to keep watch, and it wouldn’t matter anymore.

They emptied the car and brought everything into the room. No way they were risking losing anything, even if there were plenty of other places nearby with supplies. Dean parked the Impala close to the stairwell their room was on, next to six other cars left behind by patrons who no longer needed them. He locked it up and looked around carefully before going in the side door and barricading it with a couple of chairs and a bunch of empty cans from the kitchen.

Sam was surfing the internet, looking for any sign of life when Dean came back in. He was checking CNN.com, randomly IM’ing total strangers, posting on forums, and checking blogs, looking for the date and time of the very last post.

They were all the same. September 13^th, 2008. The oldest post he could find was 1:29am PST; 8:29am Greenwich mean time.

“It’s like...it’s the stopping point,” Sam said. “Moment zero. Nobody’s posting stuff like ‘oh my God, they’re here,’ or ‘help, is anyone out there’. It’s just...everything was business as usual, and then everybody was gone.” He paused. “I was saving it, you know? I expected to open the laptop and find somebody, some kind of gathering of whoever was left, some kind of...answer.”

“You gonna post something?” Dean said.

“I have. Like, everywhere. All the major news sites, as many of the stupid celeb entertainment sites as I can...I can’t think of anything else.”

“Any chance they’re all out there trying to hit ‘send’ and just aren’t getting through?” Dean said. “You’d never see that.”

Sam shrugged.

“Then leave it alone for now and see if anything pops up in the morning,” Dean said, ruffling his hair.

Sam nodded without ducking away and clicked the laptop shut. He didn’t want to think about what no life on something as huge as the internet meant. Not everyone on the planet had access to the internet. And no posting only meant no power, or no access to computers. The hotel still had wireless running, and the chances of their locale being the only place that did...was small. So small.

He didn’t want to be the last person who ever posted on the internet. He didn’t want the internet to stand as it was, the last thing that humanity had made that would stand pristine in the face of extinction; the only thing that would survive even long after the power went out, locked away in pixels forever.

He did not revise his running tally. Not yet. The evidence was too shaky. He had to relegate it to places he’d been, places he’d seen for himself.

Dean went downstairs with one of the walkie-talkies and checked the kitchen. “Dude, there’s tons of food down here, and some of it’s pre-made. What do you want?”

“I’m not that hungry,” Sam said.

“You’re gonna eat, and I’ll shove it down you if I have to,” Dean said. “Don’t piss me off.”

“I want a salad,” Sam said.

“Jesus Christ,” Dean said, and his annoyance was plain over the air. “You can have anything, and you choose that.”

“I’m gonna miss lettuce,” Sam said. “It doesn’t keep, and we’ll have to grow our own.”

There was a long silence on Dean’s end.

“Dean? You okay?”

“Only you would miss lettuce,” Dean said. “I’m gonna throw something together and bring it up. Stay there.”

“Leave your end open, then,” Sam said.

Dean did. Sam got to listen to him sing while he cooked. He could hear something frying, then a clatter and some pretty inventive swearing, then more singing. Dean broke off to mutter something about ‘these bitches better have ranch around here somewhere’ and then a falsetto rendition of Sabbath’s Iron Man.

Nothing - not even the end of the world - could keep Sam from snickering over that.

He kept looking for anything posted or anything on the news sites just before what he’d come to think of as Moment Zero. Anything indicating something odd, disappearances, disturbances. Strange weather patterns. Black holes. Strange lights in the sky. Anything that could point him to what might have happened to the world he’d known. It didn’t matter how crazy it sounded; he’d happily try anything as an explanation.

If anyone had known their time was up, they hadn’t said so online. Maybe something had happened to completely screw up the ability of the ‘net to accept anything. Had screwed up the electronics, all transmissions.

He thought of Exodus; the ten plagues. The angel of death had moved through Egypt, killing the firstborn, makat bechorot, but had passed over the homes with lamb’s blood on the doorposts.

Why were they still there? What had been their lamb’s blood?

The rest of the world’s people had practiced some kind of exodus of their own.

Dean had moved on to AC/DC. His impression of Bon Scott was lacking. Sam didn’t care; it was enough just to hear his voice.

“Dude, I need help bringing this crap up.”

Sam went downstairs and found Dean in the kitchen wearing an apron. There was a strip of cloth tied around his forehead like he thought he was an Iron Chef.

“Filet Mignon?” Sam said.

“I cooked it rare enough so that a good vet could revive it, so c’mon, let’s eat.” Dean shoved a bowl of salad greens into Sam’s hands and headed for the stairs with a tray.

They salted the door and the windows, just in case.

-|-

They watched movies on cable and drank beer and tried not to think about how, sooner or later, neither thing would exist anymore.

-|-

As exhausted as they were, they only managed a few hours of sleep between them. The last time they’d slept, the world had ended.

-|-

September 14, 2008

The weather was exactly the same in Huntington as it had been everywhere else – high clouds passing slowly. The air smelled to Sam like rain might be moving in, but it was as if there was something missing at the edges. He’d always thought he could smell a change in seasons even if he knew logically that it was just a temperature or weather change that was typical of an approaching season. The leaves hadn’t begun to turn yet, there, even though the air began to feel cooler and damper. And yet, nothing smelled familiar to him – or, as close to familiar as he understood, having been moving state to state for the last couple of years.

A detour up into Ashland, then on into Kentucky. Grayson, Olive Hill, Morehead. It was in Morehead that Dean quit paying attention to stop signs and traffic lights. They just didn’t matter anymore. It was hard, at first, because the rules were so ingrained. The center line had never meant that much anyway, since on the long stretches without traffic, Dean had always straddled it. But the lights...purposely running red lights came with flinching amusement and an involuntary glance in the rearview.

They smelled smoke when the windows were down and knew someone had left something on, a coffeepot or curling iron or who knew what, and whole neighborhoods would be going up in flames. A grease fire in a fast food place, the hot dog warmers in convenience stores - there were a million simple ways that the fires would start. They didn’t want to see the destruction or get caught up in it. They had to smell places out before they went in.

They just kept driving, passing places by until they hit Winchester. Sam marked several major road signs with spray paint he’d picked up from one of the hardware stores: we’re here, 9/14/08. He scribbled and left notes on the doors of businesses, described what they’d seen. Left their phone numbers. They left a stockpile of gasoline in Lexington and then pushed on.

Sam’s tally of the missing rose to six million: West Virginia and Kentucky.

Louisville - more markers, another stockpile. St. Louis. They stopped there for the night, to hoard gas and hide medical supplies in a couple of basements in case someone or something came along and demolished the place.

Another hotel, another corner room on the third floor, another decent meal.

Twelve million.

-|-

September 15^th, 2008

Kansas City, then Omaha, Nebraska. While they were stashing stuff and restocking in Omaha, the power went off.

It wasn’t immediately noticeable in the daylight, but once the traffic lights were gone and the automatic neon signs went dark, it became apparent that the power had finally failed...at least in that area. The untended coal-fired stations had run out of fuel, and the electricity bled off, flickering away.

“Generators,” Dean said. “If we wanna settle somewhere...we can use generators, while the gas lasts. Batteries...Jesus, we have a world full of batteries.”

“Settle somewhere,” Sam said flatly.

“Yeah, settle somewhere,” Dean said. There was an edge of did I stutter? in his tone. “If everywhere’s like this, and everybody’s gone, we gotta figure out what to do. In one place.”

It was already dangerous to keep moving around from place to place, even if there were no signs of evil. Had evil been to blame for any of it, then there would have been something left behind, at least. Evil liked to take the credit for its handiwork most of the time.

And ending the world?

That was a lot of handiwork.

Their whole lives had been about being prepared. Preparing for the unexpected; preparing for eventualities. The leap ahead to discussing the future was nothing more than a natural progression. They had always adapted to their surroundings. This was one more adaptation, and if there was nothing left for them to chase, there was no reason to wander from place to place endlessly. They would search while they could. When they were satisfied that they were alone - if it ever came to that - then there was a decision to be made about how they spent the rest of their lives.

“We’re surrounded by supplies,” Sam said finally. “One place runs out, we just...move on.”

Dean grunted. “Ain’t staying up this far north in the winter,” he said. “Mexico. Beaches in Mexico. And tequila keeps, like, forever.”

Sam smirked. It was pale and halfhearted, but it was there.

When it started to get dark, the differences hit even harder. No streetlights, no store lights, no headlights but the Impala’s. The dark was total and ominous for miles. The boys had been in only two windstorms in their lives that had been bad enough to kill the power; once for two days. It had been a rare occurrence for them to witness, because as soon as it was safe to move on, they had. John Winchester had known better than to hang around where the only light could be had by flame. They had always driven until they found a place where the power was still on. It had been something amazing to them, a world without artificial light, larger and looming and mysterious. But it hadn’t felt threatening; their young eyes had adapted quickly, and they were always armed. The dark wasn’t anything to fear, even though it pressed in on every side. It just needed watching.

They finally found emergency lights on a fire station they passed. Automatic generators and backup power were still running in the places that needed it most.

The maps they had were useless; street signs were impossible to see. Still, they were able to gravitate toward the city center, and found a hotel in the dark among buildings that were suddenly forbidding.

As they unloaded the car, Sam found himself glancing constantly around, using his flashlight to check corners and wait for movement. Dean was doing the same, watching all sides.

Somewhere in the distance, the muted sound of dogs barking went by just barely noticed.

They chose another corner room, kicking the door in because the lock was electronic. There was still a chain and deadbolt on the inside of every door, so it didn’t matter. They checked a few other rooms and the kitchen by flashlight. Sam cooked half-thawed lobster and shrimp on a natural gas stove that he lit with Dean’s lighter. There was still enough pressure in the lines.

They ate by candlelight out in the dining area, choosing an inside wall away from the windows.

“Lobster by candlelight,” Dean said. “Wow. Just because I’m the last person on earth doesn’t mean I’m gonna put out, Sam.”

Sam dug a chunk of meat out of a claw. “Shut up,” he said. “There’s still...shit, never mind.”

“You were gonna say ‘there’s still sheep’ or something, right?” Dean said. “I knew that about you.”

Sam didn’t retort.

Dean watched him, trying not to be caught doing it. Sam felt it anyway. He knew he was taking it all just as hard as Dean was trying not to. He figured Dean only felt the loss of parts of the world, the things he could deal with directly. But Sam knew he would feel the loss of the whole, sooner or later, and Sam wasn’t sure how they’d get past it.

They took showers with what could very well have been the last hot water that manmade electricity would ever provide.

Dean swore he was going to find a place with a generator. He was not going to live without hot showers.

-|-

September 16^th

They headed north to Sioux City first thing in the morning. It was a serene, partly cloudy fall day that should have been rife with school buses and people rushing to work, sirens and laughter, talk radio, exhaust and fast food. It was a ghost town. There were dogs barking again, somewhere, but they didn’t see them.

If they didn’t rush then it would be longer before they found Bobby’s house empty.

“The lights,” Dean said. “On the fire departments. I’ll bet they’ll work on all the 911 centers, all the police stations. Jails. Hospitals.”

Sam squinted at him, trying to follow his thought pattern. “Yeah?”

“We need to check the hospitals. People go there or to schools when something...happens.”

Sam nodded. “Yeah, okay. ‘Cause if the people are gone even from the morgue, then we know...well, more than we know now.”

Mercy Medical Center off 5th didn’t have any more cars than the rest of the area seemed to. There was no sign of movement aside from pigeons. They watched from a slight distance before parking closer and walking right in the emergency room entrance with hands on guns.

Silent. Empty.

The waiting room area, admitting, the labs. The emergency generators let them come and go through electronically operated security doors.

No one in any of the rooms, on any of the floors.

The morgue in the basement had no one in the drawers.

Sam recognized the look on Dean’s face immediately.

“Cemetery,” Dean said. “Let’s go.”

“Dean – “

“Sam, people were here. They lived here. They made all this stuff, and maybe they got taken or vaporized or who knows what. But it’s not like they never existed. There’s gotta be someone here, somewhere. There has to.”

Sam stared at him for a long moment, but already knew he had no reason to try and deter him from digging someone up. It would just be more evidence, in the end. It likely wouldn’t help them find out what had happened.

Sam was afraid that the coffins would be empty, and it would prove Dean wrong. People had never been there. The world was of their imagining, one big hollow echo still holding the constructs but not the creators. A Djinn had them in its grasp, and instead of what they wanted, they were getting what they feared.

All for nothing.

-|-

Calvary Cemetery was the largest cemetery in the area, just off a golf course. They drove through the gates and followed the main drive. It was sloping and well kept, open, green. Sam knew without asking that Dean was looking for the newest burials so that the digging would go quicker. It was a requirement in most places in the last couple of decades to place a coffin inside a cement liner prior to burial, to keep the earth above from sinking once the coffin below collapsed. It wasn’t done everywhere, though, especially the older cemeteries; and even if there was a liner, they’d be able to pry it apart.

“Mausoleums,” Sam said softly.

Dean’s hands were white-knuckled on the wheel. “What?”

“Find a mausoleum and break into it first,” Sam said. “It’s not like we’ll be disturbing anybody. It’s the easiest thing to try, before we start digging.”

He wanted the disappointment to be over sooner rather than later.

Dean glanced around. “The people in the morgue were dead, but they were still above ground,” he said. “Everybody above ground is gone. I wanna see if anybody’s still under it.”

Sam nodded. It was useless to remind Dean that they’d been above ground, too, and they were still there.

The drive wound through several older sections, then a WWII monument, then a caretaker’s shed. Near the far northwest corner was a recent burial, the headstone already set in place but the earth still piled, the sod loose and humped.

They retrieved shovels from the trunk wordlessly. Sam rolled up his sleeves and gently rolled up the sod, dropping it several feet away. Nobody would be coming to visit the grave again, and there would be no one to care whether anyone had disinterred their loved one. No one was going to care whether the sod ever looked good again, but it was still wrong to completely disrespect what was left.

Sam decided it was too bad there was no one left to read the Winchester Guide to Respectful Grave Desecration.

He ran the back of one wrist across his mouth to both still and disguise the urge to laugh.

It took both of them to roll the headstone back. They didn’t want it falling into the hole, or on them, and they were both careful not to read the name inscribed on the two-toned granite.

They worked in silence. The day stayed cool and got breezier as it went on, thin clouds skating by above as they partially buried themselves in an effort to unearth someone else. At roughly three feet, they hit the cement liner.

Dean hauled himself up out of the hole and headed back for the car, taking an automatic glance around. Sam figured he’d never stop doing it, not after a lifetime of it. After awhile, maybe it wasn’t people he’d need to keep an eye out for; maybe once the bigger predators started taking even the most built up places back, they’d need to make sure they weren’t the most attractive two-legged tasty things around.

Dean got a crowbar and a sledgehammer out of the still-open trunk and held them both out for Sam so he could jump back in.

“Top only,” he said. “No point digging the whole thing up, just gonna break in above the head. Like the resurrectionists used to do.”

Like the anatomists back in the early to mid eighteen hundreds had done in an attempt to get bodies to examine. It had become a popular way of making money in those times, in Edinburgh and London, to bring fresh corpses to medical schools. It was quickest and easiest just to dig at the top only, break the coffin open, and drag the corpse up and out by its head. Students often dug up their own family members just so they could learn anatomy. Sadly, it had become a trade that was lucrative enough to entice some to ‘make’ their own fresh corpses.

Sam laid into the liner with the sledgehammer. It took half a dozen blows to get it to crack apart enough to get the crowbar in and pry enough out to allow them to look in at the top of the coffin. It was dark hardwood with brass fittings. They looked at each other for a moment. Then Dean took the sledgehammer to the top of the coffin, first only denting but then shattering the treated wood. He dug more out with the crowbar, watching for splinters. When the silk lining became visible, he tossed the crowbar aside and got his knife out, slitting the cloth lengthwise.

Sam held a flashlight down into the resulting opening.

There was a pale female face below, only days dead, false color applied to the bloodless skin in the form of makeup, dark hair still carefully in place.

Dean’s shoulders slumped in relief that even he knew was macabre.

It meant people had been there, had really inhabited the same space they were currently in. They hadn’t been shoved into some alternate reality.

But it also meant people were really gone.

“Okay,” Sam said. “So anyone underground was left in place. Then maybe anyone underground for any other reason might still be out there. Not just below ground in buildings, but maybe for...construction, or mining. Really underground.”

Dean shook his head. “How long do you wanna keep looking, Sam? What good will it do to find anybody?”

“What the hell does that mean?” Sam said, keeping his voice low by habit even though there was no one else but Dean to hear him. “Someone else might know what happened, might have seen something. You don’t think it’s important to see if anybody else is still alive?”

“Other people are the last thing we need,” Dean said. “They’ll freak out for a little while, then start getting weird about who’s in charge and how the world should be, now. They’ll start yelling about how God punished humanity or whatever.”

“This isn’t a fucking Stephen King novel, Dean,” Sam said, leaning on his shovel. “This isn’t The Stand, or the one about the fog.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Dean said, turning his back on the open part of the grave but careful not to look at Sam yet. “Might as well be trapped in a supermarket with the town nutcase, the minute we run into anyone else. People revert right back to crazy chimp behavior the minute ‘civilization’ breaks down.

Someone will decide you’re the second coming or the anti-Christ yet again and we’ll have a whole pack of Gordons chasing us.”

Sam stared at him in amazement.

“Shut up,” Dean said. “I know how it is. There’s something about you, Sam, and if there’s only a handful of people left on the damn planet, they don’t get to take shots at you.” He turned back and began to replace the larger chunks of coffin and liner.

Sam kept staring.

Dean finally stood and brushed himself off, then made an exaggerated gesture toward the hole above the head of the coffin before jumping back up and standing above Sam.

Sam shook his head and filled in the smaller hole. They both filled in the larger hole, then leaned against the closed trunk of the car and listened to the world out of habit. No air traffic, no distant sound of semis on the nearby interstate downshifting.

“Donuts,” Dean said. “Gonna miss fresh donuts.”

-|-

They stopped back in Sioux City to find something to eat and for Sam to leave more notes behind. 9/16/08 was left on signs, but instead of we were here Sam had decided to stick with numbers only. Not everyone spoke English, but math was universal. He left the coordinates for Bobby’s place, using the military system their father had when directing them on where to meet up. Someone would understand.

“And what if the wrong eyes see it, and get what it means?” Dean said. “We don’t know who or what’s out there, yet, and you gotta give our one good hiding place away. And what if...”

Dean trailed off. He’d been about to voice a belief that Bobby might still be in residence on the planet, but he couldn’t do it.

Sam kept watching him with what looked like patience, but Dean knew it was sadness on the edge of panic.

“I just don’t want anybody showing up there,” Dean said. “It’s sort of the closest thing to home. I don’t wanna have to be watching our backs constantly.”

Sam’s mouth showed a brief quirk of humor. “You’ll be doing it anyway,” he said softly. “It’s who you are.”

Dean grunted, but he quit arguing with him about it after that.

They checked one more area hospital and a small medical center for signs of the living. A high school, a police station. No one had huddled there in hopes of being rescued or discovered. Long, empty hallways echoed their footsteps back, amplified their hushed voices, caused them to resort to behaving as if they were under siege. Dean had one hand on his gun without even realizing it; Sam hovered barely a half step back, looming over his shoulder.

Dean’s eyes began to ache from the strain of expecting to see movement. In the absence of any genuine input, the human brain substituted whatever the hell it felt like adding in. He knew the shadows he was catching out of the corners of his eyes were false, but it didn’t keep him from giving them his attention.

They made it to Bobby’s just before dark.

They parked by the garage, not bothering to try and disguise their arrival. Nothing looked any different. They heard the dog barking long before they got near the door. It was a frantic bark that told the boys that he’d been alone long enough to get upset about it.

The door was unlocked, like usual. Rove shot out past them then wheeled back, snuffling, checking their hands and jumping up on them to look in their faces. Then he took off into the yard.

They didn’t bother calling for Bobby. It would be a pointless exercise for appearances only.

The house was still and cool. Any fire Bobby might have had in the woodstove had long since gone out on its own. There was no sign that he’d been in the middle of something when he went. His bed was unmade, but they didn’t know whether that was normal for him.

If anyone on the planet would have been able to leave some sort of sign or message behind, it would have been Bobby.

Rove was hungry. They took him out to the garage and broke open all three fifty-pound bags of dog food that were out there and let him dig in. He could come and go and eat as he wished, that way. Rainwater had gathered in several steel tubs in the yard, so he’d have enough water.

They sat at Bobby’s table, looking at the bits and pieces of guns and machinery he’d been working on, recently-made silver bullets, newspaper clippings of one of the last hunts they’d been on.

Sam sifted through it all listlessly. They both felt out of place even though Bobby’s had been more of a home than most.

“The pets,” Sam said finally. “They’re all trapped inside, with nobody to feed them. They’ll starve to death. They’ll be scared. They’ll be so scared.”

His voice cracked at the end, and rested his head on his arms, face hidden.

Dean reached across and rested a hand on his shoulder, knowing it was about more than just pets, even though that was important. Sam was mourning the world.

They couldn’t open every single damn door in the suburban world. But if it would make Sam feel better, they could try and open as many as they could reach while they were passing through. The zoos -- they could unlock all the cages and run like hell. Pet stores, too. They could at least do that.

He ruffled Sam’s hair gently and said, “We’ll do whatever we can, okay? Let’s...check the place out, make sure it’s ready for winter. If everybody can just vanish like that, then there’s no reason they can’t just snap back into place, and he’ll be pissed off if the pipes break. I’m gonna go check and see what he’s got stocked up. You make coffee. He’s got one of those pots that doesn’t need electricity.”

He got up from the table and walked away. If he didn’t he was only going to end up crying with Sam.

Orphaned, all over again.

Dean took a look around even though he already knew Bobby was set up to be trapped for a good long time. Oil lamps, extra oil and gas, canned food, chopped wood. Batteries. Candles. Salt. He hadn’t necessarily been thinking about the entire world ending, but he’d been prepared for almost anything. They could get a couple of generators and keep them out in the garage, stay there for a couple of days and regroup, figure out what they were going to do next. Dean wasn’t ready to give up searching, yet, even though he felt in his bones that it was all over. They were trapped on a deserted island that happened to be the size of the planet.

He checked to see which of the trucks was still running, checked their fuel gauges. He’d take one and go into the hardware store in Mission. They wouldn’t want to hole up there for the winter; they’d go crazy once the snows came. Dean wanted to be able to keep moving, but he also wanted to be back, eventually. He wanted to keep using the place as a centerpoint. Maybe someone would see Sam’s spray painted messages and come looking, leave something of their own.

Rove came back and followed him into the house. Dean got himself some coffee and sat across from Sam, who was scanning a pile of books he’d picked out of Bobby’s numerous stacks. Sam had lit several kerosene lamps, and it was a warm but eerie light.

“Lots of legends about the end of the world,” Sam said without looking up. His eyes were dry, but Dean knew better. “Nothing like this, though.”

Dean nodded. “We’re not the only people in the world who had salt at the door and protection symbols all over the place,” he said. “If there was something special about the motel we were in or even that town, then we’d have at least that much company.”

“So what are we,” Sam said, “untouchable?”

Dean looked down into his coffee. “We’ve never been so far,” he said softly. “Maybe...just passed over. Maybe there’s something about us that wasn’t the right combination to get a one-way ticket off this rock.”

Sam flipped pages but obviously wasn’t looking at them.

“Let’s go into town and grab a few things,” Dean said. “Then you can research all you want.”

For just a moment, the way Sam stilled, Dean was certain an emotional explosion would follow it. Sam looked like he might sweep everything onto the floor and start shouting. All he did was stand, though, and run one hand through his hair.

“What’s to stop one of us from waking up tomorrow morning alone?” he said. “What do I do, if you’re gone?”

Dean didn’t look at him. “Not gonna happen.”

“I just – “

“Not gonna happen, Sam,” Dean said gruffly, rising. “C’mon, let’s go. I don’t wanna fuck around out there in the dark any longer than we have to.”

-|-

Like before, the total darkness was disorienting. Not even emergency backup lights were visible on any of the buildings in town. Nothing ran across the road in front of them. It took Dean a little while with just headlights to make sure they were even headed in the right direction; everything looked so damn foreign. Once he found the hardware store, he left the headlights on and shining into the front windows.

With the engine killed, there was nothing to hear.

They left the door propped open and went in, flashlights on. They stayed together the entire time.

Dean picked out a camp stove and a grill and two generators, which they put into the back of the truck. Sam hesitated.

“Knock it off,” Dean said as he put the tailgate up.

Sam looked at him in the reflected light from the headlights.

“It’s not looting if there’s no one left to own it,” Dean said.

Sam sighed. “It all takes a little getting used to, okay?”

-|-

There were pork chops in Bobby’s freezer that were still frozen at the core. Dean put them on the grill outside and used the camp stove to begin boiling potatoes, and got the woodstove going again. Sam hooked up one of the generators in the meantime, finding what he and Dean had known they would: Bobby’s electrical system was pretty damned old and needed an upgrade. Sam could rewire enough of it to patch the generator in, but he’d known it wasn’t going to be simple. Dean came out and yelled at him to come eat dinner or else, so Sam gave it up for the moment.

Dean set two chops aside to cool for the dog, who was very interested in all of what was going on. They ate mashed potatoes with butter and pork chops and still slightly cool beer out of the fridge while Rove gnawed on the bones of his portion.

“To Bobby,” Dean said, tilting his bottle at Sam.

Sam let the glass of his own bottle clink with Dean’s. “To Bobby.”

It was likely all the memorial he would have wanted. They felt his absence keenly in the old house.

Dean went back out with Sam to wrangle with the generator, and within half an hour, they managed to get it going. Dean made sure there was enough gas in it to keep it going awhile. They turned the lights on and discovered the house was running off two separate fuse boxes, so half the house lit up and the other half didn’t. Dean just laughed. At least the half that worked included the hot water heater.

They took turns in the shower after the water heated back up, then Dean went out and shut the generator off. They called it a night in the guest room they'd always shared, one bed and two worried boys.

-|-

September 17^th

They kept trying to catch something, anything on the crank radio, and failed. Not the weather, not the time, nothing. The airwaves were free of human voices.

Sam spent most of the day reading, checking old legends and prophesies and Bobby’s old journals of everything he’d ever seen or heard. Eyewitness accounts from other hunters, ancient lore. There were so many ways for the world to end, so many ways it had been foretold over centuries, but none of them mentioned this. Even had something like the Rapture been a possibility, there would have been someone besides Sam and Dean left behind. Plagues, famines, the intervention of deities, these he understood. But none of them had come to pass.

He reread the Book of Revelations.

Normally they would have called Bobby to see if he had any ideas.

It wouldn’t make much difference if he did figure out what had happened; what was done was done. Whatever the hell had been done.

-|-

Dean got under the crawlspace and made sure the pipes were wrapped for winter. Rove ‘helped’. Dean didn’t want to take the risk of making the house uninhabitable with their absence. He didn’t want to be fixing the plumbing before he absolutely had to, either.

He circled the house with the dog, checking the roofline, looking for trouble spots. He didn’t want to bug Sam, even if he didn’t think there was anything to be found that might shed light on the whole thing. He knew there had to be a solid reason behind it all. Not one that necessarily made sense, but some sort of explanation all the same, and he didn't want to begrudge Sam the chance to occupy himself and try and figure it all out. He just didn't feel that they would find it in books. Nobody had warned humanity about this one.

Wasn’t like they could do anything about it, anyway. So Dean chose to worry about what he could control.

That would work for awhile.

When he went back inside, Sam was uncharacteristically silent for not being pissed off, and Dean let him be except to make him help clean out Bobby’s fridge and freezer. They cooked up whatever sounded good and left most of the rest out for the dog. They cleared out the perishables to keep the place from becoming a moldfest once they were gone...wherever the hell they were going.

They tried not to eye anything Bobby might have made too closely. His handiwork was all over the house, but the leftovers were too personal, somehow.

It was hard to eat. Neither of them acknowledged it.

“I don’t think...he’s dead,” Sam said. “It doesn’t make any sense, if everybody’s dead.”

Dean didn’t answer one way or the other. It didn’t make sense no matter which way he tried to turn it in his head.

He went out to the garage and messed with a couple of the ham radios Bobby had out there, checking to see if there was anything but static on the airwaves.

Sam kept reading long into the night, until Dean hassled him into coming in and reading in bed. That way, Dean could sleep, even with the light on, because Sam was in the same room.

-|-

September 18th

It was Sam who left a note taped to the inside of the glass on the back door, and Dean who locked the house.

They each spent a moment looking back at the house. It was familiar. The roads and surrounding area, the towns nearby, the cities beyond, all seen before and so familiar. But no longer the same. No longer as recognizable.

Rove watched them from the garage, ducking his head back in periodically to eat from the open bags. If the dog food attracted rats, he would probably eat them too. He was better off outside and running loose to handle the new order of things however he saw fit.

Sam flipped a coin and they headed west on the 90, pausing in Rapid City to check hospitals and schools and fire departments yet again. The only signs of life were two separate groups of dogs that were actively looking for food. Sam was pretty sure he saw a cat cross the road near one of the schools.

“Do you know what would suck?” Dean said.

Sam’s response was monotone. He was gazing out the passenger window listlessly. “What.”

“Being the very last ‘possum that got nailed by a car. The last roadkill. All they had to do was wait another five minutes or something, and they’d have had the whole world back to themselves.”

There was still electricity in a couple of areas, so they holed up in the Hotel Alex Johnson, a huge old building that Dean remembered from some Hitchcock flick. Dean wandered around the floors and decided one of the presidential suites would be fine. Sam was too tired to so much as roll his eyes. He’d slept for awhile in the car, and Dean was glad, because even though the silence was beginning to freak him out, Sam’s growing despondence was worse.

Sam found a wireless connection and tooled around for awhile, and Dean flipped channels to see whether there was anything left, anywhere. Even the cable channels had stopped broadcasting.

“Figured out why we still have power,” Sam said without looking up from the laptop. “Rapid City’s on the boundary of the western and eastern power grids. We’re at one of the points where the power grids meet each other. Plus, its got hydroelectric from a couple of dams on the Missouri.”

Dean looked out the windows, down onto narrow streets and lower brick buildings with red and green awnings. “Dams,” he said. “Wonder how long they’ll last.”

Sam tapped his fingers along one edge of the keyboard, frown developing. “Lots of flooding when they start to go,” he said.

Dean let his gaze slide along the rooftops below, watching for any sign of movement aside from the birds. “Might go on for years,” he said. “They’re usually overbuilt, right? Lots of failsafes in place.”

His tone was noncommittal, and Sam heard what he didn’t say. “Temporary,” he said. “Meant for short-term emergency situations. Then all the failsafes fail.”

“Yeah,” Dean said. “Like chemical plants, and all the damn nuclear waste sitting around in rusting drums. Hell of a legacy the whole human race left behind.”

Sam bolted upright hard enough to tip his chair over, and Dean startled away from the window. The look on Sam’s face was open shock, eyes wide and head tipped forward as if he meant to try and duck something.

“The nuclear plants,” Sam said, swallowing hard and glancing around the room like some kind of answer might appear on the walls. “They’ll melt down. The radiation. Jesus Christ, Dean, there’s nowhere to go.”

“What’s – “

“We don’t even know where the hell they are,” Sam said. “All the dams, the chemical plants, the refineries. Bobby would have left us some kind of hint if he could have, but it all happened too fast. If anything happened. So if everybody went that fast, then there was no one to leave warnings or flip any switches and shut anything down. The coffee pots.”

Dean made his not following face. “Whoa, whoa, slow down.”

Sam began to pace, sweat breaking out on his forehead and upper lip. “If it was already on...that’s what we’ve been seeing. In the houses we were in. A coffee pot sits and heats for a couple of hours and shuts itself off. Those were the kinds of things we found on. The big factories and stuff would just run until the grid shut down. The grid is shutting down everywhere, Dean. And there’s nobody to monitor anything and nobody shut anything off on the way out.”

The same horror of awareness that was on Sam’s face also dawned on Dean’s. “Just about everything needs monitoring,” he said softly.

“Stuff...will overheat, and blow,” Sam said. “There’s gonna be clouds of radiation and chemicals and shit all over the planet. Either it fails before the grid goes, or it fails because the grid goes. We’re fucked.”

“Calm down,” Dean said, voice dropping into a gruff command. “Come on, it’s not gonna be that bad. Not everything is gonna blow. Some of it might just shut itself down. All we have to do is find out where the worst stuff is, and get the hell away from it.”

“You’re talking about hiding,” Sam said. “Not all nuclear plants are active anymore, yeah, but of the ones left, some are gonna burn. Chernobyl. Don’t you remember hearing about that? Just one reactor went, one, and it sent radioactive fallout all the way to fucking Sweden. It killed everything for miles. Every damn city’s got chemical plants, stuff like ammonia and pesticides and heavy metals and other shit we can’t even imagine. I mean, do you wanna go the rest of your life in a hazmat suit?”

“Sam,” Dean said, “sit down before I knock you on your ass.”

Sam paused to catch his breath, coming to stand at the windows by Dean. “We gotta figure out what to do. We can’t just wander around the world, anymore. It’s not bad enough that everybody’s gone. Everything else is gonna go, too.”

“While we’ve still got wireless,” Dean said, folding his arms across his chest, “let’s just find out where the worst of everything is, and steer clear. We can test for stuff, too, in the air, find places to crash where there’s the least amount of risk. Okay? We can do this.”

Sam nodded, hands at hips, mouth pressed into the line Dean feared the most. Sam in shut-down mode was harder to deal with than a rattled Sam. Especially when Dean was an instant from being rattled and pacing around the room, maybe hyperventilating, maybe trashing a place that presidents had once stayed.

Well, fuck it. He was president of the United States, suddenly, because there was no one else for the job.

“There has to be something like EMF meters, but for radiation and chemicals,” Dean said.

Sam lit up a little. “Uh...yeah, but I don’t remember what they’re called.”

“Whatever the hell it is, someone’ll have been selling them all over the place,” Dean said. “If we put some precautions in place, we’ll be fine. It won’t be that bad, Sammy.”

Still...he knew. The world just wasn’t quite done ending, yet.

Sam couldn’t type fast enough, checking every active nuclear power plant and saving a list, writing them down in case they lost the laptop or had no way of booting it up again. Of the roughly 100 plants and reactors in the US, a significant number had been shut down and were in no danger of starting a chain reaction. Of those that were active, the majority were near major bodies of water for coolant purposes. Of those, the area with the fewest active plants that was still in a temperate region that wouldn’t freeze them out in winter or bake them to a crisp in the summer (and didn’t have major chemical plants installed) were the worst of the faultlines through CA. The entire south was out because of the possibility of tornadoes and hurricanes. Of the disasters that nature could hit them with on a regular basis, they had to avoid those. Texas alone was oil refinery hell and not worth the risk.

There was nowhere they could go, in the world, and not be at risk for some kind of contamination.

“Sooner or later, we’ve gotta settle somewhere,” Sam said finally. “We can’t just go walking into whatever’s floating around out. ‘Cause there’s no doctors. Just us.”

“We can take care of each other just fine,” Dean said immediately. “Look. Let’s get the hell out of here, go find a couple of...what are they?”

“Dosimeters,” Sam said.

“We’ll get whatever we need, just in case. We’re not gonna run into that kind of trouble, but we can be prepared. That’ll make y– us. That’ll make us feel better.”

If Sam caught the stumble, he didn’t let on.

-|-

They found an Army/Navy store three blocks over and discovered that the residents of mining areas kept a healthy dose of paranoia active even after the cold war; they found four kinds of dosimeters, their chargers, and two styles of Geiger counters. Sam took them all.

Dean spent ten minutes slapping Sam away as Sam tried to pin something called a film badge dosimeter on him and then make him put a pen-shaped one in a pocket.

“Leave ‘em in the car,” Dean said. “Jesus, we’re okay. We’ve got stuff to do. We’ll figure this stuff out later.”

Sam eyed him.

“I said we’ve got stuff to do,” Dean said. “Hurry up.”

Sam didn’t ask him any questions, just settled into the passenger seat and read the instructions for the Geiger counters.

Dean circled around the densest downtown areas, looking for anything out of place, checking for smoke and some kind of life aside from the birds and the occasional loose dog that was looking for garbage to root in. He noticed the cars again. None were blocking the main roads or side streets; none had crashed into each other or into the buildings. Not one had gone up onto the sidewalk. The only ones left had already been in park when their drivers had vanished. Where the hell had they gone? Sam was right, no one had had the time to shut anything off or figure out what was going on; did the cars vanish with the people? What the hell for?

Yeah, well, he thought. File that one away with the other big questions, since no one’s going to answer.

The suburbs began just south of I-90, and the first neighborhoods he began to see were full of eighties and nineties-style construction, multi level homes with attached garages. They passed several haphazardly arranged apartment buildings painted in standard tans and grays. He picked one street and pulled over.

Sam glanced up, forehead still wrinkled with concentration. “What’re we – “

“When it starts to get dark,” Dean said, “we meet back here. And we keep the radios on at all times. You got me?”

“What’re we – “

“Just open the doors, don’t go searching the places,” Dean said, cutting him off again. “Not everything’s gonna want to come out, and some of the dogs might want a piece or two of us, thinkin’ that we’re breaking in. Don’t force it. Just open stuff and go on to the next place.”

Sam looked at him for a moment with total and complete understanding. Dean had learned to both fear and hope for that look, because it came so rarely and knew him too well. Sam knew exactly what he was doing. Yeah, Dean didn’t want to let all the pets starve to death, but he also wanted to give him and Sam something to do, some way to affect what had happened. All the rest of it was out of their control, but they had this one little thing they could do.

“You get bit, I’m gonna be pissed,” Dean said, purposely looking away. “I’m serious. And don’t come out here with, like, a batch of kittens or something. I’ll kill you.”

Sam got out of the car and checked his radio, clicking it a couple of times to make sure it was audible on Dean’s. Then he headed for the nearest house.

Dean watched him go for a moment, then headed for the other side of the street.

It was a whole day of kicking in locked doors and simply opening the unlocked ones. Sometimes a dog or a cat ran out, but most often not. Dean figured most of the cats just hid because a lot of them were unfriendly little bastards anyway. A couple of the dogs he encountered rushed the door with a lot of teeth when he opened it, and he’d backed away in a hurry with a lot of hey, hey Fido, down boy. Nothing really tried to attack him. He heard birds yelling occasionally, and went in and opened the cages. He would never tell Sam, but he had let a bunch of gerbils and hamsters go, too. It seemed kind of pointless, because they were rodents, and the whole world was going to be overrun by the little bastards as it was. But hey, they probably wouldn’t last long anyway, once it got really cold. It was still better than starving.

He and Sam checked in once every half hour. Once, Sam was laughing.

Dean sat in a stairwell of an apartment building and put his head in his hands, right after that. They were going to be okay, they were going to be okay, they were going to be okay.

One cat, some big brown tabby with a fluffy tail, followed him from door to door after he let it out. It was whining and begging for something to eat, and twining around his legs no matter how fast he tried to walk. Why did people keep those things? It purred and grabbed at the denim on his legs, snagging its claws. He went into the next apartment and opened the fridge, and there was some leftover roast in foil in there that still smelled okay. He crumbled it on the floor and then took off, hoping it would eat and then leave him alone.

The air was so stale. Not enough windows had been left open.

He was careful not to look around at the things that people left behind, their furniture and their pictures, the detritus of their hopes and dreams and details. It made them real again, and truly missing.

When he’d opened every door in the building, he propped the outer doors open as well, and took off into the next neighborhood.