To The Beat Of The Devil's Drums [Supernatural]

The Flatliner

Dean's eyes fly open. Cold sweat clings to his skin and his heart races in panic, still able to feel the searing pain in his chest. Sammy... she's taken Sam... I have to find him...

As he realises it was only a nightmare, for a moment he thinks he can calm down and convince himself everything will be fine. Then he realises reality is even worse.

Panic surges through him, overwhelming as he stares along the blood red rollercoaster track up ahead. He's suspended in the air, torso horizontal, staring down at a 300 foot drop. He has no idea how he got here, but the last thing he remembers is a blur of spinning shapes and crashes and pain as the cable car plummeted from the sky. As the mist thins to reveal the earth below, this time free of any trees to act as buffer, he knows it's not an experience he wants to repeat. The track extends as far as the ground, curves up slightly, and then there's just empty space. An entire stretch of it is missing. Dean can see the point where it's supposed to reconnect several meters away, yet without the track, the only place a rollercoaster car is going to go is the ground.

There's a safety restraint across his chest, preventing him from falling, yet it's placing his entire weight on his cracked and bruised ribs. Everything hurts all the more after the tumble in the cable car, clusters of pain blurring together so that he's barely able to distinguish one injury from the next. There's fresh blood in his mouth; more trickling down the side of his head. His arms and neck and back and chest all burn. The agony makes him gasp for air and his feet scramble to brace themselves on the bottom of the car, just something to relieve the pressure. He can't stop the mounting terror as he cranes his neck to look around, praying to see an escape, and his eyes land on the figure in the seat next to him.

Soiled clothes hang loose from a shrunken frame, pulled taut only over the bloat of rotting intestines. Mottled, waxy skin clings to the ridges of collarbones and knuckles Dean is able to see, yet the face is mostly covered in blood. He can smell the stench of it, flies crawling over the still-juicy pulp of mangled flesh and thick ropes of matted hair. The eyes are half-open, irises pale and cloudy, and Dean's sure that's a maggot crawling in the eye socket closest to him. His stomach lurches. Despite the gore, enough of the face is left for Dean to recognise it. Not that he wouldn't have been able to guess.

Jesus Christ, poor kid... He thinks as he fights down the bile building in his stomach. The unwelcome thought of if I don't save Sam, is that what's going to happen to me? crosses his mind, and he thinks he's just on the verge of being sick when he hears the crackling of a loudspeaker off to his right. He looks across, past the corpse of her earlier victim to where a speaker is mounted above a service platform at the side of the coaster.

"Hello again, Dean."

His blood runs cold. "Fuck you," he snarls. "Fuck you fuck you FUCK YOU." He rattles the restraint across his chest, desperation making him kick and struggle with everything he has. Even if he were to somehow break free, he knows the only thing he'll do is fall.

She waits a few moments for him to exhaust himself and then slump down against the restraint again. "Rude," she comments. "You're on the most fantastic rollercoaster in the Midwest with an incredible view of the park. Don't be so ungrateful."

Dean really doesn't have a thought to spare for the view. "Yeah, I'm so fucking grateful you strapped me into a killer coaster," he spits.

She tuts. "But I thought this was where you were trying to get to? You wanted to come here, Dean."

"Yeah, because Sam was supposed to be here! Where is he?"

She ignores that. "You know, I've always loved this rollercoaster. Really got people's hearts racing. Well...before it stopped them completely. I think you're going to love it."