A Car's Tires on a Road

I'm not good at pretending that I'm happy to be alone

The diner was burning down. Flakes of ash were raining down and whirling in the air as we walked through town, slowly and careful, our guns drawn and our eyes taking in what this town had become. Maddening screams echoed against walls full of graffiti and streets full of garbage. People were running around, some naked, some bloody and dirty, and no matter how much we tried, no matter how many times we tried to stop them, they were punching each other or gathered in groups to rampage and set fire or simply kick at things to let out an anger and violence I'd never witnessed.

A kid was sitting in the snow, in the middle of this crazy scene, resting her head against the frozen chest of a corpse that might have been dead a long time, or might only be dead a few days. You simply couldn't tell anymore. Bodies showed up all over town, playthings for the insane, or dug out from their graves and just dropped wherever, or remaining where they were killed by what used to be friends.

There was a stink in the air, a mix of death and burning things, ashes and snow mingling together like a whole new kind of weather. It was bad. Walking through and seeing how lost and absolutely out of their minds those people were, it dawned on me, finally, how much we'd lost control over the situation.

We had to shoot people. Normal people who'd once worked in a shop or babysat the neighbors toddler, coming at us in violent attacks that left us no other choice than a head shot. There was no cure to this, there was no source we could dry up with the things we'd learned, by what we'd done our whole life, because there was no monster to kill or demon to send back to hell or some big bad guy we could somehow trick and incapacitate.

This was a virus. And just like back when we'd first learned about it, about its disastrous destructive effect on people, about how it can't be cured nor ended, we were helpless. We were in over our heads, forced to watch an entire town go to shit, forced to be in the middle of this without a way to escape, with roads out barricaded and people attacking anyone too unsick, people who just couldn't help it.

Sam dealt with the whole thing by going into military mode, pushing away his frustration and fear and letting only the rational side of him act and think. Cas was being very quiet, worry never leaving his face like it'd been attached there permanently, and I just knew he wanted to make it all better and have his powers back just to have something to use against all this. I didn't have the capacity to make him feel any better, though, I still tried to suppress the constant urge to join all the crazy.

Of course none of them knew. What was I supposed to tell them anyway? That I'd obviously been infected? That somehow one of the Croats had bled on me? I didn't even know when that'd happened. But I could feel my mind changing, my thoughts drifting away from sane and from me and urging towards things I'd never thought I was capable of even thinking. I'd always been nothing but a cold-blooded killer, as some angel had once put it so accurately, I had oceans of blood on my hands. But I liked to think I did it for a reason, took life to save others, to do the right thing, and not to give in to whatever crazy things the virus in my veins wanted me to do. I saved the world, I didn't destroy it.

By the time we reached more dangerous areas in the city that were crawling with the infected, we soon realized it'd be better to return to the motel, the only nearly safe place remaining. I felt thrown back to that weird vision of 2014 Zachariah had sent me to, a strange yet somewhat sentimental deja-vu crossing my mind. I was kind of the same sort of conflicted inside as back then, only not between free will and saying yes but between somehow overcoming urges I had little to no control over and just giving in to them. Because fuck it.

Fuck this place. Fuck all their lives and fuck responsibility and that it always had to be us to get into this kind of shit. Fuck me.

Why couldn't I have just stayed home? I would probably watch a horror flick marathon right now and kill my last remaining brain cells and my liver with my twentieth drink and I wouldn't care about anyone here because I just wouldn't know. I'd still drown in my self-pity and hate myself in the healthiest way I knew, and Cas would still be god knows where and still wouldn't answer his damn phone. I wouldn't have to deal with the idea of me slowly turning into one of these things, I wouldn't have to deal with the fact that now that I could maybe have him I couldn't have him at all.