Land of Monsters

.the fallout. | .sam.

Dean struggled to his feet-yeah, something was wrong with him-food poisoning?-and led Sam out into the hallway, a small dead end with the same amount of grime and crap littered everywhere. Across from them was a rusted-out bathroom with no door at all, and to their left, the hall opened up. Out here, there was the faint smell of...oil. A poster about cars that had a classic look to them, not unlike the Impala. Which is probably back at the motel parking lot, along with most of our guns.

Dean gestured to the open room, then nodded at a turned over bucket and entered. Sam lingered, waiting to hear if Dean were sick, but his brother only shuffled around in the room, so Sam continued down the hall. He came out into a garage with a broken door and no glass at all.

"Shit."

Beyond the windows lay a wasteland, worse than the post-Croatoan world Dean had once described to him. A world of brown and pale green, of bent and broken steel and shattered bricks. Naked trees raked an otherwise beautiful sky, one with the honey and tangerine colors of sunrise, but there was something faintly green about the horizon too, particularly to...the south? Yes, the south.

Sam's heart pounded. Nothing about their current or ongoing cases pointed to a land like this. Nothing about the crazy dealings in Heaven or Hell or Purgatory pointed to a land like this. So where were they? An alternate timeline? The same one from before? Did we fall into another world, like Oz? Or maybe another archangel was still kicking around, and screwing with their mind. Perhaps it was the work of another creature thus far unknown to them.

No matter the cause, they needed out.

Sam looked around for something to use as a weapon. He spotted some heavy, blunt objects that could be swung several times before breaking, depending, of course, on what they were swung at. Sam had watched those movies replay on TV, and he knew that somehow, someway, there'd be something out there with bones and soft skin causing terror.

He hefted a long wrench first, testing its weight. He gave it a swing to check the grip. No good. He swept a pile of bottle caps off a built-in countertop, then set down the wrench. The bottle caps bounced and tumbled with tiny clacks. He toed them aside so they wouldn't keep crunching underfoot, then picked up a pipe, wondering if it were made of something safe to hold. He set that down too, and looked for anything that could be made of iron. He lifted a discarded baseball bat, its sturdy wood scratched and a little splintered where a logo once existed. A few small dents spoke of mishandling. Good enough. He lay that alongside the other weapons and expanded his search for anything useful. The gorgeous red paint of a workshop tool chest called to him from behind a cart loaded with crispy, decaying magazines. He pushed and pulled until the cart's rusted wheels scraped and screeched and finally rotated. He pulled on one of the tool chest's drawers, expecting the same resistance, but it opened with little fuss.

"Sammy?" Dean called out from the back hall. "You come across any water out there?"

"No, but I found some things we could use as weapons." It'd been a while since he'd been called Sammy, but that was likely indicative of how Dean was feeling. Sam was nauseated too, but he didn't think it was to the extent Dean was, and he figured that most of it had set in on account of seeing what he had seen.

"I've got a few things here too," Dean yelled back.

A flutter.

Sam's head shot up, his ears pricked. The weapons were on the other side of the room.

A rustle.

Dean's head poked out from the hall. The two brothers nodded at each other; neither had made the noise they'd clearly both heard.