Chapter One/Catching Out

Nebraska isn’t where Dean wanted to spend his last February on earth, but an angry Depression-era ghost makes things complicated.

What it is: WIP, will be eight chapters. Gen, PG-13, swearing, blood-letting, hobos.

Thanks: to the betas, as always: Sasquashme and Lemmypie. They elevate things like you wouldn’t believe.

“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun

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Stanford University Course Syllabus, 2004-2005

History 421: Dustbowls & Migration (offered 2004-2005)

Literature and history complete a picture of America on the move. From John Steinbeck to Dorothea Lange, from Roosevelt to the “New Deal”, from sharecroppers to rail yard bulls, this course will explore California’s place as an unattainable ideal against the reality of Depression and collapse.

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They crossed the Missouri River into Nebraska just north of the Kansas line, a point where states converged, came together, and Sam remembered other times they’d crossed invisible divides. Where Nebraska was concerned, crossing boundaries usually meant coming down from North Dakota. He didn’t think he’d ever entered the state on this highway before, and he stared out the passenger window at the almost-greening trees budding out of season. It feels like spring, stupid weather. Fields flashed by, broken corn stalks bent over like brittle old men, new growth bursting in the seams of the earth. Spring, new life, Persephone rising from the Underworld.

This would be a final spring, not a beginning, but an end.

Hell, it wasn’t even spring, was it? It was still January for a day or two yet, was a good couple of months before the seasons turned no matter which calendar you consulted, but you could feel something stirring here, feel the fragile grass straining for the sky, reaching to touch the pale wash of sun, getting what it could from something so far away. Morning in Nebraska, pre-dawn, fog forming on the warm ground like mustard gas, mixing with the chill air, and Sam drew meaningless squiggles on the window glass just for something to do.

Weird weather everywhere they’d been: hot when it should be cold, frost when it should be balmy, no way to predict much of anything. Floods, fires, hailstorms, everything but frogs. Positively biblical, no matter that Al Gore and the International Panel of Climate Change scientists preached a human cause, a secular apocalypse.

Dean pointed the Impala west, into where The West started, a frontier then and now. He took them in the direction of Beatrice and from there to Fairbury and further still to Hebron, avoiding Lincoln, avoiding the big interstate cutting east to west. Maybe they were going to see Bobby. Maybe. If Dean knew where they were going, he wasn’t telling Sam. He wasn’t telling Sam much of anything, but that was established, that was known, and Sam had grown used to the silence. He would have to grow used to a much more profound silence, he reminded himself for the first time this day.

The bastard knows exactly where he’s going, and when. He should have scheduled his fucking endgame for the fall. Would have been more appropriate.

That wasn’t fair, and Sam knew it: Dean hadn’t planned anything. The thought tugged a bitter smile and Dean may have sensed it, because he turned to look at Sam, altered the unintentional gesture into something deliberate and fiddled with the radio. The tapes were getting worn: they’d lost five since December, Led Zeppelin and Boston and Bad Company and Foghat and some mixed one that Sam had come to loathe for its cowbells. Garbled and digested and Dean had reluctantly switched to the radio. You can get a new player in this thing, later, if you want, he’d said a couple of days ago, but only after a number of birthday beers and half a bottle of Jack.

Every time the radio flickered or faltered, Dean flinched, reaching out before he caught himself. Sam noticed, but he didn’t ask. He knew the rules, both the ones for demonic activity and for fraternal communication.

The best thing about Nebraska was that it took no time at all to get through, no matter which direction you were going. That was, until they hit a more typical snowstorm just outside Hastings, where the rolling hills became the Great Plains and a blast of Arctic wind combined with what little moisture was still on the drought-blighted air, and dumped all of it along the Platte River Valley, murdering the infant greenery in its dry bed.

The Impala slid and muttered its way along a better highway than Dean seemed to desire, limped into the town of Grand Island on bald all-seasons offering little in the way of traction or safety. If I can just get through this winter, Dean had said shortly after Christmas, we won’t need snow tires, and Sam had to stop himself from hitting him.

A Chinook followed the storm like a bourbon chaser after beer, and the warm air melted the snow as though it had been an aberration, one of God’s mistakes, or the Devil’s, hard to tell who was making the mistakes these days. Sam thought God had forgotten a lot of things, had forgotten favors owed, people saved and evil destroyed, had forgotten who was on which side.

They ate in a sad little diner and listened to local conversation over coffee and toast and beans and eggs with yolks so bright they were like summer. Sam didn’t want to think about summer, wasn’t ready for spring, let alone what came after. The river was down, way down, spring’ll be a dry one. ‘Nother year of the same and I don’t know how much more I can take. Near cry when I see the fields. And the Big Mac is lousy for fishing, ice not thick enough, not a walleye or a crappie, freezer’s bare. That lake’s sprung a hole, year after year, I tell ya, shrinking all the time.

Cornhuskers, Sam thought disparagingly, almost lovingly.

Here was the thing, though, because Dean looked up, an easy grin on his face, unaware or uncaring of Sam’s continuing inner melodramas, because he was enjoying the coffee, maybe, or the regulars’ easy talk, or something, because he set his head to an angle, eyes glinting in the stuttering fluorescent light.

“See?” he asked and Sam despaired.

State of the fucking union, him enjoying the present and me worrying about the future, then realized Dean was pointing to the newspaper stretched across the table, so usual it was little more than a placemat, a local rag advertising seed lots and tractor equipment.

The story was about the double-murder of the Marshalls, a young couple near North Platte, only a few hours west on the I-80 from Grand Island. It concerned the police, because there apparently had been a similar case in a suburb east of Ogallala only a few weeks prior. That had been a family of four, blamed on a murder-suicide. Plain weird, the article might have said, but didn’t. Dean’s eyebrows wrote that untold story.

Sam shrugged, pursed his lips. A case was better than silent driving. It was better than waiting. It was not as good as researching, as making plans, but Dean had shut that down more than once, and Sam was having to rely on late-night visits to libraries and quickly-shut laptops.

I should call her, but she never answered and apparently demons didn’t have voice mail.

“What do you think?” Sam asked instead.

Dean’s turn to shrug, which he did so well, so easily, was made of shrug. “Dunno. Wouldn’t take long to figure it out, one way or another.” He poked his suspiciously uniform hash browns with his fork. “Not as though we’re on a schedule.”

Sam didn’t rise to it. At least, not the way he thought Dean might be anticipating. “Yeah. Not as if you have to be anyplace, I guess.”

But Dean wasn’t meeting his eyes, was pushing the hash browns into little columns, soldiers forming along a ridge prior to battle. “Guess not. What I’d like, though--” and stopped, bumped one of the cubes off the edge of his plate.

Sam waited. Waited for what his brother would like.

“-you know. California. Maybe.”

There was no subtlety here, no shades of gray. Just want and need and blame. “Why don’t you just say it?” Sam asked in reply, before thinking it through. “Why don’t you just say what you want? Why ‘maybe’?”

Dean looked startled. Perhaps he was startled; it was hard to tell.

“What? Because…maybe you don’t want to? Because maybe you don’t want to go to California?”

“I get a say in this?” And Sam laughed, hard. “First time for everything, I guess.”

That put Dean’s back up.

“Forget it.” He gathered the hash browns into the pool of congealing yolk, folded the newspaper into quarters. “The highway’ll be fine by now. Won’t take long to get to North Platte.” He suddenly stared at Sam, who held Dean’s stare like he would a gun, and nothing more was said, not in the diner, and not in the car, not the whole way to North Platte.

--

These were the sort of details Dean liked. Solid, predictable facts that came in a big book with pictures of circus freaks and sumo wrestlers on the foil cover. Bailey Yard in North Platte, the largest railyard in the world according to the Guinness Book of World Records conveniently for sale at the Union Pacific’s visitor center. He would have pointed it out to his brother, but he suspected Sam was already aware of this trivia, and Dean knew it would detract from his pleasure, having Sam only nod his head and then reel off the accompanying statistics as though they were flies swarming around his head. Dean didn’t give a shit how many cars and how much freight was moved through here every day.

Dean knew the most important thing and that was enough.

Laden cloud smudged the sky moth gray. The low cloud covered as far as the eye could see which in Nebraska was damn far. No more snow, please, he wished, following Sam across Bailey Yard’s access road and into the East Hump tower. I don’t want to buy damn new tires.

He couldn’t imagine what the hell Sam was going to do with the Impala once it was all over – or had just started, depending on how you looked at it -- but Dean wouldn’t be surprised if Satan gave Dean status updates just to rile him: Sam’s covered the wheel with a leather grip; he’s installed a CD player and he’s listening to Radiohead; he’s put a breast cancer support sticker on the rear window; he’s painted her white – by himself.

Now Sam was staring at him from the top step and Dean sighed. “Do you think,” Sam said, adjusting his tie, brows quirking into a ridiculous frown, “you could pull your head out your ass long enough to help me interview Marshall’s boss?”

The interview, such as it was, went off without hitch, mostly because Dean wasn’t paying enough attention to the foreman to warrant any suspicion. He was getting less good at this, the pretending, the acting like everybody else, the getting by on his smile. It wasn’t as though he didn’t care, he did, but the quotidian had become hopelessly distracting: the way the sudden sunlight shafted between the boxcars, the splash of a tagger’s colors on a car fresh from some urban center, the splay of lights across the control panel as cars were switched and bumped and hitched and unhitched. But most especially, the heavy sky beyond the glass windows overlooking the acres and acres of iron lines, always that, the sky. Hell was underground, was even called that, wasn’t it? Skies were now tufted like lures, bright and heartbreaking and they hooked him every time.

This increased awareness of life was a double-edged gift, and he took it without question and life came at him all the time, was speeding up.

He turned to see Sam staring at him with that Shar Pei furrow and the granny lips, the slight widening of his eyes. Stay with me, stay with me, Sam’s expression whispered, and Dean recognized it like his brother had said the words out loud.

Sam cleared his throat, got on his farewell voice. “Well, thanks, Mr. O’Grady. Sounds like Marshall was an upright man. The settlement should keep his…um…next of kin comfortable.”

Upon hearing this from the patently too-young insurance adjuster, the crew foreman tipped his cap back, stared out at the yards, at the slow rise – Jesus, the hump – used to tip trains eastwards, cars moving slowly or standing still, a maze of metal that smelled of hell, and he smiled yellow-toothed as a mongrel. “Yep, just started, but he was gonna work out, could tell. Too bad he ran afoul of something. Didn’t seem the type to be involved in drugs or anything like that. Went to church, so’d his wife, I reckon. Damn shame, how lawless it’s gettin’ round here.” He paused. “All over, I guess. Goin’ to hell in a handbasket, that’s us.”

Damn shame, Dean concurred, exchanged a dry handshake before turning to go. He wondered if the handbasket would be comfy. The stairwell was unheated, and they exited the tower shoulder to shoulder, Dean cold right inside like he’d never get warm again. Yep, that’s exactly what you should be thinking of, Winchester.

“Think we should check out the house?” he asked as they crunched over the dry gravel, just to hear his voice, to watch his breath plume out, proof positive that he was still alive.

Sam looked at him as though Dean was the slow kid in the class, but then, that had been his default expression since he’d turned fourteen. “Yeah, thought that was the plan,” and he stuck on that word like it should mean something else other than what it did.

Dean stopped, shoved his hands in the pockets of his thrift store suit, ducked his head as though avoiding a blow, but was really just settling in, entrenched, waiting for reinforcements. “That’s the plan, all right,” he said, unmoving. “Unless you got something better.”

Cat to Sam’s mouse, though Dean knew it was a stupid, dangerous game, taunting Sam, because he had so much fucking ammunition. Sam tested the balance between his feet, swayed for a moment like a tree about to go down, deep cuts to the base, wedges hammered in, and Dean knew something about that, watched the wind, found a moment to think about which way his brother would go.

“Dean, I don’t have any other plan. You know that.”

And Dean did, truly, he did, but that wasn’t what he was thinking.

Dean’s attention had gone down a hole, had vaporized like he was trying to hold flame. He was remembering their father, thinking of Nevada and how John got when he was set on leaving, systematically making sure everything was in place, everything under control, even when he was gone. Without warning, Dean was thinking of that October before John had sent him down to New Orleans and never called back. Sam had been exactly the same way for months before he’d taken off for California, and once you got surprised like that, once you were blindsided, it didn’t happen twice. Dean knew what leaving looked like, no matter who was doing it – his father, Sam.

Even me.

So he hitched a shoulder, dropping low, protecting himself in all the ways he knew how, tossed off a grin like it was the last drink of the night. “C’mon then. Let’s go see what’s cooking at Casa Marshall.”

The former rail yard worker lived in Hershey, a couple of miles down Highway 30, the old Lincoln Highway that followed the westbound tracks, away from and between the low convergence of the North and South Platte Rivers, a crotch of mud and grass filling in where water had once ruled. The murdered couple had recently bought a little clapboard house built at the turn of the last century, re-painted in heritage colors to match other up-and-comers in the neighborhood. Mrs. Marshall had evidently taken a lot of care, had read magazines about antiques and decorating, probably watched Martha Stewart, had learned how to trap tole paper scenes behind glass, how to scrapbook.

Hershey Nebraska was nothing like Hershey Pennsylvania, where at the corner of Cocoa and Chocolate Avenues the streetlights were shaped like kisses and Dean had always made their dad drive that way whenever they were close. Shit, as an adult he’d actually driven out of his way to get there. His gaze slipped sideways to his oblivious brother: just another prairie nowheresville to him, nothing of fancy here.

In the absence of candy-themed street decorations, the house was trying really hard to be more heritage-y than the other clapboards close by, even had a period-authentic picket fence, for crying out loud, an old one sagging in the middle, held up by elderly posts as though it was a drunk between friends.

The lock was nothing for Sam’s fast hands, and Dean let him do it, eyes momentarily following a vee of geese coming north from wherever such birds fled when the snow flew. Just above the clack of the nearby tracks, an endless line of boxcars and tankers, grain hoppers and piggyback trailers, Dean heard the sound of the geese calling to each other. Damn birds think it’s spring, stupid fuckers.

Then Sam was hissing like a kettle at full boil, tugging air with head, gesturing: Get the fuck in, you moron. Fair enough, they could get picked up for this, but then again, wasn’t everything worth doing against the rules? Dean followed him in, lifting the police tape with one finger and crouching under. The house was immaculate, except for the bloodstained couch and the scent of iron and this didn’t feel like demon, because Dean sure as hell knew what that was like.

Sam was already checking the windows, though, just in case. No sulfur, not as though that was a reliable indicator, either, really. More predictable was Dean’s own sense of hell, ever looming, becoming clearer the closer he got.

Something else, then.

Maybe this was just a standard murder, an intruder, the unlucky answering of a door when you should ignore the knock. No sign of forced entry, just two people with their heads cracked open with a blunt object, maybe a brick, maybe a club. The police reports Sam had been able to obtain hadn’t been thorough; enough time hadn’t passed, the forensics were still incomplete.

They fanned out to cover the house, room to room, Sam with the EMF monitor, Dean with his gut and his scattershot attention, calling to each other when one was out of sight, just normal, just what they always did.

Not much to report, really. Could be nothing, Dean thought. “Let’s get a coffee,” he suggested, tired of walking into houses like this, scenes of carnage, too late to help, too jaded to be properly shocked.

They came away from the house carefully, not wanting to alert curious neighbors. Just another pair of law-enforcement folks come to investigate. This was an old neighborhood by the tracks, and the vintage car waiting at the curb didn’t seem much out of place – hell, a Model T wouldn’t have been out of place around here – and the Impala pulled Dean like he was a nail to its magnet, elemental. He’d miss the car almost more than anything, was just thinking You can’t take it with you, when Sam whistled low, calling him back to the gate.

Dean didn’t say anything, bent down to where Sam was running fingers over the worn wood. There, old cuts made with a bad knife, a circle with an x in its center. From behind his duckblind of dark bangs, Sam may have glanced up. Hard to tell, though, with that fucking hair.

The symbol – and it was clearly a symbol – was about the size of Dean’s palm. “What do you think?” Dean asked. “We’re a little north for voodoo.”

Sam chuckled. “We’re a little white for voodoo.” They looked around the grounds for anything else that might have been purposefully left, but found nothing other than winter-preserved dog shit and drifting candy wrappers.

Over coffee on main street, Sam pulled out the laptop, started surfing while Dean studied Hershey’s local talent, thinking about chocolate kisses. Girls skipping out of school, maybe. What did he know about high school? Nothing. He’d never really known the first thing about fitting in there, learning the ropes, but couldn’t find anything in him that regretted that.

“How old would you say that house was?” Sam asked, not even looking at Dean and it was all normal and Dean didn’t answer at first because he was coming to love normal in a way he’d never thought about before.

Sam wasn’t actually looking for a response, he was already tapping in more stuff, maybe Hershey town records from the content of his next speech. “Okay, the Marshalls moved here from Chicago in September. The house had been on the market for months, it looks like. Real estate in this part of Nebraska isn’t exactly hot, I guess.” He quirked a smile, and Dean swung his cup around, trying to catch the waitress’s eye, wanting more coffee than she could possible give. “The Johnstons, the family killed in Ogallala, had been living in their house for fifteen years. Wait--” and he tapped again for such a long time that Dean lost interest, lost the thread, and picked up the menu.

He knew better than to interrupt and besides, he was enjoying this. Coffee and the tap of the computer and Sam hanging over it, damn hair. He’ll be okay, Dean told himself for the millionth time over years and years and years. He’s always been okay on his own. It’s me I should be worrying about. But he couldn’t quite follow that thought, never could. What was the point in worrying about it, after all, not as though there was anything to be done.

“Here’s another one.” The furrow was back, but above a shine of discovery and Dean wondered if Sam would keep hunting, after. Maybe he would keep hunting. And he wondered if that was actually a good thing.

“Another what?”

Sam’s mouth twitched: Dean, pay attention, man. Dean lifted his fingers and his eyebrows. C’mon, cut me a break.

“Another murder. Except the police ruled it accidental. Like someone would accidentally fall off a moving railcar and land headfirst on a blunt object.”

The coffee was hot, which was the only thing it had going for it, that and the caffeine. “It could happen. It probably does happen. That crew chief at Bailey Yard said that they get hundreds of riders through every year.”

“Oh, you were listening, then?”

“I have ears, yeah.” Jesus, Sam. “So why do you think murder?”

Sam pulled the laptop around so Dean could see the newsclipping: Local man dead trainhopping. Sam said, “Local man? Trainhopping? Seems strange, first of all, that a local guy wouldn’t know the rules about the rails. Says here his house was left wide open the night he died, like he’d just run out the front door. Look at his address – just down the street from the Marshalls. And he’s a lawyer.”

“You think lawyers don’t break the law by climbing onto a train and making like Boxcar Willy?” But he said it with a quick burble of laughter. Please, no arguments, Sam. Come on, life’s too fucking short.

Happily, Sam held on to his good humor. “No, smart ass. But look at this guy. He musta been fifty or more. Does he look like a hobo to you?”

And no, okay, he didn’t, not from the grainy black and white photo anyway. “Think if we look around his place, we’ll find another of those symbols?” Dean asked.

Sam’s turn to shrug, though he did it with his head and hand rather than his shoulders. “Maybe. Let me cross-reference…” Sam muttered and three coffees and a plate of fries later, he’d formed a pattern because Sam was all about forming patterns, always had been.

The county records offices of two different towns, a couple of phone calls to helpful clerks and librarians, and a number of online community directories yielded results. Three suspicious death clusters, a total of seven people with heads cracked open, blunt force, no weapon found. One a murder, one called murder-suicide, though that seemed incredible -- who committed suicide by whacking themselves upside the head with a brick? – and the third ruled accidental, a railway mishap. According to the town directories, all these people lived in houses more than eighty years old. All these people lived along the rail line that stretched like the sun’s rays from Bailey Yard through to Ogallala before dropping south into Colorado.

Sam had a map open on the screen and his finger followed the line of the Lincoln Highway, communities clustered in eastern Nebraska thinning to occasional specks by the time you got to the Wyoming border, like butter spread unevenly across a slice of ragged bread.

“On the Road,” Dean whispered under his breath and might have been blowing over his cup of scalding black brew, but that wasn’t it.

“What?” Sam asked, dimples added to the crumpled brow. “You’ve read that?”

Dean shrugged. “I think they must have made a movie or something. A TV show. With Steve McQueen? Or was it that dude from Barretta.”

Sam wasn’t buying it, clearly. “Yeah, Dean. If you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime,” and stared so hard Dean had to look away.

Cover blown, Dean continued. “But that Kerouac asshole was hitchhiking, not rail riding.”

Sam’s eyes were softening, and then he was looking away too fast as happened now occasionally, either too sad or too angry and Dean braced himself for either because both were reactions too strong for their fragile peace. “Okay,” Sam said quietly, after a moment. “Okay.”

And Dean repeated it, “Okay,” like a fucking mynah bird with a clipped tongue, mindless, and he was agreeing to something, but he didn’t know what.

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Ogallala was flat. No two ways about that, a prairie town attracting all the wrong sort of attention – too much humanity, not enough charm. Too big and not big enough, it was an in-between place unsure of itself, had given up everything that made prairie life good, but not embraced what made some urban centers great. Sam hated it on principle because of the wasted opportunity.

The people weren’t particularly nice, either, from the shirty waiter in a restaurant too used to customers not being regulars, to the motel owner and his suspicious look at Dean’s credit card. There was the pervasive demand of the clock here, that end of year feeling that everything was on borrowed time, and Sam wished it wasn’t quite so fitting.

The house where the Johnston family had lived had been re-painted, and had a For Sale sign in front of it. Good luck with that, Sam thought, hands jammed in the pockets of his coat, not warm enough. Spring-like, but dry. His lips were chapped and his knuckles cracked. California, God it would be good. Funny that Dean would be thinking of it too. Sam thought that his brother hated the west coast, hated the ocean, hated all that it meant. Washington State was avoided for one reason; California another.

They found what they were looking for scratched on a boulder, immoveable from the property line, left there by retreating glaciers sometime in the last ice age. Another symbol, different from the one on the Marshall’s post and the strange lines they’d found etched into the lawyer’s front door: this one was a cross, the northeast quadrant occupied by a small circle with three dots.

“Looks like a chocolate chip cookie,” Dean murmured, a grin twitching lazily.

Sam didn’t react; Dean was just being Dean. They stood in unison, and Sam glanced at the house, weighing options. “You want to check inside?”

Dean did, but there wasn’t much to find: the realtor or next of kin or the county had left it clean. Anonymous, and spit-shine clean. The Johnstons had been killed two months ago, there wasn’t much left.

Later, over a bag of chips and a Styrofoam container of middling chili devoured in the motel room, Sam plugged in a set of search vectors, re-assessed, re-calibrated. Hit pay dirt. He found what he knew he would. It was coming together, like the state lines where they’d crossed into Nebraska, like all those miles of track in the Bailey Yard: rail lines, murders, old neighborhoods, marks left outside.

One lucky guess, one good web site. Bingo.

“Here,” he said, drawing Dean’s attention from the newspaper’s sports section and sliding the laptop to him. “Hobo symbols.”

Dean’s eyebrows pulled up. Sam always enjoyed watching that, took it as evidence that his brother hadn’t seen everything, could still be surprised. Dean read, said the words out loud, much to Sam’s delight. “The one on the Marshall’s means ‘Good place for a handout’. Our lawyer’s house was marked with ‘Sky’s the limit’. And the one on the Johnston rock means ‘Doctor here won’t charge.’” A moment while his unspoken ‘so?’ filled the small room.

Sam felt like smiling, but he didn’t. “Know when a doctor lived there, according to the census records?” Dean wasn’t going to guess, sat blinking at Sam, waiting. Sam tried to enjoy it for a few moments, then continued, “From 1934 to the Second World War. Neither of the Johnstons were doctors. No one living there for the past eighty years have been doctors. Those symbols were made in the Depression. By itinerant workers looking for a job.”

“Hobos,” Dean clarified. He shifted in his seat and Sam prepared himself, because this was Dean gearing up. “So, we have hobos murdering people today because people living in these houses eighty years ago were…nice?”

Don’t give him the satisfaction, Sam counseled himself. “The rail lines here were a major corridor from Chicago all the way out to California. Thousands of people crossed the country, dirt poor, looking for something better.”

“You think a modern-day rail rider is doing this?” Dean didn’t seem convinced.

Sam shook his head. “These modern-day ones…They’re mostly middle class kids looking for a thrill.” He smiled, thinking back to Dean’s evasion with Steve fucking McQueen. “Like your Merry Pranksters.” There, let him stew in that. “The displaced people in the Dustbowl years? They had a purpose when they headed west; they weren’t doing it because they were bored.”

Dean stared blankly and Sam knew the look: Seriously. We’re going to argue about this?

“And you know about this, how?”

There were still one or two things that they didn’t talk about, and Stanford was one of them. “Took a course. Migration and the Depression. You know.”

Dean nodded his head as if he did know, only agreeing so Sam would shut up. Round One was Sam’s. “What are you thinking, then?”

Sam was thinking a lot of things, none of which he was going to discuss with Dean right this minute. It was a good way to get distracted. “If the people in the houses were murdered because of the symbols, it wouldn’t be a hobo doing the murdering –“

“Not unless they came looking for a handout and there wasn’t one coming,” Dean interrupted.

“Maybe,” Sam started, an idea occurring to him, remembering his history. Remembering a white Bronco in the rail yards earlier today. “Maybe it’s someone with a grudge against hobos. Railway police?”

“The bulls?” Dean stared out the window, the parking lot view marred by an imperfect stretch of thick plastic sheeting to keep out the cold. It wasn’t working, not as an insulator or as a window. Then, attention back to Sam. “Assholes, every one of them. You think a railroad cop is doing this?”

Trust Dean to know about law enforcement in all its many forms….and then something else occurred to Sam. “Oh my God. You’ve hopped trains, haven’t you?”

Dean grinned, and scraped the bottom of his container with a tomato-stained plastic spoon. “What? You haven’t?” Like everyone did it.

“It’s fucking dangerous!” It was a ridiculous comeback, was close to asinine, but Sam was imagining dark nights and the roar of steel wheels and sparks and shifting cargo. Was imagining a thousand ways to die and this death would have been meaningless, all risk, no reward. Their father would never have allowed it, which meant Dean wouldn’t have told him. Dean’s rebellions had not been small so much as secret; Sam knew it, had come to know it over the last little while. Hopping freight trains would have been a covert game, and Sam remembered Dean’s faraway look in the rail yard, studying all those cars, maybe dreaming of freedom, of escape.

Dean shrugged, tossed the empty container into a wastepaper basket. “You’ve hitchhiked. Catching out isn’t any more dangerous than that, especially since I wasn’t riding with a psychopathic girl demon.” Paused. Grinned around an epithet readied like a throwing knife. “Leather tramp.”

It seem grossly unfair that Dean, no matter how many years in school, or how few, always had the better vocabulary. Sam held Dean’s stare, felt the four years between them yawning like a canyon. Dean blinked happily, almost contentedly. “But Sam, how is this supernatural? A railroad cop killing people. Psychotic, yes. But?”

Dying to wipe that grin off Dean’s face, Sam pulled up a 1935 clipping he’d found when he’d started cross-referencing dates. There. Chew on that, asshole.

Dean’s face froze.

After a moment, he said, “Well, okay then.” But he wasn’t going to lose Round Two, apparently, was falling to the mat all right, but was still throwing punches. “Let’s go see what’s left of the jungle.”

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Not much of substance, and everything worth knowing.

Corrugated tin, loaded garbage bags employed as walls, mangled grocery carts, a tatty boxspring set on end. A gather of equally ragged men with wild eyes, off meds, about as calm and collected as feral cats trapped in an indoor kids playground. If they’d had pointy ears, they’d have lain flat against their matted heads. Tails, they’d be bushy with mistrust.

Sam had that effect on some people.

Dean had told him to drop the goofy grad-student on a research project act. These guys would either see through it in a minute, or had already been studied to death by sociologists. They wouldn’t want outside attention either way. These weren’t the sort of tramps who asked for handouts; they were the sort that found them. On the outskirts of town, where a shantyville occupied the dip under the highway bridge, the tracks running underneath as inexorable as God, a small group of displaced men, of misplaced men, made a kind of home just as they had for close to a century.

Not the same men, though some of these guys were pretty damn old, but similar enough that it probably didn’t matter. These ones weren’t catching out, though. These guys seemed too settled for that, weren’t going anywhere. Sam hung back by the car after his initial foray. Dean’s elbow and a hard glance had sent him there and Dean wasn’t sorry to see him go, for once.

There were things that Sam didn’t know about, things he couldn’t know about. Things Dean didn’t want him knowing about. Dean hadn’t prevented Sam from finding out about what it felt like to kill someone, hadn’t prevented Sam from finding out what it was like to have a knife driven into your back like a lance. He hadn’t been able to stop Sam from finding out what burning your father’s body had felt like.

But this was in his control, this one. For now.

Aside from the haircut and the morning shower, Dean knew he wasn’t so different from these guys. Layers of plaid and denim covered him, boots once good now pretty near the end of their usefulness. Mostly, though, it was the expression in their eyes, and Dean recognized it immediately: Don’t fence me in.

He approached the small fire, things used as fuel that most people wouldn’t think of: furniture, found wood from crates and pallets. Cooking and eating things most people wouldn’t consider food, either.

He’d brought a can of coffee with him, knew enough for that, handed it off along with a pouch of tobacco and was offered some coffee that he didn’t refuse. He’d had worse, and recently.

“You guys been having any trouble lately?” he asked after hearing about traffic and other realities, one guy going off about God and another about the devilry of women. “Aside from God and women?”

Two deigned to talk to him in a manner that approached organized. A skinny black dog nosed around, then sat at the older tramp’s feet. He’d introduced himself as Claude, his friend Tomson. The dog was Sparky, which made Dean grin.

Claude rolled a cigarette in hands that might have been a hundred years old, fingers the color of old cinders, a thousand campfires, of roast sausages almost burned beyond edible. “You’re not one of those assholes from the historical society, are you?”

Dean laughed, low and in his throat. “Do I look like I’m with a historical society?”

Claude considered him and something in Dean shivered, wondering if he’d become the sort of person who looked like that, if he’d misjudged himself so badly. Finally, Claude shook his head and Tomson – a slightly younger man with a beard to rival Santa’s – laughed loudly. “Shit, no.”

“Been around here, some, those ones. Last year or so, asking stuff.” No wonder they’d reacted to Sam by shutting up, going inside their makeshift huts. Sure enough, studied to death, and Sam was a walking talking researcher, no matter how many years as a hunter he put in. Made him useful, of course, and Dean wouldn’t want it any other way. Had fought long and hard to make it so, in fact.

But it meant that you couldn’t bring him here, not when there was wilder work to be done, not when it meant coloring outside the lines.

Dean kept his silence, wondering if Claude would circle back to the question.

Sure enough, “Nah, the cops haven’t bothered us much. It’s the church that really pisses me off.” And that started them off about church ladies and soup kitchens and how sleeping under a roof was just about the same as being incarcerated and all of them went on at length about that.

Dean commiserated, joined in. Sam wouldn’t recognize me, thinking about their brief time in orange jumpsuits, about how Sam hadn’t really understood what was going on, hadn’t really understood Dean in there. Does it bother you at all how easily you seem to fit in here?

No, not really.

“You still ride some?”

Claude chuckled, rubbed Sparky behind the ear, smoke trailing from his nostrils like some kind of dragon. “Nah, not for years. They just barrel on through now, barely even slowing down for crossings. And the yards around here. Nah. The bulls have radios and the crews, well, they’re too scared to help, usually.”

Tomson rolled another cigarette, fingerless gloves unraveling enough that Dean was mesmerized by the mechanics of lighting the damp smoke without setting his hands on fire. Once lit, almost no difference between the muddy brown of the knit glove and the sepia fingertips, Tomson smacked his lips, revealed mangled gray teeth. “Bailey’s always a good bet; Ogallala yard’s fine, too, if you’re scouting around. The bulls are the bulls, eh, they check, and you get your head beat, but mostly you get to where you’re goin’.”

They talked about riding for a bit, about keeping warm on open boxcars, about avoiding the tankers filled with toxic shit. About how to ride between the car and the wheels, about shifting cargo killing people they knew. About the inclines once you hit California, about the valleys so green they hurt your eyes, about smelling salt on the air like the answer to a prayer.

Tomson sucked the cigarette right down to the end, squished it in his fingers, then put it in a tin that he kept in one of his outer pockets.

“Young guys don’t get it. Not at all,” and Dean didn’t know if Tomson was talking about the historical society, or modern-day hobos, or Dean himself.

“What don’t they get?” Dean asked finally, throwing the dregs of the coffee into the bushes beside the track, wiping the handle-less cup out with his shirttail and handing it back to Claude with a nod of thanks.

“Don’t get it at all.” Tomson eyed Dean again as though he’d just appeared. “That fuckin’ project they got going uprail in Brule. What a crock. They don’t get it.”

Dean glanced at Claude, who nodded in agreement. “Teach the kiddies something, I guess they’re thinking. Load of crap. I remember just after the war; weren’t much to it then, just jump on, head out west. Work enough to make your pillow, pull out again. Wasn’t so much fun as it was…” and his hand raised, and he looked at Dean as though he was expecting him to finish his sentence, to understand.

And Dean did. He did understand. So he finished that sentence, and was told more, enough truth between the hallucinatory talk that he started to form his own patterns, different from his brother’s, but like a jigsaw, the two patterns fit.

He didn’t say much after climbing back into the car, wanted to check the timing of things, wanted to sort it out, because Sam was looking at him funny and he knew he smelled of a trash fire, of cigarettes and unwashed skin and wild. Of things beyond Sam. More than that, though.

So much more than that and Dean knew if he opened his mouth there would be a fight and he was so sick of doing that, of having an argument while trying to drive, while trying to just fucking hold it together, because that was fast becoming a full time job.

Silence was better than that. He made a couple of phone calls when they got back to the motel room, one to the local historical society. By the time darkness fell, an hour gained by crossing the time zone between North Platte and Ogallala – another day done, but not a wasted one, Dean hoped – he was ready to sit down, to put the two patterns together, or at least lay out his pattern so that Sam would put it together – these things tended to work better when Sam thought he’d done the heavy lifting.

Unfortunately, Sam had been given enough time to get good and riled, and it was all too shabby to hide with prairie town lights or beer or even a pool game. Only a fucking Pizza Hut and a pie with cheese in the fucking crust, dear God, there wouldn’t be any of this in hell, surely, and Sam with that stiffly held face.

“So, down the track aways,” and Dean stuck on that, pretended to chew, because he liked that combination of words a lot, so much he repeated them after a sip of Pepsi, “down the track aways, is Brule, little village, not much going on.” Slowly dying, in fact, Sam, slowly wasting away to nothing. “And they’re looking for tourism dollars in Brule. Used to be a big hobo jungle there in the Thirties.” He dared a look at Brooding Sam, knew better than to shrug. “Big jungle and then there was a fire and a whack-load of ‘em died. So the historical society decided it’d be a good idea to, uh, commemorate this by creating a museum, right? A kind of…Depression Park. That the Thirties were all about hanging out and not working and making do and you know, pitching in and stuff.”

He took a breath, pacing himself. “The newspapers of the day said that a tramp started the fire, but they would, wouldn’t they?” Now he waited for Sam to prompt, because he wanted Sam to prompt, to join in, but it wasn’t going to work that way. Waited some more. Okay, Sam. “But other folks? They say a railroad bull started the fire trying to clear the squatters out.” Dean shoved another large bite of pizza in his mouth, talked around it just for effect. “Historical society didn’t want to mention it, didn’t even want to talk to me about the fire, let alone who started it. Railroad’s a big sponsor, apparently. Asshole company bull torching women and children along with the tramps kinda ruins the whole Hobo Disneyland.” He lifted his brows, knew that he was pissing Sam off no end. “Opens this summer,” and I won’t live to see that, past my expiry date, “but re-writing history like that might make somebody mad. Mad enough to kill.”

Dean watched as Sam’s eyelid flickered and he looked away. He hadn’t even touched a second slice of his pizza he was so mad. This wasn’t going to end well, especially if Dean kept up his oblique yet caustic appraisal of the history project. Still, Dean had been dodging a fight for days – weeks, even – and he was tired. Was getting tired.

Sam’s jaw clenched and he sighed through his nose. “So the bums under the bridge knew all about the museum? Were they, like, curators or something?”

“Sam,” Dean warned with what he hoped was an open smile. “The researchers are looking for any guys that might have been around in the Thirties or who know a thing or two about the life. They’ve been talking to the guys there, yeah. But they’re all too young to have been around. Lost cause, you ask me, trying to find out what it was really like.”

Fuck, everything had a double-meaning now, and Dean threw down the cheese-soggy crust with disgust. Too much grease, even for him.

“Lost cause,” Sam repeated softly. “Okay. So let me guess: just as they’re breaking ground on this scene of mass death, a rash of unexplainable murders starts up.”

“Yep.” More than that might undo them in the middle of the Pizza Hut. There were limits to how undignified Dean was willing to get in public. Still, single syllables provided their own provocation.

“You think a hobo-ghost is killing people?” Sam made ‘hobo-ghost’ sound as ridiculous as it possibly could, which was a lot. “A pissed off spirit?” he amended, maybe checking himself at Dean’s expression.

Dean balled his napkin onto his plate. And this time, he shrugged. “I have no idea. It’s worth checking out, isn’t it? Go west to Brule, see what’s up?” He grinned, found the worst thing to say out of many possibilities. “Nothing to lose, right?”

You could almost see Sam trying not to explode. “Yeah, ‘cause we have time on our hands. Because this is how we should spend what’s left in the account, in cold armpit towns, chasing down hobo-fucking-ghosts. I thought you wanted California?”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” and Dean held up two hands as though he could stop it.

Sam in forward motion was damn hard to halt, though, physically or metaphorically. “You wanted a real Christmas. You want your fucking greasy artery-clogging pizza and your twins and your adventure. I get it, you know. I get that. But this? You want Nebraska in winter over a California beach?”

Dean shook his head, but Sam kept going.

“You can’t pretend it’s not going to happen. You can’t outrun it, Dean,” Sam pointed out angrily like he was a moron, an idiot. “They all tried to outrun it. All the charms and powders in the world won’t stop it.” And Sam had cause to know, of course. It was part of what was making him so mad. Dean knew about the calls to Bobby, about the late nights on the internet, about the phone calls to weird voodoo practitioners down south, to academics in towers. Even Ruby had let Sam down, Dean knew, glad that she hadn’t been around lately, hadn’t answered Sam’s calls. They had enough trouble, surely, without consorting with that.

But it wasn’t that Dean objected to Ruby’s demonic status, that wasn’t it, not really. Ruby was dangerous, because Dean alive meant Sam dead. Mostly, though, it was the…hope it stirred in Sam, when Dean knew it was hopeless.

“I’m not trying to outrun it, Sam.” Squashing hope had become a necessity: Sam wasn’t allowed to indulge in anything so vicious as hope. The next came out before Dean even knew it was there, was like it had been planted, had been waiting for years, a diversionary move always held in reserve. Live ammo when it ought to be blanks. “I never ran away from anything. Not like you.”

And Sam slammed down his plastic cup of water so hard the water bounced over the brim for all it was half-empty, and Sam stood up, unwilling to hear where Dean was going with this maybe, unwilling to examine the concept of California in all its permutations and meanings.

Dean watched him go, not able to feel regret. Not the way he wanted to end the day, sure, but better than the alternative. He finished his Pepsi and paid the bill, knowing that Sam would have walked back to the motel, the early evening not so cold as that, not as cold as it should be. Dean would apologize, because he was getting better at that over the years.

But he wouldn’t stop thinking about the nearby tracks, could hear a train even now, the clang of the warning at the crossing, thought about trains going slow enough that you could run alongside them, jump for an iron bar, swing up and into an empty car, just get the hell out town and head west.

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Sam knew her number by heart now, didn’t need to remember the dark felt-tip marks on his palm, or her oily black eyes, or her mouth or her questions, her guidance. What she’d said about his mother, and Sam listened to the ringing without expecting her to answer, because she wasn’t a dog that was going to come to heel.

He walked along the roadside, a short couple of blocks from the Pizza Hut to the motel, snapped his phone shut after about twenty rings and buried it deep in his pocket where it worried against his keys and a half-consumed roll of Lifesavers.

He hadn’t run away from his family. He had gone to something. He had become something.

He could tell himself that. He had told himself that for years. Nothing changed the facts, though, not the ones about blood and fire and what was growing within him. It had been there always, made him a freak, made him weird and unknowable and unlovable. Made him this way, still.

Alone. And different.

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TBC

a/n: I’m sure the people of Ogallala are really nice, and not at all like I’ve made them out here. Truthfully, I’m basing them on people I met in the prairie town of Havre, Montana. And maybe one account I read online about the rude waiters in Ogallala (which some online writers called ‘the worst town in Nebraska’). The Bailey Yards does have the distinction of being the largest switching rail yard in the world – or did in 1995 – but there is no plan for a Disneyfied hobo theme park in Brule. As far as I know.

The closest you can come to that is Weedpatch, but more on that later.

a/n 2: I vacillated on using the term ‘Chinook’ in the first segment of this chapter – I think a Canadian knows what it is, but when I found the terms used on American sites about Nebraska weather, I thought it would be okay. In case you don’t know what a Chinook is, it’s a warm wind that comes off the Rockies onto the Prairies during the winter months, most particularly from Calgary south. A good Chinook can make for beautiful sunsets and sunrises, and also melt 40 centimeters of snow in a matter of hours.

a/n 3: Despite the title, this isn’t going to be a ‘Dean and Sam figure out a way to break Dean’s deal’ kinda fic. I leave that to Kripke and co. There are other types of deals to be made, trust me.

Tip of the hat: This stretch of highway between North Platte and Brule is the one that Sal hitchhiked along in On the Road, during a wild ride with two grainfed Minnesota farmers at the wheel of a flatbed truck. His joyful westward thought stays with me: “I felt like an arrow that could shoot out all the way.” Thanks also to Richard Grant’s American Nomads, non-fiction about the North American urge to travel westwards, and the intricate dance between the notions of freedom and escape.