Season Three

Episode Three: Hole In The World

By irismay42

Part Three

Sam saw nothing when he opened his eyes. Just an all-consuming darkness like a physical barrier between himself and the rest of the world, crushing him, filtering out all the sunlight so that all he was left with was himself and this empty blackness, the only sound the insistent rush of water and his own ragged breathing.

He was wet and he was cold and as his eyes gradually adjusted to the darkness he could make out tree branches swaying slightly above him, could turn his head just enough to discern the waters of the River Quabaug flowing swiftly to his left.

River.

Water.

Bridge.

“Dean!”

He sat bolt upright. Fumbling in the grass around him in disorientation, memory flooded his brain and he realized the last sensation he had felt before he woke up here had been that of sodden cotton slipping through his fingers as he lost his grip on his brother’s shirt.

“Dean!”

Blinking in the unnatural darkness, with panicked movements he scanned the riverbank around him, his eyes finally lighting on a dark shape not eight feet away. Before he really knew what he was doing, he was crawling on his hands and knees toward it, oblivious to the slick mud beneath him and the stones biting into his palms and shins.

“Dean?”

Gripping his brother’s shoulder, Sam carefully turned him over, hardly daring to breathe as he bent down to listen for any signs of life. He placed two fingers against Dean’s neck, his brother’s skin cold and clammy. His relief at detecting a faint but insistent pulse was short lived when he realized Dean wasn’t breathing.

Tilting back Dean’s head, Sam pinched his brother’s nose as he bent down with the intention of attempting to administer mouth to mouth, but Dean suddenly coughed up a lungful of water, eyes snapping open and meeting Sam’s with little short of a challenge sparking in their hazel depths.

“Don’t even think about it, Samantha,” he snapped, his voice gravelly and rough. “I know these lips are pretty damn irresistible, but there are some things even a lifetime of therapy would never be able to fix.”

Sam was so happy to hear his brother’s snark right then, he actually could have kissed him, but settled for slugging him on the shoulder, and in true Winchester fashion, growling, “In your dreams, pervert.”

He offered Dean a hand, pulling him up into a sitting position and cradling his shoulders as he was wracked by another fit of coughing.

“What the hell…?” Dean managed to splutter. “Sammy, why do I feel like I swallowed half a river?”

“Uh,” Sam managed. “We kinda fell in…”

Dean glanced down at his wet clothes. “Then why aren’t we – y’know – covered in blood?”

Sam had to admit, in all the thinking-his-big-brother-was-dead-ness, that thought hadn’t even occurred to him. “I don’t know,” he admitted, getting shakily to his feet and patting down his dripping garments.

Dean looked at him for a second, eyes suddenly snapping wide open. “Dude!” he burst out. “Did I – did I shoot you?”

Sam briefly checked himself over for bullet holes before shaking his head. “Good thing you’re not the crack shot you think you are,” he teased.

Dean frowned at him. “No way, man. If I’d meant to shoot you, I’d have shot you.”

Sam didn’t doubt it for a second. Slowly, he took a step closer to the river, leaning over and noting their current position – only a few feet upriver of the rapids and the waterfall that would undoubtedly have added both of them to the Quabaug’s rising body count. He vaguely remembered snagging overhanging tree roots and somehow managing to haul himself and Dean to the riverbank, but beyond that the whole episode was a complete blank.

“It’s water,” he pronounced finally, discerning the river’s current state by squinting in the only light source available – distant halogen lighting from the nearby highway.

“How the hell did that happen?” Dean asked, wiping his palm down over his face before taking in their wider surroundings. “And – y’know – I know I was out of it for a while there, but last I remember it was the middle of the day. Did I miss something?”

Illuminating his wristwatch, Sam frowned as he read the dial. “It’s twelve-thirty,” he informed his brother. “In the afternoon.”

Dean squinted up at him, waiting for another coughing fit to pass before adding, “Either your watch stopped or someone forgot to pay the electricity bill.”

Not one star was visible in the jet black heavens as Sam stared up at the sky. “Revelations,” he said, slowly reaching an almost unfathomable conclusion. “The End of Days. After the plague of sores and the rivers of blood –”

“Darkness,” Dean finished for him, nodding. “I remember.”

Sam shifted awkwardly, taking a step toward his brother before halting a little uncertainly and finally asking, “What exactly do you remember?”

Dean looked up at him through lowered lashes, as if caught off guard by the question and not entirely sure how to answer.

“Dean, it’s okay,” Sam assured him, crouching down next to him. “The whole town’s turned into –”

“Nutjobs?” Dean supplied, smiling mirthlessly. “Yeah.” He shrugged his shoulders, picking at the muddy cuff of his jeans. “There was –” he broke off, as if trying to figure out a way to explain it. “There was someone else,” he tried again. “In here with me.” He tapped his temple.

“Yeah,” Sam agreed sympathetically. “I think maybe she tried to get in my head first.”

Dean frowned before shaking his head. “No man, not a she,” he explained. “Definitely a he. And he was – he’d been tortured. In – in Hell.” He flicked a quick glance at Sam before once more turning his attention to his sodden jeans. “I mean, he’d really been there, Sammy. It’s – it’s really real…”

“You – you remember Hell?” Sam asked tentatively.

Dean nodded slightly, not looking up. “Or – or he did, anyway. Real Old Testament stuff, man.” Dean swallowed hard, and even in the dim light Sam saw him pale slightly. “Drove him nuts. I mean seriously nuts, Sammy. I mean this guy – he was in Hell a long time. Not that – not that time has any meaning there I don’t think. It’s just like seconds measured in more agony, more torture. And – and I – he – he couldn’t – he couldn’t get out. Couldn’t make it stop. Until –”

“He found himself here,” Sam finished for him. “Inside of you.”

Dean nodded, hesitantly meeting Sam’s concerned gaze.

“So maybe,” Sam continued, tapping a finger to his lips. “Maybe the schizophrenia – maybe it is some kind of mass possession; demons that have somehow escaped from Hell…?”

“No, it’s not demons,” Dean said decisively. He dragged a hand through the short wet spikes of his hair. “The – the guy inside of me? He was just a guy, Sam. Just a guy. It didn’t feel like – like before. With Haris’ kid. And besides, the amulet…” He trailed off, fingers brushing against the gold charm still strung about his neck. “The amulet would have stopped a demon from getting in, right? Getting control? This was different. The guy –” he looked up at Sam again. “The guy had a name, Sam. Joseph Mercer. He was a farmer in – in South Carolina. Couple centuries ago I think.”

Sam blinked at him, clearly taken aback. “You – you remember –?”

“This guy’s life, yeah.” Dean shook his head. “Or flashes of it. He – he got caught banging his brother’s old lady – kinda in flagrante, y’know? The brother’s pissed – understandably. They fight. Little Joe winds up shoving his bro onto a pitchfork.” He looked down at his bare feet. “They hanged the guy.”

“You remember that?”

Dean looked up, nodding. “And what came after.”

Sam took a breath. “Hell?” he hazarded.

“In glorious Technicolor.”

Sam blew out the breath he’d just taken. “Dean –”

“It’s not like a complete memory,” Dean explained. “More like – an impression. Feelings. Images. Heat. Fire. Pain. Never-ending thirst. Just – just what you think when you think of – y’know – Hell.” He bent his head, scratching the back of his neck. “Dude, if ever anything could convince me to turn over a new leaf and go all Boy Scout like you? This would be it.”

Sam laughed despite the subject matter. “Thanks.”

“Seriously. I think harps and halos are the way to go.”

Smiling ruefully, Sam lowered his head so that he and Dean were at eye level. “I’m sorry,” he said earnestly. “That you had to see –”

“Not your fault,” Dean cut him off with a shrug of his shoulders, but Sam could see the way his jaw clenched. “I’m just – just sorry I couldn’t fight him off. Like you did.”

Sam didn’t reply, just averted his gaze toward the suddenly clean river.

“Maybe it’s your freaky psychic mojo thing,” Dean suggested. “That ‘reflecting’ thing you got going – like what you did to Alyssa.”

Sam had somehow neglected to tell Dean about what he’d done to the tupilaq and the Inuit shaman. “Maybe,” he said quietly, still gazing at the river, a hundred thoughts he didn’t want to be thinking swirling around in his head.

“Thing is,” Dean continued, obviously, Sam figured, sensing his little brother’s discomfort and trying to change the subject, “if these things aren’t demons…?” He let the question hang in the air between them, until Sam’s focus finally returned to him.

“The guy that’s possessing Rosa?” the younger brother said slowly. “He said he remembered something from after he died, too. Something that sounded a hell of a lot like what you were describing when you were possessed.” He smiled a crookedly apologetic smile. “Pardon the pun.”

Dean raised an eyebrow. “You think this whole Eighth Gateway to Hell thing’s a little more real than we originally thought?”

“Who knows?” Sam said. “Maybe that’s just a coincidence. But there’s no denying we seem to be dealing with real people here –”

“Real people who at some point died and went to Hell,” Dean agreed. “And now they’re back as – I don’t know – disembodied souls maybe? The souls of the dead possessing the living?”

“We’ve seen weirder things,” Sam said.

“But that begs the question, if these are souls displaced from Hell –”

“How the hell did they get out of Hell?”

“And why? Why now? What’s their purpose? Getting people to throw themselves into the river?”

“Maybe there’s no purpose,” Sam suggested. “Maybe these are just the souls of people who went to Hell, and the longer they stayed there, the crazier they got until finally they were released into the world to – to wreak havoc. Somehow.”

“Released by who?” Dean asked, eyes locking with Sam’s.

Neither of them said what they were thinking. And Sam had absolutely no doubt they were thinking the same thing.

“Okay,” Dean said finally. “So just ’cause Malik mentioned New Jersey doesn’t mean –”

“No it doesn’t,” Sam agreed a little too readily. “Could just be a coincidence.”

“Like crazed souls escaping from Hell in a town that advertises its own Hellgate.”

“So yeah,” Sam agreed a little defensively, “it’s a pretty big coincidence.”

“Pretty huge coincidence.”

“And we’ve got no evidence. Just a bloody river…”

“Plagues and twenty-four hour darkness? End of Days? The Beast? Sam…”

“The river’s not bloody anymore, Dean.”

Dean sighed, finally forcing himself to his feet and wincing at the cold mud squishing between his toes. “Yeah, and why is that exactly?” He frowned, taking a few lurching steps toward the river as the frown turned into a grimace.

Sam considered him for a second. “Dude, what’s wrong with you?” he asked. “You look like a cross between Frankenstein’s Monster and John Wayne.”

“You should try walking in bare feet and wet underwear,” Dean retorted caustically, eyes sweeping upriver, back toward the bridge.

“I got your boots in the car,” Sam informed him, deciding to take pity on his big brother for once.

Dean glanced back at him, a quizzical half-smile playing on his face. “You do?” he said. “Aw Sammy. That’s so sweet.”

Sam bumped his shoulder as he strode past him, heading back toward the parking lot where he’d left the Impala. “Shut up,” he said shortly. “And you’re not the only one with wet underwear. So quit whining and man up will ya?”

Dean blinked. “Who died and made you John Winchester?” he asked, turning to follow the direction Sam was headed. “And for your information I’m not just following you to the car because these freakin’ stones are cutting chunks out of my feet and I’d like my boots back. Look over there, Sherlock.”

Sam followed the direction of Dean’s pointing finger, back to the shallows near the bridge’s footings, where Sam had last seen Preacher Warriner wading out in search of divine absolution.

“No way,” Sam muttered, quickening his pace while Dean winced as he stood on a particularly sharp stone.

“Hey, barefoot here, Gigantor!” Dean snapped, struggling to keep up. “Don’t feel like you need to slow down for me or anything! Hate to stop you from striding over mountain ranges in a single bound!”

“Dean, shut up for a second,” Sam insisted so authoritatively Dean’s jaw actually shut with a resounding click. “Look. He’s – he’s baptizing them.”

That indeed was the only explanation for what the preacher could possibly be doing standing up to his chest in the River Quabaug surrounded by at least thirty people and another forty or fifty crowding down the riverbank toward him.

“Holy hell,” Dean muttered, causing Sam to wince slightly at his unfortunate choice of words as they began to thread their way through some of the people sitting on the riverbank in wet clothes, obviously having already been tended to by the preacher. Several of them were crying; most of them seemed to be in shock at the very least.

“How did I get here?” Brenda, the waitress who Sam had spoken to earlier when she was convinced she was a nineteenth century plantation owner’s wife, sat staring at her knees, shaking her head as if the whole world was suddenly incomprehensible to her. “How did I get here? I wanna go home. Can someone take me home?”

“I saw fire.” A young man wearing a paramedic’s uniform was wandering around in circles, fingers clutching in involuntary spasms at his hair. “I saw – I felt –” He trailed off, obviously unable to put his remembrances into word.

“They’re cured,” Sam exclaimed, aware he was stating the obvious. “Aside from the sores. The souls – they’ve – gone. It looks like when the preacher baptized them…somehow they were –”

“Holy water.” Warriner was looking straight at them as he spoke, lifting a young woman out of the river and ushering her, dazed and confused, toward the riverbank.

Sam’s eyebrows disappeared into his hair. “Holy water?” he repeated.

“The river,” Warriner explained. “I blessed the river.”

Dean mirrored his brother’s expression. “You – you turned the entire river into holy water?”

Warriner shook his head. “The power of prayer and the power of the Lord turned the river into holy water,” Warriner amended.

“That’s what turned it back into water?” Sam marveled. “That’s what got rid of the blood? You did that?”

“The Lord worked through me,” the preacher insisted. “I am but his humble instrument.”

“And by baptizing these people,” Dean continued. “You’re driving the crazy out of them?”

Warriner smiled slightly at Dean’s turn of phrase as he beckoned an elderly lady who looked as if she didn’t have a clue why she was there into the water. “The Lord indeed works in mysterious ways.”

“So I’ve been told,” Dean agreed.

“Dean, this is what cured you!” Sam said suddenly, eyes lighting up as if a light bulb had just illuminated his brain. “When you fell into the river – when you fell into a river running with holy water! It must have driven the escaped soul out of you!”

Dean squinted at him. “You think so?” he asked a little uncertainly. “Is that even possible?”

Sam shrugged. “The preacher was already in the river doing his thing when I got here with Malik –”

“Malik’s here?”

Sam scanned the growing crowd. “Yeah. Somewhere. He was a mess though, man. Wasn’t even speaking English.”

Dean nodded. “So how – why – are all these people here? Why are they coming here? How do they know to come here?”

“Because they think they can be saved.”

Sam turned at the sound of the familiar voice, Malik striding toward them, his pants and shirt still damp from what Sam guessed had been an earlier trip into the river.

“You okay?” Sam asked.

Malik shrugged. “‘Okay’ is a relative term I guess,” he said. “The guy who was squatting in my head’s gone if that’s what you mean.”

Sam smiled, relieved. “Well that’s something.”

“Do you – remember any of it?” Dean asked tentatively, and Sam got the distinct impression his brother was asking a much more difficult question, maybe hoping seeking out someone with shared experiences might make him feel slightly less crazy.

“Oh yeah,” Malik nodded. “Didn’t understand a word of what he was thinking, but I saw the things he did. Before.” He shoved his hands in his pockets and kicked at an imaginary stone at his feet. “He was a Hutu soldier named Gahiji,” he explained. “He was killed not long after he helped slaughter hundreds of Tutsi during the genocide in Rwanda back in 1994.”

“Oh man,” Dean mumbled, somehow relieved he’d only had to witness the one murder through another man’s eyes.

“Yeah,” Malik said lightly, as if trying to dismiss the horrors of the things he’d been forced to see. “Somehow that was worse than the things he saw after.”

“When I brought you here,” Sam asked. “What made you…?”

“Jump in the river?” Malik supplied. “I don’t know. I just felt drawn here I guess. Or…or he felt drawn here. Like the answers were here.”

“Like you could be saved?” Sam suggested.

Malik considered that briefly. “Maybe. I don’t know whether it was the baptism or the water itself that got the sucker out of my head. Just…just one of us thought it would be the answer.”

“And it was,” Sam said. “For you.”

“But maybe not for him,” Malik agreed. “I don’t think he came here for the same reason as the thing that had your brother.”

“No,” Dean agreed. “That wasn’t about salvation. It was –” he thought about it for a second before continuing. “That was something else. Not something as – as rational, I guess, as the promise of being eternally saved from the fires of Hell. More like – more like a short term solution. Like the water could put the flames out and stop the burning and the agony.”

“You were there longer than me,” Malik noted, and the confusion in pronouns made Sam’s head hurt. “In Hell. I – my guy – he was only there fourteen years. I guess he was still comparatively lucid compared to some of these folks.”

Dean nodded, seeming relieved he could talk about his experience to someone who seemed to understand what he was feeling. “I think my guy was there a couple of centuries,” he explained. “That’d be enough to make the sanest person crazy.”

“So you think,” Sam put in thoughtfully, “these people – the ones being inhabited by the less crazy souls – are being drawn here because they believe baptism could be their Get Out of Hell Free card?”

Malik shrugged. “Stranger things, man.”

“So if that’s the case,” Dean said, eyes darkening. “If the escaped souls really are being driven out of their hosts – by the baptism or by the holy water or by a combination of both – ” He looked from Malik to Sam and back again. “Where do you suppose they’re going?”

Malik drew in a long breath and shook his head, not even attempting an answer.

“These people must have been in Hell for a reason, Dean,” Sam said at length. “They’re not just going to be given a free pass to Heaven. Or wherever.”

“Because they’re evil?”

The brothers’ eyes locked, and it was Sam who looked away first.

“Not everything others see as evil is that way by choice,” Dean insisted stubbornly. “Right Sam?”

Sam hated it when Dean had subtext. It wasn’t something he was used to dealing with from his brother – one thing Dean wasn’t was subtle. He shifted from foot to foot, finally turning his attention back to Malik, who looked decidedly uncomfortable, obviously picking up on the silent conversation going on between the brothers he wasn’t privy to.

“Malik, this company from New Jersey,” Sam said, the subject change so jarring even he felt like the ground had lurched under his feet in protest. “You remember the name of it?”

“The company behind the casino development?” Malik clarified. “Lemme think. It was a really bad pun –” His eyes lit up and he snapped his fingers. “Styx and Stones Construction, that was it.”

“There’s a pun in there?” Sam queried.

Malik snickered. “Styx spelt S-T-Y-X.”

“Like the band?” Dean raised an eyebrow.

“No, like the river,” Sam corrected him. “To Hell. Or Hades anyway.” The reference made his mind wander in the direction of Erika Gudrun for a second and he shuddered.

“Kinda creepy for a construction company,” Dean observed.

“Not when you realize who owns it,” Sam informed him.

Dean grimaced. “Ah, man! Don’t tell me –”

“Ferinacci,” Sam confirmed. “The name kinda stuck in my head when I did a little research on him – uh – before.”

“Who’s Ferinacci?” Malik asked innocently. “He the Tony Soprano in this story?”

The brothers exchanged a glance.

“You – uh – probably don’t want to know,” Dean assured him. “Let’s just say he’s not someone you’d want to bump into in a dark alley.”

Sam’s focus slid back to the river, and the seemingly unending stream of people flowing toward it.

“Malik, does the water from the processing plant flow down to the casino development site?”

Malik raised an eyebrow. “Sure. Like I said, it used to be a cannery, so there’s a whole network of inflow and outflow pipes underneath. It draws its water directly off of the river, then its waste water goes back in once it’s been treated and cleaned.”

Sam nodded, a thought forming in his head. “Malik, we need a favor.”

Dean glanced over at him, the question clear on his face.

“Anything,” Malik said. “If you hadn’t brought me out here I’d still be wandering around town wondering how the hell to get back to Rwanda.”

“Well, that’s kind of the first part of the favor,” Sam told him. “When the preacher’s done here, we need him to move on into town – baptize all the people there who can’t get here or are too whacked out to feel the call, or whatever it is you felt. Then maybe he’s gonna need to move on into Worcester – the hospital anyway.”

“Sam, what if they don’t want to be baptized?” Dean asked. “I doubt all of these lost souls were good upstanding Christians in their day. Hell, some of them probably weren’t even Christian.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Sam said shortly. “We’re not asking them to accept Christ into their lives or anything. We just need to get the souls outta the people they’re possessing before they start to kill each other. Or themselves.” His eyes slid involuntarily to the bridge further upstream and Dean swallowed. “It’s not a matter of faith. It’s a matter of survival. And that holy water will make sure they survive.”

“Okay,” Dean agreed, turning to Malik. “You think you can do that man?” he asked. “Kinda a tall order. But you said you knew Warriner, right? Think you can talk him into it?”

Malik nodded. “No problem,” he assured them. “Consider it done.”

Sam took a breath. “Good,” he said decisively, before an apologetic smile crept onto his face. “Because this next part of the favor might be a little trickier…”

Pleasure Central Leisure Development site
Leicester, MA

Dean grimaced as thick mud squelched beneath his feet, eternally grateful his kid brother was such a mother hen he’d thought to bring his boots. And his jacket. In the unnatural afternoon darkness, the temperature had dropped considerably and a fine drizzle was doing its damnedest to soak him to the skin. Again.

He shivered slightly, causing Sam to give him the patented Sammy Winchester Look of Concern, to which he rolled his eyes and hissed, “I’m fine, Sam.”

Sam nodded, a look of skeptical acceptance on his face, before turning his attention back to the new leisure complex’s main gate, which the two of them had been surveilling from all conceivable angles for the last hour.

Dean could make out at least four security guys from where he was standing – the only people besides Sam in this whole town who didn’t appear to have been possessed by the souls of the dead. They seemed to rotate duty every thirty minutes, suggesting at least four more guards were patrolling the perimeter fence, which was twelve feet high, topped with copious coils of razor wire and lit by industrial wattage security floodlights every few feet.

Shaking his head, Dean figured even Michael Scofield might find this place something of a challenge.

“Dude, no way we’re getting in there without an invitation,” he told his brother, stating the obvious as he tried to get his teeth to stop chattering. “And there’s about as much chance of that as there is of us scoring an invitation to the Emmys.”

It was fairly mild for a Massachusetts autumn, but the eerie darkness and the still-damp clothing were doing nothing for Dean’s inner glow; and standing around ankle deep in mud watching apes in blue uniforms sipping steaming hot coffee from thermos flasks was making him more than a little grumpy.

Sam’s attention had drifted to the muddy incline which sloped down toward the river, which in turn flowed alongside and around back of the new development site.

“And the Emmy for Best Drama Queen in a TV series goes to Sam Winchester…” Dean added, convinced Sam wasn’t listening to a word he was saying.

Sam proved Dean’s point by completely ignoring the jibe. “Malik said the old cannery had an inflow/outflow system into the river, right?” he said, his eyes still scanning the distant riverbank purposefully.

Dean sighed, always disappointed when he couldn’t get a rise out of his kid brother. “I guess,” he agreed, suddenly inclining his head as he realized what Sam was getting at. “Back door maybe?” he hazarded. “Good thinking, Sammy. I knew I brought you along for a reason.”

Sam huffed. “What, other than to make sure you didn’t drown or freeze to death?”

Dean raised an eyebrow before heading off toward the river, tossing, “Well if you want to get picky…” over his shoulder as he stomped down the muddy bank.

Sam followed diligently, just managing to keep his footing on the slippery slope as the two of them inched their way slowly along the riverbank, neither particularly relishing the prospect of another unscheduled dip in the Quabaug that afternoon.

They stuck close to the river, making sure to duck down behind a small hillock between the bank and the wide expanse of grass and mud leading back up to the wire fence and the floodlights, finally rounding a corner where the Quabaug opened up into what appeared to be an artificially constructed inlet lying directly below the hulking wreck of the former cannery.

Water lapped softly at concrete foundations rising out of the little bay, and Dean suddenly beamed, exclaiming brightly, “Someone looking for a back door?” He pointed to a large pipe sticking out of the river bank, high up so as to be beyond the swells of the Quabaug. “Waste pipe,” he proclaimed, noting how the concrete beneath was discolored a dirty yellowish brown, as if by years of running water.

Taking a tentative step closer, he estimated the waste pipe to be perhaps six feet in diameter, and as far as he could make out there was no grill or hatch securing the opening.

“Hmm, not sure you’re gonna fit in there, Kong,” he smirked, heading off toward the pipe before Sam got a chance to over-think this rather foolhardy little twist to their non-plan. “Might have to bend your head a little there.”

Sam grunted. “Well we can’t all be tall dark and handsome,” he retorted, following on his brother’s heels and snickering slightly as he added, “And if I’m King Kong, that makes you Fay Wray, dude.”

Dean stopped dead in his tracks, Sam just about falling over him as he scowled up at him indignantly. “I am so not Fay Wray!” he spluttered, clearly incensed by the comparison.

“You’re short, you’re blond and sometimes you can be a real damsel in distress,” Sam told him shortly, shoving past him and continuing on toward the pipe. “How many times have I had to swoop in there and rescue you from some big nasty monster, huh?”

Dean stood completely still for a second, for once in his life absolutely dumbstruck, his ears turning an odd shade of scarlet. “I – I’m not short!” he managed to protest when he finally recovered his ability to form words. “And – and I am in no way a girl, Samantha –!”

“Untwist your pantyhose, Fay,” Sam shot back, grinning as he finally reached the pipe. “All that bitchin’s gonna give you wrinkles.” He stretched a hand up toward the rusty metal, running long fingers around the rim and frowning slightly when he brought them back up to his face covered in a red substance he couldn’t immediately identify.

“Well if anyone’s a girl in this relationship it’s you Gloria,” Dean continued to grouse as he drew level with Sam’s shoulder. “What happened, you break a nail or something?” He peered up at the odd coating on his brother’s fingers, tipping his head slightly to the side. “What is that?” he asked. “Rust?”

Sam pursed his lips distastefully. “Either that or –” he swallowed. “I think maybe its dried blood.”

The two of them just stared at each other for a full second or two, before Dean’s focus shifted to the concrete beneath the pipe, only now noticing the staining beneath also contained traces of a dirty crimson. “You think –” he began, hesitating for a beat before continuing. “You think maybe this is where the blood came from?”

Sam shrugged. “Pipe’s too high to be for taking water in to the complex. You said yourself it looked more like a waste pipe.”

Dean fished a Maglite out of his jacket pocket and shone it around the inside of the pipe. The red residue seemed to coat the bottom half of the metal tube, and he was pretty sure he could just about make out a tiny trickle along the bottom that was still wet. He glanced up at Sam. “You sure you wanna do this?” he asked at length, all trace of teasing or petulance gone from his voice and his expression. “I mean, if Ferinacci – hell, Lucifer – really is behind this whole thing, who knows what the hell we’re likely to find in there.”

“Hopefully it won’t be ‘Hell’ we find,” Sam commented. “We’re a ways from Spider Gates Cemetery over here, so if Leicester really does have a Gateway to Hell –”

“What if it’s here?” Dean finished for him. “Maybe the locals were off by a couple o’ miles?”

“Like Malik said,” Sam reminded him, looking for a handhold to help him haul himself up into the waste pipe. “Stranger things, man.”

“You – you want me to – y’know – take point?” Dean offered, a vague shadow of concern flitting across his face as his hand ghosted across Sam’s shoulder.

Sam turned and grinned at him. “What, you need a leg up or something?” he quipped, hauling himself up into the rusty red darkness and wincing at the unmistakable coppery tang of blood in the air.

“You need a slap upside the head?” Dean retorted, repeating Sam’s maneuver until he was crouching down next to his brother, a macabre stretch of bloody blackness opening up in front of them.

“It’s definitely blood,” Sam reiterated, eyeing with distaste the gelatinous globules of deep crimson goo splattered liberally along the pipe. He rose to his feet as far as he was able, head ducked and shoulders hunched over in an effort to avoid any accidental concussions.

“That makes me feel so much better,” Dean lied, aiming the flashlight down the tunnel as Sam made a move into the darkness. He followed, hand sliding unconsciously to the silver Colt nestled against his back. “And it begs the question,” he added, lowering his voice as the echo reverberated around them almost as loudly as the clump, clump, clump of their feet, “if this is how the blood got into the river, then where the hell did it come from?”

“There’s that ‘hell’ word again,” Sam pointed out, long fingers trailing along the pipe wall in his wake.

“Yeah man,” Dean agreed. “And we could be walking right into it! Dean Winchester and the Sewer Pipe to Hell definitely wasn’t the title I had in mind for the movie of my life.”

Sam snickered, the sound bouncing off the metal walls surrounding them. “I guess someone already used American Psycho, huh?”

Anyone else would have taken that as an insult, but when Sam turned his own flashlight back toward his brother, obviously concerned by the lack of smart-aleck comeback, Dean merely grinned big, the light reflecting brightly off his teeth. “Aw, Sammy,” he declared. “You know me so well.”

They continued on in silence for a couple of minutes, the pipe making a handful of unexpected twists and turns every few feet and an odd dripping sound causing Dean to shudder. Water, he told himself. It’s only water. There’s definitely no blood dripping on me…

“Hey,” Sam put out a hand suddenly, halting Dean in his tracks. “Light up ahead.”

Dean switched off his flashlight, Sam following suit, as the two of them inched toward the weak sliver of artificial light smeared across the darkness in front of them.

“You hear anything?” Sam whispered nervously, bracing a hand against the roof of the pipe as he sidled closer to the sickly pale disk of illumination maybe twenty feet ahead of them.

“What? Like wailing and gnashing of teeth?” Dean asked, sticking a lot closer to Sam than he probably ought to have considering the tight quarters and the very real possibility of an imminent firefight. Maybe even a literal firefight.

He shuddered, trying to block out the Hellish images still dancing just behind his retinas – burning, screaming, weeping. The constant desperate pleas for a mercy that would never be granted.

“Dean?”

Dean realized Sam was looking at him, concern plastered across his face.

“You okay, man?”

Dean stared at him for a second, as if he didn’t quite understand the question. “Huh? Uh. Yeah,” he finally managed to stammer unconvincingly.

“You wigged out on me for a second there, bro,” Sam told him, brow crinkling. “Like you were a thousand miles away.”

Dean looked down, contemplating the sticky trickle of blood beneath his feet and the fire still crackling in his memory. “I was,” he said slowly. “At least, I hope I was.”

Sam’s crinkled brow creased further into a frown, as if he wasn’t entirely sure what to do with that. “You – wanna take a minute…?” he asked hesitantly, just as something seemed to snap back into place inside his brother, that familiar devil-may-care grin shuttering out any previous uncertainty.

“Dude, since when did we let a possible Hellgate keep us from a good time?” he demanded, surging in front of Sam and making headlong for the light source.

“Dean –” Sam hurried to catch up, hampered by his having to stoop further than his brother. “Dean, wait –”

But Dean had already stopped, teetering on the lip of the pipe, his eyes wide in the sudden lighting.

“Dean, what do you see –?”

Dean’s expression twisted into a slightly perplexed squint. “It’s a hole,” he said flatly, gesturing into the room beyond the pipe with his drawn Colt. “It’s a really big hole.”

Sam drew level with him, eyes following in the direction of his brother’s handgun. He blew out a breath. “Wow,” he agreed, nodding. “That is a big hole.”

Dean jumped the foot or so down into the huge concrete room in which he found himself, boots making a satisfyingly solid thunk as he hit the dull gray floor.

He ran a hand around the edge of the pipe, which looked jagged and uneven, as if it had recently been cut away from a more extensive waste system, before turning his eyes upward. The muted overhead lighting was barely adequate to illuminate the high ceiling, which was cross-crossed by an apparently abstract network of pipes of various sizes snaking in and out of the room. A metal walkway suspended from the ceiling by rusty-looking girders ran the entire circumference of the cavernous area, leading to various doorways set high in the walls, ladders leading down to the ground at seemingly random intervals.

“What the hell is this place?” he asked, voice subdued in something approaching awe.

“Machine room maybe?” Sam offered, jumping down beside him. “Sewer junction? Pumping room?”

“Or all of the above?”

“Malik said this used to be a cannery, right? Maybe this was the waste treatment area? I’m guessing the construction company must have ripped out the machinery when they got here…” Sam gestured around the room, to various other openings onto pipes like the one they’d just traversed, and others set higher into the walls all around them. “Maybe the waste came in there…got treated here…and everything got flushed out –”

“Back into the river,” Dean supplied. “Like the blood.”

“Might explain how the blood got into the river in the first place.”

“But not that big ass hole in the floor.”

Sam took a couple of steps toward the massive chasm in the center of the concrete in front of them. “I think we can safely assume this wasn’t part of the original design,” he said, examining the network of fissures and cracks spider-webbing out from the jagged edges of the hole. “Looks like someone just blasted right down into the concrete –”

“Or blasted up,” Dean suggested, uncomfortably meeting Sam’s unsettled gaze before edging over to the brink of the chasm. He peered hesitantly over the edge before turning his gaze upward. “Where do you guess we are, Sammy?” he asked, examining the distant ceiling. “You think we’re under the casino or the strip club?”

“I’d say we’re dead center,” Sam said. “Pretty much right under what will eventually be the casino.”

Dean was peering down into the sinkhole again. “How far down do you think this goes?” he mused, absently pulling a quarter out of his jeans pocket and dropping it into the seemingly bottomless blackness.

They waited several seconds, expecting to hear the metallic tinkle of the coin hitting bottom at any moment. But the sound never came.

Dean blew out a whistle, looking back up at Sam. “I get the feeling this thing doesn’t lead to China…” he hazarded, and Sam nodded his agreement.

“Wherever it goes,” he said, casting his gaze around the network of inflow and outflow pipes surrounding them, miles of piping leading who knows where. “Whatever it’s for… Whoever’s behind this could probably taint the whole county’s water supply in a matter of days from this room.”

Their eyes met again.

“I’m pretty sure we know who’s behind it, Sam.”

“It’s not the End of Days, Dean. It’s a trick. A hoax –”

“It’s Lucifer, Sam! How much more End of Days can you get?”

“It was God who brought about the End of Days in Revelations,” Sam countered. “Not Satan. He meant it as a warning to those worshipping the Beast. If this is Ferinacci’s doing, then it’s a counterfeit, a fake –”

“For what purpose?” Dean demanded. “Why would he want everyone to think the End was nigh?”

“Chaos,” Sam stated bluntly. “You should see it out there, Dean! A whole town gone completely insane! It’s only a matter of time until they wipe each other out completely –”

“But that’s down to those tortured souls who’ve taken control of them!” Dean argued. “They’ve not been driven mad by the fear of Armageddon! The souls inside of them have already witnessed their own personal Armageddon! Why would the literal End of the World bother them?”

“Think about what this looks like to people on the outside,” Sam countered. “The people not tainted by this – the people living in neighboring towns. The whole of Leicester howling at the moon and jumping at shadows? Eternal darkness? Rivers running with blood? It’s only a matter of time until word gets out; until the chaos and the terror spreads to people who aren’t possessed; people who are just driven insane by the predictions of the End Times they’ve read about all their lives in the Bible suddenly coming true! I mean, think about it, Dean. If you thought the world was gonna end tomorrow, that there would be no consequences – at least in this life – for anything you did today? What would you do? Sit in church praying? Lock yourself in your house, switch on Grey’s Anatomy and hope when you wake up in the morning everything will be back to normal?”

“Ugh,” Dean wrinkled his nose. “Hell, if saving the world meant I had to watch Grey’s Anatomy I’d still change the channel!” His eyes became distant for a second. “Although that Katherine Heigl… Man, I’d sure get me some of that if I knew the world was about to end…”

“Exactly!” Sam beamed, his point made. “No consequences! Wine, women and song! Sex, drugs and rock n’ roll!”

“Party like it’s 1999?” Dean suggested. “Although that’s one prediction Prince sure screwed up. And if the Purple One can’t nail the date the world’s gonna end, why would anyone believe this is the End of the World?”

“Because it’s Lucifer, Dean! Just like you said! And without consequences – without rules – society collapses.”

“Anarchy,” Dean nodded. “With a capital A.”

There was silence for a second as both of them stared down into the bottomless pit in front of them.

“So how the hell do we stop Armageddon?” Dean asked eventually.

Sam sighed, no answer immediately forthcoming. “What we need is a plan –”

“What we need is a miracle.”

“You don’t believe in miracles.”

“Right now I’d believe in the Easter Bunny if it’d get us out of this.”

Dean swallowed his next comment as a distant rumble began to reverberate just on the edge of their hearing. “What is that?” he asked instead, as the volume slowly began to rise in intensity until the ground beneath their feet seemed to resonate at the same frequency, vibrations thrumming up their legs as the concrete started to tremble. “Sam –?”

“I think we need to go,” Sam pronounced as the vibration turned into a shudder, loose dust and chunks of plaster raining down on their heads from the ceiling above, the pipes rattling and clanking as the shudder turned into an all-out shake.

“Earthquake?” Dean suggested, eyes casting about him wildly.

“I don’t think so.”

Dean glanced back at Sam, something in the younger brother’s tone sending a shiver up Dean’s spine. He was staring fixedly at the sinkhole, eyes widening as he took a cautious step backwards.

Dean followed Sam’s gaze, almost dreading what he was going to see as the ground shook harder and harder beneath his feet and the distant rumble became a roaring cacophony.

“Holy crap!” he burst out, unable to hear his own words above the din. A morbid fascination overtook him as he found himself unable to look away from the surface of the sinkhole, where blood was beginning to bubble and trickle up over the rim and onto the concrete floor on which they were standing.

It was slow at first, just a few fingers of crimson oozing out toward them, but as the quaking continued to intensify, the trickle soon became a flood, blood literally pouring up out of the hole like some macabre fountain, spreading quickly over the trembling ground as it headed toward the myriad outflow pipes peppering the walls.

“Dean, we have to go now!” Sam repeated urgently, grabbing Dean’s arm and yanking him away from the approaching torrents of blood mere inches from their feet.

“Where?” Dean demanded, backing away as the bloody tide began to creep further and further across the floor, the hard gray turning to dark crimson in every direction.

“Up!”

They’d retreated back against the wall, Sam’s fingers curling around one of the flaking metal ladders leading up to the suspended walkway above their heads.

“Ladies first!” Dean insisted, as Sam began to haul himself up the ladder. Dean wasn’t far behind him, pulling his feet up off the ground mere seconds before the rapidly expanding pool of blood finally submerged the place where he’d just been standing.

Scrambling up the ladder after his brother, Dean didn’t look back until his boots hit the metal footplates of the walkway, which trembled and swayed like a carnival cakewalk in a high wind.

“Oh man! Anyone got some Dramamine?” he moaned, finally glancing backwards at the bloody tide, which had already risen a good few inches up the side of the walls, enough that it had begun to ooze into some of the pipes which would carry it out into the river.

“Dean, help me with this!”

Dean spun in the direction of Sam’s voice, his brother tugging hopelessly at the nearest door as the walkway began to creak ominously.

“I can’t get it open!”

Without a second thought, Dean ran at the door, bringing up a booted foot and kicking hard at the metal obstruction, almost falling back on his ass when the metal refused to budge.

“I think maybe it’s bolted from the other side!” Sam had to yell to be heard, and Dean screwed up his face in annoyance.

“Like you couldn’t have told me that before?”

Sam never got the chance to respond as the deafening rumble suddenly gave way to an altogether more unsettling noise, the sound of hundreds of wailing, screaming voices seeming to emanate right up out of the floor beneath them.

Dean paled considerably. “Sam?” he stammered. “That’s it. That’s the sound I – he – heard when I was – when he was – Down There.”

Sam just stared at him. “You don’t think – I mean – it can’t be… We can’t be hearing Hell, right?”

Dean was gazing at the bloody hole in the ground, seemingly transfixed. “If that’s a Hellgate…”

“A sinkhole into Hell?” Sam exclaimed. “Seriously? You seriously think that’s a sinkhole into Hell? In the middle of Massachusetts?”

Dean shook his head. “I don’t know, man –” He was cut off by an almighty roar suddenly renting the air around them, columns of white hot flame shooting up out of the sinkhole causing both boys to fall backwards onto the walkway with a loud thunk and a curse as shoulder blades and elbows were slammed into metal.

Angry flames clawed crimson fingers up toward them, the screaming intensifying until the sound of the never-ending torture of a thousand souls echoed all around them, bouncing off the walls and reverberating along the pipes, screams and howls the likes of which Dean had hoped never to hear again lodging in his ears and drowning out all other sound.

Dean’s breathing quickened as the noise and the heat and another man’s memories assaulted him, the ground seeming to lurch right out from under him until all he could see was fire and blood, all he could hear was agony and anguish, lost souls screaming for mercy, darkness and heat, vision dimming, long blonde hair on fire behind his eyelids and a window exploding outwards as glass rained down and a buzzing that grew louder and louder in his head as the world around him slowly began to gray out.

“Dean? Dean, hey!”

The next thing he knew he was sitting upright, a strong arm around his shoulder, a soft voice in his ear blocking out the tumultuous roaring of flame and wailing of damned souls.

“Dean? It’s okay, you’re okay!”

“Sammy?”

Sam was holding him up, pulling him back from the edge of the walkway, clinging on to him like a child clings to its security blanket or a parent clings to its terrified offspring.

“It’s okay Dean.”

And Dean knew it was. As long as Sam was here. As long as Sam was here, he couldn’t, wouldn’t be in Hell, whatever his senses told him. Not if his little brother had any say in the matter.

“You passed out.” Sam said it as if the very idea was completely alien to him.

“Did not,” Dean slurred. “Just had a temporary lapse in consciousness is all.”

Sam patted his shoulder, relief at his brother’s customary prickliness plain on his face. “Yeah, I know you did,” he agreed. “Can you stand? We really need to find a way out of here before –”

“Too late.”

Sam followed Dean’s wide unblinking eyes back in the direction of the sinkhole, mouth falling open to match his brother’s. “Holy crap.”

“With a cherry on top,” Dean agreed, unable to tear his eyes from the fiery, gushing sinkhole as the flames began to part and a darkness so complete, so absolute appeared to consume the very center of the seething, bloody mass.

All sound in the room seemed to stop in that instant, the screams muted beneath the background crackle of fire, the trembling of concrete and infrastructure merely a distant hum like an insect trapped in a glass jar.

The darkness itself seemed to part then, thick like molasses, a shadowy shape rising up out of the blood, out of the flame and out of the terror, vaguely human.

Vaguely familiar.

Both Sam and Dean drew in a breath as the dark shape of a man became discernible, backlit by the dancing fire, rising up out of the sinkhole like a giant shadow absorbing all light, all sound, all hope.

Their eyes locked, each knowing what this meant.

The Gateway to Hell was open.

And Lucifer sure knew how to make an entrance.

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The Winchester Chronicles