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His mother is dead.
Adam sits. He sits and holds a hand to his stomach, body exposed and skin prickling against the air, blood spilling over his fingers and coating his palm. It’s warm and smells of iron. It’s thick in his nose and viscous on his skin, on his thighs and chest and in his eyes, wetting the flannel shirt that’s been thrown across his lap.
A man kneels in front of him. He has blood on his face and a gun on hip, but he is not injured beyond a split knuckle and a bruised eye. His hands hold an old first aid kit and rips a shirt. He says his name is Dean and that monsters are real, and dumps stinging power into his wounds.
Adam doesn’t really care. His mother is dead.
Beyond Dean, his newly found half brother that barged in and tore the faces of creatures that peeled his skin and demanded his name, untying his bounds and pulling him from the table, his mothers corpse sits, cooling and gray and draining blood. Her shirt is torn open and her ribs exposed, bent and broken towards the ceiling, flesh and muscle hanging. Bowls beneath her are filled with crimson and tissue is missing from her remaining fingers, pockets of missing skin and vessels and nerves dotting her body. Adam thinks he can see her twitch. Dean turns his face away with his hand.
“Don’t look, kid. Don’t do that to yourself.”
Adam responds, dead eyed and flushed with shock and pain, strained. “My mom.”
“She’s dead, Adam. I’m sorry.”
Oh, Dean sounds so sad, and Adam doesn’t know why. Adam should be sad, not Dean, his brother he’s only just found. Adams voice should betray him and he should be weeping into his bloodied hands.
He’s numb. Dean shoves a strip of fabric against the leaking wound on his stomach with practiced hands, ragged shirt in his teeth and eyes hooded and focused as he presses it with both hands, and a gasp leaves Adams mouth as harrowment steals the air from his lungs. The older man is quick to stem the blood and move, and Adam curls and tries to focus on the pain.
The grief of his mother has yet to surpass the shock that shields him from emotional strife. He wants to feel guilt that he cannot look at the corpse of his only parent with anything beyond a dull gaze, but it’s like it’s been blotted from his ledger.
Dean has to move his hand away from his stomach, and it flops onto the floor. He murmurs things about shock and wraps something around his shoulders, hands moving up and down Adams bare arms and it’s warm. A ruined body, face bashed in and brains spilling from the broken skull, flies already buzzing buzzing is very close to him. It bleeds like it lives, but it is far beyond the scope of life. Deans knuckles share its blood, and Adam shares its face.
His wrists hurt. They are deeply sliced, and Adam can still feel the slick mouths that sucked the blood from his wounds. Dean has patched them already, tightly bound with that old shirt before he ever moved him off that butchers table, but the pressure makes them throb. He tries to touch them more than once, but Dean is quick to move his hands and scold him.
Adam tries to look at his mom again despite the elders words, but Dean has placed himself between the living and the dead. His rough hands have moved from his arms and focus on his face, palms warm on his cheeks as he scans him over with dark green eyes. How strange. Adams eyes are blue. Don’t siblings normally share eye colors?
Blood fills his eye and a muffled whine sounds from his mouth as pressure is placed above his eye. He tries to jerk away but his head is against the wall, and he slaps a hand against the wrist in front of his face. It burns something furious, even more so then his stomach, and he wants it to stop, but even with the weak batting, the pressure stays steady.
“Hold on, kid. Gotta stop the bleeding.”
Another body lies somewhere behind Dean. It’s the other creature that followed him home and split his skin. When it spoke, it seemed to be in charge of the one that held his face. It scolded the other monster for changing too soon after it ripped off one of Adams fingernails and stuffed it in its pocket. It held the visage of a brawny man then, the real features breaking though the nose and eyes. Dean killed it with several shots to the head and half decapitation.
Too late for his mother, though.
Her screams stopped after the ghouls were done needling about his deadbeat father, the older creature slicing off her tongue while the younger dug its claws into Adam’s forearm and chewed slowly at his ear. He remembered it licked the tears off his face and drew lines of blood on his bare chest and his mother begged them to spare him before she could no longer speak, gurgles sounding from her throat as she choked on blood. Adam thought he would die. He was barely fourteen and already on deaths door.
His listened to her stop breathing and screamed her name before a gnarled hand stuck its broken nails down his throat and clawed, blood filling his mouth. Both loomed over him and saliva dripped from their jaws and Adam sobbed. The dried tears are still stuck to his face.
Dean busted through the door and sent a bullet though the older ones head, and it slammed against his hip as it fell and Adam screamed. The other creature roared and jumped and Adam tried to twist his head around as black spots crept in his vision and the world swam as blood rolled down bud wrists. Wet sucking sounds as fist met flesh and slamming was heard, blood thick in the air and more ringing from a gun. Pain sung from every inch of his body.
Then, something tight on his wrists and knuckles against his sternum, rubbing harshly until Adam cried out and pulled away and restraints undone. Arms pulled him from the table and leaned him against a wall, and a voice asked his name and questioned with rough quiet voice, patching and reassuring as Adam slowly, slowly melted into silence and numbness creeped across his skin when he saw his mother.
The name John ended up in the air, and Dean put the pieces together.
Fingers curl under his armpits and pull him up on limp legs, and there is a rush to his head and Adam trips against a warm body, bile in this throat and he gags. A sturdy arm loops around his back and a hand holds his rib cage, mindful of wounds, and Adam is in the air, no weight on his legs. He sags into arms and his head lolls against a chest, world shifting around him as footsteps move away.
“Stay awake, Adam.” Dean rumbles, tightening his grip as they make it to the door. Adam recognizes the black cars outside. “Stay awake.”
“‘M fine.” Adam insist with slurred words, temple against Deans heart and he strains to catch one more look of his mother as they push their way out the door, one more look of her face.
Kate Milliagn’s face is slathered with blood and bruising, expression twisted into agony with wide eyes and open mouth. Rips are in her cheeks and a hole below her eye, popped out and hanging by the nerve against her cheekbone. Her nose is completely beat in and chewed like a dogs toy, bite marks against the skin, and her jawbone is exposed to the air between nets of fat and torn muscles. It hangs open in a broken scream.
Cold air hits Adam’s face as they are out the door, sun dipping down, and he heaves into his lap as nausea and disgust and revelation slosh in his stomach and force it’s way up his throat. Dean is quick to twist him to the side as vomit burns his torn lips and hits the ground and he chokes, and he can hear Dean give a sympathetic hum.
Adam vomits, and they leave his mother dead and tied to a table in a car that smells of leather and gunpowder to be discovered the next morning. The car purrs and his skin sticks to the backseat leather, and Dean speaks to himself in words that don’t really register in the boys ears. He can still smell blood.