Disclaimer: This story is based on characters and situations created and owned by Max Brooks; various publishers including, but not limited to, Three Rivers Press, Crown Publishing Group, and Random House, Inc. This story is also based on characters and situations created and owned by the writers, producers, et al of the television show 'Supernatural', including, but not limited to, the CW network and Eric Kripke. No money is being made and no copyright or trademark infringement is intended. This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to any person, internet persona, or other being, living or dead, is completely coincidental and unintentional unless otherwise noted.

A/N: As anyone who knows me in real life can attest, I have a serious love of zombies. Books, film, computer games – it's all good. When 'Supernatural' did their zombie episode (2.04 – Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things), I found myself somewhat disappointed. I know they try to make each of their villains have their own personal spin, but… The zombie in that show was disappointing; not a true zombie (come on, one of the ironclad rules of zombiedom is that a head-shot wastes the fuckers!). Later, when they did episode 2.09 (Croatoan), I was a little more satisfied, but still disappointed in the overall lack of good old-fashioned, traditional, American, Romero-style zombies. So, I decided to write my own 'Supernatural' zombie story. The zombies I'll be using are the ones Max Brooks describes in his books World War Z and The Zombie Survival Guide, which in turn are based on the zombies used in Romero's string of zombie movies (Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead, and Land of the Dead; see also the zombies from the Resident Evil franchise). For those of you who haven't read these books, don't worry; I'll be explaining as I go along.

One last note before I let you loose into the story: This tale is going to be completely AU. It's going to start while Sam's at Stanford, before he met Jessica. I wish I could remember the title/author of one of the SPN stories I read wherein Sam was at Stanford and had to deal with a traditional zombie uprising, but it's completely slipped my mind. It was a one-shot story, and I hope that if the author of said story reads this, they won't be angry with me for expanding on a terrific idea.

This story is rated M for language, gore, and violence. Happy reading!

Redefining Perceptions of Insanity

Chapter One

The incessant moaning was really starting to grate on Sam's nerves. His iPod didn't do much to drown out the noise, not if he was supposed to be listening for any breaches in their barricades. Sighing, he gave up on the idea of music for the time being and pocketed the MP3 player. It was odd that no one had yet asked him how he managed to keep the batteries for his cell, iPod, and laptop all charged when the power had been out for more than a week, but what else could he reasonably expect from the five people who shared their isolated existence with Sam and his roommate? They weren't exactly the brightest bunch of people.

With the exception of Sam's roommate (and Sam himself, of course), most of them were only in college because of athletic scholarships – or, in the case of Heidi, there simply because her daddy was one of the professors. Sam didn't understand it; he'd met Professor Sorenson and the man was highly intelligent, he didn't get how his daughter could be so freaking clueless. Joe was skating by with a 2.5 GPA on his basketball scholarship. Mark wasn't even doing that well, what with his 1.9; he'd admitted to Sam that he'd only accepted the football scholarship because he had wanted out of the tiny town in which he'd grown up in North Dakota. Before the proverbial shit had hit the fan, Mark had been planning on dropping out at the end of the year and transferring to a community college in order to pursue his first love – auto mechanics. Miguel was attending on a baseball scholarship, and of the three jocks, Sam was pretty sure that he was the only one who had a brain rattling around inside his skull, but since he didn't talk all that much, Sam couldn't be sure. The last of the people who shared space with Sam and his roommate was Martha, one of the members of the custodial crew for the campus. She was in that hard-to-place age category between thirty-five and sixty, with iron-gray hair, sharp eyesight, and a wicked tongue. Sam was reasonably sure that Martha was the only reason that the kids were behaving and he resolved to thank her with a steak dinner if they managed to get out of this mess alive.

He wished that Dean and his dad would hurry up and arrive. He was more than just a little tired of babysitting the jocks, dodging Heidi's half-assed attempts to get him to sleep with her, and he was thoroughly sick of all the goddamned moaning. His roommate did little to alleviate the boredom, working nonstop on his own computer. With each day that sluggishly passed by, the roomie was starting to look more and more deranged. Sam was almost positive that one day he and the others would wake up to find that Brooks had done something totally psychotic, like try to eat his computer or something.

Which brought Sam's thoughts back around to the matter of his batteries. His roommate had a solar generator that he hung outside their window. Of course, the standoffish geek wouldn't consent to sharing his resource, and so Sam had improvised. There was a small solar-powered weather monitoring station on the roof of the dorm – one of those little combination temperature, barometric pressure, and wind-speed/direction meters that radioed the information to the National Weather Service – and Sam hijacked the power supply for his own purposes. His training with electronic security systems wasn't precisely the best foundation for getting the solar cells to work for him, but it was a damn sight better than nothing. Besides, he knew how to research, and one of the rooms two floors below them had yielded a cache of assorted electronics manuals scattered around a half-built (or maybe it had been half-demolished) desktop PC whose tower was fully long enough that, had it been standing on the floor, would have reached all the way to Sam's waist. Sam's pirated solar generator might not be as sleek as his roommate's army-surplus one, nor did it have quite the same output, but it served well enough that his laptop charged fully in about five hours, his cell took about three, and the iPod, of course, was dependant on the computer.

His cell buzzed impatiently in the jacket pocket on the other side from the one wherein Sam had stashed his MP3 player. Sam pulled it out and glanced at the screen. He let out a small sigh of relief and flipped it open. "Dean? Where the hell are you?"

Dean's end of the connection was a little grainy, and there was a lot of background noise. "Fuck, Sammy. I've been tryin' to get through for the last hour. What the fuck is up with every two-bit whore and her mother cloggin' up the lines? Anyway, there's been a slight change of plan. The traffic comin' out of San Fran is nightmarish – Dad turned the truck around and is headin' out to Joshua's; he wants us to meet him there. I'm gonna stash the car, see if I can't make better time on foot."

"No! Don't try to come in on foot! They've got the damn place pretty much surrounded. Before sunset, I tried to get a head count from the roof. There's gotta be nearly five hundred of them by now."

"Damnit, Sammy, I don't see as I've got any other options just now. I'll try to drive as close as I can, but if the traffic is like this the whole way in… Look, just sit tight. I'll think of something. You have any luck findin' a radio?"

"Not yet, but I haven't searched the first floor. Wanna wait until daylight to do that."

"You sure that's a good idea, Sammy?"

Sam sighed, "Like you said, I'm not seeing a whole lot of other options, Dean. But… This is what we do, yeah? I'll be fine."

A static-laden chuckle sparked over the connection, "Thought you quit hunting?"

"Yeah, yeah – I thought so, too. It's like the punch line to some cosmic joke about my life."

"Whatever, Sammy. Be careful and I'll try to call when I'm closer to your position."

"And I'll do likewise if I find that radio."

"Oh, and Sammy?"

"What?"

"Take one of those meatheads with you; you never know when you'll need a distraction."

Sam snorted out an involuntary huff of amusement, "I'll do that, jerk."

"You'd better, bitch," Dean replied, ending the call.

"Hurry, Dean," Sam whispered to the phone before tucking it back into his pocket.

The primary benefit to having been raised on the road was that Sam didn't own much. Even after living in only two places the last year – his freshman dorm room and a small apartment for the summer – he still owned only one duffle of clothes, two boxes of books, his backpack, and his computer. Sure, he had a handful of assorted mementos, including the wickedly curved blade Dean had given him for his seventeenth birthday, but nothing too large to hide in among his clothes and books. Sam was all moved in to his sophomore dorm before his new roommate had even shown up.

All Sam knew about his roomie for the year was his name, Brooks Vanderhaven, that he was responsible for securing a three-person room for just the two of them, and that he was a biology major. Sam had tried calling him a couple of times over the summer, but had reached only busy signals and answering machines. He didn't know what his roommate even looked like – the fourth and final piece of information he had received from the register's office was that Brooks had transferred from Oklahoma State. Sam had been meaning to go online to see what he could find out about his roommate, but he had never gotten around to it; his summer job, spending time with his freshman roommate, Dan, and taking summer classes always seemed more important.

Sam had just finished pinning the photographs he owned – the one of his mom and dad, and one he'd snapped of Dean a couple of years earlier – to a corner of the corkboard that hung above his desk, taking care that the thumbtacks didn't actually damage the photos, when the door to the dorm room opened. A tanned face with serious brown eyes, short black hair, a prominent nose, and thin lips poked in. "Samuel Winchester?"

Sam smiled a little, nodding. "Yeah, just Sam though."

"Brooks Vanderhaven," the guy replied. "You done unpacking?"

"Yeah."

"Wanna give me a hand?"

"Sure," Sam replied and crossed the room. After pulling open the dorm door, he found that Brooks was almost his exact same height, maybe a half an inch shorter and not nearly as broad through the chest and shoulders; in short, he looked like a walking beanpole. The hallway was crowded with boxes and bags and small pieces of furniture belonging to the students still moving in. "Which ones are yours?"

"Still downstairs in the truck," Brooks replied, heading for the elevator at the end of the hall. While waiting for a blonde in a football jersey and his equally large, muscle-bound companion to unload a hideously ugly brown plaid sofa, Brooks asked, "So, Sam. You a messy person?"

Sam shook his head, "Not really. You?"

Brooks snorted, "Not hardly. According to the register's, you're pre-law?"

"Yeah. And you're a bio major?"

Brooks ignored the question in favor of asking his own. "You prefer studying at the library or in the dorm?"

"Wherever seems best," Sam replied with a slight shrug of his shoulders. He still wasn't quite sure what to think of his new roommate.

"Any allergies?" Brooks asked as the sofa finally got out of the way.

"What?" It was official, Sam was confused.

"I said, do you have any allergies?" Brooks stepped into the elevator, carefully enunciating every syllable as though talking to a small child.

"No," Sam followed him into the lift, "but why does it matter?"

"How about being sick? You tend to get sick easy or not?" Brooks pressed the button to take them to the ground floor.

"What does that have to do with anything?"

Brooks finally looked over at Sam. "Look, I was supposed to have that triple to myself, but the register's office wouldn't let me. They also said that I couldn't have a double to myself because their allotment of double-rooms to single residents was already reached by the upper years. I run experiments that need nearly constant monitoring; otherwise I'd just use the labs here. I need to make sure that your presence isn't going to compromise the integrity of these experiments."

"What kind of experiments?"

Brooks merely looked at Sam.

Dean split his attention evenly between navigating the choked streets of suburbia – it was no use going on the freeway, it'd been clogged solid for nearly four days – and the three radio receivers sitting on the passenger seat. One of them was tuned to the police band, one to the military, and the last was constantly scanning the civilian frequencies. They gave him a heads-up as to what to expect along his planned route; from the living, at any rate.

It was coming up on four in the morning, and Dean had just crossed into Palo Alto, and he suddenly realized that he'd not seen a single walking corpse for the better part of twenty minutes. It was unnerving. The zombies had been more-or-less a constant since Las Vegas. Out in the desert, it was only one or two every ten miles or so, but closer in to civilization, it had gotten to the point that he couldn't look in any direction without seeing at least three of the fuckers. Honestly, it made him wish he had an extra pair of eyeballs on the back of his head, not to mention the fact that he had to physically restrain himself from just wasting all the ones he saw – not that that was a bad idea, mind, just that he only had about sixty total rounds for his pistols, and that was an even split between silver and consecrated iron. He wasn't about to waste the 'good stuff' on a stupid, shambling, slimy ex-human when a normal bullet would do the job just fine. He had hoped that he'd come across a gun store by now. In fact, he had driven past three in the last twelve hours, but they all looked to have been severely looted already.

"Where the hell did they all go?" Dean whispered, peering through the dark. His headlights didn't stretch very far; fog had descended on the bay area shortly after sunset and had just grown thicker the closer it got to sunrise.

A crackle of static from the military band radio nearly made Dean jump out of his skin. "Unit Kilo-Foxtrot-Three-Niner-Five to command, command do you copy?"

"This is command, go ahead."

"San Fran's a wash, recommend fall back to sector seven-one-six and regroup, over."

"Agreed, unit Kilo-Foxtrot-Three-Niner-Five, fall back to sector seven-one-six. Choppers are on their way. Extraction at 0500. Copy?"

"Copy that."

"Fuck," Dean swore and turned off the radio. The military was pulling out of the bay area. "This can't be good."

Dean pulled the Impala to a stop in the middle of a confluence of three side streets and peered through the murky haze of the fog to find out where he was. Once he managed to make out the lettering on the street sign, he checked his position on one of the computer-printout maps that were scattered under the radio receivers. "Okay, so that's six more blocks that way," Dean muttered to himself, tracing his route with a penlight. "And then turn left, follow this for about two miles and the college is right there." Though their dad had stopped by the school a couple of times over the last twenty months, Dean hadn't gone with him. In all honesty, Dean hadn't even found out about John's little side-trips until just a few days earlier, and by then it no longer mattered.

Without warning, there was a sudden banging on the driver's side window. Dean jumped and twisted around. "There you are, you son of a bitch." Some of the growing apprehension Dean had been feeling dissipated when he caught sight of his 'visitor'.

The zombie had once been a pretty redhead, complete with long legs, a big bust, and perfect teeth. Dean knew this last bit because they were currently on display for the world to see; her lips were long gone. A thick river of blood and gore trailed down from her mouth, along what remained of her neck, and plastered her strappy little tank-top to her chest. Dean huffed out a little sigh. "At least I know I ain't slippin'. Didn't hear you 'cause you got nothin' left to moan with." The zombie's throat had been ripped out, vocal chords and all, and Dean could see shiny bits of bone and gristle among the strings of muscle and sinew.

For all that he hated using the 'good stuff' on a zombie, he also knew that he didn't have much choice in the matter until and unless he could find some normal bullets. Dean also knew that one zombie tended to attract more, and unless he wanted to put himself on the menu for breakfast, he should probably take care of the problem before it got worse. Besides, she's mucking up my baby. He scowled at the smears of congealed blood on his window and picked up his new favorite pistol – the ever-so-beautiful stainless steel Colt M1911A1 with the mother-of-pearl grips and engraved barrel, found in a pawnshop just outside of Reno two months and eight hunts before the world started coming apart at the seams – as he started cranking the window open. He had the gun in position before the ex-human could realize there was now a weakness in the defenses surrounding its meal. Two quick shots downed the former woman, the .45 caliber silver slugs splattering her brain across the wet asphalt, and Dean quickly threw the car back into 'drive' before the sound could attract any more walking dead. The gun went back into its place, resting comfortably on Dean's left thigh, which, unbeknownst to Dean, was bouncing a little with nervous restlessness.

It was less than a week before Sam realized that his roommate for the year was completely, totally insane. Once Brooks had seen how little Sam actually owned, he had taken over the room, leaving Sam with barely enough space in which to cram his bed, desk, and chair. Two days after moving in – the first day of classes, actually – Sam returned during the two hour break he had between Art History 101 and Legal Craft and Moral Institutions to find that a full three quarters of the dorm room was now off-limits.

Brooks hadn't come right out and said as much, but the fact that it was encased in plastic was as good a clue-by-four as Sam had ever seen, and that didn't even take into consideration the bright biohazard warning printed on the door flap. The plastic was thick, nearly rubbery, but crystal clear. Within the plastic, Brooks had set up a couple of workbenches, thus clarifying the purpose behind the majority of long metal poles Sam had helped schlep into their sixth-floor room. There were innumerable gadgets and gizmos, only a few of which Sam could identify, such as a small refrigerator, a centrifuge, three different microscopes, and an incubator. There were no less than three computers, and Sam was almost certain that the screen at the farthest side of the plastic room-within-a-room was an EEG. The dorm possessed three windows, but only one of which now served its original function. The other two had machinery sticking out of them. Eventually, Sam learned that one of the windows brought in air from outside – after thoroughly filtering it – and the second one vented the 'lab', likewise after a thorough run through a filtering system.

Sam had tried to get transferred to a different room, but that idea was shot down nearly before it had a chance to be brought to the register's office. Basically, since Sam was there on a full scholastic scholarship, he didn't have much say in who his roommate was, particularly since he didn't have an alternate roommate in mind. So Sam tried his best to ignore Brooks' more irritating habits, and to get used to the constant symphony of assorted humming noises that emanated from the machines in the 'lab'.

A month into the fall term of his sophomore year, Sam managed to find a day where he didn't need to be working on anything in particular and he didn't need to be at work. He figured it was probably a sign to take the time to look into his roomie's life a little. Taking his laptop to the library, Sam logged into the WiFi and started doing what he did best – gathering information. The only thing that was different about this time when compared with all the times he'd gathered similar information in the past was that this time the topic of his search was still among the living.

The information was intriguing. Sam discovered that Brooks – who had apparently been named with his mother's maiden name – was the latest addition to a family with strong ties to the government. His grandfather, Jan Vanderhaven, was listed as belonging to the CDC from its inception in 1946 until 1962, when the man apparently died in the field, working in Africa. Jan's wife had died in childbirth; of her three sons, one had died in Korea, one had gone MIA just three months later (and was still listed as MIA), and the third had followed in Jan's footsteps and began working for the CDC in 1976. The weird part was that Sam couldn't find too much on Brooks or his father. He discovered that the CDC itself was footing Brooks' tuition – something Sam hadn't known was possible. The oddest thing was the fact that nearly all mentions of either Brooks or his father linked into a webpage which had six password protections on it; not even the FBI database was that protected.

Having gotten nearly nowhere with his research, Sam turned his energy into seeing if he could remotely access Brooks' primary computer. His roommate spent far more time working on it than doing anything else, so Sam assumed that there had to be something worthwhile knowing stored on the hard drive. If anyone knew precisely what Sam was up to, they likely would have questioned his sanity, but then again, no one really understood how Sam had been raised, either. Paranoia was a necessary survival trait when hunting the supernatural, and by the time Sam started school at Stanford, it had been ingrained to the point that he didn't realize that normal folk didn't worry when they didn't know everything there was to know about someone sharing their living space.

Waiting for his laptop to establish the connection to Brooks' computer, Sam recalled that it had been really easy to get to know his roommate from freshman year. Dan liked to talk, and seemed intimidated by silence. Before three days had passed, Sam had learned Dan's life story. The only reason they weren't roommates again this year was because Dan was living off-campus with his fiancé, a spunky little blonde girl who had more energy than six people needed.

The laptop beeped, pulling Sam from his memories. Sam did the computer equivalent of thumbing through Brooks' hard drive, looking for anything worthwhile. The first thing he found was that Brooks seemed to like the harshest heavy-metal music ever recorded. His music file contained Drowning Pool, Disturbed, System of a Down, Cradle of Filth, and the harder music by Metallica, in addition to innumerable bands of which Sam had never heard before. He also, strangely enough, seemed to have the entirety of Johnny Cash's repertoire.

Moving on from the music, Sam eventually located a cache of text files, which weren't organized by name but by file size. Double-clicking on the first in the list brought up page after page of chemical formulae, annotated with a series of dates and notes. Reading through the notes, Sam realized that this file had to be Brooks' research journal. It took about half an hour of reading before Sam understood that his roommate was working on a vaccine for a virus Sam had never heard of before. A quick search online yielded no results, and so Sam decided that 'solanum' had to be a code-name for something else.

Exiting out of the research journal, Sam went on to read through a couple of other files. He stumbled across a saved email which made mention of a 'strategic guide for all levels of outbreak' that had been forwarded from Brooks' father to him for proofing. Sam quickly scanned down the list of files and soon spotted the file mentioned. The file opened as an Adobe .pdf and contained a military-style booklet of roughly a hundred pages. It detailed, to Sam's incredulity, how to deal with zombie outbreaks, ranging from a small-scale infestation of a couple of dozen all the way up to an end-of-the-world scenario. Sam would have thought it a joke were it not for the fact that government agencies lacked a sense of humor.

The booklet also only dealt with walking dead created by that 'solanum' virus; it didn't touch on what to do if the zombies in question were the result of any of the hundreds of necromantic summoning rituals which existed. Then again, Sam thought, closing the file and setting about removing any evidence he'd been poking around on Brooks' computer, those aren't exactly areas the CDC has any knowledge of. It's not their area, so-to-speak.

His curiosity and slight paranoia sated for the time-being, Sam collected his computer and his backpack and set out for supper. Now knowing what Brooks was working on, he was even less inclined to explore the plastic-encased portion of their room.

"How's it going?" Martha asked, startling Sam a little.

Sam shrugged from his position on the landing of the staircase. "It's been… Not quiet, but nothing to worry about."

Martha lowered herself to sit next to Sam. "You know, I'm a little surprised you're taking this as well as you are. The others, they've each come to me and had a break-down session. Your roommate… Hell, he's too busy throwing all his energy into trying to stop all this. But you… You just seem to be taking this all in stride." Sam let out a little laugh. "Can I ask why?"

"Why not?" Sam let out a breath. "It's not like innocence is going to mean much in the coming years, and normal… Hell, we'll be lucky to see 'normal' make a reappearance in our lifetimes. What does normal and innocent mean when there are hundreds of zombies shambling about outside?"

"I don't follow."

Sam laughed again, "Didn't expect you to. You see, Martha, it's like this: When I was six months old, something killed my mother. Cut her open, pinned her to the ceiling, and set her on fire." Seeing that Martha was about to interrupt, Sam held up a hand to forestall her questions. "Hold that thought, Martha. After Mom died, it was just me and my older brother, Dean, and our dad. Dad got it in his head to track down and kill the thing that killed Mom. He raised me and Dean on the road, going from town to town, hunting out the evil that feeds off of humanity. Before you chalk this up as insanity on my part, I suggest you take a look outside and redefine your perception of insanity. I was raised to hunt evil – vengeful spirits, poltergeists, werewolves, demons, shapeshifters. Pretty much anything you've ever heard about in stories. Most of those 'imaginary' creatures are real, even if their reputed weaknesses aren't exactly the same as in the stories. As you can imagine, my family doesn't come right out and tell everyone 'We're hunters of the supernatural!' No one would have believed us. However, what does keeping the family secret mean when the world's gone stark raving mad? Those things outside? Yeah, they're just the latest bit of weirdness in my totally fucked-up life."

"Oh," was all that Martha seemed capable of saying. The pair sat in companionable silence for several minutes before Martha sighed and rested her head on the cool metal of the guardrail. "So…"

"Hmm?"

"If you know about stuff like this, what do we do to get out of here? We're running low on food and now that the power's been off so long, it won't be much longer before the water stops flowing."

"I know. My brother's coming, though. He should be here soon. Speaking of which, I told him I'd look for a CB radio. Honestly, I'm surprised we managed to hang onto cell reception as long as we have."

Martha shook her head, "I'm not. The military would want to keep those lines open, but you're half-right. I was listening to my radio," she tapped her breast pocket which contained a little AM/FM receiver, "and the evacuation listing's been replaced. The military's pulling out of the bay area. When they go, I doubt that cell reception will remain more than a couple of hours afterwards."

"Don't you have a CB in your van?"

Martha nodded, "Yes, but I don't see how you would be able to get to it."

Sam frowned, mulling over the problem in his head. "You normally park on the back side of the dorm, right? Next to the entrance to the basement?"

"That's right."

"What's in the basement?"

Martha shrugged, "Not a whole lot. There's a storage room down there, no idea what might be squirreled away in it. The hot water heater for the dorm and the furnace… Um, the supply closet. That's about it."

"What kind of supplies?"

"The normal kind, I suppose. Toilet paper and paper towels. Cleaning solvents. Brooms, mops, that kind of thing."

"What chemicals did you use?"

"I don't know their names," she replied. "Why's it matter?"

Sam grinned, "Because some cleaning solvents are flammable. Others just need a little tweaking and they become explosive."

"You know this from your dad?"

Sam let out a hearty chuckle, "Hell, no. I did a science fair project on the dangers of common household chemicals in eighth grade. You'd be surprised at just how much stuff people keep under their kitchen sinks can be used to manufacture explosions. Actually, insofar as non-lethal explosions are concerned, have you ever seen what happens when you drop a Mentos in a bottle of Diet Coke?"

Dean was starting to get frustrated. His planned route had to be abandoned; a delivery truck and a SUV blocked one of the intersections he had to go through in order to get to the college. He pulled to a stop, put the Impala in reverse, and backed up to an alley. He was able to get around the wreck, but he didn't get far. There was the remains of an army barricade the next intersection over, and it wasn't a saw-horse-and-sandbag job – there were numerous K-rails, those concrete dividers that most people only saw when they were used to control traffic flow during freeway construction, blocking both the main road and the alleyways.

"Fuck." Dean wanted to hit something. Instead, he took the time to turn the car around before shutting it off. He pocketed the computer printout of the map of the area after marking the location of the car on it, turned off the radio receivers after tucking the civilian-band one into an inner pocket, and then peered out into the gray twilight of predawn.

He didn't see any undead nearby, so he climbed out of the car, his pistol in one hand, and the keys in his other. He hurried around to the trunk and opened it, his head constantly twisting around, scanning for potential problems. His ears were straining to hear any nearby telltale moans, but that was a joke. He was close enough to the school that the plethora of moaning from the campus zombies was a hindrance. He shivered a little at the thought that Sammy was caught, trapped, in the middle of all that.

Snagging the two spare clips he had for his Colt, he quickly double-checked that they were loaded with the silver rounds. Though iron was cheaper, the silver rounds were easier to make, and what with the world teetering on the edge of total annihilation, the cost of silver was pretty much a moot point. He'd still rather have good old fashioned lead – who knew what they'd have to deal with in the future? Dean so wasn't looking forward to seeing what happened to a former werewolf in the current climate – but luck just hadn't been with him. The spare clips went into his outside, left hand pocket. Still scanning his surroundings, he was pretty sure he could take the time to top off the half-empty clip in the gun. Once that was done, he attached a machete to his belt, hoping that he wouldn't need it. If a zombie got that close, it was because he'd run out of ammo, and that just didn't bear thinking about.

Dean sighed a little, fighting against the urge to load himself down with more weapons, but knowing that doing so would just end up working against him; the added weight would limit his mobility. "What I wouldn't give for a flame-thrower right about now."

Shaking his head, he pocketed the keys to the Impala, and shut the trunk.

Sam followed Martha down into the 'basement' of the dorm. In reality, it was more a partially-subterranean ground floor than a real basement; the hill on which the dormitory was built covered the northern half of the floor, leaving the southern side exposed to a parking area. Though he'd never had cause to venture to this level of the building before, it was just what Sam had imagined it would be. A couple of interconnected open areas, housing the dorm's furnace, the massive hot-water heater – both of which were now ominously silent – and a large area cordoned off by floor-to-ceiling chain-link, packed tight with dorm furniture, cardboard cartons, and other assorted junk. Martha led the way to a door near the steel fire-doors which opened onto the parking lot.

"Well, Sam. Here it is," she unlocked the supply closet, and Sam trained his flashlight into the darkness within.

He grinned. "Jackpot," he muttered, and hurried forward to inspect his find.

"How so?" Martha asked.

Sam held up the sprayer, "Should I even ask why there's a pesticide sprayer in a dorm?"

Martha shrugged, "Come on, Sam. You're smarter than that. First off, the school gets folks from all levels of financial ability. Secondly, most guys aren't that tidy. Roaches can be a major problem, so the school takes – took – preventative measures. Didn't you ever wonder why everyone had to leave the campus during the winter break? Or why only certain dorms were used during the summer term?"

"Makes sense," Sam allowed, before turning to investigate the shelves of plain, white industrial cleaning solvents.

"Anything there you can use?"

"Depends," Sam replied, quickly reading the labels on the bottles.

"On what?"

"On whether or not the school was still using traditional cleaners, or if they'd switched over to using the 'green' stuff."

"Green?"

"The environmentally-friendly, biodegradable junk that doesn't burn for shit." Sam's eyes lit up as he finished reading the label on a galleon-jug of glass cleanser. "Yahtzee."

"The window-cleaner?"

Sam nodded, "It's isopropyl alcohol. Kinda surprised you didn't use ammonia."

"We used to, but about six years ago, there was a kid who was deathly allergic to the stuff, he ended up having to be treated at the ER, so the school switched."

Halloween of Sam's sophomore year was only slightly less frustrating than the one the year before had been. The people he hung out with, Friends, Sam. They're your friends, knew he didn't really approve of the holiday, even though they didn't really know why, and so hadn't been bugging him about going to this costume party or that haunted house.

When the RA for Sam's floor – an art major in his last year – went through and hung Halloween decorations on everyone's door, Sam couldn't help himself – he tore down the piece of posterboard depicting a cartoonish graveyard with a pair of formless ghosts rising up from 'Sam' and 'Brooks' headstoned graves. He shredded the poster into pieces barely larger than a quarter. Nope. Not gonna happen. Not gonna be something I hunted. Never. Nope. Nuh-huh. No way in hell. Hunting rule #100, if ya come to the end of it, ya don't leave nothin' behind that someone else'll have ta deal with. The last thought echoed through Sam's head in Dean's voice. Still fending off the icy feel of gooseflesh, Sam disappeared into his room, crawled under the covers on his bed, and went to sleep. I miss Dean.

Two hours later, when Brooks returned from his last class of the day, he found the pile of confetti that was once the poster to their room. He'd noticed it when he'd stopped by to check on his experiments during his lunch break and had been meaning to take it down himself, but hadn't had the time. He had to wonder a little at why his roommate shredded the stupid thing; it was a rather extreme reaction to a childish drawing. He gathered up the scraps and left them in a pile on Sam's desk, complete with a sticky-note that sported a single question mark lying on top. Either Sam would answer the implied question or he wouldn't.

Sam woke from his nap about an hour later, feeling more drained and tired than when he'd laid down. Brooks was in his normal place, puttering about within his lab. He saw the note and poster shreds piled on his notebook on the desk and sighed. Though Brooks' lab area was well-lit, the lamps were all aimed in such a way that very little of that light made it to the area where their beds were crammed. Sam scooted back on his bed, resting his shoulders against the wall, and tucking his knees up under his elbows.

Brooks knew, he always knew, when Sam was awake. Brooks was nothing if not observant, and he could tell when his roommate was asleep, just about to wake up, or merely lying there, pretending to be asleep. It was all in the details; a worry-line here, a catch in breathing there, muscular tension, REM, it all added up to form one conclusion or another. And so, it didn't startle him when Sam moved. It didn't startle him when he started speaking, either. Sure, it surprised him, but didn't startle him – there was a difference in the two reactions. He knew he hadn't gone out of his way to be nice to his roommate – he didn't get on well with people and he knew it – and after that first week had ended, Sam had seemed to quit trying to get to know him.

"Death isn't something you should joke about," Sam said, not really talking to Brooks, but trying to answer the question anyway. "Particularly not about the ghost side of things. And not in my family. Ever." Sam's voice trailed off for a couple of moments, long enough for Brooks to wonder if that was all, but then Sam started talking again. "Vengeful spirits, death omens – they're created from violent deaths. Murder, suicide. Sometimes, under the right – or would that be 'wrong'? – conditions, a particularly nasty accident can create them. They linger; they don't go on to whatever after exists. They stick around and cause problems. Vengeful spirits tend to cause deaths, usually reenacting the circumstances of their own death. They want to hurt others they way they were hurt; they know nothing else. Their entire existence has been stripped down to pain and anger, and like an animal caught in a trap, they become violent, hurting anyone and everyone who comes within their grasp. Putting them out of their misery is an act of mercy. Forcing them to move on by destroying whatever links them to this world. My dad and my brother… For them, it's all about saving people, about keeping the innocents out of harm's way. They don't seem to get the fact that these ghosts used to be people, too. With lives of their own, hopes, dreams, goals… But something bad happened to them, and for whatever reason, they couldn't deal with it. Unfortunately, you can't reason with them, and so the only way is an act of force. I never really liked it, you know? I hated how we couldn't get them to understand that we were doing what we were doing for their own good, and by the time they understood, it was too late for talking anyway. At least, I hope they eventually understood. I would hope that whatever pain they were in, whatever anger they carried, wouldn't follow them to… whatever's after. If it does, then what the fuck was I doing? But no, I'm not going to think about that. Ever. I'll keep my hopes because really, when all is said and done, that's just about the one thing that can keep you going when everything else is falling apart."

After Sam fell quiet once more, Brooks mulled over what his roommate had said. He may have been a scientist at heart, but with what he was working on… He understood what Sam meant about hope. He'd gone with his father on more than just a few missions, and for all that the virus they were hoping to eliminate was a natural thing – more than that, it was a scientific thing – they were no closer to knowing the 'why' of it than they were when Brooks' grandfather first isolated the damn thing. They didn't know where it came from, or why no one seemed to be naturally immune to it. Exhaustive research revealed that mentions of outbreaks of solanum dated as far back as human history reached. When an outbreak was dealt with, particularly those more recently, where adequate quarantine measures could be taken, that should have spelled the end of the virus. But it kept cropping up. There could be a minor outbreak in Scandinavia, and the next year it would pop up in Siberia. It had no pattern. And so, the Vanderhavens found themselves to be in a gray area – they were scientists, sure, but they had to have hope and faith, too.

It never even crossed Brooks' mind to doubt what Sam had said about ghosts. That might have seemed strange, had an outsider been able to witness Sam's monologue, but then again, most outsiders didn't believe in zombies, either. Brooks was reasonably sure that things like ghosts and spirits – tales of which were too widespread to simply be wishful thinking or hysteria – were just one of those things which modern science hadn't gotten around to explaining yet. After all, there was a time when something as commonplace as a kidney transplant was the stuff of fiction.

The next morning, Allen Jones, the RA for the sixth floor of his dormitory, opened the door to his room to see a pile of confetti sitting on his welcome mat. Under the confetti was a single sheet of notebook paper sporting blocky capital letters done in thick, black marker which read, 'Death isn't funny.' Allen winced a little, but squared his shoulders. By the end of the day, the poster had been replaced with one that showed a pumpkin patch, and two of the pumpkins were carved to show Sam and Brooks' names.

A/N2: This story is what I've been working on when I should have been working on All at Once and Twice is Circumstance. It's not finished (yet), but I do know where it's going (unlike AaO, which seems to want to go everywhere). It may be a while before my schedule clears enough for me to post another chapter, but I hope that this first installment intrigues readers enough that they'll stick around until it's done.

Remember to let me know if you enjoyed it or not (and if there was anything I need to fix). I know it's a bit of an odd style for me, what with bouncing back and forth between two points in time, but I'll say that this will only go on until the past segments meet up with the current timeline (the flashbacks of Sam's year in school will eventually circle back around and show everyone how he ended up on watch in that first segment, in other words).

Rereads above note. Sigh. I should never do A/Ns when I'm tired. Hope that all made sense; if not, lemme know, yeah?