"What if we were to skip tonight?" Sam was lying back on the motel room's lumpy mattress, staring at the ceiling; for some reason, when they'd returned to their room at seven in the morning, Dean had managed to instantly fall asleep. As if Sam could possibly get any sleep after the events of last night.

"Hmm?" Dean mumbled. "We can't skip, Sammy. We'll get fired."

"So what?" Sam sighed. "We don't need this job in order to solve the case, Dean."

Dean sat up, grinning. "No, but I need a summer job to pay for my wheels."

"Dean, be serious. This is a waste of time. And it's dangerous."

"Oh, no, it's dangerous? Well, golly gee, I suppose we should just go back to the safety zone and hunt werewolves and ghouls some more. Come on, Sam!"

"Dean." Sam scowled at his brother; couldn't Dean take things seriously, just this once? "Really."

"Yeah, well, every night we've been there, we've been learning new stuff. Last night, we learned that salt circles work. You know what that tells me?"

"That they're vengeful spirits," Sam muttered dully.

"That they're vengeful spirits!" Dean smacked his hand against his mattress. "Exactly. And we know how to deal with vengeful spirits."

"Not when they're possessing creepy animatronic animals," Sam retorted. He swung out of the bed and wandered over to the desk, where Dean had been preparing rounds of shotgun shells filled with rock salt; he lifted one of them up and waved it like a piece of evidence in a trial. "We tried these, Dean, and they didn't work. There are no remains to be found. Unless you want to torch the entire restaurant -"

"Wouldn't exactly be a huge loss, would it?" Dean griped.

"- then we're out of ideas. Maybe it's time to call it quits on this one."

"Yeah, and let the freaky sons of bitches murder the next sucker stupid enough to take that night shift job? Not likely." Dean stood up, looking frustrated. "Come on, Sammy, we're so close! I can feel it. We'll have 'em."

Sam regarded his brother dubiously; considering their experience last night, Dean was altogether too energetic about solving this case. "Fine," Sam relented. "But we gotta be more careful this time. I say no leaving the office."

"Right," Dean snorted. "Sure. I'll stay in the office. Because we all know that it's easy to hunt things from inside a tiny room, armed with an electric fan and some hamburger wrappers."

"I mean it, Dean!"

"Here's the plan," Dean went on, ignoring his brother. "We salt the doorways of the office. Should be pretty easy; it'll let us conserve power. We won't have to shut the doors as much, only to get the stupid freaks to leave."

Sam nodded grudgingly. "Yeah, okay, but -"

"And we should poke around the place a little more. Personally, I want to take a look backstage, see if there's anything we can use -"

"Dean," Sam interrupted. "Don't you think leaving is a bad idea? I mean, come on - we got lucky last time."

Dean rolled his eyes. "Whatever, Sam." He picked up his car keys and his pistol from the desk and gestured towards the door. "I believe a gourmet pizza lunch awaits us somewhere. Let's go."

* Sorry this chapter's so short. I haven't updated in a while and had to kind of get back into the swing of things, but I fully intend to finish this story! *