CHAPTER FIFTEEN

"What the hell is concussion protocol?" They used glue to shut the wound on my head this time. Guess my skin had gotten too tore up to stitch. My sides felt constricted, which had me panicking for a split second and feeling at my waist, but when my fingers passed over Velcro I remembered: back brace. Right.

"Basically means you can't do anything." Sam spoke from the other side of the exam room. They had the divider pulled back so he and I could see each other. He was draped in a heavy blanket and had a drink with a straw in the hand that wasn't bound in a fresh cast.

"Sounds like what I've been doing."

Sam gave me the are-you-serious tilt of the head. "I mean you can't do anything at all, Dean. Doc said you aren't allowed to even sleep."

"Fuck that!"

"You've had at least two severe impacts in the last three days," Sam snapped. "Suck it up."

"Not my fault."

"If you'd just stayed at the hotel like I wanted you to—"

"You'd be horse food."

He fell quiet at that and picked at the edge of his cast. His face actually had some color back in it. Doc said he'd suffered mild hypothermia and a severely fractured wrist. Oh well. Wasn't the first time he'd had his arm bundled in a cast like that. He'd manage.

Me, on the other hand… they basically told me I was jacked for a while. I'd have a nasty scar, and my head was pretty busted up, and my lower back had been ripped open right above my tailbone. Shock's a hell of a drug, let me tell ya. I just still couldn't believe the docs bought our bullshit story about a car wreck, but hey, we had the mangled Impala to back that one up. No killer horses in our file today.

Y'all put back together?

This room had no windows, so I angled myself in the direction I assumed the parking lot was. "More or less," I said.

Good. We gotta move.

"Like, now?"

Like RIGHT now.

"Why?"

I must've taken on a strange look, because Sam leaned forward, forehead crinkled with concern. "What? What's wrong?"

I shushed him and focused on communicating with my car again. "Baby?"

Couple walking through the lot took a liking to me, she said. Particularly all the blood on my hood. They called the cops and…

"And?"

Now I hear sirens.

"Shit." I slid off the gurney, tested my weight, and stood with Sam's help, and he said again, "What?"

I plucked my bloodied jacket from the chair it'd been draped over. "Baby says someone called five-o on us."

"Guess that's our cue." Sam wrapped the blanket tighter around himself, and then just like that we were on our way out the door before anyone realized we'd made a run for it.

People were actually driving the speed limit, and—holy shit!—I could see the asphalt road instead of that slick blanket of icy snow. The Impala handled herself beautifully on the clearing roads. Her swift weave through traffic and snowbank earned a fair amount of curious (and equally pissed-off) looks from passers-by. (Or maybe it was the fact that her bashed-up front end appeared to be dripping blood.) Whatever the case, we made it back to the hotel in no time, and just as the sun was trying to tease its way past the cloud cover for the first time in what felt like eight years, Sam and I were stumbling back through that dusty parking garage.

Baby stuck herself in a parking spot (completely blowing off the yellow stripes beneath her wheels), making sure her relatively undamaged rear end was visible to traffic, not her mangled grille. She was trying to pop the dents out, but like you and I can heal only so fast, wasn't like she could get very far without a dent puller.

Rest up, she said, and let me know when y'all are ready to roll.

"Will you be safe here?" I was reluctant to let my car out of eyeshot—after all, she had saved my ass back there. I felt like I owed her.

We just killed a skinwalker, she said. Think I can handle a few bored cops, don't you?

I just grinned to myself. The parking garage was starting to get busy, and I relaxed some when it seemed nobody was giving my damaged car a second glance. They were too obsessed with throwing ski gear around and zipping up their overstuffed jackets over matching snow pants. I wrinkled my nose. Couldn't move well in gear like that. Couldn't run. Why restrain yourself if you can avoid it?

"Daddy," a little girl was saying as her family packed up their aging SUV. Her arms were folded. "I don't wanna wear my helmet. It's ugly!"

The man, long-suffering to his spawn's arguments, sighed heavily. "Either you wear the helmet, or you don't get to go."

I stopped walking.

"I'd wear the helmet, kid," I said. My voice was slurred by the concussion anyway, but you're damn right I exaggerated it. "Don't wanna end up looking like me, do you?"

Who would wanna look like me? Torn clothes painted with mud and blood alike. Ugly bruising across my cheek. Equally ugly bandage taped to my forehead. Eyes wild with pain. The girl looked up, gasped, looked to Sam with his busted arm and heavy blanket, and without another word plucked the helmet from her daddy's hands.

The ceiling wasn't very interesting. Neither was the wall. Or the window. At least the floor was carpeted and had all sorts of interesting shadows and colors. But if I stayed like that for too long, with my head kinda hanging off the side of the mattress, it started to hurt real bad again, and I could feel my pulse hammering the glue on my forehead. Sam was hacking away at that computer best he could with only one hand in working condition and his shoulders wrapped in the heavy blanket. I turned on my side, arranged myself so my horribly bruised back didn't throw much of a fit, and watched the way the laptop's screen flickered over his face and the wall behind. I was so tired. Hadn't really slept since I blacked out on the way to the ER. I blinked, struggled to pull my eyes back open, blinked again, failed even harder, shut my eyes again…

My brother pelted me in the face with a dirty sock.

"What the shit?" My eyes snapped open and I slapped the offending clothing item onto the floor.

"Stay awake." He didn't even look up from the computer. "Concussion protocol."

Tell him that's an old wives' tale, Baby said. Unless you're getting worse. Are you getting worse?

"I'm not getting better."

Not what I asked.

"How can I possibly get any worse?"

You tell me.

I gritted my teeth. Sam had his head tilted toward me, not looking at me but listening curiously. "It's only been a few hours, Baby. I don't know."

Thoughts are all over the place as usual. I think you're gonna be just fine.

"You're damn right I am," I muttered under my breath. Then I looked to Sam. "You ok?"

"Yeah, yeah. Fine." Distracted, brushing me off like a fly, too intent on that damned computer. I squinted at it, but the light kinda hurt my eyes. He had it angled away from me anyway, so I couldn't read it.

"What're you looking at?"

"Freeways opened back up about an hour ago," he replied. "No more insane weather on the way for a little while, at least."

"Good. I'm ready to get the hell on." I itched at the bandage on my head. "Can we go somewhere hot? Please? My bones still aren't thawed."

"Don't even talk to me about that." Sam glared at me over the lid of his laptop, then went right back to staring. "Sonoran Desert hot enough for you?"

Ooh, road trip out west! I'm so there. So many straight roads. Lots of places to go fast. I could almost hear my car revving her engine in excitement. Where we going? Vegas?

"Vegas? Hell yeah," I said, smiling to myself. Poker, gambling, drinking, scantily-clad women… just the vacation I needed after getting my ass handed to me by a Coloradan skinwalker.

Sam was shaking his head, which had me frowning deeply. "Not Vegas. I was thinking Phoenix."

I wrinkled my nose. "Phoenix? What's there that I can't get in Vegas?"

"I think I found us a case."

And right back to the grind, eh?

"No!" I tried to slap a fist on the mattress, but the gesture was sloppy and muted. Sam didn't even look up. "Dude. Look at us. We're jacked up. You've got a broken arm, I've got a broken head, and Baby's got a broken… everything! We shouldn't be hunting. And I don't want to."

Hey, hey, now! I'm not scrap metal yet!

"Just hear me out. I think you'll actually be interested in this one." Sam started to swing the computer around so I could see it, but then he mouthed concussion protocol and stopped himself. I just glared at him, lamenting the loss of a Sin City vacation, but I wasn't gonna give him the satisfaction of knowing I was curious.

He took a breath and went on. "I was looking into the whole living car thing—"

"Damn it, Sammy, give it a rest! You can't kill Baby and I won't let you!" Could you give someone a nosebleed with a wadded-up sock? I wanted to find out.

"Listen! This isn't about the Impala. I mean… yeah, it started out like that, but look, I think I found something worth checking out," Sam sighed. Then, before I could bitch him out any more, he thrust a finger at his computer and read off the screen. "There's this site called 'Speed Demons' I've been poking around on. A lot of it seems like a load of crap, you know, like bad synopses of King books—but there's some stuff I think's got some truth to it. Like… here." He clicked around. "There's a whole thread dedicated to the Sonoran's 'blood car'."

That got my attention. Both eyebrows shot up my forehead. "'Blood car'?"

"Urban legend, started sometime in the 70s. There are a few iterations, but it all boils down to the same thing." Sam squinted at the screen. "Some old car appears outta nowhere, pulls up to someone, they get in, and they disappear for weeks before turning up again." He flicked an index finger over the touchpad. "Well, parts of them, anyway. Bottom line's this: you get in the blood car, you don't get back out in one piece."

Ooh, yeah. Sounds like a damn good time, don't you think, driver?

I squinted at Sam, ignoring the glare of the light on the side table behind him, but I was smiling, mostly to myself. "Any recent sightings?"

"That's actually why the thread was on the front page. Nothing in the past couple months, but it seems most disappearances associated with the blood car happen around the same time annually. Right around the Phoenix Auto Expo." He looked up over the lid of his computer. "Guess what's on the schedule for next week?"

Auto Expo, here we come.

"Seriously? I only hit my head, like, six times in the last few days." I rubbed at my temple, dragged the comforter over my shoulders. "I don't wanna do shit."

Hell, if you don't wanna take this one, I'll go by myself.

"You're not going by yourself!" I snapped.

"Well, I think it's worth checking out." Sam shut his laptop with his good arm, set it to the side, and settled back with his cast across his chest. Whether or not he knew I was talking to Baby… he'd have to get used to that. "My vote gets we recoup for a few days—"

Get ME to a body shop…

I laughed at that. Sam glared at me.

"—and then we hit the road."

"Dry-ass desert, here we come," I echoed Baby. "No more skinwalker, no more snow. I'm damn ready."

After a few days' rest, my car said sternly.

Sam was quiet for a long moment. I figured he was asleep, but then he shifted, pushed his good hand through his hair, and said, "If it's all the same to you, Dean, I don't want you driving with your concussion."

"You've got a busted wrist," I pointed out. "The hell I'm letting you drive!"

"Well," Sam said, a smile flicking at the corners of his mouth. "Guess it's a good thing we got the Impala for that."

TO BE CONTINUED IN TOP DEAD CENTER

AUTHOR'S NOTE: Thanks so much for sticking with me and this story despite my serious hiatuses! It was a blast and I'm serious glad to call myself part of the SPN fandom.

Thanks again for the kind words and for taking the time to read! Y'all are the best :)