I'm sorry for such a weak conclusion, but my mother won't leave me alone and I just can't concentrate anymore. I have a dead-line with this and… ugh. I also changed a couple of words around in chapter fifteen. Brain dead didn't sound right to me, not coming from an asylum doctor.
Chapter Seventeen ; The Bed That I Have Made
Doctor Jonathan Meyers appeared to be all too much amused by the situation. He was tickled pink, tittering like the world would be ending within the next minute and laughing up a storm had been his dying wish. It was disorienting to hear, especially coupled with a crazed Dean who wouldn't shut up and a hippopotamus syringe stuck in Sam's leg.
Staring at that syringe, pumping a warm mystery serum through his blood stream – warm like a summer's day back in California, lying with Jessica in the tall grass at the park, identifying rabbits and trains and ducks in the sky – Sam rolled his head to the side. His eyes were telling as the doctor reached over to extract the large animal syringe, narrowed yet bright in what could have been a "Huh. How 'bout that?" expression.
Whatever the heck might have been in that needle, whatever might have been working its way to Sam's heart to be carried to the rest of his body, Sam had no clue. Hell, maybe it was a pain killer, Vicodin or some equally as strong tranquilizer. But after what had happened to him so far, Sam wouldn't have been surprised to find out that the clear liquid invading his bloodstream was some kind of deadly nerve gas in serum form. So sooner than later Sam was going to collapse to the floor, flopping around like a fish out of water, and that would be the end of him. Or maybe the last sentence of the book he had been so impatient with didn't run like that, maybe the stuff in him – when it arrived at that highest plateau – would eat away his brain like a man starving to death at an all you can eat buffet.
Anyway you flipped it, the coin looked grim. Grimmer than anything Poe could have dreamt up in any one of his inebriated states, and those had been Grim with a capital G.
Maybe it was from the pain of having his mouth sewn shut, maybe because of this hoodo voodo racing through him, to Sam the world was starting to rotate drunkenly on its axis. Even the doc's words seemed to have shot down a little too much eggnog in preparation for the upcoming holiday festivities. They danced through the air, whirling and twirling like some kind of drugged hippie, and by the time they reached Sam's ear the mad doctor might as well have been speaking an alien language from another galaxy.
"A minute is a long time," Meyers said, his words visibly stretching and scrunching and popping like soap bubbles, "but with the state you're in, boy, maybe not long enough."
No, Sam didn't think so either. A minute was a very long time, but even with four of them the notion of making it out of the chair and to the door seemed on the disheveled side of impossible.
Meyers, not laughing anymore but still with the aftershocks of a smile on his face, sat back down in his damned old chair for what might have been the hundredth time. He waved his left hand about wistfully, like he was about to talk about a superlative dinner he might have had at a fine dining establishment. "This all comes down to what you have in you, Samuel," he began matter-of-factly.
Have Samuel down in you. Right, okay, can do.
Winchester started to lean too far forward in his chair, his head so foggy he needed a lighthouse's spotlight and horn in order to not crash into any nearby rocks.
"Courage, tenacity, will power. Some people have it and some people don't. You've been lumbering all throughout your life in the dark, boy, and I think it's about time we found out whether you're strong enough to survive. No more stealing space from the rest of us, Samuel, this is the moment you prove how much of a man really you are."
If this is what it felt like to get hammered, Sam was ready to back off the booze for the rest of his natural life – however long that was going to be. Forgetting completely that his lips were fused together with a fine, silky black thread, Sam made to reply to what little he had understood of the doctor's survival of the fittest lecture.
"Mm…." He blinked hard, trying not to say his hellos to the basement floor with his face. "Mm mmm mmmmm mmm mmm mmmm?" Sam had meant to say, rather disdainfully, "And you think you have courage? You, a man who had to have your own wife slit your throat because you just couldn't do it yourself?"
"I'm sorry," Meyers said snidely, "I didn't catch that."
Sam made to throw his right arm up, to give the doctor a very unappealing hand gesture, but that arm seemed to just want to hang there like a wet noodle. Turning his heavy head to that uncooperative arm, he simply stared at it as though by doing that it would come back to life.
The bloodthirsty doctor laughed heartily, but it sounded more to his captive like an elephant with a head cold trying to snicker through its trunk. "You've wasted one minute already, Samuel. I'd get a move on if I were you, unless of course you're too yellow bellied."
With the unnamed substance in his body, it took Sam a little longer than necessary to gather what Meyers was going on about. He had a mission to accomplish, Sam did, and if he kept on sitting in his chair like a drunken parakeet it was lights out, sweetheart. And though, through the dense haze filling his head, he knew that he needed to start moving, his legs didn't seem to want to so much as twitch. They seemed to be more like fallen logs than legs, far too heavy for one man – freakishly tall, but scrawny – to manipulate.
Where were the marionette strings when you needed them?
Raising his head, a feat all its own, Sam looked past a giddy Meyers and at the promised exit. There was a halo of golden light around that door, a wondrous beckoning light that had a sense of cocky swagger about it. It was confusing, how an old and rotting door could have a lovable arrogance about it, but then Sam heard his brother. Staring at that door, all the while trying to force himself to stand up – to "just stand up, goddammit" – Sam could hear his stupidly frustrating (but impossible to not love) brother on the other side of it.
The words were faint and broken up, as if Dean was trying to communicate with Sam from the other side of a very long string can connection, but Sam heard them all right. He couldn't understand a single lick of what his brother was trying to put out to the basement room, but he heard it and it was enough to light a fire in his belly. At first that fire was more like a burning match being dropped in a waste paper basket. First nothing seemed to happen, but then everything seemed to happen at once.
As indignation flooding into him it pushed out the pleasantly warm serum of doom trekking to destroy his brain, drowned the fog in his mind enough to think of only one thing. Pushing himself to his feet, legs wobbling and left arm beginning to ache with the stress of having to support a – underweight – nearly two-hundred pound body, Sam's mind was solely occupied with what he had witnessed since coming to Arrowsic Island. He hadn't felt bad enough in Illinois, so Sam had dragged his brother here and had to come across the trash dump for murder. The innocent were being slain for no justifiable reason, his own brother had been considered as the next sacrificial lamb, and now Dean might not ever see his little Sammy again.
Oh, no. Not when there was still so much they needed to talk about, not when Sam was still being punished for breaking the Impala's right headlight, and definitely not when the days were still so young. Over Samuel Winchester's dead body would he leave his brother behind when those days were still so young, stinging with loss but young.
Sam might have lost Jessica, his heart might be a ravenous black hole because of that, but Dean had not only lost Dad in a great sense but Mom was gone to him as well. Sam couldn't remember her, not in the least, but Dean could. Dean could recall her enough to still shove his brother against the side of a bridge for speaking ill of her, to still get an incredible sense of pain in his eyes when he thought about her, and to still have a compelling urge to stifle his kid brother with protection like she might have wanted Dean to.
Let him be damned, the blinding flames in Sam's core were screeching, let him be damned if Sam had to put another boulder on that poor man's back by leaving him physically. Dean, it was suddenly apparent to Sam, had lost his brother emotionally. He had always been so conflicted with that – am I holding his hand too tight, am I tethering him too close to me, how far should I let him go from me? If I let him go is he ever going to come back? – that he had shot himself in his own foot. But he hadn't meant to, Sam understood now. Dean might have been one spark plug short of a fully working engine, but he had too much good in his dumb little heart, had seen far too much in his short life, that Sam couldn't leave him now.
He had screamed at his brother, told him that he should have reloaded that gun and shot him, but Dean was still by Sam's side. After everything Sam had ever put him through, Dean was still there.
But not in the basement room, unfortunately. Dean could have picked Sam up when he teetered over to a crumpled heap onto the floor – but at least he didn't break the fall with his face, count your blessings.
Meyers was laughing at his prisoner, and that laughter made Sam ill. He loathed that sound, more than the doctor said Sam hated his brother, and he despised it with so much of a passion that even though he only had "one more minute, boy" he pushed any thought of escape from his mind.
The sheer, unbridled loathing in Sam's head, in his heart and secondhand soul, was roaring like a beast depicted in a horror-suspense novel. It eradicated the mystery stuff that had been jabbed into the muscle above his knee, blew out every last fragment of pain he was feeling from his battle scars, and cleared his head to the point where everything seemed to be like brilliantly shinning crystal.
Pushing himself to the proper standing position with his one good arm – not anyplace close to nimble, but it was good enough – Sam spun around and grabbed his chair. It was almost lighter than air, being nothing more than a large group of termites holding hands, and he could easily lift it from the floor with his left hand – or maybe because he was so enraged it had been that simple.
Cracking like a porcelain doll under the weight of his rage, Sam started to swing his rotten wooden chair in the doctor's general direction. Pieces of the back were starting to sheer off or otherwise completely disintegrate beneath Sam's pulsing fist, but it stayed together long enough for him to give his best Braveheart scream and bring the chair within an inch of the doctor's right temple.
Meyers was sitting in his chair almost comically, his laughter dying away and his smile falling into a deep, shocked frown. But he needn't have worried, for Sam's chair never so much as touched a hair on his head.
At the last possible second Sam flung his left arm around behind him – it would have been a magnificent sea foam green in a Madonna music video – and dropped to his knees, trying his best to kiss them with his stitched mouth.
Emily had come on cue, her heels having picked up its sinister clack, clack, clacking soundtrack. She made no other sound than that, but Sam had reacted to her coming just the same.
The chair didn't come in contact with her. Sam had swung it behind him too late, giving Emily just enough time to rush up behind her quarry the moment the chair past the exact spot she would have been standing in had she come even a second earlier. But she did run herself into Sam, the toe of her right hospital heel jamming itself against the sole of Sam's left sneaker. With a screech, she flew over Sam – who diligently rolled away after he felt Emily's shoe leave the bottom of his – and collided with her husband; who had been so surprised he hadn't thought to try to get out of his chair any earlier than when he saw Emily careening toward him with her weapon raised and ready to kill. Not caring to look and see that the nurse's weapon was a very long, very sharp lobotomy skewer, Sam (now having rolled onto his right side) shoved at the left front leg of Meyers's chair.
Winchester heard them yelp and tumble to the ground, the right side of the chair hitting the concrete floor with a splintering thud!, but didn't stop to see whether or not Emily had shiscobobed her loony tune of a husband. He catapulted himself to his feet with all the grace and elegance of a cougar on roller skates, screaming at himself to "Wake up! I'm dreaming, wake up wake up wake up!", and flung himself at the green rot basement door.
From the other side of the soggy looking door, as Sam took the knob in his only good hand and made the possibly costly mistake of looking back at his foe – still trying to untangle themselves from each other, yelling and smacking each other – he heard Dean's voice, stronger and brighter than ever before.
"Twitching? He's twitching? Oh my God, he's twitching!" But there was relief in Dean's voice instead of fear, understanding in place of confusion. "Yes, Sammy! Come on, kid, wake yourself up. You're doing it so far, buddy, but I don't think you're trying hard enough!" Sam could hear the choked sobs (happy this time) in his brother's voice as he most likely shook his, Sam's, shoulders to help him along to the streetcar of wakefulness.
Throwing the door open, telling himself over and over again how he was dreaming and needed to wake up, Sam looked blackness in the face. He didn't know what he expected to find on the other side of the door – a tunnel like something straight out of Being John Malkovich? – but he had been sure it wasn't going to be a thick wall of black. Then again, if he opened the door to find himself looking at a giant version of Dean, looking down at the dream Sam with a tear streaked face and enough joy on his face to bring about a heart attack ("Opened his eyes, he's opened his eyes!")… that might have been slightly awkward.
Something cold wrapped itself tightly around Sam's left ankle as he imagined seeing a King Kong sized Dean waiting for him beyond the door jamb. Getting a start, twisting around as he jumped to see who had grabbed his ankle, Sam looked down at Meyers's ghastly acne scarred face. He stomped at it with his other foot, so hard and so vicious it was as if Sam was an arachnophobe trying to stomp kill one of those nasty, nasty spiders.
As the doctor's hand slipped from around Sam's ankle, as a dazed Emily got awkwardly to her feet, reality slipped away like water on an incline. Colors faded or became fuzzy, any sense of logic was gone, and Sam was able to toss himself backward into the blackness behind him without snapping the main line to his sanity.
&&&
Sam came up sputtering and in a great amount of pain, not half of it coming from the fact this his face was shoved up against something solid yet quivering and rhythmically vibrating to a song called lub-dub-lub-dub. It was just about to go into the second, highly repetitive verse when he was sharply pulled away from the song maker, his head lulling back to look at a very happy, sopping wet Dean still in the grip of breathe crying (shaky, watery, sharp inhalations followed by explosive, foundation rattling exhalations).
Crap. Sam was still dreaming; Dean had never let anyone see him cry – not even himself.
He was about to voice his complaint out loud when, out of the blue, Dean smacked him hard on his good shoulder.
"Don't you ever do that to me again, do you hear me?" Dean yelled, his eyes red and puffy and snot coming from his nose. "I was out of my fucking mind with worry, you little brat! Here I thought you were dying, watching as puncture marks show up around your mouth and your right shoulder pops loudly from its socket – not to mention the whole mess at the gas station – and here you come out of it like it's nothing unusual!"
Still cradled by his older brother, looking up at him with a slowly clearing head, Sam smirked. Dean was more like a mother than he'd probably ever admit to on his deathbed.
As if Sam had recited that analogy aloud, Dean scowled. "You can't smirk at me like that, buddy, not after all the hell you put me through! What the fuck were you doing in there, anyway, having a goddamn tea party? I wouldn't doubt it, you're always pulling shit like this with me. God, I can't wait – cannot wait – until you have kids of your own. Oh-ho, boy, you'll be sitting there in the living room ripping out your hair, one number away from calling the goddamn cops, and then your kid walks in. There you were, about to have a fucking stroke, and they were out having the time of their fucking life."
Sam laughed, but it hurt his lips badly and so he stopped short. "I love you, too, Dean."
Though he huffed loudly and rolled his eyes, Dean squeezed his brother tightly between his arms just before dropping him and getting down perturbedly from the bed. "Just be glad you didn't die in there, Sammy, because if you did…," he cut his right hand through the air in the universaly known ass-whooping motion.
When Sam smiled, exactly like when he had laughed, hot pain sparked around his lips. He put a hand to them, knowing that he'd find blood and needle holes there, but was surprised in spite of himself. Shaken by the sight of his own blood, Sam tried to get off the bed only to find Dean push him gently back down into the mattress.
"You're not going anywhere, kid. As far as I'm concerned, you're pissing in that bed."
Sam tried again, rolling onto his left elbow and sliding his legs over, but Dean again vetoed that idea. "Don't be disgusting, Dean."
"I'm serious, Sammy. I don't want you going anywhere where I can't keep an eye on you."
When the brunette attempted to roll out of bed again, only to be met with oppositional forces, he swatted at his brother's hands. "Then come into the bathroom with me, you freaking wanker – but keep your back turned. I don't need you making Mr. Winky jokes like you did when I was little, some cases of your nostalgia should never see the light of day."
Dean seemed to frown at the whole idea – of letting his brother get out of bed or not making anymore inappropriate jokes, Sam wasn't sure – but then backed off. He watched warily as Sam sat up, slung his legs over the side of the bed, and held his right arm in his left. "What'd that bastard do to you, anyway?"
Sam wiggled his toes in the plush sand carpeting, as if testing to see how real it was. "Just shoved a big game needle into my leg, 's all. His nurse-wife's the one who sewed my mouth shut. I was the one stupid enough to rip off my own fingernail and dislocate my own shoulder."
His upper lip peeling back from his teeth in a genuine display of empathy, Dean shook his head. "I hope you got him good, but I wonder what was in that needle he jabbed in you?"
Sam shrugged his working shoulder. "I kicked at his face, and I have no idea. Nothing too serious, I imagine. All it did was make me sleepy, like I had taken too much Benadryl or something."
That didn't comfort Dean at all. Frowning more than ever, he waved his hands in a gesture that told Sam to stand up – which he did, unsteadily and with his brother's aid.
"I feel fine now, mostly anyway. Just give me a few extra strength pain relievers from… the nearest drug store and I'll be ready to go." Sam had almost done a major no-no. "From your stash", that was what he had been about to say, "from your secret stash."
Dean narrowed his eyes at Sam, cautious of the pause in his brother's sentence structure, and then shook his head as if to clear it. "Go where, exactly?"
"The Meyerses'."
Coming up beside his brother, turning him so that Sam's right shoulder was facing him, Dean laughed. "Sammy, I don't think the salty island breeze is going to fix that shoulder."
Spreading his legs apart, planting his bare feet into the carpeting, Sam squeezed his eyes shut. "That's not what I mean." He lowered his head to stare through his eyelids at the floor, feeling his brother grip his limp right arm firmly with one arm and place a led hand under his armpit. "The police buried Meyers and his wife there, underneath one of the trees. He told me that."
"Okay, but not before we try to do something about those mouth wounds." Dean sighed and bowed his head, pressed his forehead against Sam's neck before standing up straight again. He remained silent while he brought his legs and torso into the proper pop-your-kid-brother's-shoulder-back-into-place stance. "I can't make this painless, but I'll try my best."
Between a clenched jaw, Sam let out a whistling breath. "Just get it over with."
It was awkward because of the height difference and took quite a bit of doing, but Dean managed to muscle Sam's arm back into its socket. He hadn't wanted to be the one to do it, having to hear Sam make those disquieting grunts and moans of pain, but E.R. doctors were out of the question. They would ask too many questions, put a damper on the entire hunt.
While Sam collapsed back onto the bed, hunched forward with a hand to his shoulder, Dean went out to the Impala. From his duffel bag in the backseat, he took two small white pills from a large, rectangular white plastic container – Wal-Mart's cheap answer to Vicodin. He clenched these in his fist while he went to the trunk and gathered the first aid kit.
Sam didn't yet ask him about the pills when he was handed them, simply swallowed them thankfully with a glass of water from the bathroom, and sat as still as he could for Dean to deal with Sam's wounds most efficiently. Between the burning alcohol and blotting medical gauze, Sam told his brother about everything that had happened since entering the records hall – also, how the fall out there had been on purpose because of the dream and the reason why Sam hadn't wanted to tell Dean about it. He left out the finer details, of course (Dean's illness), but everything else wasn't off limits. Sam ended with how he had kicked at Meyers's face.
Dean said nothing for a long time, seemed too caught up in managing his brother's injuries to do much of anything else. To Sam he looked more tired than after the Sanders incident, more worn and grated and all together fleeting. But he didn't mention it, simply remained the almost perfect patient and waited for his brother to find the words he wanted to use.
Eventually, with a poorly hidden sigh, Dean dropped the rest of the gauze into the first aid kit along with the alcohol and liquid bandages. With a loud clanging sound the lid slammed shut and Dean turned to face his brother.
"The farthest I willed myself to go was the gas station. I was thinking about buying a Twinkie when something happened, this searing pain everywhere like it had been dumped over my head like a bucket of Gatorade, and I knew you were in some pretty deep shit. It's happened before, Sammy. That's why I was in your apartment before it lit up like a tiki torch, why I was in Dad and Mom's old bedroom before you choked to death on that demonic electrical cord, why I seem to show up just about everywhere right before your fire goes out and some guy wearing khaki cut-offs says, 'the tribe has spoken'."
Sam smiled as gingerly as he could to save his lips the agony. "So that's what's all over your back."
"Huh?"
Nodding his head in Dean's direction, Sam said, "On your back there's this nasty blob of yellow and white goop. I thought you might like to know before your chest rips open, and a circus flea pops out telling you you have to go save little Jimmy from the well."
Dean punched his brother playfully in the arm. "Bitch." He rose himself from the bed and shrugged out of his jacket, turning it around by the collar and sneering at the Twinkie remains globed onto the center of the back. Walking into the bathroom, he hurriedly wiped away the mess with a towel and all but ran back into the living quarters – seeing Sam very much alive, a little frazzled and bloody, but alive. "So tell me where exactly you think these cream puffs are buried," he said as he put his prized leather jacket back on, "and when I'll actually be able to torch their sorry asses all the way to Aliquippa."
"There aren't all that many older trees around the lot, mostly young saplings in comparison to what we're looking for, and there's been a lot of erosion up there. I'll bet they're near the edge of the cliff, if not at the base of it by now."
"Well, that narrows our field down, doesn't it?"
Sam watched as Dean's face slowly washed of color, like the drain plug to his face's blood supply had been yanked and yanked hard.
"Dean, what's wrong?"
He shook his head. "Just got a fucker of a thought, that's all."
"Mind telling me about it?"
"Well, he lied to you about going after me, right? I still don't understand why he didn't, I fit his build to a T, but whatever, moving on. What I mean is, what if he lied to you about where he's buried? Sure, he thought you wouldn't make it out of there alive so, it didn't really matter if he told you or not. But the thing is, he could be lying again."
Sam considered this shorty. "You think they're at the church?"
"I don't know, but I do know that he might've been pulling your chain back there. We could go up to where his house used to be, look around for that tree, and find our heads bashed in on the rocks instead."
Standing up, Sam gathered his coat. "We can't hang around here what-ifing. Meyers is one pissed off spirit right now and, I don't know about you, I'd like to shut his ass down before he can take his frustration out on anyone else. Chiefly, me."
&&&
In spite of Dean's whining, the brother's went to the bluff on which Meyers once had a home.
Hours had passed since Sam had nodded off in his motel room, traveled to the Meyerses's Fun House of Insanity, and night had fallen on Arrowsic Island. There wasn't a single star to be seen in the oil black sky, not even the moon, and a silence had fallen over the land so strong that even the waves made no sound. It freaked Dean out, especially, Sam could tell.
Together they walked up the winding rock to the near empty lot, hardly able to make out its shape at the top of the small hill, and tried not to wonder why their shoes made no noise against the ground. It was as though Sam had gone to Deafsville, USA., with two shovels balancing on his shoulder and a brother who in the car had been humming Metallica tunes.
It wasn't just the sound that seemed to have died off either, even the lights in the houses they had passed in the popular end of the island and their street lamps seemed to be sickly. They had touched the night sky with skeletal hands, but made weak imprints that were too easily forgotten.
"Another search for unmarked graves," Dean's voice boomed through the night, loud enough for sleeping children in Sweden to be woken. "I feel like I'm a screwy version of Groundhog Day."
Sam walked with his brother up the last bit of hill and onto the sloping grass of the Meyerses' victim memoriam, shoes slipping on birthing frost. "Just keep your eyes open, I'm sure it won't be that hard to spot."
"True. How many savage killers under old trees can there possibly be on an island this small?"
As if there was someone standing over there, holding up a bull's eye lantern, Sam was drawn to the far right side of the lot. "You never know, for all we know they're not buried at all."
"Great. And how are we suppose to find them, then? With the bloodhound I carry around in my back pocket?"
Sam cut his hand through the air impatiently, the "come here before I smack you" wave.
Mumbling, Dean followed after his brother to a quiet, overgrown tangle of grass by a mangeled tree, its roots having sucked pure evil from the ground. So they were buried under a tree, all right, but half of it was over the side of the bluff.
Sam handed one shovel to his brother, started scooping earth from a spot a little ways down from the tree's wide girth of trunk.
"Are you sure they're here?" Dean asked, waving his shovel over the side of the bluff face to see if anything was sticking out of it that wasn't normal. "I mean, are you positive? Because if you're not…."
"When has your brother ever been wrong, Dean?"
Turning around, shovels now poised and ready to be used as weapons, the brothers Winchester met Doctor Meyers. He looked utterly unharmed – for a dead guy – and smiled at them with his foul teeth on proud display. In the dark of the morning the doctor seemed to glow, a radiance unmatched by any cheesy Hollywood horror flick. The shrimp might have known it too, standing there with his chest puffed out and acne ghost ravaged face gleaming.
Dean guffawed. "Can't you take a goddamn hint?" he yelled.
Meyers tilted his head in consideration, then looked back at Dean. "Can't you, scarecrow?"
"Oh, no, we aren't turning this around to me," he replied indignantly, waving his shovel at Meyers as a scolding mother might wag her finger. "You went after my brother and now you must die… again."
The doctor's smile shone with an uncanny madness that took whatever hidden light might have been in the sky, and leeched it away. "It must bother you, being that incredibly stupid."
Sam busied himself him in the shadow of a conversation that didn't yet involve him by acting shocked – shocked! – by Jonathan Meyers's visit.
Dean shook his head. "No, actually. No one ever expects anything from me, so when I do things like this–" he tossed his duffel bag to Sam, who grinned slyly at the doctor "–they aren't ready for it, it catches them off guard."
"How is that suppose to knock me off my feet, brain dead?" Meyers asked angrily. "Your brother can't possibly dig down to my grave and take out the needed instruments of arson faster than I can reach over and kill him."
Sam looked down at the greyish duffel bag, the amusement gone from his features. "Must be a shallow grave, even after all of these years. Certainly parasites like you don't get the traditional burial. And you're not in my head anymore, so I could if I really wanted to."
Meyers walked over to Sam, calmly at first, but soon fury was ready to snap and pop from him like a bonfire. He remembered the kicks to his once handsome face, Sam assumed, and didn't like it. "But you don't want to, Samuel, do you?"
He seemed to think about this for a while, then shook his head and dropped the provisions noisily to the ground. Half-heartedly, as if he was mulling over a movie he didn't really want to see, Sam shrugged. "Not really, no."
From behind the doctor's back, filling his mind with feigned anger at Sam for saying such things (he wasn't sure if the doctor could read thoughts when outside a person's head, but it didn't hurt to act like he could), Dean was taking salt from his back pocket and sprinkling it onto the two bodies jutting out from the bluff face. He could only hope that those bodies weren't impostors, two lovers caught in a freak July blizzard and buried under ten feet of snow to die – and now be incinerated by a golden hearted fool wielding salt and a whole lot of balls (big balls, but we've got the biggest balls of all, there, Bon).
"And why might that be, Samuel?" Meyers asked, craning his neck up to eye the youngest Winchester boy in a humorous image better to be laughed at on a later date.
Looking down at the duffel bag, kicking it with his feet, Sam bent down. He made to act like he was going to toss it away with a deep sigh, a realization that getting rid of Meyers was hopeless, but reached into it instead. "Because Dean would rather do it instead." Having taken out the lighter fluid, Sam tossed it to his brother – who ripped off the top and emptied it over the two bodies. They were close together, the mummified corpses, having been buried in one grave without a coffin, which made it much easier to drench in gasoline.
Meyers screamed, an ugly animalistic sound, and charged toward Dean. He was less than a dozen or so feet away, but didn't get to him before Dean took a lighter out of his other back pocket and started it up – tossed down the ninety-nine cent lighter he had bought from Rainbow Brite before the little man had clawed his way out of his stomach prison.
As flames reached out toward the ink blot heavens, Dean tugged charismatically at the lapels of his jacket. "See? Completely off-guard."
In a sight the brothers had seen many times before, Meyers (along with freshly arrived wifey) leaned back and raised their hands to the sky – screaming in the enveloping blaze, writhing in it, really nothing at all to stop a yawn.
&&&
They were going to slink away into the newly dawning morning without anyone knowing what they had done. It was a little depressing, how they had sent Jonathan and Emily Meyers back to hell but not a single Arrowsic Islander would know that. The killings would stop and they would praise their gods for it, not realizing that those gods who put an end to their nightmarish years had been two meddling brothers.
But at least those brothers got an angry motel bill out of the deal, one demanding payment for a kicked in door. When Dean had seen it, taped below the brass 12 on their door, he had told Sam to pack up, head out. And heading out was what they were doing, as quietly as they could at two in the morning with a car engine that didn't understand the term stealth.
Neither of the Winchesters said anything until they were well out of Georgetown, stopped at a stop-and-go light that appeared to hate their surname with a seething passion: it remained stuck on red with a death grip helped along by steely talons.
"Hey, Dean?" Sam asked slowly, gently in a way that suggested he was on a patch of thin ice.
The blonde turned his head just enough to let his brother know he was paying attention, but didn't take the majority of his concentration away from the burning red top light. "Hmm?" He looked like he was about to get out of the car and throw rocks at that traffic light, but he didn't. Instead, Dean bent down and picked up the raggedy old tape box from between the seats.
"When I was stuck in that basement, you know when I was dreaming…. Meyers said a few things I didn't tell you about right when I first woke up."
Rummaging through the box loudly, too loudly like the traffic light would change to green at the sound of Dean Winchester preoccupied. When he pulled one out at random, Dean put the tape in the player, but didn't start it and turned the volume knob all the way to the left. "What'd he say, Sammy?"
He shifted uncomfortably in the black leather, bucket seats of the Impala. Not able to look at his brother, Sam turned his head to stare out of the window. "He asked me about when I was twelve, when I ruined your baseball bat."
It was like Dean had been turned into a pod person, for he nodded his head politely and sat back in his own seat – but then glared death at the stubborn traffic light. "Yeah, and what'd you say?"
"I was angry he brought it up, so nothing nice."
The sun rise was beautiful, Sam thought, and was happy to have it as an excuse to not focus on Dean and his staring contest with the stop-and-go light. But the orange and red rays of the climbing star hurt his eyes, refracting off the ocean water behind the trees like a thousand shards of mirror beneath a glaring fluorescent bulb. Not wanting his vision to fizzle out on him, Sam turned his head forward to stare at the dash.
"But that's not why you mention it," Dean pushed gently. "Is it, Sammy?" Maybe he was only being this nice because of the traffic light (doing anything to keep his mind off of it, to keep sane), but Sam kind of liked it.
Still, he sighed and shut his eyes. "No."
"Look, Sammy, if you don't feel comfortable being completely honest with me about every last thing, then–"
"Meyers said that you were sick, really sick, and that you'd be 'clocking out' within the next month or so. He also said that you've known about it for a long time now, that when you go out for coffee you swallow a few hundred pills from your endless supply. He said that you haven't told me about it because you think I'm too fragile for something like that."
Dean laughed, a warm and loving sound straight from his gut. It also made it impossible to believe that he was soundlessly mouthing very dirty words at the stop-and-go light. "Sammy, I'm perfectly fine. Meyers only said those things to rile you up, probably to make you stay in that basement for ever, to make you his pet."
"Really?" Sam turned to him. "You're not lying? You haven't been keeping this from me at all, not wanting me to know and flip out on you?"
Snorting, Dean shook his head. "The only sickness in me, buddy, is insomnia… and an obsession with gummies, but you have that too. God, Sammy, I can't believe you'd fall for anything that came from his mouth. It's like being on that airplane all over again – bad people say horrible things that just aren't true."
Sam was looking at him with an unamused expression on his face.
Dean frowned. "I love you, kid. I highly doubt I'd keep something as big as a fatal illness from you."
Smiling softly, though not absolutely convinced, Sam was going to reply when he heard Dean's cell phone ringing from the backseat. He reached for it as Dean began to finally drive further away from Georgetown, Maine, and stared at the glowing text message screen like it was about to bite him.
"Dad?"
Settling himself back in his seat, Sam nodded and pulled out the travel atlas from the glove compartment. "It's definately not Carlie."
Dean laughed. "So, where to?" he asked, watching his brother closely as the brunette read over the text message and compared the coordinates with the map.
"A place called Dean's Going to Be Driving for Days On End."
Dean snapped his jaw at the rearview mirror, at the fading traffic light. "I wish he wouldn't make us do this, drive clear across the country to humor his little whims."
Sam didn't hear his complaint, though, he was too busy staring at his brother's phone. Resonating in his head, half convinced it was coming from the phone itself and not memory, were two simple words, innocent enough when separated but together something awful.
"Electric shock, electric shock, electric s h o c k…."
Curtain
I'm not explaining myself. This story was written mainly to entertain myself during the break, and then I read a few spoilers which poisoned my brain (and I just know they're totally off, meaning I'll have to amend parts of this story again once the new episodes commence). If you've read those spoilers as well, you know what I've been talking about, if not… you'll find out soon enough.
Thank you to every last one of you who's read this story and reviewed (those who haven't, I don't like you as much because I really would have liked to know your thoughts on this, but I'd still kiss you under mistletoe). This story was amazingly fun to write, I just hope you had as much joy in reading it. It's going to be sad letting this baby go.