An End Has a Start (Dean/Carmen, Sam/Jess R) 6/10
Title: An End Has a Start - Part 6
Rating: R
Pairings: Dean/Carmen, Sam/Jess
Word Count: 3,924 (50,221 overall)
Warnings: Wishverse fic, spoilers for S1 & S2 through 2x20
Summary: After Dean wakes up in the hospital with amnesia after an apparent attempted suicide, the answers he seeks just brings more questions before turning his world completely upside down.
Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4 - Part 5
Dad - not Dad, Dean thought, his eyes were yellow, forcing the part of his mind that was an observer to the dream instead of in it to remember his mentioning of Yellow Eyes on the tape; Yellow Eyes who had killed Mom and Jess - stepped backwards, lowering his head, then raising his eyes to look at Dean. He screamed, feeling like he was getting stabbed, ripped open at he felt the warm, wet sensation of his own blood dripping down his chest.
“Dean!” he heard Sam yelling, sounding so far away behind the roaring in Dean’s ears. “No!”
“Dad!” Dean groaned, begging. “Dad, don’t you let it kill me!” He felt weaker, his body draining. Dean coughed, throwing up blood. He heard Sam yelling for him, Dean turning his head to see his brother against a wall but seemingly unable to move. “Dad… please…” Dean felt his entire body go limp.
“Stop,” John said, his eyes returning to normal. “Stop it.” Dean fell to the floor as Sam rushed to a table, grabbing a gun and pointing it at John just as his eyes went yellow again. “You kill me you’ll kill Daddy too.”
“I know.” Sam’s voice was cold. He squeezed the trigger, shooting John in the leg, blue lightning dancing across his body as John fell to the floor. Dean heard movement and was vaguely aware of Sam being near. “Oh, God, you lost a lot of blood.”
His voice was weak. “Where’s Dad?”
“He’s right here, Dean.”
“Go check on him.”
Sam obeyed quickly, rushing over to his father. “Dad? Dad?”
John woke up with a gasp. “Sammy, it’s still alive! It’s inside me, I can feel it. You shoot me! You shoot me in the heart, son!” Sam was crying, and Dean was surprised to notice that he was too. He watched his brother raise the gun, cocking it. “Do it now!” John yelled.
Dean panicked, fearing Sam really would. “Don’t you do it, Sam!”
“You’ve got to hurry!” John urged. “I can’t hold it much longer. Shoot me! Son, I’m begging you. We can end this here and now, Sammy!”
“Sam… no…”
“You do this, Sammy! Sam…” Dad started to scream, the demon pouring out of his mouth in a thick cloud of black smoke.
+
They called the police, Sam leaving an anonymous tip on the machine like he had thought was best, but as it was getting dark, sitting around and wondering what would happen started to drive Dean insane. Leavenworth was only an hour from Lawrence, tops, so he grabbed the police scanner from the shelf in his closet that he’d confiscated and kept from a car he’d scrapped for parts at work, got into the Impala, and drove off.
If he got there and something was happening, the police not taking the tip seriously and ignoring the warning, Dean had no idea what he was going to do. He really hadn’t thought that far. All he knew was that he was going to sit a little ways down from the house and keep an eye on things. And hopefully no one would call the police on an unfamiliar black Chevy Impala with its driver sitting there, staring at a house all night.
Dean wasn’t kidding when he hadn’t thought it through at all. The fact that Mike had always liked to joke that the Impala made Dean look like he was hiding something in the trunk didn’t help. He kind of started to wish that he had told Sam and brought him along, too. Dean may be known for his charm, but his brother could sweet talk his way out of anything, something Dean had always hated growing up.
When he got to Leavenworth, Dean looked at the scrap of paper he’d hastily written the address down on and then looked at the state road map he kept in the glove compartment. What he thought would be a house actually turned out to be a downtown apartment above a restaurant, so Dean parallel parked across the street at a meter, noting the 24-hour convenience store on the corner that would surely have coffee, and waited.
It was nine o’clock when the squad cars showed up. Dean got out of the car, not wanting them to notice him, so he made a point to look like he was walking around, enjoying the evening. He watched the officers go into the restaurant, the owner clearly the woman who lived in the apartment upstairs that Dean was waiting for, so he went into the restaurant, asked for a seat at the bar, and nursed at a beer with a plateful of French fries as he tried his best to keep an eye on Leslie Ewing.
Dean was still there at last call, watching the head chef and wait staff surprise their boss with a birthday cake, the whole restaurant breaking into song. There was a lot of hugging and back clapping, which amused Dean to no end because the two cops that were still there stiffened anytime someone went within six feet of Leslie.
Closing time came at two in the morning, leaving Dean feeling glad that she didn’t die horribly, but also slightly disturbed that he had become obsessed and really had been trying to see something that wasn’t there. He climbed in the Impala, finding that his cell phone had fallen out of his back pocket when he’d climbed out, and that he’d missed a multitude of calls from Sam.
Dean called him back, taken aback when Sam answered on the first ring and sounded perfectly awake. “You can’t just leave a message like a normal person?”
“If you’d answered your phone then I wouldn’t have had to keep calling.” Dean rolled his eyes into the phone, not particularly in the mood for the “I told you so” speech he was bound to be getting from his brother. “We have a problem.”
Those words in the dreadful tone of voice Sam used combined with the fact that calling his brother hadn’t woken him up caused Dean’s back to stiffen. “What is it?”
“Well I went and tried a different database from the one that turned up Leslie Ewing. It turns out she wasn’t the only one in Leavenworth with a birthday today… or I guess yesterday…”
“What do you mean?”
“The first database only had residents that had registered to vote in the city, which doesn’t take into account anyone under the age of eighteen or someone who might be living there but is registered somewhere else.” Dean heard Sam swallow heavily on the other end. “There’s a Sally McIntire, a freshman psychology major at the University of Saint Mary, with a January 11th birthday. Classes start up again for them next week, so it’s possible she would have moved back in a little early.”
Dean stared at the police scanner, turned off and on the floor below the passenger seat. He felt his mouth go dry. “Can you get an address? I’m going to swing by, check things out.”
“You’re going to drive to Leavenworth right now?”
“I’m already in Leavenworth, been here since around eight thirty keeping an eye on Leslie Ewing who, in case you were wondering, is very much alive and had a red velvet birthday cake.” Dean could imagine Sam turning red, giving the phone that bitchy expression he does so well, and trying to choose his words for the lecture he was mentally practicing to give Dean. Not wanting to hear it, Dean broke his brother’s train of thought. “Where does she live, Sam?”
“Berchmans Hall, room 509.”
Dean closed the phone, ending the call. He pulled out of the parking spot, finding the main road and following the signs that pointed in the direction of the college campus. The sirens he could hear as he went through the main entrance weren’t a good sign, Dean following the road to a circle that was packed with emergency vehicles and gawking students. He turned the car around, finding parking across the street from the soccer field. Dean walked over to Berchmans Hall, mimicking the expressions of those around him and trying to blend.
“What’s going on?” he asked one of the students who actually had his camera out and was taking pictures of the scene.
“Some chick was found dead.” The boy’s tone was nonchalant, almost bored. “I guess the lights flickered, so they think she got electrocuted or something and we can’t go in until they get some people to check it out.” He looked away from his camera, turning to stare at Dean. “You think they’ll postpone classes?”
“Maybe,” Dean replied, deciding that the kid was stoned out of his mind.
“Dude that would suck.”
“Getting electrocuted to death?”
“Nuh uh, man - still having classes after some chick got fried in the dorm.” He turned back to the camera, apparently catching sight at the same time as Dean of the EMTs coming out of the dorm, wheeling a gurney that was clearly bearing a body bag. He chose that moment to slip away back to the car, not needing to hear the identity of the dead girl confirmed.
He felt sick to his stomach, stepping away from the Impala to throw up the French fries he’d eaten in the parking lot. Dean heard some people walking back to the dorm he was parked behind, cheering at him, apparently thinking that Dean was trashed out of his mind and that it was cool for him to be puking because of it. Dean dry heaved a few times before his stomach realized it was done, certainly not feeling cool - more feeling like shit because a girl was dead and they hadn’t checked thoroughly enough beforehand to try and stop it.
Dean pulled himself into the Impala, taking a few deep breaths to try and compose himself, get his body to stop shaking. He drove back to Lawrence in silence, getting back to his apartment a little before five. Sam was sitting on his couch when he opened the door. “How long have you been here?”
“Right after you hung up on me. Waited in the hallway until around three when Carmen got in from the hospital and let me in. I told her you went out drinking with some guys from work and would come stumbling in eventually.” Sam looked at Dean nervously. “Is Sally McIntire dead?”
“Yeah, and let me tell you, those liberal arts university kids are a bunch of fuck ups. No joke, the one I talked to was taking pictures.” Dean ran his fingers through his hair. “Is Carmen asleep?”
“Yeah.”
“Good. We’ve got work to do.”
+
They went to Kelly’s Diner, which was practically around the corner from Dean’s apartment and one of the few things open at that hour in the morning. They also had good, cheap food and free wireless, Sam got started, plugging away at his laptop as Dean scowled at the coffee that was placed in front of him, wondering if he would get sick again or if that was all out of his system. He decided his stomach might feel better if there was actually something in it, ordering food and taking note of where the bathroom was just in case.
“So what do we know?” Sam asked, reading the computer screen and hitting a few buttons every now and then, but Dean couldn’t see what he was doing.
“Someone’s going to die in Topeka on the eighteenth if we don’t do anything. And it’ll be their birthday.” Dean stared blankly at the cover of the notebook. “You know what’s freaking me out?” Sam shook his head, seemingly only half listening. “The last death in these cycles is about, oh, thirty minutes north of here and the day after my birthday.”
“You think you’d be a target?”
Dean shrugged. “If the locations were shifted and the days set back one, it’s possible.”
“I don’t think so,” Sam said with such certainty that Dean was taken aback. “See after I talked to you, I figured there had to be a reason that Sally McIntire died and Leslie Ewing didn’t. Whatever’s doing this is being more specific than just towns and birthdays.”
“Could explain the lack of pattern in the years then, right? We’ve got some picky ass killer on our hands.” Sipping at the coffee, Dean grimaced and added some more milk. “Have you figured out what the other, um, prerequisite is?”
“I found something interesting on Sally that also matched Thomas, but since you had the notebook I couldn’t look up the rest of them.”
Dean slid it across the table, watching it stop with an inch or so hanging off the table. “Well? What is it?”
Sam was going through hospital records and patient files through a database that was very illegal and was grounds for dismissal if there was evidence of it being used when presenting a case. Ambulance chasers had gone hi-tech in this day of age, looking at new cases in hospitals without needing to loiter around, waiting for people who had been in accidents and might be willing to sue because the whiplash they developed kept them from working. “The University of Saint Mary had an article about Sally on their website. It mentioned that she was a psychology major, wanted to specialize in child psych, and was already active in the community working with kids who had been abused. More times than not, volunteers in that field have been abused themselves.”
“And you’re saying Thomas Kane was abused, too?”
“He had pictures in his hospital file of suspicious bruising, but he never mentioned abuse.”
“So what about the rest of them?”
“That’s what I’m doing now,” Sam said, pulling up Michaela Johnson’s file. If abuse was the other common factor, it sickened Sam to think about it. These people hadn’t suffered enough growing up, getting abused by friends or family or an adult they thought they could trust, and then they were killed because of it? Going after the abuser he could understand, a sort of revenge mission by an individual or group who decided not to take it anymore, but further victimizing of the victim? No one deserved to die, especially the way these people had. “Everyone this year has had accounts of reported or suspected abuse. Sabrina Belmont had actually been taken away from her alcoholic father as a child and went through the foster care system, moving from home to home until she turned eighteen.”
“Then she has a family of her own, life actually looks pretty good, and some fucker kills her. I don’t get it - what did these people do to make someone decide they needed to die…t?” Dean smiled forcefully at the waitress as she brought their food over. If she had noticed what he was really talking about before trying to cover it up, she didn’t notice. Dean waited until she left, arching an eyebrow at his brother’s food. “What the hell is that?”
“Belgian waffle with blueberries,” Sam supplied.
“And a whipped cream smiley face?”
“I didn’t request the design.”
“I’m still gonna mock you for it, though.” Dean flashed Sam his best shit-eating grin, but his brother was clearly not amused. “So… will you even be able to look up the people that died in the Sixties and earlier?”
“Obviously not since they weren’t computerized back then. At least not without going to the hospital ourselves, pretending to be someone with the authorization to look at old records, possibly a search warrant, and just generally not care about how much legal trouble we could get into if somebody finds out.” Sam paused to take a breath. “They’ve all been consistent so far… Same order of towns, same days of the month, people in specific towns killed on their birthdays… I think it would be safe to assume that this is also consistent since it’s shared with the four people that have been killed so far this year.”
“So that’s a ‘no’ on making fake search warrants?”
“The difficulty of that aside, we wouldn’t even know which hospitals to look in. People do move around, you know. Thomas Kane has been the only one this year to actually grow up in Kansas.” Sam closed his computer, shifting his attention to the waffle in front of him, smearing the whipped cream smiley face with the side of a butter knife so he didn’t have to keep hearing Dean snicker about it. “What are we supposed to do now?”
“Figure out who’s next, I suppose. Then figure out who’s behind it all, maybe try and stop them before they can get to the person in Topeka. You got nothing better to do, right?”
Sam chewed thoughtfully, thinking about where he might be able to gather clues to figure out who was responsible. “Where’s Michaela Johnson’s car?”
“Scrap yard I’d imagine since the police closed the case. Why?”
“It’s the most readily accessible evidence we have. You’d be able to tell if anything has been tampered with, right?”
Dean had to admit that Sam had a good point. He hadn’t even considered trying to look at the car up close and personal. Granted, he also wasn’t a detective so looking at crime scenes wasn’t his forte, but he would be able to tell if someone had messed with or rigged something to the car to create the amount of electricity needed to kill Michaela Johnson as quickly and burn her as severely as it had. “I suppose so.” He pulled his cell phone out of his jacket pocket, scrolling through the address book until he found Jim’s number. “I have a connection down there - tows cars over to the shop when I need parts. I’ll just tell him I’m stocking up for the next time it snows and the college kids smash up their Volkswagens.” Dean got up from the booth, motioning to his brother that he’d be right back as he went outside to talk to Jim, not wanting to be that rude asshole in the diner at six in the morning being more awake than he had a right to be.
Sam ate his waffle in relative silence, the diner mostly empty with the exception of a couple people at the counter who had either just got off work or were about to start. Sam wasn’t sure what his brother had gotten into and then dragged him into, knowing it was impossible for just over one hundred years of deaths to be caused by the same person. What seemed more likely to Sam was that maybe there was an original killer who got caught and sent to jail for the rest of his life or executed, and then every now and then someone who was angry and looking for an excuse would hear about him, decide to be a copycat.
He was worried, though, remembering the djinn, the conversations he had with Dean that his brother couldn’t remember. Maybe that stuff really was real. Maybe the djinn and the girl had really been there, and the djinn could, like, teleport them out of there when his hideout had been discovered or whatever. Djinn and genies of folklore could disappear in a blink of an eye, reappear somewhere else halfway across the world. Legends like that always had some basis in truth, and maybe it was closer to the story than anyone ever realized. Maybe the stories had originally been fact and started to get played off as fiction to make people feel safe, so they wouldn’t really worry about the monster in the closet.
Sam shook the thoughts away as Dean came back into the diner, triumphant. He slid back into the booth, grabbing a fork and enthusiastically getting to work on his breakfast. “Jim’s gotta go find it and then fill out some paperwork, but it’ll be at the shop tomorrow.”
“Isn’t Mike going to want to know why it’s there?”
Dean shrugged. “Last year some KU frat wanted a junker for a fundraiser. It was like you give them a dollar and you got one swing with a mallet. Money went to a charity, college students got to smash the hell out of a car. Had to take off the windows and strip the parts worth saving, empty out all the lines and remove the engine. Can let them have this one, too, when we’re done with it.”
“Won’t someone notice?” Sam asked, seeing a flaw in the plan. “Michaela went to KU. I doubt her friends would appreciate people paying to dent up the car she died in.”
“If I remove the plates and bumper stickers, strip the paint, and take out the car seats, it’ll be indistinguishable.”
Dean didn’t seem worried, but Sam couldn’t help it. It wasn’t necessarily the car as much as the prospect of working with a deadline, a deadline that would end up with someone getting killed if it passed before they figured things out. He opened his laptop back up, searching Topeka for a list of residents who would be having a birthday next Thursday. He used the better database that would include people not registered to vote in the city, so mostly minors, and being such a large city as Topeka was, the database returned with over two hundred results.
“This is going to take a little longer,” he told Dean. “There are a lot of people I’m going to have to crosscheck with hospital records.” Sam looked at Dean, just thinking of something. “What if there’s more than one person with a birthday Thursday who has been abused?”
“I don’t even know,” Dean replied, “so I’m just going to hope that’s not how it’ll turn out.”
+
He’s in a junkyard working on the Impala. Something tells Dean that he’s spent a lot of time out here lately, feeling like shit, and the Impala looking like he took her completely apart. Sam was pacing, and it was making him nervous.
“You were right.”
“About what?” Dean asked, although he didn’t really care.
“About me and Dad. I’m sorry that the last time I was with him I tried to pick a fight. I’m sorry that I spent most of my life angry at him. For all I know he died thinking that I hate him, so… You’re right. What I’m doing now… It’s too little, too late.” Sam paused for a moment, Dean feeling torn somewhere between punching his brother and wanting to cry. “I miss him. I feel guilty as all hell, and I’m not all right. But neither are you. That much I know.” Dean could see Sam’s reflection in the windshield of the Impala, Sam staring at his back like he was expecting him to say something, to open up. Dean wasn’t going to let him have it. “I’ll let you get back to work.”
Dean watched Sam leave, motionless until he heard the screen door slam shut. He walked slowly, purposefully over to a crowbar that was mixed in with other tools he had strewn about on the ground, feeling the weight of it in his hands, before raising it over his head. Dean smashed the crowbar into the Impala’s trunk over and over and over. He did it out of anger; he did it out of despair; he did it because he wanted to hurt someone he loved and all that was left was Sam and that car.
Part 7 - Part 8 - Part 9 - Part 10
Rating: R
Pairings: Dean/Carmen, Sam/Jess
Word Count: 3,924 (50,221 overall)
Warnings: Wishverse fic, spoilers for S1 & S2 through 2x20
Summary: After Dean wakes up in the hospital with amnesia after an apparent attempted suicide, the answers he seeks just brings more questions before turning his world completely upside down.
Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4 - Part 5
Dad - not Dad, Dean thought, his eyes were yellow, forcing the part of his mind that was an observer to the dream instead of in it to remember his mentioning of Yellow Eyes on the tape; Yellow Eyes who had killed Mom and Jess - stepped backwards, lowering his head, then raising his eyes to look at Dean. He screamed, feeling like he was getting stabbed, ripped open at he felt the warm, wet sensation of his own blood dripping down his chest.
“Dean!” he heard Sam yelling, sounding so far away behind the roaring in Dean’s ears. “No!”
“Dad!” Dean groaned, begging. “Dad, don’t you let it kill me!” He felt weaker, his body draining. Dean coughed, throwing up blood. He heard Sam yelling for him, Dean turning his head to see his brother against a wall but seemingly unable to move. “Dad… please…” Dean felt his entire body go limp.
“Stop,” John said, his eyes returning to normal. “Stop it.” Dean fell to the floor as Sam rushed to a table, grabbing a gun and pointing it at John just as his eyes went yellow again. “You kill me you’ll kill Daddy too.”
“I know.” Sam’s voice was cold. He squeezed the trigger, shooting John in the leg, blue lightning dancing across his body as John fell to the floor. Dean heard movement and was vaguely aware of Sam being near. “Oh, God, you lost a lot of blood.”
His voice was weak. “Where’s Dad?”
“He’s right here, Dean.”
“Go check on him.”
Sam obeyed quickly, rushing over to his father. “Dad? Dad?”
John woke up with a gasp. “Sammy, it’s still alive! It’s inside me, I can feel it. You shoot me! You shoot me in the heart, son!” Sam was crying, and Dean was surprised to notice that he was too. He watched his brother raise the gun, cocking it. “Do it now!” John yelled.
Dean panicked, fearing Sam really would. “Don’t you do it, Sam!”
“You’ve got to hurry!” John urged. “I can’t hold it much longer. Shoot me! Son, I’m begging you. We can end this here and now, Sammy!”
“Sam… no…”
“You do this, Sammy! Sam…” Dad started to scream, the demon pouring out of his mouth in a thick cloud of black smoke.
+
They called the police, Sam leaving an anonymous tip on the machine like he had thought was best, but as it was getting dark, sitting around and wondering what would happen started to drive Dean insane. Leavenworth was only an hour from Lawrence, tops, so he grabbed the police scanner from the shelf in his closet that he’d confiscated and kept from a car he’d scrapped for parts at work, got into the Impala, and drove off.
If he got there and something was happening, the police not taking the tip seriously and ignoring the warning, Dean had no idea what he was going to do. He really hadn’t thought that far. All he knew was that he was going to sit a little ways down from the house and keep an eye on things. And hopefully no one would call the police on an unfamiliar black Chevy Impala with its driver sitting there, staring at a house all night.
Dean wasn’t kidding when he hadn’t thought it through at all. The fact that Mike had always liked to joke that the Impala made Dean look like he was hiding something in the trunk didn’t help. He kind of started to wish that he had told Sam and brought him along, too. Dean may be known for his charm, but his brother could sweet talk his way out of anything, something Dean had always hated growing up.
When he got to Leavenworth, Dean looked at the scrap of paper he’d hastily written the address down on and then looked at the state road map he kept in the glove compartment. What he thought would be a house actually turned out to be a downtown apartment above a restaurant, so Dean parallel parked across the street at a meter, noting the 24-hour convenience store on the corner that would surely have coffee, and waited.
It was nine o’clock when the squad cars showed up. Dean got out of the car, not wanting them to notice him, so he made a point to look like he was walking around, enjoying the evening. He watched the officers go into the restaurant, the owner clearly the woman who lived in the apartment upstairs that Dean was waiting for, so he went into the restaurant, asked for a seat at the bar, and nursed at a beer with a plateful of French fries as he tried his best to keep an eye on Leslie Ewing.
Dean was still there at last call, watching the head chef and wait staff surprise their boss with a birthday cake, the whole restaurant breaking into song. There was a lot of hugging and back clapping, which amused Dean to no end because the two cops that were still there stiffened anytime someone went within six feet of Leslie.
Closing time came at two in the morning, leaving Dean feeling glad that she didn’t die horribly, but also slightly disturbed that he had become obsessed and really had been trying to see something that wasn’t there. He climbed in the Impala, finding that his cell phone had fallen out of his back pocket when he’d climbed out, and that he’d missed a multitude of calls from Sam.
Dean called him back, taken aback when Sam answered on the first ring and sounded perfectly awake. “You can’t just leave a message like a normal person?”
“If you’d answered your phone then I wouldn’t have had to keep calling.” Dean rolled his eyes into the phone, not particularly in the mood for the “I told you so” speech he was bound to be getting from his brother. “We have a problem.”
Those words in the dreadful tone of voice Sam used combined with the fact that calling his brother hadn’t woken him up caused Dean’s back to stiffen. “What is it?”
“Well I went and tried a different database from the one that turned up Leslie Ewing. It turns out she wasn’t the only one in Leavenworth with a birthday today… or I guess yesterday…”
“What do you mean?”
“The first database only had residents that had registered to vote in the city, which doesn’t take into account anyone under the age of eighteen or someone who might be living there but is registered somewhere else.” Dean heard Sam swallow heavily on the other end. “There’s a Sally McIntire, a freshman psychology major at the University of Saint Mary, with a January 11th birthday. Classes start up again for them next week, so it’s possible she would have moved back in a little early.”
Dean stared at the police scanner, turned off and on the floor below the passenger seat. He felt his mouth go dry. “Can you get an address? I’m going to swing by, check things out.”
“You’re going to drive to Leavenworth right now?”
“I’m already in Leavenworth, been here since around eight thirty keeping an eye on Leslie Ewing who, in case you were wondering, is very much alive and had a red velvet birthday cake.” Dean could imagine Sam turning red, giving the phone that bitchy expression he does so well, and trying to choose his words for the lecture he was mentally practicing to give Dean. Not wanting to hear it, Dean broke his brother’s train of thought. “Where does she live, Sam?”
“Berchmans Hall, room 509.”
Dean closed the phone, ending the call. He pulled out of the parking spot, finding the main road and following the signs that pointed in the direction of the college campus. The sirens he could hear as he went through the main entrance weren’t a good sign, Dean following the road to a circle that was packed with emergency vehicles and gawking students. He turned the car around, finding parking across the street from the soccer field. Dean walked over to Berchmans Hall, mimicking the expressions of those around him and trying to blend.
“What’s going on?” he asked one of the students who actually had his camera out and was taking pictures of the scene.
“Some chick was found dead.” The boy’s tone was nonchalant, almost bored. “I guess the lights flickered, so they think she got electrocuted or something and we can’t go in until they get some people to check it out.” He looked away from his camera, turning to stare at Dean. “You think they’ll postpone classes?”
“Maybe,” Dean replied, deciding that the kid was stoned out of his mind.
“Dude that would suck.”
“Getting electrocuted to death?”
“Nuh uh, man - still having classes after some chick got fried in the dorm.” He turned back to the camera, apparently catching sight at the same time as Dean of the EMTs coming out of the dorm, wheeling a gurney that was clearly bearing a body bag. He chose that moment to slip away back to the car, not needing to hear the identity of the dead girl confirmed.
He felt sick to his stomach, stepping away from the Impala to throw up the French fries he’d eaten in the parking lot. Dean heard some people walking back to the dorm he was parked behind, cheering at him, apparently thinking that Dean was trashed out of his mind and that it was cool for him to be puking because of it. Dean dry heaved a few times before his stomach realized it was done, certainly not feeling cool - more feeling like shit because a girl was dead and they hadn’t checked thoroughly enough beforehand to try and stop it.
Dean pulled himself into the Impala, taking a few deep breaths to try and compose himself, get his body to stop shaking. He drove back to Lawrence in silence, getting back to his apartment a little before five. Sam was sitting on his couch when he opened the door. “How long have you been here?”
“Right after you hung up on me. Waited in the hallway until around three when Carmen got in from the hospital and let me in. I told her you went out drinking with some guys from work and would come stumbling in eventually.” Sam looked at Dean nervously. “Is Sally McIntire dead?”
“Yeah, and let me tell you, those liberal arts university kids are a bunch of fuck ups. No joke, the one I talked to was taking pictures.” Dean ran his fingers through his hair. “Is Carmen asleep?”
“Yeah.”
“Good. We’ve got work to do.”
+
They went to Kelly’s Diner, which was practically around the corner from Dean’s apartment and one of the few things open at that hour in the morning. They also had good, cheap food and free wireless, Sam got started, plugging away at his laptop as Dean scowled at the coffee that was placed in front of him, wondering if he would get sick again or if that was all out of his system. He decided his stomach might feel better if there was actually something in it, ordering food and taking note of where the bathroom was just in case.
“So what do we know?” Sam asked, reading the computer screen and hitting a few buttons every now and then, but Dean couldn’t see what he was doing.
“Someone’s going to die in Topeka on the eighteenth if we don’t do anything. And it’ll be their birthday.” Dean stared blankly at the cover of the notebook. “You know what’s freaking me out?” Sam shook his head, seemingly only half listening. “The last death in these cycles is about, oh, thirty minutes north of here and the day after my birthday.”
“You think you’d be a target?”
Dean shrugged. “If the locations were shifted and the days set back one, it’s possible.”
“I don’t think so,” Sam said with such certainty that Dean was taken aback. “See after I talked to you, I figured there had to be a reason that Sally McIntire died and Leslie Ewing didn’t. Whatever’s doing this is being more specific than just towns and birthdays.”
“Could explain the lack of pattern in the years then, right? We’ve got some picky ass killer on our hands.” Sipping at the coffee, Dean grimaced and added some more milk. “Have you figured out what the other, um, prerequisite is?”
“I found something interesting on Sally that also matched Thomas, but since you had the notebook I couldn’t look up the rest of them.”
Dean slid it across the table, watching it stop with an inch or so hanging off the table. “Well? What is it?”
Sam was going through hospital records and patient files through a database that was very illegal and was grounds for dismissal if there was evidence of it being used when presenting a case. Ambulance chasers had gone hi-tech in this day of age, looking at new cases in hospitals without needing to loiter around, waiting for people who had been in accidents and might be willing to sue because the whiplash they developed kept them from working. “The University of Saint Mary had an article about Sally on their website. It mentioned that she was a psychology major, wanted to specialize in child psych, and was already active in the community working with kids who had been abused. More times than not, volunteers in that field have been abused themselves.”
“And you’re saying Thomas Kane was abused, too?”
“He had pictures in his hospital file of suspicious bruising, but he never mentioned abuse.”
“So what about the rest of them?”
“That’s what I’m doing now,” Sam said, pulling up Michaela Johnson’s file. If abuse was the other common factor, it sickened Sam to think about it. These people hadn’t suffered enough growing up, getting abused by friends or family or an adult they thought they could trust, and then they were killed because of it? Going after the abuser he could understand, a sort of revenge mission by an individual or group who decided not to take it anymore, but further victimizing of the victim? No one deserved to die, especially the way these people had. “Everyone this year has had accounts of reported or suspected abuse. Sabrina Belmont had actually been taken away from her alcoholic father as a child and went through the foster care system, moving from home to home until she turned eighteen.”
“Then she has a family of her own, life actually looks pretty good, and some fucker kills her. I don’t get it - what did these people do to make someone decide they needed to die…t?” Dean smiled forcefully at the waitress as she brought their food over. If she had noticed what he was really talking about before trying to cover it up, she didn’t notice. Dean waited until she left, arching an eyebrow at his brother’s food. “What the hell is that?”
“Belgian waffle with blueberries,” Sam supplied.
“And a whipped cream smiley face?”
“I didn’t request the design.”
“I’m still gonna mock you for it, though.” Dean flashed Sam his best shit-eating grin, but his brother was clearly not amused. “So… will you even be able to look up the people that died in the Sixties and earlier?”
“Obviously not since they weren’t computerized back then. At least not without going to the hospital ourselves, pretending to be someone with the authorization to look at old records, possibly a search warrant, and just generally not care about how much legal trouble we could get into if somebody finds out.” Sam paused to take a breath. “They’ve all been consistent so far… Same order of towns, same days of the month, people in specific towns killed on their birthdays… I think it would be safe to assume that this is also consistent since it’s shared with the four people that have been killed so far this year.”
“So that’s a ‘no’ on making fake search warrants?”
“The difficulty of that aside, we wouldn’t even know which hospitals to look in. People do move around, you know. Thomas Kane has been the only one this year to actually grow up in Kansas.” Sam closed his computer, shifting his attention to the waffle in front of him, smearing the whipped cream smiley face with the side of a butter knife so he didn’t have to keep hearing Dean snicker about it. “What are we supposed to do now?”
“Figure out who’s next, I suppose. Then figure out who’s behind it all, maybe try and stop them before they can get to the person in Topeka. You got nothing better to do, right?”
Sam chewed thoughtfully, thinking about where he might be able to gather clues to figure out who was responsible. “Where’s Michaela Johnson’s car?”
“Scrap yard I’d imagine since the police closed the case. Why?”
“It’s the most readily accessible evidence we have. You’d be able to tell if anything has been tampered with, right?”
Dean had to admit that Sam had a good point. He hadn’t even considered trying to look at the car up close and personal. Granted, he also wasn’t a detective so looking at crime scenes wasn’t his forte, but he would be able to tell if someone had messed with or rigged something to the car to create the amount of electricity needed to kill Michaela Johnson as quickly and burn her as severely as it had. “I suppose so.” He pulled his cell phone out of his jacket pocket, scrolling through the address book until he found Jim’s number. “I have a connection down there - tows cars over to the shop when I need parts. I’ll just tell him I’m stocking up for the next time it snows and the college kids smash up their Volkswagens.” Dean got up from the booth, motioning to his brother that he’d be right back as he went outside to talk to Jim, not wanting to be that rude asshole in the diner at six in the morning being more awake than he had a right to be.
Sam ate his waffle in relative silence, the diner mostly empty with the exception of a couple people at the counter who had either just got off work or were about to start. Sam wasn’t sure what his brother had gotten into and then dragged him into, knowing it was impossible for just over one hundred years of deaths to be caused by the same person. What seemed more likely to Sam was that maybe there was an original killer who got caught and sent to jail for the rest of his life or executed, and then every now and then someone who was angry and looking for an excuse would hear about him, decide to be a copycat.
He was worried, though, remembering the djinn, the conversations he had with Dean that his brother couldn’t remember. Maybe that stuff really was real. Maybe the djinn and the girl had really been there, and the djinn could, like, teleport them out of there when his hideout had been discovered or whatever. Djinn and genies of folklore could disappear in a blink of an eye, reappear somewhere else halfway across the world. Legends like that always had some basis in truth, and maybe it was closer to the story than anyone ever realized. Maybe the stories had originally been fact and started to get played off as fiction to make people feel safe, so they wouldn’t really worry about the monster in the closet.
Sam shook the thoughts away as Dean came back into the diner, triumphant. He slid back into the booth, grabbing a fork and enthusiastically getting to work on his breakfast. “Jim’s gotta go find it and then fill out some paperwork, but it’ll be at the shop tomorrow.”
“Isn’t Mike going to want to know why it’s there?”
Dean shrugged. “Last year some KU frat wanted a junker for a fundraiser. It was like you give them a dollar and you got one swing with a mallet. Money went to a charity, college students got to smash the hell out of a car. Had to take off the windows and strip the parts worth saving, empty out all the lines and remove the engine. Can let them have this one, too, when we’re done with it.”
“Won’t someone notice?” Sam asked, seeing a flaw in the plan. “Michaela went to KU. I doubt her friends would appreciate people paying to dent up the car she died in.”
“If I remove the plates and bumper stickers, strip the paint, and take out the car seats, it’ll be indistinguishable.”
Dean didn’t seem worried, but Sam couldn’t help it. It wasn’t necessarily the car as much as the prospect of working with a deadline, a deadline that would end up with someone getting killed if it passed before they figured things out. He opened his laptop back up, searching Topeka for a list of residents who would be having a birthday next Thursday. He used the better database that would include people not registered to vote in the city, so mostly minors, and being such a large city as Topeka was, the database returned with over two hundred results.
“This is going to take a little longer,” he told Dean. “There are a lot of people I’m going to have to crosscheck with hospital records.” Sam looked at Dean, just thinking of something. “What if there’s more than one person with a birthday Thursday who has been abused?”
“I don’t even know,” Dean replied, “so I’m just going to hope that’s not how it’ll turn out.”
+
He’s in a junkyard working on the Impala. Something tells Dean that he’s spent a lot of time out here lately, feeling like shit, and the Impala looking like he took her completely apart. Sam was pacing, and it was making him nervous.
“You were right.”
“About what?” Dean asked, although he didn’t really care.
“About me and Dad. I’m sorry that the last time I was with him I tried to pick a fight. I’m sorry that I spent most of my life angry at him. For all I know he died thinking that I hate him, so… You’re right. What I’m doing now… It’s too little, too late.” Sam paused for a moment, Dean feeling torn somewhere between punching his brother and wanting to cry. “I miss him. I feel guilty as all hell, and I’m not all right. But neither are you. That much I know.” Dean could see Sam’s reflection in the windshield of the Impala, Sam staring at his back like he was expecting him to say something, to open up. Dean wasn’t going to let him have it. “I’ll let you get back to work.”
Dean watched Sam leave, motionless until he heard the screen door slam shut. He walked slowly, purposefully over to a crowbar that was mixed in with other tools he had strewn about on the ground, feeling the weight of it in his hands, before raising it over his head. Dean smashed the crowbar into the Impala’s trunk over and over and over. He did it out of anger; he did it out of despair; he did it because he wanted to hurt someone he loved and all that was left was Sam and that car.
Part 7 - Part 8 - Part 9 - Part 10