SPN FIC - Bus Me (Part 1 of 4)
It's been a long six months, hiding out in abandoned houses, eating cold Hot Pockets and mourning the loss of the ones they love. So Dean signs himself and Sam up for what amounts to a little R&R: a six-day chartered bus tour. On a haunted bus. Destination: Dollywood. But what starts out as a simple case (a series of mysterious injuries that all took place on the bus) turns into something more, when one of their fellow travelers disappears ... and so does Dean.
"Hey," Dean said, raising a finger that he waggled in Sam's face. "No dissing of Dolly Parton. Woman's an American icon. Queen of country music. Sold a hundred and seventy-four million records. Tell me that's not friggin' awesome."
CHARACTERS: Dean, Sam, various OCs
GENRE: Gen
RATING: PG
SPOILERS: None
LENGTH: Remains to be seen; this part is 2994 words
BUS ME
By Carol Davis
"No," Sam said.
"Not an option," Dean told him. "Frank's got it all set up. Two tickets. Round trip, all-inclusive. We're going."
"No we're not."
For all it affected Dean, Sam might as well have been reciting a page from the local phone book. In fact, there was something that looked suspiciously like a smile taking shape on Dean's face as he pushed open the door on his side of the car and climbed out into the early morning sunshine. By the time Sam joined him at the rear of the car, where Dean was unloading duffels of clothing and supplies, Dean had actually begun to whistle.
"Gonna remind you," Dean said amiably, "you dragged my ass onto a haunted plane. Miles above the earth, Sammy. On a plane that was going to crash."
"So a haunted bus is better?"
"Haunted bus doesn't leave the ground. And if worse comes to worse, I know how to drive the thing."
"No," Sam said.
"Not an option."
"Let somebody else do it."
"Told you. Tickets are all paid for. Non-transferrable."
"Let Frank do it."
Eyebrow raised, Dean shoved one of the duffels against Sam's chest and held it there until Sam gave in and took hold of it. Once he'd closed and locked the trunk, Dean hung the two remaining duffels over his shoulders and shifted until the straps settled comfortably into place. "Frank," he pointed out, "would be having the screaming heebie-jeebies before they even leave the parking lot. Buck up, Sammy. It's a job. Pretty simple job, from the looks of it."
"Simple," Sam echoed.
"Mm-hmm. You. Me. One pissed-off spirit."
"And that," Sam said, pointing toward the small, faux-log-walled building down at the street end of the parking lot - the main office of Northeast Adventure Tours, where a crowd had been gathering for the past twenty minutes. A crowd that currently numbered between forty and fifty people.
None of whom was under the age of sixty.
"Six days on a bus, Dean," Sam said.
"Helping people, Sam. Or do you want somebody else to get hurt? Or killed? We gotta take care of this thing. Besides - the bigmouths'll never think to look for us on a tour bus."
"Have you ever been on a bus?"
"The hell kind of question is that? Of course I've been on a bus, asshat."
Sam spent a long, quiet minute considering his brother. Not the faux-log building, or the people gathered around it; just his brother.
"Fine," he said through clenched teeth. "We'll go."
"Atta boy," Dean beamed.
"Six days. On a bus tour to freaking Dollywood."
"Hey," Dean said, raising a finger that he waggled in Sam's face. "No dissing of Dolly Parton. Woman's an American icon. Queen of country music. Sold a hundred and seventy-four million records. Tell me that's not friggin' awesome."
"Christo," Sam said.
"You're hilarious."
Dean was undaunted. Whistling again - a tune that Sam thought was familiar, but couldn't identify - and with Sam reluctantly trudging along a few steps behind him, Dean made his way across the parking lot, wove into the fringes of the crowd and dropped his duffels in an available spot near the PLEASE BOARD BUS HERE sign.
Why the hell Dean was so tickled about this whole thing, Sam couldn't imagine.
Prank?
Had to be. That was the only possible explanation.
A very involved prank, though. And an expensive one: the tickets were eight hundred dollars apiece, although Frank Devereaux might well have manipulated payment in a way that didn't actually cost anyone anything.
"Isn't it a beautiful morning??" a voice chirped at Sam.
He looked.
He had to look down. Way down. Peering up at him from beneath a huge cloud of lavender-washed hair was a small, stout woman in a bright pink pants suit. "My goodness, you're tall!" she squeaked, patting him enthusiastically on the wrist. "Just look at you! Now, you'll need to ask Evelyn right away to give you a seat up front, so you've got room for those legs. Dottie always sits behind the driver, and Evelyn on the other side, but you tell her you need that leg room, and she'll find herself another spot. She's good like that. Always takes good, good care of her entourage."
"Entourage?" Sam said.
"Us, silly. Now…oh. Where are your bags?"
Sam shifted the duffel.
"That's all? Oh, my. You travel light, don't you? You'll be able to put that right up in the overhead bin."
Nodding - and doing his best to maintain a reasonably neutral expression - Sam muttered an excuse me, then threaded his way through the crowd until he reached his brother, who was munching on a powdered-sugar donut he had apparently conjured out of nowhere. "Do me a favor," Sam said close to Dean's ear. When Dean raised a brow in question, Sam said, "Kill me now."
"Still? I thought you were on board with this."
"I said I'd go. I didn't say I'd -"
"Now, aren't you two just handsome together?"
Sam looked down. Sure enough, the lavender-haired woman was once again standing within patting distance. When she turned her wattage on Dean, Dean saluted her with what remained of the donut. "Gladys!" she trilled. "Come see these two boys. Aren't they just the handsomest thing you've ever seen?"
Gladys was somewhat taller than her friend, but no less garishly dressed; her choice of traveling outfit was a puffy black skirt, white blouse and colorfully embroidered vest. It made her look as if she'd walked straight out of The Sound of Music.
"This is Gladys," Lavender Hair announced.
"Dean," Dean said around a mouthful. "That's Sam."
Instead of responding with Hello or Good morning or My goodness, aren't you tall!, Gladys began to croon, "Helllllo, young looooovers, wheeeeerever -"
"Brother," Sam cut in. "He's my brother."
"Oh," said Gladys.
~~~~~~~~
As if he'd taken a chartered bus tour every week of his life (and when Dean would have ever taken one, Sam couldn't imagine, unless it had been during the two years they'd been incommunicado, while Sam was at Stanford), Dean plunged onto the bus, a duffel braced securely against each hip. Obviously, he intended to pick a seat somewhere in the middle, but Sam yanked him back and pointed him toward one of the two seats up front, opposite the driver.
"Already taken," Dean said.
"Don't care. Not riding for six days in the fetal position."
"More fun in the back, Sam."
There'd been a bus, ten years ago, one that crossed six states in three days. Ten years had gone by, but Sam could still remember the smell of it, and the neglected, worn-out look of all the small stations he'd studied through a dirty window. The bus he'd boarded six years ago to head back to California had been no better, no more encouraging.
If there'd been any fun happening on either of those buses, he hadn't seen it.
With a shrug of concession, Dean snaked his way back past Sam, slipped into the open space between the front seats and the railing, and addressed someone still standing outside the bus. "Got a Sasquatch in here! We good up front?" The answer was apparently yes, because Dean quickly set about transferring the collection of belongings that had been stashed on the front seats to a pair of seats two rows back. That done, he shoved his duffels into the overhead bin, then plopped into the seat closest to the window. "Park it," he told Sam. "You're holding up the line."
They'd been among the first few to board, so once he was seated - and grateful for the leg room, though he didn't admit that to Dean - Sam was able to watch a remarkable parade of people work their way past him toward the rear of the bus. A microcosm of America, he remembered one of his professors saying, and they were indeed that - despite their all being elderly. Tall, short, heavy, thin, black, white, Asian, Hispanic, male and female…
And all carrying an astounding amount of stuff.
Pillows. Blankets. Tote bags of all possible sizes and shapes. Coolers both large and small. Books and magazines, hats and jackets and extra shoes, cookies and boxes of donuts, bottles of water and soda, laptop computers, an iPad or two.
Alongside Sam, Dean chuckled softly. "Take a look. Stowaway."
A tiny dog, peering out from under the flap of a day-glo orange tote bag.
One of the men was toting a ghetto blaster the size of which Sam hadn't seen since the early Nineties.
Finally, all the passengers were aboard and settled, and the bus was filled with a drone of anticipatory conversation that sounded to Sam very much like the sound of a swarm of killer bees preparing to attack. "We could drive alongside the bus," he hissed to Dean, but Dean waved him off, snuggling happily into his seat as he bit into another donut he'd pulled out of thin air. Before Sam could put together another suggestion (one that might have involved hurling Dean, or himself, or both of them, off the bus and over the edge of the nearest cliff), a tall, gray-haired woman in black slacks and a mustard-colored blazer hurtled up the steps onto the bus, took up a position inches from Sam, and bellowed out,
"ARE WE READY FOR DOLLY????!!!???"
The bus erupted in cheers.
Then the chanting began.
"Dol-ly. Dol-ly! DOL-LY! DOL-LY!"
Beside Sam, Dean was pumping his powdered-sugar-covered fist into the air. Beaming. Chanting. "DOL-LY! DOL-LY! DOL-LY!"
Dream, Sam though desperately. Please, God, tell me I'm dreaming this.
"Roll with it," Dean told him. "Have a donut."
~~~~~~~~
Somewhere south of Kingston, the Bingo cards came out.
The woman in the ugly blazer - whose nametag confirmed that she was Evelyn, distributor of seat assignments - did her number-calling alongside Sam's left shoulder, with the aid of a PA system Sam saw no need for, as Evelyn's natural lung power would have allowed for her to be heard in the Philippines.
Dean won a COUNTRY IS AS COUNTRY DOES t-shirt.
Sam felt the beginnings of the first migraine he'd had in five years.
~~~~~~~~
"You okay?" Dean asked his brother in the men's room of a Trav-L-Stop off the Jersey Turnpike, the bus company's obviously carefully selected food-and-toilet-break destination.
The question might have indicated that Dean hadn't actually looked at Sam any time during the past three hours, but there was a deep and honest concern etched into the furrow between his eyebrows. "Been better," Sam muttered.
They'd passed a gift shop on the way into the men's room. Idly, Sam wondered if the shop offered a BEEN TO HELL - THIS IS WORSE t-shirt.
"Food court," Dean said. "We'll get lunch."
"Not really hungry."
"Food's good here."
"You've been here before?"
"Lou and Betty Ann said it's good. Sandwich place down at the end. Good soup. You like soup."
"I'm not five, Dean."
"Yeah, well," Dean said, and sighed. "Quality Inn tonight. Decent beds. Hot shower. Aim for that."
"You honestly thought this was a good idea."
Dean was silent for a minute, studying the apparatus at the rear of the sink, as if he couldn't quite figure out how to turn the water on. He offered himself only the briefest of glances in the mirror before he turned back to Sam. "I honestly thought we need a freaking break. It's six days with normal people, Sam. They're nice people. You smile at 'em and they'll give you snacks."
"Have you done this before?"
Dean hesitated, then admitted, "Long time ago."
"Seriously."
"Lunch," Dean said. "We're supposed to be back on the bus in twenty minutes."
~~~~~~~~
Dean had said nothing about Sam's condition to anyone. He couldn't have; he didn't leave Sam's sight between the time they left the men's room and when they settled back into their seats on the bus. All he did was purchase several bottles of water to take with them, snorting a little at the price, and plow through the rack of sightseeing brochures to give himself something to read during "quiet time."
"There's quiet time?" Sam asked him.
"Quiet" didn't seem to be a concept any of the Dolly fans were familiar with. They talked, they cheered, they hooted, they sang.
Been to Hell, Sam thought as he sank into his seat. This is…
Someone tapped him gently on the shoulder. A white-haired man, offering a bulky set of headphones. "Try these," he told Sam. "They work wonders."
"I -" Sam said. "What?"
"Headache?"
"No. Yes."
Smiling, the old man fitted the headphones over Sam's ears, lifting the left cup long enough to tell him, "They're sound-blocking. Use 'em on planes, usually. You got that look in your eyes. My Dorothy, she'd look like that every time her head was about to split in two." He gave the headphones one last tweak, then patted Sam's shoulder and walked away, toward the back of the bus.
When Sam turned to look at his brother, Dean mouthed the word, "See?"
The headphones were a little tight, but in an odd way, the pressure against the outside of his head began to counteract the pressure that had built up inside. Dean (and Lou and Betty Ann) had been right about the food at the sandwich shop: it had tasted good, if a little bland, going down, and showed no sign of wanting to make a return appearance. So, all things considered, the second leg of the trip started off all right.
With the 'phones on, all he could hear was a white-noise kind of a hum.
He woke up once, to discover that he'd been carefully covered, up to the middle of his chest, with a brightly-colored knitted afghan.
Dean had somehow climbed out of the other seat and was standing in the aisle in the middle of the bus, leading the other passengers in a spirited and entirely off-key rendition of Dolly Parton's "Jolene."
Oh, go on, Sam thought. Tell me this isn't a freaking dream.
He drifted off again.
Somehow back in his seat, Dean nudged Sam back awake sometime after the bus had come to a stop in the parking lot of the Quality Inn. The door was open, allowing fresh, sweet air to drift inside, and Sam pulled in a deep lungful as he lifted the headphones off his head. Some of the passengers had already made their way outside and were milling around near the front of the bus, waiting for the rest of the group to join them.
"Three diamond. Triple-A approved," Dean observed, pointing to the big sign in front of the motel. "Restaurant's got the best crab cakes in the Shenandoah Valley."
"Trickster?" Sam said.
Dean frowned at him. "What?"
"We'll have half an hour to get cleaned up and rest a bit!" Evelyn blared from somewhere behind them. "Then we'll meet at Johnny Appleseed's for your choice of Southern fried chicken or a mouth-watering steak!"
"Are we -" Sam said. "Is this real?"
"Of course it's real. Dude. Crab cakes."
Convincing his legs to allow him to stand, and then walk, took some doing. There was no sign of the white-haired man who had given him the headphones, so Sam stashed them in the overhead bin, then helped Dean collect the duffels, one of which clanked suspiciously because of the weapons concealed inside.
"You see any sign of the -" he whispered to Dean.
"Nah. It's too early, anyway. I figured we'd eat. Chill out for a while. Then come back out when everybody's asleep and go over the bus with a fine-toothed comb."
"GENTLEMEN!"
Yeah. Evelyn.
"Let's be sure not to leave any valuables on board!" she trumpeted. "The bus will be locked overnight, but you just never know, do you?!"
"No, ma'am," Dean agreed. "You sure as hell don't."
~~~~~~~~
Crab cakes and steak. For Dean, two slabs of the restaurant's signature apple pie with dumplings. Hot cups of coffee, an armload of newspapers secured from the motel's sprawling and garish gift shop, a long, relaxing shower. Clean clothes.
Sam lay sprawled on one of the room's two queen-sized beds, one arm flung over his eyes, listening to his brother massacre Dolly Parton's greatest hits, accompanied by the splattering water in the shower. Regretting the absence of the sound-cancelling headphones, Sam sat up after a while and surfed through the channels available on the big flat-panel TV.
It was somewhat of a blessing that Dick Roman didn't appear on any of the news stations.
A mixed blessing, maybe, since they had no idea where Roman was, or what he and his minions were up to.
"Hey!" Dean called from the bathroom. "They got a mini-bar here?"
"No," Sam told him. "There's a fridge, but there's nothing in it."
Dean emerged in a cloud of steam, one of the room's big white towels slung around his hips, another one wrapped turban-style around his head. For Sam's benefit, of course, since one quick scrub with the towel would have dried his short hair. "You sure?" he asked. "Did you look? Sometimes they hide 'em. In the closet or something."
"Why would they hide it? They want you to find the thing, so you'll cough up seven bucks for a bag of M&Ms."
"Huh," Dean said.
Then: "They got ham in the gift shop. You see that?"
"You want to buy a ham?"
"I'm just saying."
"Noted, then," Sam sighed. "You can buy a whole ham in the gift shop."
He went back to surfing channels as Dean made a show of sorting through the contents of his duffel, laying some of it out on the bed after he'd checked it for stains and lingering smells. "We oughta do laundry," he commented. "They got laundry here?"
"I don't know, man."
"'Cause I need -"
That was all Dean got out.
The terrified, resounding scream coming from the parking lot cut off the rest.
Part 2…
"Hey," Dean said, raising a finger that he waggled in Sam's face. "No dissing of Dolly Parton. Woman's an American icon. Queen of country music. Sold a hundred and seventy-four million records. Tell me that's not friggin' awesome."
CHARACTERS: Dean, Sam, various OCs
GENRE: Gen
RATING: PG
SPOILERS: None
LENGTH: Remains to be seen; this part is 2994 words
BUS ME
By Carol Davis
"No," Sam said.
"Not an option," Dean told him. "Frank's got it all set up. Two tickets. Round trip, all-inclusive. We're going."
"No we're not."
For all it affected Dean, Sam might as well have been reciting a page from the local phone book. In fact, there was something that looked suspiciously like a smile taking shape on Dean's face as he pushed open the door on his side of the car and climbed out into the early morning sunshine. By the time Sam joined him at the rear of the car, where Dean was unloading duffels of clothing and supplies, Dean had actually begun to whistle.
"Gonna remind you," Dean said amiably, "you dragged my ass onto a haunted plane. Miles above the earth, Sammy. On a plane that was going to crash."
"So a haunted bus is better?"
"Haunted bus doesn't leave the ground. And if worse comes to worse, I know how to drive the thing."
"No," Sam said.
"Not an option."
"Let somebody else do it."
"Told you. Tickets are all paid for. Non-transferrable."
"Let Frank do it."
Eyebrow raised, Dean shoved one of the duffels against Sam's chest and held it there until Sam gave in and took hold of it. Once he'd closed and locked the trunk, Dean hung the two remaining duffels over his shoulders and shifted until the straps settled comfortably into place. "Frank," he pointed out, "would be having the screaming heebie-jeebies before they even leave the parking lot. Buck up, Sammy. It's a job. Pretty simple job, from the looks of it."
"Simple," Sam echoed.
"Mm-hmm. You. Me. One pissed-off spirit."
"And that," Sam said, pointing toward the small, faux-log-walled building down at the street end of the parking lot - the main office of Northeast Adventure Tours, where a crowd had been gathering for the past twenty minutes. A crowd that currently numbered between forty and fifty people.
None of whom was under the age of sixty.
"Six days on a bus, Dean," Sam said.
"Helping people, Sam. Or do you want somebody else to get hurt? Or killed? We gotta take care of this thing. Besides - the bigmouths'll never think to look for us on a tour bus."
"Have you ever been on a bus?"
"The hell kind of question is that? Of course I've been on a bus, asshat."
Sam spent a long, quiet minute considering his brother. Not the faux-log building, or the people gathered around it; just his brother.
"Fine," he said through clenched teeth. "We'll go."
"Atta boy," Dean beamed.
"Six days. On a bus tour to freaking Dollywood."
"Hey," Dean said, raising a finger that he waggled in Sam's face. "No dissing of Dolly Parton. Woman's an American icon. Queen of country music. Sold a hundred and seventy-four million records. Tell me that's not friggin' awesome."
"Christo," Sam said.
"You're hilarious."
Dean was undaunted. Whistling again - a tune that Sam thought was familiar, but couldn't identify - and with Sam reluctantly trudging along a few steps behind him, Dean made his way across the parking lot, wove into the fringes of the crowd and dropped his duffels in an available spot near the PLEASE BOARD BUS HERE sign.
Why the hell Dean was so tickled about this whole thing, Sam couldn't imagine.
Prank?
Had to be. That was the only possible explanation.
A very involved prank, though. And an expensive one: the tickets were eight hundred dollars apiece, although Frank Devereaux might well have manipulated payment in a way that didn't actually cost anyone anything.
"Isn't it a beautiful morning??" a voice chirped at Sam.
He looked.
He had to look down. Way down. Peering up at him from beneath a huge cloud of lavender-washed hair was a small, stout woman in a bright pink pants suit. "My goodness, you're tall!" she squeaked, patting him enthusiastically on the wrist. "Just look at you! Now, you'll need to ask Evelyn right away to give you a seat up front, so you've got room for those legs. Dottie always sits behind the driver, and Evelyn on the other side, but you tell her you need that leg room, and she'll find herself another spot. She's good like that. Always takes good, good care of her entourage."
"Entourage?" Sam said.
"Us, silly. Now…oh. Where are your bags?"
Sam shifted the duffel.
"That's all? Oh, my. You travel light, don't you? You'll be able to put that right up in the overhead bin."
Nodding - and doing his best to maintain a reasonably neutral expression - Sam muttered an excuse me, then threaded his way through the crowd until he reached his brother, who was munching on a powdered-sugar donut he had apparently conjured out of nowhere. "Do me a favor," Sam said close to Dean's ear. When Dean raised a brow in question, Sam said, "Kill me now."
"Still? I thought you were on board with this."
"I said I'd go. I didn't say I'd -"
"Now, aren't you two just handsome together?"
Sam looked down. Sure enough, the lavender-haired woman was once again standing within patting distance. When she turned her wattage on Dean, Dean saluted her with what remained of the donut. "Gladys!" she trilled. "Come see these two boys. Aren't they just the handsomest thing you've ever seen?"
Gladys was somewhat taller than her friend, but no less garishly dressed; her choice of traveling outfit was a puffy black skirt, white blouse and colorfully embroidered vest. It made her look as if she'd walked straight out of The Sound of Music.
"This is Gladys," Lavender Hair announced.
"Dean," Dean said around a mouthful. "That's Sam."
Instead of responding with Hello or Good morning or My goodness, aren't you tall!, Gladys began to croon, "Helllllo, young looooovers, wheeeeerever -"
"Brother," Sam cut in. "He's my brother."
"Oh," said Gladys.
~~~~~~~~
As if he'd taken a chartered bus tour every week of his life (and when Dean would have ever taken one, Sam couldn't imagine, unless it had been during the two years they'd been incommunicado, while Sam was at Stanford), Dean plunged onto the bus, a duffel braced securely against each hip. Obviously, he intended to pick a seat somewhere in the middle, but Sam yanked him back and pointed him toward one of the two seats up front, opposite the driver.
"Already taken," Dean said.
"Don't care. Not riding for six days in the fetal position."
"More fun in the back, Sam."
There'd been a bus, ten years ago, one that crossed six states in three days. Ten years had gone by, but Sam could still remember the smell of it, and the neglected, worn-out look of all the small stations he'd studied through a dirty window. The bus he'd boarded six years ago to head back to California had been no better, no more encouraging.
If there'd been any fun happening on either of those buses, he hadn't seen it.
With a shrug of concession, Dean snaked his way back past Sam, slipped into the open space between the front seats and the railing, and addressed someone still standing outside the bus. "Got a Sasquatch in here! We good up front?" The answer was apparently yes, because Dean quickly set about transferring the collection of belongings that had been stashed on the front seats to a pair of seats two rows back. That done, he shoved his duffels into the overhead bin, then plopped into the seat closest to the window. "Park it," he told Sam. "You're holding up the line."
They'd been among the first few to board, so once he was seated - and grateful for the leg room, though he didn't admit that to Dean - Sam was able to watch a remarkable parade of people work their way past him toward the rear of the bus. A microcosm of America, he remembered one of his professors saying, and they were indeed that - despite their all being elderly. Tall, short, heavy, thin, black, white, Asian, Hispanic, male and female…
And all carrying an astounding amount of stuff.
Pillows. Blankets. Tote bags of all possible sizes and shapes. Coolers both large and small. Books and magazines, hats and jackets and extra shoes, cookies and boxes of donuts, bottles of water and soda, laptop computers, an iPad or two.
Alongside Sam, Dean chuckled softly. "Take a look. Stowaway."
A tiny dog, peering out from under the flap of a day-glo orange tote bag.
One of the men was toting a ghetto blaster the size of which Sam hadn't seen since the early Nineties.
Finally, all the passengers were aboard and settled, and the bus was filled with a drone of anticipatory conversation that sounded to Sam very much like the sound of a swarm of killer bees preparing to attack. "We could drive alongside the bus," he hissed to Dean, but Dean waved him off, snuggling happily into his seat as he bit into another donut he'd pulled out of thin air. Before Sam could put together another suggestion (one that might have involved hurling Dean, or himself, or both of them, off the bus and over the edge of the nearest cliff), a tall, gray-haired woman in black slacks and a mustard-colored blazer hurtled up the steps onto the bus, took up a position inches from Sam, and bellowed out,
"ARE WE READY FOR DOLLY????!!!???"
The bus erupted in cheers.
Then the chanting began.
"Dol-ly. Dol-ly! DOL-LY! DOL-LY!"
Beside Sam, Dean was pumping his powdered-sugar-covered fist into the air. Beaming. Chanting. "DOL-LY! DOL-LY! DOL-LY!"
Dream, Sam though desperately. Please, God, tell me I'm dreaming this.
"Roll with it," Dean told him. "Have a donut."
~~~~~~~~
Somewhere south of Kingston, the Bingo cards came out.
The woman in the ugly blazer - whose nametag confirmed that she was Evelyn, distributor of seat assignments - did her number-calling alongside Sam's left shoulder, with the aid of a PA system Sam saw no need for, as Evelyn's natural lung power would have allowed for her to be heard in the Philippines.
Dean won a COUNTRY IS AS COUNTRY DOES t-shirt.
Sam felt the beginnings of the first migraine he'd had in five years.
~~~~~~~~
"You okay?" Dean asked his brother in the men's room of a Trav-L-Stop off the Jersey Turnpike, the bus company's obviously carefully selected food-and-toilet-break destination.
The question might have indicated that Dean hadn't actually looked at Sam any time during the past three hours, but there was a deep and honest concern etched into the furrow between his eyebrows. "Been better," Sam muttered.
They'd passed a gift shop on the way into the men's room. Idly, Sam wondered if the shop offered a BEEN TO HELL - THIS IS WORSE t-shirt.
"Food court," Dean said. "We'll get lunch."
"Not really hungry."
"Food's good here."
"You've been here before?"
"Lou and Betty Ann said it's good. Sandwich place down at the end. Good soup. You like soup."
"I'm not five, Dean."
"Yeah, well," Dean said, and sighed. "Quality Inn tonight. Decent beds. Hot shower. Aim for that."
"You honestly thought this was a good idea."
Dean was silent for a minute, studying the apparatus at the rear of the sink, as if he couldn't quite figure out how to turn the water on. He offered himself only the briefest of glances in the mirror before he turned back to Sam. "I honestly thought we need a freaking break. It's six days with normal people, Sam. They're nice people. You smile at 'em and they'll give you snacks."
"Have you done this before?"
Dean hesitated, then admitted, "Long time ago."
"Seriously."
"Lunch," Dean said. "We're supposed to be back on the bus in twenty minutes."
~~~~~~~~
Dean had said nothing about Sam's condition to anyone. He couldn't have; he didn't leave Sam's sight between the time they left the men's room and when they settled back into their seats on the bus. All he did was purchase several bottles of water to take with them, snorting a little at the price, and plow through the rack of sightseeing brochures to give himself something to read during "quiet time."
"There's quiet time?" Sam asked him.
"Quiet" didn't seem to be a concept any of the Dolly fans were familiar with. They talked, they cheered, they hooted, they sang.
Been to Hell, Sam thought as he sank into his seat. This is…
Someone tapped him gently on the shoulder. A white-haired man, offering a bulky set of headphones. "Try these," he told Sam. "They work wonders."
"I -" Sam said. "What?"
"Headache?"
"No. Yes."
Smiling, the old man fitted the headphones over Sam's ears, lifting the left cup long enough to tell him, "They're sound-blocking. Use 'em on planes, usually. You got that look in your eyes. My Dorothy, she'd look like that every time her head was about to split in two." He gave the headphones one last tweak, then patted Sam's shoulder and walked away, toward the back of the bus.
When Sam turned to look at his brother, Dean mouthed the word, "See?"
The headphones were a little tight, but in an odd way, the pressure against the outside of his head began to counteract the pressure that had built up inside. Dean (and Lou and Betty Ann) had been right about the food at the sandwich shop: it had tasted good, if a little bland, going down, and showed no sign of wanting to make a return appearance. So, all things considered, the second leg of the trip started off all right.
With the 'phones on, all he could hear was a white-noise kind of a hum.
He woke up once, to discover that he'd been carefully covered, up to the middle of his chest, with a brightly-colored knitted afghan.
Dean had somehow climbed out of the other seat and was standing in the aisle in the middle of the bus, leading the other passengers in a spirited and entirely off-key rendition of Dolly Parton's "Jolene."
Oh, go on, Sam thought. Tell me this isn't a freaking dream.
He drifted off again.
Somehow back in his seat, Dean nudged Sam back awake sometime after the bus had come to a stop in the parking lot of the Quality Inn. The door was open, allowing fresh, sweet air to drift inside, and Sam pulled in a deep lungful as he lifted the headphones off his head. Some of the passengers had already made their way outside and were milling around near the front of the bus, waiting for the rest of the group to join them.
"Three diamond. Triple-A approved," Dean observed, pointing to the big sign in front of the motel. "Restaurant's got the best crab cakes in the Shenandoah Valley."
"Trickster?" Sam said.
Dean frowned at him. "What?"
"We'll have half an hour to get cleaned up and rest a bit!" Evelyn blared from somewhere behind them. "Then we'll meet at Johnny Appleseed's for your choice of Southern fried chicken or a mouth-watering steak!"
"Are we -" Sam said. "Is this real?"
"Of course it's real. Dude. Crab cakes."
Convincing his legs to allow him to stand, and then walk, took some doing. There was no sign of the white-haired man who had given him the headphones, so Sam stashed them in the overhead bin, then helped Dean collect the duffels, one of which clanked suspiciously because of the weapons concealed inside.
"You see any sign of the -" he whispered to Dean.
"Nah. It's too early, anyway. I figured we'd eat. Chill out for a while. Then come back out when everybody's asleep and go over the bus with a fine-toothed comb."
"GENTLEMEN!"
Yeah. Evelyn.
"Let's be sure not to leave any valuables on board!" she trumpeted. "The bus will be locked overnight, but you just never know, do you?!"
"No, ma'am," Dean agreed. "You sure as hell don't."
~~~~~~~~
Crab cakes and steak. For Dean, two slabs of the restaurant's signature apple pie with dumplings. Hot cups of coffee, an armload of newspapers secured from the motel's sprawling and garish gift shop, a long, relaxing shower. Clean clothes.
Sam lay sprawled on one of the room's two queen-sized beds, one arm flung over his eyes, listening to his brother massacre Dolly Parton's greatest hits, accompanied by the splattering water in the shower. Regretting the absence of the sound-cancelling headphones, Sam sat up after a while and surfed through the channels available on the big flat-panel TV.
It was somewhat of a blessing that Dick Roman didn't appear on any of the news stations.
A mixed blessing, maybe, since they had no idea where Roman was, or what he and his minions were up to.
"Hey!" Dean called from the bathroom. "They got a mini-bar here?"
"No," Sam told him. "There's a fridge, but there's nothing in it."
Dean emerged in a cloud of steam, one of the room's big white towels slung around his hips, another one wrapped turban-style around his head. For Sam's benefit, of course, since one quick scrub with the towel would have dried his short hair. "You sure?" he asked. "Did you look? Sometimes they hide 'em. In the closet or something."
"Why would they hide it? They want you to find the thing, so you'll cough up seven bucks for a bag of M&Ms."
"Huh," Dean said.
Then: "They got ham in the gift shop. You see that?"
"You want to buy a ham?"
"I'm just saying."
"Noted, then," Sam sighed. "You can buy a whole ham in the gift shop."
He went back to surfing channels as Dean made a show of sorting through the contents of his duffel, laying some of it out on the bed after he'd checked it for stains and lingering smells. "We oughta do laundry," he commented. "They got laundry here?"
"I don't know, man."
"'Cause I need -"
That was all Dean got out.
The terrified, resounding scream coming from the parking lot cut off the rest.
Part 2…