SPN FIC - Bus Me (Part 2 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.
Part 1 is here.
"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 2940 words
BUS ME
By Carol Davis
By the time they reached the parking lot - Dean barefoot, in hastily-pulled-on jeans and his COUNTRY IS AS COUNTRY DOES t-shirt - the screaming had morphed into a piercing shriek-sob that revived Sam's dormant headache quite nicely. Its source was a doughy woman in baggy green sweats, hands pressed to her cheeks, tears dripping off her chin.
"Rickeeeeeeee!" she howled. "RICKEEEEEEEEEE!"
She was some distance from the bus, in the middle of the narrow stretch of lawn in front of the motel. What she was howling at was a mystery; there was no one standing - or lying - anywhere near her, although a scattering of curious onlookers had begun to drift out of the motel to see what was going on.
"Ma'am?" Sam said as he and Dean approached her. "Ma'am, are you all right?"
"He's GOOOOOOONE!" she screeched.
"Who, ma'am? Your husband?"
She peered at him from the gap between her hands, struck silent at least for the moment. Snot began to dribble out of her nose, and she swiped at it with the back of one hand. "My Ricky," she mourned. "My aaaaaaangel."
The word made both Sam and Dean grimace.
"Maybe he went for a walk," Dean suggested.
She moaned, a single note that sounded like it had risen up from the depths of a bass tuba. "I brought him out. It's my fault. I brought him out, so he could do his tiddlies on the grass. I shouldn't have done it. He doesn't know where he is. Rickeeeeee…."
"His…tiddlies?" Dean hissed at Sam.
Suddenly, the woman's dismay made sense, as Sam recalled a bright orange tote bag and a pair of tiny eyes peering out from underneath the flap. "Ma'am?" he said. "Is Ricky your dog?"
"Of course he's my dog!" she wailed.
Then, her legs folded underneath her. Whether she'd done that deliberately or not wasn't clear, but she ended up on her sweatpantsed butt on the damp grass, legs splayed out in front of her, hands again pressed to her eyes. As she sobbed, the looky-loos who'd come out of the motel began to move closer. Some of them were people Sam recognized from the bus; the rest were strangers, including half a dozen men in the gray wool uniforms of the Confederate Army.
Sam raised a brow at his brother.
"Dude," Dean said. "Battle of New Market. Eighteen sixty-four. Reenactment every week during the summer. Read the brochures."
"You need help here?" one of the Confederates asked. "This lady need help? I'm an EMT."
"She lost her dog," Dean told him.
The Confederates sprang quickly into action, fanning out across the parking lot. The one who'd spoken called out orders to the rest, and their cries of "Here, doggie!" and "Here, pup, pup, pup" rang out into the night.
Relieved of responsibility, Sam and Dean moved off to one side, where they could observe the action and speak without being overheard.
"Could be pulling a Lassie," Dean said. "Headin' back home. Workin' on four-inch legs, it oughta make it in eight or nine years."
"It's probably hiding under a car."
"Or underneath the haunted bus."
"If it heads for the road -"
"Yeah," Dean said. "Don't go there."
According to Dean, all the injuries (and the one near-death) associated with Bus #3874 had occurred shortly after one a.m. Most of them had happened while the bus was en route from one place to another, but a few had occurred while the bus was parked for the night, including the near-strangling of a teenage girl who had crept out to the bus with her boyfriend for - in Dean's words - "a little private whoop-de-do." As it was only a little after nine o'clock, the odds were slim that the bus had anything to do with Ricky's disappearance.
Whatever the reason, the little dog was out there alone, probably scared out of its tiny doggie mind.
"Why would somebody bring a damn dog on a bus trip?" Sam sighed.
"Dude," Dean smirked. "I brought you."
The headache had Sam's thoughts in enough of a vise grip that all he could do was let out another sigh. "I'm gonna go look for the dog," he told his brother.
Half an hour of searching turned up no sign of Ricky; all it produced was a lot of shouting, the trampling of all the flower beds surrounding the motel, and the gathering of almost a hundred people, including almost everyone from the Dollywood tour, all of it accompanied by wild spasms of grief from Ricky's owner. Sam returned from a long, careful sweep of the motel grounds to find the woman surrounded by half a dozen people, all of them patting and comforting her - and his brother, near the motel's entrance door, surrounded by a group of a similar size.
"We got a problem here," Dean announced when Sam got close enough to hear him.
"You think?" Sam said.
Dean shook his head. "Evelyn's missing."
"Who? Wait - you mean Evelyn from the bus?"
"No, I mean Evelyn from the cast of Are You Paying Attention? Of course I mean Evelyn from the bus. Nobody can find her."
Small blessings, Sam thought.
"We tried her room," said a woman Sam realized was Lavender Hair's friend Gladys, now dressed in a voluminous plaid flannel nightgown and a bright yellow windbreaker. "She's not there. Her luggage is there, but there's no sign of her."
"Is she kidnapped?" piped another woman.
"That's not -" Sam said. "No."
"Are you sure?"
"Let's not go all crazy about this," Dean told her gently. "She's around somewhere."
"Bar," Sam said.
"Noooooo," said the woman, mouth forming a small "O". "Evelyn?"
The eyes of everyone surrounding Dean - save for Sam, and Dean himself - had opened wide, to the point that Sam could almost see through them to the whirlwind of gossip swirling in each person's mind. He felt a twinge of sympathy for the absent (if annoyingly loud) Evelyn, but pushed it aside in favor of seizing his brother by the arm and steering him away from the crowd, to a spot just a few yards from the dark and silent bus.
"Missing dog?" Sam said. "Now, missing woman?"
"It's too early," Dean said, but he didn't sound convinced.
"We need to get these people out of the parking lot, so we can scour that bus."
"We could do the badge thing."
"I don't know, man. There's an awful lot of people here. Do we need a hundred people with cell phones thinking we're Feebs? Including the Army of the Confederacy? The point of all this was to stay under the radar for a while."
"Hmm."
"What, hmm? Are you -"
Dean waved Sam off and walked over to the lawn in front of the motel entrance, where a slight rise put him a step above most of the milling motel guests. He reminded Sam of a summer camp counselor as he clapped his hands to get everyone's attention, then announced with a broad and chipper smile, "Here's what we're gonna do. We're gonna head back to our rooms, so everybody's where they're supposed to be. Who's got Evelyn's cell phone number?"
Several people waved.
"Excellent. Excellent. Okay, Dottie. And - Lurleen? You call her, let's say every fifteen minutes. Me and Sam, here, we're gonna work with the motel staff. Check all the public areas, stairwells, and so on. Everybody else should get some rest. We've gotta be up bright and early in the morning."
"What if we can't find her?" someone called out.
Someone else broke out of the crowd and strode across the lot to where Dean was standing. He was out of uniform, dressed now in baggy jeans and a Philadelphia Phillies sweatshirt, but Sam recognized him immediately as the bus driver. The man murmured something to Dean that prompted Dean to frown, then nod.
"We're goin' to Dollywood!" Dean whooped to the crowd.
That didn't go over as well as he might have hoped. "Without Evelyn?" someone said.
Curious, Sam walked over closer to his brother and the driver. "This ain't the damn Corps," the man was saying. "We don't operate on a 'no man left behind' policy, and she knows that. She ain't turned up by eight a.m., we board the bus and we head on without her."
"That's kind of -" Sam began.
"It's business, is what it is. We got forty-six people here, paid eight hundred bucks apiece to go to damn Dollywood, including the two o' you. You figure the company wants to refund all that money? You figure that, and you would be dead wrong."
"And the dog?"
"Dog worth thirty-six thousand dollars?"
His point made, the man strode off toward the front door of the motel. Sam and Dean watched him go, both of them frowning.
"There a bar near here?" Sam asked after a minute.
"No," Dean said. "I checked. Closest one's not within walking distance. And the restaurant's been closed since nine."
"Maybe she called a cab."
Slowly, Dean's attention drifted over to the bus.
They had to wait until the crowd in the parking lot had, one by one, drifted back inside the motel. Ricky's grieving owner was one of the last to go, moving on trembling legs, supported by a pair of her fellow travelers and weeping with every step she took. Once everyone was gone, Dean beckoned Sam around to the far side of the bus, where he'd left one of the sliding windows not quite latched. It opened easily, and with a boost from Sam, Dean was able to clamber inside and open the door so Sam could join him.
Before Sam could ask about retrieving equipment from their motel room, Dean had popped open the overhead bin and pulled out a brown paper bag he'd apparently shoved into its depths sometime during the day.
EMF meter. Salt. A handful of iron nails.
"Nice," Sam said.
"Be prepared, Sammy. Always be prepared."
That seemed to be the philosophy of everyone on the tour; despite the massive quantities of belongings they'd all lugged into the motel, the bus was still littered with throw pillows, bags of snacks, hats and caps, Tennessee guidebooks, extra shoes, and a myriad of items Sam didn't bother to identify. More to satisfy his curiosity than anything else, he began to check underneath the seats for the missing Ricky as Dean ran the EMF meter down the length of the bus.
Neither one of them had any luck, although Sam did discover a suspicious stain. One of Ricky's "tiddlies," he guessed.
"Bus company turned this thing inside out after the last 'situation'," Dean told him. "Or they said they did. Kinda have my doubts."
"What were they looking for?"
"Busted seat-back latches. Anything somebody could gouge themselves on. Leaks in the exhaust system."
"Still smells like a bus."
"No kidding."
Sam thought back to what Dean had told him about the various incidents involving the bus. There seemed to be no pattern to the events, other than their late-night timing; three of the victims had been male, the other two female. They'd been sitting in different seats, and their injuries had taken place throughout the calendar year. One near-strangling, an eye lost to a protruding metal bracket, a crushed hand, carbon monoxide poisoning, and a fall resulting in a minor concussion and deep lacerations. The bus company (and its insurance carrier) had put them all down as accidents - but the fact that they had all occurred on the same vehicle marked them as highly unusual, particularly since the company's overall safety record was remarkably good.
"Where were they going?" Sam asked. "The previous victims."
"Two casino trips. A flower show. A ballgame. And -" Dean chewed his lower lip, thinking. "Amish country."
"Weird, for a spirit."
"Going to Amish country?"
"Being random like that."
"Yeah. The only thing all the accidents had in common was, they all happened -"
"On this bus."
"Freakin' spirits," Dean sighed. "Look - we've still got a while before anything's supposed to start happening. If it happens at all. I'm gonna go see if anybody's had any luck figuring out where the hell Evelyn went. Or that friggin' dog. You gonna go back to the room?"
Sam shook his head. "I think I'll stay here for a while. See if I get any…spirit vibes."
"Don't vanish on me."
"I'll do my best."
Sam watched through the window as Dean padded back across the parking lot to the motel. He was still visible in the lobby, talking to the front desk clerk - flirting with the front desk clerk - for a couple of minutes, then he moved out of sight.
Even with the door left open a couple of inches, the interior of the bus was as quiet as a tomb.
Standing near the seat he'd occupied for most of the day, Sam took a long look around the vehicle's deeply shadowed interior, picking out one by one the spots where the various accidents had occurred. There was no logic to it at all, no message that made sense. A protruding bracket near the rest room door. A loose overhead bin door that had crushed a man's hand, midway up the aisle. Carbon monoxide filtering in from underneath the passenger cabin, though no one could find a leak or a crack. The woman who'd fallen in the aisle claimed she'd tripped over a "ripple" in the floor, but no one could locate that, either.
The girl who'd almost strangled said her head had been pushed into the gap between an armrest and the seat back.
None of the victims had seen a spirit manifest.
At least, none of them had mentioned anything like that.
What he and Dean should have done, he decided, was disable the bus so it couldn't be used, at least for a while (a task Dean's mechanical skills would have made short work of); then track down each of the victims and interview them. Find out what they'd really seen, or felt. Instead, Dean had decided that they needed to see the bus in action. Ride the damn thing all the way to Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, on the off chance that the spirit would decide to wreak some more havoc while they were aboard.
Or maybe that wasn't it at all.
These past six - almost seven - years, Sam had seen sides of his brother he hadn't realized even existed. He'd seen a Dean who was compassionate and caring with children; one who worked well (and happily) as part of a team. One who idolized people other than their father.
It could well be that Dean had asked Frank Devereaux to sign them up for this bus trip not so they could track down a violent spirit, but so they could spend a few days in the enthusiastic company of people who thought ghosts were make-believe. People who were willing to spend six days riding a bus to Pigeon Forge, Tennessee simply so they could soak up a little stardust. So they could listen to country music, buy kitschy souvenirs, and eat funnel cakes and barbeque.
Maybe there was no spirit. Maybe what had happened on this bus had simply been a series of unfortunate accidents.
Sam checked his watch; it was a little past ten-thirty. That allowed enough time for a little rest before he and Dean would need to come back out to the bus and see if anything happened - anything at all - between one and two in the morning. Happy with the idea of stretching out on the bed and doing nothing but resting for a couple of hours, Sam slipped out of the bus, careful to leave the door slightly ajar, and walked across the now-quiet parking lot and into the lobby of the motel.
The desk clerk, a blonde who looked to be in her mid-twenties, was alone at her post, examining something on her computer terminal. She looked up as Sam approached, gave him a cheerful smile, and asked, "How can I help you?"
"You were talking to my brother a little while ago," Sam said.
She flushed a little, a response that came as no surprise to Sam. "Dean?" she said. "He's your brother?"
Sam nodded. "Did he happen to say where he was going?"
"Back up to his room, I think. He said he needed shoes."
"He needs more than that."
A squeaky giggle got out before she could stop it. "Anything else?" she asked, still flustered. "Extra towels? Some bottled water?"
"No. Thank you."
"Tell Dean I said 'good night'."
"I - sure. I will."
If he'd discovered new things about Dean over the past few years, some things remained resolutely the same. Shaking his head in a mixture of exasperation and amusement, Sam nodded a goodbye to the clerk, walked down the long hallway to the rear wing of the motel and took the stairs two at a time up to the second floor. Since it had been a while since Dean had left the lobby, Sam wasn't surprised to find their room unoccupied.
What did puzzle him was that Dean's boots sat where he'd left them, when he'd undressed to take his shower.
Frowning, Sam pulled his cell from his pocket and called Dean's phone.
After ringing half a dozen times, the call went to voice mail.
"Dean?" Sam said into the phone. "Where'd you go, man? Call me back."
He was still frowning as he ended the call and sat down on the end of the bed. Something told him he wasn't going to get a return call.
And he didn't.
Part 3...