Dean didn't intend to stop the Impala. But something about the mop of hair and the long-legged body reminded him of Sam, and before he knew it, he was turning the wheel into the dirt of the road's shoulder, spraying rocks as he stopped in the twilight.
"Need a ride?"
"Sweet car," the hitchhiker answered, which wasn't really a fucking answer to the fucking question, was it now?
"Ride?" Dean persisted.
The young man opened the door, pitched his huge green duffel in the back and settled his bulk into shotgun as Dean floored the gas pedal.
"Kansas?"
"Driver picks the music," Dean said curtly, wondering whether it was worth the effort to kick the man back out the door and if so whether he should stop first.
"I meant are you going to Kansas," the hitchhiker said amiably.
Dean looked sideways, taking in the brown hair obscuring the man's face and the large hands resting on his knees. Almost as big as Sam, too, and wasn't that just a nice fucking thought when he was trying not to think about Sam.
"Headed that way," he said and scowled just to make sure the hitchhiker got the message that Dean didn't want to make fucking small talk, thank you very fucking much.
Ginormous goddamned hitchhiker didn't get the message from the mug.
"What do you do?" he said.
"Family business," Dean bit off.
"Me, too," Sam's doppelganger said, and Dean reconsidered the angle of boot to butt and whether he could execute a change of foot on the accelerator in the dark to make that happen. Better not to risk it, he reluctantly decided, as the man blabbed on. "But then my brother died about a year ago, and things haven't been the same since. I don't really care where you're headed. Anywhere we stop, I can make do.
"Course, you didn't say where that's gonna be."
"I'll tell you when you get to the end of the line," Dean growled and let quiet fill the car, hoping the stranger would take the fucking hint. He thought it had worked, but after a few miles of darkness, the man spoke up again, letting the words just drop into the middle of the silence.
"We're hunters."
Well, didn't that just fucking change things, Dean thought, mentally shifting his weight off the pistol in the small of his back. He didn't move any muscles, though. If the man was a real hunter, Dean didn't want to tip him off.
"Didn't see a rifle in your gear," Dean offered. "But I 'spect there's not much deer this time of year."
"Not deer," the man said, and Dean wished he had offered the man a drink from his holy water flask just a few miles earlier. "Ghosts."
"Huh," Dean said. He might not sound smart, but at least his mouth wouldn't get him in trouble before he had a chance to do it himself. Which didn't make as much sense as he thought it did when he first had the thought.
But the man didn't say anything else about hunting and a few more dark miles ticked by before he spoke again.
"I guess you're a hunter, too," he said. "Heard about you at Harvelle's. '67 Impala, dark hair, bad attitude."
Dean didn't scowl again, though it was hard. He didn't fucking think he had a bad attitude, and it fucking pissed him off that someone described him that way. He felt his face fall halfway between astonishment and anger. He didn't really know which one would win, so it was just as well the stranger changed the subject.
"My brother had a car like this one," he said. "Sweet cherry ride he inherited from our dad. Treated it like his baby."
"Gotta be careful with the classics," Dean agreed instantly. "Not many of these left."
"Lotta maintenance?"
"You have no idea."
"My brother was always under the hood," the hitchhiker said. "He had me looking online for parts all the time. We carried a few in the trunk, just in case, you know?"
"That's not a bad idea," Dean said thoughtfully. "Nothing like getting stuck in BFE and having to wait on a part. Looking it up on the Net sounds like something my nerd brother would have done."
"You have a brother, too?"
"Had. Gone now."
"Do you miss him?"
Dean missed Sammy. Oh, hell, yeah, he missed him every damn day, but he wasn't about to talk about his feelings with Gigantor the Hitchhiker. Dean scowled at the man again, much fucking good that had done the first time.
This time, the hitchhiker seemed to get the idea and shut the fuck up. Highway markers lined the road like soldiers at a funeral, marching into a nighttime that never seemed to end. Dean shook the thought off and settled down to some steady driving, highway stripes rolling past, engine purring in ageless rhythm. They were outside St. Joe before the stranger broke the hypnotic silence again.
"It's been a year," he said.
"Sorry?"
"A year since my brother died. Tonight's the anniversary."
"Oh. Sorry."
"Yeah, me, too. My brother – he was something else. He taught me how to hustle pool, lie to social workers and do my job without complaining."
"Older brother?"
"Older brother, mother and annoying nag," the stranger agreed.
Dean frowned and shifted, his jeans rubbing against the seat uncomfortably.
"I wanted to do something to honor his memory tonight," the man went on. "Was thinking about taking care of a ghost."
Dean's interest stirred.
"A ghost?"
"Yeah."
Dean waited, but there was no more info forthcoming.
"And?"
"And I'm going to take care of it tonight."
"And that's it? Nothing else?"
"I didn't get the feeling you were interested in hearing about it."
"Well, I am."
What kind of fucking invitation did he have to write to get the guy to talk after he had such a case of diarrhea of the lips earlier?
"So?"
"So tell me about the fucking ghost. What kind is it? Vengeful spirit?"
"Restless dead."
"Restless dead?" Dean felt his lip curl into a sneer. "You're honoring your brother with a candy-ass restless dead call?"
Gigantor turned his head toward Dean in exasperation.
"There are no candy-ass runs. Every run can turn deadly. You should know that. Dad said it enough."
Dean frowned.
"My dad did say that a lot. Yours?"
"It was kinda like one of his 590 rules," the stranger admitted.
Dean chuckled.
"My old man is a drill sergeant at heart, too," he told the guy, hands caressing the wheel a little. "Sammy always hated that."
"Sammy?"
"My kid brother. He and Dad butted heads a lot, mostly because they were so much alike."
"Alike?"
Dean wasn't sure but he thought it sounded like indignation in the stranger's voice.
"Both of them are always so sure they know what's right, and neither one is willing to give an inch," he said. "I kinda thought Sammy would grow out of needing to pick fights with Dad, but he never did. And it wasn't like Dad was going to change. I just wish I could have made Sammy see that before he left."
"He left? I thought you said he was gone."
"Do you see anyone else in this car?"
"Guess not."
Dean punched the stereo off in disgust.
"Then it doesn't really matter whether he left or is gone or fucked off to goddamned Morocco. So how about instead you tell me about this candy-ass restless dead and why you want me to help you."
"Yeah, sure," Bigfoot said, hair flopping in his face as he turned to look out the side window. "The guy we're looking for is a hunter. That's why they told me about it at Harvelle's. They're afraid some amateur is going to get himself blown to bits trying to take this guy down."
"Where are the bones?"
"Cremated, but because this guy is a hunter, part of his soul is still stuck inside one of his belongings."
"Which one?"
"If I knew, I wouldn't need you, would I?"
Well, well, well, it appeared the gigantic stranger had a backbone after all.
"He travels this highway," the hitchhiker said, "and we think he's looking for a job. He was in a car crash, and he can't let go of the idea that he's a hunter."
"So what's the plan?"
"The plan was for me to get you to stop and hope you'll pull over and let me torch the Impala, Dean."
Dean stomped on the brakes, yanked his pistol out of his waistband and pointed it with a calm he didn't feel. The man's enormous hands were in the air. He didn't have a weapon.
"Maybe you'd like to explain that one more time," he suggested.
"I'm sorry, Dean," the man said. "I was driving. It was my fault. If you're going to go vengeful spirit on anyone, well …"
He trailed off and shrugged.
"Keep talking," Dean said. He steadied his grip.
"I was driving," the man said again, shakily. "Dad was in the front seat. You were in the back, injured, and we were going for help. I never saw the semi that T-boned us. Two weeks later, Dad let them turn off the life support. We salted and burned the body they gave back to us, but I guess it wasn't enough.
"About a month later, we started hearing stories about an Impala driving back and forth between Nebraska and Kansas. Nobody has gotten hurt yet, but you know it's only a matter of time. That's the way these things go."
Dean said nothing, but he could feel his anger growing. He never wanted to hurt anyone who didn't deserve it, but there were so many fuckers out there who deserved it. And maybe he was just the fucking guy to take care of all those cocksuckers who needed it, and maybe he could just start with the lying cocksucker right beside him. He breathed deeply, let it out and concentrated on the eyeball he planned to shoot through.
And saw Sammy's eye instead.
Dean's vision wavered as he turned abruptly and put the gun down.
"Please, Dean, let me send you on."
Dean shifted the car into park and rested his head on the wheel. He wouldn't admit those were tears in his eyes. Fucking ghosts couldn't fucking cry.
"I'm dead? Really?"
"I'm sorry, Dean," Sam said. "It was my fault."
"Sounds like it was no one's fault. Breaks of the game," Dean told him, staring at the mud between his boots. It looked so real. The boots looked real. The mud looked real. How could those things be real but not him? But then again, he had been living on borrowed time since the Rawhead. And the shapeshifter. And the fucking airplane. Come to think of it, being alive was really too much to expect.
"All right, so I'm dead," he said. "Why the fuck do you need to torch my baby?"
"I guess too much of it was part of you or you were too much a part of it or maybe too much of your skin and hair are still embedded in it from crash or maybe it's just one of those goddamned things that doesn't make a fucking bit of sense because there's no way I should be sitting here telling my brother he's dead and having to fight with him about it."
Sam paused for a breath.
"The car has to go, Dean."
Dean stroked the wheel again and thought for a while. Sam didn't rush him.
"Not many classics like this left," Dean finally said. "Guess now there'll be one less. All the others just got a boost in value and they won't even know it."
He tried to open the door, but it didn't budge. He rolled down the window and tried to open the door from the outside. Nothing doing. He tried to think of the last time he had been outside of the car. Surely he had needed to get out to eat or drink or – hell – fill up the fucking fuel tank. But ghosts apparently didn't need to do those things.
"Get out, Sammy," he said.
"What?"
"Get out of the car," he repeated and clenched his jaw. "You'll have to do it."
"What?"
"Not sounding like a brainiac there, counselor," Dean said, trying for a smile and a joke, trying to turn on the Good Old Dean charm that used to come out of him like water from a faucet. "I can't get out of the car, so you'll have to torch it while I'm in it."
He pulled the key out of the ignition and tossed it to Sam.
"I promise not to drive away."
Sam stared at him.
"Get out of the fucking car," Dean screamed and then turned his head away. More fucking tears. Who the fuck would have guessed? Dean closed his eyes and listened as the passenger door opened and Sam pulled his bag from the back seat. He heard the gurgling of gasoline and the crunch of salt being poured all over his car's finish, hand-waxed for hours and now ruined and why was he fucking thinking about the fucking paint job right now?
He heard Sam's steps as they neared the driver's side window and opened his eyes.
"You were the best big brother ever," Sam said, and the giant dork had wads of snot blowing out his nose.
"I don't expect I'll be going to heaven after all the things I've done, so I don't expect to see you on the other side. So – goodbye, Sam. Try not to see me around."
He watched Sam flick a lighter and closed his eyes once more as the metal case thudded on the roof.