Title: Note Me, Baby (Part 1 of 2, WIP)
Author: XinaMarieUhl
Category: Gen, Humor, Crack
Rating: PG-13 (fer cussin')
Disclaimer: Just try and get me to claim something. I dare ya.
Summary: Zombies, notes, and a warlock. In Nebraska. Oh my.

Note: Betaed by the incomparable dysonrules, who also encouraged the general weirdness this story has become. Written for the first foundficspn challenge at LiveJournal. Originally, it was going to be a dark and angsty thriller. That plan didn't really work out. I'll make sure that the story is finished by NEXT Thursday. And by the way, the last part will include each of the following elements: orangutans, gibbering, and Teen Beat.

Dean found the note on a Thursday morning, tucked under the Impala's driver's side windshield wiper. He peered at the large, girlish script and read aloud: Your car is ugly.
The letters had been traced over to make them bolder, more easily read. He turned the note over; the back was blank.
"Fuck that!" Dean exclaimed in a gravelly voice. He hadn't even had his first cup of coffee and some kind of bastard was insulting his baby. He looked around the motel parking lot. A scattering of mud-splattered, driverless vehicles were the only occupants. It was almost 6:30 am, way too early for most people to be up.
What kind of fucker would write something like that? He wondered. Obviously someone with no appreciation for the finer things in life.
The hotel door closed with a click and Sam made his way out to the Impala, his hair damp and curling around his neck from a shower. He noticed Dean's frown.
"What's wrong?"
"Nothing," Dean grumped, wadded up the paper and jammed it in the back pocket of his jeans.
He slid into the Impala's smooth leather seats and turned the key, listening with pleasure to the deep powerful rumble of the engine. He sighed.
"You know what, Sam?"
"What?"
"I'm a lucky man." Dean grinned and peeled out of the parking lot.

Later, after eating up 250 miles of blacktop and nearly puncturing a tire on a piece of sheet metal in his lane, Dean pulled into the Roadhouse's parking lot. Feeling suddenly mischievous, he sped up and flipped a donut, sending gravel scattering and dust pluming, before parking.
"Damnit, Dean!" Sam groused, brushing at the front of his dweeby button-down shirt. He was holding a can of Sprite in one hand.
"Spill a little?" Dean inquired. "That's just tragic."
"Bite me," Sam replied.
"You wish."
Dean piled out of the car and stretched, popping vertebra and groaning at how good it felt to move his muscles again.
Inside, after some small talk about Jo ("Nope, haven't seen her since Christmas," Ellen says.) and Ash ("He's at a beekeeper's convention in Wichita. No, seriously.") he and Sammy got down to business.
"What's the news on Barnabas?" Sam asked.
They'd been chasing around after Barnabas the Warlock (somehow, the capital 'W' made him seem like even more of a loser) for a little more than two weeks now with little to show for their efforts. Barnabas's bizarre pastime was reanimating dead barnyard animals. The animals – two cows, a sheep, and a very large, ill-smelling pig – zombied their way around the farms until they literally fell apart, since the zombie action hadn't actually stopped the process of decaying. Sometimes even then the disattached pieces would skitter around on their own, scaring little children and causing pregnant women to go into premature labor. While no one had actually been hurt yet, some honest, unimaginative farming types were getting pretty seriously freaked out.
Apparently, evil was having a slow month.
As Sam kept reminding Dean when he bitched about how this kind of work was frickin' beneath them, neither rain nor sleet nor lame-ass supernatural doings keep a hunter from his work.
So. Turns out that a friend of a friend of a friend's ex in laws noticed a slightly balding, paunchy man in a cape (for Christ's sake) hunting around for the trappings of dark magic: blood from a virgin goat, six hairs from a left-handed, hermaphroditic dwarf, and powdered chicken's beaks. The ingredients hadn't really tipped off the friend of a friend of someone else's friend. The fact that Barnabas was trying to buy them in Bumblefuck, Nebraska, at the local feed shop, did.
"That's the intell you have for us?" Dean asked skeptically.
Ellen, in the middle of polishing a set of shot glasses, shrugged. "What can I say, boys? It's been a slow month."
"Yeah, we know," Sam said, glancing sidelong at his brother.
Out in the car, Sam pulled Bumblefuck up on mapquest (It's Bullsfordville, Dean, you crack smoker. Say it right, will you?) and got directions. Dean put the key in the ignition and, just as he was trying to decide whether to rock out to Metallica or Ozzy, he froze.
Under the windshield wiper lay a folded white note.
It's probably just a flyer for someone's lawn mowing service, he decided. Although when he glanced around the parking lot, he didn't see any ads on the other cars. That seemed a little odd.
Reaching through the open window, he craned his arm around to snatch the note, and flipped it open. In large, girlish script, written in pencil, were the words:
That shirt makes you look fat.
Dean snorted, and handed the note to Sam. "This your idea of a joke, college boy?"
Sam read the note, appearing genuinely confused. "What are you talking about? I didn't write this."
Dean pulled the first note out of his back pocket and compared the two. "I found this on my windshield this morning, at the motel. Look, same handwriting. Same girly handwriting, even. You're just trying to throw me off track."
Sam sighed. "Dean, I didn't write those notes."
"Oh, come on, Sammy. You must really be jealous of my car and my wardrobe. Not that I don't have a lot to be jealous of, but really – notes on my car? That's weak, dude. Just weak."
"Dean, I did not write those notes. Think. I never left your side in the Roadhouse. When would I have put it on the windshield?"
Dean tried to remember if Sam had left his side. He didn't normally mark it on the calendar when his brother took a leak, so it took him a moment to admit, "Well, if you didn't do it, then who did?"
"I don't know: maybe the second one was there to begin with and you just didn't notice it."
"Not a chance. Nobody sticks shit under my baby's windshield wiper without me noticing."
"Shit stuck under a windshield wiper," Sam repeated, "Not the visual image I really needed right now, Dean. Look, they are just stupid, harmless notes. Does it really matter who put them there? Maybe you pissed off some adolescent female motorist who happened to be staying at our motel last night. She could have noticed the Impala here and decided to mess with your mind. Of course, that begs the question …."
"What?" Dean asked, interested.
"That you have a mind to begin with." Sam grinned.
"You're a dick," Dean huffed.
"I've got one."
"Is that what you call that little tiny thing?"
And so it went for the next five minutes, until finally Dean took to flipping Sam off every time he opened his mouth, which eventually shut him up.

Bumblefuck was only a three hour drive away, but by the time they arrived in the mostly deserted, totally dilapidated, one stoplight town, Dean was hungry enough to eat an entire cow. As long as said cow was really dead. The only eating establishment, Peg's Diner, happened to be conveniently located right next door to the feed store where Barnabas the Warlock had been spotted.
A withered old waitress—Peg, Dean assumed—brought them both burgers and fries and deflected Sam's attempt at pleasant conversation/information gathering about chubby, balding warlocks with indifferent grunts. Dean cleared his plate in record time, even mopping up the residual ketchup with the leathery green piece of garnish and gobbling it down. He would have snagged the remains of Sam's burger, too, but the dude had a bad habit of holding his burgers too tightly, smashing the bun into a disgusting flour-like paste that did wonders for ruining Dean's remaining appetite.
The owner of the feed store, Fred, had no trouble talking about his close encounter with Barnabas. A jovial man who wore a baseball cap with a tractor on it and smelled like hay, he talked animatedly, flinging his arms up and down to emphasize his points.
"Got-damn it all if I do say so myself but he was the Got-damnedest weird ass fucker I've ever seen and let me tell you, boys, I've seen a lot of Got-damnedest weird ass fuckers in my time, I surely have." Fred's enthusiastic profanity was accompanied by a spray of saliva that shot toward the boys with sprinkler-like accuracy. Dean, always quick on his feet, dodged out of range. But Sam caught the spray full in the face. And then, didn't even move out of the way, too polite to let Fred see his discomfort.
Fred went on a length about Barnabas's cape, his shifty eyes, his slinking walk, and strange requests for herbs, and animal hair and bones. Fred figured Barnabas was one of two things: either a fairy from the big city (Omaha) or some kind of crazy who worshipped the devil. It took a while, but Sam managed to get Barnabas's last known location out of Fred: an abandoned barn at the crossroads 14 miles out of town.
Dean and Sam made their way out to the Impala, which had been parked for the whole time on the street in front of the feed shop. Dean was reaching for the door handle when he froze.
There was another note tucked under the Impala's windshield wiper.
Sam noticed it at the same time, and locked eyes with Dean.
"Well, I'll be Got-damned," Dean said.

Part II forthcoming ...

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