Author's Note: Supernatural doesn't belong to me. Unfortunately. I do own my computer, but the truck-eating garbage bag belongs to my entire family, my mom in particular.
Bobby, Sam, and Dean were sitting around Bobby's kitchen table. Everything was quiet outside as they played the Hunter's Drinking Game. One of them told a hunting story (true, of course, it wouldn't be fun otherwise), and if one of the others present could beat the story, then the one whose story was beaten had to drink. Winner was the one with the story no one could beat. Or the last one to pass out, whichever came first. Bobby and Dean were telling most of the stories, with Sam occasionally chiming in. Consequentially, Sam was the most sober of the three.
"Sham needsh to tell ush a shtory," Bobby slurred as he swayed in his chair, surrounded by bottles.
"Yeah, Sam," Dean said, his voice clearer and easier to understand. He too was surrounded by bottles.
"Fine," Sam rolled his eyes. "I've got one, and neither of you are going to be able to top it. Dean, do you remember the truck-eating-"
"Shit! I forgot about that thing. Bobby, I think we've lost, 'cause I have never once heard of anything stranger than this thing."
"First I gotta hear what it ish Dean. Then we will deshide."
"We were driving around two summers ago, looking for a case. We'd heard reports of people going missing while on road trips and truck drivers and their semi's disappearing. Just a few every year, no more than five. But it had been going on for decades, always the larger vehicles. But no one made the connection, since no one could tell exactly where they had gone missing."
"If no one thought they were misshing, how'd ya find the case?"
"Shut up Bobby, I'm telling the story, and I'll get to it in time. Anyway, Dean and I were in this little town by the stretch of road, researching the missing people. We thought that maybe someone was rigging the road to cause blowouts in tires, since the highway out of town was littered with tire fragments. In one of the newspapers, there was an interview of a man who claimed to have seen "The Beast" in action…"
Sam and Dean approached the run down house of Mr. Smith. Neither of them was sure that they wanted to do this interview. Sure, sometimes people who saw the evil monsters of the world turned to drink to cope, but even by their standards this guy was two bottles away from his liver handing in its resignation. But they couldn't just leave without making sure there wasn't a case. Sam rang the doorbell, and the sound of the bell hadn't had a chance to die before a cacophony of barking rang out from inside the house. The door opened to reveal a man in his late forties standing in a house coat, holding a dog away from the door with his foot. It was making a lot of noise for such a tiny little poodle.
The man looked at them blearily.
"Whaddya want?" he grunted.
"My name's Sam, this is Dean. We were wondering if we could talk to you for a few minutes," Sam told him.
"If it's about the fountain in the park, it was yellow before I got there," Smith told them defensively.
"No, we're not here about that," Dean tried not to wonder what the old man had done to the fountain. Whatever it was, it must not have been too pleasant. "No, we want to talk to you about the beast. I don't know if you remember, it was a few years ago."
Smith looked at them, trying to decide if they were truly being honest, then he opened the door up wider, scooping the poodle up before it could find out if Dean's socks were as tasty as they looked. He beckoned them into the house.
When they sat down in the living room, Sam asked him about the beast. And what the man told them was utterly insane, even by their standards…
"A garbage bag? A killer garbage bag?"
"Yes Bobby, that's what he said."
"Boy, that man mushta been permanently drunk."
"I'm not done the story yet Bobby…"
Sam and Dean left the old man barely able to contain their laughter. Smith had told them a tale about a large garbage bag, like the type left on the side of the road by cleanup crews. According to him, it would swarm over the semi truck (or RV, which could be pretty close in size at times) and devour it, with all its contents. The tires, however, it left on the side of the road, shredded and identical to the fragments left behind by a blowout. And the bag just folded itself back up and waited for the next victim to drive past its section of road. Smith had a whole theory about them, and he gave the brothers a copy of all the information he had gathered and deduced.
"Listen to this: 'The killer garbage bag possibly has a smaller cousin that is responsible for small cars going missing, and an even smaller one that eats bicycles!'"
"'It likely hibernates in the winter, like a bear, surviving off the metals and plastics stored up from its feasts over the summer.' Dean, this man is absolutely insane."
"We decided that there wasn't anything worthwhile in the town, so after an oh-so-healthy breakfast of cherry pie and whipped cream-"
"It was delicious," Dean interrupted.
"-we headed out onto the road behind a fast food supply truck."
They hadn't been driving for very long before they started joking around. They talked about the great black garbage bag, and Sam began reading the most entertaining bits of the package out loud. They were having a great time-
Until something flowed out of the ditch and enveloped the truck ahead of them.
It was over in minutes. The driver hadn't even known what hit him.
"Holy shit, holy shit, holy shit," Dean kept repeating. He'd had the sense to pull over to the side of the road, and now he and Sam were staring at the section of road where the truck had been devoured.
"That was a garbage bag," Sam whispered. "A killer truck-eating garbage bag."
After a few minutes, they set out to track down the bag. It was a very unusual experience; the tracks were like nothing they'd ever seen before. Eventually they tracked it to a small cave, where it lay limp and looked for all the world like a bag that had been blown in with the wind. They retreated to the road, since they had no idea what the mental capabilities and senses were of this monster.
"How are we supposed to kill that thing?" Sam asked. "It's made of plastic; how in hell do we kill plastic?"
"Liquid nitrogen," Dean said after a few minutes of thought.
"What?"
"Liquid nitrogen. Used it in high school to freeze plastics and then we smashed the hell out of them. I liked the smashing part, it was very relaxing."
While Sam couldn't believe that Dean even remembered high school, given how many times he had skipped class to have some one-on-one biology lessons in the janitor closets, he had to admit that the idea had its merits. So they found the local high school and stole the canister of nitrogen, leaving an apology note stating that the nitrogen was going to a good cause.
The drive up to the lair was rather uneventful, other than Dean worrying that the liquid nitrogen would destroy his baby if it leaked out of the canister. The hike to the cave took longer than they had thought it would, though. The canister was damn heavy! But they managed to get it manhandled up there, and stood at the small cave entrance staring down at the innocent seeming bag. Sam opened the lid and they dumped the whole thing out. There was a horrible screeching sound as the bag shrivelled and froze. They then pulled out the hammers they had taken with them and proceeded to smash the bag into a fine powder.
"And that was the strangest case I have ever worked" Sam concluded, taking a swig of beer, Dean nodding his agreement.
"If it wasn't the two of you that told me that story, I'd be thinking you were cheating," Bobby told them, drinking from his bottle. "But since it is you two, I have just one question: Have you ever heard of the McDonald's Gremlin?"