Divided Loyalties

Summary: Harold had his lung ripped out and the boys are on the trail…

A short little chapter to get us from A to B.

Chapter Two


"The lung was missing," Sam stated simply. As if a missing lung was a simple thing.

"Who could do something like that?" the nurse demanded, looking at them like they might have the answer. "I mean, the way the human body is built, you've got to work to get at a lung. It looked like they reached under his ribcage and just ripped it out."

"There was no sign of the lung?" Dean asked. "You never found it?"

"No," she said. "Which is just as impossible as everything else. The room was clean as a whistle. Mr. Cogdill was a mess, but that was it. Not a blood trail. Nothing. It just disappeared."

"And Mr. Cogdill?" Sam asked.

"We did what we could… Before we realized… But, I mean…"

Sam just nodded. They'd seen the pictures. Getting your freshly transplanted lung ripped out wasn't pretty. Poor Harold had been a goner the second the nurse had left the room.

Dean stood up and Sam followed suit. "You're sure you didn't see anything odd. Anything you couldn't explain…" Dean asked. "No matter how weird it might sound."

"Like what?" She cocked her head to one side, studying them curiously, almost too curiously. She had seen something.

"Anything. Anything at all. Even if it seems silly or irrelevant. Even crazy," Sam prodded.

She hesitated, opened her mouth to say something, then closed it again. Finally she shook her head and Sam sighed. He glanced over at Dean who looked somewhere between crestfallen and pissed off.

"Thank you, Ms. Porter," Sam said. "We need to see the paperwork regarding the organ. Can you point us in the right direction?"

"You want to know about the lung?" she asked.

"We need to know where it came from," Dean affirmed.

"You'll have to talk to Administration about that." She was still frowning and Sam could tell she was dying to ask. "Can you tell me why the FBI is involved?"

Dean opened his mouth to give a most-likely overblown answer, but Sam stopped him. "We think this has happened in several other states," he explained.

"Like… like a serial killer?" the woman asked wide-eyed.

"Something like that," Sam said. "If you remember anything else, just give me a call. It could save someone's life." She nodded thoughtfully as he handed her a piece of paper with his cell number.

Sam hurried after Dean who was already heading back toward the elderly volunteer at the information desk. They needed to see the paperwork. Sam was tired of following in the wake of bodies.


"What now?" Dean asked, as they walked into the motel room they were sharing. Sam sat down at the small table while Dean shrugged out of his suit coat and threw it on the bed.

"Paperwork says it came from the same place. The ghost is definitely taking its organs back one by one," Sam said.

"Oh… Is that what's going on?" Dean snapped. "Cause Harold's down a lung and I was wondering."

"I know you're frustrated…"

"Frustrated?" Dean viciously tugged his tie from around his neck. "We're so far behind on this one, we might as well be the Jamaican Bobsled Team."

"Dean, we can't save everyone. You know that."

"I know it, Sam," Dean grated out. "Still ticks me off."

Sam opened the laptop. They'd been following a trail of bodies and/or injuries for a week now, mostly through paperwork, newspapers and phone calls. Some of the incidents they'd been only hours behind, but it might as well have been years. In all the cases, the victim had recently received a transplant of some sort. Skin grafts, bits of bone, bone marrow, liver, kidneys, lungs… Harold had been the second ripped-out lung. From one second to the next, the pieces were torn away and then disappeared. Just gone. Bit by bit, the ghost was reclaiming the parts that had been taken.

"This is hopeless," Dean said angrily, running a hand through his hair in irritation.

"It's not hopeless," Sam replied, not even looking up from the screen. "I just need a little more time."

"Tell that to Harold."

"I'm working on it," Sam said through clenched teeth. They'd been through this conversation before and it was getting more and more annoying every time they had it. Thanks to mountains of paperwork on top of various security measures, they were still behind, following in the wake of the organ thefts, or re-acquisitions, however you wanted to look at it, rather than staying ahead of them.

Dean returned to his pacing. "We're running out of parts."

Sam just sighed and doggedly kept typing. Almost all the major organs had been reclaimed. The lesser parts weren't really lethal when the ghost took them back. Nasty, but not lethal.

Thanks to modern medicine added to modern transportation, the bits and pieces had been flown all over the country. They knew that all of the flights carrying the organs had come from Chicago. But then nearly everything in the Midwest went through the airports in Chicago so it could be almost anywhere in the surrounding states. Being the low-tech operation that they were wasn't helping. They just needed more access than was possible for two really off-the-grid, blue-collar guys.

Sam's cell phone rang and he absentmindedly picked it up from where he'd tossed it on the table. "Hello?"

"Hello? Agent Koch?"

"Ms. Porter?" Sam covered the receiver with his hand and mouthed, "It's the nurse," for Dean's benefit.

"Yes, I… I decided I needed to tell you something. But… You're going to think I'm crazy."

Sam nearly snorted. If he had a nickel for every time he'd heard that. "Anything you know might be important, so whatever it is…" he trailed off, knowing the silence would push her to talk. Nervous people needed to fill the silence.

"It's just that… right before I left Mr. Cogdill's room… I thought I heard something."

"Like what? A voice?"

"Yes. It sounded like… The voice said something like 'part of me,' then 'I'm coming,' or something like that. I'm not sure."

"That's all it said?" Sam asked.

"That's all I heard. But there wasn't anyone there. It couldn't have been Mr. Cogdill."

"No," Sam agreed. "It wasn't Mr. Cogdill." He was pretty sure Harold hadn't woken up and then ripped out his own lung.

"Does… Does that help at all?"

"Maybe so," Sam said, though his eyes were still glued to the computer screen. He'd kept typing while he talked. With the new information they'd gotten from the hospital paperwork, Sam was tracking a few new leads. "Thank you, Ms. Porter." Sam closed the phone and worked silently for several more minutes.

"You wanna share with the rest of the class?" Dean asked. "Or do I have to tell the nurse lady that Agent Jackass had a stroke and I need her to tell me what she already told you?"

"What? Sorry," Sam said, staring as the page loaded. Crap. "Dean, we have to go."

"What?"

"The heart, Dean. I know where the heart went."

Dean was already gathering the bags, a blur of motion as he threw everything into them haphazardly. "You sure whoever got it is still alive?" he asked.

"Hurry," Sam urged, standing and helping him gather the bags and head for the car. "We can get to him in a few hours if we hurry."

"Is that enough time?"

"Faster, Dean," was all Sam said.


More tomorrow.