2 - Beastland

Dean was acting like he was personally fine and nothing was wrong. Which told Sam something was very wrong.

Did Dean really think he was going to buy it? It was almost insulting. Except, the more Sam thought about it, the more he realized the act he was putting on might be more for himself. Dean wanted to pretend to be normal, because he honestly wanted to believe it. And maybe if he pretended hard enough, it would be true. That was very sad.

He needed to save him. He was trying. But Sam knew things were getting desperate now. If he had any chips to call in, he had to do it soon. He didn't know how much longer Dean could last.

Sam tried to keep his mind off of it with research, but it was difficult to focus, especially when he had to sift through so much stuff. But he finally found something. "Hey, I found it."

Dean didn't even look over from the driver's seat. "What? A headless monster that eats people?"

"Yes."

"If you say the Headless Horseman, I'm shoving you out of the car."

"No, it's called an akephaloi. They date back to ancient Greece apparently, or at least the legend of them did."

Dean at least waited until they were at a stoplight to look at him. "How do they eat people or walk around with no head?"

"Well, they do have eyes and a mouth on their chest. Presumably that's where the brain is as well."

Dean glared at him. "You're making this up."

"I swear I'm not. The Men of Letters have a page devoted to them. If they did exist - and there's some doubt about that - it was believed they'd gone extinct. But they were known to be cannibals who appeared headless, but in fact have their relevant facial features where their chests should be."

Dean thought about this, to the point of missing the light when it turned green. But there was no one behind them, so it didn't matter that much. "Is there a picture?"

"Uh, yeah. But they're only drawings from ancient texts." Sam highlighted one of the pictures, and turned the screen towards Dean. It was kind of ridiculous - basically a cartoon of a broad chested man with eyes where his nipples should be, and a mouth where his belly button should be, and absolutely nothing existing above the shoulders. It was equally laugh inducing and terrifying.

He expected Dean to laugh, but he just stared at it a moment before shaking his head. "No way in hell is that a real thing."

Sam turned his laptop back towards him. "I'm inclined to agree with you, except ... there were quite a few stories over the centuries about them, in different places. I mean, they're completely ridiculous ... but they may actually be a thing."

"So, if these fucking ugly things do exist, how do we kill them?"

"Umm ..." Sam scanned the page from the Men of Letters archive, hoping he'd find it. "There's no first hand accounts."

Dean sighed. "Of course there isn't."

"But the guess was you had to destroy the brain."

"The brain? Which is where? Their ass?"

"Maybe? I don't think anyone's ever autopsied one."

Dean was still shaking his head. "Okay, say this is what Jody's dealing with. First, how did they go from being extinct to being in South Dakota? And two, how come only two people have seen these walking jokes so far?"

Sam shrugged. There were some things you just couldn't research. "I don't know."

"Sometimes this job just sucks."

Coming from him, right this moment? Sam had to suppress the urge to laugh, mainly because he felt it'd become crying and screaming at the end. Sucked wasn't a strong enough word. Not by a damn sight.


Dean was trying really hard to take this seriously. Headless dudes with torso mouths eating people. Okay. Looking like some kind of motherfucking rejected hallucination creature from Naked Lunch or Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas. Sure, they existed, why not? Even people who were about to get cannibalized to death needed a good laugh.

If this thing was what they were hunting - huge if - Dean imagined they'd need chainsaws, go full Evil Dead on these cartoon monsters. Because if they had brains in their torsos or asses, wherever - hell, maybe it was in their feet - cutting through an entire body was far from easy. Even using a good machete to take a head off a body took more strength and follow through than you realized. An entire body had muscles, tendons, and several more sizable bones, not to mention fat. You couldn't do that with a machete, not in one hit. A chainsaw was ideal, if messy. Otherwise, you were devoting time and effort into dismembering something and why the hell was he thinking of this while the Mark was just waiting for its opening?

Dean gripped the steering wheel hard enough that his knuckles went white, and he stopped thinking about it. One step at a time. For now, he was going to pretend that was an interesting factoid Sam had dug up from the archives and nothing else. It wasn't the thing they were hunting. They had no idea what that was yet.

And honestly, gory brain images aside, he really hoped they weren't after such goofy looking things. Sure, they hunted monsters and could be said to live in a basement, but couldn't they have just a little bit of dignity? Dean realized he should be the last person thinking such a thing. He thought it anyway.

Jody agreed to meet them at the cop shop, so they were in their FBI drag, ready to pretend to be feds for her officers. Who probably wondered why they were the only feds who came around these parts, but Dean imagined Jody probably had a good excuse. She kept her troops in line.

They flashed their fake badges, and Jody appeared, waving them back to her office. Dean flashed his best smile at the woman working the front desk, but she didn't even seem to notice. Damn. He was losing his charm. That was a terrible omen.

Once they were safely in the privacy of her office, they shared welcoming hugs, and got down to business. It was a little early for coroner photos, but Jody had taken pictures of the wounds suffered by the dead men on her phone, and showed them to him and Sam.

They were as gruesome as Dean expected. Something with a fairly sizable mouth ripped hunks out of these men, like they were the world's best sandwiches. And the bite force was intense. Dean saw splintered bones, and not just the thinner bones of the ribcage. One man's arm had been bitten off above the elbow, and that bone ended in slivers.

Could one of those goofy chest face motherfuckers have done that? Dean had doubts.

"This almost looks like a werewolf attack," Sam said, grimacing at the grisly pictures. "Were-"

"Hearts were intact," Jody said, guessing his question. "In fact, the only organ missing from both men were lungs."

That made Sam sit up a little straighter. Dean knew his body language by now, and that meant he hadn't expected that at all. It was a normal person's equivalent of a shocked gasp. "Lungs?"

Jody, seated behind her surprisingly neat desk, shrugged and shook her head. Except, why was Dean surprised it was neat? Of course it would be. He couldn't help but notice she had a picture of Alex on her desk as well. "Yeah, the lungs were mostly consumed on both of them. No idea why."

Sam looked at the pictures again, frowning in concentration. While he did, Dean admitted, "There's not many monsters who go for that. I can't actually think of any off the top of my head."

"I couldn't either, but I'm not the expert," Jody said.

"So what's the whole story?" Dean wondered. "Two stoned guys get attacked at a house, and their buddy is left behind unhurt?"

"Stoned is too mild a word," Jody said. "They were meth heads."

Now it was Dean's turn to be surprised. "Oh, who has low enough standards to eat a meth head?" He looked at Sam. "Could it be ghouls who decided they wanted fresh but chemically degraded meat?"

Sam shot him a look best described as his knock it off, Dean glance. Again, they could communicate most of the time with looks alone. "Even if it was, how are they headless? That's the one thing that kills ghouls."

True. Actually, taking the head off killed most things. Which led back to those cartoonish torso monsters. Dean jumped to the only other thing he could possibly think of. "I don't supposed you noticed any hex bags or signs of witchcraft at the scene, did you?"

She stared at him like he was an idiot, which was fair. "No. But it's a garbage house. The Lindbergh baby could be there. Nearly everything else is."

Oh joy. He loved those scenes that were so polluted with stuff, you might as well burn it all down instead of searching it. "Well, I guess that means we have to pay a visit to the scene," Dean said, concealing his true feelings. Which were to light the place up and walk away in action movie perfect slow motion.

Sam handed Jody's phone back to her, and said, "Give us a call as soon as the coroner's report comes in."

"Will do. But I'll bet you twenty bucks cause of death was the lungs being ripped out of their bodies."

Neither of them were stupid enough to take that bet.

Once they returned to the car, Sam asked, "Why witchcraft?"

Dean shrugged. "I was thinking of reanimated corpses. Some witches can do that."

"Without the heads? How would they eat the victims? And why would a witch bother? We're talking major mojo here."

"I didn't say it was a perfect idea. It's just it's either that, or torso monsters, and frankly, witches are more palatable."

Sam shook his head, and looked down at the very thin folder Jody had given him on their way out. Dean guessed it was the police records of the victims, which could be enlightening, or could mean absolutely nothing. It only mattered if they weren't random victims.

It was a relatively quick drive from the police station to the crime scene. Jody had not been kidding about it being a garbage house. It seemed like a garbage block, with most of the houses along both sides of the street empty and boarded up, tagged with graffiti. "What the hell happened here?" Dean wondered.

"The fracking boom," Sam said, with obvious distaste. "They come in hard, bring in people looking for work on the rigs, and the second they're done, they clear out. For people following the work, it's not here anymore. So temporary communities like this just dry up and blow away."

Dean nodded. "How in the hell do you find any time to read anything not monster related?"

Sam gave him a cutting look before getting out of the car. "Says the guy with the latest Stephen King novel on his nightstand."

"That's monster related," Dean countered. "Fictional monster related, sure, but it kinda counts."

Maybe the empty neighborhood explained how weird torso monsters could walk around and not be seen. It was a shame, because he really didn't want to give any credence to the torso monster theory.

Yellow crime scene tape crisscrossed the doorway, for all the good it did. They ducked under it, and went inside. The fact that the door didn't quite fit the frame anymore, because the jamb had been damaged, was a harbinger of things to come. That and the smell.

Of course it smelled like death, like shit and blood and fear sweat, which had a different scent than plain old body odor alone. But there were layers of other fun scents beneath that - garbage and food waste, and chemicals and the smell of something burned. Sam had to pause and turn away for a moment, probably so he wouldn't lose his breakfast and add to the miasma, but it didn't have the same effect on Dean. Why he didn't know. He liked to think he wasn't that inured to awful scents. Maybe the Mark was somehow helping. That, or the fact that he spent a long time in Purgatory, and the smell there was better than this, sure, but it really depended on where you were and when. You never wanted to be downwind of the Leviathans, because they didn't care what body parts they left out to rot.

Blood was splattered over the back wall of what must have been the living room/dining room of this place. Without furniture to provide context, it was just an open room. The carpet was dark with filth, so it was harder to pick out bloodstains there, and there was a pile of garbage against the right side wall. Cardboard boxes, a broken table, and a whole bunch of other stuff that didn't make this place smell any better. It looked like there was scattered drug paraphernalia on the floor, as well as a huge burned spot in the carpet - which probably added to the chemical smell - where a fire had been lit, accidentally or on purpose. There were holes in most of the walls, where anything copper or metal had been ripped out.

Jody was right. There could be anything here. Dean couldn't fathom any witch desperate enough to plant a hex bag in this garbage pit, especially when they could just wait a couple days and let nature and bathtub meth take its course.

Dean decided to check out where the bodies had been found, although he didn't expect to find anything but blood. He was slightly more interested in the sliding glass back door, or at least what was left of it.

There was a huge hole where someone had clearly broken through the glass, and the rest was hanging on to the frame in jagged chunks. If anything had come through the door without opening it, they would have been cut, but the glass looked clean. In fact, it was the cleanest thing in this place. Could the torso monsters open doors? Well, they had hands. Maybe.

"Jesus Christ," Sam suddenly exclaimed, and reappeared in the living room, once again looking like he was about to hurl.

"You found their bathroom, didn't you?" Dean guessed. "That's why I try and avoid the side rooms. You never know which door is going to lead to the shit show."

"You could try not to sound so smug about it," Sam said.

"Yeah, I could," Dean agreed, opening the door. It slid easily, like the track was greased. If a door was broken, why lock it?

The backyard, such as it was, was pathetic. A little square of concrete made up what he imagined was supposed to be the back deck, and some dead grass made up the rest of the yard, to what looked like a community fence of some sort. It was thin wood and hadn't been weather treated, so it was already showing signs of rot. The community fence also wrapped around the sides, so he didn't have a good view of the neighbor's backyards, but he couldn't imagine they were any different.

Still, he decided to look, because what the hell, right? At least he was out of the stink farm.

The house on the left side had an impressive amount of beer cans and pizza boxes piled up into a little pyramid, but considering their proximity to the fence, Dean guessed the guys who'd been crashing here were responsible for it, hefting this garbage over. Why this stuff, and not the rest of the garbage? Who knew? Two were too dead to ask.

Dean looked over to the house on the right side, and saw mostly graffiti, but as he was turning away, something made him stop and look back. What?

Sam came out, and took a deep breath. "Oh god, fresher air. Relatively."

Dean was still staring at the fence across the way. It was just typical graffiti by kids too suburban to give a shit what it actually was. There were attempted tags, maybe a curse word or a really badly drawn dick, but these kids were unfamiliar with using spray paint as an artistic medium, and it showed. What was with kids today? Dean could drawn several symbols in spray paint with unerring accuracy. It wasn't that hard to use spray paint. Sure, it wasn't like markers, or blood, but it wasn't too difficult.

That was when he finally saw it. It was partially hidden between the black tag that might also have been a test spray, and a random red h. "See something?" Sam asked, coming over.

Dean pointed. "There. That's not graffiti."

Sam squinted, trying to see what it took Dean about a minute to find. "Uh, all I'm seeing is graffiti."

"Relax your eyes. Pretend it's like one of those lame magic eye posters. Except this isn't a dolphin."

"How would you know? You never did figure those out."

"I have better things to do than stare at a stupid picture. If I wanted to see a duck, I'd look at one."

Sam opened his mouth, probably to say something that would make Dean cuff him on the back of the head, when he went perfectly still, save for the new tension in his shoulders. He finally saw it. "That's a summoning sigil."

"Yeah, but summoning what?"

Sam took a picture of it with his phone. "Don't know. I guess we'll have to find out."

That was the job. But Dean was going to be so mad if it was torso monsters.