Chapter 4

Despite the fact that Dean was gagged, Sam could still hear his screams as he approached the barn. The noise turned out to be a blessing in disguise once he got inside - Dean wasn't where Sam had left him. Somehow, even though Sam had securely bound Dean's wrists and ankles and had used all the bales of moldy hay and sacks of seed he could find to pen him into a corner, Dean had managed to squirm and crawl clear across the barn and had burrowed in between a wall and a rusted up piece of farming equipment.

Sam was just thankful that he hadn't found the door or cut himself to pieces on the jagged edges of the thing, but now he had to figure out how to coax Dean out of there.

"Dean?" Sam squatted down and reached behind the contraption to give him a slight shake. "Come on, man. It's me. It's Sam."

Dean moved his head to peer out at Sam fearfully. Sam took the opportunity to swiftly remove the gag from his mouth. Dean flinched at the sudden movement and inched further back under the equipment. "Stay back!" he cried. "No more!"

"Okay." Sam held up his hands. "But I'm not gonna hurt you, Dean. I'm just here to help."

"Yeah, that's what they all say," Dean said, his eyes darting from one imaginary threat to another. "Just stay the hell away from me!"

Sam sighed and fingered the bottle of morphine in his pocket. He knew it would be easy enough to knock Dean out and drag him out of his hiding place, but he couldn't stand the thought of basically attacking him when he was in the middle of a hellish delusion.

Suddenly, he had an idea.

"Hey," he said in a hushed, confiding voice. He crouched down closer to Dean, trying to appear as non-threatening as possible. He looked around for a moment as though making sure no one was listening in, and then said, "I can get you out of here."

"Why should I believe that?"

"The way I see it, you've got nothing to lose if I'm lying. But if I'm telling the truth... I can rescue you."

A glimmer of hope and even recognition seemed to appear in Dean's eyes, and Sam could have sworn for a moment that Dean was returning to himself again.

But then he said in a small, plaintive voice, "Castiel?"

The name was like a kick in the stomach to Sam, even though he knew the instant it was spoken that it made perfect sense - Castiel had rescued Dean from Hell, so to his delusional mind, that was what was happening here. Still, it hurt to be reminded yet again that he wasn't always the one that Dean trusted and relied on more than anyone.

With a heavy heart, he smiled and played along. "Yes, it's me, Dean. Come out of there, and I'll take you home."

It took Dean a minute or two to wriggle out from under the machinery - he seemed to have expended all his energy on getting there and could barely even move now that the adrenaline was wearing off. By the time Sam could reach his hands to untie them, Dean had all but lost consciousness. He didn't even attempt to put up a fight as Sam dragged him the rest of the way out into the open and hoisted him up on his shoulders to carry him back to his makeshift bed. Somehow, that worried Sam even more than the hallucinations.

Dean was a total dead weight by the time Sam went to lay him down on the pile of blankets. He did it as carefully as he could considering that Dean wasn't exactly a small guy, and as he slipped his hand behind Dean's neck to support his head, he felt a weird bump just below his hairline. He turned Dean's head to the side to get a look at it and saw that it was a bright red welt with a raised center.

His first reaction was to shrug it off. After all, Dean's entire body was covered in red welts similar to this one. But something about it made him pause. For one thing, it was much smaller than the welts on his arms. Also, none of the others had a raised center like this one. This one seemed almost like an insect bite.

As soon as this thought occurred to him, he remembered the mosquito he had seen on Dean's neck as they'd entered the clearing around Gavin Chamberlain's house. And then he remembered what month it was.

"Since when are mosquitoes around in January?" he muttered aloud.

Suddenly he felt like a complete idiot.

Knowing he couldn't afford to waste a minute of darkness, he quickly gave Dean a shot of the morphine, secured him again in his corner, and left the barn in the direction of the secluded cottage. Now that he knew how the bastard was doing it, he was anxious to confront this Gavin Chamberlain guy and give him a taste of his own medicine.

The late evening was cold and an icy rain was falling, so Sam was pretty sure he was safe for the moment from any poisonous bugs Chamberlain might have unleashed in the woods. Even so, he moved as quickly as he could and kept all of his senses on high alert, even risking using his flashlight once he got farther away from the town and closer to the cottage.

This risk soon paid off - as Sam entered the clearing, he saw a flicker of movement from the corner of his eye and swatted away a mosquito just in time. "Great, super-bugs," he said, suddenly feeling itchy all over. He shook himself off as he hurried up to the cottage. There was no way he was letting himself get bitten now.

He switched off his flashlight and readied his gun as he climbed the porch steps, and since there was no way to know from outside whether or not there was anyone home, he rapped quietly on the door and waited a moment to see if anyone stirred inside. He didn't hear anything, so he tried the door handle.

Unlike that morning, this time the door was locked.

Sam sighed in frustration and took out his lockpick. It only took him five seconds to get inside the house, but the whole time he kept imagining that mosquitoes were swarming him and eating him alive. He was more than relieved when he finally slipped inside and quickly closed the door behind him.

The house was in complete darkness, so Sam snapped his flashlight back on to take a look around. No one was on the ground floor, but as he approached the stairs he could hear a faint sound coming from the hidden basement.

For some inexplicable reason, he started to feel nervous. Chances were, Chamberlain was keeping his poisonous pets in the basement, and as soon as he realized he'd been discovered, he could easily sic them on Sam without him being able to do a damn thing to stop it. You can't exactly shoot bugs, after all, and he and Dean didn't own beekeeper equipment or personal shields made of mosquito netting. As soon as he lifted that staircase, he was probably guaranteeing himself as this guy's next victim.

After a moment's reflection, he started to wonder whether his nerves were a sign that he was already infected.

Before he could spook himself out any further, he took a deep breath and forced himself to snap out of it. Dean needed him, and that was all there was to it. He steeled himself, lifted the staircase, and burst down into the basement laboratory.

The element of surprise seemed to work in his favour - he heard a frightened yelp as he ran down the stairs, and he entered the room just in time to see a small man dressed in full beekeeping gear spin around so fast with his hands raised above his head that half the equipment on the table beside him went crashing onto the floor. It was a sight almost too ridiculous to believe, and for a moment Sam wished Dean was there to see it, if only so they could laugh about it together after the case was done.

"Step away from the beakers, Gavin," Sam demanded with his gun aimed menacingly at the man's chest.

Gavin didn't move a muscle, his hands still raised and the potions behind him bubbling and steaming away happily.

"I said step away, Gavin. Now!"

Gavin slowly lowered his hands and struck a slightly more defiant pose. "W-what'll you d-do if I d-d-don't?"

Now Sam was downright puzzled. Despite the stammer and his initial reaction to Sam's unexpected arrival, this guy didn't sound scared at all. He was puny and nerdy, that much Sam could tell, but he seemed to have a confidence that no doubt stemmed from the feelings of power and control he'd gained from his little experiments.

Still, Sam was the one with the upper hand right now - he had a gun pointed at the kid, and as far as he could tell, Gavin had nothing.

"I'm pointing a gun at you, man," he said, inching closer as he prepared to grab the guy. "What do you think I'm gonna do?"

Sam couldn't see his face very well through the mask, but he could have sworn the kid smirked. "I th-think you're gonna d-d-die screaming," he said. And then he said something in a language Sam couldn't identify.

Before Sam had time to react, he was surrounded by mosquitoes. He tried making a break for the stairs, but Gavin was already on the move, and he tripped Sam up as he passed him by. The bugs swarmed him to the point that he couldn't even see, and he could feel the sharp pin-pricks from his head to his ankles as they literally began eating him alive. All he could do was curl up in a ball, close his eyes, cover his ears, and wait for it to be over.

It happened much sooner than he'd expected. After only a few seconds, the bugs seemed to disappear. He no longer felt them crawling all over him, and even the prickling feeling of the bites had stopped. He figured they knew somehow that the job was done and had gone back to wherever they'd been hiding, and he slowly cracked his eyes open to take a look around.

What he saw was a couple hundred dead mosquitoes lying on the floor around him.

"What the hell?" Sam jumped to his feet and pushed up one of his sleeves to get a look at his arm. It was covered in tiny puncture marks, some with a droplet of blood to mark the spot. They had definitely bitten him. He could only assume that they were supposed to drop dead once they had fulfilled their purpose.

He didn't know how much longer he had before he would start going crazy, so he decided to just let Gavin go while he spent his final sane moments tearing the laboratory apart in search of answers. He had nothing to lose now by tampering with unknown substances, and he doubted that Gavin would return to the scene of his crime until he could be sure that Sam and his gun would be long gone. All he had to do was figure out what he had done and how to reverse it.

This proved easier said than done - Sam found Gavin's notebooks without any problems, but deciphering the code his notes were written in was another matter. "Damn kid really is smart," Sam said, tossing the tenth coded notebook he'd found onto the floor in frustration. He sighed and looked at his watch. Fifteen minutes had passed since he'd been infected. He seemed to recall that Dean had started showing signs of anxiety and agitation around the time that they'd left the cottage, and that must have been about fifteen minutes after Dean was bitten, too. He stood completely still for a moment, trying to gauge whether or not his symptoms had begun yet.

Aside from the frustration and impatience of knowing he was running out of time, he really didn't feel any different.

"Why aren't I freaking out yet?" he mused aloud as he surveyed the pile of dead mosquitoes around the place where he'd fallen. "Dean was only bitten once, and they got me a thousand times." Sure, this could have been the kind of contagion that works the same no matter how much you're exposed to it, but something about the whole thing just didn't feel right.

He glanced at his watch again and then back to the dead mosquitoes as he mulled it over. Suddenly he realized what was bugging him - his arm was completely clean. There was no longer any sign whatsoever that he'd been bitten.