Disclaimer: If only, if only…

A/N: Sorry it took me so long to upload this chapter. The whole thing with Toby took me in a direction I wasn't prepared for quite yet, but don't worry, he'll have a future role. I had to wait for the muse to hit me again, that and to have enough time to actually get everything down on "paper" in amongst the hurricane of homework. It seems I've finally reached the eye of the storm.

Chapter 4

Sam hoisted the backpack higher on his shoulders and leaned over so he could see Toby through the rolled down sedan window. "Thank you, Toby, for everything."

Toby nodded. He was a man of few words and little sentiment, so it surprised Sam when he said, "Jason, look, take care of yourself out there, okay?" there was an earnestness in Toby's eyes that Sam had rarely seen before. Toby was no fool, he knew Sam was a runaway. "I've put my address and phone number on a card in the front pocket of your backpack. I want to stay in touch. Come look me up in Havre if you're ever in the area."

Sam felt his insides constrict in a sudden upwelling of emotion. He nodded. "I'll do that."

Toby nodded gruffly and turned towards the open road that stretched out ahead of him through the windshield, gripping the steering wheel between his two meaty hands.

Sam turned away, and headed for the bus that would take him to Sheridan; his heart in his mouth.

SPNSPNSPNSPNSPN

What followed was eleven months of solitude. Sam went wherever the rides took him. He slept under bridges, in sheds and under trees. Sometimes he came across a mission and although they gave him a bed to sleep in and food to eat, they were dangerous. He slept with one hand on his backpack and another wrapped around a knife under his pillow.

He did odd jobs for people, mainly those he met on the road. He hustled pool in back roads bars where no one cared how old he was, just so long as he tipped the barman and didn't try to order anything. This resulted in a couple of nasty fights, and consequently Sam sustained more than a few nasty bruises. He could hold his own though, at least well enough to grab the money and make a run for it.

Hitchhiking became his primary form of transportation, although if he had recently made a good score at a bar and had a little extra cash then he would take a bus. He had good luck with the people that picked him up. There were a couple of times when he had to pull the knife from up his sleeve, and there was once when he was almost overpowered, but mostly it was okay. Sam made sure never to fall asleep while in a car with a stranger, and if someone stopped for him and he got a bad feeling, if they seemed even a little off, then he would wait for the next ride—no matter how cold it was.

He stayed out of cities too, at least if he knew he'd be sleeping in a mission or out on the streets. An encounter with some teenage druggies in Madison, Wisconsin that left him with a broken wrist and a nasty cut on his left cheek was a lesson that he took to heart. Sam learned fast, and the street life was no more difficult to pick up on then the lessons from his junior history textbook. The stakes were higher. It was learn or die, so he did.

And he walked. Miles and miles Sam walked along road after road. A sense of urgency drove him on, and there was no time to stop and wait for a ride to pick him up. He walked along with his thumb stuck out. His pack was heavy too, after all, it did contain all of his worldly possessions. He grew stronger than he ever had been, perhaps, under John's supervision, in addition to reaching the lofty height of 6ft by his seventeenth birthday. Skinny and strong, worn and with a haunted look in his eyes, Sam could almost pass for any other weary traveler.

Sometimes Sam would stay in a town for a few weeks, working an odd job somewhere. He spent two weeks in Rock Point, Missouri, three weeks in Madison, Wisconsin, November and December in Milton, Vermont, and three weeks in Hubbardston, Massachusetts. When he felt that the residents of the towns were starting to ask too many questions, or get suspicious, Sam moved on. He could not afford to leave a trace that John and Dean might pick up on.

He liked to spend time in libraries. If Sam found himself in a safe-looking town with a library, he might spend a whole day—or several days—holed up inside, doing his best to study and learn all the things he supposed other high school juniors were learning. US History, English, Pre-Calculus…He missed school fiercely. He missed simply learning for the sake of it.

Sometimes, after a particularly lucrative job or stint at a bar, Sam would scrape together a few dollars and buy a couple of used paperbacks to keep him company on the road. Things he supposed other high schoolers were reading in school and titles that caught his fancy. The Catcher in the Rye, The Iliad, The Call of the Wild, and Crime and Punishment took up permanent residence in his backpack.

By his seventeenth birthday Sam had made his way across fifteen states, and through his first bitter winter on the streets. All the while, he did his best to avoid the supernatural. It was ridiculous to think that he could leave that life behind completely, however. This fact was brought home to him one day, two weeks following his seventeenth birthday.

He was slumped on a bench next to a grungy looking coffee shop, exhausted after having spent most of his day walking the thirty-four miles from Thurmont, Maryland, to York Springs, Pennsylvania. The previous night had been cold, despite the usually mild May weather, and he had been driven out of his sleeping bag at 3am to start his aimless trek across the state. He'd passed through the outskirts of Gettysburg, a place that he was determined to avoid seeing as there was likely to be more than a few restless spirits haunting the old cemeteries and battlefields. He refused to be dragged back in to the hunting life.

No sooner had Sam thought this, chewing on a piece of three day old bread and contemplating where he should shelter for the night (pick the lock on the teacher's lounge at the elementary school?) did he notice the headline for the local newspaper, York Springs Weekly. It lay there on a wire stand, the bold, black letters screaming at him.

Local Banker killed in mysterious break-in…

Sam's conscious mind hardly had time to register the fact that the local newspaper really needed to work on getting catchier headlines, and then snort at the irony of that thought, before he found it unfolded in his hands. With his heart pounding, Sam began to read.

"Someone had broken in. The whole house was a mess, overturned furniture and books all over the place…I found him in the living room, lying on top of the broken glass coffee table, covered in blood and with a gun in his hand," Sylvia Ross, 38 year old local resident and house cleaner for William Houston informs this reporter as she calmly sips tea from an old fashioned china cup. At 1:30pm on Tuesday afternoon, Sylvia entered the Houston house to discover her employer, William Houston, dead from an apparent robbery.

But was it a robbery? The police are inclined to doubt it. "The funny thing was," Sylvia informs me, "when the police had me do an inventory of everything in the house, there was nothing missing. I've been working for Mr. Houston for ten years, and I know every dish, every trinket in that house. He didn't have that many things, and of what there was, nothing was missing."

The case becomes even more mysterious. Adams County coroner, Thomas Grenville informed the police that William Houston did not die from any kind of external trauma. In fact, "he died from a massive myocardial infarction," Dr. Grenville informs me on an overcast Wednesday outside his office in Gettysburg. Or, in layman's terms, he died of a heart attack.

"Perhaps it was the result of excessive adrenaline secretion," Dr. Grenville jokes as he exhales a cloud of cigarette smoke. "Of fright," he clarifies with a slightly exasperated expression. And perhaps Dr. Grenville is right. After all, in a case as mystifying as this, that would not seem too far-fetched.

Juliette Montgomery

Staff Writer

Sam stared at the article. He could hear the heartbeat in his ears, feel the blood pumping in his fingers and arms. There was no way he was going to do this. No, he had left that all behind him with his family. Water under the bridge—miles behind him on the dusty, winding road of his life. But could he really risk more lives being lost? Could he really turn his back on this?