"Hey, how you feelin'?" called Sam as he ascended the stairs. Silence.
He stepped through the door, heart sinking when he saw the empty chair and dangling handcuffs.
"Dean!" he called.
"Yeah, what's the matter?"
"We've got a problem. He got away."
"Oh, shit," Dean said, coming up the stairs to see for himself. "Do you think he was changing?"
"I don't know, were both with the vamp! I had him cuffed to the wall. He must have picked the lock."
"Yeah. Look, we gotta find him," Dean said.
"Well, he's probably at an ER," Sam replied.
"Unless he's changing. Then he'll be the freaking Hulk."
"OK, so maybe you take hospitals, I take crime scenes," Sam said.
"Whatever it takes, we have to find him and make sure he's not turning," Dean asserted.
"Yeah," Sam conceded grimly.
…
The guy he had hitched a ride with had first insisted on taking him to the ER, but eventually relented to let him get off at his motel. Much to his relief, Dexter found his card key was still zipped into the inner pocket of his jacket. Stumbling through the door, he went to the bathroom, stripping his jacket and shirt off. He inspected himself in the mirror; huge swaths of red-purple bruising covered his sternum and side. His face was coated in dried blood that had dripped down from a cut on his temple, and a ripped-up gash of skin on his neck was similarly crusted. Not entirely certain why, he realized, he was feeling much better in terms of the pain in his chest and the faintness. Not exactly typical of a concussion, he decided. No, what had been going on earlier was. This was….different.
Maybe it's the adrenaline, he thought. His head was pounding, his heart racing, and noises and light seemed amplified. Adrenaline….
Shouldn't that have kicked in earlier, he wondered.
Pushing his thoughts aside, he went to work cleaning himself up, wiping away the blood and grime from his face and neck and arms, and changed clothes.
Then he sat down at his computer.
Sam, who are you, he asked himself.
A few deft clicks took him to his favorite search engine, where he typed in 'sam abduction,' and hit search.
News reports that dominated the results mentioned a pair of brothers, with headlines like: Killer Brothers Wanted in Chicago, Fatal Bank Robbery Blamed on Ruthless Winchester Brothers; Killer Brothers evade Capture; Serial Killer Pair Dead in Explosion- dead? he scoffed. No, they were certainly alive. Someone had the gumption to pull off one of the boldest cons in the book.
He continued scanning the headlines: Infamous Winchesters Return to Strike Again. He read on, report after report, of a Samuel and Dean Winchester, brothers from Lawrence, Kansas, who were wanted for a variety of crimes— credit card fraud, auto theft, bank robbery, impersonation of law enforcement, abduction, shootings, stabbings, grave desecration, and evading arrest.
In the mug shots, he recognized Sam. An image of their car popped up, on a public warning, and he recognized it, too.
Further down the page, he came across something odd.
The brothers were characters mentioned in some sort of book. On the occult….
He shook his head. Sick freaks. They deserved it as much as anyone he'd targeted.
But why haven't I heard of them, he wondered. If they're this well-known?
Thinking of reputation and news reports of fake deaths made him wonder what had been said about his own 'death.'
Had Hanna been looking for him? How were Harrison, Cody and Astor doing?
On impulse, he searched his own name, expecting something about his being lost at sea during the storm.
Nothing relevant came up.
No mention of his death in the Miami newspapers.
What the hell, he muttered absently.
Could Hanna have suspected he was alive? Had she gotten someone to erase his name from the internet somehow as a secretive call for him to contact her?
Mystified, he searched her name.
Nothing.
He searched the name of the storm they had parted during.
There was no storm Laura.
He searched Rita's name.
Nothing.
He looked on the Miami Dade city police site for any mention of himself or Deb.
Nothing. No mention of her, nor of LaGuerta, Batista, Masuka, Doakes, Matthews, or even his father.
He searched the names the press had given to high profile cases they had worked, and the names of his many victims.
Nothing. Not one mention of missing persons, nor obituaries, memorial notices, announcements of promotion, announcements of birth or weddings, or anything.
There was simply, absolutely nothing there.
He floundered through several different search engines, with a variety of terms.
Nothing. There was nothing relevant to him, his life, the cases he'd worked, his victims, or anyone he'd ever known.
He snapped his laptop shut, his heart racing.
What in the hell is going on, he wondered. It's like I've never existed.
Like no one I knew, or anything I ever did, has ever existed, he realized, a chill creeping over him.