Drum

"Oh come on Mariah! Hurry up!" Bethany called back to her sister. Mariah, who did not enjoy being yelled at by her 63-year-old little sister, gave Bethany a dirty look as she approached her.

"You can get me to go for a hike in the woods with you, but you can't get me to forget about my arthritis and skip gaily about with you!" Mariah informed her, taking a moment to rest against a near by tree. The younger rolled her eyes.

"Hiking is good exercise! It's good for your arthritis!" she said. Mariah did not seem to buy that.

"Tell that to my aching feet!" she complained and muttered several obscenities under her breath. The younger rolled her eyes and shook her head.

"Stop being so old, Mariah!" she said and continued hiking along.

"It's better than the alternative!" she called after her, still resting against a tree. She sighed and continued to catch her breath. Why did she ever agree to do this?

"Mariah! Get over here!"

"Oh shut it!"

"No! No. Mariah! Get over here! Look at this!" Bethany's voice sounded almost in a panic. Slightly concerned, Mariah leaned off her tree and hobbled over to her little sister. The younger's eyes were wide and teary. She looked pale.

"What? What is it?"

"Look…" Bethany pointed and Mariah looked.

"Oh dear Lord!" she gasped.

Lying on the forest floor were two children. They were bruised, bloody, and very, very still.

Dean had actually been impressed when Sam got into the driver's seat and turned the music on. He wasn't impressed because Sam remembered to buckle himself in, but because a Jimi Hendrix riff pumped out of the speakers. Nodding in approval as the car drove away from the curb, Dean tried to shift onto his side in the passenger seat. They had switched seats because Dean had been driving for seven hours straight and gotten so tired his eyes had begun to get fuzzy. It felt so good now, getting to close them. Even the uncomfortable chair and blaring music didn't bother him.

"When did you tell Alex we'd meet them?" Sam asked, turning the radio's volume down slightly. Dean let out a long sigh but kept his eyes closed.

"In a week."

"In Lincoln?"

"Yup."

"But you still want to see Bobbi first?" Sam questioned. Dean opened his eyes now and gave his brother a pointed glare.

"Yes. Now can I sleep?" he asked. Sam frowned slightly but turned the music back up and kept his eyes on the road. After another sigh Dean closed his eyes again.

"What do you suppose they found?" Sam asked. Dean grumbled something and looked at Sam again.

"A picture."

"Of what?"

"I don't know! Now let me sleep!" Dean said. Sam didn't reply so Dean closed his eyes again and readjusted himself in the seat. What a long day it had been. They had to be in Kentucky by now. If Sam could keep driving, and keep quiet, they could be in Chicago in a day or two.

"You should have asked what it was," Sam said. At that Dean shot up in his seat and gave his brother the look of death.

"Dude! Shut up or I will hurt you!" he warned. Sam didn't seem scared, knowing Dean wouldn't actually hurt him, but the point seemed to get across to him. He nodded and turned back to the road. Sighing yet again, Dean turned around and laid on his right side, facing his window. Before he closed his eyes again, he saw Sam's reflection making funny faces at him. Glad that Missouri wasn't there to read his mind, Dean fell asleep.

Dean had a headache when he woke up, and wasn't exactly sure why. He also had this huge ache in his neck, like someone had squeezed all the muscles. He was about to mutter a hex on how badly the car seats were shaped for sleeping, when he heard his brother's voice.

"No not yet. I wanted to clear it with you guys first," Sam said, obviously not to Dean. The elder still had his back to the driver's seat. Looking out the window it was getting light out, so it must be early morning. The sky was pink, and that meant one thing. Rain was coming.

"Shouldn't be more than a day or two," Sam said again. Dean was careful not to move. He didn't want his brother to know he was awake yet, in case Sam was plotting something he didn't want Dean to know about. Dean couldn't really think of what it might be, but he really was a paranoid bastard.

"Okay, alright. No, thanks. See you," Sam said and Dean heard his cell phone click shut.

"Who the hell was that?" Dean asked suddenly as he turned around. Sam cried out slightly in surprise and clutched his chest.

"God, Dean. Do you have to do that?" he asked, shaking his head and putting his cell phone in his pocket.

"Of course! Someone has to keep you on your toes."

"Yeah? How about the steady stream of freaks coming in and out of my life?" Sam asked.

"Other than them. Who were you talking to?"

"Alex."

"Oh yeah, what about?" Dean asked. In response Sam twisted around in his seat and hunted for something behind him. Dean took the moment to rub his neck. Damn the seat.

"This," Sam finally said sitting back in his seat. He handed Dean a newspaper. One article was circled in red pen.

"'Children Found Trampled?'" Dean read.

"Yeah. A couple of days ago the bodies of two children were found tramples to death by horses," Sam explained. Dean shrugged, not getting what was weird about that.

"In the middle of the woods, ten miles from the nearest horse," Sam continued. Dean thought about that very seriously.

"In Kentucky? I thought they had a horse for every square foot or something," he was confused. The younger Winchester let out a sigh.

"It's not the first time it's happened, either. 26 people have been found in that area, trampled by horses, since the late 18th century."

"Without any horses being near by?"

"There was a horse near a girl who was trampled in the early 1900s, only a mile away. They tried to see if they could get the horse to the spot, but it was too big to fit around the trees," Sam told him. Dean nodded, scanning over the article.

"You told Alex we'd be a few days late?" he asked. Sam nodded so Dean sighed.

"Alright then, let's go wrangle us a horsey."

The Winchester brothers were lucky enough to miss the rain. It had come, certainly, but it had come ahead of them. As generally good as this was, letting the brothers stay dry and all, it had a bad outcome as well.

"Yuck…" Dean said lifting his boot out of a particularly sticky puddle of mud.

"The rain probably washed away any residue of… whatever…" Sam said using his long legs to step around the bigger puddles.

"Yeah, well, I'm having some serious flashbacks here," Dean replied wiping some of the mud off his shoe on a nearby tree. That reminded Sam of their recent encounter with mud, and he reached into his coat pocket and retrieved a cylinder of salt

"Are we close?" he asked.

"I dunno, this is your show man," Dean replied as they got going again. Sam rolled his eyes. Just because he found out about it did not make it his 'show.'

"You know, Dean-"

"Shh. Over there," the elder pointed through the woods. Sam looked and saw the familiar flapping of loose police tape. He smiled.

"Come on Daniel Boone," Sam said and trekked off toward it.

"Hey, if I'm Daniel Boone, does that make you Pocahontas?" Dean asked.

Sam wasn't entirely sure if Dean was joking or not.

It was with another squish that the Winchester brothers stepped past the police tape and into the crime scene. The bodies of the two small children had already been removed, one already buried at the Blackwood Cemetery. The police tape was mostly still up except for one piece which flapped gaily about. Avoiding a low tree limb, Sam crouched down and examined the forest floor.

"No hoof prints," he noted.

"Considering all the human traffic through here lately, that doesn't surprise me," Dean said looking at the area that seemed to be designated as where the bodies were found. It was hard to indicate exactly where they had been on the fallen leaves and mud, but it seemed as though some attempt had been made.

"Doesn't look like anyone tried to hide the bodies," Dean mentioned.

"The things we deal with seldom do," Sam replied taking the digital camera out of a pocket and putting the salt back. Dean nodded, his brother was right.

"Anything on the camera?" he asked.

"Don't know," Sam was just turning the camera on, "how about the EMF meter?"

Dean's face panicked briefly and he quickly patted himself down. With his hand on his butt he smiled and removed the EMF meter from his back pocket.

"Tell you in a second."

"Got stuff on the camera," Sam said. The brothers carefully walked over to each other.

The screen on the digital camera showed a plethora of glowing patterns. While normally this pattern meant good luck, in this particular case, it meant death for two young children.

"It's kind of pretty," Dean mentioned. Sam gave him a pointed glare.

"Unless you're Kathy Harris or Edward Williams," Sam told him. Dean cleared his throat. Was that their names?

"Alright, so, phantom horses? What's that? Disgruntled Indian again?" he asked. He smiled again, but this time because he was remembering how funny Nikki Charles had looked channeling a horse when they had first met. Sam shrugged.

"I'd call kelpie if this was a beach," Sam said looking around. Nope, no beach.

"This all could have been plains at some point. A herd of horses could still be hanging aroun-ack!" Dean cried out and reached a hand around to his back. Sam's nerves were wound tight until Dean brought a plastic arrow around in front of him. Instead of an arrowhead was a piece of tape.

"What the hell?" Dean asked.

"Halt! Who goes there?" a voice called out to them. The brothers turned around to see a young boy stepping out from behind another tree, a taped arrow pointed at them.

"What are you supposed to be?" Dean asked, looking at the fake leather vest with tassels that the boy was wearing.

"I'm Little Bear, who are you?" the boy answered. The brothers looked at him for a moment, to the point that the boy became nervous.

"I'm Justin," he said reluctantly.

"Okay Justin, I'm Mr. Mason, and this is Mr. Wright. We're with the FBI, investigating the death of these two kids," Dean lied, flashing his fake ID. Justin lowered his arrow.

"Did you know them?" Sam asked gently, picking up on the change of expression on the boy's face.

"Yeah…" Justin answered sadly.

"Do you know what they would have been doing out here?" Dean asked.

"Edward said he had found something he wanted to show us. We're in a club, you see, well, we were…"

"What did he find?" Sam asked. The boy shrugged.

"I was sick," he sniffled as if to prove his point, "so he only showed it to Kathy."

"Alright, thanks, you've been a big help," Sam reassured him. Dean gave Justin back the arrow, commenting on the nice shot, and he and Sam walked back through the mud to the car.

"Whatever Edward found isn't going to be there anymore. Cops would have taken it," Dean said as he pulled the car away from the curb, leaving the forest behind them. Sam was on his laptop, already looking for the address of the sheriff's office.

"I don't remember any suspicious objects being found with the other victims. Nothing reported, anyway," he explained.

"It's probably something that doesn't look harmful. I hate that. If it's going to kill you, it might as well look like it."

"A mummy's hand or something?"

"Yeah, or a dagger or creepy looking pendant. But no, it's always like a cup or something," Dean complained. This made both brothers think about the silver goblet on the floor in the back seat, the one they were bringing to Bobbi.

"I found the address of the sheriff's department. What are we looking for?"

"Well, if the bodies were found only a few days ago, anything found at the site would still be in evidence."

"Do you want a look at Kathy's body?" Sam asked. Dean paused for a moment.

"No," he answered simply. The image of a young girl who had been trampled by horses was not one he wanted stuck in his head for the rest of his life.

"Okay, so we're looking for something a boy would want to show his friends. What could that be?" Sam said and started thinking about it. Personally, at that age, Sam would have wanted to show off a good grade on a paper. That wasn't likely to be haunted, though.

Dean thought too, and for him, if he were that age, he'd want to show off his first chest hair.

That was even less likely to be haunted.

"Maybe some sort of Indian thing," Dean suggested. Sam looked at him, obviously wondering where the idea had come from.

"The kid back there, he called himself Little Bear, shot me with an arrow…" Dean was kind enough to explain. Sam realized Dean was right and was slightly impressed.

The sheriff's station was practically a hole in the wall, definable amongst Polly's Knitting Supplies and Hanks' Fishing Stuff only by a small sign on the door reading 'Sheriff.' Dean parked the Impala behind a pick up truck and began sorting through his coin tray for money to put in the meter.

"Man, when are they going to make parking meters that take credit cards?" Dean complained. Personally, Sam hoped that day would never come. It seemed to him that parking meters that take credit cards should be a sign of the downfall of civilization and eventually the apocalypse.

"Are we sticking with FBI?" Sam asked as he got out of the car.

"Probably best to be consistent, Mr. Wright," Dean said. The way he said the name wasn't so much as a jest, but just a way to remind Sam who he was going to be for the next few hours.

The inside of the sheriff's station looked much like one would suspect, certainly if one had been in as many sheriff's stations as Dean and Sam had. It was small and cramped with piles of papers on the desks and outdated wanted posters on the walls. They appeared to still be using phones with rotary dials. Though, both brothers noticed, the tile floors looked almost spotless.

"Can I help you two?" a string of a man asked from behind the counter. He had to be in his 50s with one of those thin faces that made him look like he should be a mortician.

"Yeah, we're with the FBI," Sam told him and both brothers flashed their IDs, "we're here about the two children found in the forest."

The man's face didn't seem to register this information.

"The two trampled to death? We'd like to see the evidence from the scene," Sam added. The man looked at their IDs again and nodded.

"This way," he said and began to walk off. Successful but slightly confused, the brothers followed him.

The hardest part was the clothes. Folded neatly in their evidence bags, the only sign that anything was different about them was the abundance of muddy hoof marks. Sam looked at the bag containing Kathy Harris's sweater. The plastic looked like it had been gripped and crushed tightly, perhaps by a mother in tears.

"This looks familiar," Dean said. Sam set the sweater down and looked. Dean was holding up a bag with a plastic arrow in it, the tip a piece of tape.

"We had real arrows," Sam said and he wasn't sure why. Dean shrugged and they continued looking through the pile of bags. There really wasn't much they didn't expect to find. Clothes, bows and arrows, a backpack and school books, even a few bloodied rocks. One of the children apparently had an inhaler.

Nothing looked out of place.

Then, as Sam moved a backpack to the side, he found underneath it a small drum. Amongst the bows and arrows and other things Little Bear probably had some of himself, Sam had at first thought of the drum as just another toy. But this time, he looked again.

All of the other toys were plastic and generally cheap looking. They had resembled the actual items as much as Barbies resembled an actual woman, but this drum looked different. It looked… real.

"Hey look at this," Sam said. Dean, who hadn't been having any luck, looked at the drum with hope.

"That looks professional…" he said admiring the actual craftsmanship.

"Does it look like something you'd want to show your tribe?" Sam asked holding it up. Dean nodded.

"Mostly definitely."

Dean once again found himself wishing the haunted item had been something more like a dagger or a pendant. Only this time it was because things like daggers and pendants fit nice and easy into your pocket. Very easy to steal.

A drum? Not so much.

Granted it was a relatively small drum, but it still caused Dean quite a bit of trouble. Though, actually, in this case it was Sam who had the most trouble. It was his job to distract the should-be-mortician while his brother smuggled the drum out of the sheriff's office and safely to the car. Normally something like that wouldn't be very hard for the personable younger brother, but the man seemed to be as interested as he was interesting.

Sam found himself recanting what little he knew about the world of wrestling as Dean slipped out the door with the drum under his coat.

"I don't see any special markings," Dean had taken the drum out of the bag and was examining it with an eye that had seen a fair about of haunted things. Sam was driving the Impala as far from the sheriff's station as possible before they realized the drum was missing.

"What's it smell like?" he asked. Dean gave his brother a look but smelled the drum anyway.

"Dirt," he answered simply.

"Well that's not helpful."

"Or pleasant," Dean rubbed his nose a little, in case he got any dirt on it.

"Anything from the EMF meter?"

"Yeah, this is it," Dean reassured him. Sam nodded.

"Should we try and figure it out or just salt and burn it?" he asked. At that Dean widened his eyes and leaned back against his seat. He was obviously thinking it over. He began to rap his fingers on the drum.

"I dunno. On one hand it'd be nice to know what happened. I mean horses?" he asked. Sam nodded in agreement.

"But on the other hand, it kills people. Why take a chance we don't have to?" Dean asked, his fingers moving quickly against the top of the drum. Again Sam nodded in agreement.

"It's probably too dangerous to give to Bobbi. Especially if we don't know what sets it-" Sam stopped and looked over at his brother, "Dean…"

"What?"

"Stop that…" Sam commanded. His voice was the sort of calm where it's easy to tell he was trying to be calm.

"Stop what?"

"Your hand…" Sam explained. Both brothers looked down and saw Dean's fingers still tapping on the drum. Only now, instead of a gentle tap in thought, his fingers were moving feverishly, almost faster than they should be able to.

"Ah..!" Dean said and quickly pulled his hand away from the drum. He rubbed his fingertips with his other hand. Sam's eyes had been on the road so he did not see it.

"I said stop!" he raised his voice before looking back to see his brother's hands away from the drum.

Instead of yelling at his brother that he had, Dean's eyes widened in dread.

They could both still hear the fast rapping, only it didn't sound like the drum. It sounded like something faster, something bigger, something fiercer. Because Sam couldn't, Dean turned around in his seat and looked out the back window.

"Dude gun it…" he instructed.

"What? Why? What's back th-" Sam asked but stopped as he looked in the rearview mirror.

They were being followed by a posse of men on horseback.

"Aw hell!" Sam cried and hit the gas. The horsemen kept pace, plus.

"Faster!" Dean urged. Sam was going as fast he could, but decided not to tell Dean that. Then, suddenly, Dean was unbuckled and twisted around in his seat. Sam tried to look in the mirror back at the horsemen, but found his brother's rear end in the way.

"What are you doing?" he demanded.

"I'm getting the salt!" Dean asked, wondering what Sam thought he was doing.

"We're not burning the drum in the car!" Sam told him. Dean rolled his eyes as he grabbed the cylinder of salt and sat back in his seat.

"Of course we aren't! We're trying not to die here!"

"Well I'm not pulling over!" Sam explained, getting a good look at the horsemen again. They were definitely Native Americans there.

Can Nikki do long distance channeling?

"Damn right you're not pulling over! If we can't burn it, we can at least salt it," Dean told him and popped open a knife. He cut an X into the leather of the drum, opening it up. With a talented thumb his flipped open the salt and poured it into the drum.

The air was suddenly filled with hooting and hollering. It wasn't possible to tell if the sounds were angry or glad, but soon they stopped.

The brothers looked in the rearview mirrors to find themselves alone of the road.

Letting out a sigh Sam lightened up on the gas pedal and Dean leaned back in his seat. Dean held up the empty salt container and gave it a salutatory kiss.

"I love this stuff!"

They burned the drum anyway. Both brothers were sure Bobbi would have loved it for her collection, but after what those horsemen cost them in gas alone meant death for the drum. But, before setting it aflame, Sam looked it over again and found something strange. The leather on the inside of the drum was a dark red. He couldn't be positive, but it looked to Sam a lot like blood. This surprised neither brother.

So, after the drum was ash, they hit the road again, continuing on their way to Chicago, and then on to Lincoln.

"Do you think we can actually make it there this time?" Dean asked, this time from the driver's seat. Sam, who was trying to find a comfortable position in his seat and get some sleep, glared at him.

"You're the one who wants to fight evil and save people, so shut up," he said and closed his eyes.

"Well you're the psychic, I'm asking. Are we?" Dean repeated. Sam eyes opened again, and again he glared at his brother.

"Dude, shut up or I'll hurt you," he threatened before turning around and giving his brother his back. Dean frowned, and decided Sam didn't deserve such good company.