Chapter 36

Sam woke up to the sound of birds chirping and a lazy tiger's yawn. The sun was up for the morning and the heat was slowly making its way into the air. "Rise and shine, Garfield."

Dean shook his head back and forth, trying to force the sleep out of himself. The moment he was awake, he sprung up, his ears listening intently. There was something very loud happening in town, and Dean was pretty sure he knew what it was, but he was hesitant to actually believe it.

Nagging Sammy to hurry up, Dean bounced and growled impatiently. Sam threw on his jeans, a button down which he didn't bother buttoning, and his old boots, which he barely finished tying up before they were in the Impala and barreling toward town.

"What the hell is going on?" Sam finally asked his feline family. Dean just stared eagerly out the window, as if the answer would come into view any second. And as the day would have it, it did.

Sam parked the car behind a gas station right on the edge of town in case they needed to make a fast escape back into the woods. Jumping out and letting Dean out, Sam took in the chaos.

Cattle were stampeding down the street, pushing cars, bikes, and anything else unfortunate enough to be found in the path out of their way with reckless abandonment. Nothing stood a chance before these barreling bovine. Even the buildings along the street couldn't be assumed safe. Many were losing windows, outdoor furniture, and some were even suffering some internal damage when a few stray cattle made their way in.

"What do we do about this?" Sam asked his brother. Dean did his best to shrug as he took in the situation. Neither had a clue how to handle this. They were not raised around farms. They knew nothing about cows except that they made milk.

As if to answer their prayers, a voice cried over a loud speaker. Sam recognized it. It was the voice of Curtis Shawn, the animal control officer. He looked around in desperate search for the man. He found him standing on top of a one-story pizzeria with a megaphone. "All people, evacuate main street and all buildings. Leave your cars and belongings. We're going to try to startle the cattle back to their farm."

"Do you think that's a good idea?" Sam found himself asking his just as clueless brother. All he got was another cat shrug. "Well, it's a better plan than we have. But how are they gonna' do it?"

Sam and Dean watched from the gas station parking lot as a series of police cars and animal control vehicles and many personnel encircled the path of the cattle as safely as they could and began using blow horns, whips, car alarms and horns, and anything else that could draw the cattle's fear out of them and began trying to divert the stampede back toward the farm like cowboys used to do.

Despite the racket, the cattle seemed to continue plowing forward, though anyone could see the noise was definitely making the cows hesitate before continuing. It wasn't working as they wanted, but it was clearly doing something.

Next the police sent out the canine units, alongside the local farmers. They all released all the hounds they had trained to deal with such a situation, which unfortunately wasn't a large number. But, to their luck, there was a much larger and much more clever creature standing around.

Dean saw what the dogs were doing. Even though they were not even half the size of a single cow, the dogs fearlessly ran in and began scaring the cattle in the direction the animal control officers wanted them to go. It was true that all it would take for one of the cows to kill a dog was a mean stomp, but even so, the cows were afraid of them because of their skittish, docile nature, so they went exactly where the dogs were leading them.

Before Sam even knew what was happening, Dean was darting across the gas station parking lot into the fray. "Dean!" Sam cried out. "Be careful!" While he certainly meant it regarding the stampede, he also was very concerned about the animal control and police present. Dean simply roared over his shoulder in response. Sam wasn't instilled with much reassurance from it. "Yeah, whatever." Sam spoke quietly to himself. "This is gonna' have repercussions."

Dean ran alongside the canines, which surprisingly didn't veer off their mission in fear, and aided them in diverting the stampede back in the direction they were coming from. The turn-around went as well as could be expected, but did cause a few businesses to suffer as the cattle bashed through their windows and collided with their walls in a chaotic attempt at a complete about-face.

The spectating crowd watched in fear and amazement as a tiger led a pack of dogs in rounding up some cattle. Even Sam found himself gawking in bewilderment as Dean so expertly worked the cattle in whatever way he wanted to. However, Sam wasn't about to stand around like a statue forever.

He bolted down toward the crowd so he could fall in alongside Dean as best he could. Even at his impressive height and level of fitness, Sam was no match for the giant of a tiger his brother was. "Dean!" He hollered. The tiger spared a second to glance his way. "Be careful!" Sam shouted as he pointed toward where Curtis was standing. Dean seemed to understand as he zoned back in on his task with the cows.

The cattle raced back down main street toward Carl Blinkly's farm. It would only be a handful of minutes before they were back in their corral if all went according to plan. Sam and Dean both found themselves wishing against their bad luck that all would happen according to plan for just this once.

Curtis Shawn watched alongside his partner Lucy as the stampede forcibly moved themselves back toward home. However, what they both saw near the middle of the stampede made them both stiffen up in shock. A tiger was running alongside the cattle. No, not just running. He was actually directing the cows. "What the crap?" Curtis gasped.

"There's your tiger." Lucy said needlessly as she pointed to the largest tiger Curtis had ever seen, not that he had seen a ton. However, he took his job seriously, and being so close to a zoo meant that he had studied up on the zoo's animals. That tiger was bigger than any textbook said tigers could be. The thing was bigger than the cows!

"We've gotta' get that tiger!" Curtis said recklessly as the importance of the stampede seemed to fade out of his mind.

"What about all the cows?" Lucy asked wisely.

"They're being dealt with." With those words, Curtis was in Lucy's car with a tranquilizer gun he had snatched from another animal control officer earlier. "Drive!" He ordered. The car peeled down toward the tiger in record speed for Lucy.

Sam saw the reaction that Curtis and Lucy had to seeing his brother and knew things were about to get intense. There was no way Dean would ever approve of him putting the Impala in any danger by trying to drive in a stampede, so Sam took off on foot. He had to ensure Dean's safety!

Dean ran, oblivious of Curtis' pursuit. He was too engrossed in the stampede. All he could hear was the sound of hooves pounding heavily against the asphalt underneath him and the frantic mooing of frightened cattle. One odd thing that he did notice was that each cow had deep red eyes. It didn't take a ranch hand to know that cow's didn't naturally have red eyes. Something was odd and he figured it had to do with that strange man from the zoo and the motel. Maybe he had gotten into the heads of the cattle just as he had tried to get inside Dean's head? That was Dean's theory and he'd be talking to Sam about it later.

The cattle barged into their fenced-in corral and Carl was ready for it. He'd heard and seen them coming from some ways away. Once it seemed the last one was in the pen, he slammed the door shut and prayed that the cattle would calm down.

Dean continued to round the cattle up into a herd and watched as the fear seemed to leave them and the red in their eyes faded away. The stampede was over, but Singleshot had suffered a great deal of fiscal damage on main street. They wouldn't soon forget this.

Curtis and Lucy pulled up right behind the stampede. Despite Lucy driving in a manner that could have earned her a spot in The Fast and Furious, the stampede was just too dense and chaotic for her to have made it there any faster. It didn't take them long to spot the giant tiger in the midst of the cattle. "There he is." Curtis said eagerly as he prepped his rifle with the one tranquilizer dart he'd managed to bring along. "This better do it." He took aim.

Sam sprinted to his brother as fast as he could. He was impressed with himself that he hadn't fallen far behind the stampede. He figured maybe all the noise and destruction just gave the illusion that the cows were moving quickly, when in reality all the chaos and confusion just made for a slow-moving, hectic herd.

When he arrived at the farm, he found the cows all being calmed down by the police's dogs and his own dear brother. Unfortunately, he didn't have long to appreciate what his brother had just accomplished. He spotted out of the corner of his eye the animal control officer from the motel, Curtis, taking aim on his brother with some rifle. Sam assumed it was a tranquilizer rifle, but he wasn't positive. Either way, it was bad news for Dean.

Sam bolted toward his brother. He moved as quickly as his long legs could take him, his unbuttoned shirt flapping wildly in the wind as his leather boots pounded deep footprints into the dusty ground. He leapt over the pen's fence, his eyes bouncing back and forth between Curtis and his brother. The rifle and the tiger. That's when he saw it. The finger pulled down on the trigger. The gun let out a scream. The dart raced out of the barrel.

"DEAN!" Sam shouted as he threw his body carelessly in front of the tiger. Dean turned and watched as an enormous dart lodged itself in Sam's stomach, emptying all the liquid within it into his brother's bloodstream. The tiger roared fiercely at the sight of his brother fall unceremoniously to the ground like a ragdoll.

"Run." Was the only word that escaped Sam's limp lips before he was completely out cold. Dean looked up and saw the female animal control officer running at them to see what had happened. Obviously they were not targeting the human. It was anyone's guess what a tiger-sized tranquilizer would do to a human.

He knew he didn't have long. With some difficulty, Dean managed to shove his head under Sam's unconscious form and wiggle himself under so that the result was that Sam was lying upon his back. Dean watched as the officer's eyes went wide at such a sight before he took off with his sleeping sibling riding atop him.

Curtis let out a stream of swear-words as he watched the tiger escape with the F.B.I. agent on his back. It was like something out of a cartoon. What the hell tiger were they dealing with? Whatever the situation was, it was clear that the tiger and the agent had a bond and that the police officer from the animal hospital wasn't lying at all about the tiger. It was all weird, but it didn't change a thing. He would hunt that tiger and put it back in the zoo where it belonged.

Sam was probably lucky he was sleeping like a corpse as Dean ran him as carefully as he could while still maintaining a speed needed to escape their potential pursuers. His body bounced violently on top of Dean with every large step or leap he took. It didn't hurt Dean at all. He weighed too much muscle to care, but he actually worried Sam would wake up bruised. If he woke up at all. The thought scared Dean. That was a heavy-duty sleeping dart. Sam was big. But he was not tiger-big.

Unfortunately, Dean had been transformed into a tiger, not a doctor. There was nothing he could do about it at the moment, even if he knew of something he could do. Instead, Dean just kept running. The best thing he could do for Sammy now was to get him back to their camp. There, Dean could make sure he was kept safe as he recovered. He hoped all that was needed for a complete recovery was a good, long snooze.