1.) I still own only the words you're reading and not anything else, and 2.) The next chapter I promise will be longer, I'm just trying to spread these chapters out more than I did SLL.

Chapter Two ; Angst Has a Body Count

Sam Winchester was going insane, and he could feel his decent into madness. It wasn't nearly as painful as he thought it would have been and he had to admit the notion of spending the rest of his days talking to the man in his thumb was strangely comforting. Carrying on long and detailed conversations with Tom Thumb about the aliens attacking Earth meant that Sam wouldn't have to play children's games with his moronic older brother, Dean.

Pinching the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger, Sam let out a hissing sigh. "I give up."

Dean, in his traditional driving pose (leaned back in the bucket seats of his mint 1967 Chevrolet Impala, right arm stretched out straight with hand on the upper hemisphere of the steering wheel, and left arm bent with elbow out the window), frowned. "Come on, Sammy, you only guessed three times."

"For the last time it's Sam," he barked, "and I couldn't care less about your little eye spying something starting with the letter C, or any other letter of the alphabet for that matter."

Scowling at the winding coastal road before him, Dean didn't let his voice lose its usual, casual light. "All right, Lucy Van Pelt. I spy with my little eye something that begins with the letter C, a curmudgeon – you."

"I really dislike you sometimes, you know that?"

"No," Dean replied, sarcasm dripping from his feigned shock, "I had no idea."

"Screw you."

Dean, it was impossible to deny, had a great smile and Sam hated him for that. "Absolutely not a problem for me. I don't know about you, though, and please don't rush to show me."

Sam made a face that would have made one think he had just bit into a lemon. "Why do you always have to twist everything around to sex? It's embarrassing, makes me wish a hole would just open up under my feet and swallow me."

"You started it, Sammy."

He snorted angrily through his nose at that damn nickname. "I started it?" Sam asked shrilly. "I wouldn't have said anything if you hadn't roped me into yet another of your idiotic games. I'm not three anymore in case you haven't noticed."

"So shoot me for trying to bond with my little brother," Dean said stiffly. "I'm so sorry for wanting to spend some time with you outside of ghost busting. Excuse me for trying to make up for those years you wasted in college!" The knuckles of his right hand had gone white, he was holding onto the steering wheel with that much passion.

"Fuck you, Dean. At least I was trying to make something of my life," Sam shot back curtly.

Dean almost missed the sign beside the road warning of a sharp turn, the one that if he hadn't seen would have sent the brothers careening over the road and into the ocean. Maybe Dean wanted that to happen, but there was no way he was going to let his car get cancer of the frame from that salt water. "I have news for you, Sammy. This is your life now and it always was, it was just a matter of time before it came up and bit you in the ass. You were the one who ran away, so don't you dare start bitching at me about what life I did or didn't make for myself. While you were hiding behind your worthless text books, Dad and I were saving people. I did make something of my life, you ungrateful little pissface."

Sam leaned toward the tape player and quite violently stopped its playing. The radio soon kicked in, set at a station that no longer was receiving a signal, and because Dean had put the volume up so high the buzzing and popping nearly deafened Sam in the right ear. That only made him more annoyed at the world and he came close to twisting the knob right off as he turned the volume down, began hunting for a station in a brooding silence that would have made any bear in the area yelp and run the other way.

It was pointless, Dean theorized as he listened to the irate grunts coming from his brother and whatever crappy country music/religious talk show station the radio picked up, to tell Sam that the K his little eye had spied was in actuality a kite. The bell had already rung and it was a little bit impossible to un-ring it. Best to let Sam stew for a while until he got sick of the silence and started talking again. That's what Dean always did and most of the time it worked.

But the sinking feeling in his stomach told him that today wasn't going to be one of those days. Sam had found a radio station to listen to and without dead silence in the car he could last hours without acknowledging the very fact that Dean "Stud Muffin" Winchester existed.

It was another talk show, what Sam had settled on, but it wasn't revolving around sinners and penance. The main topic, at the moment, was the Red Sox trade of their third base coach to the Milwaukee Brewers. The callers were very happy about that, euphoric even, and for a good ten minutes no one wanted to talk about anything else. It was annoying, but once that was done and over with they moved on to more important news – the mysterious death of a teenager.

"Eighteen-year-old Arrowsic Island, Maine resident Adam Sanders," the woman DJ announced, "was found dead earlier this morning by his parents. Sources tell us that he hadn't come down for breakfast and upon inspection Adam was found dead of a lobotomy in his bedroom, still lying under his bed covers. We're told that there are no signs of forced entry or struggle, no evidence to be found, and no leads. Earlier this month, you'll remember, we reported a similar death of another Arrowsic resident by the name of Danielle Harris, 22. Neither of the children's parents had heard anything out of the ordinary during the night."

A commercial then came in, a jingle about getting your car checked out at Jiffy Lube.

Why did that case sound so familiar to Dean? He knew he'd heard of something like that before, but he couldn't remember where. Some television show a few years ago, damn, what's-it-called.

At least Sam started to talk again, and calmly to boot. "That's strange, don't you think? Two kids killed in their beds painfully, but they didn't fight back and no one in the house heard anything. That might be something we should look into, especially since there's not a hint of evidence or forced entry. We're close enough to Arrowsic I think, being as we're right by the ocean."

"Unsolved Mysteries."

"What?" Sam asked.

"Unsolved Mysteries," Dean repeated. "That's where I heard of this before. A few years back they did a segment on Arrowsic – you're right about close, it's an island near enough to Portland. It turns out there've been a lot of murders there, but no one's ever been able to come up with anything."

Sam laughed. "And you call me a geek?"

"Just listen for a second, okay? All the people being killed there are young, teenagers to late twenties, and found in their homes without a single sign of foul play. It's like all of a sudden, out of nowhere, they get a lobotomy or their skulls are sawed open and a hunk of their brain is removed – always the same hunk, mind you. This has been going on for decades, right? But there hasn't been a doctor on that island for a long time, and no one with enough know-how of the human system to do anything like that lives there now."

"It could just be a serial killer who reads 'worthless text books'," Sam offered sourly. "But if there's no sign of foul play, that means that these people weren't injected with anything to put them to sleep – meaning that someone should have heard something."

Dean nodded, choosing to fly over his brother's earlier text book repetition. "Yeah, we should definitely look into this."

He stopped the car in the middle of the road and made a u-turn – a very difficult u-turn because Impala's are long cars that don't turn on a dime, more like the pan for the biggest pizza ever made. For about three seconds Dean was sure he'd roll down the cliff, but he was able to save that awful scenario with the half inch of space left between the front bumper and cliff face.

"What are you doing?" Sam asked, breathless because he too was momentarily frightened of crashing into the chilly Atlantic Ocean and coming face-to-face with a blue whale.

"We're going to Arrowsic Island, are we not?"

Sam twisted himself around to look out the back left window of the car, to stare dumbfounded at the waves crashing against the rocky beach hidden from his vision. "Uh-huh."

"And Arrowsic Island is this way. I remember because they mentioned directions on the Unsolved Mysteries segment… and the sign on the highway some miles back asking us to buy Arrowsic Island pottery, the one complete with a little map in the corner."

The younger Winchester brother settled back into his seat, half listening to the radio in case more important information about the case would pop up. "I can't believe my brother is an Unsolved Mysteries buff."

"I am not a buff," Dean protested, loath to admit that he was actually, deep down, still a freak for the show. "I just didn't have anything else to watch at the time. You know, every now and then they show some relevant information."

"Oh, really?" Sam tried not to snort.

Dean motioned toward the radio with his right elbow. "They were doing the show on ghosts. They were talking about Arrowsic Island and how some of the people there still think Mad Doctor Meyers is still running around there, though he died in the 1950s. See, he and his wife – a nurse – moved to Arrowsic to pursue their medical dream. Turns out that dream was to perform surgeries on young people for whatever reason I can't remember. The townsfolk say that Dr. Meyers still operates on people from the grave. Everything else I can recall I've already explained. But I know there's more…."

"Like Dean Winchester's more of a nerd than his little brother is."

"Sammy, don't you think for a moment that I won't shove you out of this car."