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"Nine hundred bucks, Sam! Nine hundred goddamn dollars!" Dean shoved his hands into the pockets of his denim jacket, "If that zombie hadn't already been one of the un-fucking-dead I'd head back there and kill its dead ass."
"Sure, man," Sam replied, smilingly self-consciously at an old couple who had quickly crossed the street when they spotted the furious man storming their way, "Just chill okay?"
"It cannot cost that much to get exploded zombie guts outta a car…" Dean continued to mutter as he slid open the door to the diner. Like most the town, Twilla's Café had seen better days, but it was neat as a pin and the food was hot and tasty. Or at least that's what the motel manager had promised them. Keeping in mind of course, Sam mused, that this was the same guy who last night had promised a great deal at the detailing store.
Dean stormed under his own dark cloud to a booth in the back; Sam ducked his head and smiled apologetically at the waitress behind the counter. One of the things he had picked up travelling with Dean and his father, never piss off the people who serve you food. Things just got way ugly.
Dean buried himself behind the café's menu, with the occasional mutter rising from behind the cracked brown plastic. Sam slid over and leaned against the wall, making sure he had a clean line of sight to the door and windows. Even in the middle of his piss-fart, Sam had noticed, Dean had done it unconsciously. John Winchester's training may had been unorthodox – and mildly psychologically damaging – but it certainly did stick.
The waitress ambled over. She was a solid woman who had perhaps a few too many meals that ended with the phrase, 'well just one piece more'. Red hair tried to escape from the two pencils that held it back in a loose bun. The resulting look eerily resembled an exploding bowl of spaghetti. "Morning gents, what can I get cha?"
The sight of a woman, any woman, worked to pull Dean out of his funk and the two ordered breakfast and quickly wolfed it down.
"So how long did they say they car would take?" Sam quizzed, scraping up the last of his eggs with the toast.
"Duhhno," Dean swallowed around his coffee, "A day or two at least, apparently the…stuff… has seeped under the floor, so he's going to have to pull it up to get it out."
"'Kay then, what are we going to do to fill in the time?" Sam stretched out the length of his six foot frame, "It's kinda weird having free time on our hands."
"And not much of a town to fill the time with. Maybe we can catch a movie somewhere in this dump. I wonder what's playing?"
The Fates, never ones to tolerate tempting of any sort decided to intervene. The diner door swung open with a bright jangle and the local police hurried in. Sam jerked his head towards the two officers and Dean casually glanced over.
While they spoke in low voices, their conversation carried clearly over to the brothers. "Wendy," the larger of the two cops leaned heavily on the counter, "the Jackson boy has gone missing. They saw him last headed out to the lake. Have you heard anything?"
"God, not Bill and Anne's kid? Do they…do they think he's run away?" Sam noticed how odd it was that the waitress sounded so hopeful that the boy had run away.
"'Fraid not. We found some tracks beside the north shore, but…well they just vanished on us."
"Geez, Larry, this is getting outta hand. What does this one make? Five?" Wendy the waitress twisted her hands in anxiety.
"Six." The smaller of the cops spoke up from where he perched on one of the stools, his back to Sam and Dean. "I know, I know," He held up his hand as if to ward off an argument, "no one believes anything happened to old Tom, but the man doesn't just wander off and leave his hut empty. It just don't happen."
Sam looked meaningfully at Dean, "I told you it was one of ours."
Dean carefully turned back, making sure he kept one eye on the cops, "A bunch of missing people don't make it spookfest Sammy."
"Something's going on here Dean, I can feel it." Sam knew he couldn't explain it to Dean, at least in a way that would get him to understand. There was something crawling in the air, something that made everything seem just a little wrong. A little off. He'd noticed it last night when they arrived at the motel, and it seemed to leap of the page of the newspaper. Everything it the town was dying as if the life, the vitality, was being drained away.
Dean watched his brother carefully. He knew more and saw more than Sam suspected he did. He knew his younger brother could touch the world in a way that wasn't quite…ordinary. Where Dean had his cockiness, Sam had an ability to reach out to people, to flash those sea green eyes and to get them to trust him in a way his older brother never could.
And now all this stuff that had started recently…if he kept it up, Sam would soon be starring alongside Jennifer Love Hewitt. However if he thought that some of the spooky had started here, then Dean would believe him. The cops headed back out to their car and drove away, leaving the waitress quietly cleaning the counter. "Come on, let's find out then."
"Hey, what's up?" Sam slid into the seat the cop had vacated. "Did something happen? Was someone hurt?"
"No, no. Nothing for you boys to worry about."
"Maybe it might be something for us," Dean sat a couple of stools down, playing bad cop to Sammy's good cop. "We're good at handling other people's problems, especially those they're not quite sure they want to admit to in the first place."
The waitress took a step back, smoothing her apron over the rumpled pink uniform, "Just who are you boys?" Her eyes darted from one man to the other, trying to get a fix on just who had come into her place.
They seemed ordinary enough, but there was a sense she couldn't place…a sense that they were somehow dangerous and it left her unsettled. She'd worked this diner for nearly fifteen years and seen people come and go and had always prided herself on being a good judge of character. But these two…when they had first come in she'd thought they were together – 'together' in the way that had those politically correct air quotes around it. There was an easy familiarity their easy manner and banter.
"So, just who are you boys?" she repeated.
Sam shot a glace at Dean, signalling he had an idea. "We're bounty hunters, ma'am. Heading east to see if we can get a line on a bail jumper, but if you've got something happening in these parts, we'd be glad to lend a hand."
Wendy seemed a little unconvinced, "You look a little young to be doing something like that."
Dean snorted softly, "Well, it's something of a family business."
Wendy began to unfold the horror that had come upon Greenville in the last few years. Millan Lake had always been a popular area for families and couples to go and relax on weekends and vacations. Remote enough to feel like wilderness area close enough to town to still be able to get all the amenities. But strange things had begun to happen at the lake. It started three years ago when two girls had apparently committed suicide together, then a husband murdered his wife and then drowned himself and now the number of the missing was quickly approaching double figures. None of the deaths were similar or hinted at some knife-wielding madman. Nothing suggested there was anything unnatural going on, other than the regular, run-of-the-mill breakdown of the human psyche. But still…people were staying away from the lake.
The plump waitress shook herself out of the reverie that her story had brought on. "We're all probably over-reacting, mind. This is a small bump on a tiny line in the middle of nowhere on a map." Her face firmed as she tried to convince herself, "Nothing ever happens here."
As the two men left the diner Dean glanced over at Sam, "Don't know about you but it's always seemed to me that the middle of nowhere is the freakiest place to be."
"Let's see what the fishing's like at the lake."
"I think you might be right Sammy-boy. We might find ourselves pulling in a big one."