Eleven
The gun on the table watched Sam pace the motel room throughout the night. Its presence alone forced him to the austere realization that if Dean were to attack with nails and teeth, his own brother's gun would be used against him. It was a thought that, no matter how hard Sam pushed it away, kept returning with feral perseverance.
He knew, rationally, that he could not return to the cave and expect to save Dean from the hundreds of monsters that lurked within the rock walls. The sheer idea of overtaking that many creatures was ludicrous, and in addition to the obvious disadvantage of being outnumbered, he would have also been out of his prime territory. The middle of the desert with limited weapons, fighting against some evil he did not even understand was not where he wanted to wage war. To make matters more frustrating, Sam did not know how much he should push Dean, unsure of his older brother's current mental stability. He was partially worried that if he fought against Dean, the fragile mind that Dean now held would crack and give way to a greater monster.
But, he couldn't just leave Dean there.
No, he needed another plan, something that would prepare him for a battle he did not believe he could win. All he had to do, he reminded himself with an angry snort, was survive hundreds of reptiles. The same reptiles who kidnapped children and offered them a chance at immortality. Yet, if the children did not kill for the lizards, then they would be offered up as the blood sacrifice.
Yes, he just had to survive hundreds of these reptiles.
Despite how much knowledge Sam had gained so rapidly in the past few hours, there was still something missing. There was still a vital piece that he needed to pull everything together and complete the mess that was tearing his brain apart.
Why.
Of the millions of children in the country, the lizards chose specific ones. And, out of all the adult males in the city alone, Dean had been chosen because he was, in some way, special to the reptiles.
Perhaps it was the reason for their choice in the beginning would allow Sam to defeat the lizards. If he knew the "why," there must have been a "why not," and that could lead him somewhere. As much as he wanted to go back to the cave, throw a couple sticks of the illegal dynamite Dean had purchased from a vigilante in Texas, and run, Sam knew that doing so was an incredible risk. And, he would not be able to help Dean if he was dead. His best defense—unfortunately—seemed to be knowledge.
So, strapping a pair of switchblades to the inside of his ankle, Sam returned to the library after pacing the small motel room and awaiting Dean's return for the entire night. He revisited the webpage that listed the names of the missing or deceased children in the town, and then ran the names in through the obituaries to find the children's parents. When his allotted time on the computer finished so that a gawky teenage girl with a mouthful of metal could check out the Hollywood gossip on her half an hour, Sam took the list of the parents to the reference section to manually flip through the monstrously large phonebook for personal information.
He thought he had just scribbled down the phone number of the parents for a girl who had disappeared five years ago, when there was a gentle tapping on his shoulder. However, he found upon jerking upright, that he had fallen asleep on top of the phone book and the elderly librarian was looking down at him through knotted eyebrows of disapproval.
"Sir," she said, trying to sound sympathetic although failing to do so with her lips so tightly pursed, "we have a shelter in town, if you need a place to sleep."
"No, I…college research," Sam replied, shuffling through his wrinkled papers futilely, but he could see that the lady didn't believe his answer. Even though he had not looked at himself in a mirror in over twenty-four hours, he could feel the stubble on his face and see the unwashed locks of hair drooping in his eyes.
"Well, perhaps you should go finish your research at the college library," the lady told him and turned away.
Realizing that he had just been asked to leave, Sam closed the phone book and rose to his feet. He had managed to find all but three numbers of the assortment of parents of his list, and he figured that if needed, he would return to the library later when the domineering librarian had left for the day.
At a gas station a few miles from his first stop, Sam pulled out one of the police uniforms Dean and he had used three hunts ago. In the gas station bathroom, Sam quickly wet his fingers and ran them through his hair to pull it away from his face after he had changed into the navy outfit. Rummaging through the duffel bag containing their various clothes used only for "information gathering," he produced the remainder of the costume.
Sighing heavily, he strapped on the gun belt and decided that it couldn't hurt his image any. Besides, he remembered, Dean had been so eager for them to wear the belts when he first stole the uniforms from a local station. Sam rolled his eyes at the memory and finished tacking the pins belonging to an officer whose name he couldn't remember onto the blue shirt.
He ran his fingers through his hair once more, and then exited the bathroom, duffel bag slung over one shoulder and putting on a pair of sunglasses with his free hand. With the exception of the unofficial Impala, he appeared to be the perfect officer of the law.
When he threw the duffel bag into the backseat and checked the first address, he swore he heard Dean laughing from the passenger seat about how proud he was of his younger brother finally "getting it."
At all the houses, he used the excuse that crime investigators were reopening the case of the missing and deceased children due to the state's request. Typically, the parents did not argue when he flashed the badge belonging to a man from over a thousand miles away. Most of the time, they would allow him inside, where he would remove his deceiving sunglasses, slipping one end into his breast pocket, and sit on the couch while they offered him something cold to drink.
"Now," he would begin after the small talk had ended, and he would lean forward, clasping his hands together sympathetically and relaxing his face to a trusting gaze. "I'm new on the case, taking over for our last officer, so could you please tell me what…who took your child? Just for the record."
"Escaped criminal from the local prison," one sandy blonde wife answered as she looked out her beige draped window. Her long pink nails curled underneath her chin and matched the shade of lipstick she wore. "He probably buried her body somewhere in the sand."
Another father told Sam through a gruff smoker's timbre, "Must've been mountain lion. Never saw claw marks like that in all my life. 'Course," he said, lowering his voice as his wife left to put their lemonade glasses in the kitchen sink to soak, "I wouldn't tell her that. Never gonna tell her what I saw when I had to go to the morgue and identify our daughter's body."
A hysterical woman leapt to her feet when Sam asked her the question and screamed, "How should I know what took my son?" Her black curls had bobbed on her shoulders, unsettled and uncontrolled with every shriek and accusative finger pointed. "You should know that! Get out of my house! Get out! How dare you come around asking questions like that!"
He visited couples and single parents, parents remarried when the death of their children split up their first marriages, and parents who, despite having more children after the disappearance of their first, bent their heads and cried at the memories. Some of the people refused to talk to him and slammed the door in his face when he explained that he was from the state headquarters. They yelled that the cops hadn't done much good before, so the police needn't get involved in their business again.
At every house where he was invited inside, he took notes in a notebook that used to contain his lab results from a basic chemistry class at college. During a hunt when Dean and he had been forced to spend the night in a forest after a werewolf killing, they had ripped out the viable chemistry notes and used them to start a fire to keep themselves warm. Listening to the men and women talk, he was once again reminded of how his college life was slowly becoming enveloped within the supernatural mess of hunting.
After exhausting his list of people, Sam headed back to the motel room where he looked over the accumulated data. As he had suspected, there was nothing in common between the children except for the age range. Then, halfway through his third read and his bottle of water, he began to notice something else. Quickly, he turned on the laptop and opened the virtual encyclopedia program installed on the portable machine. Following several minutes of clicking and typing, he discovered the first similarity that at last gave him hope that he was finding something worthwhile.
All of the children's bodies had been found sometime during the day before the night of the new moon that month. If the bodies were found after that night, they were usually in more advanced stages of decay to indicate that it was a possibility that death had occurred on the day of the new moon. Remembering the reptiles' words to Dean that he had to kill before the morning of the new moon, Sam shook his head.
"Werelizards." He smacked his hand once against the table hard enough to make it sting all the way through his elbow. "Goddamned werelizards." Then he buried his head against his chest and began to laugh, allowing the sheer exasperation of his situation overtake him. He rested his arms on the table and placed his chin against them, laughing until his body shook, laughing until he could only hear his own throaty chuckles mingling with sobs, and laughing until he wiped away the pained tears in his eyes.
It was well after midnight when Sam finally finished cleaning and loading the guns. The television was on in front of him, but he was not paying attention to the virtual pictures, as he was fingering the gun beside his hip and merely waiting. There was a jingling of keys outside the door, and he immediately turned off the television and rose to his feet. The gun moved up in one smooth motion of promise. When the door opened, Dean, wearing his leather jacket despite the desert heat, walked through nonchalantly.
He gave Sam only a quick flicker of a gaze, but there was instantly a human veil falling over the blackness in his eyes when he spoke. His words belonged to an actor in Dean's body instead of the very man himself. "Man, I've got to tell you about the night I've had! And this blonde! Oh! The things she could do with her—"
The gun clicked and shattered the silence.
Dean's head snapped up, and he looked up at Sam where the endless black void of the gun stared at his from across the room. There was a momentary flash of fear on his face, which was quickly erased by true confusion and forced concern.
"Sam…?" he began. His pitch did not crack, and he shut the door behind him quietly, not turning his back to Sam.
Sam fought desperately to keep the tremble out of his voice when he spoke. The gun wavered only once, and he tightened his muscles to control himself. A cold chill passed over his skin, and he regretted all of the moments he had failed to act, which had led him up to the present.
This was his brother.
A man. A monster.
Dean in all.
But, Sam spoke and he raised the gun a little higher, wondering if he would have the strength to pull the trigger against the person composed of his own flesh and blood if his life depended upon that choice. "We need to talk," he said.
