Net Knots Chapter 20, a supernatural fanfic

Disclaimer etc, see Chapter 1

NET KNOTS

Chapter 20

Dean gave a curt nod. Sam had been sixteen; only eighteen months later he would abandon brother and father for Stanford. Their dad had noticed an odd pattern in Wilmington, Tennessee, as the three of them had been passing through and it transpired two unconnected families in the same town had separate poltergeist problems.

"Remember how they treated us – Hoskins and the McNairs?" Sam persisted.

Again Dean nodded but did not trust himself to speak. Royston Hoskins and his trophy wife were local political bigwigs and 'something' in the City, living on an 'estate' in some marble pile with a dozen bathrooms. Their response to watching the Winchester trio get banged up despatching a nasty entity was to practically shove their saviours out the door and slam it in their faces without so much as a word of gratitude.

The McNairs were blue-collar minimum-wage factory workers who like most working-class Americans couldn't afford any medical insurance and so lived a precarious existence in the knowledge if they got sick they would either get better or die. Their response to the removal of their terror was effusive thanks and an insistence on hugging all three men. Though Sam had been perpetually at war with John since he'd hit thirteen and was already deeply involved with earning a full-ride scholarship to Stanford, he had at that time felt deeply for his father as John had tried and failed to find some pretext to refuse the $80 that the McNairs – God only knew how – had somehow managed to scrape together and press upon the Winchesters as they were leaving. For once Sam had made no objection when John spent the entire $80 on gas and upgrading/re-supplying weaponry, aware and agreeing that the money should not be used on frivolities like junk food or motel rooms.

"Dean," Sam looked his brother straight in the eye. "I swear, the price list is just another way to deter the hardcore idiots. The 'Hoskins' we end up taking cases for will pay full whack. The 'McNairs'…will discover that the werewolf costing them $2,000 was really just a rabid dog and therefore we're only charging them $100 for gas."

"You promise." Dean made it a non-negotiable demand, not a question.

"I promise. Come on Dean, after what I've seen and done over this last year, I understand why we do what we do. I'm not out to fleece desperate, scared people of money they can't afford." Sam put a bit of affront into his tone.

"Okay," Dean relaxed slightly – he wouldn't tolerate defenceless people being left at the mercy of a wendigou or a shape-shifter because they couldn't afford to pay for relief. That sort of mercenary money-hunger was most of what was wrong with this country, where doctors had no qualm of conscience over sending an eight-year-old home to die of a brain tumour for no better 'reason' than his father couldn't afford to pay for the surgery to save him. Dean wasn't about to turn into some avaricious supernatural equivalent of those disgraceful doctors because a terrified family didn't have the cash to get rid of a vampire nest or a werewolf pack.

Satisfied, for now at any rate, Dean obeyed the original instructions to click SAVE and a number prefixed with an 'A' appeared. Remembering it, he exited the website and then went back in to the home page. On the second page, at the bottom of the screen was the small text box he had noticed earlier, with Reference Number: helpfully typed next to it.

Entering the number he'd just been given, Dean tapped the ENTER key and the screen promptly took him straight to the building prompt screen and the Structural Survey question, at which point he changed the radio button from NO to YES and pressed ENTER again.

A new screen came up:

IN ORDER FOR YOUR ENQUIRY FORM TO BE SUCCESSFULLY SUBMITTED, PLEASE TYPE YOUR FULL HOME ADDRESS, CELL PHONE NUMBER AND EMAIL ADDRESS BELOW.

REMEMBER, ONCE YOU PRESS THE 'SUBMIT' BUTTON, YOU WILL BE CHARGED $50. IF YOU HAVE CHANGED YOUR MIND AND DO NOT WISH TO PROCEED, PRESS EXIT NOW.

Carefully Dean entered the address of their old house in Lawrence, his own cell phone number and Sam's email address, then clicked the SUBMIT button firmly. Almost immediately there was a beep from his cell phone and a ping from the laptop's inbuilt speakers with the little envelope to denote incoming mail. Flipping open his cell phone, he saw a text message and read: YOU HAVE RECEIVED ENQUIRY FROM BiA WEBSITE. CHECK YOUR EMAIL.

Closing his phone and bringing up his email inbox, Dean opened the email from himself and found it showed his address and contact details and included the enquiry form he had just completed. "So we get an alert should an enquiry form ever come in?"

"That's the idea," Sam breathed a silent sigh of relief now the 'danger' had been smoothed over. "We check out the form and if we think it's something we need to look into we check out where they live and email-stroke-text them back with a meeting date and time somewhere locally convenient."

Dean frowned at his wording. "'Locally convenient'? We're not going directly to them?"

"That was my original plan," Sam admitted, "Right until I remembered the Benders and dear old Hibbing, Minnesota. We need to have the Consultation Meeting somewhere with plenty of people and preferably in solid daylight – a public park, a café or diner, a library or a church or something."

Dean nodded, "Yeah, I get it. Set up a meeting at someone's home and we could end up at some creepy Bender Mark II freak show in the middle of nowhere, or the place could turn out to be a demon trap. Nobody would miss us for weeks if not months."

He didn't need to remind Sam that the Benders for all their evil insanity had been cunning enough to scope out targets who were either strangers in the area, had no spouse or immediately family, or who were likely to be presumed as 'left of their own accord'. Deputy Kathleen Haduk's younger brother for instance had been widely presumed to have just gone road-tripping to try racing that hot-rod car of his – even though his sister had been a sheriff for crying out loud, his disappearance hadn't been accepted as non-voluntary until many months after it was way, way too late.

"Or a vampire nest," Sam put in grimly, "Or werewolf den or any one of a dozen other entities that would see luring us into a trap as a very good thing – and that's just the supernatural stuff. Some do-gooder on a mission lures us to a house that turns out to be a 'cult deprogramming centre' or we walk in to find a barrage of reporters or wall to wall cops or something."

Continued in Chapter 21