Disclaimer: We don't own Supernatural. Or Jensen Ackles's hair. (If we did we might know what colour it is - thanks for all the input, though, except now we're more confused than we were before. . .)

Chapter Five: Who you gonna call?

After finding the salt they had both run out of ideas for the time being. Ted had situated himself on the bed and had spent the afternoon channel surfing, and trying not to think about his trunk. Sammy, on the other hand, had settled in the chair in the far corner of the room and had taken to reading an old newspaper. It had been the only thing he could find.

He seemed to be determined to read every single word in it, though.

Ted flipped to yet another channel. He really had stopped actually looking at what they were, just automatically switching it every few minutes. He was fairly confident he had been through the entire listings. More than once.

"Hey. . . Ted," Sammy called, interrupting his thoughts.

With a sigh, Ted muted the television and turned to look at the kid. "What?"

"Two of the obituaries are circled. . ." he said holding out the paper.

Hesitantly, Ted got up and accepted the paper, not sure he wanted to look, but at the same time knowing he had to. He glanced down at the page, and swallowed hard. The obits were for two fourteen-year-old girls.

Oh God.

Why would they have marked this? Surely they had not. . . done this. He looked back up at Sammy who was looking at him confused.

"Do you recognize them?" Sammy asked, hopefully, probably mistaking his paleness for recognition.

Ted just shook his head not sure he could trust his voice at the moment. He moved to hand the paper back, not having really read the blurbs when a loose page fluttered out onto the ground. Leaning forward Ted scooped it up and skimmed the article.

It was an article, cut from another paper. It had pictures of the same two girls next to a picture of a burn-damaged classroom. Ted suddenly felt rather nauseous.

There had definitely been a gas can in the back of his car.

"Maybe we knew them?" Sammy suggested having come over to look at the new article.

"Yeah, maybe," he replied weakly, hoping the kid could not tell he thought otherwise. Hell, he did not need his memory to know that had he known the girls. He would not have saved this article of their death, otherwise. That was just. . . morbid.

Great, he was the world's first squeamish serial killer. Just great.

No. Until they had memories, or concrete proof, neither of them were serial anythings. He took a deep breath. No need to freak the kid out. If Sammy wanted to think they were here for a funeral, who was he to argue?

He shoved the paper and the cut out article face down on a table and made his way back to the bed. "I think I'm going to turn in," he said, not wanted to sit up and speculate on the reason for keeping such disturbed reading material.

"Uh, sure. But Ted?" Sammy asked. "Since there is, um, only one bed. . ."

"Oh, no way in hell am I sharing a bed with you Fruitcake," Ted announced firmly.

"What? Where am I supposed to sleep then?"

"I don't care. You pick, so long as it's not on my bed."

"Well, that's not fair!" Sammy whined. "We don't even know it's your room. Besides, even if it is, I mean, we were clearly traveling together. . ."

He glared sharply at Sammy. "Just how many times must I explain this to you, Fruitboy. I am not gay."

"Well then why would we get a room with only one bed?" Sammy retorted.

"I don't know! Maybe the motel was full!" he yelled back.

Sammy started to say something then stopped. After a moment he admitted, "I didn't think of that. . . but then why wouldn't we find another place?"

"I don't know. But I do know that I am not sharing this bed with you," Ted replied as he headed for the bathroom to get ready for bed.

"But – but, why do you get it?" Sammy stammered.

"Because I said I do. Seniority remember?"

"That's a load of bull. We should at least flip a coin for it or something!"

The kid was persistent he'd give him that. "Look we'll find another place in the morning," he offered as he stared at the two toothbrushes on the counter wondering which was his. He so did not want to use Sammy the Fruitcake's by accident, that would just be gross.

It was kind of funny actually, for all he knew he was a mass murderer who burned school children alive and here he was worrying about toothbrush germs.

"We can't," Sammy protested.

"What? Why not?" he shot back while mentally playing eenie-meanie-mynie-moe with the toothbrushes.

"If someone knows us, and knows we're here they might come looking for us."

Ted looked at Sammy startled. He had a point. Damn, why hadn't he thought about that? He nodded, "Yeah, yeah. Good thinking."

Sammy left him alone after that, long enough for him to make a choice – the red one – and finish in the bathroom. As soon as he headed back for the bed though, the kid sprung his next idea.

"We should alternate," he declared.

"Alternate what?"

"Who gets to sleep on the bed. If we're going to stay here and the hotel is full it's only fair," Sammy reasoned.

Ted sighed. He was too tired to argue, and maybe tomorrow another room would open up? "Fine," he consented. Sammy looked pleased with himself so he quickly added, "I get it tonight."

"What? Why?" Sammy asked. "It was my idea, I should get it first."

"Nuh, uh. Don't work like that, Sammy," Ted replied flopping onto the bed.

"Give me one reason why you should get it first," Sammy challenged.

Ted smirked at him from the bed. "Well, we're alternating right?" he asked innocently. When Sammy nodded he continued. "And if I recall right, last night you slept here, and I slept on the bathroom floor. Therefore, you already had your turn and that makes it mine."

"That doesn't count!" Sammy tried to argue, but Ted just crawled under the covers and told him to have a pleasant sleep.

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Ted had a dream where he was not called Ted, and he chased a woman who was his mother down a long empty hallway while the little girls from the newspaper exploded in flames over his head. When he woke up, he couldn't remember the nightmare, his mother, or his name.

He was up hours before Sammy, and had nothing better to do than rummage around the room until he found a laptop on one of the dressers. Sammy must not have seen it the other day; there was a sweater and an empty bag of chips on top of it. He opened it up and typed in 'memory loss' on the search bar. As he might have expected, he came up with a bunch of medical pages listing symptoms of Alzheimer's and dementia.

Ted hazarded a guess that he and Sammy were probably a tad young for that.

He went and typed in 'amnesia' without much more luck. While it seemed that anything from a concussion or head injury to drugs and alcohol could cause various forms of amnesia, it seemed very rare for anyone to entirely forget who they were. Even most cases of psychological amnesia tended to be about repressed traumatic events.

Killing people was probably a traumatic event, wasn't it?

There was one type of dissociative amnesia that involved forgetting who you were, or possibly thinking you were someone else, and usually resulted in suddenly leaving home and traveling somewhere entirely different. It would explain why they were in some random motel, but it was also supposed to be extremely rare. What were the chances that both he and the kid had it?

At the point, Sammy groaned and rolled over on the floor. He was sleeping on his jacket and a pillow that Ted had allowed him to steal from the bed. He rolled off both and hit his head on the leg of the end table. Ted had considered waking him up and offering him the bed, but since it was now seven in the morning, that seemed rather pointless.

"Wha'zat?" Sammy asked thickly, sitting up and squinting at the glow of the computer screen.

"Laptop," Ted said. "Found it over there." He gestured in the general direction of the dresser.

"Huh." Sammy yawned and stretched, and looked like he was thinking about getting up but couldn't quite bring himself to do it. "Do you remember anything?" he asked Ted finally.

"Nope."

"Oh." Sammy yawned again, and finally pulled himself off the floor. "I was kind of hoping it would go away. . . you know, if we slept on it."

"What, like a bad dream?" Ted joked.

Sammy grunted, and shuffled off to the bathroom.

They apparently didn't keep much food of their own. Sammy found squished box of old crackers at the bottom of his bag and Ted managed to dig out a package of M&M's from the back seat of his car – he still refused to open the trunk. He'd started going through his own duffel bag while Sammy had been in the bathroom brushing his teeth, and had stopped short when he found a small knife and a lighter tucked away between his clothes.

There's nothing wrong with having a lighter, he tried to tell himself numerous times. Unless said lighter was being used to set young girls on fire. He didn't want to think about that.

"I guess we have to get breakfast from that place again," Sammy commented, "What was it? José's Grille?"

"No, we shouldn't go to the same place too many times," Ted said vaguely.

"Why not?" Sammy asked, "Someone might recognize us."

That was kind of what Ted was afraid of.

Instead he said, "It's boring. Besides, I'm tired of burgers."

"You had one," Sammy protested.

"For all you know, I could eat them everyday," Ted retorted. It suddenly occurred to him that Sammy hadn't eaten much of anything the day before. Worrying about the crapload of weaponry in his trunk had made Ted forget about getting lunch and dinner while they'd lounged in the motel, and the kid had never brought it up. The kid was probably starving. Hell, he was starving, and he'd eaten breakfast yesterday.

"We'll go get something," he promised, heading to the car.

This was harder going than it should have been. Most of the tiny restaurants and diners in the town were full.

"You know," Ted said, quickly getting annoyed as they drove by yet another full parking lot, "I wouldn't have pegged this place as a tourist trap."

"Yeah, not really," Sammy agreed, "It's kind Middle-of-Nowhere'sville."

"Very naturey," Ted concluded, "Lots of chicks, though. . ."

"I kind of noticed," Sammy said dryly as a group of women crossed the street.

"Where the hell are we, anyway?" Ted asked.

"Uh. . ." Sammy went through their stuff and pulled out the local newspaper they had looked at yesterday. Ted tried to look natural, but he really wished the kid hadn't brought that with him. The whole charred classroom picture gave him the creeps. Especially when he could not stop thinking about his lighter.

"Springfield," Sammy said after scanning the front page.

"Springfield," Ted repeated flatly.

"Uh, yeah."

"Does it say what state?" Ted prodded.

Sammy looked. And looked. And looked some more. "Uh, no."

"Great," Ted muttered, "We could be anywhere."

They stopped outside a convenience store, deciding that might be their best bet for food so far. However, before they went in, Ted noticed a small diner across the street that a crowd of women were just leaving.

"Hey, let's try there, Sammy," he said, pointing at it. He barely noticed a short blonde girl stop in her tracks across the street as he did so. He reached into his back pocket wondering if he had any spare change. It would probably be better than using a fake credit card, less likely to attract unwanted attention.

The girl's eyes widened.

"Sounds good," Sammy said. He must have been hungry, because he immediately crossed the street without checking for traffic. Ted, caught off guard, jogged to keep up. Damn kid and his stupidly long legs.

At that point, he couldn't ignore the girl anymore, because she took one final, petrified look at them coming towards her and took off at a full sprint in the opposite direction.

Apparently, Sammy noticed her too. "Hey!" he called, "Do you know us? Don't go!" Ted reached out and tried to grab the kid before he ran across the street, but it was too late.

"We're not going to hurt you!" Sammy shouted as the girl disappeared behind a couple houses. Ted caught up with him snagged him by the shoulder.

"Are you insane?" he demanded, "You can't go chasing after her like that!"

"But she looked like she knew us!"

"She looked like she didn't want to know us," Ted said. A gloomy feeling had settled over him again – that girl had looked about the same age as the ones who had died in the classroom fire.

"But we need to talk to her! She might be able to tell us who we are," Sammy argued.

With a sigh, Ted relented, "Alright, we'll look for her. But no chasing her down okay?" he demanded with a pointed look at the younger man, "We'll just follow her."

Quickly, they headed in the direction the girl had gone. Fortunately, no one on the street had seemed to notice the strange scene, which in itself was kind of seriously odd. But Ted was willing to take what they could get.

They cleared the houses and looked around. They were standing in a small back lane that ran parallel to the street they had been on. The girl was no where in sight.

The lane was long, and Ted was pretty sure she could not have gotten all the way to either end, even running full out, before they had arrived. Which meant she probably jumped one of the fences bordering the small lane. Grabbing the top of the first fence, Ted hauled himself up enough to peer into a small backyard.

He had just enough time to see a a large black shape charging the fence before he reflexively dropped. Trapped behind the fence the dog snarled and barked at them.

"Uh, I don't think she went there," he said backing away and turning to head for the next yard. He had just reached the fence when he heard a siren wailing. He jumped startled, and grabbing the kid by the arm he pulled them behind a nearby dumpster.

"What the—" Sammy gasped.

Ted pressed himself against the wall and wished he could slow his rapidly beating heart. Taking a few deep breaths he peered around the dumpster cautiously, just in time to see a fire truck whiz down the cross street, oblivious to them. He sighed, and finally released the tight grip that he had not realized he still had on Sammy's forearm.

Pulling away Sammy glared at him. "Dude, what the hell?"

"Sorry," he mumbled quietly.

"Man, we've lost her now," the kid complained, clearly having not noticed the sirens. Or at least, not remembered that they could very well be wanted criminals.

And if that girl's expression when she had seen them was anything to go by, it was looking more and more likely that they were, in fact, involved in the deadly school fire.

"Come on. Let's go eat," he said, starting back the way they had come.

"But—"

"I haven't eaten since yesterday. And you didn't even eat then, so you can't tell me you're not starving, lets go."

Thankfully the kid followed, but he did mutter something that sounded rather unflattering under his breath. Ted chose to ignore it.

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

After eating they headed back to the motel. Sammy was sulking next to him, in the passenger seat, because he had vetoed Sammy's suggestion that they drive by the local high school to see if they could locate the mystery girl.

No way in hell where they going back to the scene.

Assuming of course that they had ever been there in the first place. There was still no real proof that they had caused that fire and until there was proof they were not killers. Right?

Ted pulled into the parking lot, dismally noting that the 'no vacancy' sign was still illuminated. Guess he was sleeping on the floor tonight.

"She could be the only link we have to who we are," Sammy spoke up for the first time since they left the diner.

"I get that, but she was clearly freaked to see us, so even if we could find her I think chances are low she's going to sit down and tell us our life stories," Ted snapped.

"We should at least try," Sammy continued.

"And what do you suppose we say to her? Hey, little girl, we sort of woke up yesterday with no recollection of who we are, but don't be afraid, we just want to ask you why you ran away from us?"

"Ah, well. . ." Sammy stammered, "No I guess that would seem a little. . ."

"Strange? Bizarre? Freaking weird?"

"Yeah. Something like that," Sammy agreed as they finally made it into their room. They fell silent for a moment before Sammy spoke up again, "Hey, Ted, why do you suppose she ran from us?"

Ted looked away. Oh, he had a pretty fair guess, but it was nothing he wanted to share with the kid if he could help it.

"I mean. . . What if we've done something really bad. Like, worse than just cheating old people out of their money. . . ?"

"Sammy," Ted started warningly but the kid was still going.

"What if we've hurt people? I – I don't want to be a criminal. . ." he trailed off into a moment of silence before adding quietly, "What if I remember and I don't like who I am?"

Ted just shook his head. He had no answers for the kid. Hell, he was pretty sure that neither of them was going to like who they were, he was just trying to hold out hope it was not as bad as it looked.

"I don't know," he finally admitted.