Goodbye Dork Duo
Harry had a straight back with his head held high, nose pretty much high in the air. "So this morning, we got a phone call from a very important Hollywood producer." I raised an eyebrow, not believing it for one moment. What kind of producer would call the dork squad.
"Wrong number?" Dean suggested.
I snorted a little. "Makes more sense."
"No smart asses." Ed scowled, adjusting his grip on the paper bag he held. "He read all about the hell house on our website and wants to option the motion picture rights." This had to be some kind of joke, right? "Maybe even have us right it." They put something online and end up in the movies? Ed and Harry put they're grocery bags in the already over filled trunk.
"And create the RPG." Ed said proudly.
"The what?" Dean asked.
Harry, Ed, and I looked at Dean like he was an idiot. "Role playing game." I clarified for my technology novice brother. All four boys stared at me surprised. "What?" I shrugged. "I went through a phrase."
"Impressive." Harry tried to act cool, leaning against his crappy car. "You ever wanna ditch the boys, you know exactly where we'll be." It reminded me of when Derek tried and failed to act cool but he didn't do it for me at all compared to him.
I forced a smile. "Thanks, but I think I'll pass."
Harry shrugged, thinking he was tough stuff. "Your loss."
"Well Harry, we better get off so we can go to yeah, Hollywood!" Ed announced proudly.
"Well congratulations." Sam quickly told the boys. "That sounds really great."
"That's awesome, best of luck to you." Dean said sarcastically.
"I'm sure you're hell house will be a great story." I said. But I swear, if I ever see that on a movie I am going to burn it to a crisp.
"Luck has nothing to do it." Ed said cockily. "It's about talent, seed unabashed talent." I raised an eyebrow, were these guys serious? And then we watched as Ed and Harry left town in they're car, disappearing around the corner.
"I have a confession to make." Sam said sheepishly, hands in his pocket. "I...I was the one that called them and told them I was a producer."
I swear, nothing could have stopped me from laughing. I knew that was too good to be true. "Well I'm the one who put the dead fish in their back seat." Dean grinned.
I laughed again before straightening up. "And I may or may not have loosened the air out of their tires. I estimate they get a few miles outside of town before they noticed."
All three Winchester's laughed together, having used their evil prankish minds unknowingly against the same annoyance we all had. "Truce?" Sam asked.
"May as well." I smirked as we headed back to the car.
Dean shrugged. "At least for the next one hundred miles." And we left yet another town behind.
Laying in the back of his truck, Derek was still grinning like a loon with arms over his head. 'She kissed me, she kissed me, she kissed me.' He kept thinking over and over again, his lips still tingling.
Miles away, something was stirring in Fitchburg, Wisconsin. A little girl no older than eight or so was kneeling by her bedside late at night and preparing to go to bed. "Now Iay me to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep, may angels watch me through the night and keep me safe till morning light. Amen."
After her prayer, her dad watching in the doorway helped her into bed. "Night monkey puss." He said almost sadly, pressing a kiss to his youngest daughter's forehead.
The little girl snuggled into her blankets. "Daddy, is mommy coming home?"
Dad looked at her sadly. "No honey, she's spending the night at the hospital with your sister." His eldest daughter had suddenly got what seemed like pneumonia despite not being as cold as it should to get it, and quickly admitted into the local hospital with multiple children all catching the same. "You sleep right."
Several hours later, the little girl snapped awake as she heard what sounded like a tree brand scraping across the glass of her bedroom window. Mustering all the bravery she had, the little girl ventured to the window and yanked open the curtains with all the force her little eight year old body had in her. She slowly back away because a hand had appeared, a hand with long dark fingers, slowly prying open what has previously been locked. A shadow entered the room and the man had a hood over his head. She girl screamed as a bright light started to show where it's mouth was supposed to be.
Several miles just outside the town but getting closer, the impala was driving down a deserted country road. "I do not miss things." I told Dean defensively when he suggested so.
"We already ran LexisNexis, local police reports, newspapers, we couldn't find a single read flag." Sam explained not for the first time. "Are you sure you got the coordinates right?" Exactly, maybe it was Dean's fault we couldn't find a decent lead to a case.
"I double checked." Dean insisted. "It's Fitchburg, Wisconsin and dad wouldn't just send us coordinates if it wasn't important."' Hell, maybe he was finally deciding to meet up someplace and picked this town for whatever reason.
Sam was clearly getting frustrated as he showed his bitch fade. "Well I'm tell you, I looked and all I could find was a big steamy pile of nothing. If dad's sending us hunting for something, I don't know what."
I always hated to admit it but, "Well I doubt he's going to meet us there." Like usual, I ran a hand throughout my hair. It was mostly blonde again after Dean's prank turned it green. I still had my roots a green tinge but now at least I could walk out the motel without a hat over my head.
"Maybe he will be there." Dean suggested, hopeful as ever. I rolled my eyes, slumping against my seat in the back.
Sam scoffed. "Cause he's been so easy to find up to this point."
Dean scowled. "Smart ass."
"I've come to know that as a Winchester trait." I muttered. Every one of us seemed more of a stubborn smart ass than the last.
"Well I'm sure there's something in Fitchburg worth killing." Dean insisted, fingers stretching across the steering wheel to his precious baby.
"What makes you so sure?" Dean asked.
"Cause I'm the oldest which means I'm always right."
Sam and I shared a disbelief look at Dean as I leaned up in my seat. "No it doesn't." We both said scoffing.
Dean grinned cheekily. "It totally does."
"Totally does not!" I protested loudly as we passed the sign that just said we were entering the town of Fitchburg.
I later found myself sitting on the edge of the hood of the impala. We had stopped for coffee which Dean had gone inside the local diner to get. Sam was just leaning against the side of the car beside me when Dean finally returned, holding these coffee cups. "Well the waitress thinks the local free masons are up to something sneaky but other than that, no ones heard about anything freaky going on."
"Great." I muttered, taking a sip of my coffee. I immediately dropped it in disgust. "Dean! Did you get me straight black coffee?" I was gonna be sick.
"Of course I didn't." Dean scoffed like it was ridiculous before taking a sip of his coffee. He dropped it same as I did with a look of disgust on his face. "Damn girl, how can you drink that much sugar?!" Dean had gotten our drinks switched up so we both ended up tasting what the usual did.
"What time is it?" Sam suddenly interrupted.
I pouted, crossing my arms as I looked at the coffee splatters across the side walk. "Ten after four." Dean finally looked at his watch. "Why?"
Sam nodded across the street. "What's wrong with this picture?" Across the street was a park but it looked empty. Hell, there was only one kid climbing on the jungle gym and not another in sight. I thought about the time again and the size of this town. How was one kid playing at this time even possible?
"School's out, isn't it?" Dean asked.
"Most school's get out just after three." I muttered, checking my watch again in case Sam had gotten the time wrong but nope, it was still after four
"So where is everybody?" Sam asked. "This place should be crawling with kids by now."
"Maybe mom might know." I suggested, nodding at the single woman sitting on a bench flipping through a magazine as her child played.
Sam stated before but Dean and I ventured over to the woman to get some answers. "Sure is quiet out here." Dean started us a casual conversation.
The woman glanced up and nodded, before checking on her child once more. "Yeah, it's a shame."
"Is it?" I asked casually.
"You know, kids getting sick." The woman said like it was obvious but in a town like this, it probably was. "It's a terrible thing."
"How many?" Dean asked quickly.
The woman shrugged. "Just five or six but serious, hospital serious." Damn, what could that mean? "A lot of parents are getting pretty anxious." I would be to but then again, I would never become a mother, not someone like me. "They think ta catching."
"...I'm sorry to hear that." I said quietly. We all watched the single little girl playing in silence.
After that conversation, we got into the single fed outfits we all owned each before heading to the local memorial hospital as our next stop. "I am not losing this ID." Sam told Dean urgently, having been given his new 'ID'.
I grinned highly amused. "Why not?" Dean asked as if there was nothing wrong with it but clear amusement in his eyes.
"Cause it says bikini inspector on it!" Sam hissed in a hurried whisper as we neared the front desk.
"Nah, I'm sure the receptionist would love for you to inspect her." I grinned teasingly. Personally, I didn't know what women found so attractive about the boys but I was probably just prejudice. You know, they're my brothers so of course I'm not gonna think they're hot like most girls who see them.
"Don't worry, she won't look that close." Dean said, clearly amused by the frustration his brother was showing. "Hell, she won't even ask to see it." I grinned, famous last words. "It's all about confidence, Sammy." And then he spun Sam around to face the receptionist who just looked up from her paperwork. Dean and I stepped back to watch the show.
Sam froze for a moment before swallowing hard and saying as confident as he could. "Hi, I'm Doctor Jerry Caplin, Centers for Disease Control."
"Can I see some ID?" The receptionist immediately asked.
"Poor Sammy." I whispered to Dean as we nearly choked trying to muffle our snickering.
Sam threw Dean and I a dirty look over his shoulder. "Yeah, of course." He flashed his badge as quick as he could, holding his thumb over the bikini inspector part. "Now could you direct me to the pediatrics ward please."
The receptionist shrugged. "Okay, just go down the hall, turn left and up the stairs. Sam walked back over to where we were waiting.
"See, I told you it would work." Dean grinned as Sam gave us yet another bitch face.
"And you didn't even need to 'inspect her' to get through."
Sam glared at his older siblings. "Follow me, it's upstairs." Upstairs, it took a while before I noticed that Dean had stopped following us. He had stopped at a hospital room, staring at it with a weird expression. Knowing him, it was probably some chick getting a sponge bath. "Dean!" Sam snapped and Dean quickly followed this time.
We finally met up with the doctor working on healing those six sick kids. "Well thanks for seeing us Dr. Heidecker." Dean told the doctor.
"Well I'm glad you guys are here." The doctor said looking relieved. "I was just about to call CDC myself." Well it was a good thing we arrived on time before he could. "How'd you find out anyways?"
"Word gets around surprisingly fast." I shrugged innocently.
"So you say you got six cases so far?" Sam asked.
The doctor nodded. "Yeah five weeks. At first we thought it was garden variety bacterial pneumonia." The doctor sighed with a shook of his head. "Not that newsworthy but now..."
"Now what?" Sam asked quickly. The doctor hesitated.
"Come on doc, what's happening?" I asked before he could change his mind about telling us.
"The kids aren't responding to antibiotics." The doctor explained. "Their white cell counts keep going down." For some of us who failed biology..."Their immune systems just aren't doing their job." That explanation made more sense. "It's like their bodies are...wearing out."
"Excuse me doctor." A nurse handed the doctor a form on a clipboard to sign.
"You ever seen anything like this before?" Sam asked.
"You know, mysterious sickness that has just kids dropping." I muttered, hands feel in my black fed suit jacket.
"Never this severe." The doctor admitted, handing over the clipboard back to the nurse.
The nurse stuck around. "And the way it spreads...that's a new one for me."
"What do you mean?" Sam asked the same time I said, "How it spreads?" Sickness could spread through the same water source, touching, sneezing and what not. So what made this spread any different?
"It works its way through families." The nurse said. "But only the children, one sibling after another." Why did that sound so familiar?
"You mind if we interview a few of the kids?" Dean asked. Maybe they saw something that the nurses, doctors, or parents would no doubt think we're delusions.
"They're not conscious." She explained.
I looked at her in disbelief." "Not one of them?" Sure, I could believe they were all sleeping but was no one able to wake any of these kids? The nurse shook her head sadly.
"Can we uh, can we talk to the parents?" Dean suggested. Maybe they knew something but was in denial over the whole thing.
"If you think it'll help." The doctor said.
"Who was your most recent admission?" Dean asked.
Our search led us to a single man sitting against a nearby wall. "Poor man." I muttered, knowing there was nothing he could do as his child probably laid dying.
"I should get back to my girls." The man said urgently when we stopped him from leaving for questioning.
"We understand that and we really appreciate you talking to us." Sammy said with that sympathy in his voice. "Now you say Mary is the oldest?" Of course her name would be Mary, the same as our long dead mother.
The man shakily nodded. "Thirteen."
"A good age." I said awkwardly. Thirteen had been an awkward stage for me, all curls and long limbs.
"And she came down with it first, right?" Sam asked. "And then..."
The man shakily nodded. "Bethany, the next night."
"Within twenty four hours. Sam guessed.
"I guess." The man stuttered. "Look, I already went through all this with the doctor."
"We're almost done." I said quickly before he could get up to check on his daughters.
"How do you think they caught pneumonia?" Dean fired off the question. "We're they out in the cold, anything like that?"
"No, we think it was an open window." The man admitted and I raised an eyebrow.
"Both nights?" Dean asked.
"The second time when it already happened in the first girl's room." I said slowly. A good and loving parent like this man seemed to be wouldn't make the mistake of keeping a window open in the second daughter's bedroom if that was why the first daughter was so sick.
"The first time," the man started to stutter. "I don't really remember but the second time for sure." He looked up firmly. "And I know I closed it before I put Bethany to bed."
"So you think she opened it?" Sam guessed.
"It's a second story window with a ledge." The distraught father explained. "No one else could have."
"Of course." I agreed, already multiple possibilities of different things running throughout my mind.
The boys and I started down the hallway the way we had came, leaning the father to rush back to his children's bedsides. "You know, this might not be anything supernatural." Sam suggested. "It might just be pneumonia." I scoffed, this wasn't like any pneumonia I've ever seen.
"Maybe, or maybe something opened that window." Dean refused to give up until they were sure. "Look, I know dad sent us down here for a reason. I think we might be barking up the right tree.
"I'll tell you one thing." Sam said, glancing at us out the corner of his eye.
"And that would be?" I questioned, looking at my tallest brother.
"That guy we just talked to?" Sam paused for barely a moment. "I'm betting it'll be a while before he goes home." I smirked, meaning an empty house for us to investigate.
We made it to the house where I picked the lock to the back door and quickly found ourselves in the toughest child's bedroom. We all had our EMF's out, checking over every square inch we could get to. "I don't have anything." Dean sighed.
"Yeah, me neither." Sam muttered.
"I guess that makes three of us." I sighed, holding my EMF silently in front of the closet.
"Hey." Sam suddenly said. "You were right." He opened the window he stood beside. "It's not pneumonia." My eyes widened as I caught sight of it. "It's rotted, what leaves a handprint like that?" Because there was a long finger weird looking handprint rotted across the windowsill.
Flashback to over eighteen years ago. I couldn't have been older than six at the time, so long and still kind of innocent. At the time, I was living at an orphanage in Washington. "Did you hear?" I heard my first grade teacher whispering to another at recess. "About all that sickness going around?" I hadn't noticed a quarter of my usual class was absent, or realized at the time that all of them had an older or younger sister also sick.
"Oh, I know, it's just horrible." The teacher whispered back urgently. I was sitting alone of the swings as I listened. My hair in lopsided curls and my faded pink overall dress dirt stained. Even then I didn't have any friends.
"I heard they were all in the hospital."
"I just hope no more students get sick like this." Because nobody knew it at the time but not one child admitted into the hospital due to this sickness would be coming home again.
I went home on the school bus, clutching my tiny bag to my lap. I got off the bus and stared at the ambulance in the driveway. One of the matrons was crying heavily as a girl was carried off into the ambulance in a stretcher. I recognized the nine year old of course. She and I lived in the same room together with three other girls, one of them being that girl's seven year old little sister.
I sat in my room and pulled the covers over me after kicking off my shoes. I tried to cover my head with the pillow but even that wouldn't block out the sound of that little sister crying on the other side of the room. How were we to know that little sister would be the next victim just tomorrow night.
Back in the present, I was staring at the handprint because I have seen it before. "I know why dad sent us here." Dean said, looking like he was going to be sick. "He's faced this thing before and he wants us to finish the job."
Dean barely have an explanation as we pulled into our motel for the night. "So what the hell is a Shtriga?" Sam demanded as we climbed out. I may had seen that handprint before but I had never heard of this creature.
"It's kinda like a witch I think." Dean explained as we got our stuff out the trunk. "I don't know much about them." Well he clearly knew make than us.
"Well I've never heard of it." Sam said.
"Makes you feel any better, neither have I." I said, throwing a bag over my shoulder.
"Dad hunted on in Fort Douglas, Wisconsin about sixteen years ago. Sam was there, don't you remember?" Dean asked Sam.
"No." Sam said. From my math, they faced they're about two years after I would meet mine. Damn, I thought my first account with the supernatural since I was two and unable to remember being that young was when I was fourteen and first started hunting. But turns out I had one even before that, when I was six and half the kids in my class died from a mysterious sickness.
"I guess he caught wind of the things in Fitchburg and kicked is the coordinates." Dean sighed, closing the trunk.
"To kill this thing once and for all." I let out a similar sigh.
"You think it's the same one dad hunted before?" Sam guessed. We stopped walking towards the motel doors to talk.
"Yeah, maybe." Dean shrugged.
But Sam was still confused. "But if dad went after it, why is it still breathing air?"
"That's right." I snapped my finger. "Since when did dad leave a hunt without finishing the job?" I never noticed how I would switch between calling him dad and John.
"Cause it got away." Dean admitted and I looked at him in disbelief.
"Got away." Sam repeated slowly, sounding just as in disbelief as myself did.
"Yeah, it happens." Dean snapped, looking frustrated.
"Not to John." I protested, having heard stories of the great John Winchester among the hunter grapevine before I realized we were connected by more than just our last name. And there I go again, switching from dad to John and back again.
"Well I don't know what to tell ya." Dean finally snapped. "Maybe dad didn't have his wheaties that morning."
"What else do you remember?" Sam asked, eager to know more about this story he couldn't remember.
"Nothing, I was just a kid!" Dean snapped defensively, storming into the motel.
"Defensive, any one?" I muttered to Sam as I followed Dean.
A blonde boy that couldn't have been older than twelve walked up behind the counter as he saw us entering. A little bit about seven was seen in the back room watching tv. "A king or two queens?"
"Two queens." Dean checked is in.
The boy scoffed, looking cocky as he muttered, "Yeah, I'll bet." But our trained hunter ears earned it.
"Seriously kid?" I muttered, crossing my arms as I saw Dean's already bad mood rise.
"What'd you say?" Dean demanded.
The boy plastered on a smile. "Nice car!"
That was when the mother and motel owner came in. "Checking in?" The woman asked much more cheerful than her son.
"Sure am." I muttered.
The woman turned to her son. "Do me a favor and go get your brother some dinner."
"I'm helping a guest!" The boy protested and his mother gave him one of those mom looks that had the kid cringing. "Two queens." He told him mother what we wanted before leaving.
"Funny kid." Dean faked a laugh.
"Real hilarious." I muttered, nudging Dean to take it easy. He was just some smart ass kid.
"He think so." The woman smiled. "Will that be cash or credit?" Dean handed over his master card but I was still to busy, watching the older boy pouring a glass of milk for his younger brother.