SPFSPN

Dean pulled the knife out of his shoulder. Bad idea, he knew but he didn’t want to go to the hospital with a rusty knife in his shoulder nor did he want to go to the hospital. The rusty knife was enough to send him there and he regretted every decision that lead to this moment because he didn’t want to go the damned hospital but now he had to go get his sixth tetanus shot this year. A grunt left his mouth as he held a hand to the arm blood gushing out of him. It would have to slow soon and he could easily move the arm now. The ghost gone in a fit of dust and he had no way of tracking down the ghost until next year. Dammit. He would have to make a mental note of that before he moved on. He wasn’t going to figure that out now that he had been stabbed. He didn’t want to be the one who was bleeding all over some ghost’s house. He wouldn’t be a very good hunter if he left DNA all over the place let alone all of his blood. 

He shuffled out of the house and into the yard. It wasn’t your typical haunted house. What was nowadays? There was nothing but other houses around him and the shouts of children getting home from school. Time wasn’t really much of a matter to him anymore. Though, he wanted to make sure that he was making good time on the whole getting out of dodge as soon as he was able to. Not like he was supposed to leave without a wound that could kill him if he thought too hard about the fact that the infection was seeping into his veins right at this very moment. He was sure this was going to help him but he couldn’t bring himself to get the proper fake identity in order to get to the hospital. 

Dean placed his hands on his hips and looked over his shoulder at the house behind him. All too quiet for the area around them but he had nothing wrong with what was going on. His heart yanked on strings as the thought of going back to the car. No home to think of when he made his way beck to the hotel that he had lived in for the past month. On to another once once the hospital visit was over. His whole body ached as he looked around the small suburban street. On to the next one. 

He pulled himself into the car with only a wince of pain. The blood had slowed enough that he could sit there without getting a shit ton of blood all over his baby. At least his clothes could help until he got back to the hotel and he thanks whomever was watching over him that he wasn’t more severely injured. He knew that the was going to end up in more pain than ever if he just waited it all out. He wasn’t even sure this was going to help him…going to the hospital but he was going to need the tetanus shot. He just needed to make sure everything went through okay. He wanted to be the one who was safer than sorry but this felt like he was going to die. 

Nothing had hurt this much before and he had no way of knowing how much damage the ghost knife had done to him and thus, he had to go get it checked out. If he went back to the hotel now, he had no idea if he was ever going to be able to end up in the hospital since he could get so comfortable in the bed and fall asleep right there. But then his blood would be on the bed and that would be a bitch to clean since it was a pretty deep wound. Not through and through but it felt pretty deep. He rolled his shoulder back. The joint clicked but that was normal but his skin tugged uncomfortably. Some of the blood must have already dried at this point but he wasted. He was very tried. If he were to go to the hospital now, he would have not much time to hide everything that he had brought. 

Fine. Hospital now. Hotel later. He shifted out of the uncomfortableness and he tried to drive as best as he could with just his last bit of strength and he was sure to stay as careful as he could with just the phone blaring out directions to the nearest hospital. The roads seemed a bit emptier than he expected. There should have been more than one car every minute or so. Especially in the area he was in. There should have been many people coming home from work and school. He could have been more than just the few cars that were out and about driving. There needed to be more people on He needed to look into that. But not now. He was just…too tired. He couldn’t pull over now. He might not make it at this pint and he wasn’t so sure that he could even make it through the short distance to the hospital. 

“You are on the shortest available route,” the voice on the phone navigation told him. Though it seemed redundant now as he pulled himself closer and closer to the hospital. “You are on the shortest available route. 

Dean shook his head as he tried not to think about the pain that radiated from his arm up his neck to the side of his head. He didn’t need a doctor to tell him that this was going to need more than a few stitches to keep him from dying at the moment. It just…he didn’t need anything more than that and some pain pills. He pulled himself into the parking lot of the hospital. Dean reached back and covered the rest of his weapons with a blanket. It wasn’t the best way of hiding his weapons but he needed the shot and stitches. He shuffled out of the car and towards the doors. 

The hospital was as quiet as he thought it would be for how quiet the rest of the area was. Not many people were in an emergency at least. A wince left his mouth as the wound began to bleed once again. He pulled himself through the automatic doors of the hospital and looked around. There weren’t that many people around him as he entered the emergency room and he knew that this was all wrong. Not even a nurse was at the receptionists desk. No one. Hs eyes scanned the rest of waiting room. There was one lone woman hacking up a lung in the corner of the dimly lit, but sterile room. He shifted in his spot. 

Maybe I should just go back to the hotel room…

 This wasn’t something that could happen in a place like this. A chill ran up his spine as he looked down at the desk. Papers were strewn about though he was someone who knew more about hunting than healing wounds and HIPPA. His fingers ran over the papers as he tried to make sure this was was going to help. He was just…so terrified of what this meant. Every nerve in his body stood on end as he tried not to think too much about this. He wasn’t going to make sure this was going to happen again. The injury at least. Dean kept himself in the room even though he knew this wasn’t going to help him. The woman continued to hack away in the corner. 

“H-hello,” Dean called out hesitantly as he looked around the waiting room. There weren’t many people here and that fucking terrified him all the moe than any kind of monster that was out there. “I have a knife wound to the shoulder and I would really like some help for it!”

“No one’s here,” the woman looked at him from the corner of the room and his eyes fell upon her. Though she looked old and ragged when he had first come in, he was wrong. She was a young woman with ad eyes. Heavy eyes from the looks of it and she wasn’t much younger than he was right now. “No one has been for hours. The nurse came in and said she’d be with me in just a moment and yet…she hasn’t been here in awhile. She wasn’t back at noon and she hasn’t been back in a few hours and I know for a fact that no one else in this hospital gives enough of a shit to look into the emergency room.”

“It’s the emergency room for a reason. I have an emergency. I need a tetanus shot. Rusty blade,” Dean was explaining all too much for the time being. It wasn’t like he didn’t want to keep himself as far away from her as possible but there was nothing that he could do. He was tired. Every part of his body ached and no one was there to help him. What happened here? “You know…a shot is kind of important…and the bleeding thing.” 

The woman shrugged, “Maybe some kind of plague is going around and all the nurses are all tied up.”

“I don’t think so, I think we would have heard about it,” Dean looked around the waiting room once more. His whole body chilled. The woman spoke the truth. Whether natural or supernatural there had to be some reason for everyone not being there. Though he knew that there was nothing more than that. He knew there was nothing he could do unless he knew what was going on. “Something on the news, ya know.”

Dean pointed his chin in the direction of the silent TV in the other corner of the waiting room. His eyes scanned over the just off closed captioning that looked like they were trying to help but there was nothing of note. A few corrupt politions and a few people talking about what might happen if the world were end…if the world were to end? That couldn’t be right on national news. Usually that was left to far right conspiracy “news” channels. He tilted his head to the side and looked down at his hands. He tried to get a good grasp on the situation but he wasn’t going to be able to prepare properly there. 

Of course, you don’t choose the punishment you get in Hell. If you sin then you have to pay an equal price in hell. The severity of one’s sin is obviously going to make Though, there are some great exceptions to those who enter hell. One would have to know that there had to be. The most egregiously evil people need more than just what normal people are scared of. Those who were going to be named by the general public as monsters. The serial killers, the mass murderers, the faces of genocide were all up there to be tortured by someone…something especially dark and twisted. Of course, that meant that there existed something more dark and twisted than what you might be thinking of. There was always someone much worse than the worse person you know. Most people thought the most evil person in any religion was Satan and though that was the layperson’s thought, there was a multitude of other religions to even think about but the most evil person in all of them didn’t compare to the man who walked the halls of Hell, looking into the eyes of each one of the most evil people who had come there. It wasn’t much but he wasn’t going to be the one who had to do it. There was no one more evil than he. 

Hell wasn’t hot like most people would think but maybe he got used to the heat after a few years in hell. He was sure this wasn’t going to be the last time he walked down the flaming halls of hell. His mind and body calm as he looked down at the floor below him or the lack thereof. Death row as they called it though it was an ironic name if you asked him. There was no dying in Hell. Only more torture for your body to go through. The more you wore their body down, the less and less human they looked until they were nothing but a skeleton. Slowly but surely their tissue would come back. But not without each excruciating pinprick, hot poker-like pain. He wasn’t so sure that was enough punishment for them. No. As delectable as those serial killer screams were, there was nothing like killing them over and over again in hope of finally having them repent for their sins against humanity. 

None of them had apologized though. Typical narcissist behavior. He couldn’t control it and though for many, they had only been down there a mere few days, it would surely get tiring to think about as the years get longer and the days dragged on into nothing more than torturous hell. He was sure this was going to be a lot of fun for him…coming up with new ways to bind and torture and kill those who waited for him. 

He was sure this was going to make him very happy once he was permanently dead nut for now it was going to make him feel like he was trapped in a day job where he had no chance of growth. But it was something. It was always something. He just needed to keep his mind occupied until he was able to find his way back to earth and though he knew this was eventually going to be his job in hell then he was going to have to figure out a way to enjoy it while he was still in there. While he knew it was for the best and all manner of monsters and demons were already being tortured now and he had done that to them in life so he wasn’t even allowed to touch them and he was sure that was the best thing to happen to them. He wasn’t going to even touch them. There was no use in touching them as he had already done a number on them. 

“Good morning, sir,” the skeleton of someone who Dean could no longer remember spoke though it was still odd that the jaw just dropped open as there were no muscles or vocal cords to make the noise that produced the words. “How are you? Did you rest painfully?”

“Who said you could talk,” Dean snapped at the skeleton. 

The skeleton seemed to show some kind of remorse on his face as Dean continued his walk down the hall towards the end. Though there was nothing more evil than what was behind the door at the end of the hall. He moved through towards the end of the hall where his hand touched the hot metal of the doorknob. Hot enough to burn normal human skin but here, Dean wasn’t human down here. Not when he thought about it. He was a torturous man who was meant to kill these men over and over and over as some form of twisted punishment. But it wasn’t something that he could just delve into at this point. 

If he were a saint then he would be in heaven right now. He would be having the time of his life with…well, if God and all of the other angels were on earth then who would he even be hanging out with? Who would he be partying it up with. If he were a sinner, he would be down here with the rest of them. He would being tortured at the moment. He wasn’t even going to end up in one of those cages. What hell could be worse than just hurting those who were considered the worst of the worst. It should be an honor. It should’ve always been an honor but he was drained. 

He twisted the doorknob open to face the man inside of the room. A man so deeply disturbed that Dean didn’t even want to look at him in the eye. Dean twisted his body away from the man and kept his attention down at the floor of hell. Though he wanted to look up, he knew that it would kill him to do so. The man who had chosen him for the job…Lucifer…his own little pet project. 

Sam had had this…doll ever since he was a child. One that just…showed up one day while Dean was out hustling for money. Just a dumb kid, he pulled the box into the room and opened it up. He didn’t even care about the fact that people had come to find him and his brother. People who would know that they were hunters. It could have been anyone or anything with half a mind that found him and his brother. He had opened it that night while Dean was still out and he hoped that he would find some food. The days old pizza had finally run out as did the hall a box of cereal that Dean had gotten as well. None of the food that he could scrounge up would be much help either and it sucked knowing that he wouldn’t be able to get through the food he had just given himself long enough for Dean to come back. He didn’t even want to think about it but his stomach was already rumbling. 

Sam cut open the box and flipped it open. Please be food. Please be food. Sam closed his eyes and prepared for what was in the box though, though he didn’t find much. There was just…a tiny clown. A tiny, neon yellow and pink colored clown that was so bright that he was sure that he was going to burn his eyes out just looking out at it. He didn’t even want to think about looking at it. His hand reached out towards the clown and picked it up between his hands and turned it around in his hands for a moment. It was soft like one of those baby toys that he used to yearn for when they walked through the aisles of the local Walmart. It was so easy to steal there that it was almost like the baby toys were calling out to him. It didn’t seem like he was going to even get those kinds of things anymore but he just wanted something like that so bad but…a clown…it was like whoever dropped this off was trying to scare him. But he had decided to keep the damned thing no matter how many times his back shuddered at the thought of keeping it. 

Not like it mattered but he grew up holding onto that damned clown until it was dingy enough to lose all neon to it. He didn’t even want to lose it. Even when it moved all on its own. It wasn’t like he hadn’t seen this kind of thing before. He didn’t want to think that the clown was nothing more than a helpless toy. He didn’t want to look into it so he kept ignoring its movements over the years. If he hadn’t even thought about it too much, he could have sworn the thing grew with him. Even when he grew up and he became an adult…losing the toy for all eternity to the multiple moves they had made. 

Punishment was the name of the game for all hunters. They were meant to be punished in all senses of the word. There was nothing else that he could do. He was going to be punished. This was all he could even think about for the rest of eternity. There would be some form of punishment for them all. Though, his was much worse. His was made specifically for him. When hunters spoke of their punishment for their crimes against humanity, they spoken general terms like going to hell or somewhere else to be tortured for their sentence which always ended up being a few hundred years at least and even when Dean heard of this, he knew that he had already been subjected to such a fate long before he was even aware of it. But he knew that he was going to chase it until he died. That he was going to find that punishment and figure out what it was going to end up being. There was nothing that he cared for more than that as soon as he found out that he was going to die sooner rather than later and end up meeting said fate. 

His life was confined to the house he had watched his mother die in. He was cured to relive every waking moment of the childhood abuse he had faced when all he wanted to do was forget about what happened to him. His father was the way he was and to think that there were more people coming for him to make his life more of a living hell, he knew that is was a hell of his own making. Well, some of it was his father’s making but he wasn’t so sure that this was going to be a practical way saving anything. He knew that there was nothing that he could do about the hell he was stuck in. Forever roaming the house he was supposed to have lived a normal life in. No one was around him for this to help. Just the various inhabitants that hadn’t noticed him just yet. He wasn’t causing too much of a reaction from any of the other inhabitants to bring in people who were supposed to be looking for him. He didn’t need hunters trying to run the hell he was in. There was nothing that he could do that would stop them and they would try everything to keep him from serving his sentence so he had to try to keep a low profile. There was no one that knew that he was there or so he hoped. 

But a certain angel came to him every once in awhile and though he didn’t seem to notice him, Dean definitely noticed him whenever he walked into the house. There was nothing that he could do to interact with the man. There was no way the angel would even be allowed to talk to him anyways. They were cursed never to talk. Never to make contact even though Cas seemed to think that he was there. He was someone who would never even look into his eyes. There was nothing that he could do.every time Cas walked into that house, he yearned to tell Cas how much he loved him. How he regretted not saying it back that fateful day. It was…it was the worst thing that he could do. He wished that he could say something to his angel. To say that he was okay. That he was going to get to him soon. Only five hundred more years before he could see Cas. Hopefully Cas was still alive by the time that his own punishment was done. 

Edit: I added the images up here since people were wanting to see them: 

The image that started it all

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So my brother Sam (39m) has been super interested in AI lately. Something about getting more and more into technology which I refuse to have even a passing knowledge of. The more he speaks of it, the more and more it sounds like nothing but a bunch of psychobabble to me. I don’t get it but he’s been trying to extend some sot of olive branch and I wanted to respect that so I tried to take some sort on interest in the AI paintings he had created and began posting to an Instagram account that didn’t look too popular on the outside. A few thousand followers but all of them were very active. He got thousands of comments about what he had created. I was actually proud that he had made his way into a niche subgroup like this. It really looked like he was making some friends and it was really the first time he had really ever made friends outside of the life we lived. We work jobs that don’t really allow for that kind of thing. But the more he talked about it…the more I thought this was something I could mess around with. 

Let’s be honest, I didn’t fall down this rabbit hole immediately. My brother got into this whole thing a year before I did. I followed his Instagram for like a year and half by the time I finally decided to actually get into this. It was something that I could actually pour some time into when I was. It was good for me to look into it. There was something about. There was some kind of pull for me to get into it. I wanted to see what was going on with this AI. There was no way I could keep myself away from the AI Sam had gotten so invested in. 

So, I actually ended up discovering this woman on there. Not a woman in the forums or in the community anywhere. She was a woman I found while creating some images in the AI. It was April of this year when I found her. The AI reproduced her more easily than most of the celebrities I imputed into it. Her presence is…was persistent. She haunts every image she touches. Now, fair warning, this is a tru horror story and veers sharply towards the macabre. This…this is the story of how I met Loab. 

Now, I’ll explain negative prompt weights in the way Sam explained it to me. With these, instead of creating an image of the text prompt, the AI tries to make the image look as different from the prompt as possible. Pretty much it tries to make the exact opposite of whatever you put in there. So this logo was the result of the negatively weight prompt “Brando::-1”. Is this the opposite of that logo, in turn, going to be a picture of Marlon Brando, I wondered. So I typed in “DIGITA PNTICS skyline logo::-1” as a prompt. I had halfway expected to see a picture of Marlon Brando. That’s what the AI was supposed to spit back, right? Right? Instead, I received these off-putting images. All od them where of the same devastated-looking older woman with defined ranges of rosacea(?) on her cheeks. I called Sam over to the computer to take a look at what I had created. 

"What’d you even put in,” Sam asked as he looked at the image on the screen. His eyes scanned the image in front of us.

“I don’t even know,” I shrugged and looked at the image in front of us as well because it was just so weird. 

“Lemme go try something.” 

Sam went over to his computer and took a few moments to boot up the computer. His fingers flew against the keyboard as he looked like he tried to make sense of what was going on. He looked sort of confused as he looked at the screen. His brow furrowed in confusion as he looked at it. Dean pushed himself away from his own computer and looked over Sam’s shoulder. 

“What’d you put in?” 

The image he had created was nothing like the woman on the screen. It was whimsical and magical and wonderful. The woman that had shown up during my own creation was horrible. I hated it. Sam looked like he hated the woman on the person who had shown up on Dean’s screen. 

“A hyper compressed glass tunnel surrounded by angels in the style of Wes Anderson,” Sam shrugged like there was nothing weird about what he had just said. But I thought it was weird. I thought it was really weird. “I wanted to see if she was going to show up.” 

“Send me the image,” I commanded as I walked back towards my own computer to wait for the image to come through.

It came though near instantly as I handled the image. Where I used it to combine with the one I had go the woman…she needed a name because I couldn’t keep calling her the woman. She needed a name. I looked at my keyboard and smashed my fingers into it and whatever came up, I was going to call her that. L. O. A. B. Loab. That would be her name. So I combined Loab with the image that had been sent to me by my brother, without any text and for reasons we can’t fully explain, nightmares ensued. 

Through some kind of emergent statistical accident, something about this woman is adjacent to extremely gore and macabre imagery in the distribute of the AI’s world knowledge. And since Loab was discovered using negative prompt weights, her gestalt is made from a collection of traits that are equally far away from something. But her combined traits are still a cohesivee concept for the Ai, and almost all descendent images contain a recognizable Loab. I had to keep combining them. The angel hallway and Loab also produced art with such copious gore that probably very few people want to see them. But I will attach two of them to the top list of images I am including in this post. I don’t feel comfortable posting the more disturbing ones. They were boderline stuff images of dismembers, screaming children. 

There was something more to me about those grotesque scenes and the desperation, panic and sadness that they convey. I think I spent days producing these images as inputs and with no text. They are the result of “cross-breeding” images of Loab with images of other things. The images that result from crossing Loab with other images can in turn br corssbreed with other images. The AI can latch onto the idea of Loab so well that she can persist through generations of this type of crossbreeding, without using the original image. I even made Loab as Kirby. Then one of her as a bee and her celebrating Pride month. She can be recognizable transposed into many genres and contexts. Even when her red cheeks of other important features disappear, the “Loabness” of the images she has a hand in making is undeniable. She haunts the images, persists through generations, and overpowers other bits of the prompt because the AI so easily optimizes towards her face.

Combining Loab with text prompts words great too. Her signature rosacea cheeks even turn blue when I prompt for a Na’vi version of her from Avata 2: The Way of Water (2022). I started going kind of insane at this point. I had hundred of Loab images and was starting to combine her with three or four other images at once. Most of the horror images I post even outside of this Reddit post are dependents of Loab images. Sometimes it takes more abstract forms. I mean, she has entered everything I do now. Even the job I do outside of this. 

The concept of Loabess became more and more abstract to me. I would include her in prompts that I knew would almost distort her beyond recognition. After she disappeared from the breeding lineage, she would sometimes reappear, later down the line, out of nowhere. I was ripping Loab apart and putting her back together. She is an emergent island in the latent space that we don’t know how to locate with text queries. But for the AI, Loab was an equally strong point of convergence as a verbal concept. And really, it was stronger!

The big lesson for me here with Loab is that image prompting van essentially be used to query latent space. You can produce novel syles (and character!) that you literally discover. Negative prompt weighting can help you find emergent accidents, too. Th other lesson is that image prompts, and later raw vectors and clip embedding, can be used as adversarial attacks, targeting weird stuff in the distribution. I think my process in itself constitutes art. But it also reveals the AI’s weaknesses for malicious use in other cases. 

And that was where I would have ended this but…I am concerned. I spent days with Loab and her image. So much so that I knew she was there every single time I worked with the AI, I knew she would appear. But I started to believe that I had summoned a demon. One in which I have no idea what could stop her. I am sorry…but I should have mentioned that I stopped seeing Loab in the images a few days ago…and I fear I may have created a monster. I fear…she may have finally been let out…because I also forgot to mention…demons and angels and monsters are real…and you think I might sound crazy for that and tacking it on at the end of this story but…there’s no other way to break it to people other than just with a blunt slap to the face. So…keep looking for Loab in the AI. Don’t let her out. Don’t keep looking for her in the AI as soon as you find her. Just keep going. Keep her trapped there. All I can do is hope and pray that she is still trapped there. Comments:

/u/FamouslyDangerous: What does she look like? 

/u/PM_ME_YOUR_EXULTANT_GRANDEURS: We must see what she looks like. 

/u/CuteLitigation: Pics or it didn’t happen. 

/u/TruculentLocality: We need to see what she looks like. She can’t be as gross as she thinks she is. 

One person. Sam needed was himself and he was going to be okay. He had made sure that both of them chose rituals that would be easily be done by one person and he was going to be able to do this much easier than his brother who was working on killing a creature from the Otherworld. But he was going to have to stand there for a long time and he was going to have to remember a lot of steps. He needed more to take down this creature that had made his life a living hell. The one person that had made sure that the two of them were in this living hell at this point. He was sure that he was able to make sure that he was able to kill the witch.

The whole thing was designed for a a family that lived on the second floor but if he slept on the first then he would reverse everything and he wouldn’t have to think much about it. But he wasn’t going to have to reverse it. He couldn’t perform this in any place other than a staircase or a long hallway and the hallway had to have divisions but he had a staircase so that was perfect even because he wasn’t about to let a good staircase go to waste. The rules said not to do it in a room or outside or in a small, enclosed space but that wasn’t going to be a problem either. 

Sam checked over his shoulder to look at the time before he let himself look over the items he had let himself look at it. He was going to have to see if he was missing anything. He wasn’t going to have to look at it more than once to make him feel like he was going to look at it. 

One staircase with no fewer than eleven steps but no more than sixteen0including landings? Check! W

as it the ideal staircase with twelve or thirteen steps? Yes, yes it was. 

One small, portable, battery-operated fan? Check! 

One glass of water? Check. One handful of dirt? Check. 

One candle? Yes. 

Matches or a lighter? He had both, just in case. 

Did he have a picture of the land on which his home currently stood as old as he could find? Yes, he was able to make use of his research skills to be able to look into the archives to find the image of their house in Kansas. 

Did he have the photo of his home as it stood that day? Yes, yes he did. He took it that morning so it was as fresh as one could get it and he was sure that it would have 

Did he have one pair of six sided dice? Yes. 

Two time keeping devices? Yes. He even got the analog ones that the ritual said was preferable but he had a digital backup just in case for the both of them. 

Did he have the food? He had the food offering that was meat. It was right in his hands like he wanted it to be so that he didn’t drop it. 

Did he have the mirror? Yes. His eyes landed on the mirror in front of him.

A handful of ash? That wasn’t too hard to come by in his life’s work and he was sure that he was going to be able to see it more than once that day.

2-3 dust bunnies? That was the hardest one that had been able to find and he had to look all around the house just to get them. He wasn’t so sure that he was going to find it at some points during the day and he had almost given up because he wasn’t about to drop this without looking all over the house just to be able to finish the ritual. 

Did he spend the entire day also looking for one small, living creature? Yes, yes he did and he hated himself for looking at the rollie-pollie in his hands. 

Did he almost forget the fingernail, lock of hair or other token plucked from his own body? Yes he did and he almost pulled out the blood when he realized that he couldn’t use blood like he wanted and he had no idea what he as going to do with the hair he hadn’t even thought about until he had looked over his shoulder to the rules he had printed out to make the checklist. 

Salt? He had like five pounds of it in the care already and he wasn’t about to keep himself from doing the ritual because he didn’t have usual table salt that they used because he was sure he could find some in the house if he didn’t even have any in the care but he was a hunter and he had everything that he needed to kill a normal thing that he had wanted but he didn’t even think that he was going to be encountering anything normal. 

One sharp object? He always had it on hand and he was sure that he would have to use it to kill the thing in front of him at the end of this ritual and he was happy enough to have it all done. 

He stood int he afternoon light that poured through his childhood home. There was no doubt that Dean was already on the other side of the country helping the teens that had gone missing directly with the whole elevator ritual thing and he was going to be doing this all night so he was going to need to brace himself for what was going to happen to him now. He stretched out his body and placed his hands on his hips as he made note of the time. The precise time of the ritual was important and he wanted to start at noon exactly so he stepped up to the staircase a few seconds before he had to speak.

“It is from here whence-forth I shall commence,” Sam spoke as the grandfather clock in the hallway spoke out to him. The baket of items rested on his arms as he waited for what was going to happen to him. Face the top of the staircase. Plant your feet. Do not move. Do not turn around or look behind you. 

Sam stepped up to the first step and placed the fan, “Here is the air that mortal breathes.” Face the top of the staircase. Plant your feet. Do not move. Do not turn around or look behind you. 

Sam took the nest step up and placed the glass of water onto the next step, “Here is the water that mortal drinks.” Face the top of the staircase. Plant your feet. Do not move. Do not turn around or look behind you. 

On the third step, Sam spread the handful over dirt, covering as much of the step as possible, “Here is the earth on which moral stands.” Face the top of the staircase. Plant your feet. Do not move. Do not turn around or look behind you. 

Sam made it to the next step and set the unlit candle next to the matches and the lighter, “Here is the fire that burns mortal’s hands.”  Face the top of the staircase. Plant your feet. Do not move. Do not turn around or look behind you. 

On the fifth step, he placed the old picture of his home, “Here is the time that has come to pass.” Face the top of the staircase. Plant your feet. Do not move. Do not turn around or look behind you. 

He made it to the sixth step and placed the current picture of his home and rolled the dice next to it, “Here is the present and the die is cast.” Face the top of the staircase. Plant your feet. Do not move. Do not turn around or look behind you. 

On the seventh step, he placed the watches down onto it, “Here comes the future, the time ticks by now.” Face the top of the staircase. Plant your feet. Do not move. Do not turn around or look behind you. 

Sam made it to the eight step and placed the food offering, “Here is the offering for the Devil’s mouth.” Face the top of the staircase. Plant your feet. Do not move. Do not turn around or look behind you. 

Then he made it to the ninth step and he placed the mirror down onto it, “Here is my image, in God’s likeness I trust.” Face the top of the staircase. Plant your feet. Do not move. Do not turn around or look behind you. 

He hated saying that when he couldn’t believe in God anymore. No the phrase had to be repeated word for word and without hesitation and regardless as to the religion he followed and he had no reason to keep up religion at that point since he had met the hero that had made him feel like he was going to find himself down there and he was sure that no one was going to make him feel like he wanted to follow them there. He had no reason to follow a god or gods but he was sure some of them were less douchey than the people he had met. 

The tenth step he placed the ashes and the dust bunnies, “Here is mortality, ashes and dust.” Face the top of the staircase. Plant your feet. Do not move. Do not turn around or look behind you. 

Sam took one step up and placed the living creature under a glass as it must have been alive and not be able to escape, “Here is a life I present unto thee.” Face the top of the staircase. Plant your feet. Do not move. Do not turn around or look behind you. 

On the twelfth step, he placed the hair from his body, “And here is the essence extracted from me.” Face the top of the staircase. Plant your feet. Do not move. Do not turn around or look behind you. 

On the final step, he drew a line of salt, “No further than here.” Face the top of the staircase. Plant your feet. Do not move. Do not turn around or look behind you. 

The main event did not have to be the next day but it’s recommended to be performed as soon as possible. If anything were to be moved then the obstacles would have become weaker and he wasn’t going to have that happen either and he was going to watch over it so that he could make sure the ritual was as strong as possible and he could finish her off as soon as possible. 

Sam made his way back down the stairs to head to the end of the stairs so that he could end up going to go to bed and he was going to fall asleep right then and there but there was still a whole day to work on and it wasn’t like he could just call his brother and tell him that he had started the ritual because there would be no way that he could get in contact with him for the rest of the day and Dean was on strict orders to not call him until he was done and he wasn’t going to let the happen to him. He let himself down to the floor in front of the door and he was going to let it sit there at the door for a long ass time. He had no reason to move from his spot. He had no reason to even look at anything but the steps in front of him and he was sure that there was nothing that he could do until that night and he was sure that he could watch the stairs the whole night as he hoped not to keep looking at as he made his way back down to a position in which he was going to make sure that he was comfortable enough to sit there for hours but he had no reason to get super comfortable and fall asleep and he was sure that there was something in front of him that was going to go wrong but he was sure that he could get through it without much complaint. 

The sun began to set and the room around him was going to fall down the moment he wasn’t able to make sense of it and he was sure that he was going to make it to the main event the next day if he were going to sit there all day. He was going to make sure that he was going to make it. If anything were to become amiss then he would have to stop the whole thing and restart and he had to make sure that he was going to get through all of this. He could have set up cameras and everything but he had no idea what was going to happen to it during the night since he had no way of monitoring it and he was going to go over them in the morning and take up more time though he hated to think that he was going to make more now that he could just watch the shit himself. 

Sam situated himself in front go him and waited for a moment to look over the shoulder to the door he had once looked at so many times though he hated to think that this was the only thing that he could do. He was going to make sure that all of it was going to get out of there as soon as possible when it was all said and done.

Sam waited patiently as he looked at the items on the stairs and he waited for the moments in which all of it went array and he wasn’t going to hesitate and he was going to wait the whole night as if it were going to make everything better if nothing went array. He waited as if something were to go wrong and he didn’t even think that it was going to but he waited until the sun came up to make sure nothing went wrong and he was there waiting for it. He placed his hands on either side of him and pushed himself off of the ground and made his way back to the stairs where he was to perform the ceremony as soon as possible and he wasn’t so tired from it. He was going to have to wait for it all to be the right time but he was ready. Nothing had gone wrong that moment. 

There was no one in the house so there was no one to evacuate from the house. He granted the sharp object from the basket and the second time keeping device. He twisted himself and waited for something to happen. He had to start at the same time as he started the prelude the day before which meant exactly at noon as he once started. Though he wasn’t so sure that he was too keen on waiting any longer. His body tingled with anticipation as he waited the time to come for him to enter the ceremony and he was waiting for the time to come to him and he wasn’t going to ruin it by starting it at the right time. If anything were to go amiss during any of the steps then he was going to have to restart with it. The time didn’t seem to move fast enough as he looked over his shoulder towards a clock in which he could just watch until noon hit and he was allowed the time to start the dance in which he was meant to take on and he was going to take it on when he wanted to and it was going to make him more than willing. 

Thirteen hours. He had to stand an hour on each stair and he had no idea what was going to happen to him once he stepped onto them but he was willing and able to do it. He stretched himself out once more and he was going to do it. He needed to be exact and he was going to be perfectly exact when he was done with it all and it couldn’t start a moment before. He waited as the seconds ticked by so that he would be able to move. He lifted himself off of the ground and looked over his shoulder towards the clock once more so that he could start once more. 

He planted his feet at the bottom of the staircase not a second too late. He did not move. His knees looked in place as he looked over the steps in front of him. He was not to look back or to either side and the hair on the back of his neck prickled though nothing felt amiss. He just….he had to go through this and he was going to make sure that this was completed and he was going to let Dean know at the end of this that he was going to make this through and he was ready to make this the final time they had to do something like this so that they may never let anyone get hurt again. 

The clock mocked him for the entire hour he stood there. He mounted the first step and turned on the fan. Sam faced the top of the staircase and planted his feet. He did not move. He did not turn around or look behind him. He did not care about it. He did not want to move his face but he was sure that it wouldn’t mean anything when he stood there. He was going to be the one who got this done without anything going wrong. He didn’t care to think about an entity that was following him. He could feel the breath of it down his neck as he looked at the rest of the steps in front of him. One down, several more to go. Another hour passed before he was able to move. Face the top of the staircase. Plant your feet. Do not move. Do not turn around or look behind you. 

He took a step up to the second step on the beginning of the second hour and bent down to get the glass, careful not to look behind him. He would have to down it over the course of the hour as not to pee himself over the other stairs and he didn’t want to make it out to be a big thing as he made his way up the other stairs. The hour ticked down once more and he had no idea what was going to happen but he was happy enough to continue but he wasn’t so happy to have to go through more of this nine more times. Face the top of the staircase. Plant your feet. Do not move. Do not turn around or look behind you. 

The third hour brought the third step and the same movements. But he made sure both of his feet were in or on the dirt spread across the stair. His joints started to ache as he looked over his shoulder towards the front of the stairs and the top that made him want to cry he was so ready to be done with it. Face the top of the staircase. Plant your feet. Do not move. Do not turn around or look behind you.  The fourth hour brought the same and he was allowed to move a little bit. A deep ache began to settle into his muscles as he looked at the top of the stairs. He took the lighter and lit the candle and made sure it didn’t go out. Face the top of the staircase. Plant your feet. Do not move. Do not turn around or look behind you. 

He took on the fifth step without much thought and bent down to reach the photo in front of him. Completely silent. The house was silent as he picked up the photo and burned it with the light that he had carried with him. He waited until the photo was completely unrecognizable before he blew out the light in front of him. Face the top of the staircase. Plant your feet. Do not move. Do not turn around or look behind you. He would have to carry this candle for a bit longer but he didn’t mind. He didn’t care at all. All that mattered was that he was only part way through this. 

Sam took on the sixth step and took the picture of the home he had taken yesterday and ripped it seven times as indicated bu the dice but he could not allow the pieces to fall to his feet though he was ready to let them fall. He had to remind himself what he as doing this for. The hundreds of teens who had taken on this challenge in hopes of finding a witch at the end of it all and let their one true wish be granted. He didn’t want any more teens to fall into her trap and he knew that she was going to sink her claws into anyone who was going to make this happen. He could sto[ this and he was the only one who could help stop this. Face the top of the staircase. Plant your feet. Do not move. Do not turn around or look behind you. 

Seven hours had passed and he wasn’t going to let this stop now that he as going to be amending one more step to make sure that the witch appeared in front of him and he was going to make her pay for what she had done to all of those teens. He knew that she was going to be easy to kill. She had only been created by some stupid teens on the internet and they had built in no strengths for her which meant she had so many weaknesses that he could exploit. He took the clock and turned the clock forward as many hours as incited by the side roll on the previous step. He could not turn it backwards by any means and he wasn’t going to let it fall that way. Face the top of the staircase. Plant your feet. Do not move. Do not turn around or look behind you.  

Eight. He took the eight step up and took a bite of the food that he had offered. He had to swallow it and not show any kind of disgust or remorse for the fact that he was eating it. The metallic taste of blood forced it’s way down his throat and for once he did not enjoy the taste of it. He could not enjoy something like this at all and it made him want to throw up. But he had to show as much enjoyment as he could. He could not let this be the one thing at betrayed him to the witch that was waiting for him on the other end of this. He wasn’t going to stop and he had to force the meat…ground beef…down his throat. Face the top of the staircase. Plant your feet. Do not move. Do not turn around or look behind you. 

Nine. He took the mirror off fo the steps and focused on the face in the mirror. His face. Shadows darted behind him but he had to focus on his own face. There were many distractions but the spirits were going to be the one things that had made him feel uneasy and quit. No matter what tried to catch his eyes, he had to waitfor the hour to pass. He had to. There was going to be a stop to this and he was going to sit there for the next hour before his punishment was up and he was going to be free of all of this. Face the top of the staircase. Plant your feet. Do not move. Do not turn around or look behind you. 

Ten. Ten hours he had stood there and he smashed the mirror before he mounted the tenth step. He used his knife to draw a drop of blood from his hand and allowed a drop to fall on the pile of ashes and dust. He had no idea what kind of seal this was making but it made him uneasy to look down at it. He was no idea why but it made him want to stop now. But he had gotten so far. To terminate it all now would mean that he wouldn’t be able to tell Dean that he did it. That he had finished the job all on his own without any help from his brother.  Face the top of the staircase. Plant your feet. Do not move. Do not turn around or look behind you. 

Eleven. He mounted the step and released the still alive bug. It pained him to have to do this but he placed his hand over the bug and took it out. He had to face what he had done as he waited there. Face the top of the staircase. Plant your feet. Do not move. Do not turn around or look behind you. Even as all of the bad he had done faced him down and he was sure that there was nothing worse that he could do. He had done all of the unimaginable to other people. To other humans. He was wanted for so much that it made him want to throw up. He was just as sick as the brother he had joined all of those years ago and he wasn’t going to act like killing a bit was going to make it any worse though it was going help him. 

Twelve. He mounted the twelfth step and took the token he had plucked from his body and he waited for someone to act like this was all a prank before he swallowed it whole. It hurt but he was able to force down the hair as best as he could without thinking too much about what was awaiting him. He wasn’t going to make this a whole thing now that he was so close to being done. He had gotten so close and he was sure that he was going to see what he was going to have to face at the top of the stairs as soon as he finished this ritual up and he wasn’t so ready to face it. Not anymore. His whole body shook as he looked over his shoulder. Face the top of the staircase. Plant your feet. Do not move. Do not turn around or look behind you. 

 Thirteen. He got up from the twelfth to the thirteenth step, finally recognizing that the light and completely faded from the room and he wasn’t going to see daylight for a little bit more. Maybe not until the next day but he stayed on one side of the salt line as not to invoke anything unless he was truly ready to invoke it. He kept his sharp object close. Face the top of the staircase. Plant your feet. Do not move. Do not turn around or look behind you. 

Sam crossed the salt. The witch was at the top of the stairs facing him as he looked at her with a smile on her face as if she had been waiting him for the whole time, clear as day and only having appeared after he had completed the ritual. She didn’t even flinch as Sam brought out the blade. She seemed almost pleased with it as he looked at her. A wave of relief crossed her face as the words, ‘kill me’ seemed to escape her mouth though they didn’t actually come out and were more a shadow of the voice that she might have once had but she was old and decrepit and she wasn’t going to fight him off anymore from what it looked like and he was sad that he had no way but to do what she had wanted him to do. The object he held in his hands would be able to kill her at a moment’s note and he was ready 

The witch screamed out as he stabbed her in the stomach and let her fall to ruins in front of him and he was so sure that she was done for since she burst into a bright golden light as well. Her ashes were nothing more than dust to sweep up later. Sam pulled his phone out of his pocket and dialed his brother’s number. The line connected and before his brother could even say anything, Sam spoke as he rushed down the stairs towards the front door where he knew he would be safe. He would be safe so long as he was out of the house and away from the ashes of the witch. 

“It’s done,” Sam whined and he wasn’t so sure that it had worked. He was going to be happy enough to see it all through and he wasn’t going to let that happen without much more of a thought. But he was happy. “I think we’re safe…safer than usual.”  

It was a stupid game. One where Dean knew that the only way to stop it was to be the one to play it and draw the creature that was controlling the ever expansive dimension that it hid in and kill it in a place where he was to make sure that it would never be able to take another victim again. One in which he would know that it wouldn’t be able to creep it’s way into once he was done killing it. Though, he wasn’t so sure that this was even the right dimension to be killing the creature in. 

Dean twisted his wrist in his hand. The electric shock of the creature still cursing through his veins as he made his way to the building. Not the same one that he had been in when he was attacked the first time but he was sure that it was enough for him to enter into. He had no idea what was going to happen but he had to walk in there. He had to know what was going to happen to him. He was sure that he was going to see the creature that had made its way onto the earthly realm. His fingers twisted around the newspaper he held in the hand of his aching wrist. The soft paper dug into his skin and threatened to give him paper cuts. His whole body ached as his knees locked in place. 

Sam wasn’t even there with him at the time. He had no reason to hesitate. The voice of reason wasn’t even there toe all him that doing this would be a bad idea. That he wouldn’t be safe playing this game alone. Even though the internet said to never play a paranormal game alone, Dean knew that it was the only time he was really able to capture the creatures that he hunted. The things that he and Sam chased. He knew that there would be times where he would have to go it alone. He wasn’t in a position to take this one alone but he wan’t too keen on letting Sam in there alone either. Nor would he want the both of them in there either. 

But it was just a stupid game. Teens used it to scare themselves shitless because they wanted to try and see into a world where their mirror selves had made different decisions. Ones where they may not even be friends with the people they were trying to scare in the first place. It was one of the reasons that Dean wanted to stop it. No one dare see what had happened to themselves in a parallel dimension. Even if they thought they wanted to see what was happening to them…it was like they wanted to break their minds with a glimpse into a different world. 

The game reminded him almost of a story he had read not too long ago. One where the man had fallen onto the ground and hit his head. In the moments of unconsciousness, he had lived an entire life where the man had a wife and children who had loved him and he loved them so much but one day, he looked at a lamp. The lamp didn’t even look right. It just looked weird and the man just kept staring at it. He kept looking at the lamp for days where he had no idea what was wrong with the lamp until one day, he noticed it. The lamp wasn’t real. None of what he lived was real and just as soon as the man had realized that, he was snapped back to the moment where he had hit his head. A crowd had surrounded him and he had to grieve the life he had lost. Of the people that he had loved. 

It was nearly the same. His eyes drifted down to the now crumpled newspaper in his hands. The missing posters of the teens stared back at him. There were only two of them but each one of them took up half of the page. One in which he had no idea what was going to happen to them if they were ever found. The way they smiled into the camera was nothing more than hope that they would make it out of the ritual alive. At least, that was what the police were saying. They were saying that those two missing kids were probably killed and dumped somewhere in which the police had yet to find them. He had no idea where they were hiding but he wanted to believe that they were still alive but he had no idea what was going to happen to them if they were even alive but he was sure that they weren’t alive. The creature had gotten them. 

He dropped the newspaper through the open backseat window and pushed himself towards the gates in front of him. Step One: find a building with at least ten floors. Dean waited in front of the building. Old and abandoned and just as creepy in the light as it was in the darkness. Usually that was how things went with the buildings that they had visited. It held a darkness to it that made it look like it was permanently shrouded in the light of the moon. Vines crawled up the sides. Mother Nature’s long, spindly fingers had brought itself over the bricks as if she were trying to bring down the whole building and eat it up. Windows were smashed and the hospital looked like it had once been bustling but there was nothing now except the ghosts of those who had lived and died there. It was the only building in town with as many floors. It seemed like even the towns people had known that this would happen and tried to avoid it as best as possible. But still, teens flocked to this place like it was meant to be used even after Mother Nature had tried to make it her bitch. 

Dean brought himself to the gate that was chained shut but the chain didn’t look all to secure either way. He knew that he couldn’t squeeze through the gap that was left but someone thin enough and small enough would be able to move through the gap but he wasn’t slight enough so he would have to get over the fence but sheer force even though it might not be able to hold up against his weight. The fence was probably once silver but there was nothing that he could have done to stop the rust that had collected on the diamond shapes that secured the fence in place. He was sure it would be able to hold him for a little bit and he didn’t want to make things worse for Baby but ramming her into the fence. He was sure that there was going to get over the fence now. 

“Okay,” Dean sighed to himself as he rattled the fence with one hand and hoped it would hold when he climbed over it. “Let’s get this over with.”  

Dean pulled himself over the fence without little resistance from it. He had no idea what the electricity situation was going on inside of the hospital but he was sure that it was going to be fine because he wasn’t about to make the hour drive to another place that would have the electricity to do the ritual but he was sure that it would all shake out when he eventually made it inside of the hospital. He had been so sure that the ritual was going to happen the way he wanted it to that he didn’t even care about what was going to happen when he got in there. He snuck himself across the yard as if he were being watched but he had no idea what was going to happen. But he made his way towards the front door. Or at least it looked like it was the front door but he had no idea what the faded white text said since he was so far away but he was sure that he was going to end up somewhere close to an elevator. 

The white text got clearer and clearer in view as he got closer to the door. EMERCENCY. The text was faded enough that it looked like it was in good condition for the years that he had assumed it was shut down but it was…it was faded enough that he knew that it was going to help him pretend that he didn’t know what this place was if he was caught by the police. Dean rubbed his eyes as dust kicked into his face. A cough exited his mouth as he placed one of his hands on the metal bar that burned underneath him as he tried not to hack up a lung. His other hand dug into the back of his pants to grab a mask but there wasn’t any so he would have to bear through the dust alone. 

His body slammed into the metal bar so hard that his arm would surely be bruised from the whole thing but he was sure that he would end up with worse injuries but he had no idea what was going to happen to him. He had no reason to believe that he wasn’t going to end up with another, worse off injury when he confronted the creature again. One that he wanted to believe that he would catch. Dean pulled himself into the hospital, letting the door slam shut behind him and shroud him in darkness. He pulled his phone out of his pocket and let himself wade in the darkness for only a second before he flooded himself in a bit of light. 

The ground was covered in a layer of dust that seemed permanent. Even his own footsteps seemed to not make a dent in the dust and grime that was left over from what had once been a bustling hospital. The pool of artificial light hit the ground filled with hospital equipment that had been knocked over from storms that had since passed. There were heart monitors and computer screens scattered across the floor. Glass covered the ground like ice on top of snow. There were a few gruneys scattered across the hall as well but his mind was focused on an elevator. His hand brushed against the wall in hopes of finding a light switch. The lights hummed to life just well enough to make the hospital look less creepy.

Why is the hospital still connected to the power grid? Dean tried not to think too much about the implications of the hospital being so inviting to people who wished to come there. But at least that means the elevator is active…once I find one. Dean twisted and turned in his spot as he tried not to think about the ritual once he found it. His whole body ached as he made his way closer to the end of the hall as if he were being pulled in that direction. His whole body ached so deep that he never wanted to feel that ache ever again. His heart beat so fast in his chest, he felt like he was having a heart attack. This was the right direction and he knew it. He was going to have to find an elevator at some point. It wasn’t a new building but it wasn’t an old one either and he knew that there would end up being an elevator at some point but he had no idea where that would end up being no matter what.

Dean rounded the corner towards another hallway that seemed to stretch on forever as he looked over his shoulder towards the hall he had come from before and he was sure that there was someone was following him. The hair on the back of his neck stood up as he made his way towards the other end of that hall. It lead him down a hall not filled with rooms that would have housed the sick and dying but to a bank of elevators that would help him complete the ritual. His mind and body ached as he turned on another switch to light the hallway. His body ached with anticipation as he made his way to the elevators. 

Step two should be easy. He had to make sure to be alone and that no one else joined him in the elevator throughout the process otherwise he would have to start over. No one was there so he would be there all alone as the process happened. He wasn’t going to end up messing it all up. But his finger hovered over the button like he was terrified someone would walk onto the elevator and mess the whole thing up. He wasn’t so keen on being able to get out of there. And mess everything up just because someone else decided to do the ritual with him. The elevator dinged down to the first floor where he would get on and the doors creaked open towards him where he had no choice but to step in. He had no reason to think that he had a way out of this. He had to do this. He had to do the ritual and carve up the creature. Well…bring it back down to earth with him while trying to keep the ritual active long enough so that he could kill it in the real world and not in it’s own dimension. 

He stepped onto the creaking elevator and waited for the doors to close so that he could continue on with the ritual. The next step was split into a few different parts. Dean’s finger pressed the four button on the pad of numbers in front of him and waited as the elevator jerked to life once more and rang out the numbers. Two. Dean’s heart rate quickened in his chest. Three. There was no going back now. He would have to finish now. Four. The doors opened but he waited for them to close before he pressed the two button. Three. The doors opened back to the second floor. He once again waited for the door to close before he pressed the next button to get to the sixth floor. He waited for a few moments as the elevator dinged him up to the sixth floor where he would have to go back down to the second floor all while not getting off at any of the floors he saw. Each one of them darkened by the lights that hadn’t been turned on just yet and he didn’t have the strength to turn them back on again since he didn’t want to think about a time where he would have to give up such a thing. Though, what he could see of each floor, they all looked the same. Even numbered rooms to the right and odd numbered rooms to the left. The doors opened to the second floor once more and he waited for a second before he pressed the number ten. 

Eight floors stood between him and the next step of just playing the game. Not even returning but just…playing the game. He would have to see something before he ended up playing the rest of the game but he was waiting for this last step to happen. He had no idea what was going to happen to him when he was done but…he was ready. His hand gripped one of the only other things he had brought in with him…the one thing he hoped would kill the creature. A cattle prod to overload its system. One that would allow him to completely be able to destroy the creature on his own turf. The doors opened once more but he didn’t open the door at all. He let himself wait for the doors to close before he pressed the button for the fifth floor. 

It’s just a game. He reminded himself as he waited for the whole thing to happen again. The dinging as he made his way down to the fifth floor where he would have to restart how whole life. He needed to think about what the next step he was going to take. The doors opened to a now on the floor but instead of the nothingness of the hospital that he had seen when he was on the floor the first time but now it was…there was a woman covering her face with her hair just well enough that he didn’t make out any facial features on her. Though he knew that she was apart of the game. But that didn’t stop him from thinking she looked like he had seen her before. He had no way of seeing her face all the way but he could not look deeper into her face. He was disallowed to. He was no longer going to be able to see what she looked like until he was done with the ritual. 

First floor. He wanted to say it out loud but he couldn’t. The rules didn’t allow Dean to talk to her. If he did, he would mess up the rest of the game and he would have to restart all of it. So he just sent them both down to the first floor like the rules said. The woman-who truly looked like the woman from the Ring-pushed herself into the corner as did Dean on the opposite side of the elevator. It was nothing more than a game. No one wanted to restart this and see this woman ever again. He needed to get this over with. But instead of going to the first floor like he was going to end up going to, the elevator climbed its way up to the tenth floor. 

The doors opened once more and the woman went out of the elevator for a few steps before turning her head over her shoulder towards Dean, “Are you here to visit your brother, Dean?” 

Dean stepped out onto the tenth floor, following the woman as she made her way down the halls. The fluorescent lights hummed above head and the smell of mold assaulted his nose. Though he had smelled the scent before. It was the Otherworld and he had been there once before and he was going to make this the final time he had to come back there. He held the cattle prod in his hand as he waited for someone to pop out of the corners of the office. He had no reason to play dumb. He was going to make the creature came out and found him. He banged the cattle prod against the office walls. 

“Come here you son of a bitch,” Dean screamed out into the yellow walls that twisted and turned in front of him. The same room repeated over and over and the drips of moisture only served to punctuate his words as he called out for the creature. The one thing that he didn’t want to wait for was the thing. “You can’t just shock me then leave me alone!” 

There was no way he was going to be able to find the creature in the twisting walls. He had no way of knowing what could happen to him in the moments that had been given to him. He had no way of wanting to spend the rest of his life there. He was going to find this creature and give it the shock of his life when he shoved it deep into his chest. He was going to hunt down that sun of the bitch. He was ready. The scream of the creature yelled out across the empty vastness that was in front of him. He turned on his heel and ran back the way he came towards the bank of elevators that had escaped him in the moments he had taken to walk into the Otherworld. His whole body ached as he sprinted into the expanse of nothingness. The screams of the creature followed him as he slammed back into the elevator that hadn’t even closed in the time that it had taken him to call out and find the creature that had made him feel like he was running out against time. 

The creature finally came into view as the elevator doors tried to shut. The creature-with long spindly arms made of human skin and machine parts-reached into the elevator and made it’s huge body fit into it with Dean as he pressed the button to close the doors on the thing and him, trapping the sequence of floors that would return him to the world. A long, arduous process that was the exact same way he had made his way up there. He had no way of knowing if this was going to work but he fought off life and limb as he continued through the process. 

The creature let out some parts of human speech garbled with some sort of machine-like lungs that would have been a bitch to breath through. He had no way of knowing what might have happened to the creature that had been ripped out of its home and made to fight Dean as he poked and brought the prod towards the body of the thing in front of him. He didn’t know how the thing was evading his arms but the spindly creature was able to dodge him from time to time. The thing let out a whine every time a shock went through his body but it wasn’t near enough to kill him. He would need to leave the crackling prod on the skin of the creature for much longer than that. But he had no idea what he was going to do but he was nothing without his other hand as he whipped through the steps and hope to god the elevator wasn’t being an ass on purpose. 

He wailed and screamed at the creature as it right to fight it’s way out of the poor elevator but since it was so dumb, there was no way that it was going to realize the door was opening more than once. The prod was enough to help get the thing angry. His whole body ached as he checked to notice he was on the last step. Fuck, this is where it changes. Dean tensed up as he waited for the tenth floor button to to light up as he looked over his shoulder towards the creature that was making him fight for his life. Once you’re at the fifth floor, press the button for the first floor. However, this will cause the elevate to go to the tenth floor. So you must press any other floor button to stop it from going to the tenth floor before reaching there. Dean prodded the creature in front of him. Well fuck it, first floor. Dean pressed the number two on the elevator panel and looked over his shoulder towards the creature. 

The elevator seemed to slow down as he fought off the creature. Somewhere between the liminal and the real. His own mind playing tricks on him as the creature shifted towards him and he fought it off with the cattle prod as best he could without hurting the thing too bad before he was going to get to the second floor and he was going to have to fight this thing off in the right timing. As soon as he got to the first floor then he wouldn’t be able to kill it. They were already off between his world and its and it was already fading off from view as he swiped at it with the cattle prod. The electric buzz from the prod and the creature battled each other as Dean tried not to keep the thing from going away so soon. 

Ding. 

Nine.  

Dean made a valiant swipe at the creature as the thing distorted it’s body in front of him. He had no idea if he was going to be able to kill the thing in nine floors but he swiped at the creature once more and the cattle prod landed on its body and it let out a machine scream. One that was no longer human as it made it’s way down. To the next floor. His whole body ached as he made another swipe at the man in front of him. This was no way to fight off the man in front of him. The creature in front of him as the two of them danced together as they both made unsuccessful swipes at each other though they didn’t seem to want to hurt each other in it’s entirety. 

Ding. 

Eight.

The creature swiped at Dean as he looked away from the creature but it’s cool metal hands were able to tear him open. The human flesh from the creature fell off from its metal frame and it’s whole body ached as it made it’s way towards him with much more effort than it last had and he had. No idea what was going to happen to him if the thing killed him right then and there. Would he even be able to make his way away from the curse he had put himself into? He swiped at the man once more and allowed himself to make another land of the cattle prod. He was so sure that this creature was going to hurt him. 

Ding. 

Seven.

This was going to be now or never at this point. He wasn’t going to hurt this creature. This mission was unsuccessful. He wasn’t going to make this mission unsuccessful because of what he was going to do. He swiped another way at the creature. He was so sure that this thing was going to go down as easy as he thought but it was going to have to go down at some point. He was going to take this thing down. He needed to take this thing down and he was going to make this thing his bitch if it was the last thing he could do. He was going to take this motherfucker down and it wasn’t going to help him now that he was going to be closer to the first floor. 

Ding. 

Six. 

The creature must have sensed freedom on the horizon was it swiped at him even more than he once had wished. The poor thing moved from side and he was going to make this thing his bitch if it was the last thing he did. He was so ready to make sure this thing died with the thoughts that it was bested by a man in flannel. He swiped more at the man in front of him and he was ready to make sure that this thing was killed. He reached forward with the cattle prod and zapped the thing it in front of him as he tried not to get too attached to the creature as it made more attempts to kill him. 

Ding. 

Five.

The creature wailed as he finally got a good attack on the creature and it gel to it’s knees as it held onto the sides for support but he had no way of hurting Dean anymore. There was no way that this was going to be able to hurt him. The walls were made of wood and so long as he didn’t touch the metal bars on the walls or the door then he would be fine and so long as that happened then he wouldn’t be able to die. There would be a way for him to keep that from happening and that was to shut down his systems and run. He was assured the rest of the world was going to have to wait. 

Ding. 

Four. 

Dean held the prod to the creature as it whined and groaned and screamed out for help though it seemed like the rest of it’s systems were shutting down at that point. 

Ding.

Three. 

The creature screamed out but it still writhed and moved though there was nothing that he could do to speed up the dying process. He held the prod to the thing and waited as it gave out it’s last dying breaths. His whole body ached. 

Ding.

Two.

The creature soon made it’s way down to the floor and waited for what was going to happen eventually. The death of the creature. The thing let out one final whine before it fell to the ground. Dead. The thing was dead. 

Ding.

One. 

The doors opened to the first floor and the creature disappeared. All was normal and the hospital looked just the same as he had left it but he sure not stay there a moment longer. He sprinted out into the light of the halls and made his way out to his car which sat in the same position that that he had left it in. Everything was normal…fine…and he was going had made it all okay. Dean sped out to the car. 

The road stretched ahead of them for miles upon miles. Dean’s vision blurred as he tried to orient himself according to the GPS mapping on the phone in the cupholder. He had barely taken his eyes off the road for a second when his eyes caught the attention of a deer as it rolled over the hood of their car. He swerved off to the right as if he were to avoid the body that had fallen behind them. There was something off about what had happened. There was nothing more that he could do. There was no one else around and in the rearview mirror, there was nothing. It was hard to trust your own eyes when all you had been doing was trusting your eyes to tell you where a monster was. 

Even now, Dean’s eyes scanned the darkened tree line on the other side of the road. His eyes flickered between the shadows of what were real-the headlights passing through the trees and casting shadows further into the forest-and the ones that could be created by something else. Something far more sinister than the raccoons climbing up the trees or the deer darting back to the safety of the shadows. Even the occasional bear wasn’t as threatening as what he was looking for. 

A hunter’s eyes. That’s what their dad had called it. The way police scanned the room for someone who was going to potentially commit a crime. The same way a real hunter’s eyes would scan the woods for animals. He knew what to pick out. The animalistic eyes that weren’t really from animals. The way the light reflected off of them that was just off somehow. There was always this off their eyes. Something so very off. There were people out there who knew the difference and he was grateful they did. They might not have the skills to do anything about it but they knew what they were looking at was not a creature of earth. 

With the rise of the internet, it had been one of the only times he had wished he could clone himself. There were people falling into different dimensions and being used as feed to the creatures that lived there. People were splitting off into alternate timelines, still able to communicate with people on the other side, telling them about their experiences. There were people who had encountered the creatures they were hunting and putting them on the internet for all to see so that the creatures could spread even further. These kids were even creating their own new lore and legends which would soon weaken in hundreds of years' time but for now, these legends were as tough and as powerful as some of the older legends he had encountered. 

Hell, they had just got off a case where some emo teenager tried to get Jeff the Killer to kill his bullies. Some sad sack of a kid and the bullies weren’t much better. The kid had spent so much time trying to manifest the fictional killer that it had worked in a manner of minutes and there was no killing these kinds of internet demons and there was no way they could change the rituals needed to summon them. There were people who would get the new ritual and post it everywhere they could get their grabby hands-on and the new ritual would take hold. There were a lot of ways to not kill those motherfuckers and not many ways to truly kill them. Even taking the original post down would mean nothing because people loved copying and pasting the legend around. 

It seemed like every single time they defeated an older legend, ten new ones popped up and there was no way that they could just yank it off the internet since there was no possible way in which that could happen without someone making another version or saving a copy to the hard drive. Life had been so much easier when there was nothing like the internet. Or a very tiny internet presence since there was nothing worse than going out there and getting their asses whooped by a man who called himself ‘the Rat King’. 

Dean scratched at the scabs left on his skin from the fight. He was bound to show up again but he wasn’t going to need to see that bastard any time in the near future. He wanted nothing to do with the monster now that he had placed his eyes back onto the road as if there were anything running amok on the ground in front of him. The backroads were filled with skittish animals and he wasn’t so sure that there would be people out on the road that late at night either way since there were barely any houses and the houses that were around them were the ones so far away from the road that it didn’t matter much about it. 

“Are we there yet,” Sam mumbled and twisted his head towards Dean who peeled his eyes away from the toad for a split second to watch his brother get up from his sleep and rub his eyes free from the sleep that had collected there. “Please tell me that we’re there yet.” 

“No, we’re still about five or six hours away,” Dean’s eyes flicked down to the phone in the cupholder. “Do you want to switch places at the next rest stop?”

Of course, there was no such thing as rest stops on the backroads. There were people out there who had tried to make them but there was no way that they would survive. They weren’t even allowed to make a lot of money since no one liked using them besides the hunters that decided that they were the roads that were the safest from the prying eyes of the government. It was also much easier to push away any kind of threat that would come their way if they were to meet them. Not like the scenic route wasn’t a good one but damn, highways were so much easier from time to time. He knew that the tolls would get any stolen car they were driving and no one would want to be pulled over because if he were going to be arrested, he was going to have a way out of the jail cell he would be sitting in. He didn’t want to die in there and he was going to make sure of that even if that meant going through the backroads like he was some sort of criminal. Even if it meant being the one to take most of the risk when Sam inevitably fell asleep after promising to take over on the next shift. 

“Yeah, we can do that,” Sam shifted in his seat and placed his head back onto the headrest. His eyes scanned the road in front of them. “Yeah…”

The sound of sleep still mixed with his voice and there was no telling when he was going to wake up from his sleep and be in the position to drive. If that was if he were going to get out of there without falling back to sleep. Sam always promised that they would switch at the next rest stop but they never did. They were trapped in this mess and it seemed like even the promise of Sam driving the car wasn’t enough to keep him awake. 

“We’ll be there in like an hour, you think you can stay up that long,” Dean turned his head to the side and looked him over. “Or do you want to keep sleeping?”

“No,” Sam grunted and turned the volume up on the radio. “I think I’ll be okay.” 

The news droned on in the background. Some NPR piece from the sound of their voices since there was no way that he was going to stay away to it. Dean’s hand reached down and changed the station to something that he could enjoy more regularly. Not any of that late-night crap that Sam liked to fall asleep to even though it made him want to fall asleep. If he even so much as touched the thing then station then Sam was going to wake up and yell at him to turn it back so that he could fall asleep. Even when he didn’t want to listen to the news that had been forced into his brain, it would keep Sam asleep and he couldn’t sleep at the wheel either. Both of them would know that he was going to keep pushing on when even Sam slept through the entire ride. He had nothing else to think about when the news had bored him to tears. He had no one to talk to when Sam was asleep. Not like he truly cared about it. He was happy enough to think of the monsters in the background. 

“Are you sure,” he pressed. He knew that no one would talk to him and…Cas was missing so he couldn’t talk to him and there was no way to contact him. “Like are you really sure you can make it because I can finish the drive.”

“No,” Sam didn’t sound so convincing and he had no heart to tell Sam that he wasn’t going to make it and he wasn’t going to tell Sam otherwise since he did sound so tired. “I can make it…I can make it.” 

Dean sighed and placed both hands back on the wheel. His eyes still scanned the road around him as he tried to keep himself awake long enough to get off the road and sleep. The road stretched out in front of him like some never-ending nightmare. Like a loop that would never end. The music pounded his heart and lungs to the point where he didn’t know if he was the one beating them for himself or if it were the music. Not like it mattered. Maybe if the music were helping him, he wouldn’t be so damned tired all the time. It would make him feel like he was going to die, the sleep deprivation at least, and Sam didn’t even seem the least bit worried about it and it made him feel like there was nothing that he could do save for pulling over and sleeping himself.

His eyes scanned the darkened road once more as if trying to find more of the people who had made sure that he wasn’t going to fall asleep at the wheel. There was nothing. Not even to his hunter’s eyes. There was nothing that was going to make sure that they were going to die on the edge of that room. There were people out there who knew the kinds of roads they drove at night and those kinds of people wished him dead. They were the kinds of people who had known that he would be taking them even if they went dark. They were the people that could track them. The people who knew the moves of every hunter that they had ever come into contact with. A kind of group that watched all over those who had made them all connected. A safe place that they knew they could go home to and if they didn’t keep up with the hunts they took…they could be seriously hurt. 

Sam had protested the joining of the group but they had to. Their own hunts growing more and more dangerous with every turn they made and he knew the internet wasn’t going to make their lives much easier. He had nothing more than the group to rely on and even if that meant he was going to keep himself on the down low with the group since no one was going to watch them when they were out. They were the only ones who knew what was going on. There was…another group that had been tracking them both but they hadn’t been able to track them down to the point where they thought it was good to keep them. 

Dean blinked a few times to try and keep himself awake. The sleep was overtaking him and he knew there was nothing he could do to stop it. He placed a hand on his thigh and rubbed the skin against the denim that covered it. His eyes darting back and forth across the tree lines on either side of them. Each one of them showed nothing more than the woods that was supposed to keep them calm. He had known that there were things out there and he had half expected to see one when he placed his hands on the wheel that morning. 

As his eyes scanned the tree lines, he finally saw something. He had no idea if it were the animals that had sent that same chill up his spine that vampires and werewolves did or if it was something else. His eyes darted back and for once more as Sam jolted up in his seat. He kicked the car into reverse and stopped a few feet from where he had first seen…what even was it? Could it just have been his overtired eyes? Could it be nothing like his brain tried telling him it was? Could he actively make himself feel better about the woods when he placed his hands on the tree where he had seen the thing that he had seen in the tree line. 

“What is it,” Sam’s voice carried some urgency but still carried some sleep to it since he had seemingly been in that realm. “Why are we stopping?”

“I think I saw something,” Dean felt so unsure saying that since he had no idea what was going on. “In the woods…”

“We always see something in the woods,” Sam rubbed his eyes. “It could just be a deer or a bear or something. It could really be nothing.”

“No…I saw something in the woods…something that wasn’t…” Dean put the car in park and turned his head towards the tree line once more. There. 

An arm had reached out around the tree and pulled back around the tree into the darkness. Dean pushed open the door and turned his attention to the trees as he pulled himself out of the car and onto the road. His eyes scanned the trees. The light that he had created with the headlights. He placed his back against the car as if that were going to protect him from whatever creature had shown up in the trees. He had no idea what was going to happen but he knew this…this thing was going to harm someone or at least scare them who had been walking through the forest late at night. His eyes scanned the tree line once more as he looked over them in hopes of finding the person who had left him. He had no one who had made him stop. 

“Are you sure you saw something, Dean,” the car door slammed shut behind him, rattling the car against Dean’s back. “Maybe you just need sleep.”

“Help,” the scream echoed out towards the road. “Somebody help me!”

Dean sprinted off into the darkness, not even considering the weapons that surrounded him. He had no idea what he was chasing. The screaming continued around him as he dodged trees and their roots that shot out of the ground as if someone were coming to get them. He continued down towards the one thing that he knew would help him. Arms reaching out from behind the trees and reaching out towards them. Twigs snapped underneath his steps. His breath heaved as he followed the screaming into the woods. If he were anyone else, he would know that he was just going to save someone. But the number one rule of hunting at night was that if you heard something in the woods, you didn’t and you keep going on your own track. Don’t look in either direction. Keep your head straight and not on a swivel. 

“Dean,” Sam called out into the darkness but Dean kept moving. He sprinted towards the arms that reached out towards him. “Come on man, where are you?” 

A tree branch stopped Dean dead in his tracks. The breath he had pulled in just milliseconds before shot out of his lungs before there was any real benefit. The creature he had been chasing pulled itself back behind the trees. An unholy scream filled the air. Birds flew into the air towards the partially hidden moon above them. Blood spilled onto the ground in tiny droplets like rain. The forest spun around Dean. Silence surrounded them both. Even his own heaving breath was silenced by whatever was in the forest. 

Sam shut his laptop and stretched. Every muscle in his body ached. How long have I been sitting here? Sam checked the clock on the wall across from him. At least a few hours. He was bad at checking the time when he woke up. It was usually pretty early when he woke up and it seemed to be around dinner by now so it had been a few hours. More than a few hours really. He had been there all day. His lower back ached and his eyes burned. On top of that, his ass had gone numb from sitting there for hours on end. Sam stood up from his spot and placed his hands on either side  of his laptop and pushed himself away from the table. The grumbling of his stomach covered the sound of the chair scraping against the wooden floor. 

Maybe I should round everyone up for dinner. See if they’re hungry too. Sam rubbed the back of his neck. His eyes scanned the library. The desk Dean had sat at this morning had been emptied out and the desk you had sat at this afternoon had also been emptied out. Dean could be out at a bar by now. But you were most likely in your room watching some crappy teen show on Netflix and Sam dare not interrupt that. The last time he did, he got a pillow to the face and yelled at for interrupting your “Link Time” whatever that meant. He could at least check if you were watching something and he could come back later when you were done with the episode to ask what you wanted for dinner. 

He couldn’t put it off forever. The library wasn’t far from your room but the maze of hallways always made the journey feel long. The fluorescent lights didn’t help when all he never actually felt at home-truly at home-in the halls. He rounded the corner towards your room, finding the door slightly cracked. That usually meant that you weren’t too bust watching whatever you liked to watch when you were in your room. It was much better than going to your room and finding a closed door. Closed door meant “Link Time” and no one-no one-was meant to interrupt you when there was “Link Time” to be had. 

The fact that “Link Time” had crossed his mind twice in a matter of moments scared him a bit. Maybe he had been spending too much time with you and dang, were you one beautiful creature. You were the prettiest person he had ever laid eyes on and that wasn’t an exaggeration. Sure he had seen pretty people before, just ask Ruby or Jessica (if you could even reach them) but your beauty couldn’t compare to either of them. Sam shook his head and stepped towards the partially opened door. 

The sounds of your moans filled the air, echoing off of the walls of your room. They were soft moans. Barely audible and if you weren’t listening then you would never know that you were moaning in there. The moans were almost drowned out by the sounds of something sliding in and out of your wet pussy. Sam’s mouth salivated at just the sounds alone. He didn’t need to smell or even taste it, just the sound of it got him half hard in his jeans. His hand instinctively reached down to rub himself through his jeans. 

“Fuck me,” your voice was desperate as ever. Sam was half tempted to look inside of the room but he already felt dirty enough as it was peaking in on such a private moment. The sounds of whatever was penetrating you sped up. “Please.”

Sam bit his lip so hard that it might bleed, keeping the moan that rose in his throat inside of him. His hand pressed against his hard-on and pressed it down as if he were attempting to stop it from raising. He pulled himself against the wall, not wanting to be seen or heard. Though his shadow on the wall might give him away. From there he had a perfect view of the room and the bed you lay on. You were naked from the waist down, wearing one of the shirts he had given you when you arrived on your doorstep and had never given back. Your chest rose and fell in shallow breaths. One hand was on your breast and the other was moving a…giant dildo in and out of your pussy. It was so much bigger than he could ever be and you were taking it like a champ. Your head was turned away from Sam which made him feel better about looking in on you. 

His cock only grew harder at the sight. Your moans grew louder as your hand moved faster. It seemed like you were getting closer to an orgasm. Sam slowly unzipped his pants and pulled them down along with his boxers to his mid thigh. His hand wrapped around his cock, giving it a few cautionary strokes before settling into a speed that was comfortable for him. Your moans hit a pitch higher than they had originally been. His eyes slammed shut. The thought of you was enough to start getting him off. He imagined that his hand was your cunt and he tried to get to your point before you came.

Each movement of his hand brought him closer to your point. Oh how he wished that he was in that room fucking you senseless. How he wanted to remove the toy you were using and use himself to fuck you as senseless. There was more than that…he liked you. He wanted to be with you…in you. He needed every part of you and he wished that a door didn’t separate him. That he wasn’t standing outside like a weirdo and like the freak that he was. He placed a hand on the wall to steady himself as he made his way towards the door by an inch or two to get a better look. His hand gripping his cock like it was the last thing holding him to the earth. He had no better way of doing this. He didn’t want to break in and make you feel watched or anything. He didn’t need you to feel violated. 

“Sam,” you moaned and the name came from your mouth as if you had said it that way more than once. “Fuck me, please.” 

Sam’s hand sped up around his cock and he kept the pace as your hand sped up. Your moans coming faster and faster until they came to a fever pitch. Sam spurted his cum out onto the palm of his hand. Your breathing became heavy like you had just fought a demon. His mind becoming clearer. What have I done? His eyes turned towards your form in the bed. Your head had turned towards him, catching him in the act. Red-more like white-handed. 

Slush was always more abundant than snow on most days. The dirty almost water filled most of the sidewalks weeks after the last snowfall. Inches thick and ready to muddy most anything that dared touch it. Most days, he was lucky to get to the bar with no less than one new stain on his shoes. Even then he couldn’t wait to get the shoes he wore off and replace them with the ones in his backpack. The ones he kept away from the eyes of his fellow assassins in hopes that no one would steal them. Though they would have to get through a stack of blades that covered the shoes to even get them but that didn’t stop them before. 

His shoulders drooped as he slid into the same spot at the bar as he always did while he was waiting for work. The chalkboard with names and a tally hung above him. A mockery if you asked him. There was no way to tell if anyone had killed as many monsters as they did. Their word was as good as any. An honor system. Even then, honor didn’t mean much to those who crawled through the bar. 

“Don’t look so down,” a shot of whiskey slid into the man’s view. “You’ll get another job eventually.” 

The table stuck to his clothes as his fingers inched towards the shot glass. The glass cool against his hand as he brought it up to his lips. They say whiskey burns as it slides down your throat but he had never felt such a thing when he drank it. His eyes lingered on the names that lined the chalkboard above the bartender’s head. 

Axel-75, Archer-73, Blade-70…Sam-19. 

“Not soon enough,” Sam dug into his pocket and slapped a five down onto the table to pay for the drink, unsure if the bartender would even be able to pick it up. “That’s my last five.” 

“You can’t spend all your money on booze. Tonight, it’s all on the house,” the bartender turned his attention to the tally above his head. “Don’t think you’re going to win the pot anytime soon.” 

Sam checked his watch for the time though he wasn’t sure if it would do much in the way of bringing customers to him. There were far better fighters. That was plain to see to anyone that dared walk into the bar looking for a good hunter. Some took a chance on him. Most likely out of pity. Or because his prices were so low. 

“There’s always a chance you could snatch a big game,” the bartender filled up the empty shot glass up to the brim. 

“Like what? Some kid crawling around playing pretend with a hydra for God’s sake?” 

“Hydra only counts as one still.” 

“That’s such a bad rule. It should be one death for every spinal cord I sever.” 

“One heart, one death. You agreed on it.” 

“Winner gets to change the rules,” Sam smirked. “Long time before I get to decide what goes. Maybe even end this for all.” 

“Then what else would you do for money?” 

“I don’t know, we’ll cross that bridge when we get there.” 

Sam downed the last of the shot and slammed the glass on the table.  His eyes grew heavy in their sockets. He shouldn’t be drinking on such an empty stomach. But he had the last of his food last week with nothing else since then. No work between last month and now either. With only 19 kills to his name, no one would want to hire him over the man with nearly 75 kills and climbing. Not unless they were dead broke and ready to just give everything up to gamble on him. 

“Like I said, someone will hire you. Even if it’s five bucks for some swearing blue blob.” 

“Death seems like an extreme answer to a swearing blue blob, don’t you think?” 

The bartender fell silent. Another shot was poured right in front of his eyes. Though, his stomach churned at the thought of downing more alcohol. He lifted the glass to his lips. The door to the bar swung open. His glass hovered near his lips but nowhere near spilling the contents of what he had in his hand. 

All eyes turned towards the man in the doorway. His coat was stained with a mix of rain and snow. His body shook though Sam couldn’t tell if it were out of fear or the cold. The man rushed to Axel. His hands grasped the collar of his shirt. He spoke but Sam couldn’t tell what he was saying. Axel shook his head. The set of curls that adorned his head shook even moments after he had stopped. 

The man rushed up to Archer next. Though he only received the same response from him. Blade gave the same answer. Everyone with a body count over sixty gave the same answer. Those in the fifties and forties could only shrug as if they hadn’t made up their minds just yet. 

“My daughter. Her imaginary friend just keeps multiplying. Do you think you can help me?”

“How much are we talking here?” Sam kept his eyes on the tally board. 

“Bodies or money?” 

“Both.” 

“A hundred bodies right now at ten bucks a head.” Sam almost spat out his drink though the bartender handed a napkin at his mouth before it could fly everywhere. 

A hundred separate heartbeats were more than enough money-wise. Nearly a thousand dollars for just one job! Well, nearly five hundred for the job. Half went into the pot. 

“When do you need them dead by?” 

“Tonight.” 

The money was defiantly more of a deterrent to the others. But the more they denied it, the more money he could make. The more bodies he could rack up and get to the top of the leaderboard. The bodies must’ve been a deterrent for others. They didn’t need as many as Sam did to even begin to be in the running for bragging rights and the shot of changing the tules. 

What is in room 101?

“And this will be room for the night,” the woman swung open the door to the room. “It’s not much but you were the last to arrive.” 

He bowed his head down in thanks but didn’t say anything else. The woman closed the door behind the man as he made his way in. The room was a little smaller than he would have liked. No escape route. Not even a window to let in the moonlight. 

“The lights don’t work here so you’re going to have a nice sleep tonight.” 

A nice sleep? Maybe for other people. But the room was already dark enough as it was with the sunlight that poured through the doorway from the stairwell across from him. Not even the light from the bathroom was enough to save it. The basement of the house was supposed to have gone to his brother if it hadn’t been for the fact that he had been caught in traffic for half an hour. He dropped his bag down at his side. The steps of the bed and breakfast worker headed back up the stairs to the kitchen. 

It’s just until we catch whatever’s lurking around here, Sam promised himself as he looked around the room. 

The smell of mildew hit his face. No wonder his brother didn’t want to sleep in there. It stunk so bad. He tried removing the smell from his nose but it was to no avail. It would just have to be fine for the night. After tonight he wouldn’t have to see the room again. He would just have to keep it to himself. 

The bookshelf was filled with a thick layer of dust that was surely at least ten or fifteen years old at this point. He turned back to the bag he had brought in and set it down on the ground near the foot of the bed which was covered in the same crusty sheets that every grandmother had at some point in their life. They looked as though it hadn’t been moved changed since the last time someone was there. Probably hadn’t been washed since last time either. Probably just straightened up since they weren’t there long enough to give the sheets a stench. 

The light was already fading from the room even though the sun wasn’t supposed to set for another few hours. His eyes flicked up to the stairs as if anyone had come down through his aunt would come down at any moment. Though, no one had descended into the room. He finished setting up the room and headed up to the stairs to grab some dinner.

“What’s it like in that room,” Dean joked, wrapping an arm around his shoulder. He only came into view a little bit later. “As scary as you thought?” 

He fought back the urge to cry and straightened his back up. The smell of garlic replaced the mildew that had once filled his nose. A plate of pasta was passed to him. He took the plate and walked over to the dining room. His eyes burned as the steam came up to his eyes. He set himself down at the table and pushed his chair in. The rest of the family waited for his brother to sit down at the table. His brother walked back over to the dining room table and took his seat. 

“No. It’s fine. The room is fine.”

The air had chilled a bit by the time he had gotten back to his room but he had slipped into the bed nonetheless. His eyes took one look at the room before he slipped back down into the sheets. His body barely warmed up as he covered himself with his blankets.

Knock . 

He shot up out of bed and scanned the room. His heart raced in his chest. So hard that he was sure that his ribs would break. That couldn’t be what he thought it was. It had to be his brother playing a trick on him. 

“H-hello,” he called up the stairs. 

Scraaaaape.  

“Look, Dean, this isn’t funny!” 

Sliiiiide.  

“Dean! I swear to god stop!” 

Knock.  

His breath caught in his throat. 

Knock.

He hoped it was just Dean. 

Knock.  

A shadow appeared in the doorway. Too tall to be his brother. Too tall to be any human that lived in the house. It had to be a trick of the mind. His child-like mind making things up to help fill the gap in his mind. It just had to be the house settling. It was nearly a hundred years old at this point. 

Tentacles as thick as tree trunks spread crawled across the floor and towards the bed. Too many to count. He pushed himself back against the headboard. He tried to keep his cool but his heart raced in his chest. His own body betrayed the calm he had tried to keep in the face of the men. His body froze as he tried to make his escape. He wanted to move but his muscles didn’t respond to the movement. His joints locked up so bad that the bone crushed against each other as he tried to make his way out of there. 

The sliver of light that came from the bathroom was not enough to stop the slithering tentacles from wrapping around his legs. Not slimy like he had expected from the shine on them. No, they were cool and thick and scaly like the belly of a snake. They yanked him down to the ground and across the ground. He shut his eyes tight. Stars blasted in his vision as he tried to make sure that he didn’t see what was surely devouring his legs at this point. 

“Good night.”

Applicants Wanted!

Team of highly qualified grads at UM are looking for applicant. Ideally 20-35, stocky, rough build, pref. Male but female will also work given proper conditions, want spontaneity. Running through on a first come, fist served basis. WE PAY HADSOMELY! Message us on our usenet board, UMgenealogyteam, or respond below. Are on the verge of something, need quick replies and to be easy on had. Easy to work with. Get back as soon as you can, spaces filling up fast. 

~

Sam had seen the offer as an ad on the side of one of the websites he had been trolling for another case he could jump on. It was a tempting offer. After all, they were in a bit of a situation. Dean was in the hospital (again) and he was up in arms over the bill. Dean needed expensive heart medication before the doctors could even think about letting him go home. Poor bastard’s in a chair looking off into the distance as Sam looked over the website he thought that if he signed up for the experiment or whatever it was then he’ll end it and buy Dean his medication. Dean wasn’t exactly charitable most of the time but this was Sam and he gave up his career and a life in law so he figured, hey what the hell. It was worth going out and putting himself on the line. 

Sam Winchester. 34. Athletic. He nearly fit the criteria. He wasn’t exactly stocky per se. He did plat some football when he was in high school. You’d be surprised at what he could do with those arms. He didn’t know how much he weighed but he was about six feet. He didn’t know if that mattered but he had to put that in there for their purposeless. As for the fitting in part, he doubted that they would have an issues. He worked well enough in team settings. He had worked with other hunters before but instead of putting that in, he just said that he worked on an unpublished study before which wasn’t a complete lie. When he was 19, he tested skin scream and he thinks that he did pretty well. They got free samples afterwards. Of course, whether he went through with it or not will ultimately depend on how much money they were talking. Sam’s heart medication would cost $700. If possible, he would also like a little extra spending cash so he could buy himself something nice. 

They would discuss more when they met. 

He also took a look at their board. It was pretty sophisticated for some college website. It looked like they got some really good funding. He posted the same thing on there so they’d be sure to see. He’d be available Tuesday through Saturday but he would be sure to have his phone on him at all times so he didn’t miss their call. He posted his number to the board and looked forward to whatever they got. He was pretty confident that he could handle it. He needed to. 

Sam waited for the people to get back to him, continually refreshing his email in waiting for the answer to his post on the board. He didn’t know why he was waiting for an immediate response from whoever was running the study. There was probably hundreds of applicants, right? Sam idely opened up the email once more as Sam’s heart monitor beeped in the background. The hospital wifi was slower than any motel wifi he had been on before. But he had a bit of a wait anywhere. No use in complaining about it since they could never really think all too much about getting an actual house.

Hey there Sam,

Great news! Our team has taken a look at your background and you check out. We’re also sorry to hear about your brother’s heart condition. These days, it seems like everyone is dying of some sort of disease. We hope we can help you. $700 is easily within our range given the amount of endurance and dedication this study will required. Come over on Saturday. We’re in the Fielder building on the second floor. If you have trouble finding it, our receptionist can help you out. 

We think given the description you provided you’ll work. But we need you to report for a quick interview and subsequent physical examination. Don’t worry too much, we’ve done this with all the applicants. The process will be quick. 

We can’t wait to meet you. 

~

At least the receptionist was nice and the staff was friendly. It helped ease the anxiety Sam had about leaving the hospital. The upfront payment was nice. The process was easy and he couldn’t believe that it was over. Anyways, he was going to have to report to the form every day. Not sure how the board will work. But if they had a problem with him jotting down the effects there, then they could say so and he could record them in his notes or something. He was going through the checklist they gave him on the way home and he’s looking it over. All of the paperwork was pretty long but he thought he would be able to get through it. If not, he would have one of his old friends look over it who might be able to sort through most of it. 

Their techniques seemed remarkably advanced. He took only chem and biology in 11th grade but he had been reading up on the whole cloning thing lately and it did interest him. They cloned that sheep and there are pictures of her and everything. Pretty soon you could get people cloned. Not to say that’s appealing or anything. But he would be lying if he saw the prospect of having a smaller Sam around to do chores or whatever wasn’t kind of near. It was nice that they had people going research on that. It would put Minneapolis on the map if they were able to do something like that or had any sort of breakthrough. He hoped that the other applicants were doing well. He decided to take the medication after every meal he ate at the hospital since the packet mentioned that the results could be corrupted without nutrients. 

Tonight, he was going to eat some steak and asparagus then have ice cream for desert. After that he would head back to Sam’s room, take the dose and go to sleep. He needed lots of energy for the next day. Hopefully none of this will do anything. 

The facility he visited that day had some neat equipment. He especially like that processor they had. Looked top-of-the-line. He guessed that you needed that when the field was genetics. To process all of those base pairs and helixes or whatever they were called. Amazing that way down we’re just lines of code. If he looked down the the cellar level. All those cytoplasms and alleles working in harmony. It’s like a little factory down there. 

The tour he had been given after the procedure had convinced him that maybe he should think of attending MU when it was all over (if it ever asl all over). He’d been putting it off. Getting that law degree but maybe college was what he was supposed to do after all. The campus was nice. Good sun and lots of areas for studying. He’d have to look into tuition and if there are any scholarships. He had gotten a full ride to Stanford after all. Maybe the students could refer him to the eligibility board or whatever. 

Anyways, that was all he had for the night. He would report again if anything happened tomorrow. The payment upfront helped pay for the medication and part of the hospital stay. 

~

He took he dose like the packet said with a dose of water. He reclined in the hospital chair and watched from TV for about an hour. The Pretender was on and it was the season finale and he didn’t mind watching it. He knew the packet said to go to sleep immediately but one hour of TV wouldn’t hurt. He had a dream where he was in a glass building looking up at the sky. Then he woke up around 7am. As of him writing down his recollection of the day, it was nearly 6pm. Dinner tonight was going to be pizza and a 2 liter of Sprite then another dose. He might go down to the cafeteria and get a side salad. He had been tracking the calories like the sheet said and would probably add it up. 

He thought he should mention something that happened that day. Sundays, he usually went out for a walk, not really to do anything other than just walk. He couldn’t actually do anything for fun but that since they were currently so stopped for cash. Some days, he would scrounge for change and get on a bus to head downtown and window shop. All that to say that when he got to this one display, he though they had a stereo in the window, and he was looking at it for a few minutes when he noticed his reflection in the glass. It was kind of like his eyes were focused on the setup and then they snapped back and he saw himself, absent minded. 

Something about how he looked didn’t look right. He couldn’t place it. It wasn’t anything physical but it was subtle. If he wasn’t being specific, he apologizes. It was hot out and the sun was bearing down on him. Maybe he was suffering from a heat stroke although he doubted it because he didn’t feel at all hot. His selection was wrong somehow. For a second, he wondered if it was actually him he was looking at. Then everything became clearer in his field of vision. He looked himself over and he was fine. The street was how it had been. The stereo set was right there and his reflection was okay. But there was something disturbing about seeing himself like that. He couldn’t say for sure how it was wrong. Couldn’t put his finger on it. Maybe something about his eyes. 

He walked around for an hour or so, looked in more windows and nothing was there either. Then he got back to the hospital and watched TV for about two hours. But this point it was getting to be evening so he hopped in the hospital showers and tried to relax. Nothing else had happened so far. Could be completely unrelated to the substance. Might be an illusion like he said. Not sure how that could happen, though. Given what they had described, he doubted that it would effect his mental state. 

It was about fifteen minutes until the pizza guy said he would be there. But he usually ran at least ten minutes late. It was getting dark outside and he was getting tired. A couple of minutes ago, he called Bobby. He had a lot of things to do over at his place so he hadn’t had a chance to go over to see him much. It seemed like he was always busy and only had a few minutes to talk to Sam over the phone. He wouldn’t want to disturb Bobby and he’s great. He still had five pages of the paperwork to go over. He might pull it off because it looked so complex. He wasn’t sure, really. If he does, he’d be sure to get it in before the deadline.  He figured making the entries he posted to the board more effort. He enjoyed it though. He wondered how the lab work was going. There were a lot of genetic diseases that were even worse than the pathogenic ones. There weren’t any cures that he knew of. If you have one, you just have to live with it for the rest of your life because there aren’t any external factors. The disease is programmed into cell in your body, each and every square inch of you is targeted. He knew that the lab knew all of that but it was a disturbing thought. 

~

Dean was looking a lot better lately. They got pretty much everything taken care of as far as his heart went. The insurance fraud they pulled off covered all of his treatment but the medication was where it stopped. The doctors were joking at the desk about betting who in the ward was going to die first. It made Sam sick listening to that kind of thing. Doctors shouldn’t be talking like that. Especially where parents and relatives can hear.

He had accidentally brought some of the substance along. It was sticking out of his pocket. 

“What’s this,” Dean asked, pulling at it. 

“Just something I’m taking,” Sam responded. “It’s supposed to benefit me somehow. Something to do with something called Chromatin.”

Dean leaned back in his bead, pressed the button on the side and it made it’s noise, “Is it illegal?”

Sam told him no. That it was officially sanctioned and Sade. He sighed, put his hands behind his head and that was about the end of that conversation. In three days he would be discharged and they would spend the night in a motel before getting the hell out of dodge before their scheme got found out. 

After the lunch he had at the hospital (he had also been keeping track of lunch and breakfast). Today for lunch he had a burger and salad. Today’s breakfast was cereal and yogurt. Yesterday, he thought that lunch was a leftover Caron of Chinese food in the mini fridge. Breakfast was orange juice and some offs. Day before that it was a casserole and he didn’t have any breakfast that day. Don’t worry. It all added up to the correct amounts. He’d done the math and he thought it should be fine. 

He’d been watching a lot of TV to pass the time. One thing he was starting to notice was that he’ll sit down, turn the TV on and it’ll be a show he was interested in watching but before he knew it, the show will be over. It wasn’t as if he forgot what happened , it’s more like time sped up and he didn’t notice. For some reason that only happened when he was watching TV. The end credits will be on and he’ll feel like he just watched the theme song but somehoww he remembered everything that happened during the episode. If he was just doing off then he wouldn’t know what happened. This had never happened to him before so he thought it was related to the substance. It felt like a time warp. The first few times it happened to him, he was worried but not he had kind of gotten used to it. He kind of liked it. If he didn’t like show, he could tune our the the next thing he knew, it was over. Kind of cool.

Anyways, lasagna was for dinner that night. There are some really good recipes at the hospital if you were there long enough. He’d take his does after that. Then he’d probably try out the new TV thing for a whole, maybe an hour or two, then hit the sack. He was tired. 

~

He woke to a barrage of messages on his answering machine. A lot of them were from Bobby. As he said, Bobby was very busy so his voice was upset and he had a hostile tone. He asked about Sam, how he was doing, if he was going anywhere, and why he had heard from Dean and not Sam in so long. As if it’s his fault that he always has something to do. It’s no wonder they rarely spent any time together. He didn’t think that Bobby was on the road or anything like that. But given how little time he had talked to Sam, he suspected that he had gone on the road to find someone. Anyway, that wasn’t the best thing to wake up to. After that, Sam stood from the chair. The room as empty and the shelves were covered in dust…for some odd reason. The imprint of Dean was still on the bed. Some of the food in the fridge had gone bad.. Probably a power outage. He threw it away. The lasagna from last night was good. He added some dill. 

For breakfast he had dry cornflakes. The milk had gone bad. Also an orange. After that, he put on his coat and went for a walk. It was nice out. He walked for around two hours, just admiring the architecture. After that he walked around the city center for a while. He remembered going to it a few times while Dean was in the hospital. It was a lot more modern than any of the other cities and towns Sam and Dean had been in. Times were changing as they say. He got a turkey sandwich at the food court of some mall and a mango smoothing then sat down on a bench, watching the people go by. The cashier looked at him weird when he requested how many calories they were. It was a perfectly reasonably question with the diet craze going on these days, everyone has a right to know how much they were Martin. Anyway, he stared out for a while, looking at all the shops. 

He noticed a shop that he hadn’t seen in the weeks he had spent in town. It was a coffee shop. He had been to the center about a week ago and it hadn’t been there. There had been a boutique instead. The speed in which they renovate these things is pretty amazing. He imagined it took a huge team to fix everything up and turn it all inside out. He threw his sandwich away and by the time he got to the doors, it was already closing time. When he went in, it was only around three but he stepped out and the security guard waved goodbye and it was night. He guessed he must have lost track of time. Or maybe it was later than he thought when he got to the city center. But either way that wasn’t very good for the purposes of the records he was writing. He’d assume they’d keep them for their studies and they’d need accurate information. By the time he got to the motel he and Dean were supposed to meet at when he got out (which he assumed he did by the dent in his hospital bed) it was midnight. He had checked the clock when he came in. 

As he was writing up the record of the day, it was fifteen past. He was going to order a pizza then pass out. So far nothing has happened except those occasional moments of him completely spazzing out. He still remembers everything though…in some weird way. He couldn’t explain it any more than that. He hoped it satisfied those who were in charge of this whole study enough to know more than less. 

~

Dean’s funeral was today. 

When he left the hospital, he was apparently recovering but now he’s being buried. He attended the funeral and Bobby called him and told him that he better show up or there would be consequences. He had no idea what they were talking about. Then he checked the computer’s internal clock. It’s September. Monitors don’t lie. September. When he went to sleep last night it was May. May!. He felt like hell. His stomach was a mess from malnutrition and when he looked the mirror and he looked old. If you think smoking can turn you inside out, talk about prolonged periods of unconsciousness. 

He’d finally realized how it was. You know how you got to sleep, you start dreaming and the dream is incredibly vivid, right down to the last detail then you wake up and can’t remember any of it? Only you should be able to remember it. It was right there in your brain a second ago. It was such a real experience that it should register in your memory. Only it doesn’t. That’s how these prolonged blackouts are. He remember them vaguely. Remember eating as well as he could. Remembered shuffling around the house. Remembered going outside maybe once a week to keep his legs active. But the whole time he wasn’t himself. He was someone else. Acting on commands, basic Moto functions to keep his systems running. He might have taken a bath. Now those months were one giant blur and he’d snapped back to complete awareness. The feeling resembles being shot with a gun. 

And of course Bobby is not answer any of his calls any more. He called him and he told Sam to fuck off. To never call again. That they were over. That the Winchesters were nothing but trouble and were the death of him. It sucked, though. To know there was nothing that he could do about it. He says that he came over to see him once. That his eyes were glazed over and he was sitting on the couch mumbling something to himself. The food in the kitchen was, of course, rotten according to Bobby. The furniture was dusty and he left after maybe five minutes. He probably thought he was a demon blood addict again. That he somehow found someone to feed off of. Maybe he ate some of the food while he was out. In this state, there’s no way he could tell the difference between something that’s rotten and something that’s not. It could account for his malnutrition. 

He didn’t know if the study was even still going on but he wasn’t going to take any more doses. Hell, it was probably over. The semester started already and it was too late for him to enroll and if he did, he’d probably be terrified. He was going straight. He missed enough of his life already. To see his brother’s empty casket defend into the cold Earth, knowing that for the last four months he was living a pleasant life and that he could have gone over to visit him one last time if it wasn’t for this shit is enough to convince him to give it up and they better not ask for their money back either. It was all gone. He guessed he had been paying the rent while he was ‘away’. 

~

San had been like this for almost two years at this point. He didn’t take a dose last night, or should he say two years ago. How much of that time was spent comatose sitting around, he didn’t know. He better get out the disinfectant wipes from the closet. Wipe down all the furniture down before night falls. Because when he sleeps, the world completes entire rotations, time gets distorted, doesn’t it?

He called his friends and they had completely disowned him but now. They talked about him like he was dead. Their friend who had left them all those years ago and never drops by to visit. Just vanished one day and never came back. The motel tried to kick him out. That his room and the stench coming from the decay is lowering the value of the property. Greedy prick. 

He didn’t know what to say anymore. That shit had ruins his system so that he could go into the deep whether he should take it to not. It’s rewritten him from the ground up like a typewriter and he can’t stop it. It was four in the morning and he was going to stay up as long as he can because while he’s here, he has time to do things, fix things, go around and try to repair the damage. He had been filling the cracks all night, repainting, washing. He threw away the old food. He ordered a pizza and it tasted delicious but it’s a different guy now and they’ve changed their recipe. He ate it like a pig then took a bath. He didn’t know how often he did that and his teeth were starting to hurt. He also ordered a month’s worth of groceries to be delivered sometime the next day. He couldn’t place his confidence in his subconscious because he couldn’t take care of him as well as his normal mind. He couldn’t do everything he could. No matter what the New Age gurus said. 

If anyone was reading this, or hell even if someone from the Fielder ream read it, he just needed someone to know that he was trying. There must have been gone wrong. The calories or exercise or something. If someone knew what to do, he needed some help. He needed to find something. He’d been stating at the screen and trying to stay awake, reciting things in his head because once he slipped, he couldn’t get out of it. It’ll be over him again and at this point who knows what the next time will be? Three years, five, he wakes up and everyone has tubes in their the

~

Well, there’s a new president, no one of note. He went to campus and spent the day walking. When he got there it was hot and there were people around. So many people. He hadn’t seen this many people in a long time. It was strange talking and seeing and they avoided him because of course who wouldn’t? Talking around and knowing what was up and then get to the building. No building there. It was gone. They packed up and left, Hugh? Asked it, asked guide, saidd it was out, had been moved, was gone and he figured that they had all graduated and were now winning Nobel prizes under shiny spotlights. Well can’t ignore him, can them? Can they ignore this face, sunken eyes, stomach ready to collapse? 

Just nothing but a bare field. A bare lot noe. Some people talking on it. Maybe never existed whose to say he’s crazy and it was all a dream. Babblings of an insane person. Don’t mind him. His head was about to explode. House is such a mess. God damn. 

It was kind of poetic now that he’s loose from time. He can go forward and the surprises never stop. A passenger on voyage to the end of time. Last Redoubt loomed large overhead. Black monolith in that endless night. Walk towards the Black Hills there’re seven lights. No one knows what they are but he’ll see them soon enough and Minna will be a cuter of fire. Things engulfed as he kept going on and no stopping now. Because why would there? 

Police will come throw him into a cell and won’t care about it. Hell sit and look out through bars, eyes glazed over embalmer’s glue. 

Next stop infinity. 

~

Sam now wrote from a public library. He can’t remember shit except for the password to that damned forum. That goddamned forum was still up and he was gonna update as long as it was up. 

Here in the Golden State, we don’t only want you to enjoy our incredible national resources and famous hospitality, but we also want to make sure you have a place to pull over, use the restroom, or get a drink. With hundred of rest stops statewide, many located near famous monuments and landmarks, you’ll have no problem finding one if you use our maps. If you recently used one of our rest stops, please leave an honest review below. Report on the stop’s condition, its cleanliness, and anything else. The better feedback you give, the more we can improve. 

-California Tourism Coalition, Los Gusanos Chapter

There was something wrong with those rest stops. So much wrong with them. Anyone would be able to know. The reviews might have looked normal but any further digging might include more than just the normal story about almost shitting your pants on a family road trip. It wasn’t out of the normal for Sam and Dean to stop at one either when they were out on the town or just on another hunt. So looking into the reports made on the site made the hair on the back of his neck stand up and he hadn’t even been there yet.  

Dean stood at the end of the room, looking over his shoulder and out the room towards the strip of sidewalk outside. No one was there. So long as no one saw the exit of the hotel then there was nothing else that either of them could do in the way of security. There were so many people wishing that they were already out of town. But it took a lot more than just a few hours to pack up years' worth of equipment in a matter of hours. It took all night to pack up the motel room and even then surely there were more of their equipment stored in the cracks and crevasses of the room. 

“Come on,” Dean lugged out his own duffel bag into the rain. “No use wasting any more time here.”

Their next hunt was across the country and would take a few days at least to get there. Something about a weird rest stop in California. As he said, it was not their normal hunt. Not like they weren’t completely turned off by the idea of going to one stretch of highway or another to see what’s going on. But either way, they were going to investigate which meant hitting the road and getting as much information as possible about what has happened.

Sam pulled his luggage out of the room and brushed past Dean as he headed toward the car. Dean turned back to the still-open door of the room that they should have already vacated. There were still a few bags inside the room that Dean would have to go back and get after he put his own bag in the backseat. Sam turned on his heel and made his way back past Dean before he made any attempt to move. It felt like Dean’s feet were made of lead and somehow, deep in his stomach, he could feel that something was going to go wrong. He didn’t know what…but he had no idea what was going to happen. 

Dean placed his bag into the backseat just as Sam came out with the rest of the bags and set them in the trunk. The car rattled. It was no baby but it was much better for getting around in the backroads of the California Wilderness. There 

“Well, I was there on July 22nd from what I remember. Could have been the 21st. Maybe it was the 22nd because it looks like I passed through the area with some canned goods around the 22nd.  Anyways, I had to go back in the woods for a while so it was great to have a place like that out in the middle of nowhere. I mean, it’s a pretty hard place to find. It’s being some trees but you can easily see it from the highway.”

“Sir, did you see anything weird while you were out there,” Dean pressed in hopes of finding some more answers though he received nothing on the other end. A sigh left his mouth as he shut off the phone. “Maybe there really is nothing there.” 

“Maybe…maybe not. Apparently, this only happens during the season.”

“And when does the season end,” Dean asked, not really sure if he wanted to know the answer.  

“Tomorrow.” 

“It’s a two-day trip, Sam,” Dean swallowed the lump in his throat. 

“Only a fifteen-hour trip if we take the highways and don’t stop. We can make it there by tomorrow if we’re fast enough,” Sam seemed way too confident in his position to be convinced otherwise.

~

Fiona stumbled out of the car and onto the gravel. Her eyes adjusted to the bright lights that lined the roof. It took a moment but as soon as the light was no longer obscuring her vision, she moved forward on shaky legs. Her arm was wrapped around one of her friends. Somehow, all but one of them had managed to get drunk as shit off of the cheap, gasstation whiskey they had picked up a few miles back. There were still a few beers in the back of the car and a bottle dangled delicately between her fingers as she tried to stay upright. The bag of potato chips they had also brought with them crunched in-between her and Doug’s body. 

“We’re gonna go on that hike I told you about,” Nikki’s words were less slurred than Fiona would have liked. But one of them had to stay semi-sober to keep Colt company. “It’s only fifteen minutes.”

Fiona faked a gag. Only seconds later did it turn into a real one. She doubled over, the contents of her stomach threatening to spill onto the ground like the potato chips that were once wedged between her and Doug. She lifted her head up and placed a hand on Doug’s back. 

“Okay, we’re ready.” 

Fiona trailed after Nikki into the forest. Doug walked a bit faster and easily made it up to the front in no time. Nikki was a few paces ahead of her. Colt was behind her somewhere. They didn't have any kind of compass but if her sense of direction was as good as it was then they were heading north. 

It was a short walk but soon they made their way to a clearing. It was beautiful. The stars danced overhead and not just because she had snorted a line of coke off of Doug’s hand just before they got out of the car. They all decided to take a seat under a circle of trees that had been made into a clearing. The chips and some sandwiches were the only things that they had brought up there. 

“Ugh,” Doug groaned. “I’ve gotta pee.”

Doug stood and turned around to stand away from the others. He had already begun to pull down his pants when Colt yelled out that we should all go back to the rest stop. Of course, at even the slight mention of having to pee, Fiona realized how full her own bladder was. The trek back would be hard enough as it was as drunk as high as they were but it would be even harder on a full bladder with limited fine motor skills. Not to mention the darkness that surrounded them and the vast wilderness. If any of the park rangers caught them out there, they’d probably arrest all of them on the spot. 

As soon as they all got back to the parking lot, they began to peel off to the rest stop. Women’s restroom on one side and the men’s on the other. 

“Guys, do y’all see that,” Colt’s voice was louder than his normal speaking voice but less so than his normal screaming voice. “I think it’s a mountain lion.”

Colt had a pocket knife in his hand so they would be safe at least a little bit from whatever creature came near them. They were in the area. 

“Stay behind me,” Colt cautioned. “I’ll go see what’s there.”

Colt stepped into the darkness. Doug tried telling some lame joke about a fridge. Nikki laughed even though she didn’t. Colt yelled at us to come out. It wasn’t a mountain lion. He was okay. She should have mentioned Phil, a total square who had also gotten drunk (thank fuck) with them. He seemed to be just as freaked out even though he didn’t see anything. Colt was freaked but he seemed to be calming down okay. He turned towards the rest of them. 

Fiona’s eyes stopped on what Colt seemed to be so freaked out by. A woman. She was walking out to the stop. Tall, about 25-30. She was wearing a suede jacket and slacks. Looked like a tourist. There were no other cars in the area so she shouldn’t have gotten there alone. She waved hello and walked over to the car and took a seat beside it-leaning against it like she owned it-like they had known each other forever. She looks over the car and feels it. She asks how much it costs. Colt mentioned how sad she looked. Maybe she was a convict or something but that doesn’t make sense. There were no prisons for miles. Then, she looked at the group and just started crying. They all saw it. One second she was crying and the next she wasn’t. The second they turned to look at a snapped branch in the wind and turned around again, she was gone. 

After that, they all decided that it was best to go to the bathrooms and leave. 

~

“Can’t say I saw a ghost there. The bathrooms were filthy though. Soap was everywhere, Sinks were filled with it. My husband said that there was more of a mess in the men’s room,” the woman on the other end paused. “America is crumbling at the seams these days. I remember when you could take a trip on the highway and feel safe. Today it’s unpredictable. Especially at rest stops. They’re not monitored.” 

Five hours in and nothing yet. Just some things like reviews. Ten hours left in the trip and it might not be the best. 

~

From what Fiona had described, it sounded like whatever she had seen was expressive and open. If she wasn’t, she wouldn’t present be alive. At this point in the trip, he was just going to leave. Though, Fiona said it came out of the rest stop which could mean that it was her origin. He set down his food and left the car to walk into the rest stop. At this point, he was sweating bullets. He had his tape recorder in his hand and hit plat. The atmosphere was really claustrophobic. Glass walls everywhere. Also circular in architecture. It lopped back round and you could walk through it and end up right where you started. Also, on the side facing away from the parking lop, where the bulletin board and a bench were, there was a sheet drop-off behind the wall. So if something lunched at him and knocked him through the wall, he could plummet at least 70 feet. 

He walked around slowly, making sure to look in every direction. He reached the men’s bathroom which is not the side. The women’s on the other. The drinking fountain was in the front in case anyone was wondering. He opened the door and looked in. There wasn’t soap all over the place like how some people had said. It was pretty normal. Three stalls and two urinals. One sink, a soap dispenser, and a towel. Maybe a cleanup crew came by. 

That was when shit hit the fan. The lights flicked and his stomach tied in a knot. His back against the wall as he hit play on the recorder. Damn, forgot the flashlight. He didn’t think he would need it when the rest stop was so lit up. Either that or he was just an idiot. The lights were still flickering on and off and everything was quiet except for the distant hum of the generator that he was scared of having to go out and that would leave him alone in the dark with nothing but the entity. 

~

The car pulled up to the end of the driveway, coming into a chain-link fence and some police tape. 

The Los Gusanos National Park is now closed for the season. Please visit again next year, and remember, nature is only one step away. Support your local national parks and they’ll reward you with infinite beauty and splendor. 

-California Tourism Coalition, Los Gusanos Chapter

The sign taunted them. 

Sam crossed his arms and looked over the board in front of him. It was almost as if he had stared at it for days. Dean’s knees locked up at even the site of it. Not even he could stand there for that long. Surely Sam was going to pass out if he stood there for even a second longer. He was going to have to peel his eyes away from this at some point. He placed his hands on his hips and cocked his head to the side. No intention of ever moving from the spot in front of the board.

“Find anything on that board of yours,” Dean tilted his head to the side in hopes of finding something that would tear him away from it. “Or are you just going to keep standing there like a weirdo.”

“I think I found something weird,” Sam turned back towards his brother. “Maybe.”

“Isn’t maybe weird a lot better than defiantly not weird?”

“Well, I would much rather have a definitive weird than a maybe weird.”

Sam shrugged and moved closer back to the board. His eyes scanned the board a bit. Dean tried to find the one thing that Sam had found but couldn’t. Just pictures upon pictures of small-town police officers. All of them smiling and looking at the camera. Most of them had been taken after a big bust in a murder case. Though none of the murders weren’t out of the ordinary for big cities, they were for the small towns they occurred in. Of course, this wasn’t the one thing that set them apart from the rest. Dean’s eyes finally came to rest on the one thing that Sam seemed to have already picked up on. The man.

A man, roughly in his mid-forties or fifties. He didn’t seem like the kind of guy to stick out in any crowd he was in. He looked completely innocuous. A little overweight but Dean wasn’t about to think much of it. His eyes…the officer’s eyes looked so hollow…so inhuman. He tilted his head to the side as he tried to fire out what had happened to get this man somewhere where he couldn’t be. Dean tilted his head to the side.

“The officer, right?”

Dean pointed to the offer he had noticed a few seconds before. It was so obvious. Too obvious if you asked him. There was no other thread that had popped out in his mind other than the officer. There were so many people who had seemed to have been in the photos but none of them repeated much like the one who had caught the eye of Dean’s. There wasn’t much else that could have caught his eye other than that. How could he have been so stupid to have missed that? He hadn’t noticed it before in the sea of men who had decided that this was going to be their moment. To capitalize off of brutal murders that allowed them front-page news.

“Yes, that one,” Sam circled his face with a gusto that Dean hadn’t seen since he had allowed Sam to take extra courses at Yale in an attempt to finish the degree that he had left behind all those years ago. “I don’t know if he keeps getting transferred or what but it’s starting to look a little suspicious, don’t you think?”

“An officer getting transferred isn’t all that suspicious Sammy,” Dean crossed his arms. “Unless there’s something that you’re not telling me.”

“Of course, there’s something I’m not telling you, if you would let me finish then I would tell you that this police officer had not only been transferred to that department days before the murder took place and transferred out only a few days after the murder had been solved but he had also been the one to solve the case. Well, not exactly transferred. More like this thing appeared, brought in the killer then just vanished. All of the files that people thought thing guy was working on were transferred to someone else or more than one someone in the building.”

“Let me guess, he was the one who was eventually found to have done it, right?”

“No, actually,” Sam let out a sigh. “I wish it were that easy. Good guess though.”

“Then what is it?”

“Well, you see, every single time this guy showed up to a murder, it was the murder of someone who was completely close to whoever was murdered-which aligns with all known statistics about murder and who you are murdered by-and this doesn’t just have to be one victim either. There were full-blown family annihilators and serial killers on the list. I mean, from all looks of it, it does seem like this guy is the one who did it. He comes into contact with every suspect in the case, even the murderer, and appears at this person’s place of work or home just to talk to them and I mean, the murderer just kind of spills.”

“Is there any tape of this spilling,” Dean tilted his head to the side as if that would reveal any more about whoever was on the other side of those damned pictures.

“I mean, there’s just one that I could find. All other mentions of this…this thing have been scrubbed from the internet from what I could think of,” Sam went over to the table and pulled the laptop off of it and brought it over to Dean where he already had the tape pulled up. “Here.”

Sam pressed play on the video and a soft blue light filled their faces. Dean shuffled towards the table along with Sam and his laptop as they settled in to watch the video play out. There was a few seconds of buzzing as if it had also been recorded on a tape of some sort but it looked to be in beautiful condition otherwise.

The officer picked up a small weight off of the doctor’s desk. The officer twirled the paperweight in his hands for a few moments as if he had never seen a paperweight before in his life. As soon as it was in his hands, it completely slipped from them and onto the floor below them.

“Well jeez, sorry about that, doctor. I think it’ll be okay, though. Here, look at this,” the officer picked up the paperweight-it was a small Roman soldier by the looks of the video tape and broken in two-off of the ground. “See, you just get some, crazy glue on there, and uh, yeah, it’ll be good as new. You’d be amazed at what crazy glue can do, doctor. Why, just last week, my wife-,”

“I’m sorry detective, but I’d really like to get to the point here. I’m afraid I’ve told you everything I know. Much as I’d like to, ah, talk to you some more, I do have a faculty meeting to attend to in, oh, ten minutes?”

The deceptive leaned against the table, “Oh, won’t taken even that long. I just gotta couple more questions to ask, you know. It’s just the way I am sometimes.”

“So I’ve noticed.”

“Ha! I’m sure you did, doctor. Why, my wife, she tells me I can’t ever shut up. But it’s just the way I am, you know? I always got that last inkling. That niggling little thought I gotta get out and get answered before I can even sleep that night. Why, you should hear the one about my nephew, he-,”

The doctor raised his hand up, “Detective, please.”

“Oh, oh, of course. I’m sorry doctor. I know you’re a busy man,” the deceptive raised his ands and shook his head, wincing a bit. “I don’t mean to be a pain, of course. It’s just, well, something had been bothering me about what you said.”

“What do you mean detective?”

“Now, here, you told me that Dr. Lavrisha left your party at, uh, seven thirty that night? Now, he, uh, slipped out and was found, dead, outside his office. But here’s the interesting thing, doctor. His watch, you know, it was damaged during the attack. And, well, it stopped at seven thirty-seven. Isn’t that interesting, doctor? Now, I tell myself, you know, a man like that maybe, sets his watch a bit behind. Why, I have a cousin, on mu wife’s side, who, well, he sets his lock back about forty-five minutes. I don’t know how he gets anywhere. But, and this is the interesting part, doctor, his wife, the uh, widow Lavrisha, she tells me that the, uh, departed, he had sort of a, what do you call it, an obsessive compulsion, He had his watch synced up to, you know, the very exact millisecond. He kept it up to track, of course. A watch isn’t perfect, you know. They get off, bit by bit. So he always made sure to be exact. She said he checked it everyday, just before he left work. At five thirty.”

“What are you saying, detective?”

“Doctor, I’m just saying that, a watch isn’t perfect. But it won’t get minutes behind within two hours. Your time table doesn’t match up. Even if his watch had been off, he couldn’t’ve gotten to his office, on foot, before he was found by cleaning staff, at seven forty-six. Even if he had left your home when he said, it would’ve taken him much longer to get to the office, is what I’m saying here, doctor. It all just doesn’t add up.”

“Well I guess that makes sense, you know. My clocks may have been off. Why, Ivan could’ve left the part at sevenen fifteen maybe.”

The detective clapped his head and nodded, “You know, I was thinking the same thing, doctor. But I checked. Your wife let me in, and all the clocks in the house are right on the money. She says the maid does it.”

“Well, I could’ve been mistaken. But still, detective, there’s no way I could’ve killed Iva. Guests saw me in the house at seven forty-five. Even if Ivan had died at seven twenty-seven, there’s no way I could have left the body there and been present at my party in seventeen minutes.”

The deceptive shook his head and put his hands up with a smile, “Please don’t take this the wrong way, doctor. No one’s accusing you of anything. Just making sure everything gets nice and tied up. I’m always like that, you know, doctor, my uncle, he says-,”

The doctor stood from his seat, clearing his desk of its laptop and briefcase in the process, “While I’d love to chat, detective, I do have that meeting.”

“Of course, of course,” the detective began walking towards the door before posting a single finger in the air and turning around quickly. “I’m sorry, doctor. Just, just one more thing, before I go. Something I though was interesting. And all this stuff, in your office, well it just reminded me.”

“Please, make it quick, detective.”

“My nephew, he’s a real wiz-kid when it comes to mythology. He’s telling me stories I didn’t even know were stories. But one, he told me, it really sunk in. There’s a Roman god, or maybe Greek I was never good at telling those apart, called Nemesis. They also called her Adrestia. It meant inescapable. But here, nemesis isn’t just an enemy, Nemesis was inescapable, because she represented them uh, the price of hubris, doctor. She represented the justice that comes to those who commit crimes. And well, murder’s the biggest crime there is, doctor.”

The doctor’s face grew dark, “What are you insinuating, detective.”

“Oh, doctor. I’m not insulating anything. I just think it’s so interesting that, humans, that we want to believe the bad guys get in the end. There’s a natural desire, you know, in us. To want crimes to be solved. It’s something that always interested me. I guess what I’m saying is, in the natural order of things, we’ll find who killed your friend, doctor. I’m sure we will.”

The doctor coughed and nodded.

The tape seemed to shudder to a close after that. All blue and distorted like the ones he had found in the basement of their old house. It wasn’t much of a shock to think that this case was at least twenty years old by this point, maybe even thirty. Depended on when it was filmed. Even though there was no tape.

Dean kept his eyes on the tape for a long time after it had ended. He wanted to throw up. Every part of him wanted to vomit the lunch he had been eating moments before he had opened up the video. There wasn’t much that he could say about the poor video that they had stumbled upon. There was someone out there who was making this happen. Someone who had been making people kill each other. At least, that was the thread that had finally clicked into his head when he was watching the video.

Dean placed his fingers on the keyboard. His eyes darted across the page in hopes of finding some answer in the blank page that stared back at him. How could they even find that person in the video? There were so many ways to identify a person but a police officer would mean getting the result that they wanted. Even if that meant going country by country in an attempt to identify him. But there was one thing that all officers wore that would mean finding him a lot faster than anyone else out there in the world. Badge number!

“Yo, what was his badge number,” Dean looked sharply at his brother. The clock ticked once before Dean realized how sharp his tone was. “Do you think you can get the officer’s badge number from the video?”

“Yeah,” Sam pulled up his own computer and searched for the video as Dean waited for results. “It’s uhh…3190. Badge number 3190.”

Badge numbers usually were only three digits in small countries where the population was much smaller than normal. If it was a normal-sized town or city then it could go as high as four numbers. Maybe even five in some places where there were much more populous than he could ever think of. Dean typed the badge number into Google and hoped for a response from the slow internet as his computer returned the spinning wheel of rainbow-colored death back at him. It took a few moments as he waited for the moment in which the results returned to him much clearer than before.

Finally.

The results.

Only…the badge number didn’t come back to any human officer. Nor even an officer at all. There was nothing more than a page staring back at him. A page that shouldn’t even be online by the looks of it. It…it looked like it would be locked behind pages and pages of passwords and yet, there was nothing more than just this page. No other results than this when usually there were hundreds of thousands, if not millions. But only one result remained.