SPN FIC - Clean Slate (Part 1 of 3)
Quite a while back, someone suggested "Dean discovers the LOLcats" as a possible story idea. And as I do with all the bunnies that come my way, I dutifully recorded it in my notebook -- after which it sat there quietly. For a loooooong time. Like, years.
But I find that if you let the Muse take her own sweet time with things, eventually she'll be attracted to even the loneliest, most neglected bunnies. So here we go: Dean and Sam, the King of All Hackers, and Ceiling Cat version 2.0 (with grateful acknowledgment to the original creator of that very well-known kitteh).
The little screen says Unknown Number. Underneath that are the words (if you can call them that) Ceelinkat Sez Hai.
"This is a bunch of crap," Dean sputters.
CHARACTERS: Dean, Sam -- and, eventually, the return of one of my most popular OCs
GENRE: Gen
RATING: PG, for language
SPOILERS: None
LENGTH: Remains to be seen; this part is 3514 words
CLEAN SLATE
By Carol Davis
Of course he knows about it. You'd have to be in a coma, tied up in a cave in the middle of the Antarctic, not to know about it, because it's friggin' everywhere, like global warming, and Lindsay Lohan: in the papers, on the news, on the cover of People magazine.
On the Internet, it's like a damn plague.
Ceiling Cat.
Which is idiotic. It's a CAT, for crying out loud.
At least, it started out being a cat. That's what Sam says. Back in '06, somebody came up with a picture that went viral. People liked it so much it turned into a website, then a bunch of websites. Books. T-shirts.
Picture of a cat hanging out of the ceiling.
Now, half a dozen years later, it's a whole other thing, and there's been a lot of screaming about copyright infringement. Lawsuits. Debates. If you thought it was huge back in '06, you'd be pretty much flabbergasted at the size of it now.
Now that it's CEELINKAT.
Now that Ceiling Cat is kicking some ass.
~~~~~~
"It's a joke, man," Sam says when the first text message shows up. "Somebody's yanking your chain."
"And who would that be, exactly?"
"How would I know?"
"Because you're one of the very, very few - I could even say astoundingly few - people who has this number," Dean says, growing annoyed at the way the whole thing is making his jaw tighten up, which makes it impossible for him to properly enjoy the crown jewel of a bacon cheeseburger that's sitting on the plate in front of him. Seriously? He's not that fond of cats. Or baby-talk. Or Internet fads. He's successfully avoided that whole Twitter thing for years now. He does not "trend." Glowering at the burger, he tells his brother, "If it ain't you, it's Bobby. You want me to tell you exactly how unlikely it is that Bobby's pulling this crap?"
"It's a text message, man."
"On my phone."
"Delete it."
The little screen says Unknown Number. Underneath that are the words (if you can call them that) Ceelinkat Sez Hai.
"This is a bunch of crap," Dean sputters.
"Dude. Delete it."
The person who sent this little howdy-do either has a sense of humor, or is a complete asshole. God knows the world is full of assholes, but none of them has his cell number. At least, he hopes not. Sam's attempts at a sense of humor are about all the assholery Dean can tolerate, ninety-nine percent of the time.
Bobby might have had a sense of humor, back during the Reagan Administration.
"I have had this phone for two and a half weeks," Dean grinds out. "It's a good phone. Gets reception all over the place. I do not want to throw out this phone."
There's more to it than that, of course. This phone has apps.
He likes apps.
"The number might have belonged to somebody else," Sam suggests. "Maybe the text was supposed to be for -"
"Somebody who thinks this kind of crap is funny?"
Shaking his head, Sam reaches across the table, picks up the phone and drops it into the breast pocket of his jacket. "It's like anything, man. You either join the crowd, or you pick out a ledge somewhere and stand on it, high and dry, until the tsunami eventually peters out. Which will happen, sooner or later. It's not going to do you any good to get pissed off about it."
"If you sent that to me, you better watch your ass."
"I didn't send it to you."
The original Ceiling Cat was a cat. A regular, everyday, run of the mill cat, hanging out of a gap in somebody's ceiling.
Ceiling Cat version 2.0 is a hacker.
Ceiling Cat version 2.0 is a friggin' folk hero.
~~~~~~
A modern-day Robin Hood, people say. Though of course, stealing from anybody for any purpose is illegal.
Dean's been stealing things since he was six.
The second text says Ceelinkat Seez U.
It's all Dean can do not to hurl the phone against a wall.
He's in the middle of typing a response that says Go Fuck Yourself when, again, Sam takes the phone away from him. "Dude," Sam tells him, "you can't do that. It'll alert whoever it is that there's somebody on this end."
"Of course there's somebody on this end!"
"You could end up getting bombarded with texts."
Yeah. That's not good.
They've never had a land line, so he's never had to put up with people wanting to sell him car insurance, or asking for donations to Habitat for Humanity, or yapping at him about some political thing or other. He did get a call once from some little kid who was pushing buttons at random, but that was actually a good conversation - it made a lot more sense than some of his conversations with Sam, even though the kid kept calling him Ronno MahDonno.
Normal is overrated, he thinks.
Normal people have to put up with a lot of nonsense.
It's not nonsense, Sam tells him. It's somebody who's trying to accomplish some good. Kind of like…well, them.
An old lady outside of Cleveland found a couple thousand bucks mysteriously deposited into her checking account, two days before the power company would have dropped the axe and cut off her service. A homeless family in Alabama - mom, three kids, and a dad unable to work because of chronic seizures - got a bigger deposit, into an account that'd had less than three bucks in it the day before.
On the other side of the country, a guy who'd been scamming old folks by talking them into expensive home repairs that he then botched (if he did them at all) found his formerly well-padded account completely zeroed out.
Ditto a guy who'd sold non-existent real estate.
Ditto a trio of college kids who claimed they were collecting for earthquake victims.
Ditto a shell company based in Phoenix that'd been marketing a "weight loss supplement" that was nothing more than ground-up chicken bones.
"It could be a good thing, you know?" Sam observes.
"Is it gonna give us cash?"
"We don't have a bank account."
"Don't argue with me, Sam. I do not need some hacker watching my back. I don't want some hacker even knowing I have a back. And I sure as hell do not want to end up being featured on Good Morning America because somebody found out we're the latest recipients of this idiot's little game of Shuffle The Bucks."
The only response Sam gives him is a noncommittal "Hmmm."
"It's you, isn't it?"
"It's not me."
"Then who is it?"
"It's - I have no idea, man. Maybe it's some kind of spam thing. For all we know, eight million people could have gotten the same text."
"You didn't get it. Did you get it?"
"No."
"Well, there goes that theory."
~~~~~~
Yes it is.
It's pathetic.
It's beyond freaking pathetic that there's nobody on the planet except for Sam who would bother sending him a prank text message.
~~~~~~
He's starting to look at the phone like it's a bomb, ticking down towards zero - the same way he looked at it that time back in '08, when that crocotta started calling him, pretending to be Dad - and that's just all kinds of wrong, because it's a phone, is all. A way of contacting people he needs to contact, and of using his apps.
GPS. He uses it for GPS.
A couple of days go by without any new texts. Maybe that's because Ceelinkat is busy. There's a whole buttload of money changing hands out there in the big wide world, according to Yahoo News and the New York Post.
"It's not all him," Sam says.
Dean peers at him over the rim of his coffee cup.
"It can't all be him. He'd have to have access to the database of every bank in the country."
Which is perfectly possible. If this were a movie, it would be absolutely possible. Except that the entire Russian mob would be after the guy. Or the Koreans, or…who the hell knows.
Ashton Kutcher might play the guy.
Holed up in a room somewhere, surrounded by a hundred thousand computers.
Scowling, Dean pushes the phone across the table to Sam before Sam can reach out and take it away from him.
Maybe it's a friggin' crocotta.
"You do want some cash, don't you?" Sam asks mildly.
"I might not say no."
"Maybe we should open an account somewhere and see what happens."
"Because you figure this nutball would be instantly aware that a bank account opened in the name of Mick Jagger would belong to us."
"Dude. Mick Jagger?"
You Can't Always Get What You Want is playing on a tape loop in Dean's head. He's not a big Stones fan - has always had his doubts about the sanity of anyone who is a big Stones fan - but there are moments.
"Whatever," Dean mutters.
~~~~~~
They're supposed to be tracking down an abatwa: a nasty little son of a bitch that according to the lore is no taller than a blade of grass, and kills people by stabbing them with invisible poison arrows.
Invisible tiny poison arrows.
Three people have died already, and four more are hospitalized. The docs are putting it down to allergic reactions to insect bites. Mosquitoes, spiders. Biting ants, maybe. They've found tiny punctures in the victims' skin, usually on their heels or ankles, though in one case the wound showed up near the guy's elbow, which makes sense because the guy was lying on the ground at the time of the attack, messing around with the vents on his AC unit.
Sam says it's like that Stephen King story where the toy soldiers come to life and attack the guy, and end up killing him with a teeny-tiny thermonuclear bomb.
Both of them take to wearing three pairs of socks underneath their boots. That wouldn't be much protection against a nuke - even a tiny one - but you do what you can do.
"You figure there's just one?" Sam asks.
The vics all lived within a two-mile radius. It could be a single abatwa, but that's a lot of ground for something that small to cover.
Unless it's got…you know. A teeny-tiny moped.
They're nomadic, Bobby says when they call him. They move around a lot, in search of game that they devour in its entirety, skin, fur, bones and all. And they're easy to piss off. Particularly if you step on one.
"So that wouldn't squash the little bastard?" Dean asks. "Like, if Sam stepped on it? He's been known to take out whole towns."
Reagan Administration, he thinks when Bobby doesn't dissolve into guffaws.
"Are you done?" Bobby asks.
"So we - what? Trap 'em?"
There's no response from the other end, down in the wilds of South Dakota; just the rustling, flapping sound of Bobby turning the pages of his old books, and a rattling noise that says maybe he's trying to cook dinner. Dean would congratulate him on his ability to multi-task, except that that's right up there on the list of things Bobby isn't amused by. Near the top, in fact. "Here's something," Bobby says finally, although he doesn't sound particularly enthused. "They like riding around on horses."
"With a teeny-tiny saddle?"
More silence.
"I'm done," Dean says.
"They cling to the horse's mane, or tail. If there's a whole band of 'em, they've been known to ride together."
"Horses."
"Yeah."
None of the victims had anything to do with horses. There's a small stable, though, a couple of miles outside of town, the kind that caters to weekend riders and little kids. They got a new addition a couple of weeks back, a nice, gentle mare named Bettylou.
Sam rode, that one time, back in the Old West. Kind of fell into the rhythm of it, he says, after the first few miles.
Dean's never been a big fan of horses.
"She's sweet," Sam says, as Bettylou nuzzles his palm.
"Yeah, well, apparently, she rode into town carrying a load of freakish little poison-arrow-carrying -"
Dean cuts himself off. For all he knows, the stable's full of those little bastards, and they've got their poison arrows all juiced up and ready to fire. He's protected up to mid-shin, but there's nothing to say those little freaks can't aim higher.
Crotch level, for instance.
"Not her fault," Sam insists.
That horse is really going to town licking Sam's hand, getting way down into the webbing between his fingers and everything. It's probably because Sam didn't wash up after he ate his lunch, and he's covered with tofu residue or some damn thing, but either way…it's really kind of disgusting.
"Gonna leave you two alone," Dean says. Before Sam can mock him, he adds, "Gonna take a look around outside. See if there's any teeny-tiny tracks."
There aren't.
But there's another text.
"It's harassment," he tells Sam. "It's freaking harassment, man."
"It's three text messages."
"Five," Dean mutters.
"What?"
"Five. F-I-V-E. As in, one less than six."
Sam reaches out and takes the phone, turns it around and squints at the screen, which again says Unknown Number.
And Ceelinkat Haz Got Ur Back.
"That's encouraging," Sam says.
"You've got my back," Dean protests. "You. Occasionally, Bobby. That works for me. I don't need a whole crowd back there, Sam. I especially don't need some mushroom-white, bug-eyed freak who lives in his parents' basement hunting me down and sending me constant reminders of how much crazy there is in the world. He wants to rob from the scumbags and give to the needy? That's fine by me. He probably just does it for the publicity, but whatever. All I ask is that I get left out of the loop. Okay? I don't have any money. I don't need any money. There's no reason to get me involved in all of this. Period. End of discussion. And if it is you that's doing this, I am going to make your life miserable until the end of time."
For a minute, Sam stands there pondering his gooey hand. Thank God, it's not the one that's currently holding Dean's phone.
Then he wipes the hand on his pants.
"You honestly don't know anybody who would -"
"I don't know anybody, period. You're the one who knows people. Or you used to." That sparks something in Dean's mind, and he's scowling when he says, "Those geeks you knew at Stanford. It's one of them doing this, isn't it? You put them up to it."
"I haven't been in touch with anybody from Stanford for a good five years, Dean."
"You sure?"
"Paranoia? Really not productive right now."
Sam does look a little worried, like he was that time Dean got the ghost sickness. That was years ago, but some of what went on back then has kind of lingered, like the smell of mildew. Dean's still not real keen on cats. Or tiny little dogs.
Or little blonde girls.
"Okay," he mutters.
"Seriously, man. There's an explanation. Maybe Ceiling Cat is spamming everybody who's with your cell provider."
"Yeah. Sure."
He's afraid of cats? Is that it? After almost four years he's afraid of cats?
He's not afraid of cats.
"They could be anywhere, right?" he says, and when Sam frowns, puzzled, he elaborates, "The abatwa, numbnuts. They could be frickin' anywhere. Two mile radius, that's a decent amount of territory for somebody human. For something that small - we're seriously talking needle in a haystack."
When you step on something the size of a blade of grass, you can squash the son of a bitch. Just like a roach.
"This is the dumbest thing we've ever hunted," he sighs.
"I don't imagine the people it's killed think so," Sam replies, though he's not being smartass about it, just observational.
Still, it's annoying.
Dean grabs his phone back. The text is still right there on the screen, staring at him in the instant before he shoves the phone into his pocket.
Ceelinkat Haz Got Ur Back.
Fat lot of good that does, he thinks.
~~~~~~
It's tough to figure out what kind of prey the abatwas go for, because of that whole "they devour every last hair of it" business. Field mice, maybe, or the occasional squirrel; anything bigger than that would be like him and Sam going after a T-Rex.
For the hell of it, Dean checks YouTube, but nope, there's no video of an abatwa doing its thing.
There are, however, 641,000 videos of Justin Bieber.
As if that's useful.
~~~~~~
Another one of the little bastards' victims dies.
~~~~~~
One at a time, he and Sam scour the backyards of the five people who were attacked at home. Dave Caruso would be proud, Dean thinks, because he and Sam go through those yards with a fine-tooth comb.
They find a small brown feather in one.
In another, they find a tiny clump of what looks like squirrel fur, although it's possible the squirrel got hung up on a fence or a tree branch, or it went a little nuts digging at fleas and tore out some of its own hair.
"What?" Sam asks when Dean mutters something under his breath.
"I said, there's such a thing as a level playing field."
For a second, he thinks Sam's found something, but it's a button.
And it's hot out, man. It's muggy and too warm and this whole wearing of multiple pairs of socks and their heaviest jeans and three shirts is getting old. His hair's all gummy with sweat, and there's a wet, dribbly trail running down the middle of his back into his shorts.
So the next time they have to go up against something that's bigger than they are? He will not complain. He will not even ponder complaining, because size does matter.
When his phone chirps inside his jeans pocket, signaling the arrival of another text, he wonders if he's got enough energy to go ballistic.
"I think that was your phone," Sam offers.
Dean ignores him and goes on rooting around in Joe and Denise McCaffrey's flower garden. Denise, who was out planting zinnias in shorts, a t-shirt and a pair of Old Navy flip-flops, has been dead for two days now. Bee sting, her husband says, although to his knowledge Denise didn't have any problem with insect bites.
Certainly nothing that she would die from.
"Dean?"
Sam might not be behind this whole texting situation - and Dean is still far from convinced that he's not - but he's having more fun with it than he ought to. He ought to be showing some damn solidarity, is what Dean figures.
As if what Sam said was, "Hey, man, can I use your phone?", Dean fishes it from his pocket and flings it at Sam.
A moment later, Sam goes, "Huh."
Solidarity. Seriously. Solidarity is not too much to ask for.
It's tough not to notice Sam standing up and taking a long look around the perimeter of the yard. For one thing, he's pretty much blocking out the sun. Purely on principle, Dean goes on ignoring him as he roots around in the zinnias; if he does that long enough, and with enough conviction, Sam will either give up, or he'll come over and show Dean what it is that's so freaking fascinating.
What would be good is a message from Bobby saying that if it rains, the damned abatwas will shrivel up and die, all on their own, like teeny-tiny Wicked Witches from The Wizard of Oz.
It's not that.
Of course it's not. Because that would be helpful.
Ceelinkat Iz Watchin U Dig, it says.
There is no vantage point from which the McCaffreys' backyard is easily visible, other than the big window in the McCaffreys' family room. And the sky, of course. If the sky were a big ceiling, and the frigging cat was up there, it could see the McCaffreys' backyard.
Maybe it's using a DOD satellite.
"Maybe it's metaphorical," Sam suggests.
"What?"
"Like, digging for answers?"
This phone has apps. It's a good phone. And this phone cost real money - although, granted, it wasn't Dean's real money, it was Antonio T. Tigre's.
Maybe that's it.
Whoever's behind this Ceiling Cat bullcrap has figured out that Dean's been working the system for the best part of three decades, and has decided Dean's due for a takedown - but he, she, or it is gonna mess with him for a while before he, she, or it lowers the boom. Of course, that doesn't explain why Sam gets to stroll through all of this completely lily-white, but you could make the point that Dean taught Sam to shoplift, and boost cars, and run scams on mostly-bewildered civilians, so anything less-than-legal that Sam's ever done is pretty much Dean's fault.
This is not good.
This is just so not good.
"We need to get out of here," Dean says, and he doesn't wait around for Sam's answer.
Part 2…
But I find that if you let the Muse take her own sweet time with things, eventually she'll be attracted to even the loneliest, most neglected bunnies. So here we go: Dean and Sam, the King of All Hackers, and Ceiling Cat version 2.0 (with grateful acknowledgment to the original creator of that very well-known kitteh).
The little screen says Unknown Number. Underneath that are the words (if you can call them that) Ceelinkat Sez Hai.
"This is a bunch of crap," Dean sputters.
CHARACTERS: Dean, Sam -- and, eventually, the return of one of my most popular OCs
GENRE: Gen
RATING: PG, for language
SPOILERS: None
LENGTH: Remains to be seen; this part is 3514 words
CLEAN SLATE
By Carol Davis
Of course he knows about it. You'd have to be in a coma, tied up in a cave in the middle of the Antarctic, not to know about it, because it's friggin' everywhere, like global warming, and Lindsay Lohan: in the papers, on the news, on the cover of People magazine.
On the Internet, it's like a damn plague.
Ceiling Cat.
Which is idiotic. It's a CAT, for crying out loud.
At least, it started out being a cat. That's what Sam says. Back in '06, somebody came up with a picture that went viral. People liked it so much it turned into a website, then a bunch of websites. Books. T-shirts.
Picture of a cat hanging out of the ceiling.
Now, half a dozen years later, it's a whole other thing, and there's been a lot of screaming about copyright infringement. Lawsuits. Debates. If you thought it was huge back in '06, you'd be pretty much flabbergasted at the size of it now.
Now that it's CEELINKAT.
Now that Ceiling Cat is kicking some ass.
~~~~~~
"It's a joke, man," Sam says when the first text message shows up. "Somebody's yanking your chain."
"And who would that be, exactly?"
"How would I know?"
"Because you're one of the very, very few - I could even say astoundingly few - people who has this number," Dean says, growing annoyed at the way the whole thing is making his jaw tighten up, which makes it impossible for him to properly enjoy the crown jewel of a bacon cheeseburger that's sitting on the plate in front of him. Seriously? He's not that fond of cats. Or baby-talk. Or Internet fads. He's successfully avoided that whole Twitter thing for years now. He does not "trend." Glowering at the burger, he tells his brother, "If it ain't you, it's Bobby. You want me to tell you exactly how unlikely it is that Bobby's pulling this crap?"
"It's a text message, man."
"On my phone."
"Delete it."
The little screen says Unknown Number. Underneath that are the words (if you can call them that) Ceelinkat Sez Hai.
"This is a bunch of crap," Dean sputters.
"Dude. Delete it."
The person who sent this little howdy-do either has a sense of humor, or is a complete asshole. God knows the world is full of assholes, but none of them has his cell number. At least, he hopes not. Sam's attempts at a sense of humor are about all the assholery Dean can tolerate, ninety-nine percent of the time.
Bobby might have had a sense of humor, back during the Reagan Administration.
"I have had this phone for two and a half weeks," Dean grinds out. "It's a good phone. Gets reception all over the place. I do not want to throw out this phone."
There's more to it than that, of course. This phone has apps.
He likes apps.
"The number might have belonged to somebody else," Sam suggests. "Maybe the text was supposed to be for -"
"Somebody who thinks this kind of crap is funny?"
Shaking his head, Sam reaches across the table, picks up the phone and drops it into the breast pocket of his jacket. "It's like anything, man. You either join the crowd, or you pick out a ledge somewhere and stand on it, high and dry, until the tsunami eventually peters out. Which will happen, sooner or later. It's not going to do you any good to get pissed off about it."
"If you sent that to me, you better watch your ass."
"I didn't send it to you."
The original Ceiling Cat was a cat. A regular, everyday, run of the mill cat, hanging out of a gap in somebody's ceiling.
Ceiling Cat version 2.0 is a hacker.
Ceiling Cat version 2.0 is a friggin' folk hero.
~~~~~~
A modern-day Robin Hood, people say. Though of course, stealing from anybody for any purpose is illegal.
Dean's been stealing things since he was six.
The second text says Ceelinkat Seez U.
It's all Dean can do not to hurl the phone against a wall.
He's in the middle of typing a response that says Go Fuck Yourself when, again, Sam takes the phone away from him. "Dude," Sam tells him, "you can't do that. It'll alert whoever it is that there's somebody on this end."
"Of course there's somebody on this end!"
"You could end up getting bombarded with texts."
Yeah. That's not good.
They've never had a land line, so he's never had to put up with people wanting to sell him car insurance, or asking for donations to Habitat for Humanity, or yapping at him about some political thing or other. He did get a call once from some little kid who was pushing buttons at random, but that was actually a good conversation - it made a lot more sense than some of his conversations with Sam, even though the kid kept calling him Ronno MahDonno.
Normal is overrated, he thinks.
Normal people have to put up with a lot of nonsense.
It's not nonsense, Sam tells him. It's somebody who's trying to accomplish some good. Kind of like…well, them.
An old lady outside of Cleveland found a couple thousand bucks mysteriously deposited into her checking account, two days before the power company would have dropped the axe and cut off her service. A homeless family in Alabama - mom, three kids, and a dad unable to work because of chronic seizures - got a bigger deposit, into an account that'd had less than three bucks in it the day before.
On the other side of the country, a guy who'd been scamming old folks by talking them into expensive home repairs that he then botched (if he did them at all) found his formerly well-padded account completely zeroed out.
Ditto a guy who'd sold non-existent real estate.
Ditto a trio of college kids who claimed they were collecting for earthquake victims.
Ditto a shell company based in Phoenix that'd been marketing a "weight loss supplement" that was nothing more than ground-up chicken bones.
"It could be a good thing, you know?" Sam observes.
"Is it gonna give us cash?"
"We don't have a bank account."
"Don't argue with me, Sam. I do not need some hacker watching my back. I don't want some hacker even knowing I have a back. And I sure as hell do not want to end up being featured on Good Morning America because somebody found out we're the latest recipients of this idiot's little game of Shuffle The Bucks."
The only response Sam gives him is a noncommittal "Hmmm."
"It's you, isn't it?"
"It's not me."
"Then who is it?"
"It's - I have no idea, man. Maybe it's some kind of spam thing. For all we know, eight million people could have gotten the same text."
"You didn't get it. Did you get it?"
"No."
"Well, there goes that theory."
~~~~~~
Yes it is.
It's pathetic.
It's beyond freaking pathetic that there's nobody on the planet except for Sam who would bother sending him a prank text message.
~~~~~~
He's starting to look at the phone like it's a bomb, ticking down towards zero - the same way he looked at it that time back in '08, when that crocotta started calling him, pretending to be Dad - and that's just all kinds of wrong, because it's a phone, is all. A way of contacting people he needs to contact, and of using his apps.
GPS. He uses it for GPS.
A couple of days go by without any new texts. Maybe that's because Ceelinkat is busy. There's a whole buttload of money changing hands out there in the big wide world, according to Yahoo News and the New York Post.
"It's not all him," Sam says.
Dean peers at him over the rim of his coffee cup.
"It can't all be him. He'd have to have access to the database of every bank in the country."
Which is perfectly possible. If this were a movie, it would be absolutely possible. Except that the entire Russian mob would be after the guy. Or the Koreans, or…who the hell knows.
Ashton Kutcher might play the guy.
Holed up in a room somewhere, surrounded by a hundred thousand computers.
Scowling, Dean pushes the phone across the table to Sam before Sam can reach out and take it away from him.
Maybe it's a friggin' crocotta.
"You do want some cash, don't you?" Sam asks mildly.
"I might not say no."
"Maybe we should open an account somewhere and see what happens."
"Because you figure this nutball would be instantly aware that a bank account opened in the name of Mick Jagger would belong to us."
"Dude. Mick Jagger?"
You Can't Always Get What You Want is playing on a tape loop in Dean's head. He's not a big Stones fan - has always had his doubts about the sanity of anyone who is a big Stones fan - but there are moments.
"Whatever," Dean mutters.
~~~~~~
They're supposed to be tracking down an abatwa: a nasty little son of a bitch that according to the lore is no taller than a blade of grass, and kills people by stabbing them with invisible poison arrows.
Invisible tiny poison arrows.
Three people have died already, and four more are hospitalized. The docs are putting it down to allergic reactions to insect bites. Mosquitoes, spiders. Biting ants, maybe. They've found tiny punctures in the victims' skin, usually on their heels or ankles, though in one case the wound showed up near the guy's elbow, which makes sense because the guy was lying on the ground at the time of the attack, messing around with the vents on his AC unit.
Sam says it's like that Stephen King story where the toy soldiers come to life and attack the guy, and end up killing him with a teeny-tiny thermonuclear bomb.
Both of them take to wearing three pairs of socks underneath their boots. That wouldn't be much protection against a nuke - even a tiny one - but you do what you can do.
"You figure there's just one?" Sam asks.
The vics all lived within a two-mile radius. It could be a single abatwa, but that's a lot of ground for something that small to cover.
Unless it's got…you know. A teeny-tiny moped.
They're nomadic, Bobby says when they call him. They move around a lot, in search of game that they devour in its entirety, skin, fur, bones and all. And they're easy to piss off. Particularly if you step on one.
"So that wouldn't squash the little bastard?" Dean asks. "Like, if Sam stepped on it? He's been known to take out whole towns."
Reagan Administration, he thinks when Bobby doesn't dissolve into guffaws.
"Are you done?" Bobby asks.
"So we - what? Trap 'em?"
There's no response from the other end, down in the wilds of South Dakota; just the rustling, flapping sound of Bobby turning the pages of his old books, and a rattling noise that says maybe he's trying to cook dinner. Dean would congratulate him on his ability to multi-task, except that that's right up there on the list of things Bobby isn't amused by. Near the top, in fact. "Here's something," Bobby says finally, although he doesn't sound particularly enthused. "They like riding around on horses."
"With a teeny-tiny saddle?"
More silence.
"I'm done," Dean says.
"They cling to the horse's mane, or tail. If there's a whole band of 'em, they've been known to ride together."
"Horses."
"Yeah."
None of the victims had anything to do with horses. There's a small stable, though, a couple of miles outside of town, the kind that caters to weekend riders and little kids. They got a new addition a couple of weeks back, a nice, gentle mare named Bettylou.
Sam rode, that one time, back in the Old West. Kind of fell into the rhythm of it, he says, after the first few miles.
Dean's never been a big fan of horses.
"She's sweet," Sam says, as Bettylou nuzzles his palm.
"Yeah, well, apparently, she rode into town carrying a load of freakish little poison-arrow-carrying -"
Dean cuts himself off. For all he knows, the stable's full of those little bastards, and they've got their poison arrows all juiced up and ready to fire. He's protected up to mid-shin, but there's nothing to say those little freaks can't aim higher.
Crotch level, for instance.
"Not her fault," Sam insists.
That horse is really going to town licking Sam's hand, getting way down into the webbing between his fingers and everything. It's probably because Sam didn't wash up after he ate his lunch, and he's covered with tofu residue or some damn thing, but either way…it's really kind of disgusting.
"Gonna leave you two alone," Dean says. Before Sam can mock him, he adds, "Gonna take a look around outside. See if there's any teeny-tiny tracks."
There aren't.
But there's another text.
"It's harassment," he tells Sam. "It's freaking harassment, man."
"It's three text messages."
"Five," Dean mutters.
"What?"
"Five. F-I-V-E. As in, one less than six."
Sam reaches out and takes the phone, turns it around and squints at the screen, which again says Unknown Number.
And Ceelinkat Haz Got Ur Back.
"That's encouraging," Sam says.
"You've got my back," Dean protests. "You. Occasionally, Bobby. That works for me. I don't need a whole crowd back there, Sam. I especially don't need some mushroom-white, bug-eyed freak who lives in his parents' basement hunting me down and sending me constant reminders of how much crazy there is in the world. He wants to rob from the scumbags and give to the needy? That's fine by me. He probably just does it for the publicity, but whatever. All I ask is that I get left out of the loop. Okay? I don't have any money. I don't need any money. There's no reason to get me involved in all of this. Period. End of discussion. And if it is you that's doing this, I am going to make your life miserable until the end of time."
For a minute, Sam stands there pondering his gooey hand. Thank God, it's not the one that's currently holding Dean's phone.
Then he wipes the hand on his pants.
"You honestly don't know anybody who would -"
"I don't know anybody, period. You're the one who knows people. Or you used to." That sparks something in Dean's mind, and he's scowling when he says, "Those geeks you knew at Stanford. It's one of them doing this, isn't it? You put them up to it."
"I haven't been in touch with anybody from Stanford for a good five years, Dean."
"You sure?"
"Paranoia? Really not productive right now."
Sam does look a little worried, like he was that time Dean got the ghost sickness. That was years ago, but some of what went on back then has kind of lingered, like the smell of mildew. Dean's still not real keen on cats. Or tiny little dogs.
Or little blonde girls.
"Okay," he mutters.
"Seriously, man. There's an explanation. Maybe Ceiling Cat is spamming everybody who's with your cell provider."
"Yeah. Sure."
He's afraid of cats? Is that it? After almost four years he's afraid of cats?
He's not afraid of cats.
"They could be anywhere, right?" he says, and when Sam frowns, puzzled, he elaborates, "The abatwa, numbnuts. They could be frickin' anywhere. Two mile radius, that's a decent amount of territory for somebody human. For something that small - we're seriously talking needle in a haystack."
When you step on something the size of a blade of grass, you can squash the son of a bitch. Just like a roach.
"This is the dumbest thing we've ever hunted," he sighs.
"I don't imagine the people it's killed think so," Sam replies, though he's not being smartass about it, just observational.
Still, it's annoying.
Dean grabs his phone back. The text is still right there on the screen, staring at him in the instant before he shoves the phone into his pocket.
Ceelinkat Haz Got Ur Back.
Fat lot of good that does, he thinks.
~~~~~~
It's tough to figure out what kind of prey the abatwas go for, because of that whole "they devour every last hair of it" business. Field mice, maybe, or the occasional squirrel; anything bigger than that would be like him and Sam going after a T-Rex.
For the hell of it, Dean checks YouTube, but nope, there's no video of an abatwa doing its thing.
There are, however, 641,000 videos of Justin Bieber.
As if that's useful.
~~~~~~
Another one of the little bastards' victims dies.
~~~~~~
One at a time, he and Sam scour the backyards of the five people who were attacked at home. Dave Caruso would be proud, Dean thinks, because he and Sam go through those yards with a fine-tooth comb.
They find a small brown feather in one.
In another, they find a tiny clump of what looks like squirrel fur, although it's possible the squirrel got hung up on a fence or a tree branch, or it went a little nuts digging at fleas and tore out some of its own hair.
"What?" Sam asks when Dean mutters something under his breath.
"I said, there's such a thing as a level playing field."
For a second, he thinks Sam's found something, but it's a button.
And it's hot out, man. It's muggy and too warm and this whole wearing of multiple pairs of socks and their heaviest jeans and three shirts is getting old. His hair's all gummy with sweat, and there's a wet, dribbly trail running down the middle of his back into his shorts.
So the next time they have to go up against something that's bigger than they are? He will not complain. He will not even ponder complaining, because size does matter.
When his phone chirps inside his jeans pocket, signaling the arrival of another text, he wonders if he's got enough energy to go ballistic.
"I think that was your phone," Sam offers.
Dean ignores him and goes on rooting around in Joe and Denise McCaffrey's flower garden. Denise, who was out planting zinnias in shorts, a t-shirt and a pair of Old Navy flip-flops, has been dead for two days now. Bee sting, her husband says, although to his knowledge Denise didn't have any problem with insect bites.
Certainly nothing that she would die from.
"Dean?"
Sam might not be behind this whole texting situation - and Dean is still far from convinced that he's not - but he's having more fun with it than he ought to. He ought to be showing some damn solidarity, is what Dean figures.
As if what Sam said was, "Hey, man, can I use your phone?", Dean fishes it from his pocket and flings it at Sam.
A moment later, Sam goes, "Huh."
Solidarity. Seriously. Solidarity is not too much to ask for.
It's tough not to notice Sam standing up and taking a long look around the perimeter of the yard. For one thing, he's pretty much blocking out the sun. Purely on principle, Dean goes on ignoring him as he roots around in the zinnias; if he does that long enough, and with enough conviction, Sam will either give up, or he'll come over and show Dean what it is that's so freaking fascinating.
What would be good is a message from Bobby saying that if it rains, the damned abatwas will shrivel up and die, all on their own, like teeny-tiny Wicked Witches from The Wizard of Oz.
It's not that.
Of course it's not. Because that would be helpful.
Ceelinkat Iz Watchin U Dig, it says.
There is no vantage point from which the McCaffreys' backyard is easily visible, other than the big window in the McCaffreys' family room. And the sky, of course. If the sky were a big ceiling, and the frigging cat was up there, it could see the McCaffreys' backyard.
Maybe it's using a DOD satellite.
"Maybe it's metaphorical," Sam suggests.
"What?"
"Like, digging for answers?"
This phone has apps. It's a good phone. And this phone cost real money - although, granted, it wasn't Dean's real money, it was Antonio T. Tigre's.
Maybe that's it.
Whoever's behind this Ceiling Cat bullcrap has figured out that Dean's been working the system for the best part of three decades, and has decided Dean's due for a takedown - but he, she, or it is gonna mess with him for a while before he, she, or it lowers the boom. Of course, that doesn't explain why Sam gets to stroll through all of this completely lily-white, but you could make the point that Dean taught Sam to shoplift, and boost cars, and run scams on mostly-bewildered civilians, so anything less-than-legal that Sam's ever done is pretty much Dean's fault.
This is not good.
This is just so not good.
"We need to get out of here," Dean says, and he doesn't wait around for Sam's answer.
Part 2…