Down the Rabbit Hole

Poor Unfortunate Soul Part 1

It had been three weeks since the events at the Van Ness house. The three of them had been holed up at Rufus's cabin for the majority of that time, trying to figure out a way to stop the Leviathans permanently.
"Yeah, I hear you. All right. Well, thanks for looking. Yep. Bye." Sam hung up the phone before taking a seat on the couch next to Lacey. "So, Nora didn't see any pattern to the dig sites either."
"Yeah, cause they got nothing in common." Dean sighed from his spot on the arm of the sofa. "And I got nothing from local lore 50 miles in every direction of all of them. I mean, it's like they're just... old dirt. What's Dick looking for?"
"Old dirt, by the sound of it." Lacey groaned, putting down the lore book she was reading and massaging her temples. Dean pulled out the flask and took a sip from it. Suddenly the lights began to flicker. Lacey glanced around as the boys stood up, grabbing their guns. Bobby appeared in the middle of the room and they turned, pointing their guns at him.
"Hey, hey, go easy, you idjits. Sorry for the jump scare."
"So how does this work, huh? I leave the cap off and you just genie your way out?" Dean grumbled as they put their guns away.
"I wish it were that easy. The thing..." Bobby flickered, then vanished.
"Bobby?"
"Someone wanna check his antenna?" Lacey asked, before Bobby came back into focus.
"Damn it. It's hard to stay focused. I'm still kind of warn out."
"You've been pretty busy for a dead guy." Dean replied as he sat down next to Lacey.
"All right. Listen. I don't know how long before my next ghost nap, so let's just skip to the skinny, those numbers I gave you."
"The empty lot in Cheeseville?" Dean frowned.
"Yeah, well, it ain't gonna be empty for long. I got a gander at Dick's big plan, right before he Lincolned me. They're breaking ground... what month is this?"
"Uh, April." Sam supplied.
"Grounds broke." Bobby sighed. "They're building as we're yammering. Check it out yourself. It's all right. I mean, you guys missed it because you've been kind of busy killing ghosts the past few days. But Dick is about to get into the Soylent Green business." Sam opened his laptop while Bobby spoke and opened a news article on Roman Inc's latest acquisition. "That site'll show you they're building a biotech lab, right? Biotech my ass. That sucker is a state of the art slaughterhouse. And we're the beef."
"Don't you think that's a little bold, even for Dick?" Dean asked as he and Lacey leant forward to look at the screen.
"I bet you no one will even notice, cause first, he's gonna dumb us all down with Turducken-style munchies. Make us docile."
"Yeah, we haven't been to Biggerson's since that whole fiasco." Dean told him.
"Biggerson's? He's bought a list of joints 10 pages long."
"Ah." The three of them exchanged worried looks.
"Next, he's gonna cure us."
"Cure us of what?" Sam asked.
"All the biggies – cancer, AIDS, heart disease. Let's just say they got an affinity for stem cell research."
"The Leviathan real-estate mooks building that cancer center." Dean reminded them.
"They're not hunting anymore. They're engineering the perfect herd. Now we've gone up against plently liked to eat a few folk in the woods. This ain't that. This is about knocking us off the top of the food chain. This is about them Levis living here forever, one-percenter stye, while we march our dopey fat asses down to the shiny new death camps at every corner." Sam's computer beeped and he leaned forward.
"It's an email.... From Frank." He frowned.
"What?" Lacey sat up straight.
"Frank's alive?"
"That jackass, always stealing my thunder." Bobby muttered.
"Sam, Dean and Lacey, if you're reading this, I'm dead... or worse. This email was sent because some prince is trying to hack into my hard drive right this second. So unless it's you, you got trouble." Sam read aloud. "My drive is full of compromising info. Your new aliases, hangouts, where you stored your car..."
"Baby?" Dean looked up, worriedly.
"Even though he encrypted the crap out of his drive, he says we should assume that someone can hack into it eventually. He did put a tracking device in it." Sam clicked on the link and the tracking application popped up. "All right, let's see where Frank's drive is." Sam hit the locate button and the address the device had been activated at popped up.
"Perfect. It's in the middle of the Death Star." Dean said sarcastically as he read the address for Richard Roman Enterprises on the screen. "All right, well, off to Chicago." Dean got to his feet and held out a hand to help Lacey up.
"No, wait, guys, you can't just break in. They know your mugs. What if we mailed in the flask? Then I could ghost through the joint." Bobby suggested. "I mean, it's not like Dick can kill me twice. What, you got a better plan? Come on. Just because I'm dead doesn't mean I don't know how to do my damn job."
"Bobby, that's Dick's office." Sam pointed out.
"I think what Sam's trying to say is, what happens if you run into Dick and, you know... go vengeful. You know it's not something you can just shake off."
"Come on, give me some credit. What, I'm supposed to just ride the pine?"
"Sorry, Bobby." Sam shrugged. The three of them began getting their stuff together.

Whatever technology Frank used to track his device was amazing. Sam was able to link into the web cam of the woman, Charlie Bradbury, who was hacking it and they tracked her down before heading to her apartment. They broke inside and waited for her. There was movement in the outer room and Lacey got up from where she was sitting on the bed. They could hear someone talking on the phone.
"Hey, Pete, sorry I left without telling you. No, I just wasn't... feeling well. It's a lady thing. I will be in first thing. Got to go, cramps." Dean opened the door and stepped out into the hall just as Charlie bolted for the door. Lacey waved her arm and the front door slammed shut before she could open it fully.
"It's ok, we're not gonna hurt you." Dean reassured her.
"Get away from me , you shapeshifter!" Charlie grabbed a plastic sword from one of the display units and brandished it at them.
"Look, we're not shapeshifters." Sam tried to calm her down. Clearly unfazed by his reassurances did nothing to help as she slashed at him with the sword, breaking it in half.
"Geez!" Sam protested, taking a step back.
"Look, we're not Leviathans, okay? You want us to prove it? You know what borax does to them?" Dean asked.
"Yeah." Charlie stared at them, nervously.
"Sam?" Sam held out his hand and Dean poured borax over it, followed by Lacey's, then his own. "Huh? Your turn." Dean passed the cannister to her and she splashed some on her own hand with no affect.
"Good." Dean nodded as she gave the borax back to him.
"Who the hell are you guys?" Charlie asked, looking slightly less nervous now. They headed into the living room and explained the situation to her. "So you're saying, you guys are monster hunters. So, there are other monsters? Stop. Never mind. Just shh. Okay, I get how you tracked the drive, straight GPS but it's still at the office. How did you find me?" Sam pulled his laptop from his bag and opened it up to show Charlie the footage he had from her webcam.
"Aw! Son of a gun jacked my webcam?!"
"Welcome to Frank." Dean deadpanned.
"It's creepy, but I'll give it to him. So you're telling me everything he had on his drive is true." She looked between the three of them, waiting for their reactions.
"That and more."
"Wait. How long did it take you to crack into Frank's drive?" Sam asked.
"A day or so." Charlie shrugged.
"Is there anything you can't hack into?"
"Not yet." She smirked at them.
"How about Dick Roman's email?"
"Why would I....Oh. He's one of them." Realisation dawned.
"No. Uh, he's their leader."
"So what's the end game, steal our resources, make us some slaves?"
"Planet wide value meal. We're the meat." Dean told her.
"You can't be serious. Okay. All right. Let's do this. What am I looking for?" Charlie sat down and opened up her laptop.
"Well, for starters, anything about archaeological dig sites."
"Like Indiana Jones stuff?" Charlie asked as she started typing.
"Or The Mummy." Lacey input.
"Hell, yes, Evie over Indie any day." Charlie nodded, smiling at her.
"Exactly!" Lacey smiled back happily. Dean cleared his throat and brought them back to the topic at hand.
"All we know is that Dick has been digging all over the world, and we need to know what he's looking for."
"You know, I was having a really good week. I met someone, downloaded the new Robyn album. Everything was coming up me. Oh, crap." She sighed and stopped typing.
"Look, we get it sucks." Sam tried to reassure her.
"No, not that. Dick's email isn't on the company server. It's on a private one, in his office."
"Meaning?" Dean asked.
"Can't get in it unless you have his phone or you're at his desk."
"So you're saying that if we're inside Dick's office, then we can hack into his email?" Dean clarified.
"You can't. "Charlie told them bluntly. Only someone like... but I sure as hell ain't doing it. I am doing my job and..." She paused. "What are the chances I see everything on that drive and Dick lets me live anyway"
"I think you know." Sam told her levelly.
"So I erase the drive first, protect me and you. Then I go back to my old life, right? What?" She looked between the three of them.
"It's not that easy. You're on Dick's radar, which means you don't have and old life anymore." Dean told her as gently as he could.
"I'm gonna die. I should have taken that job at google." Charlie groaned.
"Look, Charlie, it's okay if you can't do it. I mean you didn't volunteer for this." Sam said, giving her an out.
"Totally. Exactly. But now I volunteer."
"What?" Sam looked at her, surprised.
"I got to go back in anyways to wipe Frank's drive. Might as well break into Dick's office too." Charlie shrugged.
"Are you sure?"
"No. But these things are gonna eat everyone I know. What kind of douchebag stands by for that? However, I have never broken into anything in real life before, so... plan?"
"You got Bluetooth?" Dean asked.
"Yeah." The four of them crowded around her computer.
"Security system, can you get into that?"
"I can re-route any surveillance cameras we need."
"All right let's start with that." Unbeknownst to them, Bobby was listening into the conversation too.