by Nancy Holder
“I … don’t … care!” she growled.
At a signal from the mayor, his guards stopped messing around and really put their backs into it. She still wouldn’t let go. Something had to give. And it did: with a screech the table began moving across the floor—along with Jennifer, Mayor Bradley, and all the mayor’s guests, who were slowly dragged through the crowded restaurant. Everyone was watching. Everyone. Jennifer realized if she kept her job until tomorrow it would be a miracle.
Finally the woman could hold on no longer; her arms gave out and she let go. She hit the ground running. The security detail chased after her. She bobbed around as she had before entering the restaurant—apparently she couldn’t find the door again. Jennifer began to seriously wonder if the Ghostbusters had lied about their involvement in the resolution of the Mercado crisis.
Then the woman located the door and, scrambling, stumbled outside. The restaurant patrons looked on in fascination as the door swung shut. It was so quiet that you could hear a soufflé fall.
Mayor Bradley smiled and said in a voice loud enough for all to hear, “Never a dull moment.”
That seemed a signal that the strange event was over. Silverware began to clink, soft chatter resumed, and everyone relaxed.
This is not on me, Jennifer thought, twisting the napkin in her lap. She prayed the mayor would see it that way, too.
21
Rowan pinned the motorcycle’s throttle wide open. Buildings and trees blurred past and the wind ripped over the face of his new toy, making the eyes stream hot tears down its cheeks. He had no concern for his own safety at high speed, nor the toy’s for that matter—why would he?
I have survived my own death. And I have possessed a second living human body. I have become an immortal god. The Fourth Cataclysm has begun, and no one can stop it.
An image of the Ghostbusters coming to the rescue flared in the usurped brain and Rowan twisted the slack mouth into a smirk. They’re just smart girls in sanitary worker outfits. He thought of all the females who had humiliated him, calling him a dork and a nerd, or worse, pretending he didn’t exist. He remembered Angelina Beltrano, the vivacious, curvaceous Latin pixie who had burst into giggles when, after four years of loving her from afar in high school, he had finally asked her, stammering, sweaty-palmed, to go to an after-the-football game dance in the gym with him.
“You’re not kidding. You really aren’t,” she’d said, looking at him as if she couldn’t quite believe it. Then she had run off to tell all her girlfriends. Her boyfriend heard about it within minutes and had dragged Rowan under the bleachers and beaten him to a pulp.
I’m going track that jerk down to the ends of the earth, and when I do, he’ll beg for my forgiveness. But he won’t get it. None of them will.
“What did you expect?” his father had said when Rowan had dragged himself home, broken and bloody, wearing nothing but his grass-stained underpants. “You’re a weirdo, kid. You gotta face it.” Then his father had chuckled at the sight of him, and his mother, unable to maintain a straight face, turned back for the kitchen. He hadn’t shed a single tear when he learned his father had died of a heart attack. And he’d left his mother to fend for herself when he’d gotten accepted to MIT.
Let her see how it felt.
At MIT, he had focused solely, obsessively on his studies, and his dedication paid off when Professor Gupta took an interest in him and encouraged him to pursue a career in advanced physics. Dr. Gupta said he was a genius. A new world was opened to him! He had finally found his calling.
But he still had no friends, his own age or otherwise.
One evening as he was hiding in his dorm room bunk bed, browsing the Internet, he came across a post on a physics site that mentioned a “hilarious” TV interview on the University of Michigan station about the science of the paranormal. There was a link. It didn’t take long for him to find other clips of it online. That was how he first became acquainted with the radical theories of Erin Gilbert and Abigail Yates, the woman he had recently possessed.
He found nothing about the interview hilarious; the razzing Yates endured on camera was uninspired and doltish, the kind of abuse he’d encountered from nose pickers in fourth grade. The content of her talk, however, was revelatory and revolutionary. The underlying principles of an entirely new branch of physical science, though they were hastily described in a venue designed for mockery, made perfect sense to him. His face flushing and his ears turning red, he jotted down the title of their book, and with considerable effort and no small expense acquired a rare copy under the table from its print-on-demand publisher—actually it was from a janitor, and it was passed to him through a crack in the warehouse door.
After much reading and study, and his own experimentation, he came to the conclusion that the authors had far underestimated the power requirements of the systems they described. He set out at once to find ways to boost power input exponentially, and reach the theoretical “bridge point,” where the eternal barrier between the living and the dead became as substantial as smoke.
The authors had used an analogy in their book to explain the principle. A rock could be ground to powder, and that powder would still be recognizable under a microscopic or in a spectrometer as the same rock; but if the rock’s temperature was raised sufficiently, and under specific conditions, its molecular characteristics would change: it would re-form into something else, something with new and different properties. Rowan had reasoned and independently proven that adding energy of the correct type and at the correct level was the key to cracking open the gates of hell.
Despite Dr. Yates’s contributions to his own breakthroughs, or perhaps because of them, it had been a great pleasure to torment her, and it seemed appropriate that she be the first living human his spirit invaded. In a very real way she had instigated her own demonic possession. He was looking forward to overseeing her final and utter destruction.
Up the street, he could see the towering façade of the Mercado. His exhaustive study of ley lines had shown that the structure sat on the nexus of paranormal power and supernatural intrusion into this world. If he was to take his rightful place as sole lord of the dead, the coronation had to take place at the Mercado.
He parked the motorcycle at the curb and strode into the Mercado and through the ornate lobby, unrecognized, unrecognizable. He had put up with untold abuse from the tenants, even more from his boss. Repairing air conditioners. Cleaning toilets. Rage coursed through him. No matter. That life was over. Rowan North was dead.
And he had been reborn a god.
In his fine new body, he stepped up to the door of the generator room. Two uniformed cops left behind to protect the equipment sat drinking coffee, guarding the door. One of them looked at Rowan, who of course looked like the moronic Ghostbusters receptionist, Kevin.
“Hey, you can’t come back here,” the cop said.
“Interesting,” Rowan-as-Kevin said. “Is that so?”
In a swift move, a move he’d never practiced or even seen attempted, he raised both well-muscled arms and punched them both in the jaw, one with each fist. The heads of the two cops snapped back, and they slumped unconscious.
Rowan was glee-struck. He stared at the meat puppet’s biceps and said, “Oh, I should have worked out more when I was alive.”
He kicked open the door to the generator room and walked inside, prepared to face irreparable damage. But there was nothing of the kind. The fools had only partially disassembled his device, and they had left the pieces lying about! Even better, they had made no move to destroy any of it. They had assumed that “dead” meant “dead,” and that the original owner would not be returning to claim anything. Idiots! He bent down and picked up the heaviest pieces easily, like they were made of Styrofoam.
“Oh, I definitely should have worked out more.”
He began to reassemble the device piece by piece, something he could have done blindfolded, as well as dead. He needed to hurry, though. The Ghostbusters knew
he hadn’t left this world, and it wouldn’t take long for them to figure out what he was doing and where he had to be doing it.
The meat puppet had deft fingers, and putting everything back in place didn’t take long. It was oddly amusing to watch its reflection in the banks of mirrors, doing his bidding like a robot. He wanted to make it pull down its pants and dance a jig, and certainly would have, had he not been so pressed for time. Holding the usurped body’s breath, he made its finger flip the power switch.
There was a horrible pause. It lasted so long that Rowan began to have doubts …
Then it fired up. The room blazed with light as the machine pulsed and glowed, and bolts of lightning crackled out of it. As the intensity grew, raw electrical energy snapped and swirled around the room, building, building …
Ka-boom! Every one of the mirrors exploded outward, sending a mist of sparkling fragments cascading from all directions, and in the same instant, supernatural lights and spirits blasted, howling through the empty frames and into this world! Wisps of phantoms and skeletons; imps, ghouls, banshees, zombies. The ghosts of evil people who had died centuries ago—mass murderers, serial killers, hit men, assassins.
The deafening cacophony summoned a security guard, who raced past the still-unconscious police officers and into the generator room. His eyes grew huge and his jaw dropped at the spectacle before him. His arms and legs began to shake. Rowan-as-Kevin shot him his most menacing glare—in a shard of mirror still stuck to a frame, his eyes were glowing red. And then he growled like the fiend he had become.
The guard staggered backward with his hands up in a gesture of surrender.
“Hey, man,” he said, “you do you.”
Then the insect ran out of the room.
22
Erin ran down the busy New York sidewalk. Passersby, oblivious to her frantic urgency, snarled at her as she jostled in front and cut them off. She paid them no mind; her one and only goal was to reach the Mercado before it was too late. The stitch in her side was killing her, but she pressed on, ignoring the red lights, ducking through the auto traffic. She had no choice. Abby wasn’t answering the phone and she was almost positive that Rowan was back. The world was in terrible danger and she seemed to be the only person on the planet who knew it. And of course, if she shouted it at the people who yelled at her and made obscene hand gestures, they wouldn’t believe her.
A terrible thought crossed her mind. What if Abby didn’t believe her? What if that was why she hadn’t called back? Erin had no proof. It was just another theory. All she had was a picture Rowan had drawn in their book. But no, Abby had always believed her. And believed in her.
Then suddenly the sidewalk started to tremble and ripple underfoot like the surface of a rushing torrent. The complacent and inward-looking expressions on the faces of her fellow pedestrians switched to alarm—and then to sheer panic as a loud boom! tore through the air. Erin looked up ahead. In the distance she saw the distinctive outline of the Mercado building. Brilliant lights were shooting upward from it, impossibly bright lights that illuminated the afternoon sky.
Erin had no doubt what was going on. And what was going on was the worst thing she could conceive of. It was the end of the world.
Sucking it up, she ran faster, pumping her arms and high-kicking.
* * *
At the Ghostbusters headquarters, Abby looked on uncomfortably as Holtzmann worked to repair the proton packs that she had wrecked while the spirit of Rowan possessed her. She had no memory of how that had felt or what she had done. Part of her was massively grateful for that, but the objective scientist part was curious, wishing they had more data about what Rowan had become so they could find a way to defeat him. All signs pointed to a resumption of his plan to destroy the barrier and unleash hell’s whirlwind.
Fighting for calm, she punched in Erin’s number again. No answer again. She could picture Erin holed up in her apartment with bedcovers pulled up to her chin, soggy tissues strewn everywhere, pouting and/or grieving for her lost days of approval from people who had never met her and never would.
Patty was fretting, too. Abby could see it etched in her eyes. Abby finally glimpsed the full horror of the word “impotent” and why men feared it so.
A snap came from Holtz’s worktable and Abby glanced over. “Are they ready?” she asked hopefully. “We’ve got to get to the Mercado and save Kevin.” She shook her head in sympathy. “As if he hasn’t been through enough already.”
“If you weren’t so strong, you would have done much less damage to these,” Holtzmann informed her.
“I’m sorry I got possessed!” she lashed back, frustrated beyond words. “I guess I should have thought that through more.” Her sarcasm underscored just how worried she was. She suddenly realized that the phone had finally stopped ringing at Erin’s end and that she was about to get her voice mail. “Erin! Where are you? Rowan took Kevin. We need your help!”
She hung up. “What a surprise,” she said to no one in particular. “Never there when you need her.”
* * *
The Fourth Cataclysm had arrived.
And it was exactly as advertised.
Panicking pedestrians filled the sidewalk, all of them running away from the Mercado as fast as they could. Their eyes were huge, their mouths gaping. Erin fought to keeping moving against the flow. A man tripped and fell and people just stepped on him in their haste to get away. He managed to crawl into a doorway, out of the torrent. He sat there, clearly in shock, clutching the torn knees of his business suit. What she saw around her was mass hysteria, and it was every inch as ugly as the video on Jennifer Lynch’s computer. Then she spotted someone she sort of knew in the throng sweeping toward her. It was Tonya, the glow-in-the-dark eye-makeup mogul of nakedeyes.com. She was wearing leopard-print leggings, a nubby lime-green car coat, and teal flats. How did that even go together? Erin felt a microsecond of reassurance about her own history of fashion decisions. Despite all the subtle digs she had endured of late, conservative clothes never went out of style.
Unless of course the world ended; then all bets were off.
Tonya swept past, her signature eye makeup melting, running in fluorescent stripes down her cheeks. Car horns blared as drivers wedged their vehicles into the already packed streets, bumping bumpers, jockeying for a few inches of space to get the heck out of there. And no wonder: huge red clouds had formed above the structure, billowing and pluming until they spread across the entire sky and turned day into night. The Mercado was shimmering with evil light, as if it was straddling the dividing line between the world of the living and the world of the dead, containing the vast energies beneath it like the towering cone of a volcano.
And then the volcano blew.
Ghosts poured out of the building and flew up into the roiling sky—phantoms of all ages from all eras: a child from Victorian times, a flapper from the Roaring Twenties, a mobster, and a pot-smoking hippie. And in varying stages of decay—limbs missing, eyes hanging from sockets—and in all manner of diabolic manifestation: fangs, claws, glowing eyes, eager to tear and rip and destroy. As Erin looked on, they dispersed to all parts of Manhattan.
He had done it. Rowan had succeeded. The barrier was down. And with it down, it wasn’t just Manhattan that would bleed and die. It was the entire world.
“I need my gear,” she said aloud. She had to get to Ghostbusters headquarters as fast as she could.
She waved down a taxi that miraculously pulled up beside her. Erin couldn’t believe her luck. The cabbie pulled over, surprisingly relaxed given the complete uproar around them. But he was going in the opposite direction of the fleeing traffic.
“Where’re you going?” he asked her.
“Chinatown,” she told him.
“Nah.” He drove off, leaving her to throw her hands up in impotent frustration. Then she watched as he came to a red light and braked. A ghost flew over to the cab, swung open the backseat door, and got in. The cabbie screamed.
; The grim satisfaction she felt was wrong, so wrong … but so, well, satisfying.
The mayhem continued all over New York:
A couple ran around a corner, screaming as a ghost opened his trench coat and flashed them. But as he was only a skeleton, what he had to expose was nothing.
A woman fled to the entrance of a subway station, then stopped dead in her tracks as a ghost rat floated up from the stairs, squeaking and confused. Then a stream of ghost rats joined the first one and she fled in terror.
In a nearby Clark’s Coffee, a group of patrons ran to the window to check out the commotion. Nursing a coffee, Dean Harold Filmore was thinking deep thoughts about his application to work at CERN and make some real bucks, since university administrators were still, in his opinion, woefully underpaid, and sexy babes were unlikely to seek him out for his intellectual prowess. Therefore he was blissfully unaware of what the ruckus was about, aware only that some kind of flash mob or something was gathering outside.
“Huh. City College must’ve let out.”
He smirked, turning to the patron next to him to gauge his reaction. But the man sitting next to him was not a man at all. It was a hideous thing.
Filmore screamed. It growled back, face expanding into an elongated nightmare of glowing eyes and fangs. Then it went on the attack, coming right at him. He leapt from his stool and the ghost harried him out the door and into a maelstrom of multidimensional entities phasing in and out of existence.
She was right, Gilbert was right. He fled down the street, grabbing on to people who were as frightened as he was and crying, “Help me! You’ve got to help me! Hide me!”
But at this point it was every New Yorker for themselves and his pleas for help went unanswered. The ghost was still tracking him, bearing down; he stumbled along and slammed into a newsstand. He fell into a row of fanned-out copies of the New York Post with Erin’s face plastered on them. “Nosebusters!” the headline proclaimed, and as he crashed into the shelf, his own nose smashed hard into the unyielding wood and pain shot into his skull.