by Неизвестный
Eli felt the tension in his face ease up. Things were going much better now. He let his attention drift back down to the train set. Now that he was having his second look, he could see the fault lines where the segments of carved foam had been joined.
The air in the room crackled with energy. Eli looked up as a foggy orange form coalesced on the other side of the miniature village. At the center of the fog was a glinting object.
Khan backed away from the misty form and came around to stand at Eli’s side. There was an unusual expression on Khan’s face: fear.
“Charlie, where’d you get that?” Khan demanded.
The foggy shape looked more like a man now—a gray-haired man wearing a bright orange shirt—the garment Eli had first mistaken for a prisoner’s uniform.
The glinting object at his center moved forward, held now by ghostly fingers. It was a tiny pistol—the Ray-gun #112 that Eli had taken from Khan and then dropped earlier that day.
“I found this under a bed,” Charlie said in his ghostly, metallic voice. “I thought it was just a toy, but it’s not a toy, is it?”
With a shaking hand, he aimed the Ray-gun at Eli, then Khan, then back again.
“You’re right, Charlie. That’s not a toy,” Khan said. “It’s a powerful growth accelerant. If you shoot me with it, I’ll grow big and huge, and then I’ll have to smash your village before you’ve tested it with your locomotive.” He held up the train teasingly. “Why don’t we trade?”
The last bits of fog slipped into place, and Charlie became solid looking. He glanced around the attic, seemingly confused. “Where are my boxes of Halloween decorations?”
Eli kept his attention on the Ray-gun. He had no way of knowing what it would do to a person. He couldn’t know that a concentrated blast would stop a human’s heart, or that the danger it posed to humans was the main reason model #112 model never went into production, but he did know power. Eli was certain the gun had power, and equally certain he didn’t want a face full of whatever it blasted.
“C’mon, let’s trade,” Khan said nonchalantly. He was still holding out the locomotive.
“I don’t trust you,” the ghost said. “You never stop lying.”
Khan shrugged. “Fine. Shoot me. I’ll throw your precious locomotive on the ground and stomp it to pieces.”
Charlie’s glowing hand became steady, and he aimed the gun at Khan. His glowing finger twitched and pulled the trigger.
The room flashed with dazzling light. Eli turned to Khan. Eli’s vision became super-powered, as it had during the demonstration on the seedlings.
This time, he didn’t see through couch cushions to count loose change. He saw Khan’s ribs, and then he saw his heart. It beat faster and faster, and Eli saw it in three dimensions, the blood whooshing through. There was something different about Khan’s heart, that wasn’t like the illustrations he’d seen in science classes.
He didn’t have long to ponder the anomaly, because Khan’s heart went still. All the color went out of the world.
Khan’s body clenched, and then let go.
Eli reached for his friend. He didn’t move fast enough to catch him, but he did slow Khan’s fall to the floor.
The attic hummed with a bad vibration.
Eli’s vision was on its way back to normal, but still had some depth. He could see that Khan’s heart was motionless. Not beating.
A part of Eli pulled away from the scene and denied that this was happening. He was just sleeping off the alcohol. This was a nightmare. He’d wake up in a minute.
Charlie approached the two of them, then leaned over and reached his glowing arm down. He took the locomotive from Khan’s limp hand.
“There it is,” Charlie said happily. “I’ve been looking all over for my engine.” He carried the locomotive over to the edge of the village, where a train station waited. Charlie began to whistle as he hooked together the train pieces.
Eli shook Khan and urged him to wake up.
Khan didn’t respond.
“Charlie, we’ve got to get help,” Eli said. “Help! Up here!” he yelled.
The door at the bottom of the attic stairs slammed shut.
“Not yet,” Charlie said. “Five more minutes. I’m almost done. Don’t you want to see the train go through the village?”
“My friend needs help!” Eli could hear the homeowner trying to get the door to the attic open. Even if he was going to come up with a golf club, it would be better than nothing. “Charlie, open that door. Open it right now.”
“And let those poltergeists up here? No way. The little one takes my houses apart faster than I can put them together.”
Eli looked wildly around the attic. He spotted the Ray-gun lying unattended on the green-flocked hills. He rose to standing, grabbed the gun, aimed it at the ghost, and pulled the trigger.
Chapter Twenty
After Eli squeezed the trigger, the attic flashed with dazzling light again.
Eli saw through Charlie, through the eaves of the old house and past multiple layers of roofing tiles, to the stars and the moon. He saw the moon’s craggy terrain in high definition, and the equipment left behind by astronauts.
Eli gritted his teeth, focused hard, and pulled his attention back into the attic, to Charlie.
The ghost seemed unaffected by the Ray-gun blast. He brushed dust off his orange shirt and said, “It’ll take more than that to put down a tough old bugger like me.”
Eli dropped the gun, defeated.
He turned to Khan, pale and lifeless on the ground.
Eli’s anger flared up and raged inside him.
Ghosts.
He’d had enough of them. They were nothing but trouble, and now one had killed his friend. They were…
He found a spot of calm inside his rage. Ghosts were sometimes like Donny, who had possessed him and left behind those memories.
All those memories.
Donny, who’d found his girlfriend cold and lifeless.
Donny, who’d given her CPR until the police had arrived.
Eli knelt down next to Khan and focused on his friend’s words: A ghost’s power is the fear it generates. Listen to your heart. Let the fear energize your mind.
The training that Donny had taken during the summer he’d worked as a lifeguard now became Eli’s training. His body didn’t know the movements, and then it did.
He breathed air into Khan’s lungs and applied the chest compressions to keep blood circulating. Nothing happened. He used his shoulder to wipe the sweat from his brow, and he kept going.
“Come back,” he urged between breaths. “You can’t leave me like this.”
“Why?”
Eli looked around him. It hadn’t been Charlie speaking, because he was playing with his train set, oblivious to his surroundings.
Eli continued compressions, staring at Khan’s blank eyes.
“You just can’t go yet,” Eli said. “I don’t like it when people go away. Come back.”
“Why?”
“Because I barely know you, and you’re my best friend.” Eli wiped his wet face on his shoulder again. “And because this isn’t how you go. Not like this. Not in someone’s attic, without a fight. You’re a hero, and you don’t go like this.”
He leaned down and blew more air into Khan’s lungs.
When he pulled back, Khan’s eyes tracked him.
A dozen feet away, Charlie the ghost hooted happily as the model train whizzed around the track on its inaugural run.
Eli pressed down on Khan’s chest and found resistance. Khan’s body convulsed and shook as he shuddered back to life.
Eli sat back on his heels, even more doubtful that any of this was happening.
Khan rolled onto his side, facing away from Eli, and groaned. “I’m going to be sick.”
“Oh. Is that a side effect of the Ray-gun?”
“No, it’s a side effect of you, kissing me with your vomit mouth.”
Eli got indignant. “I wasn’t
kissing you. I care about you, but not like that. You should be nicer to me, because I just saved your life.”
Khan rolled onto his back, moaning and rubbing his mouth. “Yuck. What did you throw up? Possum?”
Eli took a test breath on his palm. The smell was not good. Maybe he had consumed possum.
Khan pushed himself up to a sitting position. He leaned over and whispered, “Did you know you have a tiny metal disc in your head?”
“Did you see that when you were dead?”
Khan snorted. “I wasn’t dead. Trust me. I’ve been dead before, and I know dead, and that was not dead.” He snorted again. “No, I saw it when the Ray-gun went off. It’s right there in your frontal lobe. Almost like some sort of microchip.” He rubbed his chest and made a pained expression. “Are you part android?”
“Not that I know of.”
The train kept whizzing around the nearby track, faster and faster.
Khan frowned in Charlie’s direction. “Well, I’m not paying you overtime for you to sit around. Get rid of that ghost, will you?”
Eli got to his feet and smoothed down his clothes, trying to look professional.
“Charlie, we need to talk.”
The ghost was dabbing glue on the base of the tree Eli had uprooted. “No, thanks.”
“Listen. I’m a professional ghost hacker. It’s my job to go in and deal with people’s ghosts, so I am uniquely qualified to inform you that… uh… your lovely home does not contain any poltergeists.”
Charlie leaned over the terrain and pressed the tree back into place. “You’re a chucklehead.”
“Sir, I regret to inform you that you are deceased. This house is purple because a real estate flipper bought it and painted it that color before selling it to a single father and his daughter. They’re the ones who seem like poltergeists to you. I know this is a lot to take in, but it’s actually you who’s haunting this house.”
Charlie pulled the tree back up and applied more glue. He whistled as he glued it back down again.
Eli continued, “That’s why the guys at the bar ignored you, Charlie. They couldn’t see you.”
“Those guys never liked me.” Charlie’s glowing form looked less stable now, with spots ebbing away like steam. “They’re a bunch of jerks.”
“Don’t say that. I was down there all day today. They might be jerks, but they’re the kind of jerks a person would be happy to have as friends. I had a great time with them.”
Khan got to his feet, holding onto the edge of the table for stability. “The guys would want you to move on and be happy,” Khan said. “They really loved you.”
Charlie frowned. “They said that? You’re a liar.”
Khan started to answer, but Eli held his hand up, as if to say, I’ve got this one.
Eli looked into Charlie’s ghostly eyes. “You’re right. They didn’t say they loved you. But they did a toast for you, and they said you were okay. Not that you are, but that you were an okay guy, because you’re dead now.”
“They said I was okay?” Charlie patted his chest and arms, a look of surprise on his face. “Holy smokes. I’m a ghost. The sexy mail carrier didn’t say hello, because she couldn’t see me.”
Eli nodded. “That’s right.”
Charlie’s face brightened. “I’m a ghost. I can drink as much beer as I want and never get a hangover. I can follow that sexy mail carrier home and watch her get undressed.”
“That’s awful,” Eli said.
“It’s my afterlife. Get your own afterlife, sonny.”
Khan interrupted, “Don’t you want to move on from here, on to new challenges? You’ve finished your masterpiece, and now you’re done. Go, cross over. You don’t want to stay here for long, or eventually you won’t be yourself anymore.”
“Not myself?” Charlie asked. “But I like being me.”
“Is this who you are? A mean old man who hides in his attic? A nasty old coot with no friends?”
Eli elbowed Khan and whispered, “You don’t have to be so mean.”
“I’m not an old man.” Charlie shifted before their eyes, but not into fog. He got smaller and smaller, until he was a young boy of about ten. Now his eyes were the same height as the peaks of the hills on the terrain before him.
Eli heard the humming in the room change tone, to something more soothing. He smiled at the little boy standing across the miniature village from him.
“Hi Charlie, my name is Eli,” he said. “Thank you for showing me your train. I can tell you worked really hard to put everything together.”
Charlie looked up at Eli with big eyes and asked, “Are there model trains on the other side?”
Eli wanted to say yes to the little boy, but he couldn’t.
Young Charlie turned to Khan. “Well?”
Khan answered, “Yes, of course there are model trains on the other side. And everything else you’ve always wanted. Plus everyone who’s ever loved you, and they’re all waiting. You don’t want to keep them waiting, do you?”
The little boy began to glow, brighter and brighter, every color at once. He reached for the locomotive and held it to his chest. “I’m taking this with me.”
Eli opened his mouth to say that Charlie probably couldn’t take the locomotive with him, since people were often pointing out all the things that couldn’t be taken into the afterlife, and therefore it had to be true.
But then Charlie blinked out of existence in the attic, along with the locomotive.
Eli turned to Khan, who was now leaning heavily on the table and rubbing his chest.
Khan said, “Whattaya know, you can take it with you.”
“I found that part very surprising.”
The table groaned under Khan’s leaning weight.
“We should get out of here,” Eli said.
“Did we finish eating all those pickled eggs?” Khan turned and sat on top of the terrain, crunching trees under his butt.
“We’re not raiding this poor family’s kitchen. They’ve been through enough.”
The door at the bottom of the attic stairs unlocked and creaked open. An angry voice called up from below, “Hello? Is someone up there? I’ve got a nine-iron and I’m coming up swinging!”
Khan and Eli took one look at each other, then ran for the window at the end of the attic.
Getting out was a tight fit, mainly because they both tried to climb out the window together instead of going one at a time, but they did exit the house just fast enough to avoid being beaten with a golf club.
They scrambled down the fire escape, ran around to the van, and peeled away down the street.
Khan was driving, and he took the van around a left turn on two wheels, squealing with joy.
Eli fastened his seat belt and joked, “Where’d you learn to drive?”
“Right here in this driver’s seat.” He rolled down the window and howled at the moon. When he pulled his head back in, he said, “I’ve never touched a gas pedal until the day you let me drive this beauty.”
Waves of realization washed over Eli. No wonder Khan was so terrifying behind the wheel.
If Eli had been able to see his own face, he might have noted how fascinating it was, the similarities between his own face now, and Charlie’s face when he’d discovered he was a ghost.
Eli turned and looked behind them, out the rear window of the van. He couldn’t see the house anymore, because they were blocks away, but the movement still helped him put some perspective on the day.
“We actually got rid of another ghost,” Eli said with wonder. “Is it always like that?”
“Did you have fun?”
“Except for the part where you died, I had fun.”
“Then yes. It’s often like that, though I do generally try to get paid.”
“Good point. I’m sure it works better when the human is the client, and not the ghost.”
“Better luck tomorrow.”
Eli yawned. It was late, and he couldn’t imagine getting out o
f bed the next morning, much less hunting down more ghosts.
Sleepily, he asked, “What’s the job tomorrow?”
“It’s another easy one. Total home run. Open and shut. Easy peasy.”
“Mm hmm.” Eli slumped down in the passenger seat, closed his eyes, and instantly fell asleep.
Falling asleep anywhere was one of Eli’s talents.
Khan drove for a while, then asked Eli a few questions to make sure he was asleep.
When he was sure he had privacy, Khan turned up the radio and sang along with a rock ballad.
When the song ended, he pulled out his phone and called his sister.
“Val? Do you have anything you can hack up and use to scan someone’s head? Like a microwave you can turn into an X-Ray, or one of those whatchamacallits, an MRI?”
Call of the Wild
DESCRIPTION: The adventure continues in Ghost Hackers book 3!
Turn the page to begin reading Call of the Wild or click here to return to this anthology’s Table of Contents.
Call of the Wild - Ghost Hackers Book 3
Chapter One
Eli Carter drove toward his new job at Ghost Hackers with a big smile on his face. It was Wednesday, and only his third day, but other than the hangover and a broken window in his van, things were going great.
He was actually looking forward to his work day, which had never happened at his old job as a delivery driver. Before now, all he’d be looking forward to during his weekday morning commute was his post-lunch nap.
Only three days in, and he’d already saved countless lives.
“More like two lives,” Brenda said. “Not countless.”
He looked over at his petite redheaded girlfriend, sitting in the passenger seat of the van.
“Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t realize I was saying that stuff out loud.”
She smiled sweetly, making him feel worse for forgetting she was in the vehicle with him.
“Don’t be sorry, Eli. I love hearing about your day and your thoughts. I love how this new job is helping you open up to new experiences, and—” Brenda stopped mid-sentence and began sputtering in irritation as the temporary plastic wrap covering the passenger-side window came loose and flapped around her face.