Too late! Smithy pulled on the handles and the van’s horn began to blare out. All its lights flashed at once as the alarm sounded, and the shape in the fog jerked suddenly towards them.
Smithy grinned nervously. “Uh, the van’s making a noise. Why is the van making a noise? Should the van be making that noise?”
There was a series of clunks as all the van’s many locks released. “Shut up and get in!” Weinberg yelped, pulling open the driver’s door and clambering inside.
Smithy and Denzel each yanked open one of the back doors. They scrambled inside just as the engine roared into life, and Denzel almost tumbled out when the van lurched forwards. A vision of black eyes and enormous teeth spurred his legs into action, and he kicked himself along the van’s smooth floor until Smithy caught him by the arm.
The alarm was still blasting out. The flashing lights illuminated the green fog, giving Denzel and Smithy a brief glimpse of the shark’s scarred and pock-marked snout, before Weinberg barged through a fence, skidded on to a side street and floored the accelerator.
For a long time, Denzel and Smithy didn’t speak. It was Smithy who eventually broke the silence.
“I think we’re gonna need a bigger van.”
The van skidded on to another street, making the open back doors flap around. The fog was as thick as ever, but Denzel could still see the outline of the shark chasing them down. It was faster on the straights than they were, but slower on the turns. Weinberg slammed the vehicle into a sideways skid and on to another side road, to try to buy them some more time.
“Weapons!” she called back over her shoulder. “In the crates.”
Denzel and Smithy both looked around for crates, then realised they were sitting on them. Denzel yanked open the lid of the box he’d been perched on. There was something that looked worryingly like a child’s ray-gun toy, a pair of chain-mail gloves with little screens mounted on each wrist, and something that looked like a radio-controlled drone.
Denzel glanced outside at the house-sized monster shark chasing them, then reluctantly picked up the tiny ray gun.
“Here, Denzel, what would you rather, right?” Smithy asked.
Denzel shook his head. “Not now, Smithy.”
“No, but—”
“I said not now, Smithy! Big shark. Currently chasing us. Remember?”
Denzel took aim with his gun. He squeezed the trigger. The gun made a sort of bloop sound and a tiny red pellet flew five metres, then dropped to the ground and vanished into the fog.
“Well, that’s just great,” said Denzel, then he yelped as a stream of crackling energy erupted from right behind him, punched a hole in the mist and struck the shark right on its snout. The monster banked sharply right, smashed into a row of parked cars, which all flipped over, then rejoined the chase.
Denzel turned to find Smithy holding a device that was roughly the length of a golf umbrella. Plastic tubes ran along the sides of it, with colourful liquid burbling inside each one. Something a bit like a funnel was attached to the end. “Like I was saying,” said Smithy. “What would you rather, right? That tiny ray gun of yours?” He gestured down to a second umbrella-sized device on the floor between them. “Or one of these?”
“What is it?” Denzel asked.
“They’re Dephantomisers,” Weinberg shouted from the front seat, twisting the wheel to avoid an abandoned car that appeared in the fog ahead.
“What’s a Dephantomiser when it’s at home?” Denzel wondered.
Smithy shrugged. “Dunno,” he admitted, then he grinned. “But I have a feeling it’s going to be fun to find out.”
Snatching the device up, Denzel rested the butt of it against his hip. “OK,” he said, “how do I make it—”
The liquid in the tubes burbled and a blast of energy spat from the end of the weapon, just as one of the doors flapped closed. The door exploded outwards with a screech of twisting metal. It tumbled off through the fog, and seemed to pass straight through the chasing shark. Either that, or the shark ate it. It was hard to be sure, from that distance.
Denzel jumped in fright, arcing the blast upwards. It carved a half-metre-long slice through the roof before Denzel had the sense to take his finger off the trigger. Breathing heavily, and trembling slightly, he turned to find Smithy watching him.
“Yeah,” said Smithy. “Like that.”
“What the hell are you doing?” Weinberg demanded. She spun the wheel and Denzel was slammed into the side of the van, then Smithy was slammed into the side of Denzel. Denzel’s weapon went off again. A rainbow-coloured beam of energy punched through the empty passenger seat up front, and the windscreen exploded out of its frame.
“Argh! Be careful!” Weinberg screamed.
“Sorry!” said Denzel.
He and Smithy tucked themselves in between the seats and the crates. Weinberg’s driving was throwing them around all over the place, and Denzel hoped the heavy boxes would stop him and Smithy falling out next time she skidded around a corner.
They both rested their elbows on the crate lids and took aim with the Dephantomisers. The shark was speeding through the fog towards them. It was too wide for the street, but its ghostly body passed effortlessly through the buildings on either side. Most of the time, at least. Occasionally, usually on a bend, it would slam into a building, or knock over a street light, or nudge aside cars, but then it would become like vapour again, and go back to phasing through everything in its path.
“What will you give me if I can hit it in the eye?” Smithy asked.
“A million dollars,” said Denzel.
Smithy’s head turned sharply. “Seriously?”
“No,” said Denzel. “I’ll give you … some enthusiastic applause. How about that?”
“Deal,” said Smithy. He squeezed the trigger. Energy crackled. A parked motorbike exploded, taking out two other bikes on either side.
“This time,” said Smithy. He opened fire again. A delivery truck went up in flames.
“No, wait, this time.”
A street light was sliced in two.
“This time.”
A fire hydrant erupted, spraying water into the sky.
“Just stop shooting!” said Denzel. “There’ll be nothing of the city left.”
Smithy leaned back from the gun’s sights. “Oh, wait, hang on. I had the wrong eye closed,” he said. “OK, definitely this time.”
He took aim at the oncoming shark. He squeezed the trigger, just as Weinberg sent the van into a spinning skid.
The energy blast tore across the entire bottom floor of a derelict dockside building. Bricks and boarded-up windows disintegrated. Denzel and Smithy both watched, eyes wide, mouths hanging open, as the whole building shifted on its unstable base and began to topple.
“F-faster!” Denzel yelped.
Weinberg gripped the wheel. “Is the shark catching up?”
Denzel swallowed. “If by ‘shark’ you mean ‘eight-storey building’, then yes.”
“That wasn’t my fault,” Smithy insisted, but then anything else he said was drowned out by the sound of an eight-storey building becoming a one-storey pile of rubble. It was, Denzel reckoned, one of the loudest things he’d ever heard. It was like a load of explosions had got together and were all trying to outdo one another.
Dust and smoke billowed into the air and rolled along the street after the speeding van, mingling with the green fog. Several car alarms screamed, then were suddenly silenced as debris smashed down on the vehicles, covering them completely.
“Can you see it?” Weinberg shouted.
“Yeah, it’s all over the road,” said Smithy. “But, again, totally not my fault.”
“Not the building, the shark!”
Smithy frowned for a moment, then raised his eyebrows high. “Oh. Haha. I completely forgot about that.”
“We’re almost at the Brooklyn Bridge,” Weinberg announced, although that didn’t really mean much to Denzel or Smithy.
“Great!” Den
zel said. He wasn’t sure if it was great or not, but he felt he should probably say something.
He peered through the mist and the dust. The mound of rubble was only just visible now, and fading rapidly. The shark, however, was nowhere to be seen. Could the falling building have stopped it? Was the shark pinned under all that debris, unable to get free?
“Can’t see it,” Denzel said. “I think it might be—”
“Brace, brace, brace!” Weinberg screamed.
The shark emerged from a side street and drove its snout into the side of the van, sending the vehicle into a violent roll. Denzel and Smithy hit the ceiling, then the floor, then the walls, tumbling around as the van flipped across the tarmac.
There was a sudden bang that flung them against the back of the seats, and then they dropped on to the ceiling, which – for reasons Denzel was too dazed to figure out – was beneath them.
“Denzel?” said Smithy. He, unlike Denzel and Weinberg, was completely unhurt. One of the many advantages of being a ghost was that it was very difficult to actually be harmed, on account of already being dead.
Denzel groaned and fluttered open his eyelids. His whole body ached, but it was a sort of “warning ache” that suggested much worse was going to come in the next few minutes, once his brain had fully taken stock of the damage.
The first thing Denzel saw was Smithy’s face, leaning sideways into his field of vision with an expression of concern.
The second thing he saw was the shark. It approached slowly through the fog, its tail flicking lazily, like it knew its prey was no longer going anywhere.
“The Dephantomisers?” Denzel managed to wheeze.
“I think they fell out,” Smithy told him.
With a groan of effort, Denzel managed to raise himself on to his knees. Glass crunched under him as he struggled on to his feet.
“Guys, you need to go,” Weinberg coughed. She was still in her chair, hanging upside down. There was a cut on her head, and a bruise already starting to bloom on her chin. She hissed in pain as she pulled her virtual-reality-style headset over her eyes.
“We’ll get you out,” Denzel told her.
“No time,” said Weinberg. She adjusted a dial on the side of the visor. “Hold on to your—”
Denzel felt a sensation like he was suddenly falling. He looked down, but where there should have been the van ceiling, he saw only blackness. His feet stretched out, swirling into tiny specks, as if his entire body were being reduced to ash.
No, not ash, he realised. Atoms.
And then, with a thump, Denzel and Smithy landed on the discarded pizza boxes back in the Empire State Building headquarters.
Grabbing the table, Denzel heaved himself back to his feet. The room was in near darkness, aside from the eerie red glow of Kong’s gemstone.
“Weinberg?” Denzel yelped. He spun on the spot, looking upwards in the hope of seeing the Vulteron girl come plunging out of thin air, just like they had. No such luck. She hadn’t followed them, which meant…
Actually, Denzel didn’t want to think about what it meant. The shark had been close. Weinberg had been stuck in her seat, the van’s doors crushing in around her.
“What do we do?” Denzel asked, turning to Smithy. He found him halfway through a slice of day-old pizza. “Ugh! What are you doing?”
“Eating,” said Smithy. “Shame to let it go to waste.”
Denzel grabbed Smithy by the arm and pulled him towards the door. “Come on, we need to go back for her, or get help, or … something!”
Throwing open the door, Denzel barged through into the larger basement area, then gasped when he saw a figure lurking in the shadows. With a yelp of fright, he ducked, dragging Smithy with him, just as a bolt of sizzling energy streaked across the room and hit the doorframe with a bang and a flash of blinding white.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa, Martinez, stop! It’s us!” Denzel cried.
Across the room, Martinez stepped from the shadows. He kept his hands raised, like he might fire off another bolt of magic at any second. They were shaking, Denzel noticed, and his face was almost as pale as Smithy’s.
“D-Denzel?”
Smithy leaned out from behind Denzel’s back. “And me,” he said, taking another bite of the stale pizza base. “Hang on. Weren’t you eaten by a massive shark?”
Martinez shook his head slowly. “Recall spell,” he said. “Brought me back here.” He peered past them, into the King Kong storage room. “Where’s Weinberg?”
“We, uh, we don’t know,” Denzel admitted. “The van, it was flipped, and then she teleported us here. We need to go and help her.”
“Are you nuts?” Martinez gasped. “We can’t go back out there.”
Denzel blinked in surprise. “What? But Weinberg’s out there somewhere. She needs our help.”
“Also, massive ghost shark,” said Smithy. “Which is probably part of your job description.”
“We can’t just leave her out there. We can’t just leave anyone out there with that thing,” Denzel protested.
“Oh, and what do you suggest we do, huh?” said Martinez, finally lowering his hands. “How do you suggest we fix this?”
“Well, I mean, I don’t know, do I?” said Denzel. “You’re the experienced one. We’re just… Well, I don’t know what we are, exactly.”
“Loveable idiots,” said Smithy.
Denzel hesitated. “Well, I was going to say ‘trainees’.”
Martinez laughed. It was a dry, hoarse sort of laugh with zero humour in it. “‘Experienced’. Me? You think?” he said. “You know how many ghosts – actual real, genuine ghosts – I’ve seen since finishing training?”
“Three hundred and six,” Smithy guessed. “Wait, no. Three hundred and seven.”
“One,” said Martinez. “One. And do you know how many of those weren’t a giant ghost shark? None.”
Denzel did the maths in his head. It took him a little longer than usual but he put that down to the number of knocks his skull had recently taken.
“So that was the first ghost you’ve ever seen?!” he said. “Seriously?”
“Yep.”
Denzel jabbed a thumb back in Smithy’s direction. They both raised their eyebrows.
“What? Oh. Yes. Well … he doesn’t count.” Martinez said.
“Yes I do!” said Smithy. “I’ll give you that I struggle with multiplication, and don’t even get me started on long division, but I can definitely count.”
Martinez shook his head. “No, I mean… Forget it. The point still stands. We’re out of our depth here. We need to call in help from the other chapters. There’s one in Canada. They could assist.”
That Denzel did agree with. If Martinez was going to turn out to be completely useless – and that was looking pretty likely – getting more Spectre Collectors in to help made sense.
“OK, do it,” Denzel said.
Martinez fiddled with one of his rings and looked down at his feet. “Can’t. The fog is interfering with the signals. Tech and magic – I can’t get a message out.” He looked up. “I thought we could take a car and drive out of the city. Once we’re far enough, we could call for help then.”
“You mean run away?” said Denzel.
“No! I mean beat a strategic retreat and consolidate our armies,” said Martinez. “It’s good strategy. You saw that thing! I mean, I only caught a glimpse but I don’t even think it was a shark. I think it was a Megalodon. As in a prehistoric shark. As in the largest predator that ever lived. How are we supposed to fight that?”
Denzel held Martinez’s gaze for several seconds. Martinez, eventually, looked away.
“Smithy?” he said.
“Ymmf?” said Smithy through a mouthful of pizza.
“Find us some weapons. We’re going back out there.”
“Coming right up!” said Smithy. He set off searching for something to fight the shark with, leaving Martinez and Denzel alone. Martinez kept his eyes on the floor, not meeting Denzel’s
gaze.
“I told Weinberg I thought you were a coward,” Denzel said. He saw the look of shame on Martinez’s face and immediately felt guilty. “You know what she said? She said you get it together when it counts.”
Pointing upwards, Denzel continued. “Now. Now is when it counts.”
“I … I can’t,” Martinez whispered.
An uncomfortable silence fell, and was eventually broken by Smithy’s return. “I could only find these,” he said.
Denzel turned to his friend. He stared at him for quite a long time, not quite sure how to react.
Smithy looked like he’d raided a toy shop, with a quick stop off at an office supplies store on the way back. In one hand he held something that looked like a small standing lamp wrapped in wires, while in the other he clutched what might have been an alien death ray, but could equally have been one of those overpriced water guns that can soak a target from thirty metres away.
There were six, seven … no, eight smaller devices tucked into his trousers and socks, or hanging out of his pockets. One of these looked like the ray-gun pistol Denzel had picked up earlier. A few others looked like variations on the first, while at least one, Denzel reckoned, might well have been a banana.
Slung over Smithy’s shoulder was something that looked not unlike a bazooka, with lights flashing along the side. A couple of walkie-talkies were clipped on to his belt, and he’d also found a strip of red cloth, which he’d taken the time to tie around his head like a headband.
“I thought you were going to get us weapons?” Denzel said, once he’d finished looking his friend up and down.
“I did. I got these,” said Smithy. He waggled the thing that was a bit like a lamp. “This is an Ecto-Thurmoriser. So the box said, anyway.”
“What does it do?”
Smithy shrugged. “Thurmorises stuff, probably.”
Denzel frowned. “And what does that involve?”
“Dunno,” Smithy admitted. He nodded towards the lift. “Let’s go and find out.”
Drawing in a deep breath, Denzel nodded. “You’re right. Let’s do it.”
A New York Nightmare! Page 9