"Come on!" she shouted, hoping to rouse him. He blinked furiously and managed to keep pace alongside her.
Allison reached the exit and slammed her shoulder against the metal door. It didn't budge. She drew back the locks and lugged it open. Sunlight flooded into the corridor. Fresh air filled Lilian's lungs, giving her a surge of manic energy. She ran down the hall, pulling Ben along behind her and outside.
Allison closed the door, leaning against it, breathing heavily.
"We made it," Lilian gasped. "I thought for sure we were dead."
Ben doubled over, planted his hands on his knees and spat on the pavement. He rose again, his eyes going wide. His mouth dropped open. He was looking past her.
Lilian turned. What she saw made her wish they'd stayed on the other side of the door.
The street was littered with bodies, at least a dozen, possibly more. A woman lay against the curb in front of them, her face a mass of flesh and gore ground into the pavement, as if something had thrown her from a great distance. To their left, a teen with a blond rattail and a wispy mustache had been shoved into the broken plastic mouth of a trash can. His dazed blue eyes stared out at them, his upper lip curled upward in an Elvis sneer. A toddler lay beside her upturned stroller. The child's head had been torn from her body—with its Dora the Explorer T-shirt—and lay at the foot of a man sprawled in the middle of the street, his shirt and pants torn to shreds, the flesh beneath covered in raised slashes oozing blood. Black smoke billowed against the clear blue sky from buildings in the distance. Emergency alarms wailed. Screams rose and fell.
Lilian saw all of this in a single glance. The horror of it tattooed itself onto her retinas. She turned away only to witness more death: a man impaled through the stomach near the top of an ESP pole glistening with his blood; a teenage girl strangled to death by her own hair, green eyes bulging from her purple face; a middle-aged man with his AR headset protruding from his jugular, lying in a congealing pool of gore.
She turned to Ben, trying to focus on his face, but even in this limited view there were more sickening sights. It was no longer possible to avoid death. When she shut her eyes against it, she could still hear the tormented wails of the dying, the chaotic jangle of metal and glass, the dull thudding explosions.
We'll never get out of here alive, she thought.
Ben grabbed her by the shoulders and looked her dead in the eye. "We have to go," he said. "Before it's too late."
It was already too late. There was no way she'd bounce back from a trauma like this. She didn't need Allison's professional opinion to confirm it. A switch inside of her mind had flicked. She felt it as sharply as a broken bone or cut flesh. If they ever made it out of here alive, she would never be the same.
The world would never be the same.
Lilian remembered reading somewhere on the internet there were fifteen dead people to each person currently alive on earth. Even if the math was wrong, the dead far outnumbered the living. She had no idea how the Recurrence Field technology worked. Likely Garrote's virus could only affect ghosts contained inside the park, within the area covered by Sara Jane's invention and the programmer's code. She had no reason to believe otherwise. But she couldn't help wonder what would happen if that code was somehow uploaded to the internet, by satellite or WiFi or some other means. If the ghosts were somehow able to escape the Recurrence Field… and if Garrote's virus continued to replicate itself, stretching out across the globe, absorbing ghost after ghost after ghost… what would become of the world?
As if sensing her thoughts, Ben said, "The world doesn't belong to us anymore. It's theirs now. A world full of ghosts."
SURVIVAL INSTINCT
SHOCK KEPT THEM quiet, lost in their own fearful thoughts while they hurried along the promenade, skirting dead bodies and running for cover when sounds of violence erupted nearby. Allison had attempted to initiate light conversation early on, simply to alleviate the tension, but Lilian had snapped at her and she hadn't tried again.
Ben forged on ahead of the others, fighting an overwhelming urge to turn around and finish what he'd started. Rex Garrote was here, he was sure of it now. Alive or dead, the writer had grown more powerful than ever before, amassing a legion of ghosts with his virus. It was just like Shōki, one of Garrote's first novels, loosely based on a figure from Chinese folklore called Chung Kwei (although Garrote's title was taken from a similar Japanese myth), about a man who becomes the literal "king of the ghosts," able to lead the spirits of the dead as an army to take over the world. It was one of Garrote's few dystopian novels and it hadn't been very well received. Critics had called it far-fetched. Most readers had expected a continuation of the House series. It was his first failure both critically and commercially. In later interviews he'd refused to even talk about it.
In the book, the main character lays waste to human civilization, claiming that the living destroyed the planet and the damage could only be repaired by killing everyone. It was a dark but overly complicated narrative written in a time when America was obsessed with both Japanese culture and environmentalism. When the Shōki was the last human alive, he called himself "the last living ghost," a phrase which also opens the novel.
The more Ben thought about it the more he came to believe this must have been Garrote's plan from the very beginning. To have killed himself in the most brutal method imaginable would have left a "nuclear meltdown" for Sara Jane's Recurrence Field to pick up. But she'd claimed that her team had never seen Garrote's dead energy in that house. It struck Ben that Garrote likely hadn't wanted to be seen.
He needed to stay hidden. Nobody would suspect him, nobody could have imagined something like this could ever happen. Except Garrote. He wants to control an army of ghosts. To be the Shōki. Rule the world, just like in his book. Three hundred ghosts all controlled by the world's most sadistic horror writer. Who knows what he'll do with them if they escape—
The alarms stopped suddenly, leaving a moment of eerie quiet. From the distance Ben heard a man scream, long and wavering, as if he was dying on a runaway roller coaster. Ben hadn't realized until just then that the sounds of carnage had mostly died off. Every so often they would hear a scream or a cry for help, then a long period of silence would follow during which, aside from the bodies littering the street, he could almost imagine the entire park had long been abandoned. It had been several minutes since the last incident.
The scream came again, rising tremulously. Even from a distance, it chilled him. Writhing, he thought. In Rex Garrote books the dying were always writhing. Garrote had held a special knowledge of death most genre writers lacked. He'd watched friends die during the Vietnam War, had held dying men in his arms. Hearing that awful scream, Ben could almost picture the man writhing as he died, his limbs and facial features contorted, his fingers twisted into rigid claws.
At the end of a long, lush green hedge belonging to an exhibit called Crane Gardens[xiv], they took another right turn around the Starlight Arcade[xv]. The sound of old school video games emanated from within, tempting Ben with their pings and blips and crunchy-sounding 8-bit explosions. Ben recognized sounds from several games: Pac-Man's endless chomping, the evil laughter from the Acolytes of Azathoth, Zeus's command of "Rise from your grave," in Altered Beast.
As the arcade's noise faded away the writhing scream grew louder. He sounded much closer now.
Lilian said, "That sounds really painful."
Ben agreed with a nod. He knew if he allowed himself to speak all of his fears would come flooding out and he wouldn't be able to stop them. Since they'd fled the control center, he'd been acutely aware of Allison's scrutinizing gaze toward them and he'd made a conscious effort to appear normal. The screaming man was voicing Ben's own feelings of fear and confusion and constraint. It kept his sanity from leaping out of his head in a blubber of tears and snot.
"It feels like we've been walking for hours," Allison muttered, gasping with exhaustion.
Ben had lost his map in the escap
e and Lilian had suggested continuing south at every opportunity would be the best route back to the entrance. He trusted her judgment and had led them south. Her skill with directions had helped them escape hundreds of zombie invasions and monster hordes during their years of gaming together. She'd figured Demont had driven them about a third of the way back to the entrance already, meaning they would need to cover that distance twice more. They'd been forced to take several detours to avoid chaos and violence, but even still they'd only been walking for seventeen minutes according to Ben's watch. He was amazed they had lasted this long.
The street circled around a run-down three-story farmhouse. Its front porch had collapsed, a mess of broken, splintered wood blocking the entrance. Behind it an old gray windmill turned lazily in the afternoon breeze. Beside the house was an animal enclosure filled with loose hay. Like all of the other exhibits, the farm was surrounded by inoperable ESP poles. The sign out front said, Dollop Homestead[xvi], 1947—The Making of a Monster.
The screams arose from the animal pen, where the screamer himself had been impaled on a pipe sticking up from the ground.
As they approached the fence Ben's vision seemed to double. Now it looked like two men had been impaled on the same pole, wearing identical blue track suits with white stripes down the limbs. Twins who dressed alike. Both had landed so it looked like they were squatting on the pipe with its jagged end rising from their screaming mouths.
Ben lowered the glasses and the screaming man disappeared, leaving just his dead identical twin speared from rectum to mouth by the rusty pipe. They weren't twins at all but the same man. The screamer was the impaled man's ghost, wailing and yes, writhing in desperation as he struggled to escape his own corpse.
"The blood's still dripping," Ben said. "He just died. He was one of us."
"That poor man," Allison said. Without another word she hopped the fence, huffing from the effort.
"Will that happen to us?" Lilian asked, as Allison made her cautious approach.
"Don't say that, Lil," Ben said, though he knew she was likely right. If they didn't get out of here soon, they would all die at the hands of the exhibits, then they too would become a part of Ghostland, a part of Garrote's ghost army. Three hundred ghosts, with more dead added by the minute. He didn't like the odds.
When she turned to him, he saw any semblance of hope had drained from her eyes. The eyelids themselves looked heavy, her gaze dulled, tired and dazed.
Post-traumatic stress, he thought. We're all suffering from it now, every single one of us.
"We're gonna make it out of here, okay?" he said. "The world still belongs to us, to the living. They haven't beaten us yet."
He thought but didn't say, We don't have a chance in Hell
Lilian turned away from him and headed for the fence. He followed. As they approached, Allison was already speaking to the dead man, calmly and assuredly.
"It's okay," she was saying. "I know this must be painful for you. Try to breathe."
Try to breathe, Ben thought. That's a weird thing to say to a dead man.
He wasn't even sure the ghost had heard her. The ghost just kept screaming, his gaze flitting birdlike between the three of them, like a caged and beaten animal. Ben wondered what the ghost saw when he looked at them. Were they monsters to him? Was that why the other ghosts had attacked—because they'd felt threatened?
"He's afraid of us," Lilian said, as if reading Ben's mind.
"We're not going to hurt you," Allison told the dead man. "We only want to help."
Cautiously, she crouched beside the man, avoiding the pool of blood widening around his feet on the straw-littered pavement. She laid a hand on his head and softly, slowly ran her fingers through his shaggy brown hair. The ghost flinched as though he felt the sensation and he flicked his bloodshot gaze toward her. His screams became intermittent, halfhearted, like a mollified baby, until they finally stopped altogether.
"There," Allison said, smiling. "Now we can talk. My name is Allison. This is Lilian and Ben. Could you tell us your name?"
The ghost looked from Allison to Lilian to Ben and back, despair and confusion in his eyes. His mouth opened wide and he howled once more, struggling against his physical body, his semi-translucent, ectoplasmic form pulling like warm taffy. The motion left trails in the air surrounding him, the way drug hallucinations looked in movies and TV.
Allison stroked the man's hair. The ghost allowed his mouth to close, then immediately opened it again. Black blood spewed from his lips and splattered on the pavement between his sneakers, vanishing when it struck the ground. He uttered a single raspy breath—a sound Garrote might have called a "death rattle" in one of his books—and followed it with a single word: "—dead—" It sounded like a question.
"Yes," Allison said gravely. "I'm afraid so."
The ghost tried to look back at himself, at the pipe speared through his torso and throat. His gaze settled on her shoe, which had streaked a print in the mess of blood and straw. He seemed to note this without emotion. Then he peered around in sudden terror. "Ghosts—high up—did you—see them?" The echo of his voice seemed to come before the words instead of after them. It was a strange effect that sent another chill up Ben's spine.
Allison said, "Is that what did this to you?"
The ghost nodded, his head moving in slow motion, trailing faint echoes. It was disorienting and Ben found it difficult to look at him, but he didn't want to turn away. He worried the friendly ghost would turn on them if he did, the way it would have in a Rex Garrote book, becoming suddenly vicious and tearing them to pieces.
"Running," the ghost said in its strange, stunted voice. "Screaming—everywhere—flying—"
"It's okay," Allison said soothingly, stroking his head. "It's over now. Whatever it is, it can't hurt you anymore."
Feebly, the ghost struggled against his corpse.
"Here. Take my hand." Allison raised her hand from the dead man's head and held both of them to his ghost, palms up. He looked at her hands and back to her eyes fearfully. Ben couldn't decide if the man didn't trust her or if he was afraid of what might happen now that he had a real chance of escaping his body. He thought he might feel terrified by the prospect himself.
"It's okay. You can trust me. I only want to help."
As the ghost peeled his ethereal hand away from his dead flesh, the wrists and fingers dripped like wet paint, splashing on the ground and vanishing. The ghost reached out slowly, warily toward Allison, as if he was afraid touching her might make him disappear. When their hands met his fingers slipped right through hers. Allison's eyes went wide, but not in fear. She was amazed.
"I feel it," she gasped.
The ghost flicked out his wrists suddenly and snatched her hands. Ben sucked in a nervous breath, certain this was the end for Allison, that the ghost would drag her to the ground and strangle her, break her bones, slit her throat, and there would be nothing they could do to help her. But the ghost merely looked at their entwined hands with astonishment.
Ben sensed an intimacy to the experience and despite feeling a twinge of embarrassment, as if he'd walked in on the two of them having sex, he found he couldn't look away. This was something no one had ever seen or would likely ever see again: a ghost leaving its body, shedding its corporeal self. A birth in reverse.
After all the death they'd witnessed in the last half hour, he was surprised to feel something close to joy, although he knew that soon the Garrote code would gobble up all the ghosts, like Pac-Man on power-ups, absorbing this man's essence as it had the others. It was only a matter of time for all of them, but this man's time was shorter.
Allison slowly got to her feet, drawing the ghost out of his body. The man moaned in pain, his limbs dripping a translucent ectoplasmic substance onto his corpse until finally he hovered about an inch above the ground, a fully freed, full-bodied phantom.
"Thank you," the ghost said. His voice still had that strange pre-echo quality but the ghost himself appeared
more solid now, as if being free of his physical self had made him more real. Fear widened his bloodshot eyes suddenly, and the ghost turned to look behind himself. "Be careful," he whispered. His voice had lost its echo. "He's coming for you."
"Who?" Lilian asked, looking past him, toward the collapsed porch and the boarded-up windows.
"The writer," the ghost said. "He sees through their eyes. It's so red…" He shuddered and his face flickered, a shadow of something dark momentarily flashing over his features. Was it Garrote? Ben didn't know, but they would have to get away from him soon. They wouldn't be safe around him much longer.
"I can feel him," the ghost said. "He's trying to get inside of me."
"Can you fight him off?" Lilian asked.
The ghost nodded. "I don't know for how much longer. Thank you for freeing me. I have to go before—" He scowled, looking down at his own hands. He seemed confused by them, as if they belonged to someone else. "I don't want to hurt you," he said.
Allison gestured with a nod. "Go. Stay safe."
The ghost smiled and thanked her again. He turned and hovered toward the far edge of the fence, overjoyed to have found his freedom, and Ben wondered what it might feel like: to escape the burden of his body, to never have to worry about overexerting himself, to travel anywhere and do just about anything he wanted, to live without the specter of death constantly hanging over his head. He thought it would be incredibly freeing, so long as he wasn't trapped within Ghostland's walls.
"'He sees through their eyes,'" Lilian repeated with a melodramatic shiver. "Well, I'll never sleep again."
"Wasn't that thrilling, though?" Allison held out her hands to them, marveling at something Ben couldn't see. "I can still feel his touch on my skin."
Ben thought to tell her not to get the pottery wheel ready just yet, but the ghost's warning echoed darkly through his mind. Did Garrote get inside of me that day? Is that why I feel so connected to that house, why I felt such a strong urge to come here today? Is Garrote seeing through my eyes, too? Manipulating me like he's been manipulating his ghosts?
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