Ghostland

by Duncan Ralston

  "Let's get out of here!" Lilian shouted above the noise.

  As the wave of dead energies flooded down the mountain of rubble, over the last remnants of Garrote House—making Ben think of ants, of lava, their chanting and cheering and howling and yammering melding together into an ocean of sound—Ben chased Lilian across the divide between the coming horde and the possibility of escape, of freedom beyond the hatch, beyond the wall. His limbs felt loose and rubbery, like someone else was piloting them. Numb. He was tired. All he wanted now was to get out of here, to go home, and take a long, well-deserved nap.

  They reached the alcove surrounding the hatch. Still running full-tilt, their palms slapped against the wall, slowing their momentum, preventing them from crashing headlong into it. Hot white light shone down on them. They were completely out in the open now, completely vulnerable.

  He turned to look. The dead had filled the—Arena, he thought—concrete space from side to side. An endless sea of faces, shimmering in the dim light. And suddenly the wave stopped surging forward. The ghosts hovered motionless, maybe fifty feet from where Ben and Lilian stood under the light above the door.

  "Now what?" Lilian said, shouting to be heard over the noise. The door looked like something that belonged on a spaceship, with rounded edges, a tight seal around it, and a wheel-lock in the middle. She was looking at the keypad beside it, a digital readout with keys lighted green, consternation crinkling her brow. The code wasn't numerical. The tiny black print seemed to be from some symbol-based language, but Ben couldn't decipher any of it: it could have been Chinese characters as easily as ancient Sumerian. As he looked at the images they all blurred together. He felt the crushing weight of desperation in his heart.

  Lilian thrust her fists against the door, crying out for help. Ben wished he could have saved them. But it was too late. The metal sounded incredibly thick. Likely soundproof. Anyone on the other side might hear a dull thud, a muffled sound something like a cry. Without a headset, they wouldn't hear the stadium-sized roar of Garrote's army.

  All was lost.

  He turned to face the ghosts, embracing his impending death. In this place of sudden peace, he spotted familiar faces among the surging crowd. There were Niko and Leonard, side by side at the front of the charge, their eyes as blank and emotionless as Morton Welles's and the nun's, several feet deeper into the throng. There was the dog, Freddie, and Harrison the programmer—who hadn't survived, had clearly just been used by Garrote to get what he wanted—there were Sara Jane Amblin and Dr. Death, there was the Ice Cream Man, who had finally recovered his white paper hat, and Detective Stan Beadle very near to him, and a cowboy studded with arrows, and the boy from the ticket booth. The Japanese teenagers all huddled together. The cigar-chomping gangster. The doll on the tricycle. The Behemoth. Ben saw them all, like an instant replay of his last day on earth.

  Darkness fell over the ghosts as some massive thing rose above the pit in the earth. First came swirls and tangles of dark brown tinged with gray, followed by a peach-orange landscape of ridges and small black craters. As two scrubby chestnut bushes appeared over the chasm, the odd-colored terrain furrowed between them, Ben suddenly realized what it was—and all of the fear he'd ever experienced in his entire life paled in comparison to what he felt now.

  Rex Garrote towered over them, the Shōki himself, the last living ghost peering over the great heap of rubble that used to be his home. He was at least one-hundred feet tall and completely free of the limitations of his body—All thanks to me, Ben thought miserably. He was a sadistic general huddled over his troops, a demented puppet master, a titan waging war with human toys. Worse, he was pissed.

  "Oh, that's not good," Lilian said.

  The writer grinned, each of his teeth as tall as his ghosts.

  In his terror Ben experienced a rare moment of complete clarity, the kind of epiphany that comes only a handful of times in a lifetime, if at all. He remembered suddenly what had been troubling him and knew exactly what they had to do next.

  "Lilian," he said.

  "What?" She was distracted, still pounding on the door, weaker with every strike. She paused briefly to look at him, then continued the futile gesture.

  "If they've come down here," he said, "that means they can't get through the wall. Garrote can't shut down the Recurrence Field on his own. He still needs us to open the door!"

  "What are you saying?"

  "I'm saying we have to give up, Lilian. It's the only way to stop him. If we let him out, he won't stop until everyone is dead. Our families. Your friends. Everyone in Duck Falls. In America. The whole world."

  Anguish made her face quiver. "Ben…"

  "I know." He gripped her shoulder. "I know how it sounds. But it's the only way—"

  "You don't know that. He could lose his power out there."

  "I wish we could be sure of that. But we can't take that risk, Lilian. We just can't."

  She looked out at Garrote's army, at the monstrous man who'd killed so many in such a short span of time, who'd infected them all with his mind, with strings of code, ones and zeroes. They would kill for him. They would kill and kill until nothing good was left in this world.

  "He'll kill both of us, Ben."

  "I dunno," Ben said. He was grinning, but the fear in his eyes was clear. "We just have to survive long enough to trigger the next cutscene."

  "The next cutscene," she said.

  She remembered the words that had flashed across the screen all those years ago when Ben died: Second Player Has Disconnected. Was that all death was? A flash of pain and then snap—the system shuts down? It was difficult to think of all the death she'd seen today as a switch flicking from On to Off. But looking at it this way almost seemed to make it easier.

  Because the switch turned both ways, didn't it?

  What was Off could be On again.

  If nothing else, all of this ridiculously expensive carnival-ride technology proved that.

  As Lilian's eyes narrowed to slits, Ben thought he saw the shift in them—from desperate defeat to fierce determination—and he felt incredibly proud of her bravery. The choice was easy for him. He was likely to die here anyway. But Lilian had a bright future ahead of her. She had survived so many horrors today and now he was asking her to let go, to cast her instinct for survival aside on a hunch.

  "Okay," she said. "You know, my parents always told me I'd do big things with my life. I bet they never thought I'd save the world."

  Ben grinned again, a little less anxiously. "When people tell the story about what happened here," he said, "I hope they get it right."

  Lilian stripped the keeper glove off her right hand and held it out to him. Somehow, he managed to raise his hand despite the heavy blanket of numbness weighting him down, and he clasped his fingers around hers.

  "You're the best friend I ever had, Ben. I really do love you."

  "I love you too, Lilian."

  She smiled through standing tears, a smile both remarkably sad and infinitely happy. "You can call me Lil," she said.

  He smiled back, squeezing her hand tighter, considering how fortunate he'd been to have shared even a small piece of his life with her. They pulled in closer together, shoulder to shoulder, blocking the door. They were partners. Partners forever.

  And partners never gave up on each other.

  With a flick of his enormous wrist, Rex Garrote sent the first wave of ghosts hurtling toward them.

  EPILOGUE:

  PLEASE PLAY AGAIN

  Six months later.

  LILIAN PRACTICALLY CARRIED him through the first few levels of Infinite Zombie 4K.

  Blake wasn't anywhere near as good a gaming partner as Ben but he took instructions well and didn't whine like Ben sometimes did while getting his ass fed to him by a buttload of hungry zombies. Lilian thought Blake was cute and he had the approval of all her new friends at Stanford, a definite bonus.

  They'd met at a team-building event during Frosh Week—in a locked-room myste
ry, of all things—and had clicked almost immediately. They both came from small towns, both enjoyed video games and horror movies and both had a savage, sarcastic sense of humor. Early in their relationship, Blake had told her he would have been at Ghostland on opening day if his mother's car hadn't broken down that morning. When she'd gone quiet on the subject, he hadn't pressed her. He'd been patient and understanding. He'd told her if she ever wanted to open up about that day, he would be there for her. And if she never wanted to talk about it that was okay too.

  It had only been five months since what the news had called "the Ghostland Disaster" but much of the day's events had already begun to feel like the fading memories of a bad dream. Nearly two-thousand people had lost their lives that day, making it the single biggest tragedy on American soil since 9/11. Lilian had been one of only one-hundred and eight survivors. If the hatch hadn't opened when it had—an event even the police who'd been working on the door with an acetylene torch still couldn't explain, passing off as a "miracle"—she often wondered if anyone would have made it out there alive. If she and Ben hadn't held off the onslaught in those last moments, there might have been no one left to tell the tale—or to tell the tale to.

  For a few weeks all everyone wanted to talk to her about was what had happened on Ghostland's opening day. Should be dead, they said of her. Sees dead people. By the end of summer, after the funerals and candlelight vigils and having to refuse dozens of interview requests—claiming the events had been a blur, that in the trauma of the day, of losing people she cared about, she remembered very little—eventually people had stopped asking. There were others willing, often eager, to tell their story of survival, including Miss Delyse, a former TV psychic who had managed to hide in the tram car ride with her eight-year-old granddaughter until help had arrived. And the Ghost Brothers were more than happy for the extra attention. There were rumors they might be planning a "Return to Ghostland" special for the new year.

  In truth, Lilian remembered everything.

  Some nights she still woke in a cold sweat, feeling cold, dead hands crawling all over her, the hair on her arms and the back of her neck standing as if from the static electricity of the keeper suit. Other nights she lay awake in the near-dark of her dorm room trying to conjure the faces of friends she'd made and lost that day.

  Ben had come to her during one of these nights, while the tinny, bass-less beat of her dormmate Abigail's music trickled out from oversized headphones and Lilian's alarm clock flashed 12:00 as if the power had just gone out.

  When she'd opened her eyes, Ben had been standing at the foot of her bed, as though her dream had summoned him. His form had wavered slightly—it must have been difficult for him to hold, like the weak signal from the old rabbit ears they used to have on the basement TV—and she'd been able to see the clock through his waist. But he'd been unmistakably there, wearing the same clothes he'd died in, even after she'd blinked and rubbed her eyes to be sure she wasn't seeing things.

  She'd sat bolt upright and flicked on the bedside light. Abbie had groaned and rolled over to face her, squinting at the light, asking her what the hell, Lilian. Abigail couldn't see Ben. That much was obvious. But to Lilian he was as real as anything. And when he spoke, she began to sob quietly.

  "I told you I'd haunt your ass," he'd said with a smirk.

  It had taken all of her strength not to leap up from her bed and hug him right there in front of Abigail, her arms encircling thin air in the shape of a boy who would never grow up to be a man.

  "Hey, don't cry," he'd told her. "Not for me. I can go anywhere I want to now. Do anything. I'm freer now than I've ever been."

  She'd broken down then and he'd laid a comforting hand on her shoulder. She swore she could feel it. He'd told her all about his adventures, traveling the world meeting others like himself. When she'd asked him what he meant by like himself he'd said, "Ghosts," and grinned. "You can say it. I won't be offended."

  Blake paused the game and got up from the mattress. He kissed her forehead, cupping the back of her head the way that had always given her goosebumps. "Gotta go, boo. Early class tomorrow."

  "Oh sure, just leave me hanging," she said with a grin.

  Blake smiled his half-awkward half-handsome smile and backed out of the room, nearly bumping into a pack of girls giggling their way down the hall. He pretended to wipe sweat off his forehead at the near-miss.

  "I like him," Ben said once Blake had disappeared around the corner. "Me and the other ghosts don't think he should say 'boo,' though. That's our word."

  "I'm working on it," Lilian said with a smirk. "Wanna finish off this level?"

  "Sure thing, partner." Ben picked up the controller and sat down beside her at the foot of the bed. The bedclothes didn't move, the mattress remained full. Anyone who happened to walk by would have seen Lilian sitting on the edge of her bed with the second controller levitating two feet to her right. But Ben was careful. He seemed to have a sixth sense about these things, and she had only ever been caught talking to him—talking to herself, to an outsider—twice.

  Ben picked up the game right where Blake had left off, the two of them cutting down zombies with the meager weapons they had at their disposal.

  "I don't want to scare you," he said after a while, mashing buttons on the controller, "but he got out."

  "He…?"

  "You know who."

  The swarm of zombies overtook her as she turned to face him, the crawling fear from that day returning, clutching coldly at her heart. "What are we going to do?" she asked, though she was afraid to hear the answer. She couldn't bear to think about him. She thought if she had to face him again, she would surely die.

  "I have to disappear for a while," Ben told her. "When I come back, you need to be ready. We're gonna need your help."

  "We?"

  "The other ghosts and me. What happened at Ghostland wasn't just a disaster." His eyes grew very large—with fear or excitement or both, Lilian couldn't tell. "It was a first strike. Garrote wants a war, Lilian. A war between the bre—" He'd almost said breathers. She knew what his kind called people like her. Many of them held contempt for the living, the breathers. Ben had been trying to change that. "—between the living and the dead," he finished. "I can't let that happen."

  "No," she said, feeling terror pulsing through her veins. But also, something else. She thought it might be a need for vengeance. Somebody had to pay for what happened. The Hedgewood Foundation—Ghostland's parent company—was tangled up in multiple class-action lawsuits and criminal negligence charges, but that had never felt like enough to Lilian nor—according to the news—the families of the deceased.

  Someone had to pay. And as terrified as the prospect of being pulled back into the fray made her, the alternative frightened her more.

  "You can count on me," she said.

  "Who are you talking to?"

  The voice came from the hall, causing Ben to vanish and his controller to drop onto the bedspread with a light thump.

  Lilian turned to look at the girl sneering at her from the hall. She recognized her from the snowboard team and considered a lie—but what would be the point? Soon it wouldn't matter, not if Ben was right and Garrote's first strike became a war.

  "I'm talking to a ghost," she said, challenging the popular girl with a hard look. "You got a problem with that?"

  The girl's upper lip nearly touched her nostrils. She muttered freak under her breath and wandered off.

  "Yeah, I am a freak!" Lilian called after her. "A freak who's gonna save your life despite her better judgement," she muttered to herself, picking up the controller Ben had dropped and placing it beside the console.

  She allowed herself a tiny smile of satisfaction, thinking about how much she'd changed since the day Ben had chased her through the alley after school, only wanting to be her friend again, to get his partner back. How his lust for life had helped her take back her own, and how in death, Ben Laramie had lived more than he ever could have when he
was alive.

  Her smile faltered.

  He got out.

  Cold terror gripped her, made her shiver.

  Rex Garrote was out there, amassing an army large enough to take on the whole world.

  But now there were others who would stand against him. And when the time came, Lilian would be among them.

  She picked up her controller. The fear had subsided. Ready to play again—this time in Hard Mode—Lilian hunkered down in front of the game and pressed START.

  THE END

  A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR

  Ghostland was something of a challenge for me. I started with the simple concept "Jurassic Park but with ghosts instead of dinosaurs," (or "Jurassic Park meets The Shining"), and soon realized I would have to create an entire park, the technology that makes it run and all of its exhibits completely from scratch.

  A summer spent reading Michael Crichton helped to get a better feel for the kind of books that blend science and story seamlessly. Granted, Ghostland is completely fabricated, all pseudoscientific technobabble. But I wanted to give it the same sort of feel of Crichton’s Jurassic Park books, at the very least—a quick-moving story populated with fun characters, offering up just enough of the "scientific" details to make the story feel authentic. Something that could, at least in the universe of the story, "really happen."

  I'm not sure it entirely worked, but I'm no Crichton. He was already at the top of his game when he wrote the first JP book (although in my opinion neither the original nor the sequel quite reach the same level as say, Sphere). And he had a background in medicine. I grew up with an affinity for ghosts and monsters and have spent my adult life in various television tech jobs. I did the best that I could with the tools I have. I can only hope it was enough.

  Originally, I envisioned the breakdown of the park as the work of the Ghosts R People 2 group, which was a sort of Animal Liberation Front for ghosts in those early drafts, concerned with the rights of the theme park's formerly living exhibits. Their act of terrorism (or heroism, depending on how you look at it) was what set the ghosts free. I liked the idea and I also liked many of the characters who populated this version of the story.