A Hundred Billion Ghosts

by DM Sinclair

  “Twenty seconds.”

  Sugar Frootz. He tried to imagine the taste of them. How he wanted them to taste, not how he remembered them. There would be that hint of some kind of fruit flavor, but it would be sealed in an impenetrable armor plating of processed sugar. And that was the beauty of it. That was all he wanted from them.

  He would never taste them.

  Ever.

  Unless… what if he refused the procedure? Could he do that? Margie had said it would mean his ghost would never stabilize. But he’d still have those mortal years in his body, wouldn’t he? He’d disperse at the end. But still, he’d have all those years.

  Don’t be an idiot. You’d really give up living forever just for some Sugar Frootz?

  “Ten seconds,” Margie said.

  “Both of you relax, please,” Roger said. “This will only take a moment.”

  But it wasn’t just Sugar Frootz. It was also Froot Loops, Honey Combs and Lucky Charms, Franken Berry and Frosted Flakes, Cocoa Puffs and those squares with cinnamon he couldn’t remember the name of. He would never taste any of them again.

  But it wasn’t just those.

  It was Everest. He wanted to maybe try Everest again, but he wanted it to be cold. He wanted it to hurt when he got to the top. He wanted his feet to ache and his lungs to scream at him because the air was too thin, and the bitter wind to tear the flesh off his face. Or, almost as good, he wanted to be able to say that he had never climbed Everest because it was way too hard for someone like him.

  But it wasn’t just that.

  It was also Margie. It was that evening spent watching terrible, terrible TV with her. He had felt nothing that night but now that he looked back he felt… something. He wanted to watch trash TV with her again. As often as possible. And if she reached over to touch his arm again he wanted his arm to be there. And when she wasn’t there he wanted to miss her and if it turned out that he was misreading her and her interest in him was entirely professional, he wanted it to hurt a little. Even that would be good in its way.

  Even if it was only fifty or sixty years of those things, he wanted them anyway. Even if it took just five minutes to eat a bowl of Sugar Frootz, and even if it took few years to figure out he would never climb Everest because it really was far too hard, and even if the marathon of House Shopping episodes ended at eleven, and Margie brushing his arm only lasted a fleeting second or two, he still wanted those things. He couldn’t imagine anything his ghost could do for eternity that he might want more.

  But it wasn’t even just all of that.

  It was definitely the Sugar Frootz too. He wanted to try those Sugar Frootz.

  And for that he needed a body for them to be deliciously unhealthy in.

  “Three, two, one…”

  Ryan braced.

  Fight this.

  FORTY-ONE

  Ryan clung onto his body, braced himself in it as though clutching the inside of a lifeboat about to smash into rocks.

  There was a deafening electric crack.

  The spider on his head superheated, and the cylinder filled with searing plasma. Hot bursts of white light surged down Ryan’s entire nervous system, concentrating into knife-points of pain at his fingertips and toes as it crackled out of him. His nose hairs burned down like fuses. He tried to cough but couldn’t open his mouth, so he snorted smoke and ozone.

  The all-too-familiar sensation of the world plunging out from under him took over, and he was in the emptiness again, lost and formless and careening.

  The pain was gone as his body fell away, and the escape from it was profound relief.

  He was fine with his situation. This felt better. Everything was going to be okay. Why had he even considered resisting?

  His body’s face dipped into view below him, and he didn’t recognize it. It was a stranger. It didn’t matter.

  No.

  He locked onto the face. Forced his attention to stay on it, to focus on nothing else. That’s me. Right there.

  He demanded that the world stop spiraling, locked his rotation to match that of his body so he was hovering in place above it. He gathered everything that he consisted of into a pressurized bubble of force.

  And he propelled himself straight down, body-slamming his own body.

  As soon as he sensed the hard pop of passing through his skin and ribs, he forced his molecules outward and expanded as far as he could, as fast as he could.

  He flowed himself down his spine, along all his nerve pathways to every extremity, up his neck into his brain.

  Caldwell was in there with him, already working himself into the nervous system. Ryan wrestled half control of one eyelid and managed to flutter it before Caldwell resisted.

  What are you doing? Caldwell’s voice roared in his head.

  Ryan didn’t know how to think back a response, so he focused on getting control of something, anything. Some part of his brain. There! The smell center! He conquered it with overwhelming force. The hot stink of burnt hair flooded into his mind and he gripped onto it.

  “He’s still here!” Caldwell screamed out loud. The echoes of his voice thundered through the cylinder, deafening. Ryan heard them through the left ear, but Caldwell was putting up a ferocious battle for use of the right one.

  Ryan surrendered it, but retaliated by invading the left pinky toe. He twitched it triumphantly, and that seemed to enrage Caldwell further.

  Roger’s shadow darkened the bottom of the cylinder. “Mr. Matney, don’t be a fool!”

  Ryan suspected that Roger was right. He was being a fool. But he did it anyway. He crammed himself down the length of his left leg and made a concentrated effort to kick Roger ferociously in the face. He was still far too restrained to manage it, but Roger saw the twitch and got the point. He reflexively ducked back.

  The temperature in the cylinder plummeted. The crackle of electricity went out of it, and darkness drove the searing plasma away. It’s shut off! Why?

  “Margie!” It was Roger’s voice, enraged, outside the cylinder. And Ryan realized what had happened.

  Margie had shut off the cylinder. She had figured out what he was doing, and was trying to give him a chance.

  “Back away, Roger!” he heard Margie say. Not raising her voice. Clinical, and commanding as always.

  There were thumps and scuffling sounds from outside. Something thudded into the outside of the cylinder. Ryan worried for Margie’s safety. He wished he could see something, anything.

  He felt the first rush of real fear from Caldwell. It buoyed Ryan. He could win this.

  “What’s happening, Foster?” Caldwell shouted. Both of his voices merged into one enraged, frightened one. The echoes inside the cylinder magnified the fear in his cry.

  But his fear made him fight.

  He mounted an assault on Ryan’s spinal column, coiling himself around it and squeezing into the spaces between vertebrae. Ryan pushed back, but Caldwell’s fury was too much and Ryan had to retreat head-ward. He got the use of both eyes and could feel his scalp hot with lingering electricity. He gasped for air, but couldn’t feel anything below the neck. That was all Caldwell’s territory now.

  From outside, the hum of a fresh charge began to rise. Roger must have seized control from Margie. Ryan hoped she wasn’t hurt.

  “Sorry for the interruption!” Roger’s voice echoed. He sounded uncharacteristically flustered. “We should have this done in thirty seconds!”

  Caldwell surged up Ryan’s neck and Ryan could feel him coming like a dragon roused from its cave. The sheer force of him shoved Ryan completely out the top of his head, and his body dipped away from under him. He heard a shout of triumph from Caldwell.

  Sugar Crisp, Ryan thought. He had forgotten about that one. Light and airy. The choice of cloudy summer Tuesdays.

  Emboldened by that, he dove back in, straight down through his skull cap, compressing himself into a dense spectral battering ram and hammering Caldwell downward, not stopping until he had the furious ghost all th
e way down to his feet.

  Sensation flooded over Ryan again. He was sweating. His skin felt singed. His hair was standing on end. His eyes were watering and something was dribbling out of both ears. But he was in and loving every miserable discomfort.

  Caldwell was losing his grip on Ryan’s feet. His ghost was flowing out of Ryan’s ankles, the churning steam once again spreading through the cylinder. His scowling faces went past Ryan’s vision in several pieces, the space between them widening as he lost cohesion.

  He’s out, Ryan thought. He tensed all his muscles, testing them, trying to form a physical barrier to keep Caldwell from making another attempt.

  He could feel a chilled static charge and flashes of anger as Caldwell churned around him.

  “Foster, I swear to God if you don’t get me in there right now—” Caldwell’s voice was feeble, choked, echoing like it was miles away.

  Ryan judged from the sound thrumming in the cylinder that it wasn’t fully charged yet. Surely Caldwell couldn’t hold himself together much longer. The mist was losing density, particles streaming apart in rivulets, pouring like fluid out the end of the cylinder between Ryan’s heels and wisping away on the air conditioning.

  Roger’s shadow again blocked the light at Ryan’s feet. “Clifton, change of plan! Come out of there please!” he said. He was wrestling to get his cool back.

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m going to overload the cylinder. It should obliterate him. For good.”

  “And then I can get in?”

  “And then you can get in! I apologize that this has been so difficult. I do try to make things easy.”

  Caldwell surged around Ryan’s head for a moment. Ryan could see two halves of a face floating near each other, and both of them were smirking.

  And then all the mist cleared out of the cylinder, and Ryan was alone in his body. Breathing hard, and clutching the fabric on the gurney.

  Whatever device powered the cylinder rose to a pitch so high, it left the audible range. A dread silence descended, though Ryan could still feel intensifying vibrations in the cylinder all around him.

  Roger’s voice was icy. “Ten… nine…”

  Ryan closed his eyes.

  Obliteration. There would be no fighting this one.

  He concentrated instead on taking in every sensation, enjoying every last aspect of his final moment. He took note of where on his body every feeling was coming from. He studied how his mind was processing them and he savored every one. None of the sensations were good—heat and pain and burning—and yet he savored them because in a moment there wouldn’t be any of them anymore. He marveled at the cool of the fabric under his arms, the bite of the spider’s arms into the sides of his head. He loved the scald on his tongue like he had just swallowed boiling water, the pulsating pressure of electricity building all around him. He listened hard to the buzz of the fluorescent lights outside the tube, the hollow dripping behind the walls, the click of the deadbolt on the exam room door snapping open.

  Ryan’s eyes snapped wide.

  Did the door just open?

  The sound was followed by the ancient crypt squeak of the hinges as the door swung inward a few inches. And that was followed by a voice, just inside the room.

  Benny’s voice. Pleased with himself. Thrilled, even.

  “Hey!” he cheered. “I did it!”

  Someone kicked the door open the rest of the way and barreled into the room.

  The inside of the cylinder ignited searing white again, and Ryan’s ghost was on fire.

  Ryan knew very little of what was happening outside the cylinder. His senses were coming apart along with the rest of him, blasted by a howling, hot wind. He thought he heard voices shouting. He thought he saw shadows passing by the end of the cylinder one way, then the other. He felt the whole cylinder shift sideways, kicked by some external force, and he thought he might pitch over.

  But he was losing all sense of anything. He could feel his ghost being ripped from him, his body’s connection to it snapping like seams being ripped. Hold on, he kept telling himself. Just hold on. But his will was breaking down. His mind was being sand-blasted apart. He could no longer feel terror because he didn’t know what it was.

  Through the maelstrom ripping at him, he dimly sensed something surging around his feet. A mist filled the cylinder. Multiple faces of Caldwell, climbing up him. A last-ditch effort to seize control of Ryan’s body. Ryan had nothing to resist with, no resources left to fight him.

  And then the gurney moved.

  The cylinder was sliding past. He was moving out from under the mist that was Caldwell. Leaving the white fire inside the cylinder behind.

  Someone was pulling the gurney out. Ryan could already feel his feet cooling, his legs, his torso.

  Caldwell’s howls of rage echoed from within the cylinder. Becoming less like a voice and more a primal noise.

  Ryan was out under the lights in the open air, and his mind spun and rearranged itself into something he could think with.

  I’m still here. I’m out.

  Arms of mist, vestiges of Caldwell, flailed like tentacles around Ryan’s face and dissipated. Caldwell’s shouts went silent.

  The cylinder darkened. The mist inside it cleared. Ryan could no longer feel the electric charge from it tugging at his hairs.

  It was shut off, and Caldwell was gone.

  Ryan breathed. He thought he would never do that again. But here he was, doing it.

  For a few moments, it was all he did. There was nothing to look at and nothing to hear. So he breathed, and savored the stillness.

  A ghost drifted into his view and regarded him silently.

  Its outline and its features were faint, unformed. He thought it must be freshly out, a new ghost that hadn’t found its form yet. He watched it, uncertain, as dark areas in it shifted, joined together, formed into features. A face emerged.

  It scowled at him.

  Roger.

  It looked like it wanted to strangle him. It hovered above him, dripping resentment, while Ryan wondered what he should do.

  He didn’t have to do anything. Roger’s ghost composed itself, trying to look dignified. And then it silently strode away and was gone.

  Moments later, a human form cut into the square of the light, also looking down at Ryan. Ryan blinked, trying to force his eyes to adjust.

  The silhouette blurred gradually into Lowell, just as another shape entered across from him. Ryan could see its shoulders rising and falling, breathing fast. It became Margie, holding paddles from the Box, one in each hand. They steamed.

  She threw them down and started pulling at Ryan’s restraints. “Ryan? How do you feel?” she asked. “Be specific.”

  Before Ryan could answer, Lowell interjected. “Charge up this thing again,” he said to Margie. Then to Ryan: “And you, get up. I need you to help me bring something in from the car.”

  FORTY-TWO

  Three months later.

  The dry, long grass scratched against Ryan’s legs as he pushed through onto the beach. He had his sunglasses perched in his hair even though the persistent bank of clouds didn’t so much block the sun as spread the brightness across a wider area. He carried his sandals so he could feel the sand cold between his toes.

  “They didn’t have any either,” he said. He sat next to Margie, who was sitting in an Adirondack chair on the sand and gazing out over the steel grey ocean.

  She hung up her phone as Ryan sat down. “Lowell again. He brought in the desk from his old office but he says it won’t fit.”

  “So he wants Roger’s office.”

  “I strongly suspect he already took Roger’s office. I’m fairly certain my stuff will be piled in the basement when we get back.”

  “He’ll come in handy. I have a feeling.”

  “I have the opposite feeling. If he screws up, I’m firing you both.” She closed her eyes and turned her face towards where the sun seemed to be.

  Ryan inhaled oce
an air that smelled equally of sea salt and hot dogs. One from the ocean, the other hopefully from the stand about a quarter mile down the beach. Both compelling. He kind of wanted fish, and a hot dog.

  They were the only living people on the beach. But the chill of November had no effect on the hundreds of ghosts who lay sunbathing on the sand despite the lack of either skin to tan or sun to tan it with. And there were hundreds more meandering in and out of the surf, trying unsuccessfully to feel the cold waves on their feet. It was hard to make out any details of individual ghosts in the daylight, but Ryan thought he could see some fully armored Spanish Conquistadors debating whether to mount an attack on the hot dog stand.

  “Maybe they’ll have some in the summer,” Margie said without opening her eyes. She pulled her knit sweater closer around her as a shield against the wind coming off the ocean. Even in a chair like hers, which reclined naturally at a steep backwards angle, she managed to sit like she was on a church pew. He admired her consistency.

  “No,” Ryan said, “they said they don’t have snow globes, they’ve never had them, and if somebody offered them a box of them, they’d ask that person to leave. They seemed to feel pretty strongly about it.”

  “Where next?” Margie asked.

  Ryan looked down the beach the way they had come. The SkyWheel, so towering when they had stood in front of it that morning, was barely the size of a nickel now. And it still hadn’t turned at all. He turned to look up the beach the other direction. The wall of absurdly hued condo hotels seemed endless, and impenetrable enough to block a naval bombardment.

  “There’s a Hilton right there,” he said, pointing.

  Margie stood off the chair. Getting off an Adirondack chair is clumsy at the best of times, but the way she did it was a marvel of precision movement. “Let’s go.” Before she started walking, she dug her toes deep into the sand and squirmed them into it, as she had done at every stop they’d made.

  They started walking, away from the hot dog stand and the SkyWheel, weaving a serpentine path around whatever ghosts drifted near. They fell into a leisurely pace. Ryan kept his face mostly pointed into the wind so he could feel the salt against his cheeks. Margie’s hand was cool in his, and she squeezed.