Ghostbusters (27 page)

Ghost Rowan was horrifying to behold, even more so since Holtzmann had seen him when he was alive. The transition to spirit had amplified his least attractive features and made her wonder,
Am I going to look that hammered after I'm dead
?

With a deafening snarl, the freed ghost shot out the window as Patty and Holtzmann looked on in shock. He became a black dot against the sky that shrank and shrank, until it finally vanished in the distance. Holtzmann was still rubbing her bruised throat as Abby came to, a bewildered expression in her eyes as she saw Patty on top of her. She touched her own cheek and cried, “Yeeeooowwch!”

Reacting instinctively, Patty smacked her across the face again. Abby flailed her arms at her. “Stop! It's me! What part of ‘yeowch' didn't you understand?”

“Hey, guys! Check it out!” a voice filtered through the broken-out window.

Holtzmann and Patty leaned out the window as Abby struggled to get to her feet.

It was Kevin, calling up to them from the street. Dressed in a subway uniform like a Ghostbuster, he stood beside a junky old motorcycle that had been painted white and decorated with decals, a biohazard warning with a little pink heart in the center, red triangle showing radiation turning one person into a skull and another running away, with exhaust flames added in marker, and a Ghostbusters logo was affixed to the gas tank. A proton wand and a laser had been taped to the handlebars, and a license plate identified the poignantly close-but-no-Ghostbuster-cigar contraption as
ECTO
-2. Kevin was more excited than Holtzmann had ever seen him.

“I figure you're going to need my help,” Kevin shouted to them. “I just need my proton pack, if you could—”

Abby scrambled to the window, looked up, and pointed into the sky. High above them, the ghost of Rowan was circling, just as that ghost had circled above the crowd at the theater. The evil spirit appeared to spot Kevin below, because it banked a tighter turn, craning its neck downward. It folded up, stooping like a hawk, and dive-bombed Kevin just as Abby yelled down to him, “Kevin, get inside!”

Kevin still didn't see Rowan's onrushing ghost; he was looking in the wrong direction. Crestfallen at yet another rejection, he pouted and said, “I really don't appreciate being yelled at like that. It's emasculat—”

His words were cut off as Ghost Rowan slammed into him and disappeared inside. Kevin's face instantly went blank. Or blanker. A second later, the lights turned back on behind his eyes. When he examined his arms and body, he seemed awestruck at his state of buff. Then he looked up at the three Ghostbusters in the gutted window frame.

“Thanks for the upgrade,” he said. It was Kevin's voice, but it sounded weird, otherworldly. “This will be very helpful.”

Then he jumped onto the motorcycle, revved the engine, and peeled off, disappearing down the street.

“Oh, that's not good,” Patty groaned.

No kidding,
Holtzmann thought.
He isn't wearing his helmet.

*   *   *

Beautifully coiffed and formally dressed, Jennifer Lynch sat with the mayor and the diplomats who were his dinner guests, and reflected on all that had happened to her since becoming his assistant. His Honor had insisted that she attend tonight's gathering to, as he phrased it, “make sure I don't say anything undiplomatic.” She was the soul of tact—when tact served the mayor's interests. Sometimes you had to be blunt and tell it like it was—like with the Ghostbusters, for example. What sad and lonely women.

Well, not really. We made that up,
she remembered. But not out of whole cloth. The four of them were manless, careerless, styleless, and thanks to her efforts, very likely to stay that way. But she was confident they understood what was at stake. The mayor's office
had
to portray them as crackpots. Otherwise, mass hysteria—

Her train of thought was derailed by something moving on the other side of the restaurant's plate glass windows. It was someone in a tan uniform with orange bands across the chest.
Dear lord,
she thought, strangling the linen napkin in her lap. One of the Ghostbusters was running around wildly outside. She kept darting forward, pressing against the glass, then darting forward a few steps further down. Jennifer realized with a start that she was looking for a door.

“Oh boy,” she said quietly to Mayor Bradley, nodding her head toward the windows. “Code red.”

When the mayor followed her line of vision, he blanched. “Oh, what the shit is this?”

The woman was still bounding around like a gazelle, banging into the glass, looking for a door. The good news was, she couldn't seem to figure it out. Amazing.
They
had saved New York City?

“What is this woman doing?” the mayor murmured.

As Jennifer and His Honor looked on, a couple exited the restaurant, revealing at last where the door was. The Ghostbuster brightened and sprinted toward it before it could swing closed.

“Maybe she just really likes the restaurant,” Jennifer said hopefully.

The Ghostbuster burst into the restaurant and put on the brakes when she spotted Jennifer and Mayor Bradley. Both of them tried to hide their faces behind their menus—great minds certainly thought alike—but it was no go; she ran over to them, face red, eyes wide, waving her arms like a standard-issue Manhattan maniac.

“You have to evacuate the city!” she yelled at the top of her lungs.

The diplomats stared at her. His face darkening, the mayor said through clenched teeth, “Don't say that word.
Never
say that word.”

Restaurant patrons were looking over now. Jennifer knew it was very likely that at least one of them was recording this with a cell phone.

In a louder, public voice, Mayor Bradley announced, “Ma'am, I don't believe we've met.”

The Ghostbuster leaned closer to the group. Her eyes were practically spinning in their sockets. Was she Karen or Gabby? Jennifer had trouble keeping their names straight.

“It's not over!” the woman wailed. “It's just beginning. I don't know how he's going to do it, but you gotta send every officer over to the Mercado and you have to shut down the power to the city.”

Jennifer put on her public face. “I'm sorry. As you can see, the mayor is eating right now.”

A loud rumbling erupted outside. The Ghostbuster gasped and put her hands to her head. “It's starting!” she shrieked with full-on drama.

Everyone turned and looked, including the diplomats. What they saw was a pair of white-liveried and aproned workers straining to wheel an overloaded Dumpster past the window.

“Oh, okay,” the distraught woman said as she realized her mistake. Then she tried to recover the intensity of the moment. “It's still starting, though.”

Of course the mayor was accompanied with heavy security wherever he went. Jennifer gave the signal for them to cautiously approach, and two plainclothes guards moved up and grabbed the woman from behind.

Mayor Bradley blew out a breath and said, “That took way too long.”

“No!” the Ghostbuster cried. She wasn't going to go quietly. She grabbed on to the edge of the table. The guards tried to pry her off, but she wouldn't budge. “
No!
”

“This is crazy. You're embarrassing yourself,” Jennifer said in a tight, measured voice. The statement didn't faze the woman, who clung so tightly to the table that even when the guards pulled her body parallel to the floor she would not be moved.

“I … don't … care!” she growled.

At a signal from the mayor, his guards stopped messing around and really put their backs into it. She still wouldn't let go. Something had to give. And it did: with a screech the table began moving across the floor—along with Jennifer, Mayor Bradley, and all the mayor's guests, who were slowly dragged through the crowded restaurant. Everyone was watching.
Everyone
. Jennifer realized if she kept her job until tomorrow it would be a miracle.

Finally the woman could hold on no longer; her arms gave out and she let go. She hit the ground running. The security detail chased after her. She bobbed around as she had before entering the restaurant—apparently she couldn't find the door
again.
Jennifer began to seriously wonder if the Ghostbusters had lied about their involvement in the resolution of the Mercado crisis.

Then the woman located the door and, scrambling, stumbled outside. The restaurant patrons looked on in fascination as the door swung shut. It was so quiet that you could hear a soufflé fall.

Mayor Bradley smiled and said in a voice loud enough for all to hear, “Never a dull moment.”

That seemed a signal that the strange event was over. Silverware began to clink, soft chatter resumed, and everyone relaxed.

This is not on me,
Jennifer thought, twisting the napkin in her lap. She prayed the mayor would see it that way, too.

 

21

Rowan pinned the motorcycle's throttle wide open. Buildings and trees blurred past and the wind ripped over the face of his new toy, making the eyes stream hot tears down its cheeks. He had no concern for his own safety at high speed, nor the toy's for that matter—why would he?

I have survived my own death. And I have possessed a second living human body. I have become an immortal god. The Fourth Cataclysm has begun, and no one can stop it.

An image of the Ghostbusters coming to the rescue flared in the usurped brain and Rowan twisted the slack mouth into a smirk.
They're just smart girls in sanitary worker outfits.
He thought of all the females who had humiliated him, calling him a dork and a nerd, or worse, pretending he didn't exist. He remembered Angelina Beltrano, the vivacious, curvaceous Latin pixie who had burst into giggles when, after four years of loving her from afar in high school, he had finally asked her, stammering, sweaty-palmed, to go to an after-the-football game dance in the gym with him.

“You're not kidding. You really aren't,” she'd said, looking at him as if she couldn't quite believe it. Then she had run off to tell all her girlfriends. Her boyfriend heard about it within minutes and had dragged Rowan under the bleachers and beaten him to a pulp.

I'm going track that jerk down to the ends of the earth, and when I do, he'll beg for my forgiveness. But he won't get it. None of them will.

“What did you expect?” his father had said when Rowan had dragged himself home, broken and bloody, wearing nothing but his grass-stained underpants. “You're a weirdo, kid. You gotta face it.” Then his father had chuckled at the sight of him, and his mother, unable to maintain a straight face, turned back for the kitchen. He hadn't shed a single tear when he learned his father had died of a heart attack. And he'd left his mother to fend for herself when he'd gotten accepted to MIT.

Let her see how it felt.

At MIT, he had focused solely, obsessively on his studies, and his dedication paid off when Professor Gupta took an interest in him and encouraged him to pursue a career in advanced physics. Dr. Gupta said he was a genius. A new world was opened to him! He had finally found his calling.

But he still had no friends, his own age or otherwise.

One evening as he was hiding in his dorm room bunk bed, browsing the Internet, he came across a post on a physics site that mentioned a “hilarious” TV interview on the University of Michigan station about the science of the paranormal. There was a link. It didn't take long for him to find other clips of it online. That was how he first became acquainted with the radical theories of Erin Gilbert and Abigail Yates, the woman he had recently possessed.

He found nothing about the interview hilarious; the razzing Yates endured on camera was uninspired and doltish, the kind of abuse he'd encountered from nose pickers in fourth grade. The content of her talk, however, was revelatory and revolutionary. The underlying principles of an entirely new branch of physical science, though they were hastily described in a venue designed for mockery, made perfect sense to him. His face flushing and his ears turning red, he jotted down the title of their book, and with considerable effort and no small expense acquired a rare copy under the table from its print-on-demand publisher—actually it was from a janitor, and it was passed to him through a crack in the warehouse door.

After much reading and study, and his own experimentation, he came to the conclusion that the authors had far underestimated the power requirements of the systems they described. He set out at once to find ways to boost power input exponentially, and reach the theoretical “bridge point,” where the eternal barrier between the living and the dead became as substantial as smoke.

The authors had used an analogy in their book to explain the principle. A rock could be ground to powder, and that powder would still be recognizable under a microscopic or in a spectrometer as the same rock; but if the rock's temperature was raised sufficiently, and under specific conditions, its molecular characteristics would change: it would re-form into something else, something with new and different properties. Rowan had reasoned and independently proven that adding energy of the correct type and at the correct level was the key to cracking open the gates of hell.

Despite Dr. Yates's contributions to his own breakthroughs, or perhaps because of them, it had been a great pleasure to torment her, and it seemed appropriate that she be the first living human his spirit invaded. In a very real way she had instigated her own demonic possession. He was looking forward to overseeing her final and utter destruction.

Up the street, he could see the towering façade of the Mercado. His exhaustive study of ley lines had shown that the structure sat on the nexus of paranormal power and supernatural intrusion into this world. If he was to take his rightful place as sole lord of the dead, the coronation had to take place at the Mercado.