Ghostbusters (28 page)

He parked the motorcycle at the curb and strode into the Mercado and through the ornate lobby, unrecognized, unrecognizable. He had put up with untold abuse from the tenants, even more from his boss. Repairing air conditioners. Cleaning
toilets.
Rage coursed through him. No matter. That life was over. Rowan North was dead.

And he had been reborn a god.

In his fine new body, he stepped up to the door of the generator room. Two uniformed cops left behind to protect the equipment sat drinking coffee, guarding the door. One of them looked at Rowan, who of course looked like the moronic Ghostbusters receptionist, Kevin.

“Hey, you can't come back here,” the cop said.

“Interesting,” Rowan-as-Kevin said. “Is that so?”

In a swift move, a move he'd never practiced or even seen attempted, he raised both well-muscled arms and punched them both in the jaw, one with each fist. The heads of the two cops snapped back, and they slumped unconscious.

Rowan was glee-struck. He stared at the meat puppet's biceps and said, “Oh, I should have worked out more when I was alive.”

He kicked open the door to the generator room and walked inside, prepared to face irreparable damage. But there was nothing of the kind. The fools had only partially disassembled his device, and they had left the pieces lying about! Even better, they had made no move to destroy any of it. They had assumed that “dead” meant “dead,” and that the original owner would not be returning to claim anything. Idiots! He bent down and picked up the heaviest pieces easily, like they were made of Styrofoam.

“Oh, I
definitely
should have worked out more.”

He began to reassemble the device piece by piece, something he could have done blindfolded, as well as dead. He needed to hurry, though. The Ghostbusters knew he hadn't left this world, and it wouldn't take long for them to figure out what he was doing and where he had to be doing it.

The meat puppet had deft fingers, and putting everything back in place didn't take long. It was oddly amusing to watch its reflection in the banks of mirrors, doing his bidding like a robot. He wanted to make it pull down its pants and dance a jig, and certainly would have, had he not been so pressed for time. Holding the usurped body's breath, he made its finger flip the power switch.

There was a horrible pause. It lasted so long that Rowan began to have doubts …

Then it fired up. The room blazed with light as the machine pulsed and glowed, and bolts of lightning crackled out of it. As the intensity grew, raw electrical energy snapped and swirled around the room, building, building …

Ka-boom!
Every one of the mirrors exploded outward, sending a mist of sparkling fragments cascading from all directions, and in the same instant, supernatural lights and spirits blasted, howling through the empty frames and into this world! Wisps of phantoms and skeletons; imps, ghouls, banshees, zombies. The ghosts of evil people who had died centuries ago—mass murderers, serial killers, hit men, assassins.

The deafening cacophony summoned a security guard, who raced past the still-unconscious police officers and into the generator room. His eyes grew huge and his jaw dropped at the spectacle before him. His arms and legs began to shake. Rowan-as-Kevin shot him his most menacing glare—in a shard of mirror still stuck to a frame, his eyes were glowing red. And then he growled like the fiend he had become.

The guard staggered backward with his hands up in a gesture of surrender.

“Hey, man,” he said, “you do you.”

Then the insect ran out of the room.

 

22

Erin ran down the busy New York sidewalk. Passersby, oblivious to her frantic urgency, snarled at her as she jostled in front and cut them off. She paid them no mind; her one and only goal was to reach the Mercado before it was too late. The stitch in her side was killing her, but she pressed on, ignoring the red lights, ducking through the auto traffic. She had no choice. Abby wasn't answering the phone and she was almost positive that Rowan was back. The world was in terrible danger and she seemed to be the only person on the planet who knew it. And of course, if she shouted it at the people who yelled at her and made obscene hand gestures, they wouldn't believe her.

A terrible thought crossed her mind. What if
Abby
didn't believe her? What if that was why she hadn't called back? Erin had no proof. It was just another theory. All she had was a picture Rowan had drawn in their book. But no, Abby had always believed her. And believed
in
her.

Then suddenly the sidewalk started to tremble and ripple underfoot like the surface of a rushing torrent. The complacent and inward-looking expressions on the faces of her fellow pedestrians switched to alarm—and then to sheer panic as a loud
boom!
tore through the air. Erin looked up ahead. In the distance she saw the distinctive outline of the Mercado building. Brilliant lights were shooting upward from it, impossibly bright lights that illuminated the afternoon sky.

Erin had no doubt what was going on. And what was going on was the worst thing she could conceive of. It was the end of the world.

Sucking it up, she ran faster, pumping her arms and high-kicking.

*   *   *

At the Ghostbusters headquarters, Abby looked on uncomfortably as Holtzmann worked to repair the proton packs that she had wrecked while the spirit of Rowan possessed her. She had no memory of how that had felt or what she had done. Part of her was massively grateful for that, but the objective scientist part was curious, wishing they had more data about what Rowan had become so they could find a way to defeat him. All signs pointed to a resumption of his plan to destroy the barrier and unleash hell's whirlwind.

Fighting for calm, she punched in Erin's number again. No answer again. She could picture Erin holed up in her apartment with bedcovers pulled up to her chin, soggy tissues strewn everywhere, pouting and/or grieving for her lost days of approval from people who had never met her and never would.

Patty was fretting, too. Abby could see it etched in her eyes. Abby finally glimpsed the full horror of the word “impotent” and why men feared it so.

A
snap
came from Holtz's worktable and Abby glanced over. “Are they ready?” she asked hopefully. “We've got to get to the Mercado and save Kevin.” She shook her head in sympathy. “As if he hasn't been through enough already.”

“If you weren't so strong, you would have done much less damage to these,” Holtzmann informed her.

“I'm sorry I got possessed!” she lashed back, frustrated beyond words. “I guess I should have thought that through more.” Her sarcasm underscored just how worried she was. She suddenly realized that the phone had finally stopped ringing at Erin's end and that she was about to get her voice mail. “Erin! Where are you? Rowan took Kevin. We need your help!”

She hung up. “What a surprise,” she said to no one in particular. “Never there when you need her.”

*   *   *

The Fourth Cataclysm had arrived.

And it was exactly as advertised.

Panicking pedestrians filled the sidewalk, all of them running away from the Mercado as fast as they could. Their eyes were huge, their mouths gaping. Erin fought to keeping moving against the flow. A man tripped and fell and people just stepped on him in their haste to get away. He managed to crawl into a doorway, out of the torrent. He sat there, clearly in shock, clutching the torn knees of his business suit. What she saw around her was mass hysteria, and it was every inch as ugly as the video on Jennifer Lynch's computer. Then she spotted someone she sort of knew in the throng sweeping toward her. It was Tonya, the glow-in-the-dark eye-makeup mogul of nakedeyes.com. She was wearing leopard-print leggings, a nubby lime-green car coat, and teal flats. How did that even go together? Erin felt a microsecond of reassurance about her own history of fashion decisions. Despite all the subtle digs she had endured of late, conservative clothes never went out of style.

Unless of course the world ended; then all bets were off.

Tonya swept past, her signature eye makeup melting, running in fluorescent stripes down her cheeks. Car horns blared as drivers wedged their vehicles into the already packed streets, bumping bumpers, jockeying for a few inches of space to get the heck out of there. And no wonder: huge red clouds had formed above the structure, billowing and pluming until they spread across the entire sky and turned day into night. The Mercado was shimmering with evil light, as if it was straddling the dividing line between the world of the living and the world of the dead, containing the vast energies beneath it like the towering cone of a volcano.

And then the volcano blew.

Ghosts poured out of the building and flew up into the roiling sky—phantoms of all ages from all eras: a child from Victorian times, a flapper from the Roaring Twenties, a mobster, and a pot-smoking hippie. And in varying stages of decay—limbs missing, eyes hanging from sockets—and in all manner of diabolic manifestation: fangs, claws, glowing eyes, eager to tear and rip and destroy. As Erin looked on, they dispersed to all parts of Manhattan.

He had done it. Rowan had succeeded. The barrier was down. And with it down, it wasn't just Manhattan that would bleed and die. It was the entire world.

“I need my gear,” she said aloud. She had to get to Ghostbusters headquarters as fast as she could.

She waved down a taxi that miraculously pulled up beside her. Erin couldn't believe her luck. The cabbie pulled over, surprisingly relaxed given the complete uproar around them. But he was going in the opposite direction of the fleeing traffic.

“Where're you going?” he asked her.

“Chinatown,” she told him.

“Nah.” He drove off, leaving her to throw her hands up in impotent frustration. Then she watched as he came to a red light and braked. A ghost flew over to the cab, swung open the backseat door, and got in. The cabbie screamed.

The grim satisfaction she felt was wrong, so wrong … but so, well, satisfying.

The mayhem continued all over New York:

A couple ran around a corner, screaming as a ghost opened his trench coat and flashed them. But as he was only a skeleton, what he had to expose was nothing.

A woman fled to the entrance of a subway station, then stopped dead in her tracks as a ghost rat floated up from the stairs, squeaking and confused. Then a stream of ghost rats joined the first one and she fled in terror.

In a nearby Clark's Coffee, a group of patrons ran to the window to check out the commotion. Nursing a coffee, Dean Harold Filmore was thinking deep thoughts about his application to work at CERN and make some real bucks, since university administrators were still, in his opinion, woefully underpaid, and sexy babes were unlikely to seek him out for his intellectual prowess. Therefore he was blissfully unaware of what the ruckus was about, aware only that some kind of flash mob or something was gathering outside.

“Huh. City College must've let out.”

He smirked, turning to the patron next to him to gauge his reaction. But the man sitting next to him was not a man at all. It was a hideous thing.

Filmore screamed. It growled back, face expanding into an elongated nightmare of glowing eyes and fangs. Then it went on the attack, coming right at him. He leapt from his stool and the ghost harried him out the door and into a maelstrom of multidimensional entities phasing in and out of existence.

She was right, Gilbert was right.
He fled down the street, grabbing on to people who were as frightened as he was and crying, “Help me! You've got to help me! Hide me!”

But at this point it was every New Yorker for themselves and his pleas for help went unanswered. The ghost was still tracking him, bearing down; he stumbled along and slammed into a newsstand. He fell into a row of fanned-out copies of the
New York Post
with Erin's face plastered on them. “Nosebusters!” the headline proclaimed, and as he crashed into the shelf, his own nose smashed hard into the unyielding wood and pain shot into his skull.

The irony was not lost on him as the awning on the stand collapsed and the rest of the shelves fell over on top of him. Newspapers, cartons of cigarettes, and candy bars cascaded over him. He prayed that the ghost would move on, deciding it would be too much trouble to search through the debris for him.

A ghost chased me down the street
.

Then suddenly the layers of debris above him began to shuffle skyward, like dirt clods being dug up by a busy dog, and he began to whimper.
A ghost is looking for me.

If only he had believed her.
But her sources were suspect. Nonexistent. In this day and age, evidence can be manufactured so easily …

Copies of
Newsweek
and
Sports Illustrated
shot into the crimson air. A cascade of loose cigarettes and a rain of Jolly Rancher hard candies pelted him.

I was wrong,
he thought.

And he was wrong again.

The ghost was not looking for him.

The ghost had found him.

Eyes bulging, huge, toothy maw opening, it attacked.

*   *   *

The showdown at the Mercado was under way: police, SWAT, and National Guard troops had massed in front of Rowan's stronghold. All weapons were trained on the building, but so far, the order to open fire had not come. Open fire at what? There was nothing to aim at except the building itself. Large glowing fissures had erupted from underneath the structure, as if something so large that it could not be contained was cracking it open like an egg. The soldiers and police officers were braced for battle, but the standoff was working on their nerves. The mayhem in the streets surrounding the building was monumental; it seemed like a waste of time to stand on alert when demons or ghosts or whatever they were wreaked havoc all over Manhattan. Scores of targets presented themselves most tantalizingly, but eyes and gun barrels remained focused on the Mercado, where the ultimate threat was housed.