Ghost Guard 2: Agents of Injustice (6 page)

At that moment, before Abby could set the unruly spirit straight, she sensed Ruby. In her made up and esoteric language, Ruby shouted from upstairs, warning them the breathers were coming. She repeated it several times before bursting into the basement, passing through the ceiling like a missile and circling the room in perpetual orbit. Her message never varied or faltered. Her antics got Brutus involved. He knew the egress points, and knew it was important to get the crew out as quickly as possible. But he thought his immense girth, once manifested to his full physical form, would best be suited to leaning against the one and only door in or out of the basement.

Good decision. The moment Brutus got there, the door opened and Greg Hardgrove poked in his head. That was as far as he got, though. He took one petrified look at the giant ghost and retreated into the hall. Then he had a flash about the fact that he saw, in one fleeting glimpse, his daughter, Melissa, draped over the couch like a cheap suit. An instant surge of rage overcame his senses, and he burst into the room, ready for anything.

Spurred on by his wife, he ran to the center of the basement, screaming some incoherent threats about tearing everyone limb from limb. He had his mind set on the people that he’d seen, and made up his fight response accordingly. Only one problem. The strangers that had been lurking in his house only two seconds earlier were now gone. That came as an unfathomable relief. Another unfathomable relief was finding Melissa and waking her gently, hearing her sweet voice saying, “Daddy?”

A screeching noise stirred them all. Greg, the thankful father, Sharon the disturbed mother, Father Thomas, the stupefied priest and would-be exorcist, Monty, his equally stupefied assistant, and even the not-so-easily impressed Bobby sprinted to the window of the daylight basement. In the driveway they saw it. A curved, rounded, modern yet timeless aerodynamically-designed 1920s Rolls Royce. It was called The Phantom, but they didn’t know that. All they knew was it looked like a black and silver shark speeding away, with a customized plate reading,
GST GRD.

Chapter 6

“Emile, darling! It’s me! Emile!”

Alexandra Petrovic wouldn’t let Rev out of her sight all the way to Gasworks, bombarding him with affection the entire trip.

“Listen, lady,” as soon as they reached the safety of their hideout, Rev tried to make a break for it. “You’ve got the wrong ghost.”

“She can’t hear you,” Morris met the team with more than a little concern. He took measurements and readings and made calculations, then did it all again, a redundancy just to be on the safe side. After running all the tests, his suspicions were confirmed. “She’s in quantum distortion.”

“Quantum distortion?” Abby thought she’d heard it all. With Morris, though, it was always a learning experience.

“Basically, she’s on a low frequency. Probably due to all the excitement with the exorcism and the extraction. That’s why she’s behaving this way.”

“Don’t make excuses for Rev,” Abby wouldn’t accept a word of it. “He’s done something to her and he won’t admit it. Isn’t that right, loverboy?”

“Abby,” Rev pleaded with her. “You can’t be serious.”

“Why the hell else would she keep following you like a lost puppy?”

Alexandra was oblivious to their voices, the things they were saying. She only wanted one thing—Rev.

“Actually,” Morris interposed. “She’s not acting like this because of anything Rev did. It’s because of the way he looks.”

Abby laughed cynically. “What are you saying? She took one look at him and fell in love?”

She was indignant on the outside. Inside, she simmered with concern. She knew how easily she’d fallen for Rev. Hard and fast, though she’d fought it for the better part of a year before surrendering. And now, to see another woman, a spirit no less, do the very thing to him she wanted to be doing—it drove her wild. The worst part of all was that it seemed, by his stupid smile, Rev enjoyed the whole thing immensely.

“Why’s that so surprising?” Rev grinned even stupider. How could such a handsome face look so juvenile? “
You
did.”

Abby glared daggers at him. Before full-scale war broke out, Morris doused the fire with an explanation.

“Rev bears a resemblance to Emile Petrovic. And, well, if you haven’t recognized by now, Alexandra keeps calling him by that name. It’s my expert opinion that, due to her being trapped in the low frequency vibrational phase, she thinks Rev is her husband.”

Ruby could contain herself no longer. The story of this mystery woman intrigued her easily-intrigued mind, and she simply had to investigate. She made a beeline for the newest ghost in Gasworks, adding a shrill shriek that could have awakened the dead. As a matter of fact, it did. Both Rev and Brutus reacted with a start to Ruby’s ear-piercing dive-bomb. Abby dodged out of the way. And then Morris. The only one who didn’t move was Alexandra, who watched with clear and obvious dismay as Rev escaped her loving embrace once again.

“Emile, why do you want to leave me? Come to me, my darling husband! Come to me, Emile!”

Passionately, she threw herself at him again. Again Abby oozed with jealousy.

“All right,” she tried to get in between them. But how does one get between two ghosts? “Break it up! Break it up!” Her efforts were useless. Alexandra wrapped herself around Rev like a scarf. Rev had no permanent escape.

“You see?” Morris saw confirmation of his hypothesis as he observed Alexandra’s conduct even further. “She’s behaving as a mere residual haunting at this point. And she’ll continue to do this unless I use my quantum oscillator to raise her one-dimensional Euclidean plane into a finite dimension.”

“Morris, we don’t need a dissertation. Just do it.” Abby crossed her arms and tapped a toe rapidly. She wanted satisfaction and she wanted it now.

“What’s the matter, Abby?” Rev snickered. “Don’t tell me you’re—”

“Don’t say that word!” she put her finger in front of his face forcefully. “Don’t you ever say it!”

“What, Abby? What is it that you so desperately don’t want me to say? That you’re, I don’t know, jealous?”

“Son of a—!” she reached for something, anything she could to throw. She hated it when he taunted her, and now he was going to pay. The nearest thing she could find was Morris’s tablet computer. She was about to fling it like a Frisbee when Morris stepped in, calming her down by telling her Alexandra could be cured.

*****

Morris took five minutes in setting up his worktable for the task at hand. Not that it was altogether too complicated. All he needed was one standard 15 amp fuse. He searched his entire work station until he found one, which was the main reason why it took the full five minutes.

“Would you hurry?” Abby had lost her patience six minutes earlier. Watching the phased out, spaced-out spirit of Alexandra Petrovic fawning all over her man troubled her more than she cared to admit.

“Don’t be that way, Abby,” Rev could only take Alexandra’s unending, undying affection in stride. “Remember what Morris said? She can’t help it.”

“You don’t seem to hate it,” Abby winced as Alexandra, gleaming whitely in a soft glow, manifested her softly delicate face and placed a gentle kiss on Rev’s lips. Then she went again to her main activity, which was simply cuddling with her mistaken beloved.

“How can you say such a thing?” Rev offered her the innocent look he was so good at mustering. She saw through it like a piece of rice paper, but only glared as Morris made his final preparations

“There,” he said. The setup was complete. “Ready for subquantum acceleration.”

Morris held two metal rods which were connected by thin black wiring. He aimed the rods at both Rev and their guest.

“Whoa!” Rev took a defensive posture. “Watch where you point that thing!”

“Don’t worry, Rev,” Morris chuckled. “You’re already at the same vibrational level as the output from these probes. So are Brutus and Ruby. The only ghost who’ll be affected by the acceleration will be Alexandra.”

He powered on the subquantum accelerator with his thumbs. A strange and eerie clicking sound started slowly and then gained speed rapidly. The probes emitted excited strings of confetti-like particles of light, all sizes and colors and shapes, dancing like an endless chorus line, a rainbow effect, only duplicated over and over countless times and in countless ways. The frequency of the rainbow surges corresponded with the frequency emitted from the oscillator. The ticking grew faster until it became one solid stream, and with the rapidity of the clicking came a circular motion of the colorfully lighted specks. Spinning clockwise and counter clockwise at the same time, with alternating central cores.

All of this had a strange and surprising effect: order out of chaos, brilliance out of darkness. And when it was all over, when the rainbow haze cleared into a fine iridescent mist, Alexandra Petrovic stood struggling to speak. Not for the loss of words, but for the time she’d spent in the low frequency funk. She still held Rev in her arms with the most intimate of embraces. She had her soul bared for all to see. Then the subquantum acceleration hit, lifting her to the higher level of consciousness, she became self-aware again. When that happened, she stopped kissing Rev and looked at him.

“Who are you!” she retreated with supernatural quickness. She would have slipped into the ether if not for Brutus, who blocked her every possible escape. She halted suddenly and molded into her living shape, cowering from the immense entity, a dark gray cumulonimbus cloud reaching from floor to ceiling. Alexandra took one look at him and froze, screaming: “It’s you! Oh my god! It’s The Singulate! Leave us alone!”

“Try to calm down, Miss,” Rev employed every ounce of suave, every molecule of cool. “We’re here to help.”

“No one here wants to hurt you,” Abby took over, eyeing Rev suspiciously. “We’re friends. Like Rev said, we want to help. Let us.”

“NO!” she backed away. In a terrified circle she skirted, fast as lightning, bemoaning every second of her pursuit. “You’re lying! You always lie! You lie and you cheat and you steal! You steal souls, and you have my husband’s soul! No, stay away! You can’t have me!”

As the chase grew more desperate, Morris was the only one with the sense to do something rational. A statmag emitter, set on low energy extraction, would do just the trick. If performed correctly, it would remove a small amount of energy from the highly agitated spectral woman and, in theory, act as a sort of tranquilizer. A ghost tranquilizer. He wasn’t sure exactly if it would work. All he could do was hope.

He hit the trigger and a charged particle ray slammed Alexandra like a Taser. She trembled and shook uncontrollably and, finally, collapsed. Rev was there to catch her. He rushed her to a small, out of the way area Morris had prepared for when the ghosts of Ghost Guard needed to convalesce. After a moment, Alexandra regained her strength. And her fear.

“Who are you people?” she was becoming frantic again. “What is this? Why am I here?”

“Whoa,” Rev said. “One question at a time.”

“We’re Ghost Guard,” Morris told her calmly after removing his wire-rimmed eyeglasses. “We’re the ones who extracted you from Melissa Hardgrove’s body.”

“Melissa who?”

“Don’t play dumb,” Abby wanted answers. “You know you possessed that girl. And you know you molested Rev, here,” she pointed at the overgrown adolescent ghost. Rev smiled and shrugged when Alexandra stared at him. “There’s only one thing I want to know. Why’d you do it?”

“What?” Alexandra directed her entreating gaze from person to person, ghost to ghost, settling finally on Abby. “What are you saying? I possessed someone?”

“She has no memory of the event. It might have been the subquantum acceleration,” Morris rubbed his chin, postulating. “Or it might be just the fact that her frequency was so low.”

Alexandra’s eyes glossed over in complete confusion and disbelief. She tried to piece it together in her scrambled mind. Tried to remember where she was and what she was doing and how she came to find herself in this predicament. One image came provocatively to her mind, one image and a thought. Love. Her love. Her one love. Then she turned to Rev again and a genuine feeling of recognition rushed through her spectral synapses.

“Emile?” she came closer. Abby insinuated herself between them, but it didn’t matter. Alexandra went straight through her to get to Rev, and that pissed off Abby even more. Her anger dissolved into her own brand of puzzlement, though, when Alexandra spoke next.

“You,” she studied Rev’s facial features, his hair, his shoulders and chest. “You look like my husband. You look like Emile. But you’re not Emile.”

“He’s
not
your husband,” Morris explained, giving Abby the stink eye. “And, despite Abby’s obvious rudeness, we’re all friends here.”

Abby frowned, crossing her arms over her chest. Skeptical, sure, but she was also warming up to the fact that this ghostly presence might have been telling the truth. It may have been just another case of mistaken identity.

“But how…where…why am I here?”

Alexandra’s line of questioning led to a complete synopsis of events. Morris, with Ruby’s enthusiastic help in the form of sound effects and dramatic reenactments at crucial moments, described the mission from beginning to end. He told her how they were informed about a possession and learned it was her. He told her how Ghost Guard premeditated and executed Strategy Number One, or the Phony Exorcism Plan. A plan they’d had to implement on more than one occasion. He told her everything, all the way up to the point to where Alexandra began her amorous advances on Rev, thinking he was her husband.

“And that brings me to the real question,” Morris said when he arrived at the end of his narrative. “When you first came out of the low frequency phase, you were screaming about someone called The Singulate. Do you remember that?”

Alexandra was troubled all of a sudden. She nodded sullenly.

“Who is The Singulate?”

She didn’t speak for the longest time. Then, just when it seemed she wouldn’t answer, she did.

“The Singulate is a dreadful, dreadful group.”

“Group?” Rev asked. “What do you mean, like a club?”

“A private club.”

“A secret society?” Abby furthered the questioning.

“Of sorts,” Alexandra shuddered visibly. She didn’t like talking about this subject. “People know they exist. It’s just that most people don’t know what they really stand for.”

“And what do they stand for…really?” Abby probed.

“They stand for power, for fortune, for everlasting life. To achieve that, they want to control the dark forces of the supernatural world.”

“What about your husband?” Morris asked. “You said they have his soul?”

“They had us both for a long time. He found a way to let me escape. I didn’t want to go, but he made me. Told me at least I could have my freedom,” she sobbed into her hands. “Oh, Emile! Oh, please help him! Please help my Emile!”

“We want to help, lady,” Rev said. “We just need your help first.”

“Yes,” Morris added enthusiastically. “We need you to tell us where your husband is being held.”

Clearly, Alexandra had no endurance for such interrogation. Her physical image flickering, she collapsed in exhaustion.