One Ghost Per Serving (33 page)

Eric stalked back to the school.
He wished Taffy would just keep a phone with her. Willa kept buying Taffy cell phones, and Taffy just stacked them up in her room. For all he knew, she used them to contact extraterrestrial life. He tried to remember the ending of
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
.

Rex appeared next to him, on the other side from Nathan.

“Where have you been?” Eric said, as quietly as possible.

“Where do you
think
?”

Eric nodded. Rex had been close.

“Josh is on his way,” Rex added. “He’s affected, but okay to drive.”

“What do you think it’s like working for DZ?” Nathan said. “I barely feel human anymore. Just taking Quantal Foods as a client in the first place was an ethical violation, but that contest was – I mean, if the FBI knew about it,” he exhaled, “and if the public found out, there’d be a class-action suit filed every day for a year.”

Eric stopped. “Then why the hell did you work for him?”

“That’s a fair question.” He exhaled. “I went into business with him because he was energetic and enthusiastic. It was infectious.” Nathan dropped his eyelids and shook his head. “Bad choice of words.” He gave a weak laugh. “DZ was fun to be around, was always coming up with ideas. I thought it was good that he was my opposite. Optimistic. Spontaneous. But over time I saw the underside of his charm: the compulsive shopping, the hysteria, the mood swings. And when I realized that he wanted to take over the world – literally, take over the world via a subsidiary of the family company he detests – it was too late.”

Eric kept walking and stared straight ahead. “Somehow I still find myself not caring.”

“No, I saw you with DZ in that playground,” Nathan said. “It sounded like you cared a little.”

Eric stopped and turned to look at Nathan. “Calculated manipulation.”

“I know real empathy when I see it,” Nathan said.

Eric cut away and opened the doors to the school. He walked through the floor cover of destroyed snack boxes like he was walking through a muddy bog.

Nathan grimaced when he looked down at the cuffs of his pants, which were coated with yogurt.

“You’ve got a little commerce spirit on your pants there,” Eric said, and chuckled. He reached the lab and opened the door.

“Hi Dad. I managed to get some stool samples –”

“Taffy, gross. How? No, never mind.”

“I took the usual precautions,” she said.

“The
usual
precautions?”

Taffy raised her safety glasses. “A commerce spirit embedded in nanomaterials in the yogurt enters the body through the gastrointestinal tract. The symptoms start there, so there was plenty of shedding in the halls and the cafeteria.”

“Shedding?” Nathan said.

“Vomit and diarrhea.” Taffy removed her glasses and set them on a table. “Don’t worry, I took every precaution. I’m not an idiot.”

Nathan looked queasy and went to sit down at a station in the middle of the room.

“The spirits would stay in the body.” Taffy headed to her station.

“She’s right,” Nathan said. “DZ said they were bio … bio …”

“Biopersistent.” Taffy cleaned some equipment. “They’re not digestible. They cause symptoms, which aren’t immediately fatal, but that’s the body fighting it. After a while, maybe the body gets used to it.”

Rex pawed through the things Taffy had on her station, including the yogurt samples.

“You did,” he said to Eric.

“The staining I did on the stool samples,” Taffy said, “turned up a spore-based system.”

“What? What does that mean?” Eric said.

“Just, the bacterial spore could’ve been used as a protective delivery vehicle for the spirit molecules.” Taffy said. “Or maybe it wasn’t a substrate,” she said to herself, gazing away. “Maybe the spore coat was used as a protein display …”

Nathan nervously tinkered with a microscope without looking into it. “That makes sense. DZ’s enchanters would have to imbue the commerce spirits into the spores.”

Eric sighed and watched Nathan for a moment. “Is there anything else you want to do with this?” he asked Taffy. “Because I should go.”

“Definitely,” Taffy said. “Did you know that endospores can allow bacterium to survive in dormant conditions for thousands, even millions of years?”

Rex coughed.

“Mm?” Eric said to Rex.

“I might have mentioned roughly how old I am, right?” Rex said.

Eric sketched a doodle of an amoeba, a
T Rex
, then a tiny computer, separated by ellipses. He raised a brow as though to indicate ‘somewhere in this timeline.’

“I was dormant for a while, then revived,” Rex said.

“That explains a lot about your behavior,” Eric said.

“Whose behavior, mine?” Taffy said.

“No, not yours,” Eric said.

“Mine?” Nathan said.

Eric made a face that said ‘never mind.’

Taffy leaned over a dish on the lab table. “I want to give the spores a high-grade liquid lunch, then wait for them to rehydrate and wake up.”

Rex snorted.

“Oh, no you’re not,” Eric said.

“Dad!”

“No! Are you kidding me, Taffy? For the love of Daniel Webster, I’m not going to let you work here by yourself and give the commerce poltergeists LUNCH and then wait for them to WAKE UP and POSSESS YOU.”

“Fine.” Taffy crossed her arms. “Then we’ll just notify the health department and wait two weeks for an outbreak investigation to even start.”

Eric hesitated. “Really? That long?”

“Probably. So why don’t you just let me allow the spores to germinate so we can destroy them.”

“Okay. You keep working. I’ll take angry guy and track down DZ.”

“Angry guy?” Nathan tilted his head. “Is that me? Hmm. I guess I
am
pretty angry.”

“Where would he go?” Eric said almost to himself as he stepped into the bus and sat behind the wheel. He didn’t think the schools were another decoy. The trucks had partially unloaded and then left while he was looking for Taffy in the cafeteria.

“Wow, this is where you live?” Nathan wandered through the bus toward the back.

“Rub it in.”

“Hey guys!” Josh waved from the back, where he was straightening a photo of Eric, Willa, and Taffy during one of Willa’s birthdays.

“You feeling okay?” Eric asked.

“Top-notch!” Josh said.

“No, it’s great,” Nathan said to Eric. “You have a kitchen, and a bathroom, and a – a shower … I think.”

“You must have seen it from your surveillance footage,” Eric pointed out.

“That was DZ’s thing,” Nathan returned to the front to sit in the passenger side seat.

“Hey, I’m sitting here.” Rex phased out the door in indignation.

“I was kind of busy making sure we kept operating,” Nathan said.

“Oh, then you had nothing to do with it.”

“You’re right, I should have stopped him. I was just so irritated and frustrated and tired.” Nathan ran his hand through his hair. “And I didn’t think it would work. I didn’t think setting up the contest to be unwinnable, with the glyphs and everything, would work. I didn’t think the nano-whatever stuff he was talking about with the enchanters would work. DZ always thinks everything he does is going to work out great, and I’ve been burned by that over and over. So I didn’t pay much attention.”

Eric pulled up his mapping software. He didn’t look at Nathan. “Tell me more about that competitive salary.”

At the next closest school, Eric could tell that they were in the wrong place. He looked at the location for the next one. Nathan flipped through the Flxible Metro Maintenance Manual that he found under the seat. “If I know DZ,” Nathan said, “he went to Nidus Monolithics to rub his plan in his father’s face. And he’s going to deploy more Nidus trucks from there.”

He held open the book with a hand and looked sideways at Eric. “
And
, I bet you anything, he’s going to use the enchanters to embed more spirits in his family’s pudding – their perennial cash cow. Then he’ll anonymously tip the FDA to prompt a recall, causing a public relations nightmare.”

Eric leaned on the steering wheel, his arms folded on top of it.

“Well?” Nathan said.

“Shouldn’t we hurry?” Rex said from the floor, where he was reading a magazine. Josh was splayed out on the bed, snoring.

“Why aren’t we going? It’s not that far,” Nathan said.

Eric thought Nathan was sincere, that he really did think DZ would go to his father’s company and do this. And maybe a version of that notion was in DZ’s plan for later, but not now.

“Because that’s not where DZ is,” Eric said. “He’s doing something worse than we thought. I know how to find him and defuse the boxes – but I have a few calls to make first.”

THE DIXON HOUSEHOLD

He Who Cleans House was shredding a report card, bleaching lipstick off a collar, and was still on hold with the credit card company about Mrs. Dixon’s huge bill from Saks when the call came in on his personal phone.

“Within the hour?” The sprite had a desperate tinge to his voice. “I still have to iron the sheets, snake the shower drains, refill the spice jars, and vacuum the sofa.”

“They still don’t know about you, do they?” Eric said.

“No.”

“I know about you, and we need you.”

“I’m in.”

“Meet us at the I-80 truck stop in an hour, then wait for instructions. Bring the Brownie, too.”

“If he even wakes up in time,” the sprite said.