Ghost Guard 2: Agents of Injustice

by J. Joseph Wright

  To that, Ruby grimaced. She’d been trying to get a rise from TP by making herself as ugly as possibly. But that didn’t seem to work, so she decided to make her opposition known with an ear-piercing howl. TP threw his hands over his head, protecting his eardrums from serious damage. Morris was used to it.

  “We’d better hurry,” Morris said rather sheepishly. “She’s getting pretty cranky.”

  “Sure, sure,” TP spoke into the radio receiver attached to his shoulder. “HQ, this is Patrol One, over.”

  “10-4 Patrol One.”

  TP eyed the child carrier more carefully. Something about that kid. “I got a lost hiker—or hikers—a father and his baby. Say they’ve been lost several hours and need assistance. Advise, over.”

  “Patrol One, did you say a father and baby?”

  “That’s affirmative.”

  “Patrol One, that’s a code green. Repeat, code green.”

  TP held his breath and cleared his throat. On the back of his neck he felt a single trickle of sweat snake from the hairline. That’s what always happened when he got nervous. This was it. It wasn’t a drill. It wasn’t a rumor. The spooks were here, right in front of him, and now it was his job to set the trap.

  “Sir,” he told Morris. “On behalf of The Singulate, welcome.”

  Chapter 19

  Abby awoke in a state of utter confusion.

  Though she still felt the effects of whatever narcotic had been forced on her, she knew her exact location. The darkness, the cold, those goddam things in the soft loamy earthen floor.

  Soul snares.

  Their presence was not only a terrible sight, but, to Abby, a psychic with varied gifts of emotional and spiritual sensitivity, the dozens of stakes represented nothing less than a phalanx of overwhelming despair. She loathed that feeling, the hopelessness, the mindless suffering so acute, so oppressive it nearly hurled her into unconsciousness. Her knees were weak. Her head was pounding. Her stomach was roiling with bitter bile. Misery. If there ever was a quintessential definition for the word, this was it.

  She knew the incalculable despair was not hers. Though she felt it, she could never understand. Never could she truly know the real hell of being trapped inside one of those appalling devices. That particular honor was reserved for the dead. And right now she was still alive.

  But for how long?

  “You bastards!” her instincts were to fight. She had no choice. It was in her gypsy blood to never give up, to always be defiant in the face of overwhelming odds.

  She listened. Nothing. Nothing but the ceaseless mourning, the endless wailing, the nonstop despair. Nothing like it had she ever experienced, and never before this moment had she wished she wasn’t born with her gift. She used to be shamed by her grandfather about it. He used to say it would bring bad things. She never believed his warnings. It was Grammy. She was the real reason he hated Abby’s gift so much. Gammy had the gift too. She was the one who taught Abby how to filter out the noise, how to not go absolutely ‘bat shit crazy’ as Grammy used to call it, over the constant barrage of multiple signals and voices and emotions and impressions all at once.

  Grammy was the antithesis of her grandfather. Where she was spiritual, he was grounded. Where she believed, he had to have proof. Sometimes Abby hated him for that. She hated him for his declarations of absolute loathing for their gift. He would watch them as they talked, waiting for the moment to strike, then he’d always say, “Don’t talk to the dead. They have nothing good to say.” That’s what he would always tell her, and it would drive Grammy up the wall. She thought maybe Grandpa was jealous. Grammy would whisper that to her when they were alone. She would say it and then Abby would laugh and that would make him even angrier.

  Don’t talk to the dead. They have nothing good to say.

  Those words repeated in her head throughout the age of twelve, on into her teens, all through high school and college at Berkley, in the secret School of Paranormal Studies. It even went with her when she was recruited by ParaIntell, all through the basic, intermediate and advanced training. Every time she turned around it was that voice, overriding all others, warning her in that trademark Wyoming drawl he just couldn’t shake even though he’d lived in California five decades.

  Don’t talk to the dead. They have nothing good to say.

  It sapped her confidence. That’s why she hated it. It sapped her confidence, made her lose focus, and when you have a gift like hers if you lose focus, well, it could mean all the difference in the world.

  She never knew when her gift really began. She’d always had it at least a little. Vague memories of visitations from a gallant man with clean features and a pleasant, kind voice. He would come to her and tell her nice things. It was her invisible friend, everyone would say, and her grandfather would laugh. Then came the time for invisible friends to go away, and he did. At least she thought he did. Something about him, something that lingered in her memory. When she turned twelve the other voices came, other voices that drowned out her invisible friend and overwhelmed her little mind.

  Thank God for Grammy.

  “Just breathe,” she would say. “Breathe and listen, let your mind free from your body and listen…”

  There was more, much more. Grammy’s instruction helped Abby make sense out of the nonsensical. She deciphered what was once a terrifying tangle of strange and sometimes threatening voices. It caused headaches too. Migraines. Some of the worst she’d ever felt. Shards of pain, like splintering, rusty cables running backwards through her brain, shredding it into jagged lumps. Her head had felt like it was going supernova. It took a lot of hard work and direction from her Grammy (along with ignoring her grandpa’s skeptical predictions) to learn a modicum of control, yet finally she was able to tame the beast inside that threatened her sanity.

  And now, in this indescribable dungeon of horrors, that threat had come back with a cruel intensity and no perceptible means of control. The filter was gone, and in streamed the unrelenting barrage of emotional turmoil. With it, inevitably, the pain in her skull came surging, a wrecking ball crashing against the sides of her head, making her wish the world would end and take her with it.

  Lonely…so lonely…no one here…why is no one here…will anyone ever hear me?

  I would kill myself if I wasn’t already dead.

  Destroy me! Do it! Destroy me!

  End this suffering! End this pain! End it!

  Messages of torment and loss, of abuse and torture and, worse of all, isolation and uncertainty. A tumultuous storm of terrible emotions. She was a tiny ship in an ocean riven by giant swells, each one large enough to swallow her whole. And the pain. Head throbbing so violently it drove her to her knees. Hands searching for some way, any way out of there. She’d been in that place before. She knew the way. It was just the voices, the storm of negativity was like a blunt instrument against her intelligence. She couldn’t think beyond the here and now. And right here, right now she was dying.

  Don’t talk to the dead. They have nothing good to say.

  If she would have only listened to Grandpa. She took it back. She never hated him. She wanted to think she did, but, truthfully, she hated herself. She hated that she had to be afflicted with such a ‘gift.’ Grammy knew it and lied to her, deemphasizing the true danger. But Grandpa, he told it like it was. He didn’t sugarcoat it. He was right. And now, here Abby was, reduced to a quivering mass of jelly.

  If she would only have listened to Grandpa.

  She clenched her jaw and pushed her palms against her skull as hard as she could. This allowed her eyes to focus on the surroundings enough to get a bead on her orientation. The exit had to be close. She could make it.

  Then she had a thought. It was amazing. To actually create a cognitive signal in her brain besides the pain. The thought was of no real comfort, though. Her concern was for Rev and Brutus. Down in this hellhole, in this witch’s brew of bedeviling technology, were some of the brightest, most powerful spirits in history, Rev
and Brutus included. She felt it now more than ever, and knew she had the chance to end it all, to take the spirit snares and destroy them.

  She stumbled to the nearest spirit snare, a dreadful sight of tangled wires, bones, and unearthly sinew. She was aghast at the abyss of nauseating vapors streaming forth in a heap of decayed funk. Never had she hated her gift more than now. It truly was killing her, yet she had to do this. Had to free Rev from his prison.

  She knew it was him. Rev sent a signal, an unmistakable pulse which set him apart from all other souls. She could sense his presence above the deafening noise, the unending cascade of voices. She heard him, sensed him, felt him. Rev was here, and in the background she sensed Brutus as well. Both strong and virile ghosts reduced to caged, ineffectual weaklings.

  Then Abby received something else. A message. Desperate and disturbing. A woman’s voice somehow singled itself out from the discord.

  “Abby! It’s Alexandra Petrovic! Abby, you have to leave! Save yourself and run!”

  No way would Abby run. She was in it, do or die. Her body was willing. Only problem was, her mind wasn’t.

  Before her head spun out of control and the dim shades of that tiny underground grotto besieged her vision, she felt heaviness on her chest. Then she saw an outline of a man wearing a Homburg hat, his clean silhouette cut against the rough stone wall. She smelled the spice of ages. It made her senses go wild, and her confusion grow. She was disgusted by this sinister presence, yet was oddly intrigued.

  “Soon, my pet,” his timeworn voice both repulsed and fascinated her. “Very soon.”

  Chapter 20

  Ruby wished so badly she could taste the ice cream. She imagined it. What would it be like if she had a tongue, a real tongue, not the fake one she projected to the breathers who insisted upon having a physical manifestation to gawk at and tickle and coochie coo?

  Seated in the lounge, she and Morris were treated like guests of honor at a baby adoring convention. It drove her nuts how many people kept doting over her.

  “Oh, she’s so delightful,” they would say.

  “What a wonderful little baby girl.”

  “How sweet!”

  It got to be disgusting. These ladies, most of them in late middle age, didn’t know a thing about Ruby. And if they did, they wouldn’t be calling her cute and sweet. She wanted to give them the same treatment she gave the security guard. A moment of clarity, she called it. A wormy, putrid view of what she looked like in the grave. But Morris had made her promise to behave, and to look as much the part of a cute little kid as she could possibly stomach.

  She’d almost had it.

  Luckily for Morris they had ice cream. Ruby ignored all the syrupy adulation and dreamed of one thing. What would that delicious-looking stuff taste like? She heard what the waitress had called it. Tootie-Fruity. Sounded exotic. Of course Ruby had never tried ice cream when she was living. That was a long time ago. In the seventeenth century, ice cream was a luxury reserved for the privileged few and, certainly, Tootie-Fruity was far in the future.

  She simply had to know what it tasted like. Her imagination fell far short and it was driving her crazy. It was colorful and magically creamy and had these delightful bits of red and green and yellow bursting all over. It gave her fits that she couldn’t actually eat the stuff. Sentient ghosts had many advantages over the living. The vast wealth of knowledge that comes with the psychic sea of intelligence. Uninhibited travel through solid objects. Manifestation in nearly any form imaginable. But one thing Ruby coveted most about the living was their sense of taste. Sure, she could imagine. And the dead who had experienced food in life could recall in vivid detail its taste and texture and quality. But Ruby, as stated earlier, had no way of knowing what ice cream tasted like, and that was making her mad. So mad, she began doing what kids do when they get a little testy.

  They play with their food.

  First it was innocuous enough. She dribbled a spoonful onto her chin, letting it slide down the bib they so graciously fit on her, and then settling on the tabletop.

  “Ruby!” Morris was mortified.

  At that she spewed a pink, red, and green spray of sticky discharge onto the tabletop and the hanging lampshade, which sizzled and smoked. Some of it landed in large clumps on the waitress, her blouse and auburn hair peppered colorfully. She stood frozen, not wanting to move lest she let the stuff drip onto her new shoes. Do you know how much I paid for these? Ruby heard the woman’s thoughts and squealed at the idea of a new pair for her collection. She loved shoes almost as much as she loved John Wayne, and, mouth drenched in ice cream, her eyes lit up with a supernatural fire when she got a load of the waitress’s ankle strap Gucci’s.

  “No, Ruby,” Morris ordered fecklessly. “Not the shoes.”

  He was already busy in collateral damage mode, wiping off the table and cleaning up the mess on the lampshade apologetically. He patted a napkin on the waitress’s blouse.

  “I’m so sorry about that,” he begged. “She never does this.” Ruby spat up again in severe rebuttal of that statement. “Okay, she does this a lot. Sorry.”

  The waitress took it all in stride. All she cared about were the shoes, and as long as they were spotless, she was carefree.

  “No problem,” she smiled. “It happens,” she shifted her weight and leaned in over the kid carrier. “And she’s still a little cutie.”

  Ruby couldn’t help what she did next. Something about the fakeness of the waitress’s smile. Her fawning only fell flat on Ruby’s perception. She sensed deception from all sides in this place. She more than sensed it. The wickedness oozed from every material object, every rounded and hand hewn log in the walls, every moose and elk head and bear rug, every stone in the fireplace, every eagle adorned fresco and antler chandelier. And every living being. Ruby could barely contain her disgust at the woman’s feigned niceties, her fake smile and even faker words. She knew this woman was in on it, and hated everything about her.

  Except the shoes. She wanted the shoes. Nice shoes, lady.

  “No, Ruby,” Morris caught her gawking, and heard her plain as day.

  “What’s the matter?” the waitress dabbed a fresh napkin on her Tootie-Fruity stained face. “What does she want?”

  “She, uh,” Morris didn’t want to say, but now he was in a corner and couldn’t come up with a better lie. “She likes your pumps.”

  “These old things?” she said, but inside she was thinking ‘hands off.’ Even a little baby doesn’t get near these things. Do you know how long I’d been looking for a pair in exactly this style in exactly this color?

  Ruby heard woman’s every thought, and, strictly out of spite, dropped her ice-cream cone right on the shoes, creating such a sickening mess it turned the waitress’s stomach.

  “Oh, you little monster!” she shrieked and slopped to the kitchen, trailing Tootie-Fruity all the way.

  “Ruby, that wasn’t nice,” Morris said. “And it wasn’t very smart. We’re trying to keep a low profile.”

  Morris reprimanded Ruby, but really he was happy she did what she did. The group of admirers hovering over the baby carrier had swelled to an uncomfortable number, and he was beginning to think he’d never get the chance to break out his SME meter. Ruby’s antics took care of that. Now he had not only the chance, but a fair amount of time for his calculations. He had sensors that detected where the spectral inhibitor was located. Plus, most importantly, he needed to pinpoint the location of the spirit snares containing the souls of Rev, Brutus, and their original mission marks—the Petrovics.

  Petrovic more than fascinated Morris. Petrovic mesmerized Morris with his monumental yet nearly completely unknown work. Morris aspired to be just like Petrovic. That led him to a series of incidents, all of which increasingly strange and life-altering in magnitude, beginning with small, almost insignificant things that, looking back now, and considering the trouble he was facing currently, were insignificant to say the least. The only reason he remembered was beca
use they were the events that led him to Ghost Guard.

  He hadn’t meant to become what he had become. Starting out, he only wanted to poke around at hauntings with his newly developed technology, inspired by and based on Petrovic’s designs. It was like going through hell to get ahold of even a scrap of the original schematics, let alone any notes or illustrations. The secrets were more heavily guarded than Cheyenne Mountain, more esoteric than the Oak Island Mystery, more precious than the Graff Pink. Books only discussed vague accounts and anecdotal information. Researchers who had lived back in those days were now all too senile to recollect anything of use. Morris tried everything, and through various methods and sources, was able to compile enough of a picture of Petrovic’s technology to construct some working models of his own.

  The first goal: confirmation of the static magnetic field in which the energy of spirit beings exist, i.e. where ghosts live.

  Check.

  The next goal: interacting with and manipulating the static magnetic field.

  Check.

  He found, through much trial and error, that he could extract and infuse energy to and from the field, and that he could measure the field in several frequencies. Basically, with his technology, Morris had made himself into a sort of electronic psychic, a techno medium who could speak to and communicate with and observe the dead through the use of his inventions.

  And all thanks to Emile Petrovic.

  To Morris, Petrovic was a god. And in this case a god was being confined in a prison of his own design. The irony was a sobering dose of tragic reality for Morris. It dominated his thinking. Petrovic was here, and all of his advancements in spirit energy manipulation only served as his own undoing. Would Morris meet the same fate?

  If he could only discover how Hatman manifested in and out of the material plane. What statmag frequencies did he use? Everything has a resonant vibrational pattern, aka a statmag frequency. That and a host of other variables would allow Morris, with his sensors, the ability to track Hatman’s every move. He was close. All he needed was a few more minutes in the heart of the lion’s den. His handheld statmag detector looked so much like a smartphone. The perfect cover. All he had to do was sit casually as Ruby feigned eating her ice cream and let the detector do its work.