Ghost Guard (19 page)

“A ghost?
Is that what you want? You want me dead again?”

“No, that’s not what I said.”

Morris shook his head.

“I have a hunch
it won’t matter.”

“What do you mean?” Rev asked. Abby was curious too. They all were worried. Rev coming back from the dead—that was a new one, even to the gifted veterans of Ghost Guard.

“We’re treading in uncharted waters,” he attached another sensor to Rev’s forehead.

“OW!” Rev flinched at the sudden shock. He frowned at Morris. “That hurt!”

“Stop being such a baby,” Abby exchanged terse glances with him.

“Sorry,” Morris shrugged. “I have to get some
more readings. If my hunch is correct, you shouldn’t be alive.”

“No
bushwa I shouldn’t be alive,” Rev said. “I’m supposed to be a ghost, remember? I was a ghost until Elyxa dug up my corpse.”

“I don’t mean that…I mean, I
do
mean that, but not how you’re thinking.”

“Morris!” Abby demanded. “Stop gibbering and tell us what’s going on!”

“I’m not sure,” he said. “But if my memory on this matter is correct, I’m fairly positive that Rev’s life and Elyxa’s life are linked. Biologically, they’re connected.”

“You mean we’re interdependent?” Rev asked.

“Not so much her, but you, yes. Rev, your new life, this-this body of yours—it’s only alive because of Elyxa’s power. She created this, she recreated you, and when she dies, you die also.”

“But
Elyxa was killed,” Abby said. “We all saw it.”

“Allegedly.
Still, the fact remains, Rev is alive.”

Ruby
whined and whistled, soaring from her position near the ceiling down to the same level as Abby and Morris, asserting if Rev was alive, that meant—

“
That means Elyxa is still alive,” Abby finished Ruby’s garbled sentence.

DOCTOR HARVARD G. ANDERSON simply despised his tenure at the Multnomah County Morgue. He’d been grumbling at the board of directors for twenty years about the wholly inadequate facilities and nobody ever listened to him about it. They were just like the damn corpses he had to deal with day in and day out, only the dead had better personalities.

“I’m getting too old for this,” he complained for the hundred-thousandth time, peel
ing away the blood-soaked sheet that had been so graciously placed on the deceased. When he saw it was a young, beautiful woman, peppered with bullet holes, dried blood in her nose, hair matted with brain tissue and spinal seepage, he shouted to nobody in particular.

“What the hell did you guys
do to this one!”

As if answer
ing him, the door flew open and seven men in suits streamed in, some pointing guns at the dead girl, some chattering on tiny telephones, others examining the doctor and his postmortem laboratory.

“What now?”
Dr. Anderson rolled his eyes. He was used to this kind of interruption, only it seemed to be happening more and more these days. And just a few weeks until setting sail in the Caribbean forever too.

“We’re here to make sure the subject is dead,” a black man stepped in front of his colleagues and held up a smart phone. Chase Brinkley
, a field manager for Delta X, was as dedicated as they come.

Anderson cast a derisive glare around his lab
, pointing to the woman’s battered skull.

“I don’t know how much deader you can get,” he prodded the cerebrum with his steel poker. The skin flapped open and a strong stench of fresh kill permeated his nose. “You guys sure did a number on her. Why’d you have to be so savage? I mean, look at her. She’s beautiful,” he
used a wet washcloth and wiped some blood and mucus from her cheeks, revealing the fair skin.

“That beautiful…
thing
just murdered some good agents,” Brinkley said. “Not to mention the thousands she’d tormented and slaughtered throughout the centuries.”

“Centuries?”
Anderson skewed his neck. “What in Christ’s name are you talking about?” he scanned the stone-cold faces. “Have you guys all lost your minds?”

“Just give us your best, most informed medical opinion,” Brinkley demanded.

“Opinion on what? Will she make a good candidate for organ donation? I don’t think so.”

“No, not that.
Tell us if you truly believe she’s dead. We know you have over three decades of experience. We need an expert, and you’re the best. Please, Doctor Anderson, tell us, is she really dead?”

Anderson eyed every man individually, saving the most scrutiny for their spokesman.

“You guys aren’t kidding, are you?”

“Doctor Anderson, we couldn’t be more serious.”

“All right, all right,” Anderson bent down and touched his stethoscope in several places. He went through the tests despite not really needing to undergo such formalities. One look at the girl and he knew she was kaput. He glanced at the machines and saw no abnormalities in the readouts.

“No signs of heartbeat. Brain function has ceased. Respiration is…
wait a minute.”

“What?” Chase said. “What’s
wait a minute
mean?”

“It means exactly that—
hold on.”

The agents shifted their feet. Anxiety lingered in the air. Anderson said, “I spotted a number in the galvanic skin response—something that shouldn’t be there.”

“She’s alive!” one of the agents shouted, and the rest cocked their pistols. Chase carried a silvery handgun the size of a cannon.

“That’s absurd!” Anderson began the second round of
assessments, a double-redundancy he didn’t ever think he’d have to perform. This girl was so very dead.

“Why is that so absurd?” into the crowded morgue strode another man, this one
appeared much different than the others. Long hair tied back in a ponytail. Ruffled shirt with a wide collar and gold chains on his suit jacket.

“Who the hell are
you!” Chase twitched his gun toward the newcomer, who swept with unnatural quickness and backed him into another agent. Two guns went off, but that was it. Aros—although nobody in that room save for the ragged, bloodied corpse on the table would ever know that name—slid a gold-handled dagger from his coat, moving with blinding speed, slicing neck after neck, letting each man choke on his own blood. Then, when he got to the last quivering, reeking mortal, he quelled his urge to kill and sheathed his blade, but not before wiping it clean on the trembling man’s white lab coat.

“P-p-please…don’t…” the medical man held up his hands, wishing it all away.

“Don’t worry, old fellow,” Aros consoled him with an empty promise. “I won’t hurt you,” his smile gave away his motives, and Doctor Harvard Anderson picked up on it. The elderly man was too slow to do anything about it, though. Aros pointed at the allegedly dead woman on the gurney. “She will.”

The coroner inhaled sharply and slipped on the blood left by
seven gurgling, dying federal agents. He almost lost his balance, but caught himself on the metal bedframe. Then he lost control of his bladder when Elyxa sat up and grasped his throat with one hand. Standing on the bed, she lifted him off his feet, all the way so his back was against the ceiling. The skin on her face flopped open in several places. Her eyes darted left to right, then back to the helpless man in her grasp. With one jerk of her wrist, she snapped his neck, almost taking his head clean off.

“Welcome back,”
Aros bowed his head.

F
IFTEEN

“ABBY, WE HAVE a message coming in from a secured server. Looks like it’s for you,” Morris handed her his tablet computer.

“Who is it?
Mahoney?” Abby glared at the device.

“No, it’s…”
he hesitated, then waved his hand and the screen came alight with a man’s face, but this man wasn’t the double-chinned, hairless blowhard from Para-Intel. This man was young, strong, handsome, dark. Wavy, perfectly groomed hair, cropped but not too short. At least not too short for Abby’s taste. She felt a twinge of elated surprise when he popped onscreen, and couldn’t contain herself when she blurted:

“Riley!”

“Riley!” Rev sat up, and right away wished he hadn’t. Both Ruby and Brutus helped comfort him to the cushiony sofa again.

“Hello, Abby,”
Riley sounded somber and frantic at the same time.
“I just wanted to give you a heads up…and a warning.”

“A warning?”
Abby was concerned with his cryptic tone. “What are you talking about?”

“It’s
Elyxa.”

“She’s missing, isn’t she?” asked Morris.

Riley’s answer was a deep sigh.

“What!” Rev shouted. The sudden outburst made his head throb. He threw up his hands to cradle his brow. “Ouch!”

“What happened, Riley?” Abby pressed. “I thought you guys had her.”

“We did. Or we thought we did.
Turns out she wasn’t dead. Then her friend showed up to get her. They killed seven more of our men, Abby. This woman—this thing has to be stopped…now.”

“Morris, this is really, really bad,” Abby said. “
Elyxa’s probably coming for us right now. We have to do something.”

Morris only
shook his head.

“If she was going to come after us, she would have already. I suspect she’s still too
incapacitated to try anything yet. She needs time to heal. She’s immortal, but she’s not indestructible.”

“Then that should give us some time to come up with a plan,” Abby was
n’t in the least relieved.

“Whatever you guys
do, I want in,”
Riley said, and to that, Rev sat up again.

“
Wait a minute, buddy. We don’t—”

“Rev, shut up,” Abby sliced and diced him with a sharp glare. “Riley,
I’m sorry, but Ghost Guard is…I just…I don’t think it would work out.”

Abby wanted to say more, and Riley sensed that. So did Rev
. It rubbed him raw like sixteen grit sandpaper.

“Abby, you really need to be careful.
Elyxa, she’s…she’s dangerous. I’d hate to see you get hurt.”

“Thanks, Riley,” Abby’s face turned red. Rev’s blood began to boil.

“
Abby?”
Riley stopped her from terminating the connection.
“Abby, I…it’s really good to see you again.”

“Goodbye, Riley,” she collapsed the screen
with a grin.

“Oh, please,” Rev laughed. “Can you believe that guy? What a jerk.”

“Why’s he a jerk?” Abby snapped. “Because he’s nice to me?”

“Hey,
I’m
nice to you.”

“
Pfft!”

“Guys,” Morris played referee. “Putting your personal feelings aside, Riley had some pretty disturbing news.”

“We got Elyxa once, we’ll get her again,” Abby declared.

“And next time we’ll finish the job,” Brutus said with more glee than anyone in the group had seen from him in quite a long time, if ever.

“You’re happy about that, aren’t you?” Rev glared at him.

“And you’re not?” Brutus glared back. “I thought we were on the same side, Rev.
Why are you so worried about that immortal monster?”

“If you haven’t noticed, I’m back to being a walking, talking slab of meat. Look at me. Let me tell you, this is no picnic.
Being alive hurts. And what’s worse is, according to Morris, my life is tied to Elyxa’s. So excuse me if I don’t share your exuberance for making her extinct, because as soon as someone kills her, then
I die
.”

“What’s the big deal?” Brutus shrugged. “
You’ll just become a ghost again.”

“It doesn’t work that way, big fellow,” Morris knew it would come around to him, and he hated giving bad news. It always seemed to be up to him, though. He adjusted his glasses. “Normally we would have no worries. Rev could die at any time and it wouldn’t matter.”

“Hey!” Rev was insulted.

“You know what I mean,” Morris smiled nervously. “You’d normally become a spirit and have the choice to either stay here or go to the next astral plane like every spirit does.”

“So what’s different?” Abby asked.

Ruby chirped with a rare menace in her tone
, and everybody knew she was talking about Elyxa
.

Morris nodded in confirmation.

“Elyxa’s influence is the problem. Because Rev’s been placed back into this body, and because this body was reanimated by artificial means, it’s an abomination, a freak of nature. I’ve done some investigation on such entities. Few have really existed. Mary Shelly wrote a fictionalized novel about one such case, and as far as we know, when the creation finally died, its spirit was trapped in oblivion.”

“You’re talking about Frankenstein
’s monster?” Abby asked. “That was real?”

“The novel was based on a real incident. It wasn’t totally different than Rev’s situation.”

“That’s impossible!” Abby upturned her chin.

“Why is it impossible?” Morris posited. “Authors do such things all the time—change names, places, even the sexes of the characters to protect them. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. What concerns us now is the fate of Rev’s soul, which, I’m afraid, is dubious.”

“Dubious?” Rev was confused. Without his ability to tap into the ether and gather any bit of knowledge he so desired, his vocabulary had become quite limited. “What’s that mean? Dubious?”

Ruby moaned in her own unique, squeaky way
, ashamed of Rev’s ignorance.

“It means you’re in trouble, buddy,” Abby sighed. “Morris, correct me if I’m wrong, but you’re saying we don’t have a clue what will happen if and when Rev’s new physical body dies, right?”

“There’s no guarantee he’ll come back as a ghost. And even if he does, there’s no guarantee he’ll come back as a sentient ghost. My guess is he’ll end up either as a mindless residual haunter, or he’ll be flushed into oblivion.”

Rev shuddered visibly.

“I know,” Morris got the chills himself. “It’s unsettling to think what might happen to you. You could be ejected into the emptiness of space for all we know.”

Brutus scowled
, “Sounds like the Ghost Gun.”

“Precisely,” Morris said. “The same basic principal is applied. Forsythe developed a way to tap into that desolate void where all spirits dare not go, for if they do, they never return.
Elyxa is from that void, and the key is to send her back there, but we’re not sure if Rev will go with her when he does.”

“Let me get this straight,” Rev’s head was cloudy. He felt heavy. His vision doubled, even tripled in places. His neck stiffened, and a deep bruise in his side was screaming at him. “Because I’m not sure if I’m hearing this right. I’m alive now, but I can’t get used to this, because my life is tied to an immortal we have to destroy.
I get the part where, after we destroy her, I die too. But after that, my spirit might extinguish completely?”

“So far so good,” Morris said.

Rev looked at himself in the mirror.

“Life was so much better when I was dead.”

“What’s the matter, Rev?” Abby teased. “Miss your psychic abilities? Can’t sneak into women’s minds and make them want to sleep with you anymore?”

“Of course not,” he laughed
uneasily. “But since you brought it up, what about my service to Ghost Guard? Now what am I going to do? I can’t do the same things I used to. I mean, I guess I could keep driving the Phantom, but other than that, I’ll be useless to you guys.”

Ruby
whistled and popped, telling Rev
they’d be useless without
him
.

“I’m afraid Ruby’s correct,” Morris confirmed. “Now that Rev’s no longer a ghost, and deprived of his extraordinary powers, Ghost Guard won’t be the same,” he took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “I’m fearful this might mean the termination of the team.”

“Bullshit,” Abby refused to accept it. “No way. We’ll figure something out. Bottom line is Elyxa needs to be destroyed, and when that happens, we’ll get Rev back as a ghost.”

“It’s good to hear you
’ve got your priorities straight, Abby,” Rev smiled smugly. “Finally acknowledging who’s
numero uno
around here.”

“You know what?” Abby grabbed the nearest thing she could find, a first aid kit, and dropped it on Rev’s
foot. He winced at the sudden ache. “I was wrong. This team will do just fine without you. We don’t need you. Never have. You can be replaced—easily!”

“Oh, really?”
Rev’s arrogance was matched only by his boldness. “I’d like to see that. You know as well as I do what every paranormal expert from the NSA to the CIA and every other alphabet agency in-between has said—not to mention our own Morris, here. And even you’ve said this once or twice—that my abilities were through the roof. One in a billion.”

“Yeah…
WERE
. Past tense. Anyway, a billion isn’t that big of a number,” she sneered. “If I have to interview every dead person from here to Hell and back, that’s what I’ll do.”

Ruby squeaked
candidly, saying she believed Abby would do it.

“She would
not
,” Rev crossed his arms over his chest. On the outside, he stayed cool and calm. Inside, he was in anguish.

“Oh, I would. And I will,” Abby turned in a huff and strode out the door.

“She can’t replace me…can she?” Rev questioned to a round of silence. “Can she?”