GHOSTBUSTERS: The Return Page 17

  Half of the police officers were frozen in shock. The other half were on their radios, calling for immediate assistance from the fire departrnent. Ray, Egon, and the police captain all rushed over to Goodraven, grabbing at the flamethrower and his massive arms.

  "What are you doing?!" Poole screamed.

  "I should think it clear," Goodraven replied in his usual grim tone. "I am ridding this structure of evil influences."

  "You set it on fire!" shouted Egon.

  "I have long found the purifying power of righteous fire to be most efficacious."

  "But there are people inside!" yelled Ray.

  "Those who do truck with shades must share their fate."

  "We can't wait for the fire department! We've gotta get those people out of there!" said Poole

  "While there are ghosts with acid and golf clubs in there?" said Ray. "Even if your people find the hostages, you'll never make it out in time! Not without help!"

  The captain only paused for a second. "All right," he called to the surrounding officers. "I need two volunteers to go in with me and the Ghostbusters!"

  The young policewoman, Burke, ran forward, along with an equally young male officer.

  "Good work," Poole told them. "Sing out when you find hostages, then get out of there like the Devil himself is at your heels."

  "Because he probably is," muttered Egon.

  "Go!"

  Side by side, the captain, the two police officers, and the Ghostbusters plunged through the door into the burning store.

  Goodraven stayed where he was, watching them with the same grim, impassive expression he'd worn throughout the exchange.

  Quietly, in his rumbling voice, he intoned: "'For I shall rain down fire upon their heads, and sulfurous brimstone upon their houses. And they shall know my power and fear my name. '"

  CHAPTER 13

  The Mayor hadn't felt this good in days. At last, things were finally getting back to the way they should be.

  Oh, it was too soon for the polls to shift all the way back yet, but Lapinski was confident that it was only a matter of time. Hiring Goodraven had been a master stroke. Bringing in a new spook hunter - a better spook hunter - knocked out the only aspect of Venkman's campaign that might conceivably have made him a threat.

  "Mister Mayor," said Wong, "You claim to represent the common man. Yet, just last year, you pushed through legislation that nearly doubled the increases that were allowable under the existing rent control guidelines. How do you respond?"

  "An excellent question, Nate. Thank you," the Mayor replied from behind his podium. "My opponent would like to twist the facts to make you believe that this legislation hurts the common man, when nothing could be further from the truth. Who are the landlords of New York? The stereotype says they're corporate fatcats or faceless holding companies. But really, many landlords are the little people, like you or me. Like Mollie Jane Kidorf of Queens, or Anna Day of Staten Island. They're ordinary working people many of them elderly - who've scrimped and saved their entire lives just to own the building they live in. They rent out parts of those buildings to others, just to be able to make ends meet.

  "And as all of us know, making ends meet is getting tougher and tougher these days. Why, the cost of heating oil alone has risen fourteen percent in the last ten years. Outdated rent control laws have prevented these hardworking New Yorkers from keeping up with their own rising costs. My opponent would like to keep it that way, punishing good people for the crime of pursuing the Arnerican Dream. Now, maybe he's just being naive, since he's new to the issues and probably doesn't understand them fully. But, personally, I think we need to give a fair shake to all New Yorkers. We need to keep rents stable for tenants without draining the bank accounts of their slightly more fortunate friends and neighbors."

  Wong applauded. "Great job, Mister Mayor! That's it for now."

  With all modesty aside, Lapinski had to agree that he had done a great job, indeed. Over the course of the practice session, Wong had hit him with the toughest questions he could: every unpopular decision, every scandal, and every shortcoming from the past several years. Lapinski had taken every punch and spun every mistake into a virtue. He'd artfully sidestepped inconvenient issues, like the city's spiraling debt or the fact that the "corporate fatcats and faceless holding companies" were actually the biggest beneficiaries of his new rent control laws.

  Stepping down from the podium, he asked, "How'd I look, Nate?"

  "Terrific, Mister Mayor. Perform like that in the real debate tomorrow, and you'll wipe the floor with Venkman."

  "That's what I like to hear."

  "And because you did so well, we have a little gift for you. It just came in an hour ago." He handed the Mayor a thick folder of paper.

  "What's this?"

  "Peter Venkman's police record."

  Lapinski grinned like a hungry barracuda. "Just when I thought the day couldn't get any better... " He hefted the file in his hand, enjoying its weight. He almost started whistling.

  He opened the folder and eagerly began to flip through the file. But before he could make it all the way through the first page, an aide approached with a cordless telephone.

  "Excuse me, Your Honor," said the aide. "The Police Commissioner would like to speak with you right away. He says it's urgent."

  Lapinski took the phone and held it to his ear. "Jim! How are you?" he said, in his wannest, most effusive tone. "Thanks very much for sending over the Venkman file. I'm just looking at - " He paused to listen as the Commissioner interrupted him. "On Fifth Avenue? Well, Goodraven can handle it... He's on the scene? Good... "

  His face went pale, then beet red. He lost his grip on the thick file in his hand. A flurry of papers fell to the floor like snow. "Goodraven did WHAT?!"

  The good news was that Goodraven had fired through the window, so the display caught most of the blast. The bad news was that the blaze was spreading - fast. The smoke was already starting to make it difficult to see. The heat inside the store was incredible, hot enough that the sprinklers were doing little more than adding steam to the smoke. And there were four cackling ghouls in caps and plaid Bermuda shorts smacking acid-filled golf balls around the store.

  When you put it all together, the bad news pretty much outweighed the good.

  "We need to do this quickly," said Egon, ducking below the smoke and flying golf balls.

  "Isn't that kind of... " Ray coughed several times from the smoke. "Isn't that kind of obvious?"

  The police were already on the move, staying close to the ground to crawl under the smoke. The captain called out, to locate any living people who might be trapped inside. "Police officers!" he shouted. "We're here to rescue you! Call out your location, and we will assist you to safety!"

  Panicked voices shouted back from various parts of the store: "Here!" "Over here!" "Help! Please help me!"

  Poole sighed. The store was big, with plenty of aisles and displays that might hide victims or perps. To no one in particular, he said, "It figures. Just once, why couldn't they all be in the same place?" Then, to the two junior officers, he added, "Follow the voices. When you find someone, sing out and get them out of the store. But once you're outside, check whether it's safe before you come back in. We don't need dead heroes today."

  The younger officers acknowledged the order and headed off to help.

  Elsewhere in the store, Ray and Egon were already doing their bit. Over in the shoe section, Ray squinted against the smoke to see one of the ghouls rearing back to hit another ball.

  "Fore!" shouted Ray, zapping the undead creature with an ion stream that bound it before it could complete its swing. He used his foot to send a trap skidding across the floor beneath the ghoul. A flash of white light, and it was gone. "One ghost down!"

  Despite the poor visibility, Egon found a second ghoul teeing off in the basketball section. He leveled his nutrona wand and fired, but a sheet of flame leaped up in front of him, spoiling his aim. The ion beam tore through a
rack of basketballs. Dozens of the balls exploded from the force of the blast. Others careened madly in all directions.

  Before Egon could get off a second shot, he was tackled from behind. The unexpected blow wasn't especially heavy, but under the circumstances, it was enough to make him lose his footing and hit the floor hard.

  The proton pack on his back made it difficult for him to scramble back to his feet right away. But even before he rose, he managed to grab his fallen nutrona wand and twist around to face his attacker - only to find himself staring into the inanimate face of a dummy in a basketball uniform. With a sigh of relief, he noted that its feet were melted, probably from when it was hit by acid, or perhaps from the heat of the fire. Either way, that was what had caused the accidental tackle. Still, the delay had done its damage. By the time Egon got back to his feet, the second ghoul was gone.

  Over the roar of the fire, he could hear the young policewoman's voice, coming from somewhere to his nght. "First hostage clear!" she called.

  "Second hostage clear!" came her partner's voice from the other side of the store.

  Egon nodded. That left three living people to evacuate, and three ghosts left to contain.

  Suddenly, from out of the smoke, he spotted a golf ball whizzing toward him. He ducked to avoid it, calculated its approximate trajectory back to its source, and fired blindly in that direction.

  Yet he still couldn't see well enough to know whether his ploy worked. He narrowed the beam and pulled back on the wand, like he was landing a bass, and found that he was dragging the bound and writhing ghoul out of the smoke and flames. He stamped down on the pedal of his ecto-trap, and the ghoul vanished inside. "Two ghosts down!" he shouted.

  Ray was in the middle of binding the third ghost when he heard Poole's voice from somewhere near the entrance. "Hostages three and four clear!"

  Ray triggered the trap. "Three ghosts down!" he called back.

  Almost done! Just one more person and one more ghost! Ray thought, wiping the sweat out of his eyes. We're going to do this! It's going to work!

  As if on cue, the fire at the front of the store took its toll. Weakened by the flames, the plaster and wood in the ceiling began to crack and buckle. With a deafening roar, massive chunks of burning debris gave way and fell from the ceiling to block the door.

  Ray's mind started racing as he tried to think of alternate routes to get out of the building. Maybe there's a rear exit, or -

  But he dropped the train of thought when he heard the screams. Trying as best as he could to avoid the flames that were sprouting all around, he followed the sound. He soon found that it was coming from a tent that was set up as part of a display in the middle of the camping section.

  It sounded like a woman inside the tent. Ray figured that she'd probably taken cover inside when the golf balls started flying, but the strategy backfired when the tent caught fire, trapping her inside.

  He needed to get her out, but he couldn't open the burning tent flaps with his hands. Desperately, he searched around for some kind of tool that he could use. Sleeping bags, lanterns, camp stoves. . .all useless. Then his eves lit on a rack of fishing poles.

  Ray put down his ecto-trap and grabbed one of the poles and cast toward the tent. The hook caught in the canvas of the tent flap. Gingerly, being careful not to dislodge the hook, he pulled back on the pole. Slowly, the tent flap rose. By the light of the flames, he could see a saleswoman huddled inside the tent, her head buried in her arms.

  "It's all nght," he called to the woman. "We're going to get you out of here. I'll hold the door. Just crawl out carefully and stay away from the walls."

  The saleswoman didn't lift her head. She just kept sobbing and screaming.

  She can't even hear me. She's hysterical, thought Ray. "You can make it. But I can't let go to come get you. You've got to do it."

  She didn't move. With a sinking feeling, Ray realized that the only way she'd make it out of the blazing tent was if he got her out himself.

  Meanwhile, Egon was making his way through the store, holding his PKE meter in one hand and his nutrona wand in the other as he searched for the last ghost. So far, he hadn't found a trace. The reading on the meter indicated that it was still around some where, but the golf balls had stopped flying and the ghost seemed to be Iying low.

  Still, he couldn't afford to give up the hunt, even though the fire had spread throughout the store by now. The last thing they needed was to have the ghost pop up unexpectedly to stop them from escaping.

  Suddenly, the indicator on the PKE meter jumped. Egon stopped in his tracks and slowly swept the meter around his body until the reading jumped again. With the smoke and flames, he couldn't see more than a couple of feet in front of him., but he set off, using the PKE meter like a compass, and watched the reading.

  The limited visibility made it difficult for him to see which way he was going, but from his crouched position, he could see enough of the merchandise near the floor to realize that he was heading into the golf section. In retrospect, it seemed like an obvious place to look.

  Without warning, another dummy - this one dressed in golf clothes and holding a nine iron - toppled forward out of the flames. It knocked Egon to the floor, landing on top of him.

  He started to push it off him, only to find himself staring into the glowing red eyes. Pseudo-organic possession. The dummy raised the nine iron over its head and started to bring it down.

  Egon didn't even try to dodge. Instead. he simply pulled the trigger on his nutrona wand, which was pressed up against the dummy's chest. At point-blank range, the ion stream blew the plastic body to bits. When the shrapnel cleared, all that was left was a ghost howling in helpless rage within the grip of Egon's ion stream.

  "Last ghost down!" shouted Egon.

  Ray couldn't see Egon through the blaze, but he heard him. "Great!" he called back, still holding the fishing pole in place. He coughed several times; the smoke was getting worse. "Now, follow my voice fast! I need some help!"

  "In a minute! I can't let go of the ghost!"

  "Stick it in a trap!"

  "As soon as I find one! I fell and dropped it!"

  Grimly, Ray realized that there was no way for him to get help in time to save the woman in the tent. The police couldn't get back in through the debris that burned in front of the door, and until Egon could get the ghost into a trap, he was as helpless as Ray.

  Ray was going to have to do this alone.

  Constantly checking to make sure that the tent flap was still open, he stepped backward while slowly letting out more of the fishing line. When he reached a bank of shelves full of camping gear, he managed to wedge the fishing pole among the products on one of the shelves. As gently as he could, he let go of the pole.

  It held. The pole stayed in place, holding the tent flap open.

  Still coughing, Ray raced over to the tent, and got down on his hands and knees. He knew that if he let his clothes come in contact with the flaming tent, it could spell disaster. So he got as close to the floor as he possibly could and inserted his head and shoulders into the tent.

  "It's okay," he told the sobbing woman. "Come on, let's get out of here. Together."

  He laid his hands on her shoulders, and the human contact alone had a helpful effect. Without opening her eyes to look at him, she clung tightly to his arms as much for emotional comfort as for physical support.

  "Keep your head down," he said, guiding her through the doorway of the tent.