GHOSTBUSTERS: The Return Page 4

  Everyone stared, wordlessly, at the storm drain. Then, one by one, the other kids looked at Jed.

  "How come I always gotta go get it?" he complained.

  "'Cause you got the longest arms," Esti replied.

  "But it's gross!"

  "It's our only good ball!"

  "Maybe I can't even reach it. Maybe it dropped all the way down to the sewer this time."

  One of the other kids was crouching down and peering into the drain. "No, I see it!" he called. "It's stuck right there on the ledge!"

  Jed knew he was beaten. "Okay, okay." Resignedly, he made his way across the street.

  After checking to make sure no cars were coming, he kneeled down beside the drain. Sure enough, the red ball was visible directly beneath the grate, wedged among a dark mass of unidentifiable...stuff.

  Jed sighed. "Yell if any cars come, okay?" he said to a girl in a baseball cap and uniform shirt. The girl nodded. She stepped into the gutter beside him and turned to keep an eye out for oncoming traffic.

  Jed stretched himself out into a prone position across the storm drain. Hesitantly, he extended a hand inside - then he yanlced it back and jerked himself up onto his knees. "Did you hear that?"

  "What?"

  "Something's down there!"

  "Shyeah, right!" said one of the kids.

  "Is not," another kid said with a dismissive wave.

  "Don't be a baby!" said a third.

  Esti shielded her eyes against the sun and looked down into the drain. "I don't see anything."

  Jed peered carefully through the grating. Everything looked exactly the same as it had before. The expression on his face showed that he was unconvinced, but everyone was watching him. He didn't want to look chicken. "Yeah, okay," he said.

  He lay back down across the drain and reached inside. The ball was directly beneath him, but the problem was that he couldn't reach straight down to get it. He needed to manuever his arm around the gate and stretch it back underneath And since his body was covering the grate, he couldn't see what he was doing. He had to try to find the ball by touch.

  He groped around the area where he thought the ball was. His face twisted in disgust, and he recoiled as his hand encountered a pile of soggy muck.

  "You got it?" one of the other kids asked.

  "Not...yet."

  Gingerly, Jed probed around in the dark, his arm straining as he tried to reach further and further inside. He felt things that were hard, that were clammy, that were rough, and that were downright slimy. But so far, nothing felt like the ball. After a couple of minutes, though, his hand rested on something that felt different. It wasn't the ball - he was pretty sure of that - but it didn't feel like anything else in the drain either. It was big, far larger than his hand. As he moved his hand over it, he found that it was rounded and leathery. Ridges indented its surface in some sort of regular pattern. Jed's curiosity almost made him forget the ball as he ran his hand back and forth across the mystery object, trying to figure out what it was.

  Then it moved.

  With a shriek, he jumped back off the grate. Everyone reflexively pulled back in surprise. Jed scrambled to his feet halfway across the street, pale and breathing heavily. The rest of the kids stared at the storm drain in a mixture of anticipation and anxiety.

  Nothing happened.

  Once the kids realized that, their mood shifted from fear to ridicule. They jeered at Jed in the way that only a bunch of young children can.

  But that all came to a sudden stop when the red rubber ball suddenly popped out of the drain, all by itself. It arced up through the air, bounced against the pavement two or three times, and slowly rolled to a stop.

  The kids looked at each other, confused. Mostly, though, they looked at the storm drain, not quite sure what had just happened.

  That was when a pair of huge, chalky white jaws shot out of the drain. They missed Esti by inches, snapping shut around empty air.

  The children screamed at the sight. They scattered, running in every direction and leaving their equipment forgotten behind them.

  Albino alligators were swarming out of the sewer now. More of them were coming out of manholes and the other storm drains along the block. They seemed to ooze their translucent bodies unnaturally around the grating, in ways that no ordinary alligator could. Their growls cut through the air.

  By this point, it wasn't just the children who were screaming. Adult passersby ran from the block or took refuge inside stores and barricaded the doors. One of them flipped the sign on one of the store entrances to CLOSED.

  The only one who wasn't going anywhere was Esti. After her her close call with the first gator, she stood frozen in terror, trembling but otherwise unable to move. In all the confusion, the alligators hadn't seemed to notice her - but one of them noticed her now. It crept toward her, sniffing the air as though guided more by smell than by sight.

  On some level, Esti knew she had to get out of there. Yet, as the alligator inched closer, the fear wiped all rational thought from her head. She had to get out of there, but she couldn't will herself to do it.

  Just then, a hand grasped her wrist firmly. Jed yanked her out of the animal's path. He took off, pulling her along into a run until her legs started to work for themselves again.

  The alligator "watched" them disappear into the distance and decided the potential meal wasn't worth the trouble of chasing after them. Instead, the huge, spectral reptile lumbered off toward the school building, in search of easier prey.

  There was plenty there to be found.

  CHAPTER 4

  The second grader was sobbing and screaming - at least whenever she could catch her breath long enough to do it. She'd managed to stay ahead of the alligator until now, but wedged into a corner between the school building and the fence that surrounded the yard, there was nowhere left to run. The huge, white predator closed in, opening its jaws.

  "Not so fast, Albert!" called a voice from behind the beast.

  In a flash, the ghostly gator was wrapped up tight in the grip of an ion stream. At the other end of the beam, Venlunan hoisted the howling monster up over the second grader's head. He maneuvered it over to the monkey bars, where Winston triggered the trap that swallowed it up in a burst of light.

  "...and they were everywhere!" Off to one side of the schoolyard, the hysterical principal was babbling at high speed, a mile a minute. "The children were in a panic! The staff, too! They - they train us to deal with fire drills, but something like this..."

  "Understandable," Egon replied.

  "It - it was all we could to evacuate the students! We - we called animal control!"

  "And when did you start to suspect that this wasn't a natural phenomenon?"

  "W-when they started flying!"

  Sure enough, three of the creatures were airborne. They flew in a fairly tight circle, buzzing a small, plastic playhouse where a burly man in a uniform labelled ANIMAL CONTROL was hiding inside and whimpering.

  A short distance away, Ray snagged another alligator in an ion stream and guided it toward Winston's trap. "Y'know," he called to his comrades, "As fun as this is, we can't keep doing it one at a time. There's just too many of them!"

  "Do you have a suggestion?" Venkman called back, steering another gator into the trap.

  "I've got an idea," Winston called back.

  A few minutes later, he was standing in the middle of the schoolyard, his nutrona wand sheathed and his hands empty.

  "Hey, you walking handbags!" Winston yelled. "You call yourselves predators? I've seen worse on Forty-second Street! Come over here, and I'll make shoes out of you!"

  One by one, the alligators lifted their heads and turned in his direction. It wasn't clear whether they understood his words, or whether the blind creatures were simply responding to the sound of his voice. Either way, he was catching their attention.

  "Yeah, that's right!" Winston continued. "I'll kick your tails right back to the bayou!"

  He definitely h
ad their attention now. The snarling predators were coming toward him, snapping their jaws. As they approached from all sides, they formed a moving circle around Winston, leaving him nowhere to go.

  "Oh, you're gonna eat me?" Winston yelled. "I'll have you for breakfast! No wonder you taste like chicken!"

  The circle was tightening around him like a noose. Winston could start to feel their breath on his body. Sweat poured down his brow and his voice started to get a little shaky, but still he continued. "You're as ugly as you are stupid! But hey, what can you expect from something that comes out of the sewer?"

  "Now!" cried Egon.

  Winston shielded his eyes as brilliant white light shot up all around him. Being blind, the alligators hadn't seen the ring of ecto-traps that lay on the ground all around him. But now that they were directly over the traps, they could certainly feel their effects.

  They roared in helpless rage as they were sucked in; then, just as suddenly as they had opened, the lids of the traps slammed shut. The roars of the gators vanished, replaced by a series of small electronic beeps as the indicator light on each trap switched from green to red.

  "Nice one," said Egon.

  "Thanks," said Winston.

  "Yeah, but we're not done yet," said Ray. "We've still got to clean up any strays inside the school."

  "Can't we just let the cafeteria food kill them?" Venkman asked.

  Despite the tired protests, the four Ghostbusters cautiously approached the large metal doors of the school and entered the building. Inside, all was quiet. Their footsteps echoed through the empty hallways.

  They moved along in a loose circle with nutrona wands drawn, keeping all sides covered. As dangerous as the schoolyard had been, they knew this could be worse. The creatures could be lurking around any comer or behind any door, just waiting to attack.

  "Hey, I thought these things were supposed to be an urban legend," Winston said, an edge of nervousness in his voice.

  "Blind, albino alligators in the sewers of New York? Yup. They don't really exist," Ray replied.

  Winston kicked open the door of a kindergarten room, and leaned in to make sure it was clear. He found blocks, graham crackers, and finger-painted likenesses of the Sta-Puft marshmallow man, but no alligators. Satisfied, he resumed his position with the group and continued speaking as they moved farther down the hall. "Kids bring home baby alligators from vacation, but then get bored and flush them. So the alligators end up breeding in the dark in the sewers."

  "Uh-huh. Urban legend, all right," said Venkman.

  "Yes," said Egon, "but remember the stories about banshees vomiting blood through their eye sockets during homecoming dances? That was supposed to be an urban legend, too."

  "Until Berlin," said Ray

  "Exactly," Egon said, with a knowing look.

  Suddenly, Ray stopped. "Wait a minute," he said, pointing toward a nearby door.

  "The boys' room?" Venkman asked. "Ray, I thought I told you to think of that before we left home."

  "No," said Ray. "These things live in the sewer, remember? So where do you think they'd naturally gravitate?"

  "Worth a try," Winston said with a shrug.

  "Okay," said Venkman, "but if they're smoking in there, I'm telling their parents."

  Winston's military training made him the natural choice to take the point position. Once again, he kicked the door open and leaped into the room. He landed in a crouching position and swung his nutrona wand left and right to cover the area. The others followed close behind him. Their eyes scanned the bathroom, taking in the sinks, mirrors, and urinals.

  The room was as dingy as school bathrooms often are, with cracked tiles here and there, and occasional bits of graffiti. But at first glance, the Ghostbusters did seem to be the only occupants. Egon shifted his nutrona wand to one hand so that he could pull out his PKE meter to measure the ambient psychokinetic energy in the room.

  "Poor Vinny," said Venkman.

  "What?" Ray asked, confused by the non-sequitur.

  Venkrnan pointed at the message scrawled on a nearby wall. "Well, according to this, he's got a really tiny..."

  "Sshhh!" Egon said, putting a finger to his lips. He pointed at the gauge on his meter, which twitched madly, jumping repeatedly into the red. The activity intensified as he directed the device toward the four stalls at the far end of the room.

  All conversation ceased. The Ghostbusters crept quietly toward the stalls, hoping that they might still be able to take the creatures at least partially by surpnse. Venkman caught the others' attention and pointed a finger toward the various stalls. Picking up on his signal, they fanned out so that each stood in front of the closed door of a stall.

  Venkrnan raised one finger. Then two. Then three.

  Acting as one, they kicked in the doors of their respective stalls. They flew open and slammed into the walls of the stalls with a resounding series of bangs. And inside, they found...

  ...precisely nothing. Oh, the usual things were there - toilets toilet paper, and so on. But there was no sign of the spectral alligators.

  Venkrnan had to chuckle at the ridiculousness of four grown men armed with high-tech weaponry charging into toilet stalls. "Looks like your gadget could use a cleaning, Egon - the only danger here is having to sit on these seats."

  Egon studied his meter and gave it a shake. "I don't understand. . ."

  Relieved, Venkman leaned over. "Hellloooo," he called into the toilet. "Anyone in there?"

  Without warning, the toilets exploded. Four spectral alligators erupted out of the drains, amid a shower of water and shards of porcelain. One of them flew straight through Venkman's chest.

  Reflexively, the startled Ghostbusters recoiled from the barrage, but they recovered quickly. As the ghosts soared past them and out of the stalls, the quartet spun around with nutrona wands blazing. The mirrors over the sinks exploded into a cascade of broken glass under the force of the blasters' ionized bombardment.

  When the air cleared, the Ghostbusters could see that two of the beasts had been snagged in Winston's and Ray's ion streams. The other two were airborne and circling the room, snarling and weaving in close to snap their jaws at their would-be captors. Egon wasted no time, and immediately began throwing handfuls of paper towels on the floor.

  "Egon, I think they have janitors who can take care of the spill," Ray said.

  "I don't want to risk a short circuit," Egon replied. Satisfied that he'd used enough towels to see that the top layer remained dry, he dropped an ecto-trap on top of the pile.

  The third alligator cried out in anger out as Venkman wrapped it up in another ion stream.

  Egon triggered the trap, then took another shot at the final ghost. His first shot missed, taking out some ceiling tiles. The second one missed, too. But the third time proved to be the charm. The gator was trapped.

  One by one, they eased the ghosts into the trap, taking care not to cross their beams. It was more of a challenge in this confined space than it had been at Madison Square Garden. With a little effort, though, they soon managed it. The trap snapped closed, and the familiar indicator light flashed over to green