GHOSTBUSTERS: The Return Page 7

  "Yah. Nana," he said, with his mouth full.

  Dana peeled the banana, broke off the top half, and handed it to him. She took a bite from the other half, watching Oscar eat with pleasure. She exhaled through her nose as she chewed, finally letting her body relax.

  Slowly, she became aware that Peter's voice was filling the apartment again. "That's funny," she told Oscar. "Did I bump into the answering machine?"

  As Peter's voice was replaced by a reporter's, though, she realized that the source was someplace else. Curious, she stuck her head into the living room to look at the television and see what was going on.

  She stared at the screen.

  No, she thought. It couldn't be...

  "Geeziil!"

  "No need to holler, o infinite master of trepidation. I'm right here beside you."

  Xanthador flexed every one of his many claws. His tail swept slowly from side to side, then suddenly whipped out to shatter a rock outcropping that stood behind him. Geezil threw his arms over his head to protect himself against the ebony rubble that rained down on the barren plain.

  "Attend, Geezil. Gaze in abject awe. Already, I begin to succeed. Already, I can feel my power beginning to grow."

  "I am so pleased to hear it, o venerable overlord of fright."

  "With every strike executed by my minions, the fear increases. The barrier between worlds weakens. It is only a matter of time until the Earth shall fall beneath the shadow of Xanthador."

  Geezil started to edge away from his master before Xanthador could bring down another outcropping. "Very good, o formidable ruler of misgiving. I'll go prepare for your final triumph."

  Xanthador reached out and stopped him. "Patience, Geezil. The time is not yet upon us, but it shall come."

  Geezil managed to croak out a response, despite Xanthador's hand wrapped around his throat. "Not...yet?"

  "No. The prophecy has not yet been met. My power grows, but slowly."

  "I guess that's...why...my head's still...attached..."

  "Hmm? Ah." Xanthador released his grip, as though he hadn't even noticed what his hand was doing. As Geezil gasped for breath, Xanthador continued without so much as a pause. "For now, I regret to say that I must content myself with localized incursions. Yet, each individual's terror adds to my might. The fear of one fuels assaults on ten. The fear of ten fuels assaults on hundreds. The scope of our efforts shall expand, the fear shall multiply, and my power shall thrive."

  Geezil cleared his throat and took a deep breath. "Works for me."

  It had been a long night - and morning - by the time Rudy Hamilton dragged himself back into the lobby of his hotel. He'd long since lost track of the number of bars he visited over the course of the night. Through it all, he hadn't managed to pick up a single woman, but he had much better luck picking up glasses of scotch. Rudy had stuck around long enough to hit closing time at several nearby bars, then moved on to close the after-hours clubs as well.

  Now that morning had come, he made his way to the elevator, stumbling a bit along the way. He hit the UP button and ran his hands through his various pockets, searching for his room key as he glanced idly around the lobby. He could see that foot traffic was light at this early hour of the morning.

  Just as Rudy found his key, something caught his eye. Across the lobby, the door to the hotel bar was ajar...and the lights were on. Could it be? Was the bar open at this hour?

  The doors of the elevator parted as the car arrived with an electronic bell tone. Rudy looked down at the room key in his hand, then back at the door that led to the bar. Well, I guess I could just check whether they're open, he thought. Just out of curiosity.

  Pocketing his key, he headed over to stick his head inside the open door. Sure enough, a bartender was standing behind the bar, polishing glasses with a white cloth. There was only one patron inside: an attractive, languid woman who was sitting at the far end of the bar.

  He pushed the door open a bit more and stepped inside. The bartender looked up and saw him approaching. "Can I help you?"

  Rudy climbed onto a stool. "Scotch and water, please. Neat."

  The bartender smiled, but shook his head. "Sorry. We're not open. I'm just cleaning up." To punctuate his point, he gestured toward the chairs that were stacked upside down on top of tables around the room.

  "You're not serving?"

  "Can't. It's not legal, this early. I could lose my license."

  Rudy looked over at the drink that was nestled in the hand of the woman at the end of the bar. She looked back at him, the corner of her mouth curling into a lazy smile. "Not even one last nightcap?" he asked the bartender. Or morningcap, or whatever?"

  "Sorry," the bartender replied with a shrug. "'Course, if you were to help yourself to something while I wasn't looking, well, there wouldn't be much I could do about it, now would there?"

  Rudy caught the bartender's knowing smile, and nodded. He started to ease himself off the stool, but the woman at the end of the bar raised a hand. "Don't bother yourself," she said, in the sort of throaty voice that often came with a little too much alcohol. "I'll get it for you. I need a refill anyway."

  Thanks," said Rudy.

  Watching her get off her stool and move around to the back of the bar, Rudy guessed that she'd had quite a few refills already. But then again, after the night he'd had, he supposed he wasn't really in a position to judge.

  "Scotch and water, right?"

  "Yeah, thanks."

  Still, despite her blurry-eyed look, Rudy had to admit that she was a good-looking woman. Long hair and pale skin - maybe a little too pale, but no big deal - that was offset by a silky black dress, cut low across the front and slit high up the side, revealing just enough to keep him interested. He glanced at himself in the mirror behind the bar and straightened his hair with his hand.

  "Here we are." She came back around the front of the bar with a pair of amber drinks in her hands. She set one glass down on the bar and sat down beside him.

  Rudy raised his glass toward her in a toast, and looked deeply into her eyes. "To early risers," he said.

  "Or late bedgoers," she said, slurring her words a bit.

  They took a swallow from their respective drinks.

  "So," Rudy said, "are you staying in the hotel?"

  "Mm-hmm."

  "In New York for work or pleasure?"

  "Oh, working, unfortunately." She took another sip. Then, in a meaningful tone, she added, "Not that there's anything wrong with mixing in a little pleasure too..."

  "I couldn't agree more."

  "Really..." she said. "And you? Are you here with anyone?"

  Bingo, Rudy thought. "Nope, just me. Finished off my sales quota yesterday. So now I'm all by my lonesome, looking for a little fun before I head home this afternoon."

  "Lucky you. I've got miles to go before I hit my quota."

  "Poor baby. What's your line?"

  "It's...hard to describe."

  "Technical, eh?"

  "Something like that. But I could show you...if you'd like to come up to my room."

  Rudy's heart was pounding in his chest. "I thought you'd never ask."

  She turned to the bartender. "I don't suppose you could be a dear and send room service to room 1218? We're going to need some ice. A lot of it..."

  Rudy's eyebrows rose. "Oh, really?" He wasn't quite sure what she had in mind, but he quickly decided that he'd like to find out. The next few hours could turn out to be very interesting.

  The bartender chuckled and reached for the phone beneath the bar. "Sure. No problem."

  She eased herself off the bar stool, brushing against Rudy as she rose. He was right behind her.

  "Hang on a minute," he said. He pulled a twenty dollar bill from his pocket and dropped it onto the bar beside his empty glass. "Oops," he said, sliding the bill toward the bartender with a wink. "I think I dropped some cash."

  "I'll keep an eye out for it," the bartender replied. He tossed Rudy a little two-fingered salute
before slipping the bill into his pocket.

  Rudy turned back to his new friend. He slid his right hand into her left, their fingers intertwining. "Shall we?"

  "Mm-hmm."

  The two of them walked to the door, hand in hand. As they passed a tall window, they were enveloped in the warm glow of a shaft of sunlight. Rudy closed his eyes momentarily against the glare. As a result, he didn't notice the other effect that the light had on his companion.

  It turned her body translucent.

  Perhaps more important, Rudy also didn't notice the other change that was gradually taking place as they left the bar. While he held her left hand, the fingers on her right hand began to glisten. Slowly, they grew long, hard, and metallic, until they resembled a set of razor-sharp blades.

  "By the way," she purred, "How are your kidneys?"

  "My...kidneys? They're fine," he replied. "Why do you ask?"

  CHAPTER 6

  "I'm telling you," Ray said, "There's something going on."

  "Why?" Egon replied dryly. "Just because in the last seventy-two hours, we've had to deal with twelve freefloating vapors, six class-four poltergeists, eight fullbody apparitions, and a swarm of ectoplasmic, urban-legend alligators that I'm still not sure how to classify?"

  "No, it's more than that. You have to consider the forms they've been manifesting, too. Sewer gators. Kidney thieves. Hook-handed killers. Heck, we had three vanishing hitchhikers this morning alone! When's the last time that happened?"

  "So you're saying that they're all connected."

  "They have to be, don't you think?"

  Egon nodded. "I'd say so. As coincidences go, I'd place the probability of this happening by chance as...just slightly less likely than all of the plankton on Earth suddenly jumping up and singing 'Hello, Dolly.'"

  "Which would make it slightly more likely than the plankton jumping up to sing 'Ice, Ice Baby.' "

  Why do you say that?"

  "Even plankton have some taste."

  Egon smiled at that. Ray always took it as a personal triumph when one of his jokes made Egon smile. It was the closest Egon ever came to laughing out loud.

  "Someone's bringing urban legends to life," said Ray. "We're not going to be able to stop this for good until we figure out who and why."

  "You're probably correct," Egon agreed. "But it'll have to wait until Peter and Winston return from their meeting, and we're back to full strength. For now, I think we'd better table the discussion and turn our attention to the matter at hand."

  "Right."

  Throughout the conversation, the pair had been slowly inching up toward a four-foot, potted cactus, their nutrona wands held loosely but ready. Large potted plants were not uncommon along the streets of New York, but this one was different. Ordinarily, it would have been strange enough that this particular plant stood in the middle of the street, or that both the cactus and its pot were a pale, chalky white. Or that the afternoon sun shone partially through it, rendering the cactus translucent. But in this case, all of those considerations were overshadowed by the thing that was even more unusual:

  The cactus was moving.

  It wasn't that it was floating or walking around or anything like that. It wasn't even jumping up to sing "Hello, Dolly." But it was pulsing and bulging in various places, with an organic motion that made it seem alive.

  Ray and Egon stopped walking and maintained a respectful distance of about three feet from the spectral cactus. Egon shifted his nutrona wand to one hand and took out his PKE meter with the other. He waved it slowly in front of the cactus, moving it up and down, then side to side, as he scanned the plant for supernatural energies. Not surprisingly, the readout on the meter was going through the roof.

  "Readings in the red zone?" Ray asked.

  "Infra-red," Egon said.

  "And here we are, shorthanded."

  "Apparently, Peter and Winston chose a rather inconvenient time to start moonlighting in politics."

  Ray edged a half-step closer to the pulsating cactus. Without taking his eyes off it, he asked, "Ever hear of dead plants leaving ghosts behind?"

  "Not in the last fifteen centuries or so," said Egon. He was keeping an equally close eye on the cactus. "There's the legend of the Deadly Night Shades, but that's about it."

  "Sounds right. How about urban legends about cacti?"

  "No, but I'm not really up on the literature. I've never had much patience for things that aren't real."

  "Why's it moving like that?"

  "I'm not sure. Um...does it look to you as though it's starting to move faster?"

  It was true. The pulsations were coming fast and furious now, as though it was reaching a fever pitch.

  "Shoot it!" cried Ray.

  But before they could trigger their weapons, the cactus exploded. It burst into a spray of...something...that filled the air and splattered across their bodies.

  For a split-second, the two Ghostbusters assumed it was ectoplasmic slime. Immediately, though, they both realized that it wasn't slimy, and it wasn't a single mass - the "it" was really a "they."

  And "they" were alive.

  Egon looked down at his chest in alarm. "Ghost spiders!"

  "Thousands of them!" cried Ray.

  The spiders were everywhere. On the street. On the walls. And most important, on Ray and Egon. More out of reflex than anything else, they flailed wildly, trying to swat the spiders away. But their hands simply passed harmlessly through the insubstantial bodies of the ghostly arachnids.

  "We can't blast them!" Egon realized. As long as the spiders were swarming on their bodies, zapping them would mean zapping each other - and with weapons that could blow holes through concrete, that just didn't seem like a good idea.

  "They're on the clothes! Ditch them!" Ray shouted back. He was already stripping off his gear and coveralls, carrying the bulk of his spiders with it. He stomped on the pedal of a fallen trap and tossed his coveralls into the brilliant white light that poured out of it. In a flash, Ray's spiders were gone...and his coveralls were, too.

  A moment later, Egon followed suit. Standing in their underwear, the pair snatched up their proton packs and looked around at the waves of spectral arachnids that seemed to be everywhere.

  "I wish I thought to thank my mother when she was alive," Ray muttered.

  "Thank her for what?" Egon asked.

  "For teaching me to always wear clean underwear."

  "Let's get to it." Egon gritted his teeth and took aim. "Where the hell are Peter and Winston?"

  I could get used to this, Venkman thought.

  He adjusted the silk necktie they'd given him, straightened the lapels of his new Armani suit, and struck his most mayoral pose. Lights flashed as the photographer snapped another picture.

  "Excellent," said the photographer. "Now, let's get a few of the two of you together."