...
...
"Who are you?" Danny whispered.
The tip of the gun was still digging into the back of his head, and there had been several tense moments of silence before he decided he would have to be the first one to speak.
"How did you escape?"
Danny's green eyes shot open at the sound of her voice.
At that moment, he nearly whipped his head around, just so he could know that she truly was alive and all right, but the loaded gun against his skull reminded him that no sudden movements were allowed.
But the similarities were unmistakeable. He had been hearing that voice—both the warm, motherly tone and angry ghost hunter tone—nearly every day of his entire life. It had to be her. Even though he was in ghost mode and therefore being looked upon as the enemy, Danny couldn't help but feel elated to know that she was near.
"The door hinges rusted away," he said in a low voice. "How long was I in there for, Maddie?"
The gun withdrew from his head at once.
"How do you know who I am?"
In spite of the horrific circumstances he was in at the moment, Danny smiled. "Come on, how can I not know that voice? And you've always been the one readily pointing a gun at me before getting down to the chitchat."
Testing his luck, Danny slowly swivelled his head around to get a glimpse of her. His heart leaped in his throat as he saw his mom standing just behind him in her usual teal-blue jumpsuit. She looked just like she had the day she and his dad had captured him and locked him away for "future experimentation." The only noticeable changes were the weary lines etched into her face and the dark circles beneath her eyes.
She was regarding him carefully for quite some time. While the hesitation was a welcome break from the immediate ghost-annihilation mode he normally saw with his parents, it was still agonizing to have to remain at a safe distance from each other like this. In fact, it took quite a lot of effort for Danny not to just run into his mom's arms and hug her as though he would never see her again.
Instead, he twitched in place, deliriously happy to see her alive and safe, but also devastated that he hadn't thought of transforming back before going up to the Op Center.
"Mind explaining what's going on?" he asked at last, opting to examine the darker details of his day in order to forget his painfully sad reunion with his mom.
Maddie stared at him for several unbearably long seconds. Startlingly, tears started forming in her eyes and had it been anyone else in front of her, she probably would have completely broken down crying. This was still a relatively controlled expression of emotion, but her defenses were on the decline. She continued to keep the weapon trained on Danny's face, but it was a half-hearted attempt to threaten him, unlike so many of their previous encounters.
"M-Maddie?" Danny asked softly. His voice was full of concern, though his mom wouldn't view it as such. He unwittingly took a step towards her, thinking of placing a hand on her shoulder for comfort, but he was taken aback when she suddenly jerked her head up and stiffened her grip on the gun.
"You remember the day my husband and I captured you-" Danny nodded, thinking back on that awful day when Jazz had still been at school and his parents had managed to suck him into the Fenton thermos on his flight home, "-we placed you in the Containment Unit for ectoplasmic examination. Our first order of business was something Jack had been working on at the time, a liquid version of his Ecto-Stoppo-"
"-Power-Erfier," Danny finished for her, almost breaking his neutral expression to smile at the stupid name his dad had given the machine. He stopped his lips from moving upward as soon as he noticed his mom giving him a strange look.
"Precisely," Maddie backed away from him as she spoke but did not put down the gun. "As it turns out, Jack went over the recommended dosage and you unexpectedly fell into a coma."
"What?" Danny exclaimed.
Maddie sighed, ignoring her enemy's panicked outburst. "To preserve the ethical integrity of our research, we were forced to cease all experimentation until you woke up. By my calculations, you were supposed to have regained consciousness the following day. Not that it mattered, because that's when the Walkers arrived in Amity Park."
"Walker? You mean the ghost?"
"Not a ghost. Walkers," Maddie's eyes seemed to glaze over as she said this. Her gaze then travelled to a nearby window. Danny darted a hesitant glance at his mom, then, figuring he had been granted permission to do so, walked over to one of the Op Center's enormous glass panels and observed the street below.
The sight that met him wasn't a joyful one. There was debris littering the streets, cars flipped carelessly onto their sides, and shattered windows in nearly every home in the proximity. But Danny's attention wasn't focused on the damaged property. He was staring at the people who were mulling around the area.
They wouldn't have been so alarming if they hadn't been walking in such erratic, unnatural patterns, as though they had all sustained serious leg injuries. They seemed to have no definite direction, and even from this height, Danny could see their tattered clothing covered in blood and grime. Their faces were extraordinarily pale, even more so than a ghost. Some were so clumsy that they bumped into each other, but didn't even seem to notice as they switched gears and hobbled off in another direction before bumping or tripping over something else.
Danny understood at once: these weren't normal human beings.
"W-what are they?" Danny asked in a high voice. He vaguely recognized one of them as Nathan, a fellow student from Casper High. The boy wandered aimlessly in circles before tripping over a lifeless figure whose head had been violently smashed against the edge of a curb. Nathan's body shuddered upon landing, and he did not get back onto his feet.
Unable to continue watching the pitiful display of the "Walkers" moving about, Danny turned back to his mom.
"Walkers. They're like you," she spat accusingly. "They're dead. Or they're supposed to be."
Danny had had plenty of rough encounters with his parents before, but this time, his mom's words cut like knives. He hated the way she was glaring at him, like he was somehow responsible for whatever freakish catastrophe was occurring beyond the walls of the Op Center.
"We had no time to escape," Maddie continued as tears streamed down her cheeks. Her grip on the gun was shaky at best, but she looked angry enough to fire at any given moment. "They just…broke in. My husband was out and my children-"
Danny watched in dismay as his mom, for the first time in his life, broke down into sobs. She set the gun down and leaned against a nearby desk for support, trying to wipe away her tears so as to appear less weak in front of this familiar ghostly foe. But it was no use; the tears were flowing freely against her will.
"My children," she said in a broken voice. "Were at school. There were at least twenty of them in the house, all attacking each other. I had no choice but to retreat up here. I tried calling the school, but by then…"
Ignoring the fact that she was basically trying to justify abandoning him in the basement, Danny decided that the worst possible thing in the world was having to see his mom cry and not being able to do anything to comfort her. She would never accept the warm embrace from a ghost, even one that was secretly her own son.
"B-By then it h-had been overrun," she finished in an emotionless voice.
Danny felt his heart turn to ice as the weight of her words came crashing down on him. His friends, his family, his teachers…were they all like those unhuman-like monsters that were limping around the streets down below?
"How long was I imprisoned in the lab?" Danny asked in a hollow voice. He now understood that nobody had come to rescue him because the area had been completely infested at the time. His only protection had been the reinforced glass enclosure.
But as far as Maddie was concerned, he was a ghost, just another one of the living dead. His mom couldn't have possibly imagined that she was leaving her own son at the mercy of the flesh-eating intruders.
While that explained the blood and guts everywhere, it didn't explain how the food had spoiled so quickly. If his mom's calculations had estimated that he would come out of the coma within a day or two, then why did the rotten food look much older than that?
As the tears finally began to dwindle away, Maddie looked at him directly. "About four or five weeks."
...
...
Of course it's Maddie. Kickass moms always survive the initial outbreak of disasters, right? Plus, I love writing Maddie/Phantom interactions, so I just couldn't help myself. Hope you all liked it, and even if you didn't, feel free to leave constructive criticism :-)