A continuation of the previous chapter.
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Ectoplasm
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It was the phone ringing that woke Danny up this time. He hadn't meant to fall asleep. He vaguely remembered that you weren't supposed to fall asleep when you had a concussion. Or was that different now? He didn't know.
Before he answered the phone, he checked the time. 12:12. Okay. That was a time. Yeah. He couldn't remember what it had been before.
"Jazz?" he said, into the phone.
"I'm at the park with Sam and Tucker," she said. "Tell me if you hear this."
There was a pause. "Hear what?"
"We haven't done it yet. Come on, Tucker," she prompted, words clipped. Then a long, low blaaaaaaaaaaat came out of the phone speaker.
"Was that an air horn?"
"Yeah. Did you hear it?"
"Only through the phone. Let me put the phone down, and do it again."
"Sure."
This time, Danny was able to hear a very faint, echo-y blaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat. What followed was a game of hot and cold. Danny knew he wasn't being as helpful as he could have been. He kept getting distracted by the pain in his own head, and forgetting how loud the previous blaaats had been. Eventually, however, his friends had found him.
Normally, he would have zoned out at that point, but apparently he looked a lot worse than he'd thought. He hadn't even noticed the copious amount of blood and ectoplasm matting his hair and staining his clothes, or his broken arm. But then, concussions were brain injuries, and brain injuries could make things weird.
Jazz had brought the first aid kit, the big, green one. The one that had stuff for both humans and ghosts. It had a bunch of weird, Ghost Zone things in it, including vials of purified, energized ectoplasm, and ectoplasm patterned with Danny's ectosignature. Jazz made Danny drink one of each. He didn't want to. He couldn't possibly be that badly off. The former was sort of like drinking an unholy combination of caffeine and Nyquil. The later always made him think of drinking blood, even though it was sweet, and tasted absolutely nothing like blood.
They took turns carrying him. It was probably a good thing that he was supernaturally light, even as a human, but he could have done some walking. Probably. The ectoplasm was making him feel like a hyper noodle.
When they got to Jazz's car, they laid him down on the floor in front of the back seat. Sam got down so that his head was resting in her lap, and Tucker got into the front seat.
"Why?" he asked.
"So people looking in won't see you," said Jazz. She looked over the back of the seat as she got in. "The GIW have set up watching posts."
"Everything is very rapidly going to dystopian hell," said Sam. "No one's been able to get in or out of the shield since last night. We can't even call people outside."
"We'd honestly kinda hoped that you had gotten out, dude," said Tucker. "When you didn't come home, the options were either that, or, well. You know."
"Uh," said Danny. He was having some trouble processing. He didn't know, actually, but he suspected that when it came to him, it would keep him up at night.
The drove on, Danny zoning in and out, Sam trying to fix up some of his more superficial wounds, Jazz and Tucker talking quietly in the front seat. They got closer and closer to home, but then turned, going away.
"Where're we going?" asked Danny, confused. "I thought we were going home."
"We can't go home," said Jazz.
"Why?"
"The GIW have practically taken it over. We have a room at the Grand Julian. Thirteenth floor."
"You know," said Tucker, "the one that doesn't exist because Amity Park is where physics goes to take vacations."