Welcome to the Emerald City

or alternatively: A Stew of Restless Minds

The second day of the Amitypocalypse—reporters had already begun to call it the greenout by then, but Tucker coined his own term to mollify Sam, who smiled and agreed that yes, that was much more creative—passed much like the early hours of the first. The main difference was that some of the fear had been bled off and replaced with a transfusion of pure, unadulterated boredom. They napped periodically. They bullied Danny, as the most combat-ready member of their little huddle, into escorting them to the kitchen for snacks every hour or so. That said, Danny still looked peaked. He napped more than either of the others, and the closest he could get to invisible was a sort of half-translucent state that sent whispers stirring up the back of Tucker's neck, wherein when you looked from the corner of your eye you thought you saw patches of glittering darkness where his organs should be. Once it took Sam a full minute of shaking to wake him up.

They had dared to emigrate from the laundry room to the living room and were watching the live news stream on Sam's parents' flatscreen (the power was somehow, miraculously, still working, and those guys at the station had better get a raise sometime in the future) when word first came in that the federal government had come to town. Danny snorted derisively when the first shaky footage aired, filmed through someone's second-floor window. Two people in white hazmat suits were setting up shoulder-height plastic barricades at the edges of the affected area. Something moved sinuously at the corner of the screen, and the two agents looked at each other, eyed the camera, and then speedwalked back to their plain black van.

"Those guys are terrible," Danny commented when Tucker asked about the sour look on his face. "Literally incompetent. I've been running circles around them since I got zapped, except this one time when they pulled me into a circle and then accidentally summoned, like, six poltergeists."

The embers of hope in Tucker's lungs dwindled, but he didn't let them die. "Maybe they just hadn't sent their best guys. How high-profile were you in the Chicago supernatural scene? God, I just said that sentence out loud, didn't I."

Danny considered, cracking a half-smile. "I didn't have a specific, like, haunt or anything, so they just sort of had a vague idea that I existed and I wasn't your normal ghost. Don't think they ever connected the portal operator to the guy who'd been doing their job for them for, like, half a year. So I guess it's possible they have better people." He seemed to find the notion more unsettling than promising, which, fair.

The next day, Wednesday the 2nd, wasn't much different, hazmatted bureaucrats notwithstanding. School was still cancelled. Danny went into the other room and had a long, tense phone call with someone named "Jass" or possibly Jeff, according to Sam, who listened through the door. For some reason Danny seemed reluctant to tell them who this was; Tucker had noticed him starting a sentence with "Ja–" and then backtracking a few times, always when talking about ghost science or his fights back in Chicago. Another ghost-person, maybe, or just someone who needed to maintain their deniability if Danny's probably-illegal existence was ever noted by the powers-that-be? He seemed nervous enough about it that Tucker had never pursued the subject. (Sam hadn't noticed.)

Tucker's dad called in the afternoon; his mom was busy on the phone with Aunt Lacey, who was not doing well. Tristan had woken up that morning with a fever of 101F, his mostly-closed stab wound ringed with swelling and redness that he'd apparently been hiding for a few days. He'd been discharged with instructions on long-term wound care, of course, but the only thing the family had been told to do in case of infection was to bring the fever down and report back to the hospital as soon as possible. Now there was no way to get him to the hospital, and no one answered the phone when Lacey called seeking any advice they could give her on deep-tissue infection, so she was stuck scouring the internet and cold-calling doctors outside the greenout zone for tips of the more and less reputable varieties.

Mr. Foley dutifully updated his son on this development, but tried to maintain an upbeat tone. He was sure these new government guys would get a handle on things soon. He and Mom were here if Tucker needed them, just a phone call away. Everything would be fine, no problem at all.

The weird thing was, it actually made Tucker angry. He gave one-word answers around a hot chest and gummy tongue. But he could hear the tension in his dad's voice, so he nodded along. His parents needed to hear from him as much as he needed to hear from them, if not more.

When the time came to say "I love you," he didn't forget. Across the room in a patch of sunlight, Sam untied and retied her shoes.

By Thursday morning, it was apparent that the guys in white polyester and latex were not the heroes Amity deserved. It became apparent because of someone in an apartment in the Heights, who sent Tiffany Snow and her crack team a grainy photograph of two guys dragging a third one back out through a gap in the orange plastic barricade–two white hazmat suits flecked with red, and the third significantly more dirty, and also missing both legs. Apparently this had been the government's first incursion into the greenout area. They did not try again on that particular Thursday.

On the bright side, quite a few Amity residents were showing an interest in amateur photojournalism. So. There was that.

The media and police were relying a lot on individual citizens for information–casualty counts, areas with more concentrated paranormal activity, etc.–so ringtones could be heard through thin walls all over. In the evening one of Danny's friends from Chicago called, implying that while the crisis wasn't yet on national news, it had at least made its way through the grapevine of family members, coworkers, and acquaintances to nearby cities and towns. (Coworkers were probably a big one. Tucker pitied the guy who had to tell his boss that he couldn't commute to work because he was dealing with a highly localized ghost emergency.) The Manson landline got a lot of calls from concerned neighbors, and four of Tucker's friends rang his cell to make sure he was okay. Among them was Mikey, who reported that he was holed up with his parents in their third-floor apartment, and it turned out their landlord, a weird, unsociable old man who was quick on repairs but otherwise practically impossible to deal with, was actually the perfect kind of weird for this situation: the prepper kind. He had bags and bags of salt stocked up in his basement along with plenty of other non-perishable food items, and he was quick to set up a system for rationing supplies, calling up tenants, and keeping a lookout on all sides of the building. He was noticeably happier, huffing up and down the stairs at all hours dispensing safety tips; this was apparently the emergency he'd been waiting for his whole life, or at least since his last tour in '94.

Of course, this begged the question of how those without emergency food stockpiles were doing across the city. Things were already bad, but they would get much worse if a large number of people were forced outside in search of food. The looting so far had only been limited by the fact that many of those who attempted to loot…didn't even make it to the stores.

Finally, on Friday, Danny was well enough to go out and fight some ghosts. Whatever was in the gym seemed well and truly unable to get in–they'd triple-checked–so Sam and Tucker didn't really have a legitimate argument to keep him there, though they did their best.

"You're already dead, wasn't once enough?" Sam yelled from the kitchen. Tucker could faintly hear the microwave humming behind her. Sometime soon they should really start rationing, he noted absently.

"Seriously, it'll be fine. Everything people have been able to film so far seems like a total pushover." He said it laughingly, but his face didn't quite match his tone. Maybe it was the way his smile was just a little too wide. Or maybe it was his pupils, dilated in a way that Tucker was pretty sure did not mean he was looking at a loved one. He kept glancing at the door and taking aborted little light-footed steps toward it, like it was going to run away if he stood here much longer.

In the end, Danny did make it out the door, and they watched him walk with terrifying purpose down the middle of the sunlit street and slip fluidly around a corner.

The whispers were louder without him.

So Sam and Tucker had some time to kill. Just two old friends in stale, sweaty clothes, scrambling for any topic other than the one that had dominated their lives and allowed no room for distractions. The silence was suffocating, oppressive. The green sky taunted them through shrinking windows. Despair bore down from above, starving conversation, dooming action, threatening even to swamp coherent thought and drown one's very soul….

"Sooo, you come here often?" Tucker asked with a waggle of his eyebrows. Sam covered her face and groaned.

~(*0*)~

Danny came back five hours later as dusk gathered on the edges of buildings, bloody, limping, and grinning with every one of his teeth. The air around him seemed to quiver, his outline hyper-distinct along with the shadows on his clothes and skin, and Tucker was struck with the bizarre notion of a three-dimensional object in a two-dimensional world. Like at any moment he could pop forward, right out of the reality around him.

Sam squinted at him, shook her head slightly as if shooing a fly, and then proceeded to walk far closer than Tucker felt was strictly healthy right now. He silently resolved to stay at least five feet away until whatever this was was…well, not gone, but hidden. Wrapped back beneath Daniel Fenton's skin.

So Sam took charge of surveying Danny up and down while Tucker very subtly moved from the couch to the stairs in the corner. "Yikes. Who had you for breakfast?" she asked with the air of the rookie detective at the murder scene in a bad CBS cop dramedy. Tucker thought it was a figure of speech until he took a closer look and, oh yeah, those did look a lot like bite marks, didn't they. Grandmother, what big teeth you have….

Danny flopped onto the couch and stretched hugely, arching his back and popping his shoulders. He glanced at Sam slantwise and offered a languid smirk while the leather creaked and gave beneath his weight. "You should see the other guy."

"And the other guy was a…yeti?"

"Dragon."

"No fuckin' way."

Danny just grinned.

"How…is it, out there?" Tucker ventured hesitantly.

"Not nearly as bad as I thought!" came Danny's cheery reply. "If anything really big got through, it's laying low in the sewers or something. And I'm not the only one out exploring! Obviously there's my parents, not accomplishing much, but there's also someone in a red hoodie setting sigil traps all over town–pretty clearly not an expert, it's all pretty simple stuff you can get online rather than some of the really horrible ones I've dodged in really active places, but it's working!They might have even sliced up more than me today. Wouldn't let me get close enough to see their face, though." He seemed disappointed, but then brightened again. "Oh, yeah, and a couple times I think I saw a werewolf!"

Predictably, Sam latched onto the part about the red-hooded ghost hunter, probing Danny's memory for more details, and Tucker was happy to fade into the scenery the same way the sky outside faded from lime green to kelly green to emerald-on-black-velvet above the Mansons' similarly darkening hedged-in yard. It wasn't just the furtive movements, or the absolutely horrifying vibes that Danny probably couldn't help radiating; it was the open, relaxed body language, the lazy but alert smile. This new version of Danny made him uneasy, but he couldn't put a finger on exactly why. Something had changed….

Oh. Danny wasn't tired. And it was terrifying.

It didn't last, or at least Tucker was pretty sure it diminished. Danny talked animatedly on the couch with Sam for a while, and by about an hour in he was blinking more often and his smiles glinted less. He yawned once, and he and Sam padded into the kitchen to eat Captain Crunch straight out of the bag. By the time they got back, the earthquake-in-reality effect was pretty much gone, leaving only that faint smell of ozone and aftertaste of tinfoil that Tucker had mostly become accustomed to. Danny conked out in the laundry room not long after.

Now, if only that goddamn fox would stop showing in his peripheral vision, Tucker's life would be absolutely peachy keen.

Tucker made the educated decision to take another nap. When that didn't work, he said screw it and tried eating Captain Crunch straight out of the bag. He actually did feel a little better after that.

~(*0*)~

"Oh, yeah. I think it'll probably be relatively safe to go out probably…day after tomorrow, at least in large groups. I talked to a guy who knows about this stuff, and I'm pretty sure he said all the ectoplasm should automatically drain back through me and all the natural portals over the next few months."

Tucker startled, and he and Sam glanced at each other. "Okay, wait, you do know someone who knows a lot about ghosts? Why didn't you tell us?! Or, like, go to him straight away?! And also what do you mean 'pretty sure he said,' who is this person?!" As she occasionally managed to do, Sam expressed Tucker's exact thoughts with pinpoint accuracy.

Danny fidgeted, sliding his hands into his pockets. "Well…he's dead…."

"Oh."

"I guess I should've clarified that."

"I mean…okay, I guess that makes sense?" Tucker was forced to allow. They were all awake again, leaning against counters or, in Sam's case, the enormous black refrigerator, debriefing more thoroughly in the kitchen now that Danny had stopped eyeing people's jugulars. It was 11:23 pm and full dark outside, but their eyes skated carefully across the walnut flooring, carefully avoiding the windows and especially the big glass sliding doors. There was an unspoken understanding that the meeting wouldn't end until they'd finished the Captain Crunch.

"So who is he beyond the fact that he's dead?" Sam questioned around a sugary mouthful. All Tucker had to do was stare at the box longingly, and she handed it over without a word. Sam was cool like that.

Danny hopped up to sit on the counter, leaning forward so he wouldn't hit his head on the cupboards overhanging the stove. "I met him this summer, and I've only really talked to him, like, twice. He haunts the old clock and watch repair place next to Porky's BBQ. He's pretty scrambled, so I'm thinking he's really old, but the couple of times now that I've caught him lucid and not, like, a vague scattering of semi-sentient particles, he knows a lot about being a ghost. From an instinctive perspective, rather than a scientific one. And he basically told me that the should that makes ectoplasm flow from here to there will always prevail in the end. Just like, you know, how time flows forward toward the inevitable heat death of the universe? Entropy, and how it causes and is echoed by the decay of civilizations? He says that on every level, our existence is structured around that should, like regression to the mean except the true mean is zero. Everything moves toward death."

…

Sam and Tucker both stared at Danny. Danny slurped orange juice out of a cup through Sam's metal boba straw.

….

"What? Oh, yeah, he uses a lot of weird time metaphors. Guess that's what happens when all your roommates are clocks."

"Moving on!" Tucker announced. He passed Danny the Captain Crunch. "So the good news is, it's going to go away on its own."

Danny frowned. "Not exactly. The whole green-sky thing and a lot of the weaker ghosts and ambient energy are gonna go away on their own, but most of the actual conscious stuff is gonna need some…polite urging. And then the rest of them I'm going to have to beat up, or that person with the sigil traps will take care of them, I dunno. Getting them all is gonna take probably a couple of months." Schlorrrp. "But if I go out for a couple hours each day and Red Hoodie keeps helping, I feel like we should probably get enough of them that it at least seems like it's no longer dangerous. Just a few sewer monsters snatching unattended children once in a while. Hospitals and stuff will probably open again" –he glanced at Tucker when he said this, once again prompting Tucker to get really uncomfortable about the exact range of his hearing– "and we can actually go around and, like, see who's okay. And get food, and stuff."

It took Tucker 2.3 seconds to process this.

And at that, half the nervous energy that had been cluttering up Tucker's hindbrain throughout this nightmare just…left him, in a rush. The numbness in his limbs rushed up synapses to replenish his negativity supplies. Five days. Wait, had it really only been five days? They went for Danny early Sunday morning, so that was Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday…yeah, five days. Less than a week. And if Danny's, to be fair, very-much-inexpert opinion gleaned from tangential experience, a very sketchy ghost source, and someone named Jeff (or maybe Jass?) was to be believed, the whole state of emergency might be resolved before the week was up.

And what would they find, when it was? Empty streets, people still living off stale crackers and afraid to go outside? Broken windows, shops that might end up closed for good? (Empty beds with red-brown splotches? That odor, everywhere, drifting down hallways and circling stairwells, wafting in noxious concentrated clouds from heretofore unopened bedroom doors, maybe even the same odor that had emanated from that dumpster and filled their noses and the cramped dark corridor, was that what it smelled like, had that been the smell–Stop.)

The detritus of five days' time. That was all it took to obliterate a city's peace of mind.

And, you know, a person's. Obviously. But that was beside the point.

(Heels bouncing against the cupboard where the Mansons' cook kept skillets and pots, Danny smiled quietly around his boba straw, looking fully and completely alive.)

~(*0*)~

It was late afternoon on Saturday in the light-blue-and-chrome microcosm of the Manson kitchen when Sam got a surprise. Tucker was in the living room toying idly with his PDA and Danny was out doing his thing again when it arrived, in the form of an unknown number on the home phone while she was busy taking perishables out of the hulking black fridge and pondering how to use as many of them as possible in tonight's "dinner." (They hadn't yet really figured out organized meals, but Tucker had tried last night with limited success, which is to say, lukewarm marinara over vegan pasta that was only slightly too hard, supplemented with various bruised fruits and energy bars). Tiffany Snow, who looked worse and worse with every passing day and should probably get a key to the city or at least some sort of journalism award when all this was done, had warned them to expect rolling blackouts as the power station coped with dwindling fuel and missing personnel; it could be life-or-death, she managed to convey without saying anything of the sort, that citizens empty their fridges and preserve anything that could spoil. As such, Sam had to drop several chilled chicken cutlets and an armful of artisanal butters in the sink in order to answer the phone before the last ring. "Hello?"

"Is this Samuel Manson?" A man's voice, low, flat.

Uh. "This is Samantha Manson? To whom am I currently speaking?" Ugh, she sounded like her mom. She really needed to un-brainwash herself in the area of phone and email skills.

There was a quiet "ah" of understanding. "I'm from the Government Bureau of Irregular Emergency Response. There's a woman at the checkpoint here who claims to be your mother? We were hoping you could speak to her and explain why she cannot pass the barrier, there is no need to pass the barrier, and she needs to back off and wait at an appropriate distance like everyone else and no, she cannot purchase some sort of pass." The guy gained steam as he rolled along, and then at the end sort of caught himself and cleared his throat uncomfortably. Pamela Manson tended to do that to minor bureaucrats and customer service people.

But wait, seriously? What?

With trepidation, Sam assented and waited through the clunking and clicking sounds of a cell phone changing hands. Her mom's voice faded from quiet to loud, as if she had started speaking before completely raising the microphone to her mouth. "I swear, I–Samantha? Sam?"

"Uh. Yes?" The freezer door slowly swung shut, leaving Sam face-to-face with her own full-body reflection. Shoulders squared, tailbone hitched against the opposite counter, face pimply and wan. Cradling a jar of fig jam in the crook of her elbow. Was the unease audible in her voice?

"Oh, thank god, I left my phone at Mabel's when I left and I tried to call at that gas station in Ohio but I don't have my contacts and I forgot the last digit and your father wasn't answering and–Samantha are you alright, are you okay?!" The words tumbled over each other and cut each other off at the legs so that ultimately the whole sentence ended up slumped on the floor in a breathless heap.

If Sam didn't know better, she'd say Pamela was drunk. But this was actually the opposite of what that sounded like. Sam's tongue stumbled. "I'm. I'm fine, I'm with friends. Didn't Dad say that when he called you?"

Pamela took a moment to process this. Her inhale rattled on the other end. "He–yes, but that was four days ago–or, wait, it–is today–today is Saturday? Six days?"

"...Yes, it's Saturday." Sam slowly set down the jar of fig jam on the counter beside her, maintaining eye contact with her reflection. The color of the fridge gave it the illusion of night. "Is everything alright?"

"No, Samantha, everything is clearly not all right!" Fair point, but Sam still bristled for a moment before registering that the hysterical bleeding edge was still in her mom's clipped vowels.

"Mom, did you…" No, don't ask that. "Okay, wait, where are you right now? Are you actually trying to get into town?"

"Of course! This whole quarantine is ridiculous, I have a right to go into my own city, my child is inside."

Sam blinked. "Mom, you can't just push past the government guys, they're trying to protect us." She gagged a little at that sentence, but in this particular situation it held true. "Dad says most hotels are filled up with people trying to get in, but I'm sure you can find a room somewhere. Call Dad, okay? They don't think this will last much longer."

Pamela interrupted at around the word "last," so for a moment they were both speaking at the same time. "Wait, hold on, but what is this, what is going on?!"

"...Did you not watch the news?"

"No, I didn't watch the news; I didn't even bring my phone, Samantha!"

Unbelievable. Sam wrenched her eyes away from her dark double and spun on a toe to start re-stacking the chicken cutlets in the sink for easy carrying. "Mom, seriously?! There's really too much for me to explain–! Okay, I mean–uh, there's, like, ghosts?"

"What does that mean, ghosts?!"

"I don't know! It means ghosts! They—" This was going nowhere. A chicken cutlet encased in styrofoam and plastic slid off the small pile, and she angrily snatched it up by the corner and smacked it flat on the counter with her free right hand. "Just watch the news, okay? You can get the channel at any nearby hotel. Just—Mom?" She paused, pulled the phone away from her ear to look at it, put it back to her ear. "Mom?"

There was a crackle of static. The small, old-style digital display showed a horizontal line that you'd expect indicated booting up or powering down, then went blank.

Right next to her, where he most definitely hadn't been before, Danny casually picked the fig jam up off the counter and sniffed it. There was a small smear of blood trailing into his hairline. "Y'know, that happened to our house phones once back in Chicago. Something probably chewed through your wires. Or someone. Heh." He made an approving face and carried the dig jam to the opposite side of the counter while Sam was still trying to recover from swallowing her lungs.

Breathe in, breathe out. "Stop doing that!" she groused, consciously loosening her white-knuckled grip on the phone.

Danny looked confused. "Uh. Okay? I can probably get my dad to look at your cords sometime soon if you want."

"Th—I—" Sam took another deep breath. In a strange shifting of perspective, sudden clarity, she became aware of how her heart was pounding. "Uh. You know what, sure. Thanks."

~(*0*)~

It was weird. That was what Tucker kept thinking. Probably the reflection he returned to the most.

It was weird how fluidly those five days slipped further and further behind them. At a pace that sometimes felt slow and sometimes felt almost absurdly fast, the city began its recovery. Squares of green light migrated slowly across the walls just like any other hue. The government people began to push into town; more and more often they could be spotted wandering empty streets carrying beeping sensors with long antennae, which looked impressive but never truly seemed to detect much of anything. Calls from friends became less frantic, more conversational. Infant weeds dragged themselves little by little from beds of potting soil; flowers bounced when breezes passed. Fathers and mothers left Timmy Jr. with the neighbors and met up to shuffle in wary packs to City Hall, which had received an emergency shipment of hygiene supplies and non-perishables.

The predicted blackouts came and went. The Manson mansion's resident carnivores had luckily eaten the ham in time, and they'd packed the rest in trash bags full of ice, so all they ultimately had to throw away was three eggs and some wilted lettuce. There were advantages to waiting out a supernatural disaster in a household that was one third vegetarian.

By Saturday afternoon, the streets were safe enough that half of the staff of the Amity Local News was able to go home for the night. Tiffany Snow took a much-deserved shower. Danny stopped shadowing his parents' van and turned instead to darker corners, the dockside warehouses, the sewers. By Sunday evening there wasn't an extranormal entity in sight. (They were still around, of course. Danny assured them of it. They may have slunk into basements, down tunnels, behind human eyes, but they were still there, still smiling. Any ghost worth its sanctified salt knew how to hide.)

And so began what Tucker privately thought of as the second stage of the Amitypocalypse. First came the greenout; then came the Hush. Because here's a tidbit about human psychology: We are incredibly uncomfortable with the lack of a pattern, and with the lack of a cause to marry to effect. So much so that we even see patterns where they do not exist, and we convince ourselves that natural, random regression to the mean is the result of our own words and actions, or someone else's. We struggle to objectively evaluate chance. And so when a phenomenon is truly unprecedented, when there is no comprehensible pattern from which to draw predictions, when the sky is still green and we have no clue what caused it and therefore no clue how to prevent it from happening again…. Well. That's a foolproof recipe for some very uncomfortable minds.

~(*0*)~

DATE: 10/6/2019

AMITY PARK, ILLINOIS

POPULATION: 168,390

CONFIRMED DEAD: 120

CONFIRMED MISSING: 364