Sing to Life

By JadeRabbyt

Chapter 10: Crater Complications

Milwaukee Journal, 10/2, Jessica Donell: A nation mourns as the city of Green Bay burns, hundreds dead and unknown thousands missing… Efforts to control the fire are still underway, but the scale and number of the fires has severely reduced the chances of saving any significant part of the city… The Journal was able to confirm that the light just east of Green Bay is indeed a government encampment established to investigate the mysterious outbreak of the fire, but the site remains closed to civilians.

Tucker poked Danny's shoulder and he opened his eyes. The bed was moving. Danny's clothing shuffed on the seat's fabric as he righted himself, and he froze as Sam shifted against him, nuzzling her head on his shoulder one more time before sitting up to blink away the sleep. Danny watched her, wide-eyed, and she rolled her eyes and smiled at him. Danny mumbled an apology and glanced past her out the window, where fields of blackened landscape glimmered faintly in the late starlight, rolling away to the dark horizon. The car creaked to a stop and the parking brake groaned, Jazz reaching for her lukewarm coffee. Beside Danny, Sam began to smooth her lightly tousled hair into place, arranging the small ponytail absently, and Tucker lugged up his backpack from the car floor and shuffled around inside it, the electronics within clattering as his hand spidered through them. Tucker came up with his digital assistant and settled back in the seat, the glow of its screen throwing shadows across his face. Sam quietly shook her head and Danny shrugged, and when he was sure Tucker was safely immersed, he gave Sam a light good-morning kiss. She pressed his hand and turned to the window. The fields shimmered and flowed in a strange light, the dried dirt and grass like water on a lake.

Jazz threw off her seatbelt and stretched her arms. "Well," she said. "Here we are."

Danny looked away from the windows to the clock on the dash. 3:30. Yesterday's events strolled into his memory, facts parading before an examiner. The night was quiet outside, nothing to be heard but the soft ruffle of fabric and sleepy, half-caught breaths. Outside the night was waiting, that strange shimmer calling them out.

Tucker dropped the PDA into his lap, unable to find an internet signal. "Did we just, like, pack up pretty much randomly and haul off to Green Bay in the middle of the night?" His mouth stretched in a wide yawn.

Danny wished Tucker wouldn't be so blunt about it. "I think so."

"Were we thinking clearly?"

Sam shrugged and opened her door. "Definitely not." She slammed it shut again. "It's cold out there."

"Hey Jazz, could you turn up the heat?" Danny asked.

Jazz jumped. "Hm?"

"The heat."

"Oh. Right." Jazz flicked it on and pushed out the door. "I'm going outside." She left them and stood at the corner of the car, arms crossed across her chest. Tucker asked what she was looking at.

"I don't know. I can't see around her." Danny shrugged. "It looks like there's some kind of light over that way. Maybe she's looking at that."

Sam stared out her window, her mouth forming a perfect 'O.' "You guys have to see this." She struggled out of the car and joined Jazz, Danny and Tucker following close behind. They stood in a jagged line, the four of them looking out over the fields.

"Incredible," Sam murmured. Jazz had parked the car on a high knoll at the dead-end of a dirt road, allowing a good view of the two lights shining side-by-side in the near distance, one of them to the right, the other farther away and to the left. The farther light burned a jagged and bloody red. As their eyes adjusted the red resolved itself into the skeletons of high-rises, hunched, crippled, and emaciated, clothed in flame that reached up to lick the billowing shrouds of smoke. The low booms and sharp cracks echoed to their ears as the cripples hunched ever lower, a colony of damned lepers. Miles away from the inferno shone the other light, a white pool on a level patch of the fields, channeled and carefully bounded to service a hive of urgency, human resources gathering to see if they could outguess Green Bay's scorching ailment, trying to prevent another disaster in a city just like it. Little black, shining specks-cars-glinting everywhere in and around it, parked about small islands of hastily-erected portables and booming tents. At its far shore, Danny thought he could see a line of dirt, and beyond that, a crater of near-blackness.

Danny dug a small pit in the dirt with the point of his shoe. Tucker heard the scuffle and looked down. "Second thoughts?"

Danny shook his head. "No. Just nervous." He rubbed his arms against the cold. "This is definitely going to be tricky."

Jazz glanced at him. "So, what do we do?" Tucker and Sam leaned forward to hear his answer.

Danny took a last look and the winding dirt road behind them and sighed, shoving his hands in his pockets. "The crater is over by those lights, and there's people around, so it's probably safe. I can always use my powers if we get caught." He stepped over the knoll and waved for them to follow. "Let's go."

They trekked over the landscape, most of which was quartered off into pastureland, brushing through the grass that darkened from brown to black before it disappeared completely as they crept closer to the bright floodlights. Danny, Sam, and Tucker walked together, Danny out in front, while Jazz hung back a couple steps, wishing she had worn different shoes. Danny plowed on ahead of her, his steps hardly faltering save for a few gopher holes or a rough patch, and Jazz didn't wonder that Sam and Tucker had followed him all the way out here. She had only seen the trio in action two or three times, but never in any detail, and rarely anything serious, at least to her knowledge. Yet here he was, here they were, trudging through the grasslands of another state towards the Feds, OSHA, WHO, and probably every other alphabet-soup government agency. The armchair psychologist in her asked Wasn't she worried that she'd get caught? What about all those college apps; this was her senior year after all. But Jazz wasn't worried. Danny and Sam were sensitive to something in the air, they had smelled it together from the moment they'd woken up the previous morning. Jazz had caught a whiff of it, maybe, of course it was probably just post traumatic stress disorder. For the moment, she was willing to consider the possibility that something more important than her college career was at stake.

Jazz nearly stumbled over Tucker in her contemplations.

The three friends collectively shushed her and gestured to a field a little way over. A black-clad man with a heavy assault rifle strolled around, scanning the country for careless trespassers.

Danny grabbed Sam and Tucker's hands. Jazz took hold of Sam's, and she experienced an unusual lightness of limb as Danny phased their linked group safely out of sight. They continued on silently, sneaking under the nozzles of several more posted guns, and twenty minutes later found them crouching among the cleared-away rocks and boulders at the border of a massive, well-lit compound filled with government drones that scurried back and forth like bipedal beetles.

"Okay," Danny muttered. For the first time since he'd woken up, Jazz noticed a flash of worry cross his face. "No noise, no extra movement, and especially no letting go."

"No kidding," Tucker added. Danny shook his head and smiled wryly.

They all took a moment to breathe, and then Danny stood them up-safely invisible-and led them into the light. Armed men strode everywhere, ducking into portables or nosing in and out of tents, many toting thick stacks of papers and apparently permanent scowls. Danny licked his lips and held his friends' hands closer. A balding man in a trench coat strode right for them, and before they could move aside, the man walked right through Sam. She cringed and made a soft noise in her throat.

The man whipped around and glared through the four intruders, the sharp eyes behind his spectacles sifting the dirt at their feet and flickering aside to check the dark corners of stair and rail about the nearby buildings. Jazz felt her lungs seize up with fear and doubt, but the man tilted his head and swung himself around, the tails of his coat swishing as he stalked away. Tucker shook out his weak knees and Danny half-smiled at Sam, but she clenched her teeth and looked away. Jazz suppressed her sisterly inclinations as her brother raised his and Sam's linked hands and squeezed, Sam's self-abasing expression turning a bit happier. Tucker pointed and waved to the hive around them, bringing everyone back to the matter at hand. Danny nodded and led them forward again toward the barrier of tossed-up dirt, a sloping mound of burnt-black earth and rock that stretched away into the darkness in either direction. They breezed around men in labcoats stooping to collect samples with a curt frustration that, if anything, exceeded that of the paper-carrying drones on the perimeter. The four walked around them when they could, through them when they couldn't. They were lucky. It didn't look like anybody had even touched beyond the crater's border, there was nobody crawling up or down in it, and inside they'd at least have a moment of privacy.

They were two steps from the slanting piles when the alarm began to shriek.

Every eye in the compound gravitated toward the crater, a half-second that startled the drones out their own private disgruntlements, then everybody was moving, rushing around with recording equipment and powering-up strange machines-

Danny looked back and forth at the mess, muscles taught as a piano wires. "Is that for us?"

"Probably not," Jazz whispered. "They wouldn't be looking for ghosts... would they?"

Their eyes drew toward a labcoat with a CD-sized device. He paced around, squinting from the device to the air in front of him, and looked straight at the foursome from ten feet away. His mouth split in a grin and he yelled that he 'had found it.'

Sam backed away as a cluster of shouting, paper and gun and vial-waving men beginning to form around them. "No, I don't think they were prepared for us at all." She would have slapped her forehead if she hadn't been holding on to Jazz. "We are so stupid..."

The men shouldered their guns. "Time to move!" Danny went ghost and flew everybody forward, closing the distance between them and the crater.

Sam tried to pull him back. "Go through the ground! That might block their signals." Danny nodded, and they phased through the dirt and into darkness. Danny struggled against it, going ghost and lighting his fists with incandescent ectoplasm, but nothing helped. Sam and Tucker had grips of iron on his hands and Danny could hear nothing more than muffled noises coming from either of them. He bent his head and plowed ahead, figuring they must come out at the interior of the crater, and after a couple seconds that seemed a couple years, they did.

Danny blew a small burrow in the crater wall with a bright flash of plasma, enough to keep them out of sight from the startled hive above, and phased everybody back to human. Back to normal. He sat against the rough wall of the hole, more than a little tired. "One heckuva morning."

Jazz shuddered and wiped the dirt from her clothes. "Please tell me you don't do this regularly."

Tucker laughed. "No way. We get in scrapes, but nothing like this."

"Anything ever with the government?"

Danny sighed and leaned back against the dirt. "This is the first time."

"Good."

Sam peeked out the front of the burrow and craned her head. Danny sat up. "See anything?"

She pulled back in. "Yeah, about fifty guys setting up rappelling gear."

"Okay, time to go." He turned to Tucker. "Go ahead and get out the thermos."

Tucker adjusted his hat. "Well, funny thing about that..."

Danny's mouth dropped open.

"Just kidding." Tucker laughed, pulling the thermos from his backpack and tossing it to Danny, who nearly dropped it. "Got ya!"

"I'm gonna 'get you' after we get outta this," Danny grumbled, clipping the thermos to his belt. "Tell me something? How are you still cracking jokes at a time like this."

Tucker shrugged. "Hey, somebody has to keep his head in this funeral."

Sam took another look outside. "Tick tock."

"Alright alright, come on." Danny dropped his legs over the lip of the burrow and set his arms against the dirt to push himself over, but something stopped him. A pressure against his chest that wouldn't let him forward.

Sam's hand was on his shoulder. "It's alright."

"I'm not afraid of him." I just can't seem to move from this spot, is all.

Sam's voice again. "We beat him once, we can do it again."

Danny looked down. The white figure lay on the ground below beside a black sphere that swam with dark, tinted colors. Danny gulped. "Nothing is going to happen," he said. "Nobody is going to be hurt." There must have been something besides a tremor in his voice, because Tucker and Jazz's expressions inexplicably lightened. Sam took her hand away, and Danny shoved off into the crater.

One by one they slid down the steep incline, collecting various bruises and minor cuts along the way to land in a heap at the flat bottom of the crater, painfully aware of the new injuries and the bright floodlights turning toward them. Danny had the distant impression that he was about to be buried alive. The walls stretched up around them for a hundred feet or more, and the shifting lights threw sliding shadows over the larger rocks all around them. The dark sphere glimmered and flashed electrically in the center of the crater's great bowl, and the white figure lay on its side, facing away from them. It wore a pair of ragged jeans, and the smudged whiteness they'd seen in the picture was from its t-shirt, stained with ash and dirt. They edged closer for a better look, and Danny wrinkled his nose. It didn't really look like Alex, but the hair on the back of his neck told him there could be no mistake about it.

"What's it doing?" Jazz shaded her eyes for a better look.

"Um, taking a nap? Maybe it's dead." Tucker shrugged. "Oh well, time to go."

Sam had followed a little behind Danny. He looked at her, and past her to the rappellers, who were, oddly enough, scrapping with each other on their way down. The crater was deep, but he'd give it about two minutes maximum before they arrived. He went ghost and prepared a beam. "If he hasn't started spouting off by now, than chances are he's not explosive. I'm going to smack him with something."

Jazz gasped. "But if it's Alex! Danny, don't-" But the little green ball of ectoplasm flew through the air and struck the figure, flopping him over onto his stomach. Everybody held their breath, the feds on the hill stood tense, but the figure groaned, rolled over and sat up, knees and arms splayed out to support himself. "What- huh?"

He was a college kid, no aura at all. A long, unwrinkled face stretched across a couple high cheekbones, etched in skin on a skull that wobbled atop a tall but fairly built body. Norwegian or German ethnicity, maybe.

Tucker let out a breath. "Okay, that is not Alex."

Danny shook his head. "No, that's him alright." But there's something seriously wrong here.

Jazz walked toward it, Danny and company close behind. They stopped when it was close enough to hear, far away enough to dodge. Jazz looked down at him. "Hello?"

Alex shook his head and looked at the dirt. His eyes moved from the ground to his own hands, traveling up to meet Jazz's tentative gaze and drifting there. Danny brought the glow on his hands to life, but there was nothing in those brown irises but animal confusion. Alex worked his jaw noiselessly and his fists closed on handfuls of dirt. Danny got ready to fight, but there was no need. Alex burst out in laughter.

The men on the walls didn't move but to aim their guns, waiting. The laughter scraped across the rock, fingernails on a blackboard, and Danny and Sam automatically found each other's hands as Jazz and Tucker scooted closer, the group tightening itself against the hysteria. The laughter roared and then echoed before at last ebbing away, and Alex collapsed back with a puff of dirt, still giggling a little. "Figures." He shook his head, smirking. "It figures."

Tucker shuddered in a cold he hadn't noticed before. "Okay, so it is Alex."

The figure on the ground raised his head. "Alex?" He glanced across them, almost interested. "Alex?" Danny didn't trust him any farther than he could throw him, and last time they'd met he'd only barely managed to throw him far enough. "C'mon guys, seriously. Who now?"

This is wrong. His speech is wrong, that black sphere-thing feels wrong, this whole place is wrong. "You." Danny stood out from the group, taking what he hoped was an aggressive stance. "You're Alex. Your name is Alex."

Alex gave him a long, confused stare that made Danny wish he would just attack him the old-fashioned way. "Well, you can have the name. I don't want it."

Danny couldn't tell if he was a ghost or not. The chest moved up and down, rippling and smoothing the t-shirt with breath. The face was empty and vacant, but the expression wasn't alien. A blank, vacuous hopelessness, yes, but still human. Danny stepped closer without meaning to, looking more carefully. The old evil, the black tentacles, were gone. Danny was sure of that, but now there was something else, something worse. Something of the future in those glazed brown eyes that flickered to life and caught Danny's gaze. The mouth cracked into a sneer and before Danny could back away Alex was standing, standing at his full human height and looking right at him, seizing his shoulders without touching him, closing fingers around his throat without stretching out his arms.

"You see something you like? You see what's going to happen, you miserable little hero?" Danny didn't understand. There was nothing like the old blackness holding him, no tangible force at all. But he couldn't tear away. "You see what I have done now? You see with your little green eyes, you small-minded fool? This portal? You see?" Reality closed in around Danny, but it was a horrible, revolting reality nothing like the night of his anniversary-had that only been a day ago?-this was a reality of scorched earth and waste that slithered up around him, around the animated maniac, around every cold inanimate and every beating heart, coiling and clouding and slowly degrading until the day poisoned fangs dropped down from the heavens and closed over all. Alex's voice cracked and splintered, collapsing under its own weight. "See what I have done to you..." And a shallow trickle of liquid slipped from his eye and wet the dust at his feet.

A jerk on the thermos' belt yanked Danny back into reality and a beam raced over his shoulder to swallow Alex, dissolving and pulling him back and away into itself. Danny heard Tucker spin the thermos lid shut, and the three of them stood around him, Sam's hand on his arm, looking into his face. Danny tried and failed to come up with something reassuring. He watched Sam's expression change for the worse and felt the chill of a blunt metal point at the base of his neck.

"Turn around and drop the device."

Tucker let the thermos thump to the ground and Danny turned to come face to face with the nozzle of a jet-black hand gun. "You're under arrest for violating Emergency Measures 119, 648, and 390." A pair of heavy cuffs snapped shut on his wrists, and around him Sam, Tucker, and Jazz struggled against the same. "You four are going to have to come with us." The man's face was half-hidden under a visor. His hands were gloved and his padded jacket was fattened with a bullet-proof vest.

Danny glared at the gun and smacked it away. "Can you guys just give me a BREAK!?"

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A/N: Thanx much to reviewers Cheerin4danny, Mrs. Granger-Weasley, and Sakura Scout! Next chapter we'll leave the angst to simmer for a bit while Danny and co. meet the harried staff of the Federal Bureau of Prestidigitation. Reviews are heartily encouraged!