Sing to Life

By JadeRabbyt

Chapter 12: Bad Egg

Madeline Fenton's log book, 10/3: The equipment's been working strangely. I think the plasmic mixtures have been affected somehow, but for them to all be affected simultaneously in the same way would require some kind of chemical shift in the composition of the Ghost Zone itself, which is pretty much impossible ...I suppose I'll figure it out sooner or later.

Jack was drilling away at the latest invention, trying to get its edges machined properly so that all the interior circuitry would fit, when the cheerful little 'ding-dong!' of the doorbell sounded through the lab. He groaned and glanced over to Maddie.

"Can you get that?"

"I'm a little busy right now, Jack." Maddie sat hunched over a table, soldering the actual circuits for the machine, so Jack huffed and stalked up the stairs, opened the door, and stared at his son, his daughter, and several black-suited, sunglass-donning, stony-faced government drones.

"Yes?"

One of the drones held out a hand. "Good afternoon, Mr. Fenton. My name is Arthur McKinley and this is my assistant Gerald Stone. We're with the FBP."

"Oh," Jack said. He glanced down at Danny and Jazz. They both had their best puppy-eyed please-don't-kill-us smiles turned up full power, which wasn't so unusual for Danny, but the last time anybody had needed to reprimand Jazz was... Well, Jack couldn't remember the last time he or his wife had last needed to tell her anything.

"Excuse me a minute." Jack scurried back to the top of the lab's staircase and called down. "Honey? Some guys from the FBP just brought our kids home."

There was a clatter from down in the lab, then Maddie blew past him and had the front door open wide.

"So sorry about that. Please come in." She put her up goggles, and Jack smugly watched her give Danny and Jazz a withering glare, wiping those butt-kissing grins right off their faces. As the four walked inside, Maddie whispered to Jack that he should be nice; the FBP was a major donor.

She led them all into the living room, but nobody sat down. Danny and Jazz kept near the stairs, while Jack kept close to his wife near the coffee table. Maddie toyed with the fingers of her gloves and smiled thinly at the two agents. "Can I ask what this is all about?"

McKinley took off his glasses, and his younger toady reflexively followed suit. "I have other places to be, so I'm going to keep this short. We apprehended your children at the site of the Green Bay accident."

Maddie coughed, but not fast enough to cover her startled gasp and parental what-were-you-two-THINKING stare of amazement at Danny and Jazz. Their brown-nosing smiles were back, Jack saw. Danny gave a helpless little shrug, and Jazz clasped her hands and looked at the floor. Jack resented the small grin that appeared on the toady's face.

"Yes," McKinley continued. "Nobody knows it, and nobody had better continue to know it, if you understand my meaning…"

"We get it," Jack muttered. Government drones. Pfft.

McKinley smiled. "Good. There's a site outside Green Bay, the source of the disturbance that caused the fire. It's a large crater, and a ghost was found inside. I believe you've got a picture of it."

"Aha! I knew it!" Jack oophed as Maddie jabbed her elbow in his ribs.

"Your children approached this crater, armed with several devices from your labs—"

Ooo, Jack thought. There'll be firecrackers when these guys are gone. From the skittishness of the kids, they were thinking the same thing. Jack knew exactly what had happened. They'd sneaked off, thinking they were all gung-ho with the ghost weapons, then had managed to get themselves caught, probably with added prison sentences. Jack sobered at that one, but as he watched his offspring, their faces did weird little twitchy-smiley motions, and Jack could tell that, once again, he had missed something he should have been listening to.

"Eh? What?" he asked, clearing his throat.

"Medals," McKinley repeated. "They get heroic commendations for their brave work in the field."

Jack blinked. "What?"

"Danny and Jazz helped apprehend the ghost," the toady explained. "You must be very proud. Without their help, we never could have caught it."

"That so?" Jack looked at the kids again. They smiled and shrugged. Jazz had loosened up a little.

"Yes. And after seeing the marvelous work their devices did, we thought we'd ask you to come to work at the FBP's local facility to help with the research and development of the captured ghost."

Maddie looked away. "Well, this is a little sudden…"

"The pay is excellent," piped the assistant.

Jack grinned. "We'll do it." Once again, he suffered the wrath of Maddie's elbow.

"We'll have to get back to you. This is, you know, kind of a lot to take in."

"We understand." McKinley donned his glasses and made for the door. "Don't take too long. The situation is time-sensitive, and, as you know from the news, very delicate." He gave Maddie his card. "Call us."

Jack nodded. "Gotcha. We'll be in touch."

The two drones shut the door behind them, and Jack turned to Maddie, Maddie turned to the kids, and the kids turned to the stairs. "Get back here" Maddie started.

Jack grabbed her shoulders, grinning madly. "We are so going to take the job!"

Maddie threw his arms off and glared at him. "Jack, our kids"

"Were out FIGHTING GHOSTS! D'ya hear that, Maddie? They get MEDALS!"

She crossed her arms. "Dear, they were lying to us."

"Theywait, what?" Jack hated all this confusion.

"The kids must have done something beneficial, but it wasn't what those men told us." She turned to look up the stairwell to the second floor, where Jazz and Danny were both creeping around eavesdropping. "You kids get down here right now!"

Danny groaned, obviously exaggerating. "Gee, Mom, I'm really tired."

Upstairs, Jazz peeked over the railing and nodded her agreement. "We were up all night. Both of us could use some rest."

Maddie leaned on the railing, glancing over them. She knew very well that both her kids hated their curfews, and it wasn't yet three in the afternoon. Although, they did look pretty wiped out. Danny had some rings under his eyes, and Jazz must have been on some kind of all-night adrenaline-coffee buzz to look the way she did. "Well, alright, but we're going to talk about this later."

"Thanks Mom!" They rushed away down the hall, out of sight.

Maddie sighed and dropped her head on her chest. She could always catch up with them later. After smoothing things over with Jack and sending him back to the labs, Maddie pulled out the card. A gold-embossed business card announcing in rigid script McKinley's email, work phone, work address, etc.

Maddie sat back on the couch. They would, of course, be going to work for the FBP. The funding contract required a certain measure of cooperation when it was requested, and although Maddie was certain that she and Jack didn't have to cooperate, it was definitely in everybody's best interests. She'd heard good things about their labs; maybe she could figure out what why some of the equipment had been failing. Besides, if her kids were getting mixed up with the FBP, Maddie was going to make sure she was in the loop for it.

XXX

Upstairs, Danny dropped onto his bed, hardly believing what had just happened. He rang up Sam and Tucker, made sure everything had gone okay with them. It had. McKinley had covered for all three of them in pretty much the same way, and Sam and Tucker had both managed to get away with partial explanations to their parents.

Danny said goodbye to Tuck and dropped the phone receiver back onto its cradle. He lay on his bed, dangling his feet off the edge as he sized things up. Alex was back. That was bad. McKinley was helping, which was good, but Danny didn't know if McKinley's help would be useful or not. Sprawled out on his bed, Danny perused the landscape of his ceiling, chewing on his lip. McKinley would probably be fairly helpful, actually. He'd said stuff about a linear accelerator being used, and that his labs had been able to find out some good stuff using lab techniques, which was more than Danny knew how to do on his own…

As Danny mulled it over the darkness of night rolled over the sky, the full gravity of the situation landed on his head as a heavy, enigmatic grey blob of responsibility, pushing down his tired eyelids and signing him over to his subconscious.

XXX

The week began to go badly when Danny's alarm rang the next morning. It got worse when he arrived at school to find a huge fight in the center of the yard.

Several anonymous slackers were prancing around beating the crap out of each other in the middle of the school yard, their fists and legs flailing around like missiles, the motion blurring the rage in their faces. Danny watched, resting his hand loosely on the chain link fence by the sidewalk, as a couple other kids shoved through the thickening crowd to restrain the two fighters, but they too were drawn in and the fight became a brawl as the muted thuds of fists against skin and fabric accelerated.

Danny felt vaguely that he should be doing something, but the silence of the fight held him still. A violent kind of tranquility, a serene insanity that wouldn't bear his interruption. But for the punches and kicks, the only sound was the breeze rustling in the golden autumn trees. Blood dropped from the kids' noses and spattered in streaks across the lawn.

An administrator blasted through the double-doors of the school and stormed up to the whirlwind, roaring for them to break it up. Somebody dropped him with the sharp crack of a good left-hook, and the fight went on, and on. And everybody watched, glazed-eyes, animals in headlights, the sense of danger without comprehension.

Two or three more burly hall guards stalked into the yard, their authoritative voices thudding through the air as they shoved aside the much-abused double doors of the school. They hauled the boys back by their collars, catching their arms with beefy hands and gradually bringing the feuding boys to heel. Their charges blinked and shook themselves, adrenaline, shock, and anger all cooling into juvenile indignation at being manhandled so rudely, a sentiment they didn't hesitate to share with the guards.

Danny shook himself as the situation came under control, returning safely to the realm of familiarity. He jumped to hear a nearby voice.

"That was... weird." Sam stood by him, her own fingers knitted into the fence. "Interesting way to start the day."

"Yeah, well," Danny sighed. "They'll get detentions, maybe a suspension, and then sent home." Lucky. Danny didn't want the fight, but an excuse to walk back home didn't sound too bad.

The first bell trilled for class. Sam glanced at him, chewing her lip. "Do we go in?"

"I guess so." They didn't move, watching kids stream in to the big brick building, the fighters hanging around to be shouted at by the office personnel. Danny didn't know what it was, but something felt wrong.

There were all the same kids, all the same jocks and cheerleaders and some party animals. Maybe it was the light, or a certain prevalent slumping posture among the students, or some other little thing that lurked just beyond the edge of conscious perception. It reminded Danny of that raw egg he'd seen in the pan Saturday morning, before he'd heard about Green Bay.

Snake eye.

But that was crazy, worrying because school reminded him of a dumb egg. Danny smiled at Sam and kissed her cheek. "We'll be alright." He squeezed her hand, and they walked in.

Danny had review session in geometry, which went pretty well. He managed to pay attention and understand the problems Lows worked out on the whiteboard. Second hour held P.E., and at the beginning of class the teacher lined them all up, prisoners of war in a firing squad. She declared that she was 'sick and tired of all you snot-nosed little monsters' and announced the start of the dodge ball unit. Danny cringed when some kid spoke up from behind him.

"What is there to learn about dodge ball?"

The teacher growled at the kid and called him out to help her demonstrate proper ball-throwing technique. After watching the demonstration, the class decided it didn't have any more questions.

The teacher explained the specific kind of dodge ball to be played. A big painted circle on the blacktop, a bunch of balls and a bunch of kids, and if you got hit you were out. "That's not too tough for you idiots, is it?"

Danny had been ready to hit the deck when the whistle blew for it to begin, but the game quickly took on a surreal kind of order. Nobody seemed to be too hot on taking advantage of the obvious opportunity for pain, mischief, and all those other lovely privileges endowed on the participants of a dodge ball game. Danny's game was much more a dance than a battle, kids sneaking around throwing the balls, not hard enough to hurt, but hard enough to make a nice smack for the teacher's ears. Kids were on their toes; movements as controlled as possible for a class of sophomores, everyone with an eye out for trouble.

A couple sharks darted about, the nasty kids even nastier than usual. Danny turned to see one of them gearing up point-blank to take out a couple of his teeth, but a hard smack from behind stunned him long enough for Danny to escape. Recovering from the throw, Joseph gave him a friendly thumbs-up from a yard or two away. Other bullies were identified and eliminated in much the same manner, the quiet majority against the vicious minority, and despite the electrical tension, nobody got hurt. Danny had never seen anything like it, and from the bafflement on Teacher's face, neither had she.

English and world history slipped by in a lazy river of droning voices and boring notes, nothing that couldn't be harmlessly slept through. Nobody snapped at the dozers, and quiet conversations went on without rebuke.

Danny doodled with a pencil, drawing little more than scribbles, catching the talkers in peripheral vision. Something wrong, he thought. All the right people were doing all the normal things, but the feel was all wrong. Nobody was laughing; maybe that was it. The girls, their shrieking giggles so familiar in these kinds of classes, had their voices toned low. A slow shiver crawled up Danny's spine as the class dragged on.

At last the school bell sounded for lunch. Kids popped up from their seats to beat the lunch lines, and Danny rushed to capture his tray from the garrulous, food-spattered lunch room and meet Sam and Tucker outside at their usual bench.

Sam scootched over for Danny. Tucker quirked an eyebrow at him, munching on a burger. "Danger Will Robinson, Danger!"

Danny thought that was a fairly accurate description of their situation.

Sam rolled her eyes. "Sci-fi techno geek…"

"Oh, that's great," Tucker motioned to Sam with his fork. "She's labeling me now."

Sam took a sharp breath for a scathing retort, but Danny cut her off. "Guys, if we could stop the babble for just a minute, I think this whole school thing needs to be seriously dealt with."

"Killjoy," Sam mumbled. "And I wasn't babbling."

Danny looked closely at her. Despite her stolid expression, Sam's hands were shaking. He looked up, meeting her eyes as she looked away. "Did something happen?"

She laughed, shaking her head. "Oh no. Nothing at all."

"Absolutely nothing, or a weird kind of something-nothing?"

"Something-nothing," Sam mumbled. She bit her lip. "It's so stupid. Nothing has even gone wrong—"

"But it feels like the planet is upside-down," Tucker finished.

Sam sighed. "Exactly." She licked her lip, glancing up at Danny. "Hey, do you think this has anything to do with, with um…" She stopped. A thin quiet dropped down over them, pregnant with implication.

"Yeah." Danny poked his lunch. "I think it might."

Tucker scoffed, thumping his arms on the table. "You guys are so morbid." Danny glanced up sharply. Tucker looked angry, and a little disgusted.

Across the table, Sam glared at him. "Excuse me?"

"I mean, every time something a little weird goes on, you both start yelling about Alex."

"What? Tucker, you said yourself that things were getting odd around here." Danny put an arm around Sam's waist.

"Don't blame us for stating the obvious," she added.

"Things are weird, yeah." Tucker picked at the tables' splinters, uncomfortable and edgy. "But that doesn't mean that it's got anything to do with Alex."

Tucker glowered at the two of them, and through his annoyance, Danny felt the wedge coming down between himself and Sam, and Tucker, and division was something they could definitely not afford right now.

He took his arm away from Sam, a motion she mutely approved. "Okay. Do you have any other ideas about the reason for this whatever-it-is?"

Tucker sniffed, stabbing at peas on his tray. "Actually, I do have a theory. Look, this kind of schoolwide zombification and-or universal excitement thing happens every Friday before a vacation, every Monday after a vacation, and every time something really exciting or really traumatizing happens." Tucker shook his head and Sam and Danny. "Hello! Green Bay ring a bell? And we're not even considering that it might just be Spectra or some other small-time ghost."

"Yeah, but it's, I mean, this time things are, um…" Danny shut his mouth, surprised at his inability to argue that point. Tucker was right. "Hey, that's a really good point, actually."

"A good point from Tucker? Alert the media."

Danny nudged Sam with a prodding elbow, a small smile on his face. "Tucker does have a good point. Admit it."

She groaned and smacked him away. "Alright. You're right. Tucker's got a point."

Tucker beamed. "Thank you."

"But I really doubt this is Spectra's work. Green Bay, maybe."

And the rest of the day, barring several questionable incidents in the halls, actually went very well. No ghosts popped up, and Danny managed to have a fairly relaxing time with Sam and Tucker over at the arcades after school, though Sam didn't hang around for very long. She left around five, but in the light wind and low shine of the sun, she'd let him kiss her goodbye. Not as intense at last Friday, sure, but it put a light smile on his face that Tucker's teasing was powerless to erase.

Danny headed home as it began to get dark, lording a rare victory over Tucker as they parted. At home Danny finished up the little homework he'd been assigned, goofed around on the internet for a while, and went to sleep feeling pretty good, replaying scenes of past victories mingled with dreams of Sam.

A/N: Huzzah for updates!Good wishes and large, fresh-baked chocolate chip cookies go out to Cheerin4danny, Sakura Scout, and Divagurl277. Stay tuned!