Sing to Life

By JadeRabbyt

Chapter 16: Briefing Jazmine

Report to Director McKinley from Agent Camrey, 4:30 AM, Thursday: Sir, you're not going to believe this.

Jazz had to check the address twice on her way out of town. McKinley's local headquarters or base of operations or secret lair or whatever it was had been built a couple hundred miles outside the city, from the looks of the map. Situated in some boring little farming town whose main attraction was probably gas stations for the truckers, she figured it must be a fairly conspicuous operation, unless it was underground or something like that. From the address, it didn't look like it was underground. 423 Baker Street sounded like the address of somebody's grandma. Jazz sighed and shoved the map back into the glove box.

At least she'd see Mom and Dad. They really should have mentioned how far away they'd be.

Jazz wound her way through the light, early-morning traffic of the city and hit the highway running. High-rises gave way to suburbs which dissolved into fields and low hills, the grass green and wet from the chill of the previous night. Jazz would have thought it was pretty if she wasn't so impatient. McKinley hadn't said anything about what he wanted, only that he needed her to come down right away. Something about Alex, so she gathered, though naturally he hadn't told her exactly what it was, which may or may not have been a pretty tactful move on his part. Truth be told, Jazz was very, very nervous about Alex. Danny wasn't with her this time, and Alex had been acting so strangely last time...

Doubts needled at her for another hour or so. Once she nearly pulled off the road. Finally, Jazz stopped at a gas station, bought herself some much-needed coffee, and resumed the rest of her trip with the questionably comforting help of the radio. Unfortunately, good music and clever programming had apparently been outlawed in whatever county she was currently passing through, but nevertheless, the nasally talk shows and badly-sung country music did manage to stave off the willies long enough to get her into town. She took the exit with a smooth curve of her steering wheel, following the pavement until it turned into a pressed dirt road. She passed several trucks of fruit on her way into the town, which was indeed a small farming community composed of a couple dozen buildings, several gas stations, and a handful of fast food joints.

She drove through it, following another bumpy road into the bare, brush-covered hillsides until, finally, she reached a dead end at a small white kiosk. The man at the kiosk squinted at Jazz through a pair of black-rimmed sunglasses. He checked a list; Jazz tried to keep her voice steady as she told him her name and reason for coming, which she hardly knew herself. The man checked a monitor—taking a picture of her license plate, probably—before waving her on through. The yellow rail lifted silently, and Jazz slid under it. The parking lot was bounded on three sides by barbed wire, and by the sharp slope of a hill on the fourth. The lot, its hundreds of spots filled with every manner of car from Hondas to Corvettes, swept everywhere inside the fence like an ocean of black tar, brushing up against the hillside, the barbed-wire fencing, and the only building in sight. The building looked like a warehouse, and it stuck out like a big white boxy zit from the hillside. It gave Jazz the creeps.

As she found a spot and parked, Jazz couldn't help feeling that the relatively humble facility before her was far more impressive than it appeared. The way the hill sloped was odd, for one thing. It rose up straight from the parking lot; the long grass and prickled brush she'd seen on the surrounding hills had here been laid bare and dry, scraped away deliberately to slope so sharply. Not sharp enough for landslides, but sharp enough for something else.

Like an underground base. The building came right up against the hillside. As Jazz walked closer, the patter of her shoes clicking disconsolately in the dry climate, she could see that the humble factory had actually been built right into the hillside. Its four or five floors rose up from a discreet glass-paned entrance and swept directly back into the earth. With its rough, cream-colored paint and lack of any decoration save for a green stripe running along the first floor, the building really did look like some kind of geological blemish.

Jazz gulped, hesitating at the glass-paned door. At the rear of the reception room sat a tidy desk and a bored secretary. A gray carpet, wooden walls, a couple chairs made up the unremarkable reception room, but behind its wood panels Jazz saw visions of twisting chrome stairwells and white-masked men working on things glowing green and flashing with power. She saw Alex suspended in some huge green tank like a goldfish, wires running in and out of his head in a room vaulted so high that the ceiling disappeared in the darkness up above, banks upon banks of computers towering over everything… And Alex in the center, those freakish brown eyes wide open and centered on her.

"That's ridiculous," she muttered. "I'll be fine." She wasn't about to turn around and suffer six more hours of hillbilly music, and besides, Jazz was doing this for Danny. She shoved open the door and pushed past the cool rush of air, strode up to the desk and announced herself, trying to sound as if she knew what she were doing.

The secretary frowned. "McKinley, eh?" She looked out at Jazz from under her brown bangs, pausing in her nail care.

"Yes. He called me in Amity, and I've been driving a while, so I'd really like to see him quickly." She put her hands in her pockets. "If, you know, that's possible."

"Don't worry." She smirked at Jazz. "The Grouch has been waiting for you." The secretary made a note, shuffled some papers, and pressed an intercom switch. "Your little Miss Fenton is here."

The intercom scratched irritably. The weary voice on the other end sighed, the speaker crackling as the breath of air touched it. "Just because you have a job today doesn't mean you'll have one tomorrow."

The secretary took her hand off the button and grinned. "McKinley's been trying to fire me for years. Johnson won't let him."

"Johnson…?"

"Director of the FBI."

"Oh."

"I'm his cousin."

Jazz had to laugh at that. "I see." She decided she liked the secretary. "Do you know anything about what's been happening here? This place is…"

"Creepy?"

"Exactly."

"I just know what they tell me." She raised a brow as she inspected her right hand, the red gloss shining wetly back at her. "The engineers come out muttering sometimes." Catching Jazz's alarmed look, she waved her hand. "No, don't worry. They're not nearly as strange as the architecture. Pretty friendly, most of the time. Cute too, some of them."

"So, what do they tell you? Do they say anything about what's going up on there?" Jazz gestured vaguely at the space above her head, encompassing the ceiling, the mountain, the entire strange-looking complex.

The secretary shrugged. "Not much. That the world is ending."

"They're exaggerating, of course." Jazz turned to see McKinley standing at the entrance to a hallway leading off from the room. He gave his secretary a dirty look. "Things are going fine, and don't you forget to tell that to the yokels around here."

She rolled her eyes at him and winked at Jazz. "Good luck."

McKinley shook his finger at the secretary. "We're going to have a talk as soon as I get a free minute."

"Which will be never."

He gave up the spat, issuing a properly disapproving look for the staunchly good-humored secretary before addressing the noncombatant. "Are you ready?"

Fingering the strap of her purse, Jazz answered in the affirmative. She was ready for something, just not an encounter with a homicidal maniac. She wished she'd brought a camera, not that they would have allowed it.

She followed McKinley along the hallway, matching his long stride with her own hurried, nervous one. They moved through the long, white-painted hallway, the walls lined with cabinets of vials and chalkboards with hastily scrawled equations that were inscrutable to Jazz. The ceiling was marked by unusual devices every here and there. They were stationed periodically throughout the place, some of them smooth half-spheres bulging from the ceiling, others more spidery and portentous.

"Protection." Jazz looked up at McKinley. He nodded at one of the devices as they passed beneath it. "Ghosts, you know. A laboratory with contaminated samples is useless. Most of these on the ceiling are only designed for monitoring, but we do have a couple defensive robots."

"Oh." Jazz didn't care much what they were. The things were strange.

McKinley continued as they passed doors and offices, some with windows. Others without. "The entire facility is built into Foxtread Mountain. The bland front keeps most of the locals away, and the mountain itself houses most of our critical experiments."

"Including Alex?"

McKinley glanced at her, something nervous in his eyes, but whatever it was disappeared an instant later. "Yes."

Jazz didn't remember him being this stringent back at the crater.

They kept walking, and suddenly the windows to the outside disappeared. The air acquired a sharp, sterilized aroma as they entered a more expansive part of the complex, the part beneath the mountain, Jazz guessed.. Machinery hummed, sometimes distant, sometimes roaring close by. Feet clicked on white linoleum and the dampened sound raced through the criss-crossing hallways to reach distant ears. The place echoed with the sounds of industry, but the halls were mostly empty. Looking in the small, square windows of the wooden laboratory doors, Jazz caught glimpses of scientists at their cluttered workstations.

As Jazz walked through the hallway, peering in on original research in a legitimate scientific facility, she couldn't help but think that maybe her parents weren't so eccentric after all. Here their work continued, the subject of ghosts turned from a quaint fascination into a serious, federally-funded, scientific enterprise. If it weren't for the fact that lives might possibly be at stake, she would have been thrilled. As it was, the novelty only made her more uncomfortable, more out of her element. But still, the discoveries these people must be making and the research they must be doing… Jazz remembered what she had learned of psychology's own beginnings, Freud and Jung and Pavlov's bells, the days when nobody had any clear idea of what was going on and all they had to go on was their own ingenuity. She had never thought of her parents as modern visionaries, but from the looks of things around here, that was exactly what they were. Hopefully McKinley would let her see their lab.

"Here we are." McKinley had stopped at an office, his own name on the door. He pushed it open—no locks, Jazz observed—and offered her a seat in front of a wide desk, littered with papers with graphs and printouts. A computer squatted on one corner, and a small brass plaque on the other. The walls were lined with bookshelves or else covered by posters with pictures of inscrutable charts and tables of data. It was a messy office, but in an orderly, productive kind of way.

McKinley sighed back in his cushy chair as Jazz took her own, a comfortable armchair in front of the desk. He swept aside some papers and steepled his fingers. "First of all, thank you very much for coming. I realize this is very short notice, but I can assure that we appreciate it. You'll be duly compensated."

Jazz wondered if she should be worried. "I'm sorry. Compensated for what?"

"Well… If you agree, of course, we'd like your opinion on Alex."

"I kind of figured that. But what happened? You call me up at five in the morning because you want my opinion in person?" Jazz shook her head. "That doesn't make any sense. Something must have happened, and you tell me what, or I'm going right back to my car."

McKinley looked over her shoulder for a moment. Jazz folded her hands uncomfortably, waiting. "Not something that happened. Something we learned." His gaze wandered for a few minutes, almost nostalgically, before his attention snapped back to Jazz. "Would you like to meet some of the scientists who have been working on him?"

"Um, okay. But I still want to know what's going on."

A moment later found them both out in the hallways again. Jazz decided that she definitely should be worried. All this milling around… McKinley had been much more diplomatic back in the crater; she was certain of that. Something was wrong here just the same way as things were wrong back at Casper High. What had the engineers told the secretary? That the world was ending?

They reached another door, a lab this time. Jazz peered through the window the instant before McKinley turned the handle, and to her relief she saw two ordinary men. No ghosts; no Alex. They looked up from their computers as the door swung open, and McKinley ushered her inside.

What followed was a crash course in physics, ectoplasmic dynamics, and spirituality.

The scientists, after discovering that she wasn't half the ghost-hunter her parents were, had to lay her some groundwork. The world, they said, was basically divided into three basic elements. Ectoplasmic substances, ordinary matter and energy, and a soul. The first two were not supposed to be able to interact without the influence of either a soul or a clever man-made instrument, but Alex had found some way around that rule. That was their central problem. How had Alex changed that rule? Jazz asked what they meant. The scientists said they'd get to that.

Green Bay had been burned by an electromagnetic blast generated by the process of the mysterious sphere's creation back at the crater, and people were acting abnormally because the same process that created the sphere and the blast also initiated the growth of a kind of atomic rot, ectoplasmic in nature, which affected everyone and everything, and that rot was the reason people were given to abnormally negative behavior. Jazz made them repeat that one several times before she got it, but with a heroic amount of open-mindedness, she managed it.

The electromagnetic blast, which was basically a typical lighting-storm multiplied by a million, screwed up the electronics in Green bay and the surrounding area. The broken electronics caused electrical fires, which caused Green Bay to burn to the ground. Check.

The blast was a result of the sphere being created, presumably by some kind of tear in space. The technicians thought the sphere might be some kind of portal, a wormhole or the like, but they honestly weren't sure. Sphere: sorta-check.

The atomic rot, they'd said, was a progressive 'moldering' of all matter. Ordinary matter, under the influence of the mysterious rot, was either dissolving into or producing 'this weird black stuff,' similar to what Alex used to manipulate back before the crater incident.

Jazz caught the 'used to' in that bit. "So, you're saying Alex doesn't have the… blackness powers any more? That this rot is something completely different?"

The scientist chewed his pen. "More or less. The rot is ectoplasmic—ghostly—in nature, and it likes to cluster around people. We suspect that Alex may be able to influence the way the rot clusters and moves, but he probably doesn't have much direct control over it at all." The rot was far more sedentary than Alex's former darkness. It was the difference between a fungus and a predatory animal, they explained. Like a fungus, the rot grew where it could. (Currently, 'where it could' included anything with mass, but it seemed to like living organisms the best.) The other stuff, like an animal, had been a single entity and had, through Alex, exercised a will to actually seek out victims one by one.

Maybe ectoplasmic research was legitimate, but that didn't make it any easier for her to understand. Or accept. Jazz struggled for a moment to find the right question to ask. She had to think like a scientist. Assume their explanations were true, then try to understand them. Get things as clear as possible. "Okay, so the world is dissolving. How's that affect us people?"

"Well, the ectoplasmic component of the rot is making people more irritable, for one thing. As the rot gets worse, so does everybody's attitude. The FBI has been very busy, lately."

"Why?"

He frowned. "What do you mean?"

"It doesn't fit in with the rest of this. I can understand how the rest of it would happen, but what's the rot doing here?"

"Right now, we don't know what purpose the rot would serve. Things are getting progressively worse, so maybe some kind of breaking point is coming." The scientist shrugged. "We just don't know."

Jazz rubbed her temples, wishing she were back at school dealing with troubled students. "You know, you're kind of stupid for a professional."

"Oh, excuse me. Maybe I should let you analyze sixteen terabytes of data taken in a scientific field that's virtually nonexistent."

Jazz listened to him explain the rest of it. Apparently the Ghost Portal hadn't worked because there wasn't exactly a Ghost Zone anymore. That was another nifty little thing the explosion had done. The sphere had sucked everything out of the Ghost Zone and put it somewhere else.

"Where?"

"We don't know, but we think the rot has something to do with it. The energy and ectoplasm from the Ghost Zone got downconverted into reality and emerged as the rot, perhaps."

That wasn't the most exciting part, though. The most exciting part was where they thought they could get her to talk to a certain somebody.

"No."

"He won't do anything but swear at us, and he's not half as dangerous as he used to be."

"Absolutely not. Do my parents know about this?"

"Yes."

"That figures," Jazz grumbled.

"Will you do it?"

She took a breath, sweeping back her hair and wondering if there would ever come a day when she would wake up and realize this whole fantastic mess had been, after all, just a crazy dream. She really, truly hoped there would. "Yes."

She wondered if the rot had been affecting her.

The scientist smiled. "We appreciate it."

XXX

A few moments later, Jazz found herself walking down the hallway in the company of McKinley once more. "I need some time to think about this."

"We don't have a lot of that. Time, you know."

"Yes I know, but I need some time to think about my approach. Alex isn't exactly a disgruntled freshman." And Jazz wasn't going near him without some kind of strategy in hand.

McKinley looked away, mind wandering, attention disconnecting. Like back in the office. "No. Not exactly…"

Jazz caught it like a red flag, this time. "You're not telling me something."

McKinley turned to her, looking every year of his age. "No, I'm not… I was planning on telling you before you went in, though."

"When? Five seconds beforehand?" Jazz couldn't believe this. "I don't know what your problem is, but if you want me to help you then you need to tell me what's going on! I have to graduate and go to college and win a Nobel Prize, and I'm not going to die just because you got squirrelly with the details." Even as she spoke, flustered and angry, something occurred to her. Jazz didn't trust it, because she'd had too much coffee and too little sleep to trust any of her instincts at this point, but she had a feeling that Alex wouldn't actually hurt her.

McKinley hadn't been following her train of thought. The director wiped his brow and pulled a paper out of his pocket. "I'll tell you. I managed to run a search on Alex, just on the off-chance that he actually was alive at one point…"

"You're kidding. You really have honestly got to be kidding me."

McKinley nodded. "We found him in the databanks early this morning. A body was never recovered, but he lived around here, back in the 1930s. He attended high school, got bad grades. He never held a job. He finished two years at a junior college… And disappeared."

McKinley still wasn't telling her everything. Jazz gritted her teeth. "And then what happened."

"Well, on the first day of the following school year, somebody made a, ah, visit, and everybody present at Alex's old high school that day—that's to say, most of the student body—ended up in a coma. None of them ever woke up from it." McKinley put the paper back in his pocket and pushed up his glasses.

Jazz shook her head. "This is too much. This is insane. This is just, absolutely…" She growled, holding her head in her hands. Her brains were trying to explode out her ears. "Who ARE you people? Why do you all just sit on things like this and leave it up to me and MY LITTLE BROTHER to fix! Aren't you supposed to be, oh, I don't know, professionals or something? All these things are happening and you 'just don't know'… And now you want me to…"

Jazz wiped at her eyes. "Look, I'm sorry. I swear I'm not usually this nervy, and I know everybody's under pressure, but do you guys understand what you're asking of me? Of my entire family, involving us in this?" She raised her eyes to him. Did he understand?

McKinley seemed only halfway in the world, the rest of him buried in some other, faraway dimension. He looked at her with pity and sadness and understanding, a depthless understanding that Jazz never would have hoped to elicit. "Yes. I do."

Jazz stifled a sob. Everything felt so strange, but somehow everybody—her parents, Danny, the kids at the school and even McKinley, she now realized—had been thrown into the strangeness together. And in some vague yet completely accurate way, McKinley understood this.

He smiled sadly. "It's always the Gifted that have to give up their gifts, isn't it?"

Jazz never figured out why he said that, what prompted McKinley to remark on something that had nothing to do with ghosts or danger or anything at all really, but at the time it seemed like the single grand explanation and justification for everything that was happening to her. Part of a web, part of a net, part of a huge descending something that made her feel needed. The phrase wound behind the curtains and nipped at a cosmic specter that might, someday, be a real explanation. Jazz felt ready and able to do some Good Work, for better or for worse.

"I'll need a quiet room, a clipboard, and a whole lot of lined binder paper. I want a chair for when I talk to Alex but I need some time to do preliminary stuff beforehand."

McKinley bent his head, more of a small bow than a nod. "You'll have all of it."

Jazz studied over what she knew of Alex. She compared his past attitude with his present one, set up a strategy based on that, then made the local lab assistants bring her tapes of the last time they'd brought in somebody to talk to him. What she saw made her wince. Jazz scrapped her careful strategy. Alex wasn't going to respond to anything that seemed programmed, that was certain. She spent another half hour revising her approach, looking at all the angles, covering all her bases. It took her nowhere. In the end, Jazz had learned only that any formal approach was no good, but at least that was something. The session would depend on her ability to think under pressure, which was exciting in a mortifying kind of way.

She called McKinley over the intercom and told him she was ready. She waited silently as they passed through the infrastructure once more. Jazz held tightly to her clipboard, refusing to be intimidated by the steadily increasing security of thick walls and mechanical sentinels. McKinley took her down into the earth, where machinery whispered everywhere around them and the only employees around looked busy, and frightened. He escorted her to a door wide enough to admit a truck and heavy enough to survive an explosion, bolted with big steel bolts and reinforced with huge, crisscrossing struts.

McKinley slipped a card through a keypad and pressed his palm to a screen on the wall. The door opened as McKinley punched in a code on a nearby keypad, and Jazz, feeling her knees knocking, walked as normally as she possibly could to the chair placed only several yards from of the blue-glowing bars of a cage. She sat down, the indignant stare of the creature within raising the hair on the nape of her neck.

"Hello, Alex."

A/N: This is one of those chapters that I thought was going to really suck, but which actually turned out really, shockingly, not-so-sucky. Or not as sucky as it might have been, anyway. Thanks again to my reviewers! You've all been great, picking up my points and making predictions and accurate interpretations of things. I'd get you sodas but I have no money.