Sing to Life

By JadeRabbyt

PART III

Chapter 23: Dead or Doomed

Pain crackled up Danny's spine as the thermos shattered. It dumped him onto a surface dry, cold, and rocky, and since there was nothing that immediately prompted him to move, Danny stayed down and waited for the ache in his muscles to recede. His ears echoed with a sharp, clean, deafening tone, but when it stopped, a noise of crumbling earth made him conscious of the other being nearby. He had to think before he remembered who it might be.

"Sam…?" Danny hauled himself into a sitting position, rubbing his head. His watery vision made it hard to discern where he was, but he could tell that it was bright and open.

The figure next to him joined him, her hand searching for his own. Danny took it, squeezing it, trying to bring them both into the world at hand. She leaned against his shoulder, more for support than comfort. "Where are we?"

"Five or six miles out of town."

They both recognized the voice. Sam's body went rigid, and Danny quickly scrambled to his feet, but he couldn't catch his balance and tripped backward. The voice chuckled. "I wouldn't try anything like that just yet."

"Alex?" Danny stumbled back crab-style until he hit the more or less vertical surface of a boulder, and, using his feet, backed himself up against it and managed to stand. Everything was blurry. He felt pathetic. "Where are we? What are you doing? What happened? Where's Tucker?"

"I hate questions." A human-sized blur moved a short distance away. Squinting, Danny could see that he and Sam had emerged at the foot of a hill, up against a small landslide of dirt, gravel, and one or two larger boulders.

Sam managed to get on her feet, arms held out carefully for balance. "Why did you let us go? At least answer that."

"Because if I'm not allowed to sleep through this then you sure as hell aren't." Definitely Alex, Danny saw. By now he could see him clearly if he worked at it. Alex looked bored. Half-lidded eyes stared with a dull kind of venom at himself and Sam, a hint of a snarl on his lips.

"Tucker is dead, naturally. So are both your parents and siblings and just about all your relatives, unless they happen to be visiting Europe, Asia, or Antarctica, in which case they've probably got another day or so. Maximum."

Sam narrowed her eyes. "Liar."

Alex jerked his thumb over his shoulder. "You wish." Behind him, over the field and beyond forest, something black as coal slithered over Amity Park's skyline. Alex smiled at their shocked expressions. "Amity's a ghost town, now. Except I'm fairly certain that thing eats ghosts, too, so unless either of you has a death wish you should stay away." Alex crossed his legs, leaning comfortably against a different rock.

The cloudy sky above them looked like it should start raining any minute, yet the air stayed dry as a bone. It was one of many things that made no sense to Danny. "So how'd you survive?"

Alex shrugged. "I'm more of a tool than a ghost."

"You can say that again," Sam muttered. Alex almost managed a glare at her, but he merely looked away and went on.

"What I mean is that I was designed to open the portal for that thing. I'm just a gear in this thing's machine, and even though I'm a useless gear, apparently I'm just lucky enough that it reads enough of itself in me to leave me alone." He smiled the kind of smile people smile when they'd really rather be strangling something. "Ironic, isn't it?"

"Sure," Danny muttered. He'd been testing his powers, bringing experimental balls of plasma to his hands, recovering his abilities. He was fully recovered from the shock of the thermos, and Alex still hadn't made any moves. A nod from Sam let him know she was alright again, too. Danny took an assertive step forward, saving the devastating reality check for later and assuming his slightly deflated role of hero. "Alright, what was that… whatever it was that attacked us?"

"A disassembler program."

"Clear as mud, Alex."

Alex rolled his eyes. "I assume you're familiar with gravity?"

"I'm not stupid."

He sighed. "Yes you are, but listen and you might learn something. Reality is encoded with laws expressed as mathematical equations. Who knows why the hell they're mathematical, but they are. Things like gravity and magnetism are facts."

Sam crossed her arms. "So you're saying this thing is like that. A fact."

Alex nodded. "More or less. It's similar in that it's a force encoded in all matter, like the four normal forces, but different in that it also acts on ectoplasm, while the other four: gravity, strong nuke, weak nuke, and electromagnetism—" Alex ticked them off his fingers mechanically. It was clear to Sam that he'd been through this with himself multiple times. "Anyway, those four obviously don't act on ectoplasm, a.k.a. ghosts. This new fifth force acts on everything."

Danny looked back at Amity, at the dark cloud circling about it, dipping in and out among the skyscrapers. "But it's evil."

"You don't blame gravity when elderly people fall and break their hips. You're welcome to blame me for 'activating' this force, but you can't attack the force itself." Alex spread his hands. "How could you? It's physics."

Sam wasn't buying it yet. "So if it acts on everything why aren't inanimate things affected? There's a forest over there and it looks okay." She wasn't especially enjoying the discussion, but she'd much rather focus on Alex's explanations than the painful deaths of millions.

Alex continued, still sounding mildly computerized. Distantly, Sam recognized that something about him had changed again. The same thought had occurred to Danny, but he was too troubled by the sight of Amity's blackness to give it any credit.

"The forest isn't affected because forests aren't emotional," Alex answered. "The principle difference between ectoplasm and ordinary matter is that ectoplasm isn't bound by any of the conservation laws." Alex bent and picked up a small stone. "By Einstein's equation, the amount of energy able to be extracted from this rock, were such a thing either possible or practical, would be no greater than 'm' 'c' squared. Follow?"

Danny nodded. He was starting to really hate physics.

"Now, start with any amount of ectoplasm and you'll be able to get an indefinite amount of energy from it, depending purely on the emotional state of its source. Unless that forest gets really, really pissed off, the black stuff won't consider it worth its while to convert it. It'll have to wait for the main body of force, which, unlike gravity, travels as a cloud, and thus takes a little more time to reach the more distant clumps of matter. It's probably got some kind of wormholing ability to cover interstellar distances."

Alex paused to think. He shifted, snatching a rock off the ground and tossing it between his hands. "Here. Watch." He pressed it between his palms, brow furrowing. Danny shuddered as the rock darkened and collapsed into a lethargic puddle of black. Alex let it pour from his hands to the ground, where it stretched out thin tentacles and withdrew into itself again, not moving much. "The stuff is in everything, but it likes to stay put. The bigger it gets, the more motive it is. I suggest you get used to it, because eventually the world is going to be one big black ball of this stuff. After that, the universe. It'll take a while, but physics is very patient. Now you know as much as I do." Alex didn't say anything more. He leaned back against his rock, waiting for them to respond.

For his own part, Danny couldn't believe it. It didn't seem possible, even given the weirdness of the last couple days. Maybe he could wrap his brain around it if it was just Amity, or even America—some kind of earthquakey thing—but the whole planet? The universe and all reality? He looked back over the trees, over at Amity. The darkness was real. It was real, and it was all that remained of every living person in that town. He blinked, turning back to Alex, who merely raised an inquisitive eyebrow and shrugged.

The world had been good, hadn't it? Things hadn't always been this way, even though recently it had started to seem like that. Danny was sure he could remember having a good time with Sam as recently as last week, and hadn't that been their anniversary? He remembered too all the kids at school, flawed, yes, but happy? Yes, all things considered, that too. Now the school probably sat in the middle of a pile of that stuff. Now all the people he'd known, Tucker and Dash and Paullina and all the rest of them were probably laid out flat on the floor. The world truly had been good, but now everyone was dead or doomed and Danny could feel his mind being slowly corrupted by this blackness that permeated everything.

He stabbed a finger towards Alex. "You…"

Alex nodded. "Yes, me."

Danny clenched his fists. "How could you do that?"

"It seemed like a good idea at the time." He flashed a snide smile at Danny. "Still does, actually."

"Danny," Sam interjected. "I know, oh God I know how bad this is, but please don't—"

"Sam, this guy just destroyed the world!"

Alex shrugged. "'S true."

Looking at the tight smirk on Alex, Danny snapped. With a roar of anger he flashed forward and tackled Alex, hitting him with everything, blinded and seeing blood red.

Alex just laughed. Danny jumped on him, flung him to the ground and put his foot in his side, planted a knee on Alex's ribs and pummeled him—but Alex just laughed, and when Danny halted for a second to shake his fist free of the ectoplasm leaking from Alex's battered face and body, Alex just laughed all the harder, his face reforming instantaneously. "I'm a ghost, you moron!"

"I wish I could kill you," Danny seethed.

Alex couldn't stop lauging. "I wish you could too."

"Danny!" He jumped as a hand landed on his shoulder. The hand fled away as he whirled to face Sam. Her eyes pleaded with him. "Come on. We've got enough problems without wasting energy on Alex."

Danny became aware that he'd been panting. He stood up and walked back from Alex, weak-kneed. "You killed my family." He locked eyes with Alex. "Except Sam, you killed everyone I ever loved."

Alex propped himself up on his elbows. He rubbed his jaw, that insane grin yet plastered across it. "But I didn't kill your mother."

Danny's eyes narrowed. "What?"

"Come on Danny." Sam tugged his arm. "Let's go."

Danny twitched, and Alex half-expected another kick, but, at length, Danny decided against it. He turned and let Sam lead him away and out of sight, the two of them moving away from the city and around the rocky hill.

Alex sat up, rubbing his aching face. Not that rubbing it made it feel any better. He stared thoughtlessly into the gray sky, tracing it down to the high-rises of Amity's skyline. The blackness continued to curl possessively above it.

A motion nearby caught his attention, the black goop he'd created from the rock. It didn't seem to know what to do with itself. It tangled among the dry grass near the rocks, just a couple feet away. On a whim, Alex leaned over and picked it up. He held it in his hands for a moment, wondering why it hadn't disappeared. When he'd rubbed the black stuff out of McKinley's chair, back when he'd first been caught, it had retreated back into the chair pretty quickly when he put it down. Alex figured that now that its boss was in town, goop was more stable as goop than as a solid object. He toyed with the stuff between his fingers, testing its consistency, its pliability. The countryside around him lay utterly silent.

"Hm." Alex held the thing in his palm and concentrated on a remembered image of the thing's original form, the stone. A half hour, an hour passed, and the blackness moved up and began to form itself into a round shape, continuing to be black and goopy, but mildly resembling the stone. Alex cocked his head, going over in detail what he could recall of its former texture, contours, and colors. The blackness shuddered, and suddenly Alex was holding a stone. He tossed it up once, caught it, and threw it against the boulder near the remains of the thermos. The stone clicked solidly, neither breaking nor dissolving.

Alex nodded slowly, unable to bring himself to feel one way or the other. "Now that's interesting."

A/N: First chapter in a while to achieve something like 'quality'... Nox! Glad to hear you like my stuff. :) Kudos to Sakura, the predicter of the truth. And kudos to Asilla and Chaotic for their positiveness. Gecko, I'm not totally sure if I agree with your critique, but it continues to give me warm fuzzies of pride, and motivation. Thanks all!