Flying intangibly high above the city, held tightly by Danny beside her, Sam pointed down at a large park in the middle of the city. "There!" She said, "We need to get them to that park!"
Danny looked around at the surrounding city. Thankfully, there seemed to be plenty of big roads leading into the wide park, plenty of big buildings to funnel some of the dumber ghosts through.
"I think you're right," he said after a moment. "If we can get them right there," he pointed at a small rise devoid of trees toward the center of the park, "we should be able to pull it off."
"Ok, let's split up then," Sam said more calmly than she felt. A Divide-and-Conquer maneuver like this one generally needed at least four people. With just the two of them, that meant there were going to be a lot of ghosts for each of them by the time they got to that hill.
"Put me down by that big church over there," she said. "It looks like there's a pretty big grouping I can start with."
"Alright," he said, "and I'll start by the stadium," he pointed at the massive structure on the opposite side of the park. "Clockwise, you think?"
"Yeah," Sam replied. "Well, we'd better get started, before things get really crazy."
Danny flew toward the large steeple close to a mile from the park, just visible over the tops of the buildings, the odd ghost coming in and out of view.
Invisibly, he set her down lightly in an alley a few hundred feet from the church. Sam had been right; the place was swarming with ghosts, but it looked like whatever religious group owned the place had splurged on a ghost shield.
Which made sense.
"Good luck," Danny said. Giving a brief wave, he sped off in the opposite direction. Sam took several deep breaths, ran a mental checklist on the contents of Danny's backpack, lifted her Fenton AR, and fired.
ooooo
"Where are they?" Kat said, sounding well on her way to panic.
Alex pointed at one corner of the nearest screen, "There!"
The helicopter pilot must have seen him too, because he quickly tilted his craft to give his cameraman a better view. Zooming in, the speeding form of Danny Phantom streaked purposefully toward the football stadium in the distance.
But Kat couldn't see Professor Manson at all. "Where is she?! She was with him, where is she?!"
Katsuo spoke from below her, "Keep calm. Mr. Phantom would never leave her if she were hurt. This may simply be a plan of theirs."
"Yeah, there's no way she's hurt," Caleb said. "Not with Phantom there."
Katsuo looked over at him, trying to decide whether to respond. He looked back at the screen, searching for some sign of his teacher. He was glad the anchorwoman had fled into her own bunker; the sounds of his fellow students were distracting enough.
ooooo
Bob had long since stopped sticking his head out of his hole, trying to see if the coast was clear. The rotting boards covering the small, filthy gap between two stairways and an alley had hidden him well, but he could hear screams from further down the street, and they were getting closer.
Every now and then, he stuck his still-running camera through a space between the boards, but it looked like most people had found their own hiding places.
Another scream echoed off the redbrick walls of the surrounding historical apartments, and Bob screwed up his face in fear. "Please god, let me get out of here. I swear, I'll never drink booze in a mosque restroom, I'll never speed through a stop sign in front of an elementary school, and I'll never forget to put the toilet seat down ever again!"
ooooo
Some callous operator in the media bunker had decided to side-by-side Bob's feed with the helicopter's as he said this, his fear coming through perfectly clearly to the students under the Mains building.
Soon, the poor man's whimpering grew quieter for some reason. Kat had been waiting for almost twenty minutes for some sign of Professor Manson. She could see Danny fighting from the helicopter feed, but it wasn't looking for Professor Manson.
She hoped for something, anything that said she was OK. Katsuo said he wasn't worried, but she couldn't see why not, especially now.
This full grown man was crying in terror, relatively safe in his hole, while Professor Manson was who knows where.
Kat was panicking, she knew that, but it seemed like the appropriate time to panic, so she didn't bother to try and calm down.
Hanging off Alex's shoulders, staring intensely at the nearest screen, a terrible sound filtered through the speakers above her. She'd never heard fear like that; spoken so clearly with no words at all. She could feel helpless tears gathering in her eyes at the sound.
ooooo
Katsuo too had begun to worry, regardless of what he had said to his classmate. He knew it was a large city. He knew it had few cameras for them to see with. Still, he worried.
He tried to remember his father's words and take comfort in them.
He'd realized long ago that he did not possess what Ms. Manson, Mr. Phantom, and Mr. Foley possessed, so he tried every day to avoid thinking of them like himself. To remember what they had accomplished…
Yet still he worried. Perhaps because you can never fully understand what you are not.
Several minutes later, only a few of the students and faculty were still staring up at screens that had gone quiet while the Helicopter refueled. Then, a noise filtered down through the speakers, and all looked up, expecting the aerial footage.
But it wasn't. It was the poor cameraman huddled behind his rotting sanctuary. The sound of screaming intensified, and the camera shifted.
Suddenly, he too screamed, static erupting from the speakers at the noise. Then the screen went dark, but before anyone could begin to mourn for the man, it reappeared, several feet above the street and looking down, the man's screams accompanying it.
For several electric seconds, the swaying view of the ground several feet below and the terrified voice of the cameraman above immortalized the cameraman's precarious position hanging helplessly from the arms of a ghost almost a dozen feet above the street.
Then a lance of green light sprouted from the dark street, and the ghost holding the man let go. His dirty, terrified face and the rapidly ascending buildings all the bunker saw as he fell.
When he hit, his hold on the camera slipped and it skittered across the asphalt, the chaotic view from its eye falling still, pointing back at the man. The sound of his crying grew steadily louder as he crawled toward it.
Many journalism students present would take the man's dedication to heart and become some of the best in their field because of it; something the man might have found amusingly tragic considering his panicked early retirement.
The camera captured several more lances of vivid green light striking out from behind him. The gathered school watched through the camera's shaking, disorienting eye as the man lifted it to his shoulder and tried to stand.
Only to collapse again.
A hand reached forward and grabbed his arm. Kat gasped next to Katsuo.
"Get up!" the camera's mic heard Sam say, trying to drag him up, a deep cut still bleeding on her cheek, breathing heavily, the camera lens inches from her face. For a moment, everyone could see the dirt caught in her hair, smudged across her chin and forehead, and mixing with the blood drying on one side of her face.
She looked exhausted.
The room cheered anyway.
"C'mon, man, get up!" Sam shouted urgently, looking over his shoulder. He seemed disinclined to do so.
"I said, GET UP!" She bellowed past the camera. She yanked him up violently, until the camera was much closer to Sam's eye level. "In about two minutes this whole street is going to be packed with ghosts! You need to get these people," the camera violently panned to face the others Sam must have saved, "into that building!" it shifted again toward a sturdy brick building.
"NOW!" her voice commanded from the left.
He moved. Still crying, still carrying his camera, its view shifting back to the people crumpled on the ground, he moved. He helped several of them up, a grimy hand reaching into view to drag some of them to their feet. As the sounds of ghosts grew louder, they rushed into the building, the camera's view bobbing violently, occasionally catching sight of the heels of the other survivors and the approaching dark doorway of the building.
Katsuo heard a voice shouting from the street, but it wasn't until the cameraman had gotten inside, sealed the door, and set himself up next to a window that Katsuo could hear what it said.
"…on you pathetic green slime!" It was Sam. She was taunting the ghosts from the middle of the street. Actually taunting them. A small, deceptively skinny woman standing in the middle of a wide street, empty of everything but smoking cars and broken glass, flickering streetlights failing miserably to banish the encroaching darkness, was taunting the ghosts terrorizing the city.
Her gun was down, her eyes roving, a silver belt glowing green at her waist. There was a scooter on its side several feet behind her, smoke still coming from its exhaust. "You guys couldn't hit the broad side of Pariah's Keep, never mind little old me!" her voice echoed all along the barren asphalt, reverberating between the rows of tall brick buildings.
The room full of people held its collective breath, and in the silence, they heard the cameraman's quavering whisper, "This kid is freaking crazy…"
"There you are!" she said, looking up, "Here I thought you'd chickened out!" Faster than a blink, she raised her gun, and at the same time, the camera shifted.
"Oh my god…" the cameraman's voice said, a reaction shared by most of the room.
For hanging in the air in front of Sam was a vast wall of ghosts. Hundreds, no thousands of them blanketed the sky, blocking the view of the brightening stars above them, the glow of them seeping down into every shadow.
And all of them snarling down at the skinny woman standing alone in an empty street.
Sam fired, Kat hid her face, Katsuo stared, the room gasped, a blinding light flashed.
A moment later, where Sam had once stood, a deep, smoking crater twenty feet across had appeared. The people in the room cried out, but before it could escalate further, the camera's view shifted and they saw Sam through its eye, speeding away on the scooter, still calling taunts behind her, firing blindly over her shoulder from her wrist ray.
Moments later the entire torrent of well over a thousand furiously howling ghosts flooded past the cameraman's window, deafening the students and faculty in the room with the noise; every single one of the ghostly forms chasing after her, each of them gunning just for her.
Katsuo was unaware that he, too, had held his breath through this. When he realized it, he slowly breathed it out in a single word, spoken in profound awe, his heart still pounding at the memory of that menacing green wall:
"Fire."
ooooo
"Danny, how's it coming?!" Sam shouted into her Fenton Phones over the noise of the wind and the squealing of her tires. "I'm almost at the stadium!"
Constantly swerving to avoid the almost constant stream of ghost blasts hitting the asphalt all around her, Sam could barely think past the next few yards.
"Ugh!" Came the initial reply. "I'm—Ugh!—just reaching the church! Start heading toward the park! We should get there about the same time!"
"Got it!" Sam shouted, leaning hard into a turn that her commandeered moped really wasn't designed to take. Somehow managing to recover from the slipping tires, she gunned it. On her left side, the massive steel and concrete mass of the football stadium towered above her. Under her, the largest north-south road leading to the park sped her forward.
And behind her, more than two thousand polymorphic ghosts followed her, dipping and swerving, shrieking and howling. Two thermoses were going to be very full tonight. Good thing Mr. and Mrs. Fenton had reinforced their design!
Buildings sped past on either side; the ghosts behind her still fired at her near-constantly. Ahead of her the soft, green grass and lush evergreen trees grew rapidly larger and larger.
She leaned further over the handlebars, headed straight through the open gate, and careened over roots and bumps in the grass, all her attention focused on getting to that hill.
ooooo
The anchorwoman was back. "Our Action News backup helicopter team has taken to the skies to bring you even more comprehensive coverage of the unfolding action," she said.
"And, ladies and gentlemen, what coverage it is," she smiled in what Katsuo assumed she thought was a gracious way, "Two large masses of ghosts are heading toward Central Park, led on either side by Danny Phantom and his unnamed female companion."
Footage of the two massive groups heading like arrows toward each other appeared side-by-side on the screens. And at the tip of each, just out of their reach, were two dark specks barreling closer together.
Katsuo saw the one coming from the stadium stumble, then it separated into two. He could see the distinctive shape of a scooter get swallowed by the ghosts, but Ms. Manson sprinted on.
"You see that?" A tall student in front of Katsuo said to another. "You see what that looks like?"
"You need artillery for that maneuver," the other replied. "Where's theirs?"
Katsuo watched the screens as Professor Manson and Mr. Phantom drew together at the top of a small hill. The two huge groups of ghosts surrounded them, as the helicopters struggled to find an angle. Finally, the cameraman of one managed it, then zoomed in as far as he could.
Ms. Manson and Mr. Phantom were standing back to back, arms and weapons raised, each facing what had previously been the other's group.
"They're done for," one of the two students in front of Katsuo said.
"I told you," the other replied hopelessly. "You need artillery to pull that off."
Katsuo tapped them hesitantly on the shoulder. When they turned toward him, he pointed at the screens and said simply, "Watch."
The two looked back at the screen. The mass of ghosts had begun to swirl around the two on top of the hill, but the cameraman in the helicopter still had an angle. The room watched, breath held, for what they knew was coming.
People gasped all around Katsuo, many looked away, and the anchorwoman droned on hopelessly as Ms. Manson threw down her gun and lowered her arms. Beside her, Mr. Phantom did essentially the same. The swirling, writhing mass of ghosts closed in tight, surrounding the two from all angles.
A howl of triumph forced its way across several miles of city, over the anchorwoman's voice, into the set of mics around her, and finally out through the speakers above the people in the bunker.
Kat cried, Alex shook his head, Caleb put a hand over his face, and the sounds of sobbing began again all throughout the room.
Katsuo spoke, loud enough to be heard by all around him, conviction heavy in his voice, "They are the artillery."
As if to answer his words, a vast dome of green light pushed the writhing ghosts out and away. Then, before the violent green specters had a chance to so much as right themselves, two bright blue shafts of light erupted from the hilltop.
As the thousands of ghosts were sucked against their will toward the source, the cameraman had a clear view of Ms. Manson and Mr. Phantom, standing back to back, confidently directing the shafts of light from a pair of thermoses, making sure they hit every single ghost.
A deafening silence spread, and was quickly shattered as the room cheered louder than ever, many wet cries of happiness mingled throughout. The two students in front of Katsuo looked back at him, jaws hanging open and eyebrows meeting their hairlines. Katsuo nodded at them and said, "See?"
He turned toward Kat and Alex, fighting his way past the celebrating others.
ooooo
Sam and Danny sat down next to each other more quickly than either had intended. "Ow," Sam said, shifting off her tailbone. Which shifted her onto her throbbing thighs, eliciting another groan.
Next to her, Danny panted, "Let's… Never… Do that… again."
"Sounds good…To me," Sam gasped. The two of them laid back on the grass all but choking for breath, too exhausted to care that the helicopters were hovering over them like a pair of vultures.
After almost ten minutes, the two had regained enough energy to notice the sound of approaching citizens. Sam glanced at Danny and they shared a look.
Danny struggled his way up to a sitting position, then a standing one. He reached down and pulled Sam to her feet.
"Do you have that trip in you?" Sam asked sluggishly.
"Well, it's either I change back with a couple news helicopters above me or I do it in the mountains somewhere instead," he said.
Sam sighed, glancing at the approaching people, "Worth a shot."
Danny carefully picked Sam up, legs in one arm, shoulders in the other, and slowly took off back toward campus.
Almost twenty slow, exhausting minutes later, Danny saw the campus come into view. Looking down, he saw that Sam had fallen deeply asleep, one arm loosely wrapped behind his neck, her breathing slow and steady. So, being a model boyfriend, he drifted silently toward the roof of her dorm as students filed back to theirs from the many "ghost bunkers" around campus.
Phasing down to her room, Danny set her lightly in her bed, covered her with her blanket, turned toward the outer wall… and paused.
Drifting back across her room to her door, he reached through the handle and stuck a quarter behind the latch, locking it closed.
Then he turned back to the wall and drifted off to his own bed in a daze.