Disclaimer: I do not own Danny Phantom. Butch Hartman does. I would never dream of making money off his work, this is but one fanatic's homage. So please don't sic the rabid lawyer hordes upon me, there's not much for them to sue out of me.

Author's Note: I swear, I am just spoiling you people this week! I apologize in advance for the end of this chapter. At least you people know I'm good for regular updates, right? As always, reviews are appreciated!

Chapter 11: Phantom's Bane

"This ain't no game; I play it hard

Kicked around, cut, stitched and scarred

I'll take the hit but not the fall

I know no fear, still standing tall"

-"Bounce" - Bon Jovi

It was already over when I regained consciousness, surrounded by rubble. I had been shoved beneath a desk, and that had thankfully held up. A cold form draped stiffly over my legs in that inky darkness. I could faintly hear explosions in the distance, the ground beneath me trembling slightly from whatever was happening. I was surprised to be alive, in all honesty. I was certain that if that blast didn't strike me down, than the likely collapse of the building would have. I felt a faint draft of air, which meant to me that the rubble my dad and I were buried underneath couldn't be that thick.

"We've got to get out of here-" I squirmed in that cramped space, tapping the recall button on my sled. I heard the sound of its engines firing nearby, confirming that we could probably dig ourselves out. I didn't want to think of what was going on outside, but I knew it had to be bad. "C'mon, Daddy, we've got to get-"

I froze as I felt a sticky substance on my glove. Dazedly, I prodded the still form next to me in the darkness. "Daddy-?"

I got no response as I felt around in the murk. My exploration indicated that my father was indeed next to me... but a wall of rubble pressed down on his back, and he lay horribly still, cool to the touch. No, this can't be happening! I screamed to myself. After everything else that had happened, it just couldn't! I groped in the darkness, pressing two fingers lightly beneath my father's jawbone, praying for a pulse. I couldn't feel anything, but at the time blamed it on how badly I was quaking with my own terror.

"Daddy? Come on, Dad, wake up! He's gone, you can stop playing dead... please-!" I whimpered, trying to feel for his breathing and finding only silence. "Daddy... c'mon..."

I'm not sure just how long I sat huddled there in that pocket of safety, rocking back and forth, trying in vain to coax a response from my dad. It may have been hours, it may have been a few minutes after the awful reality made itself known. In that crushing black silence, I only know I felt horribly, acutely alone. I honestly thought in that instant that it would have been better if I had died, if only to not have to face this anguish. There's only so much trauma a person can take, after all. My mother had been gone for years and years; I'd lost my dearest friend through my own stupidity, and chased him to his death; the city I had grown up in and given everything for was as good as gone; and now I was to lose the absolute last person I cared dearly for? My only remaining family member, my last refuge from my fears and doubts?

My sled was still straining to break free, and I heard the rubble slowly shifting as its thrusters tried to make the board obey the recall command. It took a lot of delicate maneuvering before I was able to clamber out of that little pocket in the ruin, and I was surprised to find that the building was actually for the most part intact. The ceiling had collapsed to the basement floor, but the outer walls still held, albeit creaking ominously. Phantom's blast had effectively gutted FentonWorks instead of toppling it. It probably wouldn't take much more abuse before it collapsed but it still stood, for the moment. Sunlight poured into the basement, hazy through the thick cloud of dust that had settled following the explosion. I could look straight up from the basement and see the gaping tear in the roof where the Fright Knight's blast had ripped into the op center.

I still distantly heard sounds of a battle, but my thoughts were on my father as I struggled with the wreckage, pulling him free of the rubble after at least an hour's effort. My sense of time was skewed, it might have been more than a day. I honestly don't recall. It was awful though, when I saw what Phantom's wrath had done to him. Where my dad wasn't scorched from the ghost's powerful blast, he was crushed and mangled to an unrecognizable mess from the fallen debris. Even if he had survived, his injuries would have been so grievous that he likely would have suffered even longer before reaching the same conclusion- there were likely no hospitals I could have taken him to, he would have died of his wounds anyway.

I find it hard to describe my mental state. I was alone, depressed and grieving, but I was also numb. It was just like that day, eight years earlier when I stood at Danny's grave and wept for the loss. Only now the horror laid out in ruin before my own eyes as I hefted the remains on my sled and flew to the cemetery in a daze, the action almost automated as if I was letting someone else go through the motions. Already Amity Park was looking little different from the ruins beyond the shield's former boundary; buildings broken, snapped like twigs or blasted into heaps of debris; streets blasted out and littered with the rubble. A miserable rain had started up, green explosions lighting the underside of the cloud deck, a fitting day for the city's demise.

Tears streaming down my face, I blasted out a grave for my father in that broken cemetery, but I was only able to give him a shallow burial, with my old ecto-grenade launcher driven into the soil to mark where he lay. "I promise I'll be back, Daddy." I croaked around the lump in my throat, around my tears and grief deeper than I have words for. "And then you'll get a proper monument... Please watch over me, Daddy, please..."

It's most strange describing how I felt. My grief and massive loss, my despair; it all merged with a dark realization as I watched the explosions in the distance, the sounds of a losing battle. Ten years ago, on that day in Amity Park, I destroyed Danny's last hope of support, his last chance. With the explosion, and my reaction, he had lost everything and everyone that had supported him, cared for him. And here I was, ten years later, standing before a shallow grave, and I was just like him. A lost young woman who's world was turned inside-out, bereft of friends and family, all alone in a terrifying and very hostile world. Because of him.

I don't have a ghost half to blame for my reaction, either. I went insane that day, I willfully jumped off the deep end and made my own descent into madness. It had to be madness, pure insanity or some subconscious suicidal impulse. I would destroy Phantom, by my own hands. Never mind that none of my weapons seemed able to do significant damage to the ghost, that little fact was utterly irrelevant. I would stalk him through the ruins, hunt him through the wastelands, fight him until the end of him or my own likely gruesome ending.

What more did I have to lose? My life? Hah, in my state of mind, my life was already forfeit, I felt like a corpse that had merely forgotten to lie down just yet, an empty shell. I had already lost Danny. I had already lost countless friends, countless comrades-in-arms; people who had counted on me to lead them, who had put their lives at stake on the battlefield. I had lost my hometown; it lay in broken ruins all around me, a hideous mockery of the nice place to live of my childhood. And now, I had lost my father, my comforting guiding light; my only support against the guilt I carried for chasing Danny off years ago, for my role in the creation of the monster that haunted Amity Park now. I had nothing left to lose, and truth be told, I had no fear left. No fear of Phantom or his unstoppable strength, and certainly no fear of the idea that I was rushing headlong to my own death. I was perfectly content with the idea that I would very likely die trying to destroy that ghost. I think I even welcomed the idea, I took a demented sort of glee in knowing that there was nothing more that he could do to me that would hurt me. In a twisted sort of way, I felt absolutely invincible. There was nothing more Phantom could take from me that I cared about, since I no longer cared whether I lived or died. But I still had a chance to take away the only thing that seemed to give him any pleasure. I could stop him, bring a halt to his ten year reign of terror and bring a long overdue revenge to its right and proper conclusion. For my father, for all those people in the city who were now broken, bloody corpses. For Danny.

I wasn't thinking clearly, I knew that much. But in the wake of such events, I imagine I had to either go insane or turn into a catatonic, useless whimpering husk of my former self. I was dead for certain either way, the only difference was how I arrived at that death. Viewed through my demented logic, it was better to rush to meet my end with all guns blazing instead of waiting uselessly for Phantom to find me and finish me off. The very idea of the spook standing over my broken remains and laughing that horrible, mad laugh was enough to set my teeth to grinding in my agitation.

To this day, I'm not certain what happened in the immediate aftermath of the shield falling. I don't know what became of the Fright Knight, though I heard various conflicting tales from surviving Patrol members in later months. Some thought they saw Phantom strike the Halloween spirit down, others were certain it was someone from the Patrol. What I do know is that no sooner was Phantom within the shield boundary than he was flinging massive blasts, toppling the high-tech towers, picking off people in the streets below. And that he delighted in the destruction, in the mass-murder.

Survivors told horror stories of how he used that wailing attack to destroy most of the Patrol in a single shot- aircraft and tanks unable to withstand the sonic blast, the machines trashed and toppled, blown away as if by a hurricane. Anything that survived that attack he delighted in destroying with more traditional blasts and basic brute force, throwing people, throwing tanks as if they weighed no more than a few ounces.

I saw the wreckage myself in many cases, the battered and blasted hulls, the broken wreckage of the Patrol's heroic last stand as I walked through the ruins, through what remained of the battlefield. I was proud of them, though they hadn't been able to do much. They had fought, and fought valiantly. It was their sacrifice that kept Phantom busy long enough to enable some of the civilians to scatter into the wasteland.

It was an Apocalypse in truth- our way of life, our society had been turned on its ear before, true. But now civilization in its entirety, our society, everything was destroyed, so much ruin in a vast grey expanse of wasteland. The survivors had to eke out an existence from the death and destruction; cowering from the fear, the absolute, paralyzing terror that the ghost would find them. My father was fortunate to have as much of a burial as he had gotten, I discovered. There was no way to even estimate how many people were killed. Communication was almost non-existent between the scattered small groups of survivors. It probably wouldn't be a stretch to guess that at least nine-tenths of Amity Park's population was killed in Phantom's fourth and most devastating rampage.

The first survivors I came across shied away from me at first until one of them, a Patrol member recognized me. I was then quickly welcomed into their den, a tiny cavern formed from a roadway overpass and a collapsed building, and it housed perhaps twenty people, mostly teens and young adults, huddled up in fear, jumping at even the slightest noise from outside.

"Commander! You're alive!" The Patrol member, a member of Dash's long-defunct posse gaped at me. "We thought for sure you were killed when the explosion-"

"I should have been." I stated, surprised even in my madness at how cold my voice was. "What's the status of the Patrol?"

"Th-the Patrol?" The ex-jock stammered, taking an involuntary step back from me. I must have been quite a sight to behold, jet sled tucked under one arm, ecto-gun in one hand, various other weapons stashed away in my dirty suit, and with an expression that had to have been frigid enough to make glaciers with.

"Yes." I confirmed.

"After FentonWorks went up... well, we kept fighting, Commander. All of us." The guy explained haltingly, obviously distressed by whatever horrors he had seen. "We didn't stand a chance. After that huge sonic blast, there were so few of us left. Nothing we did could stop him! We tried, but nothing worked, none of our equipment, none of the tactics! Paulina gave the order to fall back and scatter... we had no choice, Commander. We had to run."

"I'm going after him." I stated, one fist clenched tightly. "Who's with me?"

I was met with twenty matching stares of disbelief as I surveyed the small grouping. Some of the younger kids in the group actually hid behind the older members, biting back frightened whimpers, and they all backed away.

"Are you insane?" The ex-jock stared outright. "We couldn't do anything to him with the entire Patrol! We have nothing to fight him with!"

"We still have our lives, don't we?" I snapped.

"And that's about it." The Patrol member cast a fearful glance at the entrance when a thunderbolt split the sky outside, the wind howling over the ruins.

"And you have the nerve to call yourself part of the Amity Park Ghost Patrol?" I hissed, taking an angry step toward the poor guy. "I'm your Commander, remember?"

The ex-jock shivered under my glare, obviously he had to steel his nerves before he could speak his mind. "N-not anymore."

"What?" I demanded, grabbing a fistful of the front of the guy's uniform. He met my glare, though I could see the fear in his eyes.

"There's nothing left!" He managed to pull away from my grip, jumping back a few feet in his panic. "There's no more Ghost Patrol, there's no more Amity Park! How can you command something that doesn't even exist anymore?"

I glowered at the guy. "Fine. Hide then. I'll hunt him down myself if I have to." I spat as I whirled to depart.

Such was the pattern of most of my encounters. The will to fight had been absolutely destroyed in everyone I came across, they would rather hide away and hope to escape Phantom's notice than confront the monster. A tiny handful of other Patrol members had made the jump to insanity that I had, but we couldn't cooperate. Many of them wanted to confront the ghost head-on, a last-ditch fight that I thought would be useless. My own form of madness had taken the form of a cold, calculating determination; not a hot burning rage. I had no more sense of self-preservation than the other insane ex-Patrol members, but I wasn't going to be entirely stupid about this hunt.

So it came to pass that I was watching five ex-Patrol members fighting the ghost. Three of them still had jet sleds, while the remaining two did what they could from the ground. Where was I? Hidden, buried in a pile of rubble, lying motionless in wait as I watched, my weapon's muzzle invisible in a tiny gap in the debris. I wanted dearly to fire the weapon, to inflict some harm to the source of my suffering, but I waited. The opportune moment hadn't yet arrived.

"You go to-" One of my former comrades shrieked, firing wildly at Phantom.

"Go where?" The ghost sneered, suddenly moving in and snatching the sled from underneath the poor fool's feet. "The Ghost Zone? Been there. It got boring."

"AAAH-!" The cry was cut short by a brilliant green energy blast.

"You monster!" I heard one of the others shriek. I watched from my vantage as Phantom turned to deal with that one.

There! That was my moment! I squeezed the trigger of my weapon, not wasting the effort on smiling as the pink beam shot out from my weapon and slammed into Phantom from behind, sending him flying through the air but not doing any real damage. He was as surprised as the other Patrol members, looking around with an angry glare to figure out where the blow had come from.

"Get him-!"

Unfortunately, those brave idiots were little more than cannon fodder, and I watched Phantom toy with them from my vantage. I probably could have rescued them, I would have had the advantage of surprise, but I didn't. It would have put my vengeance at risk, and I held that above all else then. When the blasts cleared, Phantom floated to a landing no more than three feet from my hiding place, chuckling to himself about his handiwork.

"Absolutely beautiful." He mused to himself, obviously unaware of my presence, which was precisely what I wanted. "Wouldn't even recognize this disaster area now."

I lined up another shot in silence, right between those crimson eyes. I didn't waste effort on taunts or witty banter, I simply pulled the trigger. The pink energy beam said everything I needed to say as it sent Phantom flying in surprise and skidding to a halt against a pile of rubble, momentarily lost in a cloud of smoke, sputtering angrily.

"What the-?" The spook waved the smoke away as I broke cover, flying away amid the piles of wreckage. "You're still not dead?"

I didn't respond, firing a few blasts that kicked up more plumes of smoke, a few shots tagging the pursuing ghost. The ploy worked, he lost track of me, giving me time to go to ground and take up a new hiding place. My hand held radar was great for pointing out where he was, how fast he was moving, and in what direction. The ghost peered at the likely hiding places- crannies in the rubble, half-standing buildings, but couldn't find me so long as I remained calm and very, very still.

"This is cute." The ghost raised his voice to make sure he was heard. "You want to play tag, Valerie? How unlike you!"

I stayed deathly still in my hiding place, listening to Phantom's taunts. I knew he couldn't locate me, I knew he was trying to bait me. But he was trying to bait the old me, the sane one; not the me that was insane with grief, a solitary predator with but one goal. I was free of the responsibilities now that had prevented my going after the ghost with a single-minded intensity, free of obligations. I was free of emotional handicaps like dignity and friendship, leaving me only with a merciless, ruthless thirst for violence. I was able to dedicate myself completely to my only purpose. His defeat.

"No answer?" Phantom cupped one hand to his ear, still smirking. "How totally unlike you. No more witty banter? Or did that die with your old man?"

Not even that cruel taunt could make me move from where I lay buried deep in a rubble pile, my sled above me to keep the weight from crushing me. Had it been just a year earlier, I would have already leapt out, firing wildly and shouting curses. But I merely bristled in silence, plotting how to trap the ghost, how best to use my limited tools to their greatest effect.

Such was the pattern of my life for the next six months. A most dangerous game of hide and seek, tagging Phantom while avoiding him and escaping his retaliation. I would lie motionless in wait for days just for a single solid shot to his back or face. Sometimes other survivors would assist me, providing what supplies and shelter they could, while others avoided me, likely fearing I was every bit as dangerous as the ghost, a red-clad shadow, the bane of any and all ghosts in the wasteland.

So it came to pass one day that I was hidden in a pile of rubble, my largest ecto-cannon charged and ready. It was a grey morning, making the already bleak ruins more so. My radar faintly registered the ghost springing into place a few hundred feet away. I should have known something strange was going on just from that; Phantom had no way to mask his ecto-signature from my radar. He couldn't just appear well inside my scanning range as though from thin air. But the reality of it was so unbelievable that I could only assume it was Phantom. I heard voices, faint, but vaguely familiar, just on the edge of recognition.

"How do you think this all happens?"

My radar tracked the ghost- Phantom was moving slowly along, perhaps stalking whoever that was I heard talking. I sighted him through the scope on my cannon, nearly gasping before my resolve hardened. It was a trick, I was certain. Just like ten years ago when I first drove him through the Fenton Portal, he was changing his appearance to try and play with my emotions, so that he could take me down. Well I wasn't going to fall for it. I was no more of a sappy fool now than he was. I lined up the shot, ready to leap from my hiding place.

"I dunno, but based on what we just saw... " I heard that voice, straight from my childhood, sounding confused and worried. Oh, he thought he was such a good actor that I would actually fall for it? Hah! "I have a really bad feeling I'm the one responsible."