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: Whoa, wait a minute! An update on a completed fanfiction? WTF! Like I mentioned on the final chapter of Benediction, I was going to do a couple of short-story "After the End" chapters on this story. Both to give readers who wanted MORE MORE MORE after the story's ending, and to bridge the gap between the end of this story, and the beginning of my next fic Indemnification.

Jeremiad: After the End

By: Firefury Amahira

Part One: The Underground

"Silent voices down from below

Rising up through the ice and the snow

Ancient angers cast upon all

Through the land of the slain"

-"Revelations" - Dragonforce

I shielded my eyes against the afternoon sun as I made my way over the New City toward the Outlands on a routine patrol. Funny how quickly a group of people will assign new names to an altered landscape. What used to simply be the wastelands, the ruins of Amity Park had lost their nameless terror. Sure, the ruins were still dangerous, but now those dangers were mundane in nature rather than ghostly. The vast field of destruction was now simply the Outlands, the areas of the old city that had yet to be reclaimed.

Granted, the New City, or New Amity depending on who you asked, was still hardly what I would call a "city." In the past few months since I returned from my last surprising trip to Wisconsin, the survivors had managed to civilize only a few square miles. More of a village than a city, and barely that much. Still, to call it a city gave things a more familiar sense to them, I suppose. We all needed some semblance of "normal" after the past several months following that awful day.

More survivors were trickling in day by day, more than I had thought could possibly have survived Phantom's final and most deadly rampage. It seems that the emergency system worked better than I had figured; many survivors had taken refuge in the underground complex that had been the city's industrial sector. In fact, many of the survivors were still living out of those warrens, moving into surface housing slowly as new dwellings were gradually raised.

Three months later, and not everyone even knew that Phantom was gone. That was one of the reasons for my patrol route. The remnants of the Amity Park Ghost Patrol had become the workhorses of the New City. We were charged with finding water sources, food, salvageable materials, and locating survivors who were still in hiding. Especially survivors still in hiding. With the ghost no longer a threat, making sure people were safe from the more mundane hazards of sinkholes, collapsing buildings, and assorted potentially toxic debris took a new urgency.

The "near" Outlands were particularly dangerous, since the underground manufacturing complex lay beneath the ruins right up to the perimeter of the now-broken anti-ghost shield. There was a lot of very valid concern about massive collapses due to the damage on the surface. So far however, the area beneath the New City seemed to be holding firm. In the Outlands though... the danger was more apparent, great gaping holes ripped in the earth where the underground complex had collapsed; toppled skyscrapers swallowed by sinkholes several thousand feet deep.

In all fairness though, the "old" Outlands were almost as dangerous, but for different reasons. First and foremost being the miles and miles of unstable debris between the farthest reaches of the old city and civilization. Little was known about what lay so far from the safety of the New City. Thugs or bandits, taking cues from old post-Apocalypse flicks; decade-old toxic spills; heck, possibly even other ghosts.

I reached for my binoculars when I spotted a plume of dust in the distance, not too far from the remains of one of the shield towers. Tower Twelve, if I remembered correctly. Such plumes weren't uncommon, a grey or brown cloud of dust would waft skyward whenever a large chunk of the ruins settled. Still, it was worth investigating, as it was possible there were people hiding in that area.

"HQ, this is Valerie." I spoke into my wristband, steering my oft-abused jet sled toward the tower. "I'm investigating activity in the near Outlands. Looks like a building co-"

My report died on my lips as I watched the nearly skeletal remains of the shield tower cant over, the structure steadily gaining momentum until it slammed to earth and raised a second, much larger dust cloud. Even from my location perhaps a mile off, the shriek of steel and abused concrete was clear.

"Valerie? What is it?" A voice crackled over my wristband. "A building what?"

"Sorry." I replied, shaking off my surprise at the ongoing destruction Phantom had brought. "One of the old towers collapsed. I think it was number twelve. I'm going to go check for survivors now. Valerie out."

HQ responded with a quick affirmative as I blasted off toward the wreckage. There wasn't much of a breeze that day, the disturbed dust settling slowly over the immediate area or hanging in the air like a gritty fog. I squinted against the stuff, tying a rag I kept handy for such situations around my nose and mouth. It was times like that I wish my newer suit had a hood and visor like my first set of ghost hunting gear did.

The damage as I flew over the scene was impressive, even by the standards of the wastelands. The tower had fallen over entirely, smashing three other collapsed buildings into an unrecognizable mass of concrete and steel beneath its bulk. More than that, I realized, flying lower.

The tower hadn't failed... the foundation it was built on had. The ground beneath the tower had clearly failed to hold the weight of the structure, and it had gone over, ripping a gaping hole into the underground complex. I sent my sled even lower to investigate and found fully a third of the tower's uppermost skeleton had plunged into the sinkhole, along with a veritable mountain of debris.

"HQ, confirming tower twelve has gone down, and it's opened a new entrance to the Underground." I reported over the comm. "I think it's a section we haven't been able to reach before, either."

There was a moment of silence before I received a reply, surprisingly from Paulina. She was usually too busy coordinating the survivors to handle much in the way of Patrol duties.

"A new area?" The Latina inquired. "If it was anybody else, I'd say wait for backup. But do you think you can check it out now? There could still be people hiding out down there!"

Like you read my mind. I mused to myself before replying. "Sure thing. I'll keep you guys posted on what I find."

To be fair, I didn't expect to find much underground this far out, right at the border of the old shield. Few people went too near that boundary before the shield fell, and I simply could not imagine anyone wanting to try and seek shelter beneath the generators once Phantom had broken through.

Though I'm hardly a good judge of what a refugee might do, considering my reaction was insanity and a singleminded obsession with destroying Phantom that nearly got me killed a few dozen times over. It would have gotten me killed, had that freakish time travel stuff never happened that brought Danny from the past ten years forward in time. Seeing him, Sam, and Tucker all alive had been the slap upside the head I'd direly needed.

I approached the giant tear in the ground, cupping my hands to my rag-covered mouth and shouting into the dark crevasse.

"Hello! Is there anyone down there?" I listened, first hearing my call echo back to me from down there, then silence.

Well, no helping it, I'll have to go down there myself. I frowned as I slipped into the cavern.

To be perfectly honest, I hated going into the Underground, though I'm not claustrophobic. It wasn't too bad where there were people living, but the complex was vast, dangerous, and downright creepy in places, even to someone who had seen the horrors I've seen. Maybe it was the ambience; very little light from holes in the ceiling, with debris everywhere and the musk of stale air and decay. It was certainly enough like the setting of some horror movie to set a person's nerves on edge.

I followed the line carved by the fallen tower, clicking on a flashlight as the daylight from above faded to a general murk. It was cold underground, and impossibly silent. I could make some crack about the silence of the grave, but it all fairness there was a very real chance it was someone's grave. A great many someones, even. We'd found that in the Underground, far more than I liked to think about. Areas where clearly a group of survivors had hidden, only to be cut off from the surface by collapses or buried; cut off from food and water and left to starve, or cut off from fresh air and quickly suffocated.

I climbed off my jet sled, tucking it under one arm as I proceeded deeper into the cavern, sweeping my little light back and forth in search of signs of life or dangers lurking in the dark. There was nothing to see except decrepit equipment and collapsed rubble, perhaps the area was truly deserted?

I stopped when I heard a faint sound from deeper in the cave. Without my footfalls obscuring the sound, I could hear it again. It wasn't the sound of still-functioning industrial equipment; it was too irregular and not metallic enough to be that. It didn't sound like settling debris either; the sound was far too breathy to be concrete and steel sliding against one another. Which meant one thing: there was someone, or something down there.

"Hey, if you can hear me, please respond!" I called into the murk, maneuvering through the passageway to follow the faint sound.

As I progressed I found more collapses; older ones, given the settled dust and weather damage. Entire buildings from the surface had ended up mangled heaps of rubble down in the Underground. I wrinkled my nose through my rag; the stink was steadily worse as well. Old machine oil, stale air, the stink of rust and... a faint coppery smell. I fought down the urge to be ill at that smell, sliding one of my guns to the ready position.

The stink wasn't fresh, it had that same aged quality to it. If there was anything down there, it had been down there for awhile. I had a bad feeling that if there was something, that it wasn't human. I studied the facade of a building that had fallen sideways into the complex, and realized it was from outside the shield perimeter. There was only one way for an entire building from outside the shield to get into the Underground within that perimeter.

More of Phantom's handiwork from trying to break the shield before he got that new power.

So it was an older building, a chunk of solid debris that the ghost had picked up and flung through the barrier. Probably it had been subsequently buried in Phantom's final rampage, and eventually brought into the Underground by a ceiling collapse. So any bodies in that mound of broken building could have been trapped anywhere from a few years to a few months. I wouldn't find any survivors. Remnants, perhaps; but no survivors.

"Are there any ghosts in the area?" I called out, pulling an ecto-detector out of my pack. "You better show yourselves if there are!"

The device I was holding started beeping almost immediately, signaling the presence of a specter. A thin form materialized ahead, the dim glow it gave off sufficient to locate it beyond the reach of my flashlight. Given the only known remaining ghost portal at the time was the one Vlad's got in Wisconsin, any ghosts found in Amity Park had to have either come from Vlad's, or occurred in the city itself: victims of Phantom who could not rest easily.

The ghost's appearance was vaguely human, its armor bearing distant relation to the Patrol's uniforms. The guns it had aimed at me certainly looked like outdated standard-issue Patrol firearms. So it was a ghost, most likely of a Patrol member who'd been killed a few years back; probably in Phantom's third rampage when we fired up the shield for the first time. All that remained was determining if it was hostile or just jumpy.

"Hey, easy. Put the guns down." I pocketed my gun in an attempt at placating the spook, who said nothing. "We're both Patrollers, right?"

Its unblinking red gaze was the only response as I took a cautious step forward. If I could identify who it was, there was a good chance the ghost could be talked into cooperating with the Patrol. Ever since my last trip to the Ghost Zone, with the revelation that both Sam and Tucker existed now as ghosts, along with Danny's human half, I'd greatly tempered my responses to ghosts in general. I still didn't like a great many of them, but I no longer saw them simply as random collections of pure evil. Random, certainly. But not automatically evil.

"Phantom's gone, you know." I told it, trying to keep how wary I was from showing. "For about four months now, and he'll never be back."

"Gone?" The thing finally spoke, its voice somewhere between a moan and a jagged whisper. "Gone? GONE?"

I stopped, one hand going back to my pocketed gun. That fixation was not a good sign. Ghosts that had that sort of an irrational obsession weren't fully-formed ghosts, if what Sam had told me was true. Fully formed ghosts like her or Tucker, they were fully rational beings despite their particular obsessions. Irrational ghosts weren't true ghosts, but rather the deceased's malevolence pumped up on ectoplasm; a fixation given form.

"GONE? No!" It shrieked, opening fire on me in a sudden frenzy.

I spat a curse and tumbled out of the way, narrowly avoiding a flurry of pink beams that I could hear plowing into the debris all around. The cave was not a good place to try and fight a crazed ghost. There simply was not enough room in the cramped Underground to effectively fight, and that was assuming the fighting didn't flat-out bring the roof down first.

I turned tail and ran for the exit, ducking and weaving to avoid attacks from behind me. There was no doubt in my mind the ghost was the remains of one of the Patrol members; and that Phantom was its particular obsession, given how poorly it reacted to learning that he was gone for good. Regardless of who it had once been however; now the spook was a clear and present danger to the survivors, and as such needed to be dealt with. Permanently. To do that, I needed the advantage of the open sky and my jet sled.

"HQ, this is Valerie!" I shouted into my wristband as I reached my sled and jumped aboard. "Hostiles in the Underground near Tower Twelve. Confirmed presence of one hostile ghost, possibly more! Engaging as soon as I'm out of the tunnels!"

If there was a reply, I didn't hear it over the noise of gunfire behind me. It was a good thing I found the spook and not one of the others; I was the most experienced and undeniably best sled pilot in the Patrol. It would have been suicide for anyone else to try and fly out of that tunnel at full throttle. As it was, I had more than a few close calls from falling debris as I powered through the air towards daylight and safety. I readied my weapons as I fled; a smaller rifle rather than my larger cannon, thoughts racing to plot a course of action while reflexively evading the enraged specter behind me.

I risked a glance behind me as I burst into the late afternoon sky and nearly gasped. The ghost had some sort of jet sled-style device strapped across its back, like a makeshift jetpack; and the spook was far too close for comfort. So I dovetailed my sled to one side and killed the throttle; the ghost shot past me, too slow to anticipate the maneuver and enabling me to take a clean shot at its backside.

It's a strange feeling, that instant the target lines up in the sights. Time almost seems to slow down, and there's a sudden mental calm right before pulling the trigger. No emotion, not even hate or fear, or even a perverse sort of pleasure in that instant as the trigger is pulled. I have to wonder if its like that for the other Patrol members, or if it's a lingering fragment of my own bout with madness.

My shot struck home, and with a pained shriek the ghost was quickly destroyed. Ghosts like that were seldom very powerful; though they were often more violent than "true" ghosts, they lacked the completeness that could withstand more than a blast or two. The "true" ghosts could take a pounding, and heal; almost like an ectoplasmic parody of actual life. These crazed specters couldn't do much more than maintain their form and lash out at whatever happened to set them off.

I waited, weapon ready in case anything else had crawled out of hiding, listening to the wind. After several minutes, I assumed the one spook had been the only thing down there, and called it in to headquarters. Several airborne specks closing in on my position broke off and returned to their normal routes; the Patrollers who had no doubt been scrambled to respond to my alarm. I maintained my post for several more minutes before resuming my own patrol, mood sour.

I used to take such pleasure in hunting ghosts, all those years ago. Now it was... just a job, a duty I had to fulfill; ever since that dark day more than ten years ago when I had reluctantly accepted the task of stopping Phantom during his first rampage. I shot a glance back toward the wreckage of Tower Twelve. That ghost was one of my comrades from those dark days; well, had been, at any rate. I never found out who it had been, probably for the best; given I knew the names and faces of every member who served on the Patrol during that long decade.

I shivered as the evening progressed, the air starting to turn chill as I started for home. That singleminded hatred for Phantom; that all-consuming desire to destroy him regardless of who or what got hurt in the process. That could have been me, had the circumstances been different. I doubt I would have slept easily had Phantom ever managed to carry out those threats on my life. It could have been me haunting the Outlands, howling incoherent rage and lashing out at anything that came near.

But that wasn't me, I had to remember. I'd left that madness behind me, it disappeared the instant Danny-from-the-past and his friends had shown up and been menaced by Phantom. I'd come a long way since, learning tolerance and leaving my old animosity toward ghosts behind. They weren't all bad, certainly none of the "true" ghosts were necessarily evil. They were as diverse as any living race, each with individual emotions, goals, obsessions, hobbies, and peeves. They could be reasoned with, bribed, threatened, and argued with; it was possible to cooperate with them to the benefit of both sides.

Heck, that was how Vlad had been able to boss Skulker and Technus around even without any powers of his own. The old geezer had things the ghosts needed, they had simply bartered to a mutually agreeable exchange of services for goods. Even ten years ago before I knew any better, when Danny had first disappeared; I had struck a bargain with Skulker, at a time I still despised all ghosts.

Amity Park and the Ghost Zone both had suffered dearly thanks to Phantom. Both had been laid to waste, it was truly impossible to know how many deaths... and, well, afterdeaths? there had been. Now efforts at returning to normal were underway in both worlds. In Amity Park, the efforts were being led by me and Paulina; in the Ghost Zone, apparently Tucker and Dora Mattingly were organizing Ghost Zone society.

Cooperation... A thought hit me as I returned to headquarters for the night. I'd have to get back to Wisconsin sometime and go pay the ghosts a visit...

Closing Note: That's not too painful a cliffhanger, is it? I'm trying to be fairly light on those for these short stories. Mostly because Benediction is packed full of really nasty cliffhangers... and, ah... Indemnification is probably going to be even more vicious with 'em. Anyway, like I said in the intro, the purpose of this chapter, and the two more to follow it is to bridge the gap between Jeremiad and Indemnification. Each one is meant to stand mostly alone, with fairly simple stories. Mostly this is because I need to literally build the setting for the next fic from the ground up. These stories are my way to help establish the altered setting without having to spend some 20 pages of narration boring people to death explaining all the details of future Amity Park a year after events in Jeremiad. Granted, in the next fic I will still need to describe the setting, though it will be in third-person and angled from a different point of view. I hope these chapters add greater depth to that.

Anyhow, it was both weird and enjoyable to get back into Valerie's point of view after just barely under a year since I started writing Jeremiad. I was concerned at first that after so long, and after also writing Dan's point of view and then Jazz's psycho-analysis of him that I wouldn't be able to get Valerie nailed down. Turns out that despite a rather unpleasant case of viral bronchitis I was able to slip quite easily back into her shoes.

In any case, long-winded author babble aside, I hope you enjoy these extra chapters, and that you'll also read my other stories. Unlike Benediction, which you could read knowing only The Ultimate Enemy and not get confused, Indemnification is a true sequel to the three prior fics. I call it a "trilogy in four parts", since Jeremiad/Anathema both tell the same story, only the viewpoint differs, with Benediction following after them, and Indemnification after that.

And as always, reviews are very much appreciated!