59. No Way Out
It shouldn't have happened. He had controlled it, he knew he had controlled it, and yet here he was, staring at the smoking remains of what once was Caspar High school, reduced to a huge pile of rubble. It was amazing, he thought, a distant thought, a mad, laughing thought, how little remained of the boring, blocky building. Once three stories high, it had collapsed onto itself, leaving nothing but stones and dust. Gray dust. In fact, everything was just... gray.
Slowly, he stepped forward, commanding his feet, a tenuous command, but there. His white boots almost made no indent in the dirt on the ground as he was light, very light, almost, but not quite, weightless. For a moment, his mind drifted away to a safer place, a dream, becoming an astronaut, going into space, travel to the moon, the planets, the stars...
Darker thoughts invaded his mind, pushing the dream away, laughing at him, mocking him. He'd never be an astronaut, he had always known that, not with his grades. And even if he had been a straight A student, he'd never have passed the physical tests, even if he had remained fully human. As a half ghost, physicals would bring him a one-way trip to the labs of the GIW. There was just no way a blood test wouldn't show the excess amount of ectoplasm in his body.
Thoughts of the GIW pushed back the darker self, because although their incompetence was legendary, the GIW had something neither he, his parents or Valerie had: numbers. Where one or two agents failed, three, four, ten or even fifty might succeed. If he was to survive, he needed to at least appear harmless, although the destruction would be a little hard to explain. Glowing red eyes would be a dead giveaway.
A desperate smile tugged his lips as he continued, a smile because the alternative would have been crying and screaming. He still had control. For a moment, he considered the way he must look, a mad ghost, smiling at destruction, but then dismissed it. There was nobody there to see him. Nobody alive, anyway. If he interpreted his ghost sense correctly, and he nearly always did, there were at least two ghosts nearby, one right in front of him and one a little to the right. They were quiet though, no doubt stunned by the force of the onslaught, the insane power display that had flattened the building in one blast, literally obliterating it. It would have obliterated the ghosts too if they hadn't managed to evade it, barely.
Now, they were keeping quiet, seemingly not wanting to aggravate him or even gain his attention. His darker thoughts swirled and pleaded, wishing, hoping they would make themselves known, challenge him, because then he'd lose control again and he could take over. The scary part was that part of him, the part that had remained sane, actually agreed.
He stopped. He had reached what seemed to have been the entrance to the building, part of the steps that had led up to the doors still there. He knew those steps well, he had sat on them often enough, waiting for his friends, a little to the side as not to be trampled by other students rushing past. Somehow, nobody ever noticed him there, sitting, waiting, watching, not even the football players who loved tormenting him.
Unsure of what to do, he turned around and watched the crowd in the distance, hardly visible through the shimmering of the green ghost shield that had been erected around the school minutes after it had been destroyed. A ghost shield, generated by a device in the basement of the demolished building, somehow miraculously surviving the weight of the rubble that had crashed upon it. His parents had installed it after Pariah Dark's invasion, almost two years ago, replacing the one that had been destroyed in what was generally referred to as 'The Ghost War'. He had known it was there. He hadn't known it would be his undoing.
He was trapped, together with the two weak ghosts that were hardly strong enough to keep form, let alone attack him. His reaction to them had been excessive, he knew it, but like they say, it had seemed like a good idea at the time. Of course, anything involving destruction always seemed like a good idea to his darker self. He could only be thankful at the fact that the school had been out for hours, which probably meant there hadn't been anybody inside. He couldn't be sure though.
He couldn't go human. There was no way to hide, he was in plain sight, and although being captured as a ghost would be... unpleasant, being captured as a human-ghost hybrid would be... well, he didn't want to think about it. His nightmares had come up with terrifying scenarios, and none of them ended anywhere near '...and so he lived happily ever after'. He was sure that whatever his subconscious, overstimulated by countless horror movies and even more countless trips to the ghost zone came up with, reality could very well be much worse than he could imagine. There was no limit to human cruelty.
Something changed. He blinked and stared at a point in the ghost shield, a point where he thought he had seen a flicker of movement, a break in the green, something white...
And then there were more of them. They were advancing on him, grim smiles on their faces, triumphant as if they had already beaten him. The ecto guns – scratch that, ecto cannons – they were holding all pointed at him, their gleaming deadliness enough to intimidate even the strongest ghost.
He felt the fear then, washing over him in waves of terror, the knowledge that there was no way out of this, no way to avoid what was going to happen. The ghosts near him, the weak apparitions, hardly existing at all, drifted away, seemingly trying to run from the inevitable. They were quickly shot down, captured, stored in some storage device that bore a frightening resemblance to one of his parents' thermoses.
He shifted.
The force inside of him moved, the darkness overwhelmed him, and for a moment he was blind. He was still there, watching, letting the rage take him, replacing the fear, letting his darker self out, the one he had promised, sworn, would forever stay hidden. He felt himself being pushed away, felt the power surge go through him, making him glow, felt the burning red take over his eyes. Then a presence, malicious, angry but above all terrified, alien to him and yet disturbingly familiar and comforting even, took over. He wanted to open his eyes, wanted to see what was going on but a surprisingly gentle push shoved him back to the back of his mind, whispering softly, don't look.
So he sat back, disturbed by his inactivity, his readiness to accept his other self, his willingness to let him handle the situation. A situation he knew he couldn't get out of without there being casualties. He felt himself move, dodge, fire, using that seemingly endless source of power, a source of power he himself had always been unwilling to use. His other self had no qualms about that though. The emotions, the fears, the anxieties of other people, they were there in abundance, because even through their numbers – there must have been at least thirty GIW advancing on him – they were still afraid of him. And rightly so.
It was surprisingly easy.
