Chapter Nine-
Ragg sped as fast as legally allowed so as not be caught and detained by the police or highway patrol while he was on the expressway. But now that he was on the private road that led home, he could be more liberal with his speed.
He hoped down to the soles of his feet that Meg hadn't made it to the mansion, as he prepared to slow down on the way to his driveway.
He hiccupped an anxious gasp when he saw up ahead, a shabby, red station wagon, pull away from the side of the road a few yards from his house, heading for the end of the road and the boulevards that would lead back into town. Spitting a curse, he accelerated the clunker in pursuit.
Meg glanced up at her rearview mirror when she reached the intersection and, while waiting for the light to turn green, relaxed upon seeing a badly conditioned pick-up sidling up behind her. Definitely not the conveyance of a rich man.
She closed her eyes for a moment and actually chose to think that she might have a chance of succeeding at all of this, when she heard shouting from somewhere in back of her. When she next heard a horn sound off from behind, she decided to see what was going on.
She leaned her head out of the window and called out to the obviously agitated driver.
"Hey, I have to wait for the light to turn green, too, okay?" she said.
The second the angry, pink head of Zachary Ragg shot out of the window of his purloined truck, Meg swore and went pale.
In the space of a millisecond, Meg debated on whether to tear out into the streets, red light or no. Luckily, the light had already changed by the time she stuck her head back in the car, so all she had to worry about, as she almost stood on the gas pedal, was surviving the inevitable chase that would either take her home or to the police station, depending on whether she lost Ragg in his search, or gained the attention of Quahog's Finest for reckless endangerment with a vehicle.
The station wagon leapt out into the middle of the intersection, Meg gripping the steering wheel tight to make a desperate bootlegger turn when Ragg's truck lurched too close to her.
Meg told herself that going back the way she came was the better course of action; it was more familiar, more direct. To hurtle further out of town seemed a foolish way to get herself lost.
She pushed the family car as hard as she dared as she flew back up the road. Ragg's truck, not as maneuverable due to its damage, got caught in another traffic jam when he tried to copy her move. Other cars stopped in time to avoid hitting him, but the tie-up slowed him down and gave Meg a considerable lead.
Despite the lead and the battered nature of the truck, Meg continuously glanced at her rearview mirror for signs of her pursuer. When she didn't see him, she slowed to avoid a ticket, but kept her guard up.
She soon reached the intersection that opened onto the street that held the shops and the mini-mall she visited earlier to buy the cans of furniture polish to trick her way into the mansion. She checked left and right and was about to pull into traffic, when the car was slammed forward suddenly.
Meg recovered quickly from the shock of the hit and turned her head around to see the smoking, overworked wreck of a truck chugging loudly behind her.
Again, she accelerated dangerously among the other drivers; silently apologizing for the danger she was clearly putting them in. She hoped that the bright color of the station wagon could in some way alert them to her approach and allow them time to evade.
Except for one time trying to impress her father, she never drove this recklessly before. Her heart was banging almost painfully in her chest as she warned people away with blasts of the car's horn and swerved this way and that to lose Ragg, who was now, for some reason, latched on to her, pushing his vehicle to the breaking point and refusing to yield.
A smile almost played across Meg's lips as she finally entered the expressway. It was very close to rush hour and the number of cars here had increased. As she cruised into a faster lane and even managed to pass a smaller, lighter car to get into it, she could see the truck was not having a better time negotiating the unforgiving lanes, or the now punishing speeds it needed to maintain a safe distance in relation to the other cars.
She put him out of her thoughts as she drove back into town. It wouldn't be long before Ragg's ride would break down altogether, hopefully in the middle of the expressway. Him being stranded there would have been a perfect way to end the day, as far as she was concerned.
Meg allowed herself to think tactically for a moment. Once she got off the expressway, she turned down another street instead of the one she planned on entering, watching her rearview.
Just as she thought, Ragg survived the traffic, managed to exit the expressway and followed her, as well, though his truck was now huffing ever-blackening smoke from the engine and out the tailpipe, and its speed was noticeably slowed.
Meg threaded a manic course through a midtown route of boulevards that branched out into such areas as an industrial section of the city. Here, more trucks of a far larger variety could be encountered among the cars, trundling alongside her or trailing behind.
The one thing she knew she couldn't do was run a red light. She was good enough to miraculously navigate at high speeds so far, but she knew she wasn't that good. Driving of that caliber could only be attributed to aces like Mad Max or Elwood Blues, which she knew she wasn't. So she didn't let the situation rattle her too much when Ragg's heap finally caught up with her and shuddered as she waited for the light to change.
The only thing Ragg could do under the circumstances was curse, rail, and blow the horn whenever he could get close to her. He wanted her to know what he intended to do to her for leading him on this not-so-merry-chase.
He had to admit, through his anger, that this truck handled itself admirably. In fact, as he gripped the wheel tighter in anticipation to Meg obviously readying herself to launch when the green light was lit, he could feel a connection with the vehicle. It, like him, would not give up short of complete physical breakdown, and he could just sense the power still remaining in it to fly out into the street to overtake his prey.
The green light shone and, as predicted, Meg burst forward across the intersection, but this time, Ragg put his foot down as hard as he could on the accelerator. The truck began to catch up gradually with her. She couldn't possibly drive like a bat out of hell the entire way home without one of them making a mistake in the process.
As if coaxing more speed out of the heap by sheer willpower, Ragg was now behind her in the lane. If she kept driving fast, yet safely, he might be able to force her into a controlled crash, and then he'd snatch her away from the accident zone before anyone would know what had happened.
It was at that exact moment, however, that Meg had done the wholly unanticipated. She put on a sudden burst of speed on her way to another intersection just as the traffic light went red, but she didn't come to stop this time as she had before.
Rather, she continued on, and made an almost impossibly last-minute evasive swerve to avoid an oil tanker truck that roared out from a side street. Instead of impacting and folding her car around her in a possibly fatal t-bone, the station wagon swept away from the near-collision with a bullfighter's grace and sped up the street as it righted itself.
Ragg, however, could only enjoy watching the aggressively bold maneuver, before that selfsame tanker, unable to stop its forward momentum in time to save him, plowed into the side of the already damaged pick-up, causing the tanker's own cab to take damage that somehow reached as far as the oil tank itself.
Meg could feel the shock wave of the resultant explosion even from where she was. From the side mirror outside, she could see the hellish plume of flame and rich, black smoke flow from the accident like a titanic fountain. Although her adrenaline was surging in her veins, she managed to finally give a relieved sigh.
Her hands shook so hard, holding the steering wheel was difficult. She needed to cool down and think about what to do next. Up ahead was a large tract of land that she recognized easily enough and one that she knew would be deserted while the day still lasted.
She reached the location and turned sedately into the driveway of the local Drive-In Theater. She drove through the open, gravel-paved parking lot and stopped the car when she decided she was close to the center of the area. Then she collapsed in the driver's seat like an exhausted, loose-strung puppet.
Meg glanced wearily over at the folder lying beside her, but was too tired to read it in peace. She just closed her eyes.
The distant sounds of fire trucks made her open her eyes again and she wondered for a second if Ragg's death was mercifully quick. She had no love for the man after the truth was discovered about him, but she didn't want to feel cold about his passing, either. She didn't want the bitterness she admittedly sometimes harbored in herself to consciously manifest in that way.
After taking a cleansing breath, Meg picked up the folder and settled in for what she hoped would be a fascinating and incriminating read.
Upon opening, she slowly and carefully perused the file, and with each new sheet she read, the expression on her face changed. Not with dawning comprehension, but darker with more confusion.
Finances and charts met her scrutiny. Paragraphs concerning what looked like sorry profit quotas from one quarter to the next stood out for her inspection, and, most perplexing of all, a very thorough report detailing the legalities that were to involve Ragg's company.
Legalities that Meg, with her legally trained mind, could now easily recognize.
"Chapter 11?" she mused aloud. "Bankruptcy?"
There was no mentioning of the supernatural, no papers written in some glowing, celestial script that no Human being could possibly fathom, no godly power flowing from it to Meg's unworthy human touch. No report on the mass, earthly deaths of a clutch of naïve children. Nothing.
Meg just stared at the rest of the file, dumbstruck and confused. There didn't seem much sense going back to Ragg's house to search again. Time was still the enemy here.
'What happened?' she pondered in frustration. 'What did I do wrong?'
She was so deep in thought that she almost didn't hear the sharp tapping of metal on glass in her ear. She turned her head to the sound with a start, and knew she was caught. The deathly dark tunnel of a small gun barrel peered through the window at her, cold and non-negotiable.
Ragg, scorched and bleeding about the head and neck, held the gun on her with ill-disguised glee, his well-tailored suit now a singed testament to his incredible triumph of survival.
"Come on out, Meg," Ragg ordered with surprising cordiality. "Let's talk."
Meg closed the folder and held it as she carefully opened the driver's side door and slowly stepped out.
She closed the door and, at Ragg's gestured urging, walked a few feet away from the relative safety of the car. He stood facing her from a shorter distance, his gun hand more relaxed now that he was in control.
With his gun hand he pointed casually at the folder she still held. "So, I see you read my report," he said with a weary smile. "Anything in there you liked?"
Despite her fear, Meg wanted answers. "I don't get it," she said. "The Mortality Report is all about bankruptcy? I thought it explained about how a person died."
Despite his calling the shots, Ragg's face suddenly darkened in alarm by what she had just said, and his gun hand twitched into a tighter grip as a result. For the life of him, he couldn't understand how she could have possibly known that much about his and the Devil's business.
"How do you know about that?" he asked, trying to calm the worry in his voice. "I don't know how you know about the Mortality Report, but that's not it."
"Yeah, I gathered from what I read so far," Meg said. "But then why does it say "M.R." on the folder?"
Ragg wanted to laugh, but he smirked instead. Since she came such a long way only to be stopped by a mistake on her part, he might as well be the bigger man and explain her folly to her before her well-deserved death.
"That stands for "Must Resurrect," he said. "As you probably read, my great-great grandfather's company, his legacy, is going belly-up. Subscription sales are way down and profits this quarter are a joke."
He cocked his head and said, as if talking to himself, "Damned I-this and I-that. The electronic media is making a dinosaur of the printed word. You've seen the news, haven't you? Newspapers are falling by the wayside because everything is going digital. Well, I won't stand for it. I love this company and the people who work in it too damn much to let those cowardly shareholders sell it off to some electronic media company, while they float off in their golden fucking parachutes. That's why when I become the new ruler of Earth, one of the first things I'll do is force Washington to bailout my company. It, like me, shall stand. And whenever anybody picks up one of my magazines, they'll know, for all time...that it's a Ragg."
Then the smirk returned on his face as he calmly began to walk around Meg, the smirk growing wider as she looked more apprehensive.
"So, you're going to kill me, because I know too much?" she tried to ask through a racing heart and a nervously dry throat. She didn't think she would die like this, killed executioner-style in the parking lot of a Drive-In.
Ragg stopped behind her, lining his body up in relation to hers for some as yet unknown attack. The gun arm was raised.
"No, Miss Griffin," he said with that same triumphant calm, as he then raised the gun high over his head, butt side down.
Before Meg could ask another question, which by her reckoning was probably her last, a shockwave of pain tore through her brain brutally, and her mouth hung open in surprise as Ragg brought the pistol's butt crashing down into the base of her skull. She buckled into an unconsciousness heap on the gravelly ground.
"You are," he said quietly.
The sun sank quietly in the late afternoon sky, marking the events of the wayward day. Car chases and explosions, fire and mayhem. In the dark numbness of oblivion, Meg knew nothing.
But in the space of time that passed since her fall and Ragg's subsequent leaving of the area after calling Caruthers via cell phone to pick him up, something stirred within her mind.
Outside the station wagon, an ethereal point of light appeared, hardly visible in the daylight, like the glow of a firefly. It gradually grew in size, substance and coherence until the ghostly form of Astral Meg coalesced into being.
"I'm getting way too much practice out of this," she muttered to herself as she looked around to check her bearings.
Turning to her car, she noticed that the engine was running. Then she spotted a clear hose emerging from the slightly opened driver's side rear passenger window, its slack length running from there around to the rear of the car. She didn't have to add it all up to see what was happening.
Meg went to the driver's side window, which was closed, and could see her unconscious self slumped across the driver's and front passenger's seat. The other windows, save the one with the hose running through it, were closed, as well, and the interior was becoming foggy with carbon monoxide fumes flowing from the hose.
She reached over to open the door and her hand and forearm slipped through it as if it wasn't there. She felt nothing as she tried to grab the handle, the whole front half of her arm emerging on the other side, ghostlike.
She could still see her body somewhat clearly from the deadly mists inside, but such a barometer couldn't give her an accurate assessment of how long she was in there and how much exhaust she breathed. She had to get out and fast, and she was already failing at that.
With fear of her imminent death, she began to panic and, not thinking, swiped impotently at the hose outside the car. Her hand blurring by, again, not feeling anything.
Meg wanted to scream at the futility and senselessness of it all. She flowed through the driver side door and tried to rouse her body, but she went too far and flowed halfway through her prone form and she had to back out in frustration.
She started to pace by the car, teeth gnashing and mind racing to find a solution, for something to use to save herself. She looked around the vast parking lot for salvation and found only tire tracks in gravel, theater radios in their stands, the blank wall of a movie screen far off in the distance. And a bum.
Meg did a classic double take when she spotted the homeless man rooting through the dumpster by the side of the concession stand. A living, human body was just the thing. She just had to get his attention.
She ran across the lot soundlessly, waving her hands and yelling to her physical limit to get him to stop his daily business and look at her. He continued to rummage unabated.
Meg finally made it over to the man, gesturing and calling out to him. For a second, the man looked out over the lot in the direction of Meg's car, and she thought that she somehow got through to him, but he simply coughed up some phlegm by her feet, scratched himself by his privates, and went back to his foraging.
Meg stopped moving about and let understanding come upon her. She was completely invisible to the human senses. That man would have had a better chance of noticing the lice reproducing in the thatches of his hair than notice her presence.
He was oblivious and it surely wasn't his fault, she reasoned. She just wished that Death had mention that little item when he taught her astral projection. It wouldn't be long, she fretted, before her body would finally succumb to this faux suicide and she truly became a member of The Choir Invisible.
Then a thought struck her. Maybe, in some weird way, she already was a spirit, in deed, as well as in word.
She couldn't physically interact with earthly objects like the car, but she wondered frantically if that didn't limit her to entering the living…and possessing it.
She took an appraising look at her would-be host and was thoroughly disgusted at the sight, and worst, the smell, of him. He looked like a devastated, lice-ridden Tommy Chong on the worst day of his life, but she made up her mind, when she remembered the knife's edge her life was balanced on, that she could do a lot worse. And so, with great and griping reluctance, Meg possessed her first body.
The man jerked upon having bodily control so clumsily usurped and he urinated on himself as a result.
"Ugh!" he said to himself, surprising Meg when it appeared that he even sounded like Mr. Chong. "I didn't mean to do that. I gotta get control of this guy."
There was too much time lost to try to learn how to walk with her host, so Meg inelegantly turned and ran like a drunk on fire towards her car, almost tripping three times when she didn't watch the angle of the man's feet, and almost falling when she leaned too far forward.
At last, the homeless man arrived and Meg, meaning to get him to take the hose from the tailpipe, accidentally ran him into the back end of the car, causing him to slide across it and the hose, which loosened and came out.
Meg righted the body and made her way to the driver's side door. She spent a precious moment to peer into the car and was now having a hard time seeing her body through the smoke inside.
She raised the man's hand and, without preamble, and even less training, thrust it forward to grab the door handle. But in her panic, she didn't judge for distance, and the hand smashed painfully into the side of the door.
Despite the pain, Meg kept desperately ramming her host's hand into the door, yelping with every impact.
Although the hose was lying on the ground and no longer channeling the toxic smoke inside, her body was not removed from the car. She could still become a corpse if ventilation was not forthcoming.
Regretting what she was about to do, yet no longer thinking any more about the man's physical well-being, Meg was a force of nature concerned only with survival. She made him take two crooked steps back, raised his head skyward, and then rammed his head into the driver's side window with suicidal force.
The man's forehead collided with the glass and miraculously shattered it, showering Meg's body with tiny, glittering fragments, and leaving a gash across the homeless man's head. Stunned, he stumbled back and fell on his backside by the door.
Astral Meg exited the man and saw the smoke begin to waft heavily out of the hole in the window, her body becoming clearer to see.
As the noxious cloud was lifted and carried off by the life-giving winds, she could hear herself groan into sickly consciousness and stir in her seat.
As Meg's body slowly, painfully, began to sit up, her astral self faded away in the afternoon light. Her fingers clumsily probed and fumbled at the door handle, and upon unlocking and opening the door, she tumbled out onto the hard ground beside the man who helped her live.
Exhaust was thinning out of the car now, but Meg was too tired to notice or care. As the wind cooled her face and brought cleansing air into her stricken lungs, she slipped once more into unconsciousness, but this time she welcomed it, and fell into a deep sleep.
The surroundings were hazy, like a white room with no discernable walls, floor or ceiling, just an infinite space. There was no familiarity to the place, yet it didn't alarm Meg as she stood in what seemed like its center.
What did catch her attention was a human shaped silhouette coming towards her at a leisurely measure. When the figure came into the sourceless light of the place, Meg shed a tear and laughed at the joy of the meeting.
Standing at ease, as he had in life whenever he was around her, and wearing a smart looking army dress uniform, stood Specialist Kevin Swanson.
Seeing him meant that she didn't make it from Ragg's deathtrap, and she didn't care in the least, as she leapt up and crushed him a hug that made even him gasp for breath.
"Kevin...You're alive? Where are we?" she asked, not wanting to separate from him ever.
"That's not important, right now, Meg," he said tenderly into her hair as he held her against his broad chest. "What's important is that you get up. People are counting on you to see this through. You have to wake up, Meg."
Meg wanted to ignore him. She just wanted to enjoy her reward for suffering that cold, hard Earth by just being with him. Just spending eternity fused with him, physically, emotionally, spiritually, like a romantic work of art.
"Oh, I missed you so much, Kevin," she breathed out. Then she plucked up the courage to say shyly, "I wish I knew when you were going to ship out. I would have given you something worth fighting for."
The appreciative chuckle that came from deep within Kevin was worth the risk of embarrassment. Inside, she was glad she told him the depths of her feelings just then.
There was so much she wanted to say and share with him, eons to make up for lost time, but this was something she had to tell him now, while the moment presented itself.
"I still think about you, sometimes, even after your father told me...what happened. I tried to be strong and move on," she said.
Kevin looked past the surface of her eyes and into the soul within. "I know. I used to hear what people said about you before I went away. I never believe them, and I still don't."
He then looked ashamedly away from her. He didn't want her to hear bad news that involved her in any way, but the air had to be cleared for the sake of further communication.
"My dad was never that happy that I was dating you, and he didn't want me to tell you that I was enlisting. I'm so sorry I didn't take a stand for you, Meg."
Already he could see the pain begin to cloud the connections between her eyes and her soul. The selfsame disappointments that became so universal in her life. Yet Kevin couldn't let these hardships take her away from him, whether in this life or the last. He gently drew her face to see his, as the conviction hardened his face with a love she never got to see in private.
"My dad was a scared, old man, trying to make me strong for his own reasons. But you already beat me to it, Meg. You're already stronger than me. I want you to know that before the end, I thought about you, too."
Meg could only cry in silence.
"You're my piece of the rock, you're the company I want to keep, and I know that other people are in good hands with you," he told her with a pride that she could actually feel. "Go back home and prove me right, babe."
Meg sighed between her sobs and knew he was right. Others needed her right now, and she could tell that as long as she breathed, she represented his sacrifice and his belief in her.
"I will, Kevin. I will," she vowed.
He said nothing else after that. He simply raised her face to his, and kissed her gently upon her lips.
Meg let the sweet contact bear her away from everything. She was buoyant, primal, at peace, and impassioned. If this was death, she could fear for nothing.
With the sunlight softly warming her cheeks and illuminating her clearing vision, she gradually woke up.
And saw, in horror and rising abhorrence, the homeless man kissing her full on the lips.
With a scream that echoed across the length and breadth of the parking lot, Meg gathered her strength in a quick surge, and bodily shoved the man away.
While she spat messily and wiped her mouth as thoroughly as she could, the surprised man said, "Hey, I'm sorry there, little lady. When I woke up, I thought you were into the whole car-crash-as-a-sexual-turn-on thing when I saw you laying there."
Disgusted, Meg shouted out, "Yuck! No! God!" It was when she looked at him and remembered what she made him do, that she calmed down in shame and kept her opinions to herself. He saved her and he didn't need to hear her appraisals of him.
"Look, thank you for helping me out, just now," she said softly. "You helped me out more than you know."
A casual look at the low-sitting sun in the sky prompted Meg to action once more. Much too much to do before the end, and she still had to do it.
Reaching into her pocket, she quickly pulled out some dollar bills, and, after getting wobbly to her feet, handed them to the man.
"Here, you deserve this. I have to go."
Meg snatched her toque from her head, reached in, and swept the glass pieces out of the driver's seat of the now cleared out car. She then put the already idling car into gear and took off, rear tires spitting loose gravel and obscuring dust in her wake.
Rubbing the dust from his bleary eyes, the man looked from the red car driving into the sunset, to the money in his hands. When he saw the accidental amount of money given, he brightened considerably.
"Seventy dollars?" he cheered with a wave in her direction. "Whoa! Thanks, babe!"