Chapter Fourteen-
Meg drove downtown, weaving through the mid-morning commutes. The van sputtered and sometimes stalled in traffic, but she managed to coax it back to life and continued on, as the day grew cloudier.
Meg didn't know how long Ragg would be with the police, but she was thankful for the diversion, all the same. Just then, a sound, like one a radio's speakers would make if they were flubbing out, squawked in the rear of the van. Meg turned down the car radio and glanced back at the sound while she drove, wondering what that was.
"Brother Grim to Big Bag Wolf," came the static-ridden voice. "Come in."
Meg was perplexed at first, but when she stopped at a red light, she found time enough to look over into the back of the van.
On the floor, among the other scattered effects of the erstwhile kidnappers, was one of the men's walkie-talkies. Meg figured that it must have been left on by one of them to talk to either Ragg or the Devil.
"Brother Grim to Big Bad Wolf. Come in," the message repeated, and by the time the light went green again, she heartbrokenly knew whose voice she was listening to. The butterflies returned to her belly with a vengeance.
She knew he'd get free of the police soon enough, but she didn't think it would have been this soon. She wasted too much time on those killers, and gave Ragg the time he needed to return to his place of business.
"Big Bag Wolf, come in," Ragg said. "What's your location? Did you kill her? Over."
Meg ignored the voice and kept her mind on both driving and what she was going to have to do to get in the building.
She could already see the landmark buildings that indicated that she was almost there, and so, to ease her nervousness, she flippantly said to herself, as if in reply to his summons, "Yeah, she's toast. We're on our way to Massachusetts. One of the guys just proposed to me and I said yes. We'll send you a postcard. Bye-bye, now."
By the time Meg reached the office building's block, Ragg had stopped calling. She slowed down as she reached the company parking lot, preparing to flash her ID to the guard stationed there, when she saw something through the van's cracked and tinted windshield that was both curious and disturbing.
Milling about outside the building was a cluster of security guards. From what she could see, it looked like they were waiting for someone.
"Uh-oh," Meg said under her breath, as she thought about what this could mean. Either the guards were all outside to have a smoke break, or they were gathering for an action of some sort. One that involved security, guarding access to someplace, and her.
And if they were summoned by Ragg to guard the building against her arrival, then it stood to reason that all the guards probably had standing orders to detain and/or contain her if she tried to get in. Even the guard in the parking lot.
So, without another thought, she accelerated back into the street and drove by the men and the building. No guard gave the van a second look as she drove past them. As she reached the intersection, Meg looked around hastily. Downtown was not the sort of place where one casually took in the sights, unless one was on foot.
Since she was the first vehicle at the stoplight, she could see up and down the right and left side streets, and it was there, up the right side, that she found it.
A parking space lay abandoned around the corner of the park that stood across the street from the office building. She turned and parked the heap without incident and put money in the meter.
She was parked a few cars down from the corner, so she would have to walk to it to see across the street at the guards there. When she furtively arrived at the spot and looked out, she unwisely froze out in the open, in a panic at what she saw.
Coming out of the building, wearing such an anxious and angry expression, that even Meg could see it from where she was, was Ragg. He stopped to address his troops, although Meg couldn't quite hear what was being said.
But when the man began gesturing at the cardinal points of the compass, and small teams from the group broke off to search in those directions, Meg ran back to the safety of the van.
Although no one could see inside the van, thanks to its tinted windows, Meg hunkered down in the driver's seat anyway, out of fear. Already, she could see, just over the steering wheel, one of the teams moving up the street, checking under parked cars for her.
Praying that the opaqueness of the windows were high enough, Meg laid down, slipped under the dashboard, and squeezed into the leg space underneath.
She held her breath and stood as still as the grave when she heard, at first, two pairs of shoes from the closest team walk to the van, and then more pairs run and then stop to join them.
She could hear them leaning against the doors to look under the vehicle and converse amongst themselves. Then she heard Ragg's voice among them and she willed herself to be unnoticed.
"She's around here somewhere," Ragg postulated to the others. "Some of you go back and check inside the building in case she already doubled back. The rest of you, with me. We'll search the park and the buildings around here in case she plans to slip by us."
The group obeyed and split up, leaving Meg to breathe, and soon after, to ponder after her close shave, how to get inside. She got up from her hiding spot and stepped gingerly into the rear of the van, being careful not to make noise while she entered.
Peering out of one the small windows set in the rear doors, she saw Ragg and his team head further up the street and around the corner. She was alone for now.
She turned from the window and ran half-baked ideas in her head, pacing around in the dark, cramped space.
Then her foot kicked over the shopping bag that was left behind, spilling its festive contents onto the metal floor. She had used the chocolate frosting earlier, but put everything else back in the bag, because she didn't see a use for them. Now that she stopped and stared at the items on the floor, an idea formed in her brain, and she liked the way it sang to her.
Ragg crossed the street with his team from the park in frustration. It was bad enough that his crack killer-kidnappers hadn't answered his call, but because they didn't, there was every reason to believe that Meg was on the loose somewhere. The Devil had assured him that even if she, by some miracle, eluded the kidnappers, she couldn't do whatever it was she finagled a recess for, in time.
As he listened to the other teams that gathered by the front doors tell him that they found no one, Ragg cocked his head towards the park. He could hear something.
Telling the others to be quiet, he listened again. A popping sound, faint, but sharp enough, was coming from the park, or more specifically, by the park.
"Come on," he ordered. The whole group ran across the street and around the corner, and saw the unexpected.
A battered, black van became a noisy, eye-catching parade float, of sorts.
Sparklers were spitting light and hissing as they were held up in dark, rolled-up windows. Whiz-bangs were living up to their name, as they shot forth from under the van, smoking up the street around it.
They ran over to the van's open rear doors, careful not to get in the way of the fireworks that launched out from there in a cacophony, into the darkening sky.
Exiting behind them from the driver's side, using the fireworks' noise, smoke and colored lights, and even the sky's overcast as cover, Meg snuck, from car to car, back to the corner.
After a fast check to watch for guards and finding none, she ran pell-mell for the front doors.
Stepping into the lobby, she saw the security kiosk and was about to make a run past it for the elevators at the rear corridor, when she recognition made her stop.
Manning the kiosk was the old guard that she met when she first came to the building lo those many days ago. Her mind immediately registered him as no threat, but more importantly, she over and gave him a big kiss on his wizened cheek.
The old guard reared back in happy surprise. "Whoa! What was that for, young missy?"
"Because you are a genius," Meg said. "And you get paid not nearly enough for what you do."
"That's true," he agreed. "But what's this all about?"
"You said that people coming out of the building could sometimes see a light on the roof, even though they cut the power to the spotlight up there, right?"
"That's right."
"Then that's where it is," Meg told herself, triumph glowing from every pore.
Pointing to the elevators behind him, she asked the guard, "Do any of them go to the roof?"
"The elevators? Nah," he said. "None of them can take you directly to the roof, but if you get off at the last floor, there's an old maintenance stairway that leads to the roof."
Meg looked up in thought, trying to picture what this stairway would look like. She decided not to waste time. She would see it when she saw it.
She thanked the guard, gave him another kiss on the cheek, and jogged over to one of the elevators whose light indicated that it was already on its way down.
When the elevator doors opened, her smile turned into fearful dismay, as she looked in the car, and saw that it was full of security guards.
The smoke was beginning to clear, the sparklers were fizzing out, and the whiz-bangs sputtered into silence, as Ragg and the other managed to get closer to the van.
After the initial fireworks had died down, he and the guards peered into the slightly smoky rear and saw a curious thing. A pink and white pinata stood in the middle of the doorway, with its back to them.
A lit M-80 was sticking out from between its butt cheeks, and on its cheeks, written in marker, were the words, "Kiss It!"
Ragg and his men managed to just jump out of the way before the explosive went off with a boom loud enough to set off every car alarm on the block, showering them in burning candy and papier-mâché.
Meg ran back to the lobby and stopped near the security kiosk again. Looking back, she could see that the guards didn't give chase, but simply made a call on their walkie-talkies and strolled purposefully out of the elevator towards her.
She was about to cut her losses and run out the door, when the other guards burst in, and then Ragg, as though he were the conquering king he believed himself to be, came in and closed the doors behind him, smiling darkly.
"Oh, you led me on a merry chase, little girl," Ragg said with a purr. "But now it's time for the fun and games to end."
He regarded his guards with an indulgent grin. "Gentlemen, you may beat this girl within an inch of her life. And then you may take that inch, too."
The guards, as one, with the exception of the old one in the kiosk, pulled out their nightsticks, and moved in on Meg with slow, deliberate menace.
She couldn't believe she was about to be beaten to death by an army of unexpectedly homicidal rent-a-cops. As she glanced around to see which guards were the closest to her, and thus, the greatest threat, she saw a PA microphone sitting on top of the kiosk.
Looking around again, she saw the park from the lobby's wide windows. Impossibly, inspiration hit her.
She turned to the old guard and asked, as though her life was not about to end bloodily, "Does the PA system in this building have speakers on the outside?"
The old guard glanced to the windows, thought, then said, "Yeah. Why?"
"Can I use it?" she asked, grabbing the mic.
The old man thought it odd, especially under the circumstances, but said, "Sure, little missy, but who are you gonna call?"
Meg gave the man a sure smile and said, "Back-up."
Pressing the send button, Meg took a deep breath as the guards and Ragg closed in on her, and then gave the loudest series of birdcalls she ever produced, running the entire catalogue of local bird species in her mind to find the closest and more abundant flocks in the area.
Meg chirped and whistled a blue streak, leaning into the microphone to perform like a virtuoso jazz flautist. Ragg, witnessing this strange display, actually laughed at her apparent folly, and gestured the guards to hold off their advance for the moment.
"What is this?" he asked her incredulously. "The Gong Show? What's next, Stupid Human Tricks?"
Meg finally stopped her calls and looked back at Ragg, out of breath and defiant. She didn't really think it could work; the long shot for it would have been astronomical.
Ragg raised his hand to signal the march to her doom again, when the already overcast daylight suddenly grew darker still.
He heard the sound of something hitting the windows behind him with quick, organic thuds. Turning, Ragg, and soon the security guards, all stood dumbfounded as, in groups of ten and fifteen, small and medium-sized birds began flying and caroming into the glass, causing it to vibrate and shimmy violently.
The dim daylight from the windows was suddenly snuffed out under a frighteningly dark blanket of muscle, claws and wings as over a hundred local birds flew, hovered, attempted to climb and inevitably bashed their bodies against the lobby windows.
Ragg backed away as the windows shook in protest to the growing flocks, rattling in their frames until, at long last, they can hold them out no longer and they shattered inward.
Glass fragments flowed in their birds' frenzied wake like ice in an arctic storm. Outside, the weather worsened, and a strong wind, the prelude to a local storm front, blew into the lobby through the ruined windows.
This combination of things made the already skittish avians, even more confused and scared. Clouds of birds flapped against the walls, the kiosk, the doors, each other, and anybody standing in their panicked way, blotting out the interior lighting completely in a storm of feathers and a riot of disharmonious birdsong.
Meg crouched down and used the maelstrom of birds as cover as she ran back to the elevators.
As the birds' circled, swooped, and crowded in, space became non-existent, and in their collective, claustrophobic terror, they simultaneously defecated everywhere they flapped. Ragg's suit and the guards' uniforms were ruined under the gastro-intestinal onslaught of half-digested insects and liquid fecal matter.
Meg, still out of breath, but unsullied and unharmed, stepped into the waiting car, then turned to watch the last of the special live performance of Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds,before the doors closed and she finally ascended.
"She's going to be late," the judge said to no one in particular. The Devil, however, heard him loud and clear.
"Well, Your Honor," he said. "It's like I always said. You get what you pay for. And it seems quite obvious that the defendants went bargain basement. Still, to be fair, we'll wait until time's up, and then I'll crush her defense, once and for all."
"We'll see, prosecutor," said the judge as he watched the Devil's infernal legal assistants work around their lord, like ants tending to their queen. Personally, he didn't need them at all, the judge knew, but appearance was everything, and looking like you had a crack team of legal eagles, or maybe in their case, culture vultures, would make the other team all the more intimidated and less prone to success.
The judge then looked at the other team seated in their bench, already dead, but looking even more morose, more condemned than before. The only thread of hope they had left hadn't returned yet, and the judge had long since guessed that her absence had everything to do with trying to win the case, and less to do with some sappy TV tearjerker.
He had to smile a little at Meg's bold play at using recess to buy more time. Secretly, he liked her spunk and resolve, despite her inexperience, and he hoped, deep down as an angel and a judge, that she'd beat that ol' Devil down.
"We'll see," the judge said again, more to himself, this time.
The elevator had reached the uppermost floor, and during the quiet, mercifully uneventful trip, Meg had time to think. About many things.
She thought about how came from such a long way to be where she is now. She never thought in a million years that she ever be some thing as prestigious and important as a lawyer. She heard the rap about lawyers being rapacious, money-hungry, soulless opportunist who cared little about their client and even less about their morals.
But after having somebody reach out and ask for her help, even from beyond the grave, it changed her. It gave her purpose, focus, and armor against the attacks that plagued her for so long. She took so many chances, gambled with her life so much and so quickly now, that it felt like it was all a dream to her. She cheated Death as much as she needed his help at times, an she found her new life, for lack of a better word, exhilarating.
She also hoped, for all of her risk-taking, that she wasn't wrong about this hunch. Or that the old man wasn't just rambling for want of company, when he told her about the roof. This was for all the marbles.
The door opened and Meg stepped into a dusty, long-forgotten floor. It looked like the interior of an abandoned warehouse. Windows were caked with grime and cobwebs, and paint was peeling from both the ceiling and the walls, the falling pieces were so numerous, they almost layered the floor. Paint and primer cans stood in dusty stacks in corners alongside defunct fluorescent light fixtures that were never installed.
Meg looked about in the gloom of the place for the stairway, but it wasn't seen. However, walking farther into the disused corridor, she could see that it bent around the corner to extend its length a few more yards before terminating at a paint can piled dead-end.
Curiosity prompted her to walk its length, and just before she arrived at the dead-end, she spotted an old wooden door, a holdover from the building's very early days, on one side of the hall. The doorknob was missing, and when Meg trying to push it open experimentally, it held.
Frustrated, she looked around the floor near her for the errant knob. There was only debris and dust.
With no other choice open to her, Meg walked across the hallway from the stubborn door, made her stance, blew out a breath, and ran at the door full tilt.
Meg bounced off the door and favored her pained shoulder, but when she struck, she heard the door crack from where the lock's bolt was held in place. It was old. Old enough.
Meg went back to her starting place again, planting her feet squarely. She took off again, yelling to offset the coming pain and to focus her strength against the aged door.
With a bang, the door flew loose, its lock coming apart in pieces and hitting the dirty floor with metallic clunks. The rest of the door swung free in a squeal of rusted hinges, as Meg's momentum had her running into something angular, cold and hard.
Straightening her glasses, she looked up to see an ancient, but still sturdy staircase winding up into the dark. A single window set in one of its landings above provided Meg with a little light, which intensified only briefly from the occasional lightning flash.
"This must be it," she said to herself to keep the butterflies in her guts down, as she started walking slowly, cautiously upward.
It was when she was halfway up the length of the staircase, that she heard the sounds. Heavy stomps, like from large workers' boots, could be heard tramping downward. Coming to her.
They were too close to her, which meant that whoever was coming was close enough to hear her, so she put running back down the stairs out of her head. She backed up against the corner of the landing she was on, heart hammering and wondering who the hell was already up here.
Doctors Raymond Stanz and Egon Spengler marched down the stairs before her, looking weary, their uniforms scorched and splattered with ectoplasm that seemed to glow faintly in the lightning flashes outside. She couldn't believe what she was seeing.
"What are you guys doing here?" Meg asked, thankful it wasn't a guard, or worse, Ragg.
Ray regarded her, and said, while slightly out of breath, "We got a call to check out a disturbance up on the roof. Thought it was a normal haunting, but we were caught off guard. We handled it, though."
Meg was thunderstruck. Ghosts? The office building was haunted?
"Who was it? Gozer?" she asked expectantly.
"No, worse," Raymond said, turning stone-faced as the lightning strobed through the landing window again. "Nicholas Cage. They were filming the sequel to Ghost Rider. "
Meg gasped in shock as the two battle-hardened men walked past her. But just before she could restart her own journey, Egon wordlessly turned back and gave her a cursory scan with his PKE meter, which squealed and raised its arms in reaction to her. Egon lowered his hand-held sensor, gave Meg a mournful shake of his bespectacled head, and then joined his friend and partner downstairs.
Meg gulped, but then resumed her climb.
The secretaries had seen him in all manner of stress before, but when Ragg marched past them on his way to his office, they didn't know it could be pushed to such a limit.
He burst into the room, looking crazed, stinking and moist with guano, and covered haphazardly with feathers of various species of bird.
Ragg looked around the immaculate office for something. Something to use. Something to kill with. Stationary was too small for his purposes, and it was just his luck that he left his gun at home when he had to be questioned by police earlier.
Meg had proven through sheer luck, guile and fortitude, to be, in his mind, the most dangerous woman on Earth, and if he wanted his rule on Earth to be complete and absolute, Megan Griffin must die.
"I had to leave the gun at home," he fumed. Then his eyes spied something he hadn't thought to use but, under the circumstances, would have been perfect for the occasion.
He walked almost reverently towards his decorated wall, where his trophies hung. Where the two crossed rapiers proudly hung, sure and lethal.
Thankfully, this door was more cooperative than the first one, and upon reaching it, Meg opened it to see a stormy vista of the heavens.
The building was clearly one of the tallest in the city skyline, and as the leaden clouds moved along under the strong winds, it felt to Meg as though the roof and her were moving, like a ship at sea.
She stepped out and the roof was immense, a tar black field stretching hundreds of yards. Meg looked up at the building's sign proclaiming Ragg Publishing, and almost succumb to vertigo.
Instead, she gingerly walked around, past proton-pack scorched ventilation shafts, satellite dishes, wiry weather sensors, skylights, and fire-fighting equipment.
She took another look at the turbulent skies and knew that she was late getting back to the trial. In all honesty, she wasn't too sure her closing argument would have swayed the jury, anyway. Hence, this last minute desperation play of hers.
She kept the image of Jennifer on her mind as she continued to look around. Then she decide that the best way to see all of the roof at once would be to come over to the edge and then look back.
She carefully did so, fighting the temptation to look over the edge. Just behind the titanic sign and to the side, was a large, rotund structure, canted on its side and rusted from disuse. Meg went over to it, and gave a thankful sigh. It was the old spotlight.
The long forgotten, weather-beaten spotlight stood off to one side of the wide roof, damaged and canted on its supports, rusted from long disuse. Its lens had a dusty layer of old black paint covering it, but where small holes had worn through its surface from a few years of exposure, a few thin rays of light from within escaped.
"The spotlight that shined, even when it had no power," Meg surmised in awe. This had to be it. The gamble was, ultimately, about to pay off.
She ran her fingers along its thick surface, trying to find places to dig them into to pull the paint off, but the layers were too thick and intact to do so without breaking nails or even the fingers themselves. Force would be needed.
Meg looked around where she was, but couldn't find anything loose and sharp enough to serve her. Then it hit her. By the roof entrance was the fire-fighting equipment she saw earlier.
Confident that she now knew where the spotlight was, Meg quickly jogged over to the equipment's zone. There, a frame that held a fire hose in a hefty coil with attendant plumbing, stood against the elements. A fire axe supported on a frame of its own, caught her attention.
"No time to be subtle," she figured, as she grabbed the axe and turned to run back to the spotlight.
The sound of a violent impact behind her made Meg turn to see that which she most wanted not to. The roof entrance door was wrenched open with enough force to tear it half off its hinges and Ragg stumbled forward in his crashing momentum to almost make him fall.
Meg noted that the door wasn't especially barred or reinforced against opening; it could have been opened as easily as any other. But seeing who had broken through, and why he was angry enough to want to destroy the door, cleared things for her.
Ragg righted himself and stood seething as he kept hateful eyes on Meg, his body now coated with a layer of fine dust on top of the existing layers of droppings and feathers, his right hand, grasping the hilt of his collectable rapier as though to pour his vitriol into the blade to give it an even deadlier keen.
"I'll kill you, Griffin!" Ragg howled into the wind as he approached her without fanfare, eager to cut her down.
Meg, her guard up, brandished the axe, which made Ragg laugh in a giddying fashion.
"You're going to use an axe against my rapier? It's so light, it'll slice you into steak tartar before you raise that thing. I don't know how you managed to know about everything I've been planning, but I swear, you not going to stop me now," he said with iron certainty.
Meg backed away, keeping the axe up defensively, but she frowned. Time was almost up, if not already up. She couldn't waste time with Ragg, even if he had the upper hand in a fight.
The souls of the clients were more important.
"Dammit," she swore, and then ran to the spotlight like a bat out of hell.
The Devil smiled like the cat that ate the canary, as he said, almost musically, "She's late, Your Honor."
The prosecution sensed the judge's expression, and thought it delicious, as the judge said with a reluctant bite in his voice, "I understand."
Then he regarded the stricken defendants as they saw their one faint hope slip almost visually out of their hands.
"Since counsel has saw fit not to return from recess, I'm going to instruct jury to come to a decision now without closing argument. I'm truly sorry."
Jennifer found it curious that she didn't burst into tears. She figured that she was too scared or too numb to care.
She did, however, turn to hear the Devil say to the judge, "I wouldn't have worried, Your Honor. It was an open and shut case from the beginning. Defense was simply over her head, that's all."
"As a matter of fact," he added, his head slowly rising, as if sensing some expected stimuli. "I'm pretty sure that the next time she comes back up here, it'll be to stay."
Meg charged at the spotlight with the fire axe like a barbarian, yelling to focus her strength. Ragg had decided to walk to his prey. If she tried to backtrack and go for the stairwell, he was far enough behind her to intercept her easily. Best to take his time with this and savor it all.
The axe head crashed into the painted-over lens, shattering glass and layers of light-concealing pigment. Again and again, Meg cut away more of the lens, releasing an ethereal light that bathed the roof in brilliance.
She used the axe to sweep away the loose glass and black paint, then dropped the implement to reached carefully inside the spotlight.
She felt the touch of the divine warmly course through her hands, as she triumphantly lifted the glowing, supernaturally white Mortality Report from its earthly resting place. There, on the cover, was proudly writ in gold, Heaven's Helpers Cult Members.
She knew she won this case now. Nothing could possibly touch her, as she held it protectively against her breast. But she also knew, with a bittersweet smile, how much time was spent since Ragg last said anything. Time was up, and he said nothing. He was close. Maybe too close…
Her gasp was drowned out by a momentary thunderclap. The sword point took her breath away as it slid, almost without effort, through her back and out of her chest.
Meg could feel her punctured left lung and heart grow heavy with destruction and internal bleeding, and she slowly gazed at the blade, that extended so far from her body, that she gladly went into a disbelieving shock that it was her at all.
For so long, she had entertained thoughts of her own demise. The close calls from attacks, either perpetrated by the family, or because of their neglect.
At times, in those secret moments, she sometimes longed for it. The glittering razors that left their kiss on her arms, that, if too much pressure was applied, or if cut in the wrong place, could end her life in a red rush. Her sad flirtations with death. She almost laughed at the thought of Death being uncomfortably flattered by her attentions.
Then she vaguely felt Ragg's warm breath on the back of her neck, blowing gently, almost intimately, and wondered why he didn't pull the sword out of her, as her breathing became shallower and her vision tunneled. But as her legs finally buckled, and she slumped to the surface of the roof, the report still held close to her, and her body slipping free from the blade's length, she couldn't quite work up the concern any more.
Somewhere, across dimensions of matter, space and time, in a courtroom that was waiting for a jury's verdict, a girl sensed the end of a beloved friend. With a wail that rivaled the damned, because she couldn't feel any worse, Jennifer cried out, "Meg!"
All hubbub ceased in the courtroom, as though they, too, felt the immediate loss wash across the room.
The judge tensed as he, also, felt something was wrong, and sorrowfully watched Jennifer give up any semblance of control, as she wept sad, angry tears; red eyes burning holes through the Devil, as he sat unperturbed by her pain.
The judge turned to watch the Devil's reaction, and the Devil simply shrugged in response.
"I hereby declare a ten minute recess," the judge managed to say to the people through a tight throat. With a bang of his gavel, he stepped down and departed to his chambers.