Chapter 15: Alert

A TV is playing a movie: The Day After. A made for TV movie from 1983 about the lead up and aftermath of a nuclear war, we watch as the missiles begin to launch from their farmhouse-disguised launch pads. From outside the University of Kansas we see John Litgow's character standing in the stadium watching as the missiles fly into the sky. His female student looks on and asks, "What's going on?" Lithgow's character answers, "Those are Minuteman Missiles." "Like a test sort of," the student asks as she looks back, "Like a warning?" Lithgow shakes his head no before saying it out loud, "They're on their way to Russia. They take 30 minutes to reach their target."

The male student asks with dread in his voice, "So do theirs, right?"

The screen suddenly went black as white text appeared on the screen with loud electronic screeching. After a steady dual-tone plays a robotic voice comes over the speakers of the TV corresponding with the text on screen:

EMERGENCY ALERT SYSTEM

CIVIL AUTHORITIES HAVE ISSUED

A CITY WIDE EVACUATION ORDER

THIS MESSAGE HAS BEEN REQUESTED BY THE OFFICE OF THE MAYOR OF NEW YORK CITY. AT 11:45 AM AN ORDER OF EVACUATION HAD BEEN ISSUED FOR MANHATTAN, BRONX, QUEENS, BROOKLYN, AND STATEN ISLANDS. DUE TO THE PARANORMAL DISTURBANCES THAT HAVE BEEN INFLICTED ON THE CITY ALL CITIZENS ARE ORDERED TO QUICKLY AND CALMLY EVACUATE THE CITY UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE. SHUT OFF ALL POWER AND GAS IN YOUR HOMES AND TAKE ONLY ENOUGH SUPPLIES FOR 3 DAYS. BE SURE TO TAKE ALL VALUABLE IDENTIFICATION DOCUMENTS WITH YOU. FOR THOSE WITHOUT VEHICLES, THOSE WITH DISABILITIES, AND THE ELDERLY, ALL MAJOR MTA DEPOTS HAVE BEEN INSTRUCTED TO TRANSPORT YOU OUT OF THE CITY LIMITS SAFELY. ALL LAW ENFORCEMENT AND FIRE PROTECTION PERSONNEL HAS BEEN INSTRUCTED TO GO DOOR TO DOOR TO ASSIST IN THE EVACUATION. ANY PERSON THAT VIOLATES THE EVACUATION ORDER WILL BE REMOVED BY FORCE. STAY TUNED TO YOUR LOCAL RADIO STATIONS FOR FURTHER UPDATES AND INSTRUCTIONS.

With three short electronic bursts, the screen went back to the movie. The TV was soon quickly turned off as the family watching began scrambling through the apartment to get their supplies together. It was bad timing.

Ghostbusters HQ

12:30 PM

Even in the Tribeca neighborhood the evacuation order was a strange and confusing ordeal. Old Man Dan looked out of the front window of the second floor and watched as people started loading their cars and trucks with whatever they could take with them. To him, this was the second citywide evacuation he witnessed that he also was in direct consequence of. It was like a nightmare for him seeing it again.

Serena walked up to him and saw how disturbed he was. She knew her Dan enough to know anything like this was far more bothersome than the ghosts and demons themselves. She asked him in a soft voice, "Just like your 'Heat Rising' incident, right?" Old Dan nodded his head, "Mayor Daley - the then mayor of Chicago - issued the EAS alert before we talked to him. We got to the roof of our HQ and we started hearing the Civil Defense sirens going off as power transformers throughout the city exploded from the intense heat. It was like the beginning of nuclear war. I was always afraid of the damn EAS. It was an interruption of normalcy. That feeling like life just ground to a total stop and that it will never be the same again. I heard it's predecessor - the Emergency Broadcast System - all the time as a kid living on the edge of tornado alley in Joliet; being on the edge of the Dresden and Braidwood Nuclear Power Plants' air exposure zone; being downstream of Argonne National Laboratory; Joliet itself being a primary strike target for nuclear missiles. Now we have demons and ghosts that can cause the damn thing to be activated. I hate my life; every goddamned aspect of it."

"I've never heard of America's EAS before," Serena confessed, "but I can see why hearing it sounds harsh and disturbing. I can see why anyone who knows the sounds of it knows it's bad. But, without it, you wouldn't know it was bad, right?"

Old Dan sighed, "That's not the point, Moondust. It's worse now that I grew up knowing of it and now seeing it turned on because of something I'm personally involved with. It feels like if I don't succeed here, then it'd be like I was the one that ordered the world to end. The EAS to me means death and destruction. The potential lives saved means little to me if everyone doesn't make it, and every time that damn sound screeches over the TV, I just know someone's gonna die. You can set your watch to it." This man took so many things personally and had a great deal of fears. He was so afraid of failure because he knew if he did, it was too much for the human mind to bear.

"Hey, Dan!" Old Dan and Serena turned from the window to see Dan standing there, "We gotta get this plan rolling. We got the experimental disruptors out of storage and did the modifications like you asked. What do we do next?"

Holly had been watching the news, horrified at what had been going on. Helicopter shots of the city played on the muted TV as she saw people loading up vehicles and hospitals beginning to transport people away from the city. It was hitting her hard now that she was sober enough to experience the terror she was inflicting on the world. Her anxiety was so bad she was dying so hard for a drink. It was hard guilt that was making her question more and more about the other side of the chaos she placed on the people of the world. These people were like her father; hard workers who got up every day to make society function. All because of the actions and lies by a group of mafioso-controlled scumbags did she lose faith in all of it. The voices hurt her so badly she had to drink to be numb, and that numbness was exploited by another man.

Her front doorbell rang causing her to leave her couch. She had not changed from the night before and slept in her clothes leaving her looking slightly disheveled. She opened the door and found two NYPD officers - one hispanic and young, the other older and black - at her door, "Ms. Bautista, Mr. St. James asked us to come by and check on you," the older officer said. The younger officer also spoke up, "My Gydja, we also have news. I'm sure you saw the evacuation order?" Without saying anything Holly nodded as she averted her eyes to her front stoop. The officer continued, "Ma'am, Jensen has been arrested. The Ghostbusters confronted the Mayor and he now knows of your Order's presence. He didn't issue any direct statements about you…"

"I understand," she said softly, "Just tell the brothers and sisters in the NYPD to be ready for anything." The young officer responded, "Yes, Ma'am. För gudarna!" She was silent and nodded as she closed the door. It looked as though the news of Jensen's arrest didn't surprise her, but it also didn't anger her. The two of them walked enough away from the microphones in her front door's cameras to not be picked up as they commented to one another, "She didn't look at us. This shit is eating her up inside." The younger officer nodded, "Mr. St. James might be right; she may not be up for this." One of the officers' phones went off. Both of them searched their pockets until one of them figured out who was beeping, "It's me," he said as he looked at the caller ID, "It's Mr. St. James," the younger officer answered the phone, "NYPD, Officer Hernandez… Yeah, she's like you said, Sir. Should we look after her, or…?" The officer's face went from inquisitive to worried. He sighed, "Yes, Sir. I'll let the duty commander know." He disconnected the call and put his phone back in his pocket.

The older officer looked beside him and saw how stressed out he was. He spoke candidly as the both of them walked back to the squad car, "What the hell does that Vampire want now?" "He said we're to watch what she's going to do. If she leaves, we have to follow her."

The older officer didn't like the way he said it. He knew what this meant, "I didn't like when that asshole was my point-of-contact when I was with the Bishops. That poor woman suffered enough."

The younger cop turned on heel and confronted him, "You helped that damn family kill her father. Now…" he huffed a bit before getting back to his point and spoke even lower, "Now he needs her under control. Without her, the Final Stanza can't be played. Hel's palaces are the only place left for us to go. We have to look after her and make sure nothing's going to happen to her."

"I don't trust that man," the older cop stated, "I don't trust him because he's so damn sneaky. According to the system at the station, this man has no past. He practically doesn't exist. Why do you listen to that fucking creepy asshole?" The young officer stood with his hands on his hips for a moment as he thought it over. Being one of the Forgotten that hadn't been mutated, he knew of his own past and knew it was robbed from him. Matthew had stated time and again he had a distaste of what the Bishops did, not only to his family, but for all the kids in the Angel Guardian Home. He knew those with no family needed a new place to go, and being that Madame Holly was one of these people that lost someone to the Bishops, he knew he could trust the both of them. "I have to believe in something. If Hel's palaces are them, then I know I'll have a family."

"Son," the older man stated, "family is something more than just finding a group of people that love you more than you can hope; it's having enough love yourself to help other families that are broken become whole again. This end of the world shit?" he pointed to the darkened sky, a few of the winged monsters in the sky, "This will break more homes than all the crime and drugs and politics combined. I hated working for the Bishops. My captain made me dispose of evidence in a murder case to protect the family only because he was in on their take. I had a daughter to support and I couldn't risk putting her in danger. When the time comes - unless it's that fucker St. James I'm doing it to - I am refusing to hurt another person, directly or otherwise. You do your Order shit and leave me out of it." The older man started to walk back to the squad car leaving the younger man to think for himself a moment. After a head shake he followed the older officer back to the car.

After the Disruptor units were retrofitted with their new parts a map of the city was laid on Egon's workbench. Everyone gathered around as Old Man Dan started pointing out at all of the circles, "When I was brought into this dimension, we were in the middle of an emergency clearing operation. Using the experimental PKE disruptors from the 91' Architect Incident we tuned the disruptors to act more like shield emitters. Ecto-1, New Hampshire's Ecto-HHR, and my Chi-Ecto were going around Manhattan and dropping the modified units in strategic places; Ecto-1 in the main parts of the city; Chi and HHR acting like chase units to lure the monsters away from Ecto-1 while also dropping additional units. I was in the middle of getting to the lower financial district to drop the unit I had when I was thrown into this Mickey Mouse dimension."

Egon looked up from Old Dan's laptop looking at the schematic of alterations that were made to the units. He explained what he was looking at, "From the look of your alterations you had to place a large energy pack into the units to get them to function. We're still going to need to power them. How were you able to get these units to spread over such a wide area of the island?"

That was when everyone heard Eduardo huffing as he came into the Lab with something that looked like a car battery. He panted a few times as he complained, "I got your battery thing out of your car." It was a rectangular unit like a battery, it even had the terminals, but instead of a plastic case it was bookended with aluminum heatsinks. Large ones, "What's with this thing, man? It's heavy as hell!" he dropped the unit on the workbench with a very loud THUD! Serena walked up and put her hand to the heatsinks to feel the warmth coming from it, "Wow! This thing is really warm!" Amy walked up and smacked her hands away from it, "Serena, don't touch that! It looks like a…"

"Yeah, it does, but it can't be!" Kylie interrupted, looking at Old Dan, "Were you running your Ectomobile on an RTG?!"

"It's not an RTG!" Old Dan stated.

Mina raised her hand as she started talking, "Sorry, back-of-the-class science student here. What's an RTG?"

"Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator," Roland explained, "There are these plates called thermoelectric generators that are made of two metals back to back. When you apply heat to one side and a cooling source to the other, it generates a small amount of power. Using the decay heat of a radioactive source, you can make units that can last longer than any battery or solar cell for unmanned devices."

Kylie added extra information to Roland's, "NASA uses them for deep space probes and the Soviets were using them for radio relays."

"What is currently in front of you is what we call an ETG: EctoThermal Generator," the Old Man told the group, "Using two ectoplasms we collected called 'Cryoplasm' and 'Pyroplasm' we use both slimes in tandem with the plates to generate a crapload more power than RTGs could ever make. This came out of Chi-Ecto. We use it for fuel efficiency in the Explorer taking the alternator out of the belt drive loop and running all of our equipment directly off it. We even have an electric motor to assist the main engine. It's one of Chicago Division's major contributions to energy generation and all of GBI in general."

"So," Kylie asked, "it's not radioactive?" Old Dan shook his head, "They're safe so long as you don't touch the slimes. They're stored in tanks on either side of the plates. On my laptop is a set of formulas the Dr. Stantz of my world as well as other GBI scientists came up with to make a more energy dense set of plates. They'll generate the proper amount of current to power the units," he looked to Egon as he said, "If there's anyone who can pull it off…" Egon quickly opened the files and saw the equations in the document. He nodded, "I can improve on the molecular thermal density of the plates making them lighter while giving the same current output."

Dan was looking at the previous document on the laptop before Egon interrupted him. He got the laptop back and went back to the other document for the PKE Disruptors, "What's this note about 'Emitter ripple shut-off sync'? What does that mean?"

"Ooooh! I know! I know!" Serena said as she raised her hand and hopped up and down, "That's where someone turns off the faucet while you're brushing your teeth, right?" Everyone in the room stared at the woman with confused looks. Dan and Roland actually started to laugh because they understood why she thought that. Raye called her out, "What planet did you just arrive from, Meatballhead?"

Serena sounded innocent as she explained her rationale, "Well, he said something about a sink. The only thing you can shut off in a sink is the faucet. I mean, water ripples, right?"

Dan finally got himself under control, "Serena, that's 'sync' as in 'synchronization,' not 'sink' as in 'the thing in your bathroom.'"

Serena blushed in embarrassment as Old Dan told everyone, "When we activate the units, there's going to be a moment where the shields touch. Once they detect the ripple of energy from the other shields, both units will have to shut down and recalculate the harmonics. It'll give us one continuous shield over the city once all the shields are active, but each shield will have to take 15-20 seconds to recalibrate and reactivate. The creatures will be pushed back out once the units start again, but it'll leave the operators open for that maximum 20 second window."

Garrett asked, "Didn't you guys have teams?"

Old Dan shook his head, "We were running low on personnel. Pat out of New Hampshire was driving the HHR when one of the syncs took place. They tore the HHR to shreds, but he made it through one of the shields and made it out okay. At least, I think he did." No one liked the sound of that, "You mean," Lita asked, "you don't know?" "No. We were in the middle of the operation when I heard him screaming on the radio. He said he was fine afterwards and that he made it back here in one piece, but that was the last I heard from anyone. The other teams were working the perimeter of the fields and one set of us were at the firehouse when I was making the last drop."

"Wow," Raye said with sympathy, "it sounds like you went through a lot."

Old Dan nodded, "We all did. I don't even know what's going on right now back home. All my guys had been fighting tooth-and-nail back in Chicago against these things, the one guy from my office that's stuck with me through all of this, Steve Hessler, he was holding the line at the firehouse…" He sighed as he looked to the people before him, "I just hope with the people we have here we can pull this off better this time."

"Now that we have a map and an idea of what we're doing," Darien tried to get the group back on task, "who's going to go? You don't have enough Ghostbusters to do everything."

"Correct," Old Dan stated as he went to the next part of the plan, "we're going to do the same thing as last time, but instead of Ecto-1 being the only one having a three-person crew, we're gonna have to get three per vehicle. Those smaller fanny-pack size Proton Packs should be enough to push the buggers away while the units are being unloaded, so we'll need a driver, a full size pack operator, and a support pack operator per vehicle. It isn't gonna be perfect. Ecto-1 will consist of Jackson, Kino, and Miller. My other self here should take his truck and take Griffin, and that would leave me and Rivera in Chi-Ecto. Three people are ideal, so we'll need two volunteers."

"Why don't myself and Janine…" Egon began.

"We need you to stay here, Dr. Spengler," Old Dan stated, "We'll need someone to watch after the Ecto Containment Unit, and you know better than anyone what to do if something keyholes. Same with Ms. Melnitz; she's more valuable here seeing she likely knows how to operate the equipment as well." Dan nodded in agreement, "Okay, sounds fine with me," he turned to the Sailor Scouts and Darien, "You heard the man: Who wants to volunteer?" The Scouts and Darien looked to each other for a moment. Almost without a thought Darien turned and raised his hand, "I'll volunteer."

"Good," Old Dan stated as he assigned a vehicle, "You go with Shannon and Griffin in the F-150. One more occupancy. Someone doesn't figure it out, we're drawing straws." Serena, Raye, Amy, and Mina looked amongst themselves and tried to figure out who was going to jump on the opportunity first. After a couple moments when they realized no one was going to be the first, Raye spoke up, "Okay, who's gonna go?"

"Honestly," Amy said with hesitation, "I don't think I could handle the driving these two can do. I saw the Explorer and I heard about the pickup truck our Dan had before we got here."

"It couldn't be worse than Ray's driving when he took us to the tower," Mina stated, "but operating one of the Proton Packs kinda scares me. I was shot with one, remember?"

"No kidding," Raye said, "I mean, what would happen if we hit a regular person with one of those beams?"

"Unless it's properly tuned," the blue-haired woman stated, "it would destabilize the person's atomic cohesion." That lost Mina, "What does that mean?" As the girls continued their conversation Serena kept thinking back to the whole ordeal with both Starlight Tower and what happened in Chi-Ecto on the streets of New York. She racked up such a large debt to the Ghostbusters…

She turned to Old Man Dan and raised her hand, "I'll do it! I'll help!" That surprised just about everyone. Old Man Dan was especially taken off guard at her declaration, "Are you sure Moondust? The only one left for occupancy is Chi-Ecto and you remember what the Flying Batshit Brigade did to us, right?" "I know," she stated as she started to blush, "but if it weren't for me you wouldn't have stayed in the same spot taking care of me when these things decided to attack us. It's my fault your truck was destroyed. I want to make up for it the best I can! Please?!"

Old Man Dan looked to his counterpart with a look that sought approval. Dan walked over and put his hands on her shoulders as he looked her in the eye, "Are you sure about this Serena? While you're running with us, you can't turn into Sailor Moon. You absolutely have to use the Proton Pistol. Are you okay with that?" There was a moment of uncertainty in her sapphire eyes before she thought back again to the Tower. If there was anyone he owed even more, it was the man before her. A look of determination came to her face as she nodded. She made her decision.

Dan accepted that. He looked to the crowd among them, "Kylie, Lita, get Serena and Darien uniforms, get her a Proton Pistol and him a Proton Pack. Show them how to use them," then addressed the rest of the Scouts, "Raye, Mina, Amy, here's what you're going to do…"