Rachel Caine: Ghost Town

“No use,” Frank gasped. “I’m done. Finish this. Claire, finish it.”

She turned toward the console of the machine. It was covered in dust, and the screen was cracked, but it was still alive and working. She reached for a handful of wiring, but stopped just an inch away as she felt the hair on her arms stirring and standing up.

“You can’t,” Myrnin said as he rolled over and stared at her. “You can’t stop it. It’s all right. Once you let go, it feels better. You’ll feel better. Just . . . let go.”

“I can’t do that.” She was crying now, out of sheer frustration and fright. “Help me. Help me! ”

“It can’t be turned off now,” Myrnin said. “I made sure. Ada won’t ever be hurt again. Not by you, not by me. She’s safe.”

“She’s killing us !” Claire screamed. “God! Stop!”

“No, she’s fixing us,” Myrnin said. “Don’t you understand? I read the journals, the ones upstairs. Morganville hasn’t been right for years. It’s been changing, turning into something wrong. She’s made us right again. All of us.”

“Bullshit,” Frank Collins said, and coughed blood. “Shut it down, Myrnin. You have to do it.”

Myrnin looked at him over the pile of rubble. “Don’t you want to go back to when you were happy, when we were all happy? You, your wife, your daughter, your son? It can all come back. You can feel that way again. She can make you feel that way.”

Frank laughed. “You’re going to give me my family back?” he said. “Is that what you’re telling me?”

“Not me,” Myrnin said. “Not really. But I can make it all as it was, for you as well as me. You, of all people, should want that.”

Frank’s throat worked, as if he were swallowing something unpleasant. His eyes were bright and very, very cold. “So you’re God now,” he said. “You can bring back the dead.”

“I can give you a new family. This girl can be your new daughter. We can find you a wife. I can make you forget. You’ll never know the difference, and she’ll forget all about who she once was.”

“You really think that’s tempting,” Frank Collins said, very softly. “It’s sick. My wife and daughter are dead, and you’re not going to make me believe a lie. You’re not going to pervert their memories. My son loves that girl, and I’m not letting you take her away from him, too.”

Myrnin looked up, as if he’d sensed something. “It’s too late,” he said. “It’s starting.”

Claire heard the pitch of the machine’s hum changing, shifting to something higher, more urgent. She felt a pulse of power from it, and something went weird in her head. Something she needed.

Something that held her in place in the world, in time, in space.

It hurt . It felt like her brain was being shredded, ripped in half, and memories spilled out in a silvery stream. She couldn’t hold on to them; it was all just . . . noise.

The pain stopped, but something worse took over. Panic. Horror. Fear. She was looking at a room full of strangers. Scary people in a scary place. How had she gotten here? What was . . . what was happening? Where was she?

Why wasn’t she at home?

No, that wasn’t right. She knew them; she knew them all. That was Shane, getting to his feet . . . then everything shifted, and he was a boy she didn’t know, dark-haired, dusty. A stranger. He started toward her, but then he wavered and stopped, and put his hands to his head as if it hurt. Hers still hurt, too. There was a sound, a weird sound that wasn’t really there, wasn’t really a sound at all, and she felt . . .

Lost. She felt so lost, and alone, and terrified.

It was like having mental double vision. She knew these people at some very basic level, but she’d also forgotten them. She didn’t/ did know the man with the scarred face, and the boy reaching out to her, and the girl with the dark hair and the pale face, and the other golden-haired boy. She could see them in one way, with names and histories, but it kept fading out. Disappearing.

No. She didn’t know anyone here, and she’d never felt so vulnerable and horrible in her life. She wanted to go home.

There was another stranger dressed in funky old Victorian clothes, like some steampunk wannabe, staring at her with big, dark eyes. He reached out for her, and she knew that wasn’t right. Knew she had to stumble away from him, into the arms of the boy.

Another older, gray-haired man elbowed her out of the way and slammed the Victorian man into the wall, then dragged him out and down the tunnel. He was yelling at them all to follow. Claire didn’t want to; she didn’t trust them, any of them.

But the boy took her hand and said, “Trust me, Claire,” and she felt something inside that had been howling in fear go quiet.

Another wall of pain slammed into her, and she almost went down. It was all going away, everything she was, everything. . . .

She fell to her knees and realized that she was kneeling next to a man with a scar on his face. He was trapped under a fallen metal pillar, and it looked bad, really bad. She tried to move it, but he reached out and caught her hand in his. “Claire,” he said. “Get out of here. Do it now.”

He let go and rummaged through a bag that had fallen next to him. He brought out something round and dark green, about the size of an apple.

Grenade. The word floated through her mind and dissolved into mist. There was some reason she should be afraid of that, but she couldn’t really think what it was.

The dark-haired boy was yelling at her now, pulling her to her feet. He looked down and saw the thing, the grenade . “Dad,” he whispered. “Dad, what are you doing?”

“Get out of here,” the man said. “I’m not going to lose you, too, Shane. It’s starting to all go away, and I can’t let that happen. I have to stop it. This is the only way.”

The boy stood there, looking down at him, and then dropped to his knees and put his hand on the man’s head. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Dad, I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be,” the man said. “I need a little help, and then you need to get your friends out of here. Understand?”

The boy was crying, and trembling, but he nodded.

He reached down and took hold of the metal ring in the grenade, and his dad yanked his arm in the other direction. The pin sprang free.

“Go,” the man said. “I love you, son.”

The boy didn’t want to go. Claire practically dragged him across the room, in the direction all the others had already gone. They stopped at the mouth of the tunnel, and Claire saw the man roll the grenade slowly across the floor, until it clicked against the metal of a huge, Frankenstein tangle of cables and clockworks, pipes and keyboards.

She knew him. She was almost sure she did as he turned his head and smiled at her.

His name was Frank. Frank Collins.

Frank said, “Good-bye.”

Claire gasped and yanked Shane into the tunnel. He tripped and went down, and she did, too, and it was a good thing.

In another second, the world exploded behind them.

She woke up to a ringing sound in her ears. Her whole body ached, and her head felt like it had been filled with battery acid, but she was alive.

And she felt . . . whole. Herself again.

When she moved, she found she was pinned under a heavy, warm weight. Shane. She wriggled out from underneath and turned him over, frantic with terror that he’d been hurt, but then she saw he was breathing, and his eyes fluttered open, looking momentarily blank and oddly surprised. They focused on her face. He said something, but she pointed to her ears and shook her head. She helped him sit up, and ran her hands anxiously over him. He had some cuts and bruises, but nothing bad.