I told you he has death wish, Hugh pointed out.

The pair had stopped in the swath of light coming from the open door, but he could still see from their posture they were generally nonplussed. “Er,” Shane began hesitantly. “Should you do that? I mean -”

“This is a hospital,” he interrupted, gritting his teeth and yanking an i.v. out of his arm. It hurt more than he expected and bright tears to his eyes as he felt a spurt of warm blood from the hole. Sucking in a sharp breath, he continued, “It’s teeming with dead. I can feel them, and if I don’t get out of here now, they’re gonna overwhelm me. I need to -”

But it was too late. He felt someone else in the room with them, someone not taking in oxygen, and as he reached for his second i.v. with blood slicked fingers, he just had time to say, “Oh, fuck me,” before the world went away.

One thing he had learned as an “agent” or whatever the fuck he actually was, was that all people had different ideas of a “happy place”, and some of them were pretty unique. Which was why he was only mildly surprised to find himself in a clothing store. It was a woman’s clothing store, somewhat upscale judging from the amount of silks, cashmere, tweed, and other fine fabrics on display, and the elegant dresses and finely cut suits. The carpet was a plush navy blue, the walls whiter than eggshells, and as he looked around, he found there was one other person there: a woman at the counter, folding up a pair of silk pants and putting them in a box with pink paper overflowing the sides.

She was an unremarkable looking woman, a bit overweight, probably no more than five three, long, lusterless brown hair held back in a ponytail, revealing a round and plain face, her pale eyes surprisingly flat and emotionless, the thousand yard stare of a torture victim. She could have been a zombie, if any of her flesh was rotting. “I used to like workin’ here,” she said, finishing packing up the pants. “Believe it or not. Before Ron made me quit.”

“Ron?” he asked, looking around. He didn’t see his own reflection in the mirror, but that wasn’t too startling. This was her world, not his.

“My husband,” she said wearily, but at the same time she said it, he knew.

It came in a rush, and he remembered everything, how the name came with the taste of blood and the sound of breaking bones, and how death - as painful as it was - was something of a relief, an escape from all that pain. Love was cruelty, as blunt and brutal as a hammer - much like the one he murdered her with. Oh god, he hated this; he hated being a conduit for the world’s pain, which was voluminous, unending, and wickedly creative. “Julie,” he began, running hands through his hair and trying to get a grip on his wildly careening emotions. Disgust was a big one; it was hard not to be disgusted when you found yourself beaten to death. Ray’s betrayal by his friends was absolutely nothing compared to this.

Her whole life had been a slow motion train wreck, leading up to this ultimate disaster. No Hollywood ending, no triumph or happiness, just a bloody coda that could have fit in to any horror movie. Perhaps the worst part was, when the end finally did come, she was glad it was finally over.

“I’m dead, aren’t I?” She asked, giving him a sickly smile.

He nodded, seeing no point in sugar coating it. “Yeah, I’m sorry. And I’ll get you briefed on what’s going on as soon as possible, but I really have to go right now. I’m sorry.”

She sighed and went back to boxing the pants, with the resigned weariness of the terminally disappointed. “Sure. It’s not like I’m going anywhere, is it?”

He wished he could tell her something happy or encouraging, but words tasted like ashes in his mouth. Julie Barker was one of those sad people who wandered through a painful and quietly desperate life, waiting for a payoff that never came. He couldn’t help but wonder if his life was an echo of hers, and he would end up much the same way, dying while waiting for some Godot that just never bothered to show.

He was back in the hospital room once more, holding the i.v. tube between his fingers, Clay and Shane studying him like he just projectile vomited a gallon of pea soup. “What just happened?” Shane finally asked.

“A ghost, that’s what happened. And that’s why I have to get out of here now. Can you give me a lift to my motel? That’s all I want.” He yanked out the other i.v. and watched the blood drip down his arm, too freaked to even feel pain now. Besides, it paled in comparison to being beaten to death by a hammer. It was funny how these sorts of thing gave him perspective.

He threw the blankets back, and was surprised but not disappointed to find he was wearing one of those awful paper gowns that gave easy ass access for docs who felt compelled to ram a probe up there.

“Are you saying the hospital’s haunted?” Shane wondered.

“Not haunted per se, just full of dead. There’s more than ghosts who slam doors and annoy the shit out of the living, you know; there are some who are stuck where they are, and don’t even know it.” The light from the open door let him see a bit more of the room, but it wasn’t helpful, as he could see little beyond his privacy curtain save for the shadows of other patients’ working machines. “Where are my clothes?”

He was asking his passengers, not the ghostbusters, but they both looked around, and Shane made a pointless “Uh” sound.

They’re probably in a cabinet, if they didn’t just cut them off and throw them away, Mr. Aronofsky said. Having been in the hospital a couple of times during his life - sometimes for himself, sometimes for his wife and other family members - he knew them pretty well.

I think I saw one after he was wheeled in, Hugh admitted reluctantly.

“Why don’t you check then?” Gryphon said, putting his feet on the floor and wondering if he could stand. He still felt light headed and weak in the knees, and his back inexplicably hurt (the spinal tap?), but he thought he could manage for the moment.

“Umm, you know, I’m not sure we should help you sneak out of the hospital,” Shane offered hesitantly. “We really don’t want to break any rules …”

“But you already did. This is hardly visiting hours, is it?” Thanks to Mr. Aronofsky, he knew that little tidbit.

He heard a drawer open, and both Shane and Clay looked to the left side of the room as if they’d heard a gunshot. The monitors of his unseen roommates started to sound a bit erratic, and Gryph could feel the static electricity crawling over his skin as something slapped the floor, making the two Stooges jump, and the sound of plastic sliding across the floor filed the tiny room off the ICU. It stopped at his bed, a plastic snap lid container full of clothes, and he reached down for it, saying, “Thank you, Hugh.”

I still think you’re a moron for doing this. But if you want to die this way, so be it.

His head swam a bit as he leaned over, but he managed to ride it out as he opened it and pulled out his jeans, slipping them on underneath his paper gown. He really didn’t like going commando, but for now he could live with it.

“Oh my god,” Clay gasped, sounding like he was about to pass out.

“You are the real thing, aren’t you?” Shane sounded a little winded himself.

The sense of static electricity faded, and the machines resumed their regular, monotonous beeping, as the two men gazed at him, slack jawed and pale in the sliver of yellow light. He wanted to laugh, but had neither the energy or inclination. They thought he was a fake, maybe mentally ill, and came to check up on him, and now, the true believers of the afterlife, were forced to believe something they had already dismissed.

He took off the paper gown and used it to wipe some of the blood off his arms before throwing it on the bed. He then pulled his t-shirt on (it did smell a little ripe, isn’t it?), and grabbed up his jacket, movement making him feel even more lightheaded, almost weightless. But he didn’t think he was going to pass out again, at least not now. “The real thing? Yeah, I guess I am. I don’t wanna be, but hey, we all have our crosses to bear, or some shit like that, right?” He pulled on his boots carefully, and felt winded by it, but tried not to let that show. “Can we go now?”

They remained stunned, but so much so that they acquiesced almost instantly. Perhaps they were a little afraid of him now - the man who commanded the ghost.

You don’t command shit, Taneesha snapped.

Ah, what would he do without her to keep him grounded? Probably enjoy life.

They went down the hall, and cut down the emergency access stairs, which turned out to be a bit more than he was ready for. He got a curious sense of vertigo looking down the stairwell, and had to grab on to the rail to keep from falling. Clay grabbed his arm, and said, “Are you sure about this?”

“Damn sure. I can feel them coming. I’m a magnet for them; I don’t know why.”

“Them?” Sweat beaded on his forehead, eyes flicking around nervously, as if seeking out the very things they were discussing. “Ghosts?”

“No, Shriners.” He scowled at him. “Can we go now?”

Clay helped him down the stairs, while Shane led the way, the advance guard. Gryphon felt the blood seeping into his sleeves, making the coat stick to him, but it was black and unlikely to be noticed. They were on the second floor when Clay asked, “How’d you know about my mother?”

The stairwell was cold, drafty, and many of the lights were out or flickering (was that his fault?), so it wasn’t always easy to see, making his sudden sense of vertigo that much worse. Surface and shadows seemed to jump and recede, like the staircase was moving. Clay smelled of some cloying aftershave, or maybe it was hair product since he had a beard, and softener that was just a bit too floral; it was hard for him to suppress a sneeze. “What? Oh, right.” Maybe it was due to the fever, the fact that he was still bleeding, or the general sensory overload, but he was too tired to lie. “Sometimes I just get a sense about dead people, especially if they seem to want to communicate something to the living. I got the sense your mother was very sorry, but she wanted you to know it wasn’t your fault, and she never meant to hurt you. You were her one regret. Does that make sense?”

A muscle in Clay’s jaw twitched, and he looked away, trying to hide the fact that his eyes were filling up with tears. But Gryphon had held back, not telling him that he already knew his mother, Sonya McLeod, had committed suicide when he was ten. A manic depressive woman (what would be called “bipolar” now), she waited until Clay had gone to school before straightening up his room, making some brownies, and then sticking her head inside her gas oven. Clay found the body, and the trauma of it all had set him down his path, fascinated with death and spirits. Especially since, when he was seventeen years old and in a car wreck, he was sure he had seen his dead mother, urging him to get out of the car. He did, in spite of a bad head injury, and the car was shortly afterwards engulfed in flames; had he remained inside, he probably would have died. But the fact that he had had a head injury made him wonder if he had really seen her at all; maybe, like everyone said, it was just a hallucination. Yet he kept trying very hard to prove it wasn’t, by proving the existence of ghosts.

Which he hadn’t done yet. But Gryphon knew he was probably thinking of him as his Holy Grail, the one thing that could prove it … maybe. If he wasn’t a complete loon. You can’t trust these people, Taneesha said. Beware of true believers, and people who need money real bad. Both of ‘em will sell you out, cause or cash, no hesitation.

You are such a cynic, Mr. Aronofsky said.

No, I think she has a point,Ray, the new guy, interjected. And if anybody should know, it’s me.

So speaketh the weasel, Hugh sniped.

Clay cleared his throat, swallowed hard, and finally said, “Yeah, it makes sense.”

They had just entered the final stairwell, the one that would dump them out into the front entrance - he sincerely hoped no one at the front desk recognized him in a vertical position - when he saw an elderly black man with a nimbus of gray hair, wearing one of those awful blue paper gowns, standing beside the exit door. He look straight at him, and said, “He’s after you.”

Gryphon looked over his shoulder, the stairwell yawing like a sinking ship, yet saw nothing but shadows. Some seemed to move, flicker like the negative of fire, but he was sure that was just a hallucination. (Right?) “Who?” he asked, looking back at the man.

“Who what?” Clay asked.

The man wasn’t there. Shane paused, hand on the door handle, and gave them a curious look. “Something wrong?”

What the hell was that? Ray asked, sounding anxious.

Gryphon wished he had an answer for him. “Nothing. Let’s just go.”

His stomach knotted, and he was so cold he could feel it in his marrow. Something was going very wrong here, and he was starting to understand that it was him.

Arms burst through the floor, decayed flesh like rotting leather hanging in flayed strips off greyed bones, cadaverous fingers skittering across the floor like spiders as the restless dead pulled themselves up, dirt and chunks of littering the floor as the rotting corpses continued their pursuit. The door finally broke, a sea of dead washing in, falling over one another in their haste to reach him first. The room filled with the scent of blood and something sweet, decaying meat.

“I can’t help you!” He screamed, desperately looking for somewhere else to hide. Everything behind him was solid black, like shadows had solidified, but feeling his way along the darkness he found something that could have been a door, and shoved inside.

It was an utterly black room, a pocket of darkness that seemed to seal up after him, and he hit the wall, trying to catch his breath as he listened for more of them. It was oddly quiet in here, and he didn’t trust it. All he could hear was his heartbeat, his breathing, and he knew lurking somewhere behind it was the dead, the hungry dead with their desperate and terrible need to reach him, possess him, take him over for one final time. He wanted to melt into the wall, merge with it, so they couldn’t see him, or find him, or do anything to him. Why couldn’t they just leave him alone?

It was then a seam of sickly yellow light appeared in the wall, yawning wider and wider, the jaundiced illumination making him squint. In it was a single black shadow of a seemingly whole, intact man, which was a relief. Or was it? Because suddenly he got a bad feeling about this, his skin prickling like it was trying to crawl off his body, and a taste like copper filled his mouth and made him want to gag.

The man just stood there, in a narrow rectangle of piss colored light, and said, “You’re the one?” It was a man’s voice, deep and resonant with ill humor. “You’re just a boy. For all the trouble you’re causing, I expected more.”

He just stared at him, wishing he could see his face, and wanting to ask him what the hell he was talking about, but he was far too scared to utter a single syllable. This man … there was something not right about him. Oh, he wasn’t dead, but he wasn’t sure he was alive either. But he must have been, right? There was no third choice. (Was there?) He was radiating cold like an open freezer, an air conditioner on full, frost condensing in the air, drifting to the floor between them like dust. “You won’t be any challenge at all.”

It was then the scene stopped, shifted, with the violent randomness of a dream. He was now standing on a small porch overlooking a flat roof, upon which someone had built a meager but endearing rooftop garden. There was a small, burbling fountain and plants in decorative urns and narrow, window style boxes near the edges of the roof, making a type of rectangular formation, and there was a covered aluminum grill, a Styrofoam cooler, and two plastic lawn chairs, currently empty. Although from here - and the roof below - he could see down the street, where cookie cutter suburban housing stretched on towards the horizon, and on the right, across the grey ribbon of street, a chain link fence contained the charred remains and garbage of a burned down house. While the scenery was drab and boring, the roof garden was at least strangely peaceful, and unusual enough to seem almost beautiful in this sterile urban setting. He was standing beside a wooden trellis smothered by pea vines and the occasional bright fuchsia flower of a petunia, growing intertwined with the snap peas.

It was vaguely sunny, a layer of thin clouds keeping the light to tolerable levels, and it was so much warmer here than it had been with that man it almost felt like being tossed in a sauna. “Sorry to interrupt your nightmare, but I figured you wouldn’t care,” another male voice said, so suddenly it made him jump. But at least this one was familiar and friendly. “Wanna beer?” Hugh asked, going down the stairs, headed for the rooftop and the cooler. “It’s not that piss in a can stuff you usually drink either.”

“Uh, umm, why am I here?” he asked, wondering what the hell was going on. “What’s wrong?”

Hugh paused at the bottom stair and looked back up at him, as if trying to discern from his expression how much he already knew.

This was Hugh’s rooftop garden, or at least one he put together with some neighbors in his small apartment building, a place where they could - in Hugh’s words - ‘get drunk and grill up some ribs’. It was another odd piece in the puzzle that was Hugh - he never would have thought of him as a gardener in any definition of the word. Seeing him again only made it more strange, as he had only seen him just the once, when they first “met”.

Hugh was one of those firefighters who was always picked to be the shirtless cover boy for their charity beefcake calendar. (And he was, three times.) He was tall, six four, and had the broad shoulders and chest of a man who did a lot of heavy lifting in his daily life, which was only partially true, as he wasn’t hefting the fire hose every single day of his existence; but he did hit the gym for a bit in his spare time, which showed. He also liked to show off the physique he worked so hard for, by wearing tight t-shirts such as the one he was wearing here, navy blue with some kind of Denver area firefighter’s insignia on his left breast. It was tight enough that it seemed like the shirt might tear every time he moved.

He also had an absurdly handsome face, with a strong jaw, raven hair, and clear blue eyes, a visage attractive to men and women in equal measure. He liked to point out, if given the opportunity, that he was once a Cosmopolitan magazine “bachelor of the month”, which led to an agent contacting him and telling him he could have a real future as a male model. Since Hugh had always suspected this anyways, he felt unduly proud.

But as inadequate, ugly, and small as being around Hugh made him feel, Gryphon knew things about him that no one else knew, mainly because he was a part of Hugh now, and vice versa. He knew that Hugh always suspected there was something deeply wrong with him, because he found it nearly impossible to connect with people in any meaningful way; the few relationships he had had, with men and women alike, had ended very badly. His last girlfriend, Carmen, who’d broken up with him about three weeks before he died, told him he was a “pretty robot”, all surface and no depth, and no real feelings. He suspected she was on to something there, but would never admit it. The only time he ever felt alive was in the middle of a raging inferno, tackling a problem that could, in all likelihood, kill him. He had been considering seeing a therapist, but didn’t know what he’d say, so he never bothered. Once, when Gryphon was feeling really depressed about his lot in life, Hugh had said Cheer up kid. At least you’re not like me. I think I was dead before I was dead, you know? At first, he didn’t know what he meant, but now he thought he did.

Hugh could help people, he could calm them, he could save them, he could fuck them, he could leave them, he could pretend to be the amiable party guy, but he could never understand them. He felt like a sleepwalker in a waking world, only awake when he was staring death in the face.

“Well,” Hugh began, unusually tentative for him. That alone was a warning flag. “What’s the last thing you remember?”

He wanted to say ‘being attacked by zombies’, but he refrained. Gryphon thought about a minute, and remembered the café. “Oh shit, I hit the floor, didn’t I?”

“Yeah, you did.” Hugh started climbing back up the stairs, and Gryphon felt his stomach in the real world just clench like a fist. “I want you to know we tried to take you over, but your body wasn’t working quite right. It was … you were really sick, okay? We did what we thought was best.”

Gryphon gripped the porch railing hard, sure he could snap it with the power of his own dread. “What the hell do you mean? What did you do?”

Hugh glanced off towards the side, as if afraid to look him in the eyes. “It isn’t so much what we did do more than what we didn’t do.”

He stared at him, at his handsome mask of a face, and didn’t want to understand him. He didn’t want to know what he was trying to brace him for, but he feared that he did. If he had a real body here, Gryphon was sure he would be swallowing back bile again. “No.” It was all he could make himself say.

Hugh held up his hands, a warding off gesture that was especially funny due to the fact that his hands alone were twice as big as Gryphon’s - he felt like a child beside an adult. “Don’t panic. We have everything under control -”

“Did you people walk me to a hospital?”

“No.”

“No?”

“No.” His pause was dramatic. “We let the EMTs take you.”

Gryphon felt all the strength bleed out of his legs, and he sat heavily on the porch, wondering if he could faint wherever the hell he was. “Oh god. You let me go to a hospital?”

“Look, we’re watching out for you as best we can, okay? And when all their equipment malfunctioned, they figured it was due to the fact that the power went out earlier, and it took a moment for the back up generator to kick in. A glitch. Of course, when they try and give you an x-ray, they’ll know it ain’t the equipment but you that’s causing all the interference, but -”

“How in the hell could you let them take me to a hospital? Do you want to kill me, is that it?”

Hugh crouched down so he was closer to his eye level, assuming a sympathetic expression. “Do you know how sick you are? The EMTs put your temperature around one hundred and six; that’s brain cooking level in kids. We think the reason we couldn’t take over your body is you were having some kind of seizure. They think you have fluid in your lungs, and the working theory is you have meningitis. That can be fatal, you know.”

“Hugh, it’s a hospital. It’s full of dead people.”

He seemed to be studiously ignoring that. “You’re also dehydrated and slightly malnourished. They’ve got you on i.v.’s, and they’ve already done the spinal tap, so -”

“Spinal tap? I’m assuming you don’t mean the band.”

“No. They needed to get a sample of your spinal fluid for meningitis testing. It hurts like holy fuck, but lucky you, you were out for it.”

That made him break out of his shock for a second. “Did you guys feel it?”

“Kind of. Not really. But we figured if anyone was idiotic enough to try and take you over, they would have felt every centimeter of that needle. None of us was that masochistic.”

Gryph rubbed his eyes, and demanded weakly, “Take me over and get me the fuck out, now.”

He grimaced and shook his head. “No can do. If it’s bacterial, you need immediate intravenous antibiotics, otherwise you’ll be dead within seventy two hours.”

“Since when are you a doctor?”

“I used to date one. Of course, date is a rather generous use of the term, as his damn beeper seemed to go off every time we actually bothered to go somewhere …”

“Why can’t I take my chances? Are any of us sure I can actually die?”

Hugh stared at him like he’d just said the most idiotic thing in the world. “Of course you can. Just because you’re stuck with us doesn’t mean you’re immune.”

“Let’s find out.”

He shook his head, trying on his best sympathetic face. “Maybe you want to play games with your life, but we don’t.”

His fear transmuted into anger, which was good, because it made him feel powerful. “Don’t you pretend that you’re all concerned about me, because I know that’s bullshit. The only reason you’re so worried about me is because I’m you’re ride, and without me you’re screwed. So don’t try this concerned shit on me, ’cause it won’t work.”

Hugh’s eyes narrowed, hardening somewhat. “We do care about you, even though you’re a whiny, annoying brat at times. Doesn’t that get us extra credit?”

“I want up. Stop holding me down, stop keeping me here, and let me wake up so I can get the fuck out of here.”

He rolled his eyes and sighed, a martyr ghost. “If you have a death wish, do us all a favor and wear a big Star of David and Pansy Division tour t-shirt into a redneck bar, okay? Just stop doing it in increments and half measures.”

“Ya vole, commandant. Now let me go.”

He must have, because suddenly Denver and Hugh were gone, an already fading dream, and he opened his eyes to find himself in a black room, not dissimilar from the “safe room” in his nightmare. He could see tubes snaking into his arms, and he felt weird, his head half hollow and radiating heat like an ember, his eyes dry as dust. There was ambient light bleeding under the curtain surrounding three fourths of his bed, oozing beneath the door, and he was baffled by the lack of monitors near him - he could hear them beeping away for someone else in this very room - until he remembered what Hugh said about the equipment malfunctioning when they tried to use it on him. His death psychokinesis or whatever screwing things up again. God, it was so hard to think, and he could feel a dull pain just behind his forehead, a throbbing that was just painful enough to be overwhelmingly annoying. He needed to get out of here, but he wasn’t sure how to go about it.

The door opened, letting in a shock of light, and as he squinted against it he could see the silhouette of two people … and something else. Something like movement in peripheral vision, half-shadows, smoke that drifted into near shapes and dissolved into fragments once more.

It was the dead. He could feel them as they must have felt him, and they were waiting impatiently, eager and hungry.

Gryphon realized that the earlier dream wasn’t a nightmare - it was a premonition.

And here they came.

“I’m fighting a cold,” he said, pretty sure he wasn’t lying. Or maybe he was - since when did he have a cold without being a walking snot factory?

She nodded and walked away, as rain lashed against the window and made him glance out at the street. There were more cars on the street than before, but still very few pedestrians, as the storm was only easing off in increments. Most people were too smart to be out in that.

His eyes felt hot and dry, so he closed them, resting his head against the cool glass, It felt better than it probably should have.

After a moment, he realized he’d nodded off, and something made him jolt awake.

There was a man sitting across the table from him.

Gryphon had never seen the guy before; he was certainly neither Larry nor Curly. He was young too, maybe his age, with scruffy reddish brown hair and a scraggly kind of beard covering his narrow chin and hiding his upper lip like some kind of tropical fungus. A tiny gold skull earring dangled from his left earlobe, and his wardrobe was quasi punk: worn black leather jacket, black t-shirt with a slight tear in the collar, a silver necklace that looked a little like an actual bicycle chain. His eyes were a hazel green, and somewhat recessed beneath heavy reddish brows in his thin, acne scarred face. “So what is this place?” The guy asked, glancing around the Red Dog. “Some kinda restaurant?”

He just stared at him, wondering what kind of drugs he was on. “It wasn’t a café when you came in?”

The boy fidgeted in his seat, eventually stretching his legs in the booth and sitting with his back against the window. “Hell no, it was a bank. The … oh, what the hell was it? Eldorado Savings and Loan, some shit like that.”

He stared at him, wondering how that was a joke. Weren’t they supposed to be funny?

The wind outside rattled the glass in the frame, making a gritty noise, and suddenly he knew who this was. This was Ramsey Matthews, called Ray by his friends, and he had been dead for some time.

“How could they do that to me?” Ray asked, apropos of nothing. “I mean, I always knew Stan was a bit scumbaggy, but to shoot me? Shee-it, that’s a new level of scumbaggery.”

The knowledge hit Gryph like a punch to the brainpan, a flood of memories like a dam had burst. He was there when Ray, Stan, Dave, and Charlie decided to rob the bank for some quick cash, with inside help from Patty, Charlie’s girlfriend, who worked there as a teller. It was a meticulously planned robbery that went awry almost immediately, with a big guy in line getting the brilliant idea to rush Dave. Dave ended up shooting him, making a hole in his chest the size of a melon, killing him pretty quickly.

Ray freaked out - he hadn’t wanted to hurt anyone, and Stan promised him they wouldn’t, just grab the cash and go. As soon as he started freaking out, Stan told him to shut the fuck up, that everything was fine, but he knew it wasn’t. This was life in prison shit if they were caught, and considering there was a murder, it was a better bet they’d be caught now.

Maybe it was the gunshot, the screaming, or all of it, but police cars started showing up outside before Patty and Charlie had finished shoving cash into the backpack. Ray wanted to try and split out the back, but Stan suggested that taking hostages was a better idea. Ray totally lost it then, pointing out the guys in Dog Day Afternoon died after trying that shit, and when Dave started sizing up who would make the best hostages, Ray held his gun on him and told him he was fucking going, and he didn’t care what they did, but he was out. Stan leveled his gun at him and accused him of being a pussy before telling him he was all in or all out; there was no changing his mind now. Ray’s famous last words were “Fuck you,” before Stan pulled the trigger, and he was blinded by a bright flare of light from the muzzle.

“Can you believe that?” Ray exclaimed in disgust, shaking his head. “He fucking shot me! What kinda friend is that?”

Gryphon sat forward, resting his elbows on the table, letting his head fall into his hands. It was nice to feel that his skull was intact, one solid piece that had yet to be fractured by a bullet, but he still felt remarkably shitty.

What kind of idiot robs a bank with a bunch of tweaker losers, and then is surprised they kill him when he gets cold feet? Hugh snapped, and just by joining the conversation, Gryphon felt reality snap around him like a slender membrane.

Suddenly he was slumping forward against the formica topped table, not sure how a ghost had joined him without him being aware of it beforehand. He could usually feel them before they got that close to him. Fuck, was he breaking down?

You’re sick, Mr. Aronofsky insisted sternly. Very sick. Maybe you should go to the emergency room.

“No,” Gryphon insisted, sitting up just as Becky set his glass on the table, and raised her eyebrows at him. She was giving him the ‘Oh god is he completely fucking nuts’ look, which he knew so well by now that he was surprised when he didn’t see it.

“Is, uh … are you all right?” she asked, surreptitiously taking a step back from the table.

He nodded, not liking the way it felt like his brains were sloshing around, slamming up against the walls of his skull. “Fine. Sorry.”

She couldn’t even fake the placating smile well; she just went away quickly, trying to pretend she wasn’t fleeing for dear life. Under his breath, he muttered, “No hospitals, ever. Too many people have died there. Do you know what would happen to me?” He shuddered at the thought of drowning in the dead, in being completely swallowed by them and their need. It would happen; he knew it would if he went anywhere near one of those death pits.

Uh, guys, Ray asked tentatively. What the fuck is going on? How come I ain’t in the bank anymore? I don’t get it.

Shut up newbie, Ruby interrupted. Kid, you gotta get outta here. These wannabe Ghostbusters can wait.

He gulped down his tea, which tasted like that instant, granulated stuff, barely made palatable by the addition of lemon juice. It slaked his thirst and seemed to cool him down for a moment, but just a moment. He was sweltering in here, and everything was looking kind of funny, like he was staring at the world through a piece of warped glass. “I don’t get sick,” he muttered. “You guys take care of me.”

Do any of us sound like Jonas fucking Salk to you? Ruby replied harshly. Now get yer ass up and get outta here, or I’m takin’ you over.

Umm, really, what’s goin’ on here? Ray asked.

Shut up! Hugh, Ruby, Taneesha, and Mr. Aronofsky shouted, making Gryph wince.

Geeze, what’s your guys’ fucking deal? Ray replied, but he sounded cowed, and shut up after that.

He couldn’t remember how much the tea was supposed to be, so he pulled out a handful of bills and put them on the table. He was pretty sure they were just ones, but he didn’t bother to check. His head hurt - maybe due to the shouting - and he thought he could taste bile in the back of his throat. “I’m okay, I can do this,” he told them, bracing his hands on the edge of the table and levering himself up. “See? I -”

The room seemed to pitch sideways, like a ship capsizing, and he felt as light and ephemeral as a cloud. “Oh shit,” he said, as the nicely tiled floor came rushing up to meet him.