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Well, she was the professional here. I was just an amateur with a correctly tuned ghost receiver.
And since I was out of ideas, I let the others take the reins. I wasn’t even sure that the road we were on did lead out of the park—I only figured it might. But the dead definitely knew their way around better than I did.
We took simultaneous deep breaths and took off after the ghost, more noisily than I would have preferred, but with enough speed to possibly make up for the lapse in silence.
We fled faster. He followed faster.
But we had a good lead on him by then, and we had someone leading us. We reached the tree line in moments, and we dove on through the trunks. It was one thing to run around in the dark on an open stretch of road, but another thing entirely to navigate a woody obstacle course. Our progress slowed considerably, but again, we had a guide, and we had a lead.
Of course, our pursuer had a gun.
He fired it again, enough times to empty the thing. He was forced to stop long enough to jam a hand into his pockets and grab more ammunition, and we made good use of that time.
There were enough tree trunks between us and him that he didn’t have much hope of hitting us, and we liked that. We wanted to extend that buffer as deep as we possibly could, so we kept going, tagging after our indefatigable leader as he whipped around the trees. Dana and I clung to each other still, yanking one another to the left, to the right, around and past and over—pulling each other’s skin until we left red marks, digging in until we left scratches, anything but letting go.
Eventually we could no longer hear the determined footsteps dashing haphazardly along in our wake, but we didn’t feel too relieved about evading him yet. Our guide was still pulling us farther into the park, and we kept after him.
Finally, the ache at my collarbone and the waning of my adrenaline had worn me down enough that I needed to call for a time out. Apparently that perpendicular hand signal is not as universal as a finger to the mouth, but the ghost caught on quick.
“Time out,” I gasped, not too loud. “Time out. Can’t run anymore. For a minute. Give me a minute. ”
Dana agreed. “Wait. Just wait. Oh God, we left Tripp. ”
“Tripp’s dead,” I said, with less tact than I
might have scrounged up otherwise.
“I know,” she said, and I thought she might start crying again, but she didn’t. “I can’t believe I ran off and left him. ”
“We couldn’t have carried him, you know. And,” I added, not meaning to sound so harsh, “he wouldn’t have wanted you to stay and get killed. You know that, right?”
She wiped at her face with her forearm. Maybe she was crying again. She was hiding it well, if that was the case. I didn’t hear a squeak or a sniffle. “Yeah. He would want me to run. ”
“Definitely,” I panted.
Our guide obliged us, stopping to wait. He didn’t look impatient or hurried at all anymore. The sense of urgency was gone. Assuming his goal had been to see us away to relative safety, this mission could be regarded as a success.
He approached us with something like idle inquisitiveness putting out a hand to me like he wanted to shake hello.
I lifted mine, unsure of what he intended or desired.
His hand went through mine, more or less, giving me a tiny twinge of a chill where what used to be his flesh met mine. He moved his fingers around mine as if trying to touch them. If he was trying to achieve some literal, physical impact, he failed.
“I don’t think it will work with her,” Dana said, sounding almost normal.
“What?” I asked, but the ghost clearly understood.
He turned his attention to her and offered the same hand.
Dana took it, and drew it forward. The ghost fell into her, a drifting, soft collision wherein Dana absorbed the spirit completely and easily. She had done this before.
She blinked, hard.
A few of the others had caught up to us by then—a black woman with a white bundle of something like laundry on her head, two of the enlisted men, and one of the officers. It was too dark to distinguish their uniforms. It was too foggy to tell them apart too well; but even as I remembered and noticed again the fog, it retreated.
Not everywhere, but around us the wall of white backed away, clearing us a patch—a small circle—and giving us room to see one another better.
“She’s cold,” Dana said, in a voice that was perfectly ordinary. It didn’t sound like it belonged to anyone else at all, not the way they portray it in books and movies. It sounded like Dana.
