Chapter Two: Gods and Busters
“What the…?!” Jacqueline began, until the creep with the
blue fire for hair interrupted her.
“Now, now, before you finish that wonderful
phrase,” Hades said, “Allow me to introduce myself…”
“Don’t
bother, dude,” Natalie interjected. “We’ve all seen Hercules and played Kingdom
Hearts about a billion times already.”
J.G.
cleared his throat and sheepishly uttered, “A billion and two.”
Natalie snickered, while Hades was a
bit frustrated over the interruption. “Anyways!
I should warn you measly mortals that you are way in over your heads
with this Gozer guy. I mean, he’s like bad news, man!”
“Let us be the judge of that,” J.G. challenged. “What
connections do you even have with Gozer?”
Hades
let out an amused chuckle. “Hello? I’m
a god! He’s a god!”
“Yeah,” Natalie said, “A little candlelight
dinner, and you two crazy fruitcakes can really set it off.”
Hades verged on a comeback to her witty comment,
but then stopped when he realized that he didn’t have one. “Oy! And I thought I had all the good one-liners.” Shaking
off the embarrassment, he refocused his attention on the moment at hand: “Alright!
Have it your way, mortals! It’s your funeral…literally. I’ll be waiting
here to collect the bodies.” He then turned his attention to an unseen party
and yelled, “Pain! Panic! Introduction, please!”
Out of nowhere, two small, strange-looking
demons—one pink and one turquoise—magically appeared at the feet of Hades. The
pink demon (Panic) said, “Presenting the Sumerian God you all know and fear…”
“…Gozer
the Gozerian!” The turquoise demon (Pain) finished.
Hades, Pain, and Panic then moved to the side,
as a bright white light emerged and descended the stairs, slowly materializing
into a human form. That form was a thin, hollow-cheeked woman in her
mid-twenties, her eyes burning red pinholes, looking around at the spectacular
rooftop view. She acknowledged the two Terror Dogs, stroking them like house
pets.
The Ghostbusters stared at the apparition with
wide-eyed bewilderment.
“Hold
up!” Natalie objected. “Gozer’s a chick?!”
“Yeah,
I thought he was a man,” Jacqueline added to the confusion.
“He
becomes whatever he wants to be,” Spengler clarified.
Hades guffawed over the bewildered mortals. “Suddenly
that ‘candlelight dinner’ crack isn’t soundin’ all that smart anymore, is it?”
Natalie
shot him a smug look.
“I
don’t care what she, he, or it is,” she declared. “She’s not gonna get
past us!”
“That’s
right,” J.G. agreed. “Because we’re a team!”
“Absolutely,”
Natalie said before she gave Stantz a pat on the shoulder. “Now go get her!”
Stantz slowly turned in her direction and almost
glared.
She
winked at him in a way that was hard to determine as being genuine or mocked.
Whatever it might’ve been, he was put into position at that point in time to
deal with the massive threat they currently faced.
Cautiously, he took a few steps up the
staircase.
“Gozer
the Gozerian,” he boldly addressed, stricken thereafter when the demigod’s gaze
centered on him.
J.G. took a deep breath, swallowed hard, and rapidly uttered, “As
a duly-constituted representative of the city of New York, and on behalf of the
county and state of New York, the United States of America, the planet Earth
and all its inhabitants, I hereby order you to cease and desist any and all
supernatural activity and return at once to your place of origin or next
parallel dimension.” He then took another deep breath and sighed, feeling
somewhat relieved.
“Well,
that ought to do it,” Natalie surveyed. “Thanks very much, Jay.”
Hades rolled his eyes, annoyed. “Idiots,” he muttered.
Gozer stood up to her full height and regarded
Stantz curiously. “Are you a god?”
“Oh,
this should be good,” murmured Hades, looking on with a hint of
interest.
J.G. turned to Natalie, as if summoning her for
some sort of advice. She simply shrugged her shoulders and motioned for him to
do whatever was best. So, Stantz returned his glance on Gozer and, being
compulsively honest, gave a simple answer: “No.”
“Then…DIE!!!”
The deity blew away the
Ghostbusters with searing bolts of energy.
Hades watched this with intense excitement,
flames shooting out from his body as he screamed, “Yes, baby! Yes! That is what
I’m talkin’ about! YES!”
Momentarily stunned, the Ghostbusters tumbled
all the way down the stairs and nearly fell over the edge of the rooftop. Down
below, Genevieve and the large crowd of New Yorkers saw the searing bolts of
energy sparkle in all directions. They knew whatever was going on up there
couldn’t be going well.
The Ghostbusters quickly recovered, picking themselves
up, moving as far away from the edge as possible.
Jacqueline
grabbed J.G. by the collar of his jumpsuit and shouted directly to his face, “The
next time when someone asks you if you’re a god…YOU SAY ‘YES’ LIKE YOUR LIFE
DEPENDS ON IT!!!”
J.G. gingerly nodded in agreement.
Natalie stepped forward, glaring down the
two supernatural figures ahead of them.
“Are you twerps ready to give up?” Hades affronted.
“The only thing we’re ready to do is kick the
living crud outta you jerks,” Natalie raged, as she and her teammates leaped
into action, one-by-one activating their Proton Guns and taking up positions
for an entrapment.
Gozer
braced for the onslaught, crouching down low.
“Let’s
toast this chick,” Natalie ordered her team.
Together,
they fired the particle streams.
However,
their mark was missed when Gozer soared out of the way with superhuman agility,
executing a perfect double-flip with a half-twisting round-off at the end. She landed
flawlessly on the altar right behind the team.
“Please! I made better moves than that while on
the cheerleading squad!”
Even
though she pretended not to be all that impressed, Natalie was stoked out of
her mind from the demigod’s moves.
“Forget
the trapping! Just blast her!” J.G. yelled.
Gozer
stood calmly, absorbing the force of their streams.
And
then, in a brilliant pink flash, she disappeared.
Hades
and his two minions blinked rapidly in mystification. “Wait! Wh-What just
happened here?”
“Maybe
she just, like, spontaneously combusted or something?” Panic assumed.
“Can ghosts even do that?” Pain inquiringly asked.
The
Ghostbusters stared for a long moment, finding it hard to believe themselves that
they won so easily.
“Yeah!”
Jacqueline triumphantly whooped. “That’s what I’m talkin’ about! Nobody can
mess with us! We are the best!”
Sean
scanned the area with his Psycho-Kinetic Energy meter (or “P.K.E. Meter” for
short), a handheld device used to locate and measure that kind of energy
emitted by ghosts; he wasn’t at all convinced that the danger had passed.
“I
don’t believe it! We neutronized it!” J.G. happily exclaimed. “She’s a
molecular non-entity now!”
“Not only do we have the tools, but we’ve got the
talent to back it up,” Jacqueline jubilantly cheered.
“We
bad tonight, ya’ll,” Natalie exchanged high-fives with Stantz and Zeddemore.
Spengler’s
face suddenly registered extreme shock as he addressed his teammates: “I hate
to break up the celebration...but this is extraordinarily bad!”
Suddenly, there was a deep seismic
rumble.
The
entire Tipton Hotel itself vibrated and swayed.
Cement
carvings and moldings around the edge of the roof cracked and broke off,
falling toward the crowd below.
Noting
the oncoming danger, Genevieve rushed to Zack and Cody and shielded them the
best way she could while the rest of the crowd screamed and ran to avoid the
cement debris.
Mr.
Moseby tried to calm down the hotel residents:
“People,
please! Stay in an orderly fashion as you flee for your lives here! We don’t
want anybody getting hurt!”
Maddie,
who stood by in disbelief over Moseby’s assertive attitude in the midst of all
the chaos, realized her boss was standing directly in the path of danger – a huge
chuck of debris was falling towards him.
“Mr.
Moseby! Look out!” she cried, running and tackling him out of harm’s way. Lying
on top of him, Maddie asked, “Are you alright?”
An incredibly loud thunderclap rocked the entire rooftop even further.
Hades
continued to stand by, reveling in the chaos that erupted all around, while
Pain and Panic ran like chickens with their heads cut off.
The
Ghostbusters searched to the swirling dark cloud in the sky, facing their new
god like Moses on Mount Sinai as it spoke to them in a voice that could be
heard throughout the entire world:
SUBCREATURES!
GOZER THE GOZERIAN, GOZER THE DESTRUCTOR, VOLGUUS ZILDROHAR, THE TRAVELLER HAS
COME! CHOOSE AND PERISH!
“Didn’t
I warn ya not to miss with the gods?” Hades wickedly cackled.
“What’s
he talking about? Choose what?” Jacqueline questioned.
CHOOSE!
CHOOSE THE FORM OF THE DESTRUCTOR!
“I
believe what he’s saying is that since we’re going to be sacrificed anyway, we get
to choose the form we want him to take,” Sean assessed.
“You
mean the form of a Yugoslavian model wasn’t enough for him?” Jacqueline
belittled. “I don’t know whether to find that sad or appalling.”
Natalie’s
mind was fixed on what Spengler just told them.
“You
mean to tell me if I stand here and think of Hannah Montana, then Hannah
Montana’s gonna come and destroy us all?” She scoffed at the idea, but then
quickly realized how much sense it made, considering all that was already
happening. “Alright! Just everybody clear your heads, okay? Don’t think of
anything. We’ve only got one shot at this.”
THE
CHOICE IS MADE!
“What the…?! Nobody chose
anything!” shouted a panic-stricken Natalie.
THE
TRAVELLER HAS COME!
“But we didn’t choose anything,”
Natalie bellowed. She turned to Spengler. “Did you choose anything?”
“No,”
Sean immediately responded.
Natalie
then looked to Jacqueline. “Did you?”
“My
mind’s a total void,” Jacqueline defended.
Venkman
returned towards the sky and innocently proclaimed, “I sure as heck didn’t
choose any…” She stopped once she realized there was one person who she hadn’t
turned to yet: J.G.
They
all turned and looked towards him, and right away he spoke in his defense, “Why’s
everybody looking at me? I didn’t think of anything either!”
“There’s
only four of us here, Jay,” Natalie said. “So that would only leave you.”
“Unless…”
said Spengler, surmising over a possibility while he looked over the edge of
the building and down towards the crowd of people. “One of them could be accounted for as well.”
“Oh,
you’ve got to be kidding me,” Natalie griped. “You mean our lives could be
destroyed by some fruit loop’s imagination of a—”
“LOOK!”
J.G. screamed, pointing southward.
They
all turned and looked in that direction, past Columbus Circle, where part of
something big and white moved between the buildings, accompanied by thunderous
footsteps of almost seismic proportions. By the time it reached Broadway and
55th, they caught a glimpse of what appeared to be a fat, white arm. The
thundering footsteps continued to plod upon reaching Columbus Circle as the
thing started to emerge from behind the buildings.
From
what the Ghostbusters could additionally make out, a blue garment seemed to be
covering its enormous chest.
“What
in the name of all that is holy is that thing?!” Jacqueline cried, noticing a
large, square, bobbing, and laughing white head atop a massive body of similar
puffed white squares.
J.G.
recognized it instantly, a look of shock registering his face.
“Oh,
man! It’s…It’s…”
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