📖 The Ghost of Emily - Chapter 23

In which a platoon of fools lay a petard upon which to hoist themselves.

Jake was lying on a bed of crunching leaf litter, resisting the urge to roll and pick the jagged barbs of bunya pine needles out of his clothes as they poked him. He was surrounded by a small group of petrified looking leeches in the rear position of the assembled attack team.

Ahead of him he could see Reynard lying similarly just below the crest of a small ridge across the forest floor. He was surrounded by his now well-armed militiamen, his bald head glistening in the dappled late afternoon sunlight. Jake could see his lips moving, the look on his face one of stern rulership, as he gave orders to the poised members of his vanguard.

Farther ahead, beyond the ridge and the edge of the forest, six militiamen were slowly, quietly creeping towards the great timber barn that lay ahead of them. Beside it stood a towering wheat silo with a gaping black opening at its base.

The militiamen moved in pairs, carrying the large cases that Jake assumed were loaded with explosives. Jake felt someone shuffling towards him and he turned his head to see Phil clumsily crab-walking his way, rifle strung over his back, rattling around in a way that distracted and concerned Jake. He could see its safety was disabled and that it was loaded.

As Phil reached him, Jake pressed his finger to his lips and creased his brow. Phil’s expression widened in realisation that he was being too noisy. Jake pointed at the rifle on his back, and whispered harshly. “Is there a round chambered in that?”

“Huh... a round... um... I don’t know.”

Jake held his hand open, and his expression too opened up, as if to ask may I?

Phil took a moment to process the silent request, then with a sharp inhalation of comprehension, nodded and pulled the gun over his shoulders and held it out to Jake. As he passed it over, the muzzle was pointed right in Jake’s direction. Jake quickly grabbed the shaft and tilted it upwards with a force that wrung it from Phil’s hands. Phil look annoyed. Jake shook his head.

He pulled the bolt of the rifle back, slowly, without a sound, and in opening the chamber just a fraction he could see that, indeed, a round was in place ready to be fired at a brush of the trigger. Jake pulled the bolt back further and with the tiniest click, the cartridge was ejected into his other hand, and he gently pushed it back into the internal magazine.

“You’re going to need to pull the bolt again to load it, okay?”

Phil nodded, looking sheepish.

“That rifle was shaking around on your jacket there. If that scarf knot had hit the trigger, your brains would be all over those trees by now," Jake said, his tone curt and lecturing.

“Oh... shit...”

“And, you were pointing it right at me when you handed it to me," Jake added, for good measure.

“Sorry, Jake.”

“Have you ever had firearms training, Phil?”

“No.”

“Spent much time checking this thing over?”

“No... I... I actually found it in a house attic... just before Jim and I found you.”

Jake laughed under his breath. He felt he should have known from Phil’s manner at their first ill-fated meeting that this was the case. Phil had been the twitchy, nervous one in the duo of captors. He seemed eager to make Jake an ally. Jake took a breath, and considered his next move. He suddenly found himself armed, a state that Reynard had not yet trusted him in without Olivia’s supervision. Phil was still looking at him like a kid would at his elder brother.

“If we get out of here alive, I’ll give you some lessons, Phil." Jake knew that prefacing the gesture with the grimness of the situation would establish the doubt that he wanted Phil to experience. He saw Phil swallow and his face went slightly pale. He looked nauseous.

“Are you okay, Phil?” he asked, confidently.

“Uh... Jake... if I let you hold my rifle, can I stick with you?” Phil’s hands were trembling profusely. He quickly hid them, but he couldn’t hide his terrified expression.

Jake smiled, reassuringly. “Alright. Don’t worry, okay?”

Phil nodded, compressing his lips in an expression that was intended to look brave. Jake pulled the bolt again, slowly, and with a click the round was chambered once more. He laid the gun out in front of him, and looked through its scope down towards the militiamen who now silently surrounded the silo, magnified by the glass that his eye peered through.

Their cases were open and laid unsupervised on the floor, and Jake could see some of them grinning as they tossed long brown cylinders of paper to each other and laid them out in a ring around the base of the silo. One of them had a long roll of wire that came from a box with a T-shaped handle on a rod that stood perpendicular to the ground. He was carefully feeding the wire around the silo and twisting strands from each cylinder into it, adjoining them all in one daisy chain. Something about the way the men were haphazardly handling the explosive rods troubled Jake. He could see that the ends of the paper rolls were frayed and oily, and it looked as though the tubes were leaking some kind of foamy liquid that had encrusted on their outer layers. The sight of this foam reminded Jake that his headache had not disappeared, only subdued as he’d moved away from the stinky bomb-sticks.

The militiamen finished placing the dynamite around the silo, and withdrew towards the tree line. Reynard and his four other militiamen lay waiting with their trembling leech scout some fifteen metres back from the explosives. The leech’s eyes were clenched shut and he was armed only with the knife that Reynard had given him a few hours earlier. He looked no less exhausted and terrified than he had when Reynard first commanded him to join the vanguard.

The shimmering blade that shook in the scout’s hand reminded Jake of the blade he held in his own belt, and instinctively, without looking at it, he slid it out of its sheath and fitted its ring carefully over the muzzle of Phil’s rifle, then tightened the screw to clasp it in place.

“What’s that?” Phil asked in a harsh whisper.

“That’s what I use if your five bullets aren’t enough to keep you alive.”

“Oh," said Phil, gulping audibly.

The wireman reached his militia companions at the tree line and carefully placed the trigger box on the earth in front of them. He turned back towards Reynard, who raised his head and offered a thumbs up, high in the air.

The wireman nodded, snickered to his companions, each of whom began to unashamedly laugh with excitement, knowing that if their voices were heard by the ghost in the silo now, it was too late. The wireman pulled the rod up with a jerk, revealing its full length, and then, with all of his body weight, fell down upon it, depressing it completely into its case.

Jake held his breath.

Nothing.

The militia bomb-riggers looked at their wireman companion, disappointed. There was a brief exchange of whispered words and angry gesticulations, and then the wireman nervously stood and starting creeping across the clearing again, towards the silo.

He walked around the perimeter, looking for a break in the circuit. When he finally found it, he squatted down and began fiddling with the wires. As he worked away, Jake noticed movement at the edge of his rifle’s scope. He panned across quickly to the opening of the silo, and saw a figure emerging.

A glowing figure.

The other militiamen saw it too, and began shouting to their colleague, who appeared to be working faster. They were shouting and waving for him to come back; to hurry. One of the bomb-riggers, who was not gesticulating, stood. As the glowing figure stepped clear of the silo entrance, the silent militiaman leapt towards the trigger box, and as his wireman companion finished and scrambled to his feet, he jerked the trigger up, and then fell upon it.

Jake’s eyes were only open and receiving light for the tiniest moment. A second, maybe two. But inside Jake’s perception, time seemed to slow down.

The flash of light began as a ball above one cylinder. It cascaded around the rim of the silo’s base. The earth below it seemed to ripple outward, a slowly writhing ring of movement that expanded, sending flakes of dirt and pieces of broken grass spinning into the air. The silo itself seemed to rise off the ground a foot or two, then the gigantic cylinder of timber cracked in two down its length, the slowly opening fissure expelling vicious lapping tongues of yellow fire.

Jake saw the wireman’s body launch limply through the air towards the tree line, hotly pursued by a tsunami of gushing red flames and shards of debris. His body smashed into his compatriots, each of whom were caught in the shockwave and sent tumbling over each other, looking as light as dried weeds. The clothes on their bodies were incinerated instantly. The silo splintered into a shower of scorched timber panels that fell down on the militiamen and the glowing figure within. The whole team of bomb-riggers lay in a knotted pile of cooked flesh, some limbs impaled on javelins of shattered pine stud and hardwood joist.

Reynard, his four militiamen, and his leech scout had all slid down behind the ridge and covered their heads the instant the blast had begun. This had served most of them well, but one militiaman was positioned poorly. The structural apex of the silo’s roof just happened to come down directly on his body, most certainly killing him instantly.

By now Jake’s sense of time had restored to normal as the blast of hot air rippled over his face and his instinct to duck had taken over. Though they all took cover, Jake, Phil, and the eight other leeches positioned at the far rear were well clear of the debris from the blast.

Before the last flaming plank had reached its final resting place, the two militiamen to Reynard’s right both stood. In abject terror at the freak accident they had just witnessed they began to run for the forest, in the direction of where Jake and the leeches lay.

Reynard turned and saw them bolting, and with a scream of rage he stood and, clutching the M4 rifle low against his hip, opened fire in two snapping bursts of three rounds each. The first burst hit its target true, and pierced a hole in the abdomen of the nearest deserter, who fell in a heap and began silently leaking all over the forest floor.

His comrade must have heard the crunching impact of his friend’s body, because he started running much faster. Soon he was scrambling up the slope to the crest, behind which the curious leeches were rising to brush themselves off to try and see what had happened. The militiaman was moaning wildly in warbling tones that swayed between roaring masculine screams and child-like whimpers of pathetic resignation.

Reynard let fly another two bursts of bullets. Leaves and dirt snapped at the militiaman like jaws of wolves, as the bullets missed him by a foot or two and smashed into the ground. Particles of dirt were kicked into his eyes, which took his panic to fever pitch. His feet slipped out from under him as he clawed his way higher.

Two more bursts.

By now Jake knew what was happening, and he was staying down, holding Phil down with him, and shouting warnings to the other leeches. A few of them had already reached their feet, and a stray bullet from the sixth burst clipped a leech in the face and dropped him, hard. The rest of them, realising their leader had turned on them, and that they held the high ground, all turned and ran as fast as they could into the thick, darkening forest. Jake was left alone with Phil. They were both still laying low, hearing the pants and moans of the militiaman who had almost reached the crest, and the safety that waited beyond it.

A burst of three bullets clipped the edge of the crest, carrying pine needles and dirt into the stump of a tree with an explosion of splinters. Another burst hit dirt, and possibly the foot of the deserter, as he yelped loudly and stumbled with its impact. But he kept coming. The man’s arms slammed over the crest and onto the plateau on which Jake and Phil lay. He wrenched himself over with his arms. His eyes, bulging with pain and terror, met with Jake’s. He reached out to Jake, as if to ask for a hand to pull him over.

Jake hesitated. He knew that to help this man was to likely get himself shot, and in the second of hesitation came the ninth spray of bullets from Reynard’s M4. All three of them exploded through the man’s back, spraying a mist of hot red blood over Jake’s and Phil’s faces. The body hurtled over, landing parallel to them, still and dead.

“FUCK!!” Reynard screamed, obviously unrelieved by his vengeful action. Apparently unaware that Jake and Phil remained, he turned to take stock of his militia.

One man - his best, also armed with an M4 - now stood looking out over the smouldering debris-field under which most of his friends were buried. One trembling, crying leech, lay on his back, holding his hunting knife above him as if to maintain some defensive perimeter around his body. The handle fastening ring rattled in his shaking hands.

Reynard spat at the ground, and then finally turned around to assess the aftermath of the melee. “Where are they?” he shouted unnecessarily loudly at his armed underling, who was slowly stepping over the ridge and moving towards the rubble where the silo had once stood.

The militiaman said nothing, he just turned to Reynard, then nodded his head in the direction of the thickest pile of ruin, under which he had seen his scorched comrades get crushed into pulp.

“What the fuck did they do?!”

“Dunno, boss. Too many bombs?” he shouted back to Reynard.

“That much is fuckin’ obvious!” Reynard scoffed, then he turned to the whimpering scout who still lay with his eyes closed, shaking, and muttering in some kind of prayer.

“You! Leech! Get the fuck up.”

The leech showed no signs of comprehension, or awareness that Reynard was even there. Reynard had no patience left. He raised his M4 and stomped towards the quivering young man.

“GET UP, I SAID!” he screamed.

Still no response. Reynard’s finger moved to the trigger. His face contorted in seething hatred for this pathetic leech, or for himself, or for every living thing that ever was.

“Boss!” the militiaman called, and Reynard’s attention turned towards the farmyard.

At the black smoking epicentre of the blast, where the base of the silo had been positioned minutes ago, they saw enormous charred panels of torn timber rising and sliding outward, as if an eruption was beginning from the dark unknown depths below the surface of the earth.

An arm came into view. Then shoulders, thrusting a head up out of the rubble. It was a woman. And she was unscathed.

“It’s the fucking ghost!” the militiaman shouted in sudden dread, and he swung his rifle upward and began to spray bullets in her direction as quickly as he could.

Reynard studied the woman. “STOP!” he bellowed.

But his militiaman was now in a rippling trance of recoil and illusory power and he continued to unload his bullets at the woman, each seeming to miss, or simply prove utterly ineffective.

“STOP, FUCKER!!!” Reynard screamed as he broke into a run towards his best soldier’s back.

The soldier did not yield.

“STOOOPPPP!!” he screamed once more as he squeezed the trigger of his own M4 and loosed his final burst of three hot lead spears into the back of his last standing militiaman, tearing his back muscles open with a violent puff of red steam, shattering his backbone into shards of smashed porcelain as he fell limp, folded in half, and hit the ground already slain.

Unconsciously, Reynard knew his rifle was spent, and he tossed it aside as he continued marching towards the woman, his face falling wide open in disbelieving wonder. His arms reached out ahead of him, as she emerged fully from the rubble and stepped towards him, smiling warmly.

He stepped on his soldier’s broken carcass, his heavy dirt-encrusted boot crunching down on the side of its head, his eyes totally fixated on the woman as he drew closer and closer. He shook his head as he called out, and Jake, who was creeping down the hill slowly with Phil’s rifle poised, heard a tone in his voice that he had not heard before. Vulnerability.

“T-Tina...?”

“Renny!” she called back, laughing through the word and her French accent.

Reynard broke into a run and she met his pace. Their bodies collided and they fell to their knees together, grasping at each other’s bodies wildly, the bloody mayhem and smoking destruction around them seeming to be of no concern.

Reynard kissed her all over her face, and she blushed and giggled. “I don’t understand... how is it that you’re here?”

“I have so much to tell you, Renny," she said.

They began to talk rapidly to each other in French, as Jake continued forward as stealthily as he could. His breathing was controlled, and he moved from tree to tree, doing his utmost to remain unnoticed.

He reached a wide-trunked bunya pine and leaning against its jabbing bladed surface, he lowered the rifle, reached into his pocket, and pulled out the small black cylinder that Marcus had given him. He squatted down and placed it on the ground, leaning his rifle against the tree. He slowly peeled the lid of his backpack open and lifted Marcus’s device from its interior.

It was a large sheet of what appeared to be glass, though it felt anything but fragile. It had a few flashing glyphs of coloured light appearing on its surface, some gliding across it, others changing in some kind of sequential pattern. The glass sheet was mounted into a black frame that had an array of odd-shaped batteries taped to it, with strands of wire joining them to a flat green board that had tiny cylinders and cubes jutting out from it. The whole contraption was heavy, and alien to Jake, but he had been told explicitly to check that nothing had come loose and that the screen was showing activity, which he was now able to confirm.

He closed it up again and placed the backpack and its contents gently down by the base of the tree. Lifting the rifle with one arm and pointing it out ahead of him, he stepped out from behind the tree clutching the cylindrical remote trigger handle in his other hand, his thumb poised above its red button. He continued his advance towards the clearing and the carnage, the blue gloom of the encroaching evening shielding him from clear visibility.

Reynard was lying in Tina’s arms, being cradled liked a child. “I’m so sorry, mon amour...” he wept in broken English.

“Shhh...” she comforted, smiling at him adoringly. “It doesn’t matter now, Renny. We’ll be together. Forever.”

His face contorted into a broad, contented smile.

Jake, now in the clearing and standing on the outermost shards of silo detritus, pressed down firmly on the button.

Tina’s head tilted up, and her expression turned blank. Then, abruptly, the details of her face brightened, and with a blinding flash, turned to full white. Her body stiffened, and Reynard slipped off her knees and onto the ground, his own face twisted into shock at the sudden change from this cathartic scene of fantastic redemption into a cold technological horror.

The frozen white contours and geometry of the body and face of his long-lost lover began to compress. Her brow, nose and ears seemed to turn to a slow-moving liquid as they puddled down and her head became a radiant orb entirely devoid of distinguishing features - like a mannequin of neon.

As Reynard instinctively backed away from the shattered illusion with flailing arms and legs, the white light began to fade, and, of a sudden, the entire surface of the ghost’s body became an unlit, dull metallic grey.

The machine was frozen in space, now a mere faulty device, seized up like the rusted-out tractors and butter churns found on farms like this everywhere. Reynard stopped crying, halted his retreat and sat up, staring at the object before him.

Climbing to his knees he shuffled carefully towards the grey humanoid statue in front of him, slowly reaching out to touch it. He yelped and cursed as a burst of blue light reanimated the statue. The ghost, too, fell backward, alive but somehow unwell. Its arms and legs went limp as it crashed to the ground, snapping lengths of wooden debris in two and leaving an indentation in the earth.

Jake looked on with fascination. All confidence, purpose, and control had suddenly disappeared from this machine. Though it had been momentarily inert, now it was alive again, and a very different animal.

The ghost looked like it was struggling with the weight of its own limbs. It was able to toss its head side to side, and a cavity opened in the front of its face, where a mouth should be, that gaped, twisted and formed primitive expressions.

It looked afraid.

A strange sound came from it, a sound that was harsh and synthetic; constant in pitch and amplitude, with multiple notes layered in a dissonant harmonic. Jake didn’t know what to make of it at all, having never heard a synthesised waveform before.

The ghost seemed to be looking at one of its arms and heaving from its shoulder to try and lift it. Reynard cursed again, his scramble backward accelerating. When the ghost managed to flop an arm across its own torso, fist clenched, Reynard spun about and dashed towards the tree line.

As he reached the edge of the clearing, he stopped, and turned towards Jake, his face changing from abject terror, to rage. “You did this!” he screamed, then began to run straight at him.

Jake could see that Reynard had no intention of slowing down, and raised his rifle. “Stop, Reynard!” he ordered, but the aggrieved man did not stop. In threat, Jake pulled the bolt back, ejecting one unused cartridge to the ground, but Reynard continued towards him. He raised the rifle and fired a round into the air, but, to Jake’s astonishment, Reynard increased his speed and the distance was closing fast. Then, reluctantly, Jake drew the bolt back again, took aim at Reynard’s torso and squeezed the trigger.

He felt and heard the snap of the gun’s hammer against the back of the cartridge. But instead of another deafening explosion, he heard a fizzing sound. He squeezed again, but the trigger was jammed. Realising that the cartridge had misfired, he braced himself for the imminent impact of Reynard’s body against the spear-tip of the bayonet.

At the last second, Reynard dived low and, using his small stature to his advantage, found his way under the gun altogether, and slammed into Jake’s shins, causing him to fall forward and flip head over heels landing on his back. The rifle slipped from Jake’s hands and went spinning into the bushes, and he found himself disarmed and dazed, looking up at the towering spires of pines and bunyas piercing the dark blue sky above.

Reynard was on him, laying fist after fist into his face. He made three ferocious connections of knuckle into brow and cheek before Jake found the bodily will to roll him off. Reynard was thrown a few feet, and Jake, feeling no desire to kill him, stood and began to run.

He heard the click.

“Stop right there, Thorne!” Reynard shouted, his voice slurred and wet.

Jake obeyed. He stood still, realising his execution was likely to follow. Breathing deeply he thought of Gus.

He felt the cold steel ring of Reynard’s revolver muzzle press into the back of his neck.

“Turn around.”

Jake submitted, and they looked into each other’s eyes for a moment. Jake felt he was looking at something utterly alien to him.

“You did this, didn’t you!?” Reynard screamed.

“Yes,” Jake said softly, his eyes rolling to one side, gesturing towards the cylindrical trigger handle that lay in the dirt nearby. Reynard glanced at it very quickly, then returned his fix to Jake.

“Kneel down, Thorne," Reynard spat, with finality.

Jake remained standing.

Suddenly he felt the skin of his cheek splitting open, and a dizziness wash over him. Reynard had struck him with the revolver shaft.

“KNEEL, FUCKER!”

Out of dizziness more than acquiescence, Jake fell to his knees. The gaping black O that hovered in the air before him traced his movement down, the blurry face of Reynard sneering at him beyond his vision’s focal reach.

“I’ve wanted to do this for a long time, you fuck," Reynard said, almost in a whisper.

Jake’s instinctual urge was to close his eyes. To meet his death in the dark. But something in him resisted. He wanted to face it consciously. He wanted to study every aspect of it with the fraction of a second he had left.

A clap of thunder smashed into his ears.

He felt hot liquid spray all over his face.

His vision turned red.

Blood.

Blood in his eyes.

Stinging.

He felt a shower of shrapnel smash into his face, some of it penetrating the skin and sending a wave of numbness across his whole upper body, in some kind of automatic shock response.

He heard Reynard scream; a horrifying scream. At first a groan of frustration, or disbelief, then, as his mouth and lungs slowly opened, an expulsion of air and sound from his chest so total, that his voice shredded into nothingness soon after.

Reynard fell to his knees, and with his left hand reached over and clutched the bloodied stump where his right hand, and the gun, had been a moment ago. In place of his hand was a frayed splinter of white bones, with two fingers dangling loosely, three missing altogether.

Jake’s vision still skewed in and out of clarity, but he saw the pain leave Reynard’s face and turn to hatred. Blind, animal rage, as some last vestige of will. A will no longer to survive, but to die and take the object of his hatred to hell with him.

His left hand unclenched, letting his right stump flop down, and he swiftly reached for the pistol holster on his left hip. He drew, and began to raise his arm to point it at Jake’s head, cocking the hammer as it arced up through the air.

Another clap of thunder.

In the same instant he saw Reynard’s body jerk violently, one side of his head bursting open, spraying red and white particles outward in a fan-shape. The remaining half of his head chased after the ejected, liquefied brains, dragging his lifeless body to the ground below.

Jake, in shock, looked down and saw a tiny bullet hole in the temple of the un-pulverised half of Reynard’s head.

Against the darkening forest around him, he saw the blue ghost ahead, standing, now appearing to have control of its limbs. The ghost ambled towards Jake awkwardly, reaching out a hand as it approached him.

The sight was intoxicating to Jake.

It seemed familiar.

The glowing figure of a featureless blue being coming towards him was not frightening. He wanted to rise and take the ghost’s hand. But he was still dazed, and could feel a throbbing ache in his cheek, where blood was seeping down to his neck and collar, dragging shards of Reynard’s finger-bones along with it.

The mouth of the ghost opened, and the same synthetic sound emerged. The mouth closed and the sound stopped. Jake cocked his head, unconsciously. As the ghost drew closer, it opened its mouth again, and beneath the dissonant drawl of the synthetic tone, he thought he could hear the shape of a word.

“Aaaaayyyy-zd.”

He cocked his head the other way, curious, eager to understand. The mouth opened again as the blue ghost stopped in front of him, its stance heavy and asymmetrical.

“Jaaaaaaaayy-zd," it droned.

Its hand rose again, palm tipped upwards, then hovered waiting for Jake to take it.

Once more, it spoke. “Jaaaaaaaaayy-k!” it enunciated, and Jake now understood it was addressing him by name.

He reached out to the take the hand of the blue ghost, but just as their fingertips were about to meet, he heard a muted beeping sound emerge from behind the nearby tree.

His backpack.

The device!

And with the beep, the ghost jolted into a straight standing position, its arms straight downward, and the blue light abruptly switched off, returning it to its grey, unlit state.

Its whole body flashed white. A moment later, it cycled through flashes of red, green, blue, and yellow.

A detailed image appeared across its body incrementally, scanning downward from the crown of the head. The features and clothing of Tina appeared to slide into place, stretched over the neutrally shaped body of the ghost. The surface began to warp and bulge, and the contours of a face, the widening of hips, the folds of clothing, and the mounds of breasts pushed outward, giving shape and colour to the absolute likeness of Reynard’s lover.

With a sudden jolt of her body, she animated. She looked at Jake with momentary confusion. Noticing the blood all over his face, she glanced down and saw the leaking remains of Reynard in the dirt. She dived down to him and picked up his bleeding carcass in her arms, laying it effortlessly over her lap.

Jake watched, in silence, still kneeling. He saw drops of blood fall from the torn base of Reynard’s head, and roll uncannily down her dress to the ground, where it was absorbed. In its wake, no trail or trace was left on her clothing. It rolled off her like a bead of mercury.

“Noooo!” she keened, weeping genuinely.

She looked up at Jake, her eyes red and glossy, her face deformed with grief and rage. “You KILLED him!!” she snapped. “He’s DEEEAAAAAD! He’s really DEAAAAAAAADDD!!!” And then, falling over him, she simply wailed.

Jake finally stood, beginning to fear imminent violent reprisal. But as he staggered away, he heard her voice stop. He turned back, and saw that the ghost had returned to a neutral form, a dull white glow, and it stood coldly, letting Reynard’s body flop back onto the earth. Without any apparent recognition of Jake, the ghost turned and walked steadily into the obscurity of the twilit forest, and out of sight.

Jake stepped over to the bunya tree, still unsure as to what had happened, and scooped up his backpack. Glancing in, he saw a red flashing light on the screen of Marcus’s tablet, indicating a battery failure.

The device had shut off; the interference signal had been cut.

He furrowed his filthy, blood-stained brow trying to make sense of it all, when he heard fast footsteps tearing towards him. Turning, he saw a small figure emerging from the darkness of the wood and into the last light of the clearing.

Gus! Jake blinked hard, willing himself to move towards him. Gus wore a large rifle slung across his shoulder, and he was crying and overwrought.

Their bodies met in a fierce embrace and Gus buried his face into Jake’s bloodied shoulder, moaning, his chest heaving with remorse, shame and fear. “I... didn’t... want to... do it Papa... but he was... he was going to...” Gus lifted his head, and looked at Jake. His eyes were burning with loss. With devastation. With total uncertainty. “He was going to kill you, Papa! I wanted to come… but… that ghost! Should I have shot the ghost too?!” his face fell, and he started crying again.

Jake squeezed Gus tightly, his fingers laced into his son’s hair, trying to shield him from the internal turmoil. Jake breathed deeply as he understood what Gus was confessing. “No, Gussy. You did the right thing. You hear me? You did good.”

Gus just cried.

“And now it’s over, Gus. He’s gone. And I’m not letting you go. We’re together now. And we’re staying together.”

He pressed a kiss into Gus’s hair, and dropped to his knees, pulling him in for an embrace that would last as long as it had to.