Purgatech: Adrian's Ghost-hunting Angst

Chapter Twenty: Who You Gonna Call?

Adrian stood helplessly, watching the Old Hag hovering above the man who’d been saving him around every turn; the same man who’d entered Adrian’s home to fight ghosts, lost his hand, had his face clawed by a ghostly child and finally got shocked with a stun gun, all while doing his best to preserve saving humanity from the curse that was these ghosts.

“Do it, b***h,” Ben shouted, “If you’re going to kill me, come on and do it then.” He roared. The Old Hag began to laugh, a deep, nasally laugh that made the windows shake.

“You’ll die, Benjamin Stone, but only when I allow you to.” The Old Hag replied, leaning down to pick him up. It was in that moment that Adrian remembered the gun that he had strapped to his waist. The shotgun’s slug, if what Ben said rang true, will have weakened the Old Hag enough that these two shots should be able to put her down. Adrian watched as the bullet entered her and vanished inside her form, not exiting through the other side and thus, it must have done something, right?

He drew the gun, just as the Old Hag’s hand wrapped around Ben’s shirt, “Hey!” he shouted, gun aimed to the Hag’s back. He fired one round in hopes that this would be the one to kill her. She turned to face Adrian, who held the gun still. He wanted to make sure that she wasn’t going to die, so that one more bullet could be spared for another, but all that happened was a ghastly display of contorted rotting flesh on her face, a hand raising up at Adrian pointing, and a terrible screech that punctured his ears,

“You’re next Adrian Beck. Do not think for a moment that I have forgotten about you.” She turned back down to Ben. Knowing that he only had the one last bullet, Adrian didn’t want to waste it. He moved closer, to make sure the last shot would put the Old Hag down, but before he could get any closer, she hoisted Ben into the air by his throat, her cold dead fingers wrapping around his neck. She stood behind him, using Ben as a shield for the final bullet.

“Adrian,” Ben started. Adrian could hear the strain that was placed on his windpipe by the crushing hand of the Old Hag. Her power was still immense, even though the bullets that lodged themselves in her body were enough to at least, weaken her, “She’s scared and hiding. Don’t let her get away. It’s another heap of s**t if I died in vain, so put the bullet through me. Rather sacrifice someone who’s doing nothing to live for than letting this b***h get out, or worse, give her the option to kill you.”

“I can’t do it.” Adrian shouted. What was this offer, really? It was murder. The house was already a hotspot for ghosts that roamed and if he put down a friend or someone that he’d been considering as a friend for a while now, would that make any of this worth it? Would killing the Old Hag really affect him so much that this decision would be justifiable?

If not only to him, would the courts see it as such? It was, in essence, manslaughter. Hiding behind the illusion that ghosts were real would never win in this case and he wasn’t brave enough to take the risk. Adrian Beck was a coward in terms of prison. He was too pretty for the way they treated men in the joint, that and he’d only ever had one real fight in his adult life. He’d lost a tooth from one punch, and it wasn’t even he, who was the main focus of the battle.

So how would he defend himself? What would he be able to do to escape a gang raping? These were issues that plagued him while he watched Ben die by the hand of a ghost he was too afraid to kill.

On the other hand, if Ben was killed by the Hag, he would look like a torture victim. One that Adrian had toyed with before killing him and finally strangling him to death while he sat weakly from a stun gun, loss of blood and so on. There was no real way out of this situation that Adrian could see a beneficial solution to.

“Christ, man, take the shot. She’s right behind me.” Ben said, his words growing more strained with every passing second, “Take the shot. Aim just lower than where my heart should be, it should be okay. It’ll go straight through me and kill her.”

Ben knew that Adrian was by no means a marksman. Adrian knew this too, even with the gun he had under his pillow, he didn’t know how to handle a gun in the same way he assumed his one-handed partner did.

“I can’t do it. What if you die? How would I live with myself?” Adrian shouted his reply.

“I’m going to die with this piece of s**t strangling me.” Ben replied, “And let’s be fair, I think I’d rather die at your hand than at the hand of something I’ve wanted to watch burn since I was a young man.”

Adrian didn’t bother making sense of Ben’s last sentence. The Old Hag peered her head out from behind Ben’s, a wicked grin on her rotten face. She knew that Adrian was too scared to take the shot. Or at least, she thought she knew this. Adrian on the other hand, considered every single option he could in the few moments that he stood and watched the ghost strangling Ben. Time was running out and in a matter of seconds, it would be over. So he aimed the gun at where Ben told him to, he closed his eyes and took a deep breath. He’d gone to the shooting range, obviously, and picked up a few tricks there that would benefit him if nothing else. He knew how to breathe, he knew how to aim and he knew how to squeeze the trigger in the way that would bring an end to this.

But he was a beginner, any one of his actions could have gone wrong and it could have killed Ben.

So he just had to take a leap of faith and squeeze down on the trigger. The bullet entered and exited through Ben, who gave a heavy wheeze and fell limp in the Old Hag’s hand. The Old Hag looked at Adrian, screeching in terror as the bullet pierced her core.

She dropped Ben, her full attention turned on Adrian, and began moving towards him. Her slow, drawn-out movements, Adrian considered, came from the fact that she was dying. He stepped back as she neared until he struck the counter. He was afraid, he was going to die, he thought, knowing that the Old Hag would at least want to take one of the pairs before she disappeared into the cosmos.

“Adrian Beck,” She shouted, her voice reminiscent of Eliza’s for some peculiar reason, “You will not face this world for much longer. Give in to me and come over to the other side. You know you want to.”

Her strides were slowly turning into limps. Adrian considered her words, and maybe, she was talking about how he tried to kill himself a while before. They must have been watching, even though they did not come to him. But this was the old Adrian. One who had nothing to live for, one that was alone and abandoned by everyone he once knew and loved. The Old Adrian would have easily taken the option to let go of this world but not today.

“No, thank you,” Adrian replied, knowing that he needed to do something now, to buy time until the bullet took its full effect. He brought the EMP from his side and fired as she neared. Unlike Tommy, who was stuck in place, the Old Hag fought through the EMP’s power until a hand gently stroked his cheek, fumbling down to his neck. Never in his life had Adrian been strangled and he was preparing for what would have been the worst experience in his years. This would have to be his fate, dying with the Old Hag. It was worth it, he thought. Saving the world after having faced off against so many ghosts, after losing the only man that ever believed in him to accomplish something great and stepping away from it all an unsung martyr seemed nice. He waited until her hand wrapped around his neck, squeezing softly at first until the pressure began to build. The Old Hag gave it everything she could and Adrian, resisted the best he could.

“From once you came, you shall remain, until you are released again,” Both Adrian and the Old Hag turned to face the man who spoke the words that seemed out of place in this context. He faced her from the ground, unable to move anything else apart from the gun that rested between his fingers loosely. Now, it was just the last trigger that had to be pushed and everything would go back to normal. She was weakened by three holy bullets and an EMP field. She couldn’t have had enough to resist the temptation of eternal death that the stun gun had to offer, right?

Adrian and Ben both knew there was only one way to find out.

Ben fired and it struck the Old Hag in the back. She immediately released her grip on Adrian, falling back as the pins – unlike with the other ghosts – hooked into what was once flesh and brought her to the ground. She screamed with a dazed terror, looking to Adrian and then Ben before death finally took her.

The Old Hag vanished into nothingness.

~ ~ ~

Adrian helped Ben as best he could. After a moment of brief lunatic laughter on both parts, Adrian made a cup of coffee, brought Ben to a resting place on the sofa and switched on the television to watch saved shows on his DVR. They laughed at the television shows, while the adrenaline wore off. The coffee was good, it was the best coffee they’d ever have drank since it was the first cup of anything after a near-death experience.

Adrian knew that there was nothing he and Ben could ever do from this moment that would ever be seen as odd, in the other’s eyes. The pair spoke a while, about how they came to be in this world, what they had done to get here and what they had done as children. They were both parts of a unique class of person. Ben explained there were only two kinds of people in this world, and Adrian asked what they might have been:

“Those who took the Purgatech Trials and those who did not.” His reply.

And when they were rested and had a moment to breath, Adrian Beck walked Benjamin Stone to his car.

“So what are you going to do from here?” Ben asked, limping uncomfortably from all his various war-torn scars the day produced.

“I think I’m going to move. Sell the house and get out of here. I heard Newark is nice this time of year so I thought I’d go check it out. Maybe become a Jersey kind of person.” Those words seemed right. Evergreen left more nightmares than possible solutions in Adrian’s life, and starting over somewhere new seemed right, “What about you?”

Ben laughed, falling into his car. He laughed knowing that after everything they’d been through, Adrian didn’t see anything wrong with this situation, but Benjamin Stone was weakened, battered and beaten. He pulled from his pocket the hand, which not an hour ago was severed and threw it into the glove compartment, “Well I really do think I need to get to a hospital.” He teased.

“Oh s**t, I forgot about that.” Adrian nearly shouted, “Do you need a hand getting to the hospital?”

Ben laughed, noticing that the irony of Adrian’s pun was lost to him, “I think I should manage, kid. Go back in, prepare for your move. Newark will be gaining a hero today.”

Adrian liked that thought. He was a hero. It played in his mind as he watched Ben’s car start rolling down the driveway and out the front gate.

“When there’s something strange,” Adrian began singing, “In your neighborhood, who are you gonna call?”

He looked down at his clothes that were stained in blood and dirt, he looked to the stun gun and EMP on his belt, he looked at his house, the open door where three ghosts were moments before slaughtered, and he nodded:

Ghostbusters!