[pm] I did. Well, kind of. I promised I wouldn't talk to you about her but she's not doing great, and I think I have more questions than answers about what happened that day.
[pm] Seriously? Nothing? So we're just completely defenseless?
[pm] That depends entirely on what you’re trying to protect yourself against. There’s plenty of other ways to protect yourself against...probably anything.
[pm] ...Amazingly enough? It did. It was blueberry and it looked like he slapped it together but my hungover ass devoured about a quarter of it all the same. I can't believe that actually worked.
.
[pm] Well, I did bug him pretty hard on your behalf. You’re welcome, by the way. How are you feeling now, about, you know, everything?
[pm] I appreciate that. I kind of… did. The thing with the ghost knocked me for a loop but I’m fine. Really. The last few weeks really have just been a lot but we’re on the verge of an uphill swing. I’m due for one, anyway. How are you?
[pm] Are you feeling better about it now? Did you wanna talk about...any of it? I don’t really understand why you were so
I’m okay. We’ve had a lot of scares at the house here, with Bex. But the dust just needs to settle again. It always does.
[pm] Didn’t really do much in the relaxation department unfortunately but it was good, yeah. Thank you. I’m fine now, by the way. I don’t know how but I think she made me… severely dehydrated?
[pm] That does scan with what she said about me being dry, I guess. I’m sorry. I know that must have been...terrifying. I mean, I was scared and I wasn’t even the one she...drained? I’m gonna go back and ask the other ghosts about her, see if there’s a way to get her to...not do that, at least until I find an exorcist I haven’t pissed off.
SUMMARY: Erin and Morgan take a day off to play target practice at Jericho Hill, but someone there wants to make a target out of them.
CONTAINS: Gun use (salt rounds). Many, many ghosts.
In a world of life, death, and violence, sometimes you needed to drive out to Jericho Hill with a friend, a bag of empty bottles, and a couple of pistols for some fun. Morgan aimed a salt round at one of the targets she’d poised over a leaning tombstone. The colonial soldier watching them, pimply as a high school kid and just as eager, smirked and nodded at her to take a shot. She’d been doing okay so far this afternoon, but this one was at an angle, and a little close to Soldier Boy. If she missed, he wasn’t going to be around to spectate the rest of the day.
Bang.
Salt burst against the glass in a white spray of smoke and water. The glass fell over and plunked to the ground. “And that, friends, is how you do it in Texas!” Morgan cheered. She blew on the muzzle of her pistol, just for show. “You know, this is a lot easier when you’re not running for your life or scared out of your mind. Funny how that is, right?” She looked sidelong at Erin, nudging her teasingly. “How about it, Annie Oakley? It’s your turn.”
Erin let out an appropriately loud holler as the salt bullet connected with the bottle, holding her own lager high into the air. “Oh, that was beautiful,” she laughed, perched atop a long forgotten memorial bench, the surface worn smooth from age and weather. It was hard to even make out the inscription anymore. She wasn’t sure what to expect when that salt bullet cut through the air but the way it knocked the glass off, causing a satisfying shatter as it smacked to the ground was certainly something. “You want me to follow up after that?” She raised a brow but stood anyway, hopping up from her seat. “Alright, alright.” Guess it was her turn to fail beautifully at something. She’d been the expert with the hockey stick and the dishes last time, after all. With one last sip, she emptied the beer bottle in her hands and stuck it in place where the previous one had sat.
“You’re going to show me how to use this, right? I mean, Nic showed me how to use the real thing and it looks similar but--” she shrugged, eyeing the salt pistol warily. “Believe it or not, I’m not Annie Oakley, dollface. I’d like to desecrate as little as possible while we’re here,” she smirked, but took the gun anyway, looking off at the target in the short distance. Her gaze drifted after a moment towards the open cemetery. Looked as normal as it usually did, to her, but she had to wonder-- “You’d tell me if there were ghosts hanging out with us right now, right?”
“Heck yeah I do!” Morgan encouraged. “If you know how to use a real one, then--okay, well I don’t know how to use a real one because my parents weren’t that kind of Texan, but it’s the same principle, so I bet you can do it!”
She came around beside Erin and put her friend’s hands in position on the pistol and got her in a good position to hit the next bottle. “Just keep your eyes open and hold steady. You got it, toots.”
At Erin’s question about ghosts, Morgan gave the soldier watching their target practice an uneasy look. “Uh, would you want to know?” She asked. But just from Erin’s tone, she already knew the answer. “We do have one discreet spectator, but he seems nice. We passed a few of the regulars on the way in, but they’re just hanging where they like to hang, nowhere close by.” Morgan scanned their surroundings, and the colonial soldier did the same. He whistled, a tricky thing with half of his mouth blown to pieces, and jerked his thumb behind him. Morgan stepped away to check. In the distance among a wiry corpse of trees stood a girl, shriveled as a skeleton, picking flowers and tucking them into a pocket in her white dress. When she saw Morgan, she waved and beckoned her over.
It took Morgan a second to wave back. Normally ghosts couldn’t tell she saw them so fast, or cared about interacting. “We’re okay over here!” she called. “But thank you!”
She came back to Erin, shrugging. “Some sad flower-picking girl ghost. Wanted some company I guess. But, she has plenty of friends here, I bet. Now take your best shot!”
Same kind of principle. Super encouraging. Erin nodded anyway, deciding that Morgan was probably right and the logistics weren’t too different than what she was used to. If anything were to go wrong, the most she had to worry about was possibly blasting a tombstone with some salt. Or if her aim was off enough and she managed to hit a ghost--well, that was to be determined, huh? She moved the way Morgan directed, eyes flitting back and forth between the bottle and her friend. “Think I can handle that,” she said, though her smirk held more confidence than she felt.
Her finger hovered over the trigger and she took aim, holding the pistol tightly between both hands. There was more kickback than she expected when she pulled the trigger but it knocked her only slightly off guard. Not surprisingly, the shot missed, whizzing by the bottle and smacking into the tree behind it with a bang. White dust blew in the wind as the pellet evaporated. “Damn it,” she grumbled.
Her muscles tensed at the comment about the ghost girl. Guess that answered her question. She wasn’t sure why she was surprised. This was a graveyard. Didn’t mean she had to feel comfortable and it resonated in her voice. “Right. And… what happens if we hit one?” She asked, glancing off into the distance to where Morgan had seemed to be speaking to while readying the gun for another shot. “Does it just… poof? For good?”
Morgan winced as the bullet missed. The colonial soldier laughed, even after Morgan gave him a look to the extent of be nice. “Don’t get down on yourself. It’s only your first one. And how long has it been since you handled one of these things at all anyway?”
She saw Erin tense as she talked about the ghosts and squiggled her face with confusion, then amusement. The colonial soldier behind her shifted further away from the bottles. “What? No!” Morgan put out an arm to reassure the poor kid. “Seriously, no. You’re gonna be fine,” she said to him. “They just kind of dissipate for a few hours. It hurts them, maybe. I would assume it hurts to have your spirit kind of scattered or...whatever happens. But they’ll be fine, in the end. No permanent damage. So they have plenty of time to move on with themselves peacefully.” She gave the solder another pointed look, though not an unkind one.
“Don’t worry, Erin, okay? It’s as deadly as shooting blanks. You’re not gonna scar any spirits for eternity.”
As she spoke, the girl in white drifted closer, spinning and throwing her flowers in the air in a strange, clumsy dance. She tossed some their way and waved again, beckoning so earnest Morgan could almost hear a child’s voice whining, please can we please please pleeeeeaseeee. Morgan waved back, not knowing what else to do.
“Don’t look now, but I think you’ve got an admiring audience,” she said, coming around behind Erin again and adjusting her form. “See those floating flowers? She’s really excited about having some gal pals around, I guess. Ready to try again?”
“October,” Erin answered flatly. The last time she’d held a gun in her hands, she’d used it to shoot Roy. The last time she hoped she would ever need to. She blinked the memory away as she grabbed another pellet and reloaded it like she’d seen Morgan do earlier. “That’s a shame,” she muttered quietly to herself. Would’ve been nice to have a real way to protect herself against another incident like the all out brawl she’d had with ghost-Dale a few months back. Her eyes followed Morgan’s as they bounced between what she assumed were the locations of their visitors. When the bottle was set, she moved back into position and lifted the salt gun like
“I mean, I don’t want to maim or… re-murder a ghost but it’d be nice to have something I know could actually do some permanent damage. We both know they’re not all cute, sad ghost girls who just want to make friends. Sometimes they’re assholes in tacky vacation shirts and sometimes they’re--” She glanced briefly over at Morgan with a tilt of her head. “Well, you know.” It was interesting to see Morgan standing so calmly amongst them, even now, after all she’d gone through. She lowered the gun, pausing briefly. “Sometimes they’re Constance.”
Morgan scoffed at Erin’s remark and took back the pistol, wanting another turn. “Hey, at least your asshole in a tacky shirt didn’t try to destroy half the town. Not that the other stuff was great but—I mean, they’re just people, Erin. The only people around who might know them long enough to care are the other dead. It’s shitty and lonely. And sometimes that makes assholes and mal-adjusted teenagers into a serious danger, and sometimes it makes them sad, or kind.” She fired once, then twice. The rounds knocked over one bottle and grazed the air next to another. So she wasn’t much of a sharpshooter yet, but she hadn’t exactly been practicing. She still felt a little ill at the thought of hurting someone and the ripples and painful cycles it always seemed to make.
“Besides, isn’t being wary of them in sight, or I guess chill, in your case, some kind of profiling?” She said this lightly, certain that Erin was just having a bad day, or a bad few months, and didn’t mean it all so much in a literal sense. “Maybe fix your aim a little more like—” She adjusted Erin’s hand. “That. And really hold yourself steady. And uh, keep your eye on the prize so you don’t accidentally maim your new ghost groupie.”
Part of Erin knew Morgan’s points were all valid and that her fear was just that--fear. Still, the feeling lingered, wrapping icy fingers around her bones, sending a chill up her spine at the empty spots where Morgan had been looking before. “Maybe,” she admitted with a small huff, folding her arms in against herself. Focused on the bottle as it clinked against the tombstone before landing with a thump onto the grass instead. The more she thought about it, the less she wanted to stay stuck in the thick of that fear. That “imaginary friend” of hers had turned out to be more real and more of a friend than any of the children she’d known back then too. They were people. “I don’t know. It’s just… unsettling. It’s not their fault, I guess. I can’t see them and knowing what they’re capable of, what they’ve done, just doesn’t feel great.”
She allowed Morgan to fix her positioning, and when it felt right, she let loose another pellet. This time it connected, just barely, but enough to send the bottle flying. The next shot wasn’t as accurate, flying a little too far to the right, smacking into a tree and--the sound of a young woman cried out in the same direction. The bullet ripped through her shoulder but left no mark, no blood, before it hit the tree. Like it’d simply gone straight through her. It was hard to tell from this distance, even if her eyes weren’t fixated on the haunting skeletal face staring back at her or the flowing white dress that was as pale as the rest of her. There was no discernable expression but her body language, the way she clutched to her shoulder seemed to indicate that she’d been hurt. Maybe even fearful of the two women. “Morgan,” Erin managed after a moment, tongue suddenly heavy in mouth. “You see that too, right? Please tell me you see that.” She finally managed to pull her gaze from the woman, who was staring at the same spot on her shoulder in shock. “She didn’t--she didn’t poof. Why didn’t she poof? Who--what did I just shoot?”
“Erin!” Morgan pushed her arm off course, but the round had already gone flying through the ghost. Morgan followed it with her eyes and stared, dumbfounded, as the girl remained intact. It took her a few seconds to realize Erin was talking to her, and her thoughts hadn’t just taken on a different voice. “I see her. I--uh--I just can’t believe you can see her.” She would’ve heard from someone if mediums could be ‘activated’ mysteriously, right? Morgan’s eyes slid sidelong toward Erin, confusion giving way to awe. “--Holy shit,” she said, laughing breathlessly. “I don’t know how this is happening but--holy shit!” She squeezed Erin excitedly.
“Sorry!” She called. “It was an accident! My friend is still learning how to shoot, but we’re not mad at you or anything!”
She turned back to Erin. “She’s beautiful, isn’t she? I mean, for being a ghost, she’s amazingly intact, and did you notice her dancing earlier? The joy she still has even though that dress looks like it’s from, what, the 1930s? I’d go bonkers without someone to talk to for that much time. I don’t think she’s even mad…”
The girl was inching closer, hesitating, like she wasn’t sure whether to believe Morgan’s explanation.
“Come on, we should at least make amends, right? I think she’s lonely. It doesn’t have to be for long, and you could think of it as--exposure therapy! And you know what’s also great for defending against ghosts? Ghost friends.” She gave Erin a tug and nodded encouragingly. This could be a nice kind of surprise in the day, couldn’t it?
Whoever this was had been simply going about their undead day before getting pelted with something that, from what she’d been told, should have ended her day pretty quickly. For that, Erin did feel guilty, though the fear wasn’t far behind it. They’re just people, she reminded herself, using Morgan’s words as a mantra. Erin shook her head, ignoring Morgan’s sudden enthusiasm as she struggled to focus on keeping her composure. “I don’t know either. Are we sure she’s a ghost?” Morgan seemed sure, and she knew more than Erin ever would, but there was a quiet, tickling nag that kept her from rushing over and checking on the young woman. Ghost friends. Erin scoffed and her jaw clenched at the thought but resisted only slightly when Morgan started tugging her. She supposed she had to do something here. She did shoot the girl, after all. “Okay, okay,” she whispered at Morgan, the zombie’s insistence pulling her out of her stunned disposition.
Taking a quick breath, she swallowed her nerves and took a timid step forward. “Hi there,” she called out softly, giving a gentle wave and a smile that showed her sincerity. The woman’s head tilted to the side. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t see you there, I swear and--are you okay?” She asked, brows furrowing in concern now. Maybe she’d missed. Maybe the bullet had simply grazed the ghost or missed her completely. It’d explain why she was still standing.
The girl nodded slowly, seemingly accepting her apology, silent as she looked between the two other women. Her curious gaze fell on Morgan. “I’m fine,” she answered after a long moment. She wiped off her shoulder where Erin had sworn she’d seen the bullet slide through. Maybe the salt pellets were duds. “Are you playing a game? I don’t know what you’re playing but I don’t think your friend is very good at it.” Her voice was softer and more innocent than Erin expected. She allowed a smile to creep up her lips, a playful sparkle returning to her pasty features. “I like games, though. If you’d like to make it up to me, I know a really fun one.”
Morgan was almost bouncing on her toes with excitement. “Oh, that. I guess you could call it a game, but it takes a while to learn, you know? We definitely didn’t mean anything, and we’re so glad you’re not hurt! Oh! And uh, I’m Morgan. This is Erin. What would you like us to call you?”
The girl laughed. “I haven’t had a name in I don’t know how long. You can call me whatever you like best, as long as you’ll play my dancing game with me.”
Morgan turned to Erin and shrugged. It wasn’t every day you got to do a dance party with a ghost, right? She gave the girl her hands, ready to try whatever she had in mind.
The girl gripped her firmly.
“Have you always been able to do this? Touch people?” Morgan asked.
The girl squeezed her tighter and spun her in a circle. “Why shouldn’t I? Have you always been so dry?”
“So what?”
But the girl didn’t answer. She let go of Morgan and let her stumble around the grass and turned her attention to Erin. She didn’t ask for her hands, just took them, smiling in a way that showed too many teeth. “Oh, I like you.” She said.
Erin was almost more bewildered by Morgan’s eagerness than she was with the cryptic ghost who wanted to dance with them. Not just a ghost, she reminded herself again. A person. Was this how the woman spent her sunny afternoons when she was alive? Laughing, frolicking, barefoot in the grass? An unsure smile gave way to a genuine laugh of her own as she watched Morgan try to find her footing.
“Do you hear that Morgan? She likes me,” Erin teased, glancing back at her friend as she was pulled in closer. She wasn’t a dancer and her movements lacked the same grace, but she had accidentally shot the woman. She could at least play along here. Her hands were as cold as a cadaver and the once warm, shy smile made her uneasy. Or maybe it was the quick, repetitive circles she spun them in making her dizzier than expected. “Whoa. Can we slow down a little?” She asked and tried to slow down her movements but the ghost either wouldn’t hear it or didn’t care. Only hummed a whimsical tune that seemed misplaced in a place surrounded by gravestones. Her stomach churned with every rotation. Something was very wrong here. “Hey--hey! Stop!” Her voice cracked, the words spilling out like saw dust as she tried to shout. God, when was the last time she had something to drink?
“Stop?! Oh, dear, but we’ve just begun!” Her laugh pierced her skull like a nail, agitating the increasing pressure building in her head. Where was Morgan? The world spun in a blend of greens and greys as the woman dragged her farther from Morgan.
Morgan found her balance by way of stumbling into one of the grave stones and falling over. By the time she’d stood up and shaken the grass and dirt from her hair, the girl was dragging Erin further afield. There was something...off about this. Erin wasn’t being clumsy so much as she was dragging her feet, trying to slow them down. “E-erin?” She called.
The girl yanked on Erin harder. Trying to run off with her. Morgan fumbled along the ground, looking for the salt pistol. “Hey!” She called. Where was it, where was it, where-- At last her fingers closed around the handle and she leveled it at the pair. “That’s enough, let her go!” She marched toward them, looking for a clean shot. “She’s not like you, she needs to rest!”
“Maybe when I’m finished with her. It’s been so long.”
Morgan’s heart plummeted. That sounded a lot like killing people. She’d been around enough supernaturals to know how they tried to be cute and discreet about killing people, including herself, and that was definitely some kind of no-good very-bad code for killing people. Shit, shit, shit… The pair whirled And Morgan fired two shots, as many as she dared. She squeezed her eyes shut when the last bullet left the chamber. She didn’t want to know if she’d hurt her friend. She didn’t want to know just how wrong she’d been about this.
Erin heard Morgan, finally, and with a jolt and the blast of two gunshots, the dancing stopped. A blood-curdling scream replaced the laughter that had once filled the cemetery as she thudded to the ground with a slump. Her arms and legs ached, stiffening and seizing as she crawled away. Morgan had landed the shots--something she’d praise her endlessly for later--but it wasn’t fatal. There was no ethereal dissipation like Morgan had described earlier. She was just angrier now, her fingers digging into Erin’s ankle as she stopped her from getting away.
“I don’t like this--game!” Erin grumbled, emphasizing the last word with a hard kick that sent her backwards. What kind of fucking ghost bullshit did she find herself in this time? This was stupid. This was so stupid. It was a weak kick and the salt bullets had little effect. Within moments, her hands were on Erin again, dragging her back. Her breathing became labored, dry and sore as her chest heaved with more effort than she should have been necessary. And then suddenly--she let go.
“I think that’s quite enough, miss.”
Out of nowhere and of course, in the nick of time, the colonial soldier ripped the woman off, dragging her backwards across the grass. He nodded at the handful of ghosts that had gathered in the area that now circled the two as they began to help. “You won’t be harming another living soul on my land if I have anything to do with it. Come now. Good job, everyone.” He instructed the other ghosts to lend a hand. Gave one last nod at Morgan, an assurance that they’d take it from here. Erin could only watch as the woman flailed about, the other ghosts invisible to her panicked human eyes. “Morgan?” She asked, tearing her gaze from the sight as she tried to sit up, the fear thick in her throat. “What’s happening? What--how--”
Morgan was already scrambling toward Erin and pulling on her arms, ready to fling her onto her back. She looked up the the colonial soldier, bleary eyed with relief and gratitude. “Thank you,” she whispered. He was too busy leading a strategic charge with the other souls in the cemetery, chasing her uphill, wielding hoarded scraps of rustic metal as projectiles. The girl shivered as she fled, and Morgan could only wonder if she was the reason the young colonial soldier remained. If he still wanted to defend his miserable little town, because it was his.
He spent one look her way, calling simply. “She’s not so clever when she’s cold.” Before rounding around the trees as she sped to get around him.
“We’re being rescued,” Morgan said to Erin, pulling her up and starting to run. “But I don’t know for how long. I think the best they can do is make her work around them. When we get to the car you need to blast the AC, in case she tries to come in.” They hadn’t parked far. Morgan tightened her grip on Erin and pulled out her keys, punching the button to unlock. “Hurry!”
Nothing that Morgan was saying made any sense, but with the world still spinning around her, Erin wasn’t about to argue. She nodded and followed on wobbly legs, collapsing into the car the moment the door unlocked. “Go, go, go!” Shaky fingers found the knob and cranked the AC at full blast. She cringed at the blast of warm air bursting from the vents. “Water,” she droned, glancing around in a panic. “Where’s my water--” It was here somewhere. Her cheeks burned, her skin flushed a bright red, like she had been standing under a heat lamp in the middle of the desert. The water bottle rolled at her feet and she very nearly wanted to cry at the discovery. It was warm and tasted like it had been sitting in a car for a few hours but it was the greatest thing that had ever touched her lips, temporarily calming the black eating at the edges of her vision. A glance out the window showed the woman in white off in the distance, struggling against something Erin couldn’t see. Anger flared up hotter than the warmth in her cheeks. Too angry to speak, to even yell. Again. This bullshit happened again. She had been trying this time too. Really trying. Ghosts were people too. When she drank as much as she could without getting sick, her hands touched over the vent, waiting for the air to cool down, watching the cemetery grow smaller and smaller behind them. God, she was exhausted, pure adrenaline keeping her eyes wide open. “What the fuck was that?” She snapped, finally turning to Morgan when they’d made some distance.
“I don’t know,” Morgan said, ignoring the speed limit and lurching down the lane. “But the other ghosts in the cemetery knew what was up with her. If I had to guess, she can do something to change her constitution. And somehow she’s visible. And the ghosts in the cemetery have put up with her shit before. I might come back later and talk to them about it, see if there’s a way to do something about her for good. She didn’t dissipate, but maybe she could be trapped somehow, at least until I can phone an exorcist who I haven’t pissed off or insulted. They were able to make her stay solid, right? And whatever she did to you isn’t something she can do on dead people, so I’ll probably be safe. But that was still-- I didn’t even know they made deluxe ghosts like that.”
She slowed down as she neared the busy center of town and let herself ease back in her seat. “Are you okay? What did she even do to you? Do you need the hospital, or first aid or--something?”
Deluxe ghost. Those two words popped out to Erin more than anything else from Morgan’s explanation. A graveyard full of dead people and Erin had still managed to be the most useless and the most helpless one of the merry bunch. Even now, she couldn’t do anything to get rid of the thing that had violated her. “I’m fine. I’ll be fine,” she managed, her teeth clenching at the dull ache lessening bit by bit between her eyes. She lifted the water bottle to her lips, feeling the weight lessen and lessen. It was like she could drink ten of these and still not be satisfied. “I don’t know what she did. It was like she was absorbing the water right out of me.” The only time her body had ever experienced something like this was during an ill-prepared hike on a hot summer afternoon a few summers ago. Even still, it didn’t come close to this. This was instant and all-consuming, leaving her exhausted in more ways than the obvious physical toll. She covered her eyes with her hand, slumping against the car door, trying to force away the itchy, gross feeling crawling along her flushed skin. “Can you just take me home? Please?”
“Yeah,” Morgan said quietly. “Of course.” She gave Erin a sidelong glance when they came to the next stoplight and reached out to touch her arm, maybe cool off some of her flush with her cold body temperature. But wherever Erin was inside her head, it was the kind of not-okay that sent out spikes when you got too close. A dozen questions filled Morgan’s mouth (Where are you? What’s really the matter? Why aren’t you talking to me…) but she swallowed all of them down. “I’ll uh, get us there fast as I can, okay?” The light turned green and Morgan hit the gas a little harder. She’d get Erin home and come back later and leave some iced tea by her door and whenever she found it, she’d know that they were friends, and Morgan would do anything for her that she could, and then they’d talk and everything would come out and it would be okay. Of course it would. Morgan and Erin were always okay.
[pm] Hey. [d: I'm sorry I've been dist] [d: We should t] Sorry. It's been a while. Things have been busy over here but, uh--I don't know about you but I could use one of our excellently chill nights, if you're up for it?
@corpse--diem
[pm] Hey. Everything okay?
I thought about reaching out before, but you just kinda had ‘gimmie space’ vibes and I didn’t want to push.
[pm] Eh, she hasn’t totally put it down but I can manage to get past it here and there. I know you’ve got that nifty zombie zombie healing prowess but I’m glad you’re alright.
.
[pm] Good to know it’s not just me.
And...yeah. It wasn’t great at the time, obviously, more like terrifying. There’s no warning call for when the undead are going to bite the dust a second time, so anything too hairy is...it could be the moment. But that aside, I’m not sure if it ranks at the top of my “almost butchered” moments of the last two months. Which is a thing that I can now rank. We’re up to five now, counting the creepy critter with Marley and the one-night job I took with Felix.
