Subtlety was out the window and the ghost looked right at Bunny and changed course.
“Fuck.” Bunny has always had a way with words.
I backed up and he backed up as the ghost came at us. Bullets went right through. Hadn’t really counted on that. I’d been hoping that the vibration thing happened only when going through walls, and maybe that was supposed to be the case. It just never crossed my mind on the bullets part.
I hoped to live and learn.
We backed into our hotel room. That was intentional. We weren’t limiting our access to anything. We were drawing the ghost away from a target. Bunny took a chance and tried firing again with the same result. There was that high-pitched scream as the bullet moved through without actually touching the target. What came out the other side didn’t look like a bullet. A missile went in and black dust came out the other side. Near as I could figure, the vibrations shredded the bullet as it passed through. That hadn’t happened to the walls before and it hadn’t happened to the people the ghost killed.
I tried warning Bunny, but I don’t think he could hear me over the noise, so instead I pulled on his shoulder and urged him backward. He nodded and retreated.
The ghost’s hand touched the air where Bunny had been a second before. Looking at that blur was disorienting.
At the same time, he tried for another head shot and the scream came again. Not a ghost, a banshee. It was screaming and I was beginning to think we were dead.
The ghost’s hand bumped into the wall and instead of phasing through anything, it disintegrated the drywall and the wooden studs behind it. A trench exploded along the wall where the hand touched. The ghost paused long enough to look at the damage and then came at us even faster.
Bunny retreated and I grabbed the mattress on the bed and hurled it as hard as I could toward the approaching killing machine.
There were bits and pieces of mattress exploding all over the place and the scream came back again. Bunny fired three more head shots and this time around our resident spook stumbled backward.
I couldn’t tell if it was the weight of the mattress or if it was the bullets.
I screamed, “Shoot it again!” and whether or not he heard me, Bunny cut loose. The screams came loud and fast, like high-pitched thunder cutting loose from two feet away. I felt the vibrations in my fillings and my vision distorted even more as my eyes shook in my skull.
Still, the ghost fell back again and again, until it struck the wall. The wall screamed and so did the ghost.
The wall shook and shuddered and started to crumble. I didn’t have another mattress to try my luck with, but I had to try something. Bunny’s shots had caused some sort of damage, but it was impossible to say how much. What was certain was that the suit was still functioning enough to be a serious problem. The wall was fracturing and neither of us could grab the ghost and try to pull the assassin away without being vaporized.
“Screw this!” I ran past Bunny and headed for the bathroom. I’d call it instinct more than anything else. The suit ran on electricity and maybe there were a few holes in the wiring. If so, there was a chance to short the thing out, but better than nothing. I grabbed two tools. The first was the fire extinguisher under the bathroom sink. The second was the ice bucket. I put the bucket in the tub and opened the tap. Cold water sloshed into the bucket and the tub.
I didn’t wait for it to fill, but instead pulled the ring that prevents accidental discharges on fire extinguishers and ran back to the main room. The ghost was half-buried in the wall. The wall was vibrating and Bunny was looking a little desperate for something he could do about it.
I gave him the fire extinguisher and went back for the water. When I got back into the bedroom, Bunny was covering the ghost in foam that vibrated itself all over the place. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.
My bucket of water, maybe a liter all told, splashed all over the ghost and the suit.
There was another scream, but this one was more human and less terrifying. Several very large sparks arced from the ghost and then the screaming stopped.
My ears were ringing. My body ached from the levels of sound that tore through me and I could see Bunny wincing even as he looked over our ghost.
The entire suit was gray now, the sort of gray that settles on dead flesh, though I could clearly see scorch marks and circuitry in places. I now understood what Bug had meant about scales. They were all over the place, buried in the mattress ticking and the walls, and now that the fun was over, I could see where two of them had hit me and, thankfully, bounced. The red marks showed me where the bruises would be.
Bunny got the worst of it. He had about a dozen spots where the scales had hit him like high-velocity guitar picks. They weighed almost nothing. If they’d been heavier, we likely would have been dead or at least punctured in places I don’t want to think about.
I still couldn’t hear much, but I called it in to Bug and the other team.
The cleanup team wasn’t going to like us very much. I knew that.
The wall was ruined. More important, our ghost had stopped vibrating at the wrong time. She and the wall had become one.
I can’t call this one a victory. I mean, partial, yes, we stopped the execution of several foreign dignitaries. Top and Warbride never saw a sign of any sort of ghostly assassin, so we decided there was only the one. It could have gone either way, I think. Their diplomat could have been first on the list or Maurice M’Gombe could have been first. Bunny and I just got lucky. The entire thing was over before they could make the distance from the Dolley Madison to the Madison, and the two hotels are less than a block apart.
But back at the offices I discussed the entire thing with Mr. Church.
After we were done with the formalities, we got down to business. I like that about my boss. He doesn’t usually dance around the subject.
“Bug got back to me on the suit.”
“Yeah? What did he have to say?”
“The sort of thing that makes him happy. Point of origin unknown. There is some very common electronics at work, but only some. The scales and the fabric they were woven into are both puzzlingly organic.”
“Come again?”
“They’re artificial, but they show signs of having been grown, not manufactured.” Church reached for one of his vanilla wafers and contemplated it before speaking again. “There are at least four separate elements that no one in our department can identify.”
“Let me guess, extraterrestrial?”
“We can’t identify them. That means the possibility is real, no matter how improbable.”
“What about our banshee?”
“Is that what you’re calling her now?” He offered the smallest hint of a smile and then took a bite of his wafer before answering. “She’s a complete unknown. The damage to her body was very nearly on a cellular level. No teeth for dental records. No fingerprints, as her flesh was liquefied. If she has her DNA on file anywhere, we haven’t been able to locate it. Red hair, pale skin. That’s all we have.”
“Got to wonder what our foreign dignitaries were up to.”
Mr. Church nodded. “I was thinking the exact same thing. Interestingly enough, three of the survivors have been pulled from duty in the United States. Either their home countries are afraid we’ll start watching them or they’re potentially embarrassed by what was going on behind doors.”
He finished his wafer. “Either way, it’ll be interesting to discover more information.”
“Not a closed case?”
“Not remotely.”
Have I mentioned how much I hate unsolved riddles? Not as much as Mr. Church, but then again, that’s one of the things I like about my boss.