“Yes, but—”
“So he gets fed and doesn’t get bored. Unlike all those poor souls stuck in some overgrown cemetery somewhere, the kind nobody visits anymore. Ever wonder what happens when the weeds come but the visitors don’t? Ghosts live off shed human energy, but if there’s no humans—ever wonder what happens then?”
“I—”
“Well, I’ll tell you.” He sat on an insubstantial-looking rock and watched Daisy stalk another victim. “First, the ghosts begin to starve. But they’re not all equal, are they? So pretty soon, the newer, stronger ones start cannibalizing the older and weaker. Until, eventually, they either eat them all or drive them off to the Badlands. That’s where we are now.”
I looked around. No wonder this place was giving me the creeps. “So this . . . is like a cemetery . . . for ghosts?”
“In a manner of speaking. Only there’s no visitors. The only way to feed—as those who arrive with any sort of mind left quickly realize—is to consume the scattered remains of the less fortunate. If they do it enough, they might even mange to escape—”
“Escape?”
He smiled sardonically. “Now you’re getting it. Ghosts aren’t bound by the same rules as you or me. They can transition here and back again, if they have enough power. And here’s where it gets fun: they can take us with them.”
“Us?” I grabbed him.
“Us in the generalized sense. Not us as in you,” he clarified, prying my spectral hand off.
“But I told you, I have to get out of here!”
“Then use your own ghost. What am I, a charity?”
“But he’s weak. He almost faded saving me—”
“Then lend him some energy.”
“I can’t spare any! You have to help—”
“I told you: I don’t have to do anything. But you have to get back to your body.”
“Why?” I shot back, pretty sure he was just trying to scare me. “You said there’s no time here. So I can’t die, can I?”
“Maybe not. But you’re still outside—”
“So?”
“So spirits without the body’s protection are what again? Oh, that’s right. Big wads of energy, free for the taking.”
“And who’s going to take it?” I demanded. “Some old ghost remnants?”
“Um, excuse me,” Daisy said.
“No, little girl,” Roger said testily. “But they’re not the only ones out here, are they?”
“Aren’t they? You just said—”
“That ghosts who fade can lose their tether to time and end up here, but it’s by accident. Others come on purpose.”
“For what? Why would anyone—”
“To hunt. All those territory-less ghosts—or what’s left of them—might not be much individually. But together they form a nice, big pool of energy, and one with no awareness left to fight back. No hungry ghost is going to turn that down—”
“No way,” Daisy interjected. “I mean, just look at them all.”
“—and as a living being, you’re more tasty than a thousand faded spirits.”
“A human is still more powerful than a ghost,” I pointed out.
“Than a ghost, certainly,” Roger agreed. “But you forget—there’s no time here. So you’re not dealing with one era’s ghosts but with all of them!”
“Well, I don’t know if it’s all, but it sure is a lot,” Daisy said as I wondered why the air had started shaking around us.
And then I knew why.
“Fuck!” Roger said, and dove for the side of my cell, which was currently the nearest.
I just stayed where I was, rooted in place by the sight of an army of ghosts, thundering at us across the horizon. Like the entire horizon, because there had to be . . . I didn’t even know. Thousands. Maybe tens of thousands, centuries’ worth of predatory ghosts, the strongest ones, the most successful ones . . .
The ones that were almost on top of me, I realized, and dove back inside my cell.
“What did you do?” Roger yelled in my face as something crashed into the wall behind me. Followed by a couple hundred friends, rattling against the exterior like gunfire. “What did you do?”
“I didn’t do anything!”
“Bullshit! They don’t act like this—they never act like this!”
“Then maybe you did something!”
“I know the Badlands—hell, I used to live in the Badlands! And the ghosts don’t act like this!”
“Well, apparently, they do!”
“Not even for a disembodied human who doesn’t have the sense to—”
I caught sight of my body sitting up, with my tits in my hands.
“—listen when someone with more experience tells her—”
“Are you feeling me up?” I asked Rosier, because I knew it was him. Even before I spotted his own small form, lying limp and lifeless on the floor.
“I give up!” Roger said, throwing his hands out.
“That’s what’s concerning you?” Rosier shrieked, over the gunfire sound effects.
“It’s not helping!” I glared at him. “What are you doing in there?”
“Trying to keep you alive!”
“We’re outside time! I’m not dying!”
“And I’m supposed to know this how?” he demanded, still clasping my breasts, as if for comfort. Until I knocked his hands away, although that probably would have happened anyway.
Because we’d just rolled over.
I fell from the floor to the new floor. Which had been the wall, until the number of ghosts hitting us all on one side sent us clunking over. And then over again, and again, until it felt like we were in a wacked-out dryer set on kill.
“What are they doing?” I yelled, falling into Roger. Who snarled and pushed me off. Only to get my body’s foot in his face, because it wasn’t like there was a ton of room in here.
“Trying to shake us loose,” he yelled back. “The cell walls are wards, to protect the living from spiritual attacks. Ghosts don’t have the power to break through!”
“Daisy did!”
“Daisy is bound to me, as your servant is to you. The wards see them as part of us, and let them in!”
“Oh, good,” I said, relieved.
“No, not good!”
“Why?”
“Because we need to get to the barrier in order to shift!”
And then Billy woke up.
“The fuck?” he said, materializing beside me and staring around. At Rosier’s discarded body tumbling like a sneaker in the aforementioned dryer. At Roger, trying to brace in a corner. At me, attempting to hold steady in the midst of it all, hovering near the center of the roll. Until I gave up and grabbed Billy around the neck, just as Daisy drifted over.
“Hello, I’m Daisy,” she said, sticking out a hand.
“The fuck?”
“No, the Daisy.” She smiled at him. “Like the flower, you know?”
“Cassie—”
“We’re in the Badlands,” I told him breathlessly, which made no sense because this version of me didn’t need to breathe. But it was one of those moments. “And we need to get out—”
“We’re where?” His head twisted around to try to see me, because I was clinging to his back.
“In the Badlands. And a bunch of predatory ghosts are on the other side of that wall. We have to get out!”
“I— we just— Don’t you ever take a day off?”
“Will people stop saying that?”
“Maybe I would, if I ever woke up to find you making pancakes or something!”