Ghostbusters: Resurrection

15. Sacrifice

*Note: this work is an 18 chapter novella, not a collection of shorts, best started at chapter one. Rating PG13*

Inside his head, Ray hears Egon warn him, "Patrick Bronsdown is possessed. He's not alone in there, Ray."

Winston drops his slime sprayer, grabs his proton thrower and hits Bronsdown's phone with a narrow proton stream and knocks it out of his hand, into melted oblivion. Bronsdown screams in rage, looking at his now empty but impossibly unburnt hand. The energy he's channeling is protecting his body in some way.

Retreat back into the app for now impossible, the ropes of glowing Gozer goop that have been oozing Their way into meat space, begin to writhe and thrash frantically. Phoebe's Gozer Grinder machine pulls It's tendrils in like spaghetti on a fork. It shouldn't be able to scream because It doesn't have a mouth, but It does. Gozer screams in agony inside everyone's head. Bronsdown screams with it.

The screams motivate the few celebrity Gozarians, who haven't been slimed or trapped yet, to surge at Phoebe and Podcast, trying to rip them away from the machine. Venks and Zedd fight them off. Zeddemore zaps the dead ones and Venkman sprays the living ones. There's something wonderful about shooting these privileged modern monarchs right in the face with a steady stream of pink pearly goo.

With Gozer weakening and distracted, fighting the machine, Podcast scrambles in low, under the action, and yanks Trevor down off the altar. Gozer's power loses it's grip on Trevor when he's pulled from its loci and splashed with crossfire slime. The two boys army crawl away through the slimey celebrity melee.

Patrick Bronsdown thrusts his fists into the tendrils of Gozer's remaining energy as It fights against the sucking tide of Phoebe's machine. He tries to physically pull it free, to keep it here in our reality. He's roaring, shrieking, making sounds no human voice box should be able to make. The sickly blue veins are pulsing and spreading up his neck.

This famous, wealthy, beautiful man, who has had every privilege, every power that our world can offer, handed to him at his birth, still wants more. There can never be enough for men such as this. Hollow men with an insatiable lust for power. Men who have become nothing but a bottomless hunger for more. He wants to rule. He wants immortality. Neither Bronsdown nor Gozer will accept defeat.

It shouldn't be possible, but Bronsdown is winning. He's somehow coiling the Gozer energy around himself, backing away and keeping it from the sucking maw of Phoebe's device. Phoebe, outraged, is trying to increase the vacuum power of her Grinder. Gozer's time inside the almost infinite power source YouView has made the parasitic creature incredibly strong.

"Slime Bronsdown!" Ray is yelling. That creep is supernaturally enhanced. They have to reduce his advantage. Dispossess him immediately. Winston and Zedd, down on the floor in the center of it all are too busy fighting blue goo strands, famous ghosts and possessed celebrities to hear him.

Below Ray, famous people slip and slide in the slick pink ectoplasm that coats them and the ballroom flooring. They call out for their personal assistants, their drug dealers, their agents, their mommies. Wigs and toupees askew. They groan and giggle and flop. Only the ones smart enough to lay down and slide themselves to the dryer edges of the ballroom are able to leave. Anyone who tries to stand, especially in heels or leather soled dress shoes, takes a topple as though standing on a sheet of ice.

Bronsdown looks around in frantic desperation, Gozer's electric blue gloop form coiled around him like an anaconda, then he drops to his knees, places both palms on the slimey floor, and screams something in Ancient Sumerian. Ray catches "arise" and "rule" but not much else.