On the off-chance you do have a sudden craving for antiques while trekking across America, fear not — Bobby's shops are well-stocked. Most of the items are one-of-a-kind, but there are certain types emerging. The classic tablet pen that seems to draw on its own in the middle of the night. The standard record player that makes you swear you sometimes hear someone crying during well-known choruses. The typical TV that turns on all on its own and shows you grotesque faces at 4 AM.

As we walk into the shop and all the objects start screaming, I realize there might've been another thing or two I forgot to mention.

"What the hell is this?!" Dee desperately tries covering her ears. It doesn't help her. When ghosts scream, and you can hear, they'll reach your very core. I learned that the hard way.

"Please! Anyone! Where am I?!"

"Juice? Is that Juice?"

"Come on! Get us the hell out of here!"

"Watch out, Juice. There's more of him now. Many more."

"I'M TV! HELP!"

"Shut up, Robby, you don't even have any right to complain, I'm a goddamn toothbrush!"

"AND MOLLY'S A 1930s VIBRATOR, GET SOME PERSPECTIVE, DONALD!"

"Electricity to signals. Signals duplicated. Duplicates to others. So many."

I gently pull Dee over to the front desk. As expected — Elijah, the blind and deaf old man Bobby keeps around to run the sales in the case of actual customers, is there. Feet on table, newspaper in-hand. Some things never change.

One sniff is all he needs to figure out that whoever's shown up isn't there to spend money on haunted knick-knacks and nods us in the direction of the janitor's closet.

In the janitor's closet is the hatch that leads to a bomb shelter about fifty feet below. I let Dee start going down the ladder first. I follow, closing the hatch behind me, and the screams thankfully stop.

"You. Owe me. An explanation." She says as I hop off the ladder.

"I thought it was pretty self-explanatory." I say, setting off down the marble hallway we've now found ourselves in.

"The only thing I know for sure is that someone named Molly's a vibrator. And that your friend here is literally selling ghosts."

"See, you got it."

"Why would ANYONE do that?!"

"If you were stuck in a hair straightener and nobody could hear you, and you couldn't even so much as move around, wouldn't you wanna be taken someplace where there's others like you?"

"Something about that scene back there didn't exactly spell out: 'Cool ghost hang-out.'"

"I'm just telling you what he told me." I say.

"And you agree with that? I mean, isn't this like a prison? Or slavery, or something?"

"I wouldn't take it that far." My toes squirm in my shoes. "Between being stuck in some teenager's bathroom and being stuck in a display case, where I can at least talk to someone, my hair straightener self will gladly choose the latter."

"Until you get bought. Then you still end up in some teenager's bathroom."

"Which is when most of them figure out the store wasn't so bad and manage to get themselves returned through classic ghost shenanigans. Presuming the spooked owners don't respond to said shenanigans by throwing them in the trash."

Dee clicks her tongue. "How does this place make money, again?"

I chuckle. "By having a no-refunds policy."

She doesn't say anything to that. I think she sighed. I'm not sure. Is she angry or something? Why? What's the alternative for all those people upstairs?

No, it's probably just my imagination. Everything's fine.

In spite of the fact that we've been walking straight for about two minutes, the light endlessly bouncing off the marble gives the impression that the hallway itself is twisting, and our step along with it.

"He's got taste." she says. "Your friend."

"Again, we're not friends."

"How do you know him?"

"I used to work for him."

"Sure, sure. But how do you come to work in an antique shop on the side of the highway?"

"When Bobby died, he came back as a Ferrari. He freaked out. Couldn't have happened at a worse time, either, they were driving through the mountains. He crashed through a safety rail. Don't know what happened to the guy who was driving him at the time, but given that the crash was enough to send Bobby elsewhere, I never held my breath. Neither did Bobby, obviously." I sniff. "The second time, he woke up in a grave. That's where we met."

"You shared a grave?"

"No. We met at a graveyard. I heard him screaming for help and dug him up. Calmed him down, helped him get a grip on things. He didn't take too well to being the body of a freshly-deceased fifty-year-old."

She sighs. "He didn't know how lucky he was."

"You don't know the half of it. As it turned out, he didn't jump into the body as a whole, but the old man's pacemaker. The pacemaker's electrical impulses — his impulses now — spread throughout the body, allowing him to effectively control the entire nervous system, just like he would if he were in the brain."

She looks at me. "Does that mean if, like, the body gets chopped up, he's just... fine?"

"Well, of course he's not fine, he'd probably be having trouble doing much in a mangled body. But, I mean, sure, he wouldn't be catapulted somewhere else or anything; as long as the pacemaker itself was intact. That fact certainly made him a lot more appreciative of that lucky star of his."

"Psh. You don't say." She taps her chin. "I never thought of that, though. We should get a pacemaker. Then you put one in me and I hop in."

"Where would we get a pacemaker?"

"We'd rob the pacemaker store."

"I don't even know how to install a pacemaker."

"It's fine, we'll have you play Trauma Center or something."

"I don't know what that is."

She shakes her head. Somehow, I feel like I'm being patronized.

"Anyway," I clear my throat, "a few months later after I dug him up, the roles were a bit reversed. Now I was the fish out of water. He's smart. Knows how to get a handle of things. As a sign of appreciation, he asked me to come along and work for him. Showed me a side to... all this I never would've imagined."

"Why were you at that cemetery in the first place?" she asks me.

I tilt my head. "You're not gonna ask me what I did for him?"

"Given that's the question you expected, I'm convinced I asked the right one."

I can't help but tug at my collar. "I mean, it's no grand mystery. After I realized I could hear people — and that corpses could be possessed — I started hanging around the graveyard on the weekends. There were a bunch of times I managed to hear someone call for help. I'd do the same I did for Bobby. Dig them up, calm them down and send them on their way."

"Just like that? What if they were rotting?"

Valid question. "Most were in early stages of decomp at worst. I gave them a few ideas on what they could do about that. Frankly, they were just glad to be out of the coffin."

At the end of the hall was the elevator.

"We're going even deeper?" Dee's not looking too thrilled about this.

"Bobby likes his privacy."

We step in and I punch the button to take us down. The elevator whirrs itself to life. I feel something in my stomach rise.

"Didn't you ever get worried the people you were helping out were, like, serial killers?" Dee asks. "You know, like, they'd just gotten the lethal injection or something, the world thought they were rid of them for good and then — BAM — they end up alive again, but six feet under ground. And then — BAM AGAIN — some jackass digs them up and lets them loose."

"Huh." I say. "That's funny."

"What is?"

"You thought of that immediately. I didn't."

"And?"

"And, let's just say there's a reason I stopped hanging around the graveyard on the weekends."

She doesn't know what to say to that. She didn't expect that answer. I didn't expect to give it. Especially since the actual truth of why I stopped digging people up was more sad than it was macabre.

"Still, though." I say. "I like to believe it's good I have that air of naivety to me. I mean, if I was paranoid you were a serial killer, we probably would've never made it this far, would we've?" I turn on my heel to face her. "Speaking of, you wouldn't happen to be a serial killer, by any chance?"

"No." she says.

"Just checking. I barely know anything about you."

"You're one to talk." she scoffs. "Either way, there's nothing to tell. I lived a boring person and I died a boring person."

"I don't think you're boring."

"That's because my current circumstances aren't boring."

"Doesn't mean you're not interesting."

"Sure, sure."

"For example," I try to think fast, "what do you do on the laptop all day? We ran out of leads ages go, what else is there to find?"

She laughs. "Um, the rest of the internet? I haven't had a chance to sit at a computer for a long while."

"So, like, what are you doing? Like, when you're browsing? Watch videos or something?"

"Yeah. Mostly porn."

"Oh."

"Yeah."

Damn.

She scratches the back of her head. "I think I'm into Asian girls."

I cough. "Okay."

"I mean, it's mostly what I watched when I was alive."

"I don't think I need to know this."

The elevator comes to a graceful stop.

"We're here." I say.

"The timestop stuff is pretty weird, though, not gonna lie." she remarks.

The doors open with a beep and I do my very best not to run out.

"Hey, whoa, slow down there." She's laughing. "Do you not like talking about porn?"

"Who does porn as small talk?" I ask.

"People? In general? And, I mean, I used to work in it."

I raise my brow. "Pardon?"

She blinks. "Oh. Uh. Right. I guess there's. That."

I swallow down the saliva in my mouth.

"Right." I say. "Anyway."

"To be clear, I was in charge of the lighting." she raises her voice ever so slightly. "The lighting. I didn't actually—"

"Right! Anyway!"

I turn around and make my way down another marble hallway. I'm sweating again. I haven't even taken a shower since yesterday. I feel dirty. I wish she hadn't told me that. My cheeks feel red.

"Are you, like, offended?" she asks.

"What? No! That's not the part that— I just don't like talking about it, okay?"

"It's not as bad as you'd think, with a decent director and production hou—"

"I'm really not judging you about this. Money's money. For crying out loud, if I got a stick up my ass for all potentially immoral things people did for money, we wouldn't have hit up those gas stations; or, hell, even set foot in this place, because let me tell you—"

We turn the corner.

Dee freezes in her tracks almost immediately.

Standing at the end of the hall is a humanoid figure. He's wearing the Friday best — a black and red striped suit jacket, a bow-tie, khakis and sandals. Bobby learned a long time ago that it didn't really matter what he wore — most people would stay focused on the wolf head I surgically attached to the dead body he's inhabiting.

"It's not about the money, though." Bobby says. "It's about—"

"The community, yeah, yeah, I explained that a while ago." I say. "Hello, Bobby."

"Right, yeah, hello, Juice." He turns to Dee. "Dee, right? Say, Dee, do you consider yourself a good person?"

"Uh." Not exactly the most traditional of introductions. "Sure? Also, hi. I'm Dee."

"Mmhm. So, you definitely didn't tell her."

"Tell me what?"

God damn it.

I should've known he'd do this.

"I told her as much as she needed to." I say. "Let's not really do this. It's not like it's something you should be proud of."

"Oh, I don't know. I'm proud of it." he chuckles. "You're not?"

"You know I'm not." I say. "I came here to ask you for h—"

"Did Juice tell you about the part where we psychologically break a good portion of our trapped friends up there, hook them up to transmission towers and train them to copy and store internet packets for us?"

Dee's jaw is just short of reaching the floor. "Wh—"

"Well," Bobby taps his nose, "there's also the ones we use for decyphering those packets. You'd be shocked how a single ghost can outperform several dozen state-of-the-art computers. AES stopped being relevant a long time ago, thanks to us."

"Okay, there, uh." I cough, desperate to make eye contact with Dee. "You might've been closer than you thought with that slavery comparison." I have to think of some way to rationally explain this. "I mean—"

"Dude!" she exclaims.

Okay, yeah, I've got nothing. "Yeah."

"Dude!"

I sigh. Right. Maybe there was a thing or two, or five, I forgot to mention.

The whole reason we're seeing Bobby is that, at the end of the day, he's an information broker. He first started with only a town. Then a region. Then a state. Now, with the rapid expansion of his antique stores, he's pretty much tapped into the entire country. If anyone would know who pr0c is, it'd be him. And the reason he'd know was because he turns ghosts into effective machines.

"Look." I say. "There's—I mean—" I roll my eyes over to Bobby. "What are you doing standing out here in the hall, anyway?"

He shrugs. "Saw you walk in on the cameras. Figured I'd make a cool impression."

"Yeah, congrats, you've convinced her you're an asshole."

"She was bound to hate me, anyway. I said a cool impression, not a good one."

"Saying you use ghosts as slaves isn't cool, you dumbass!" I point out.

"Well, stop calling them slaves, and it won't be as bad!" he points at me. "And, for the record, I'm against slavery, okay? My grandfather's friend's friend was a—"

"The only impression I'm getting," Dee says, "is that you're both terrible people."

"Of the two of us, he's the only person." Bobby slaps his hands. "Ha. See what I did there? Hell yeah."

I rub my eyes. This was a large part of why I didn't like bringing people over while I was working for Bobby.

Bobby licks his nose. "Anyway, what can I do for you this fine day?"

"We—" I glance over at Dee. She's pissed. I'll never hear the end of this. Didn't she suspect anything when I had to make the most likely person to help our last resort? Maybe I should've just left her in the camper. No, no. She would've never settled for that. I should've let her talk more about porn. Get some juicy details she could've been embarrassed about later. Now she holds all the cards.

"We need you to help us find someone." Dee herself finishes my thought, in the end.

"Help? Find?" he crosses his arms. "No, no. You're not asking me to help, you're asking me to do the entire thing. And I don't have to find anyone, I know where everyone is."

"This should be a cinch, then." I say.

"It will be. For a price."

"You owe me one." I remind him.

"Oh, I haven't forgotten. The fact is, though, what you're asking of me would cost you two favors."

"Come on, man, you can't just arbitrarily decide that."

He flings his arm in the air, his fingers forming a peace sign. "Two! Dos! Two favors!"

Dee shakes her head. "Can't believe you had the nerve to give me shit about porn."

"I wasn't giving you shit about porn! You could've been banged by five pizza delivery guys and I wouldn't care!"

"I was the lighting girl!"

"I know, I'm just making a—" I groan, turning back to Bobby. "What do you want?"

"You sure you don't want me to give you two a moment?"

"What do you want?" Dee reiterates the question.

"Oh, well." Bobby's face makes the closest thing to a smile it can likely make. "It's nothing too complicated. Frankly, I just need you to help me murder a tree."