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It’s August. School starts soon, so they’re taking the last weeks left they have to be lazy, but it’s still stupidly hot and muggy and the main reason they’re down in Danny’s basement is that it’s fifteen degrees cooler there than it is upstairs. But you know how it ends.
A flash. A scream. The feeling of your body being ripped apart at the molecular level…
He slumps to the floor in front of the portal. Sam and Tucker are also screaming by now.
His hair is white.
They don’t know what that means (can an intense electric shock like that burn all the melanin out of your hair? They’re 14, they don’t know!) but whatever weird experimental technology that could sear his hair like that and leave him lying there, crumpled on the floor, that’s not normal. He’s not okay. He doesn't move at all. He looks… dead.
Tucker is stock still, frozen to the spot, but Sam breaks the frozen moment of horror to shakily stumble forward (oh God oh God oh God this is her fault, it was her idea, he was in there because she was joking around and egging him on to go into the Spooky Ghost Portal—oh God what is she going to tell his parents—)
Sam drops to her knees next to Danny, rolls him over, and—ohhh no oh God oh no.
“He’s not breathing,” Sam says. She sucks in a breath and looks up and Tucker is over here now, too, crouching down and holding his hands up awkwardly like he wants to help but has no idea how. “He isn’t breathing.”
Tucker’s voice cracks at a pitch he would be incredibly embarrassed about in any other circumstance. He doesn’t even notice. “What do we do? Do we call 911? Do we call a hospital? Do we call his parents?”
“He needs help now!”
“Obviously! But what—”
“Do you know CPR?”
“Only what I’ve seen people do in movies! It’s not like I’ve ever done it! Don’t you know CPR? Weren’t you a girl scout once?”
Sam would be embarrassed at that in any other situation. Now, she wildly wishes she had stayed a girl scout. “Yeah, when I was six! They don’t teach six-year-olds CPR!”
“I mean,” Tucker says frantically, because every second feels like a year and Danny is still just lying there, “I can try, TV can’t be all wrong, can it—”
“Yes it absolutely can,” Sam says, but it’s not like she knows adequately lifesaving CPR form either and also is getting all her information from TV, but—
Tucker leans over Danny (who has not reacted to any of this, by the way), puts his hands on Danny’s chest in his best imitation of how people in movies do it (why is Danny’s chest so cold, should it be so cold, that can’t be right), takes a breath, and pushes down—
And Danny opens his eyes.
They flash shining green. They’re hard to look at.
And then Danny says, “Ow.”
Tucker yelps and pulls back and Danny rolls over gingerly to push himself up into a sitting position. “Yeah. Uh,” Danny says. “That’s my highly scientific assessment of that particular machine device. Ow. Giving my parents a solid two stars out of five there.”
“Danny,” Sam says, and Tucker says, “Are you okay, man?”
“Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, I think so. Except for the, y’know, ow. My whole body hurts. I am not—I am not doing that again.” He tries to say it like it’s a joke, but his voice wavers. His eyes are still glowing unnaturally green.
Whatever the portal did to him, though, it didn’t kill him, and that’s the important point. They could ask his parents what glowing green eyes meant later. Hopefully it wasn’t radiation, or something. But right now, Sam’s breath catches as she hugs her friend. “I thought you died in there! You did die in there! You weren’t breathing!”
“Oh, uh, wait, really—“
Tucker’s breathing is shaky when he jumps on Danny to add to the hug. “I was gonna do CPR on you! I would do mouth to mouth for you!”
“Don’t be a jerk, Tucker, that’s lifesaving medical intervention, it’s not weird, you are the one making it weird—”
“Hey, guys, thank you, I really appreciate it and I’m also glad I didn’t die,” Danny’s voice is squeaky under the weight of the group hug and only shakes a little—“but uh I wasn’t joking about the ow and this kinda hurts.”
Tucker breaks the hug first and a little reluctantly, but steps away. “Right, yeah, you should probably still go to the emergency room or something, that still can’t be good for you, right?”
“Yeah,” Danny says. “Probably. Although I don’t know if they know what to do about ghost-hunting technology accidents.”
By this point Sam is sure. She pulls away, stares at Danny, and then grabs his wrist.
“Sam? Hey, what—”
Sam takes a deep, steadying breath, and then shoves her hand under his jaw, near his ear.
“Hey, uh, remember the part about the ‘ow’—”
“Danny,” Sam says, “you still don’t have a heartbeat.”