No More Practical Jokes!
(For now)Anyway, Egon came out with a real zinger that made Ray hoot and look at Pete expectantly. As Pete opened his mouth to reply, that obnoxious New York Lotto commercial came on the TV. That awful, fingernails down a chalkboard screech as that idiot taps the microphone to see if it's working can make me flinch on a good day, so I could imagine how it must feel to somebody with a headache. "On that note," Peter said, after a moment, to Ray and me, "I'm going to bed before Egon takes further advantage of an injured man."
And he did, even though it was really early by his usual standards. Of course, before he went to sleep, he short-sheeted Egon's bed.
Like I said, it started innocently enough.
Ray was worried maybe Peter was hurt worse than we thought, but the next morning we heard him singing in the shower, so we figured he was all right. Shortly after the water stopped running, Egon told Slimer that Peter had a pizza in the bathroom with him so he wouldn't have to share.
"Slimer!" we heard Peter shout. "Oh, yuck! Get away from me!"
Slimer came back out and gave Egon a reproachful look. "No pizza," he said mournfully before disappearing. In the bathroom, the water started up again, but this time there was no singing.
Ray laughed out loud. Egon's lips hardly twitched, but there was quite a twinkle in those blue eyes of his.
That's how the latest practical joke war started.
It stayed small at first. What looked like one of Egon's slime molds popped out at him the next time he opened a cupboard in the lab. Then Peter discovered that Egon had put something on his comb that turned his hair green.
Minor stuff. Ray and I mostly sat back and watched, pretty amused at what two grown men could come up with to top each other in the silliness department.
Not that we've never indulged in practical jokes ourselves, mind you, but this time we were just having more fun being the audience.
Anyway, it escalated, as wars have a tendency to do. I don't want to bore you with all the details, so I'll cut to the chase.
Peter got Egon good. I don't know what all was involved, because I only heard one side of the telephone conversation, but I gathered that Pete had somehow gotten some physicist friend of Egon's in on the joke.
Egon didn't twig to what was going on until he caught Ray in an unsuccessful attempt to hide a smile at Peter, who was about to dissolve into a puddle of laughter just out of Egon's sight range. Egon then claimed that he had known all along that something was improbable about the call, but that he had gone along with the spiel out of pity for Peter's lame attempt at a practical joke. We all knew better, but we agreed with him politely, waiting until he was in his lab to laugh. None of this was ever meant to hurt anyone, you understand, on either side.
Pete tried to be nonchalant about it, but I could see he was extra careful after that about stuff like opening drawers, looking at magazines, or answering the telephone.
So Egon did something he would never expect.
He rigged the shower.
We had been out on a bust. It involved a bunch of little Class Twos - not dangerous, but tiring - and Peter had gotten slimed, as usual. I swear one of these days Egon is going to hog-tie Pete to do those tests I can tell he is just itching to run to find out why, of the four of us, Peter is so often the ghosts' favorite ectoplasmic target. Anyway, I had an idea something was up when I caught a glimpse of Egon's face as Peter called dibs on the shower, so I didn't protest, even though the thought of hot water pounding down over me was mighty appealing right then.
Egon and I started up the stairs a beat after Peter left, and Ray tagged behind. "Oh, Egon, you didn't!" he giggled as he caught on.
Most people turn on the shower before they get in, to adjust the water temperature, so Egon had set it up so that clear water would flow for nearly a minute before what he had rigged kicked in.
We heard the water start, then we heard, "What the - Oh, gross!"
Then we all jumped about three feet when Janine hit the alarm downstairs. That meant it had to be a bad one, so we went flying down to find out what it was. Peter joined us about a minute later, zipping up a still-slimed jumpsuit and using a towel in a futile attempt to get some kind of sweet, syrupy goop out of his hair.
"What have we got?" he demanded.
It was a major disturbance in Central Park, with a couple of people already hurt trying to flee from whatever it was. The mayor's office didn't know much more than that, except it was definitely in our bailiwick and not the cops'.
In Ecto-1, I discovered that Pete smelled like a gigantic bouquet of flowers. Very fragrant flowers.
It wasn't until we got to the park that we noticed that he was limping.
"'S nothing," he said. "I slipped in the shower."
Egon looked troubled at that point. "I'm sorry, Peter," he said. "It seems my timing could have been rather better."
But Pete shrugged it off. "No biggie," he said. "Just a little bruise."
So we headed off in the direction all the people seemed to be fleeing from. It was my turn to say, "I've got a bad feeling about this," when I noticed that the entity we were going to be dealing with was a humongous bee.
Of course the thing decided almost immediately that that shiny pink, flower-smelling goop in Peter's hair made him a prime target. Actually, things were going fairly well until Peter started to sneeze.
Pete and I had the bee in our streams, while Egon and Ray were working their way 'round to the other side of the thing to try to catch it in the middle before one of us threw a trap out.
But then Pete started to sneeze, that allergy kind of attack sneeze, and his stream cut off and he went down on one knee.
One stream wasn't enough to hold that cussed thing, so I hollered for Ray and Egon as it headed straight for Peter. Pretty quick we had three streams on it and then we sent it into the trap Ray threw out.
Unfortunately, not before it stung Peter. I guess the goop wasn't as appetizing as it looked or smelled to that big bee, 'cause it was ticked. Pete was having trouble breathing, and I thought his face was beginning to swell, too. "Come on," I said, "we need to get you to the hospital." Ray took his proton pack, and Egon and I grabbed his arms and kinda propelled him toward one of the ambulances the police had waiting at the edge of the park.
I have to admit it was a reporter who made the difference. Egon and I seemed to be carrying more and more of Pete's weight, and I was getting really worried about the sound of his breathing - not to mention the fact that he hadn't complained once - when this reporter from the daily rag came running up to us.
I was all set to snarl at the guy, when he asked if the bee had stung Peter. He had something in his hands, and the question didn't sound like it came from a reporter.
Turns out the guy is deathly allergic to bee stings, so he always carries an epi pen. He banged a shot of epinephrine right into Peter's gut, just below where the bee had stung him.
It made a difference. A small one, but enough so that Peter was still breathing, sort of, when we got him to the ambulance. They raced off with him, and wouldn't let any of us come along. That sure didn't make anyone happy.
As we hiked double-time back to Ecto, Egon announced that it was all his fault. I told him he couldn't possibly have known we were going to run into a giant ghost bee.
He hardly seemed to hear me. "I wanted to do something he wouldn't expect," Egon said. "I should have realized that syrup would be slippery. It certainly should have occurred to me that it might trigger Peter's hay fever."
"C'mon, Egon," I told him. "You had every reason to think he'd have time to clean up before it even mattered."
That made him look at me at least. What he said was, "But he didn't, did he?"
Ray tried telling him that I was right, but Egon didn't say anything more, and his mouth was a grim hard line all the way to the hospital. From what they told us, I guess it was touch and go for a while, but by the time we got to the hospital, they had Pete's condition stabilized enough to begin cleaning him up before transferring him from Emergency to a room. Of course, we also learned more than we ever wanted to know about epinephrine and adrenaline and all the other stuff they gave him to counteract anaphylactic shock, and bring down the swelling in his respiratory system.
Egon called Janine, who had been watching PIX's live coverage on TV and getting more and more upset. He filled her in on what we knew, then told her he'd call her again later when we had a better idea of Pete's condition.
When they finally let us in to see Pete, he was really sleepy, so he kept drifting in and out, but we were told he wasn't in any danger any more. Of course, we were also told it would be prudent to make sure he carried Benadryl and an epi pen with him from now on. A normal bee sting shouldn't cause as massive a reaction as that huge ghost bee, but once you have an allergic reaction to something, you're guaranteed to have one again if you don't stay away from whatever it is you're allergic to.
Anyway, Egon apologized very solemnly, with 'guilt' written in capital letters across his forehead. Peter told him not to sweat it; of course, made some joke about it being like getting slimed, even mumbled something about Egon having to wait to find out what his revenge was going to be before he fell asleep again. He knew what was going on, but he was just a little too out of it to deal with the situation the way he might normally.
Egon wasn't ready to accept forgiveness, of course. As we drove back to the fire hall to clean up and pick up some of Pete's things, he announced that there would be no more practical jokes. We had better things to spend our time on, he said, than such frivolous activities, especially when such frivolity might get one of us killed.
Now what do you say to a speech like that? He was right - maybe we should be a little more careful about the types of practical jokes we came up with - but he was wrong, too. Wrong because sometimes we really need frivolity, a break from the gloom and doom of having to save the world, or at least New York City. But right then was not the time to say so. He wouldn't have listened anyway.
We brought Peter home two days later. He looked about as wobbly as a newborn calf, but he was moving under his own steam and breathing fine. He settled in on the couch to let us wait on him.
That's when Egon told Peter he had decided that there would be no more practical jokes perpetrated by any one of the four of us. The risk outweighed the benefit, he said. Peter listened placidly enough, but I knew he had something going on in that head of his. He did point out, quite mildly, just how many practical jokes we had played on each other before anything went wrong, but Egon countered that something had almost gone catastrophically wrong this time, and he did not intend that we should run that risk again.
"If I promise to belt you one when I'm feeling better, will you stop beating yourself up over it, Spengs?" Pete said. "It was an accident, and it's not real likely to happen again." He yawned. "I tell you what - how 'bout you wait on me hand and foot for a while, and we'll call it even."
"Honestly, Peter, I'm trying to make a point here," Egon told him, exasperated.
"So am I. It's okay, Egon. I'm okay. Okay? Now where's that ginger ale I wanted?" Pete said plaintively, doing his best to look like the wounded hero.
The atmosphere around the place lightened up a bit after that, because Peter kept making Egon laugh or shake his head in fond exasperation, but Egon wouldn't budge from his decision about practical jokes.
We'll see how long that lasts. A few minutes ago I caught Pete short-sheeting Egon's bed.